iConoclast: 7 Things We'll Miss Most About Steve Jobs

Image via Complex Original

When you picture Steve Jobs, most likely you picture him on stage. The otherwise reclusive inventor and CEO transformed into a complete ham at well-attended industry showcases like Mac World and later WWDC. Jobs had an unmatched stage presence at these potentially boring events, pacing the stage back and forth while bemoaning The State of Technology in broad, often cutting, strokes. He routinely cast whatever new device or software he was getting ready to introduce as a momentous breakthrough that could quite possibly change the world-- and audiences ate it up.  Jobs' keynotes became such influential events that observers often attributed him with creating a "reality distortion field."

Who can forget when he resurrected Apple live on stage with the iMac, or the dramatic reveal of the first iPhone, or the speech at this year's iPad 2 unveiling where he coined the increasingly prescient phrase "Post-PC?" Jobs was a preternatural public speaker, and it's hard to imagine how anyone will be able to fill his shoes.

Steve Jobs has always considered himself an artist. He never got a degree in computer science or engineering, and in the early days of Apple he typically left the technical side of things to his partner Steve Wozniak. From the very beginning, what Jobs was better at than anybody else was aesthetics. Unlike the coders and builders who ruled the fledgling computer industry unabated at the time, he had a taste for beautiful things and understood the importance of making products that people would lust after on a physical level.

A calligraphy course Jobs dropped in on uninvited during his brief stint in college famously inspired him to use multiple typefaces in the Mac, which also was the first computer to use desktop icons and a graphical user interface instead of command lines on a black screen. Later on, during the Apple renaissance that began in 1998, he would partner with kindred spirit and eventual Senior VP of Design Jonny Ive to create such landmark feats of industrial design as the original iMac, the MacBook Air and the iPhone. Jobs also had a penchant for beautiful architecture, and turned Apple's own stores into mini sight-seeing destinations around the world.

Recently Apple has announced its two biggest architectural projects to date: A new store in New York's historic Grand Central Terminal and a massive, space-ship-like new headquarters in Cupertino, California.

One of Jobs's most identifiable characteristics is also one his most eccentric. Some time around the turn of the century, he started wearing a now-famous outfit during public appearances that included round, frame-less glasses; a black, long-sleeve turtleneck blue jeans and New Balance sneakers. The Look spoke of a minimalist attitude and a dedication to craft. He was hardly ever seen without it.

By many accounts, Steve Jobs the CEO was a formidable, occasionally intense presence in person, but he can't be accused of being humorless. When he first met Steve Wozniak as a high school student in the early '70s, they reportedly bonded over tales of grand pranks they'd pulled. Another such prank would come decades later, when Jobs famously called a local Starbucks while on stage introducing the iPhone and ordered 4,000 lates. "No just kidding, wrong number," he told a bewildered employee. 

Later as the pressure piled on at Apple, Steve would use humor to diffuse whatever tension was in the air, like when he triggered a slide with the famous Mark Twain quote "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," after he underwent chemo for pancreatic cancer; or when he told an audience to "Stop me if you've seen any of this before" while unveiling the iPhone 4 in the wake of Gizmodo's infamous leak earlier that year.

Jobs owed his success to a different way of looking at the world, and part of that came from his participation in the countercultural revolution of the '70s. Jobs was a hippie and would-be activist who believed that the real way to change the world was through technology. He attended the Hare Krishna temple near campus at Reed College in Portland, made a pilgrimage to India seeking spiritual enlightenment, converted to Buddhism and called taking LSD "one of the two or three most important things he had ever done in his life."

How many CEOs have a resume like that?

Jobs was a maverick right down to his email communications. In recent years, he took to responding to customers and other interested parties directly via his widely known email address, sjobs@apple.com. The emails are often hilariously curt and to the point, such as this hilarious exchange with an infuriated iPhone 4 customer during "antennagate," or this one where he reveals his aversion to porn.

Perhaps most integral to Jobs's legend was unbridled chutzpah and cojones. He routinely matched his peerless visions with bold and often controversial leadership. At his core, Jobs was a fearless and tireless iconoclast with no patience for outmoded ways of thinking. This is perhaps most evident in a string of well-studied incidents that includes the elimination of the floppy disk with the original iMac; his initial insistence on a uniform 99 cent price tag for songs sold in iTunes; and in the critical blows dealt to Compact Disks and Flash animation with the MacBook Air and iOS devices respectively. And that's to say nothing of a risky foray into mobile products, from the iPod to the iPad, that eventually changed the core identity of the company formerly known as Apple Computer.

Jobs famously eschewed the market testing that drives development at most companies, insisting that the customer doesn't know what they want until you show it to them. That sort of thinking would land most CEOs in the poor house, but somehow Jobs always seemed to know the right thing to do.

Apple will likely have many more CEOs over a long life as a highly lucrative and influential company, but it will never replace Steve Jobs. He was one of a kind.