Steve Jobs Introduces the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch

I think you shared my point, that too much communication starts to be superficial. Subway is a undisturbed time, where reading news or books can be done. Indeed, if you want to communicate in a meaningful way, it makes sense to reload information from time to time.

Yes, I agree with that. I actually start thinking about clustering communication types in different ways that it is usually done. I'd say that writing paper letters, writing e-mails and even commenting on discussion boards or places like HackerNews are one type of communication, while face-to-face talk, phone call, texting and IM-ing is the other type (and of course IRC would be grouped with going to a bar).

One type of communication gives you time to articulate your thoughts and reflect on what you have to say. The other is about tight feedback loop, back-and-forthing little bites of thought and emotion. Both types are of course useful and important, but I'm starting to feel that the perceived "superficiality" of communication is people talking too much with each other, and not writing enough letters. Too much human warmth, not enough time to think.

Sure, our technology is a facilitator of this problem. But the nature of the problem is different than usually portrayed.

I felt what you wrote was in poor taste. I think that it's in poor taste to speak for the dead when one was close friends with them, and I think that it's worse still to speak for a celebrity whom you had no personal acquaintance with.

I feel like you did nothing more than mask your own personal complaints about Apple inside dialog written as if spoken by Jobs' , but with little forethought about Jobs' past history of actions, or the hierarchy of team effort that goes on at Apple, or even the way Jobs presented himself.

The disparaging comments about 'his' previous lineup that 'he' (you) made proved that furthermore.

I say all this with a personal hatred for Apple and the Steve Jobs method of getting stuff done, so I'd hate for anyone to think that i'm simply upset that it is sullying His name. I don't care about that; I just don't think that it's realistic in the least.

First up, under Jobs phablet iPhones would have been out of the question. He would have flat out rejected those, because he was simply wrong about some of the assumptions of phone design and would be a lot slower to admit that than Apple did without him.

Second, the Apple Watch would not have been what it was now. For the first time in tech, Apple is second in execution with a more complicated product - one with a more complicated, information dense interface that requires two input methods to operate [1]. I'm not insinuating that Apple Watch will be an inferior product (I think it's more likely the opposite), but I don't think the execution of the product is something Jobs would have let happen in the same way.

But that's all okay! Apple is going in a different direction, and it just might actually be the better direction to go in. I'll be buying my first iPhone later this year, and I very much doubt I would have done so if Jobs was still as influential as he was.

This deification of Steve Jobs is incredibly annoying to me. The annoyance I feel when people say "what would Jesus do?" is the same annoyance I feel when reading these articles about "what would Steve do?". This article is just one level above fan fiction and it has gotten more than 450 votes. Ugh. He was a pioneer in the field, but let's appreciate him for what he's done and not for what he should have been doing today.

[1]: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/smartwatch-wars-the-app... - the comments contain the gem "What kind of bizarro world are we in now where Google releases the clean, minimalist UI and Apple releases the information-dense but cluttered one?"