BEAU COLBURN

Steve Jobs

I was in line at Shake Shack. “You ok?,” asked the text from a friend. “Yeah… About what?” I figured it was serious when he called a few seconds later. Dazed, I opened Twitter and saw a flood of links to apple.com. I told my wife we needed to go home.

I’ve spent the past few days thinking about how someone I’ve never met, and didn’t know, could affect me so deeply. I keep going back to one of my first experiences with the iPhone.

So many years in, it’s hard to remember just how exciting it was to hold an iPhone that first time. One of the first things I did  was open the camera app. I took a few snaps, holding the phone vertically, like most people do. Then I turned the phone ninety degrees to the side to take a landscape photo. When I did, the camera icon on the shutter button gently floated ninety degrees to the side as well, so that it was properly oriented. Not too fast, not too slow. I remember gasping, and my eyes watered for a moment. I was caught completely off guard, and looked away. It was the perfect little detail.

When I think about Steve Jobs and Apple, and the emotional connection that millions of people have with him, I often think of that moment. A connection that’s not easy to explain, yet is somehow deeper than “I’m happy because now I can listen to all mymusic on the subway.”

I rode home in a blur, and when I got there, I started looking at Twitter again. Maybe an hour passed, and suddenly the most beautiful thing happened: one after one, people started posting nothing but the Apple logo, . It was this cascading effect where, for a few minutes, every time the stream refreshed, that was almost all I saw. It was sad magic.

When I joined Twitter, I thought of it as an extension of the Apple/tech community, and while I still think of it that way, I realized that I now follow a much wider group of people: baseball beat writers, old friends, coffee shop owners, politicians. Everyone was suddenly united, and it was overwhelming. I’m not sure I could have drawn a common line though that group before that moment and, in an instant, there it was.

Outside of my family, there are two people without whom I can say, unequivocally, that my life would not be the same: Jerry Garcia and Steve Jobs. Their losses shifted the bedrock under my feet. The evenings that both passed, so many years apart, ended the same way: my head on my wife’s shoulder, eyes damp.

I’ll never know if Steve Jobs had anything to do directly with the way the camera icon rotates on the iPhone camera app. It doesn’t matter. As the memories pour in from those that worked around him, one comment comes up repeatedly — “What would Steve think of this?” was never far from anyone’s mind. That never has to change.

In a product that literally changed the world, I’m sure he thought that little detail was really great.