“The Macintosh is Catholic,” wrote [Umberto] Eco. “It tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach ”” if not the kingdom of Heaven ”” the moment in which their document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons.”
Nearly two decades later, the hagiographers producing eulogies for Steve Jobs produced evidence that Eco was close ”” but that he needed to soar past Rome and around the globe to India and Japan. In essay after essay, journalists have argued that the so-called “cult of Mac” was driven by the Apple leader’s “Zen-like” state of mind.
It seems those iMacs, iPods, iPhones, iPads and MacBooks really were religious objects after all, with their gleaming surfaces of glass, aluminum and white or black plastic. There must have been a grand scheme behind that yin-yang minimalism.
Little do people know that [url=http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/cardinal-zen-vatican-officials-have-blocked-popes-plan-for-chinese-church]Zen is Catholic[/url].
Lutheran Church Missouri Synod! Who would have known! However, it makes some sense. Even with a conversion to Hinduism or Buddhism, there would be lingering traces of that upbringing.
Hence, we read, “…relentless and abrasive perfectionist who left scores of battered psyches in his wake.”
🙂
OK, I’m sure I will be damned to perdition by legions of the Apple Faithful, but what did Steve Jobs ever make (well, promote/facilitate/whatever as he never actually made anything) that wasn’t, at its heart, mostly entertainment? I will acknowledge that artists and film editors use Macs. (It is also true that a great deal of what these people produce is entertainment of one sort of another.) Everything else Jobs was involved with — iPod, iPad, Pixar — is all entertainment.
Dennis Ritchie, the principal developer of the C language (the successors of which are C++ and Java) and co-developer of Unix (the open source version of which is Linux, which is actually the foundation of Applie’s iOS) just died last week.
[blockquote] “The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today,†said Brian Kernighan, a computer scientist at Princeton University who worked with Mr. Ritchie at Bell Labs. [/blockquote]
Whoever even heard of him? He was never on late night TV, didn’t give commencement speaches at Stanford. Didn’t stand in front of an audience of millions to pitch a product. But he changed our lives more than Steve Jobs ever did. Steve Jobs was a business genius with a huge talent for design (or at least recognizing good design) but his real talent was for promotion of the shiny, mesmerizing, beautiful, entertaining things his company made.
iPods, iPads, and iPhones are used by all businesses, Catholic Mom, not just for entertainment:
Umm…Apple was actually a late comer to the “smart phone” business. As was often the case, it looked at what others did and figred out a way to make it sexier. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. Nokia, Blackberry, and others were all out there first. What made the iPhone a great hit was not the ability to get “email and surf the web” on the go, which already existed. It was the idea of having open source apps that thousands of people could develop and sell on the device. (Other companies were tightly controlling access to the code needed to develop apps for their phones.) I will admit those apps have been very cool although certainly not a life changer for most people. I and hundreds of people I know don’t even have an iPhone or iPod and we live just fine without those apps. And we all know that by far the most popular apps are the games. On the whole, if we had to judge the iPhone/iPod as a productivity enhancer or productivity waster, I personnally would put my money on the latter.
As far as the iPad, many studies have shown that overwhelmingly it is used primarily for entertainment. Future versions (as well as the apps developed for the present versions) are all designed with that fact in mind.
People don’t line up at the Apple store at 2 am and sleep on the sidewalk to get the latest iPhone version because they just can’t wait to start improving their productivity. They do it for the same reason that people line up for concert tickets. They are drooling over all the fun they’re going to have with it and they can’t live another day without it. I have nothing against fun — but let’s stop talking about Steve Jobs as if he cured cancer. Or even developed Unix.