I am writing this as the proud owner of a new phone. For too long, to the genuine embarrassment of my family, I have carted about the five-year old cast-off my daughter had for her 11th birthday. How could anything so relatively new look so old already? Attempting to get it to charge, or looking bemusedly at incoming texts apparently sent three days ago, always reminded me of the moment in Star Wars when Han Solo, unable to get his space ship to start, thumps vigorously on the dash board - cue the lights coming on and the engines firing up.
My wondrous new gadget, an iPhone knock-off with its GPS, email, camera and no doubt all manner of other devices calculated to make the jaw drop, would not have happened, or at least not so soon, without Steve Jobs, finally overcome by cancer yesterday after a long struggle.
Would we have been worse off without stuff like the iPhone? Without the computers which I'm using to write this and you to read it? There's an easy way to tell. Just think back to what it was like beforehand. I don't remember the pre-digital age being so bad. We got by with books, maps and landlines. We certainly weren't tempted to waste time blogging when there was ironing to be done and music to write.
Jobs' iPhone and iPad are things of beauty and ingenuity, but perhaps we didn't really need them. If Apple and Pixar aren't enough to satisfy you as to Jobs' worth, hunt out his Commencement Address to Stanford Students. I heard parts of it on the radio and it makes moving listening. There's a transcription here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-address. This speech alone makes Jobs quite a man.
