macolyte.net

Most people probably woke up this morning and didn’t notice any change. Their world is the same today as it was yesterday. But I am not most people. My world feels different. A little less vibrant. One of my heroes is gone.

I watched the iPhone 4S presentation on Tuesday night, almost as soon as Apple posted it. As I was watching, I couldn’t help but notice that the camera seemed to be deliberately coming back to one particular seat. It was an empty seat, marked Reserved. Eventually I started thinking of it as Steve’s seat. “That’s where Steve would be sitting if he were well enough to be there,” I told myself. We’ve known for a while this day would come. Death is inevitable. Steve talked a great deal about it in his Stanford Commencement Address back in 2005. But even with all of the lead time we had, all of the preparing we may have done, it still came as a shock when the day finally arrived.

I never met Steve Jobs. I’ve never been to Macworld Expo or WWDC to see a Stevenote in person. I’m sure I’ve never even been within a hundred miles of him. But the products he was instrumental in bringing to market have profoundly changed my life. I found out about his death from a text message on my iPhone 4. I’m typing this post on a MacBook Air.

I have enough self-awareness to know I will never be as relentlessly driven and focused as Steve was. But I hope that every once in a while I hear his voice coming from the seat I have reserved for him in my heart and in my mind.