Genius

It’s quite redundant that a nineteen year-old girl from the north of England would have such intense views about a 56 year-old businessman from San Francisco, but I truly believe that Steve Jobs was a genius. The word ‘genius’ is overused in our society. It is such an unbelievably potent word and is used so flippantly. It is from the Latin genius, which means ’generative power’ and school-kids use it when talking about a sketch from Little Britain. It’s crazy. But I know that Steve Jobs deserves the accolade.

In 1986, Steve Jobs made a computer, which is pretty clever. I couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it. Well done, Steve! You knocked it out of the park! But, hey, computers are made all of the time. No offence, but some guy was already setting the pace for those things 150 years earlier. Also, Jobs was fired from the place that he made the computers for. Not so clever.

What was clever was buying this graphics company called ‘The Graphics Group’ off of George Lucas. See, Steve could see that computer graphics were quite nifty. Steve helped make the company quite successful and, by the end of the decade, they managed to squeeze out a film - Toy Story. This was after they changed their name from ‘The Graphics Group’ to ‘Pixar’. Toy Story became one of the most financially successful, not to mentioned one of the most loved, films in modern history. You go, Steve Jobs! Jobs, with relatively very little money created one of the most respected film companies of our time. That took serious brain power and foresight.

However, he wasn’t the only one making money. The company that he made the computers for? Apple? They made some healthy profits too and in 1996, Apple said they were going to buy Mr Jobs’ other company, NeXT, for just over $400 million. He;d be working for them again. Not one to sit around, he went in and he changed it. He rid Apple of a number of dwindling projects and streamlined the company into a well-oiled, but still quite clunky, machine. He then designed a new computer. He called it the iMac. It sold rather well. So well that Steve Jobs became Apple’s CEO. He became the head of the company who sacked him. Smart guy, this Jobs fella.

When you thought that Apple couldn’t get more hip unless it wore an ironic t-shirt over itself, it started to make digital appliances. (You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?). He made a portable music player. Like a CD Walkman, but it didn’t skip if you ran with it. And it was a lot smaller than a CD Walkman. And it didn’t require CDs. Or tapes. It just kind of ‘had’ all of your music in it. Like, all of your music. Not just one CD, but tens and hundreds of CDs. On this little thing! It was quite a boon to the music connoisseur.

They then made a better version. And another even better version. And we kept buying them. We bought millions of them. Then, when Apple brought out mobile phones, we bought them too. And we bought the better version of those as well! It was as if we needed them in our life. Our lives weren’t better with them: they were worse without them. Steve Jobs created something that not only served a purpose, but created its own necessity. He generated something bigger than its own physical size. Steve Jobs made music and films and computers that created their own power. He was a genius.