Sublime

My friend continued to respect Steve’s taste, even though he deplored his temperament.

Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”

The arc of his life helped to create a very particular California sensibility, a state of mind that has gone on to spread throughout the entire world.

More generally, he was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible, and he was willing to invest his own time, effort, and influence to see that they were. Through looking at demos, asking for specific changes, then reviewing the changed work again later on and giving a final approval before we could ship,

One of Jobs’s business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will,”

A quixotic intellectual troubadour, he has prosecuted a series of discrete visions united only by a potent sense of curiosity and a provocative optimism.

At Apple, he brought together at least four disparate cultures in which he had become deeply immersed: 1960s counter-culture, the culture of American business entrepreneurs, the culture of design and the culture of computer geeks.

“Bauer Bodoni,” he said, “and Times New Roman, and Garamond.”