It’s funny how every Apple thread like this turns into Steve Jobs would’ve never let this happen, or Apple died with Steve Jobs. Look, no doubt Steve was a genius and set the bar for product vision and design. But Apple’s strength was never just one man. Jobs himself famously said, “I hire people smarter than me so they can tell me what to do.” Tim Cook was handpicked by Steve, not by accident, but because he knew Apple needed operational excellence to scale the kind of innovation he started. And guess what? Under Cook, Apple became a multi-trillion-dollar company that now builds its own chips and redefined wearables while still making massive impacts in the iPhone category.
So yeah, Steve made an impact but pretending Apple’s a mess now because he’s gone is like saying Disney stopped being creative after Walt died. The founder laid the blueprint the company built the empire.
Yup. Things change. Nothing stays the same. That’s life, that’s evolution. The impermanence of stuff.
Anyone remember this from decades ago? I think it was MacWorld. One of their writers briefly wrote about an URL that has something to do with evolution, and interestingly, that URL was registered to Apple.
Without the process of evolution, technology would be stuck somewhere in between the 50s and the 90s. There would be no, to name a few, SSDs, USBc, Wi-Fi, and smartphones under any brand names.
Alas, humans do not like change. We humans are content with the constant — no change. We settle in on our comfortable chairs and refuse to move. And we damn those who dare to get off their comfortable chairs to explore the possibilities. We become anxious and panicky when we encounter changes that we do not like.
But humans who are willing to learn new things and adapt will succeed in using whatever tools or situations to their advantage and advancement.
We would learn nothing if we lived in the past. But if we allow ourselves to embrace change, to learn and adapt, we could move forward.
I think all of us humans are explorers and adventurers, but we do become passive when we settle in on something. We are explorers and adventurers, and at the same time, we can also be passive and afraid of change. That’s just being human.
