Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs has died at the age of 56 after a long battle with cancer.
London - There is currently an iPhone 4 on sale in southern China with an image of Steve Jobs, the late co-founder of Apple, on its cover.
Police in California were put on alert in the days before his death, in case large numbers of mourners arrived at his home in Palo Alto.
Jobs was a brilliant man, a visionary in his field, and his passing at 56 is tragic. But isn’t the worldwide wake that has followed, with its iconic black-and-white imagery, the stark black turtleneck, the serious face staring out, in danger of turning into a cult?
Take away the name, Steven Paul Jobs, and replace it with The Leader, and there is a scene straight out of Orwellian fiction.
Jobs already had cult status among specialist technology journalists. At the launch of the iPad - a humble press conference, after all - he walked onto the stage to a standing ovation and a roomful of iPhones held aloft and set to record.
Yet his products were not given away. Jobs did not donate his genius to society. He sold it, for a vast profit. If ever there is a sign of modern times, it is that the passing of the owner of a multinational corporation is treated like the demise of Gandhi. He wasn’t Mandela; he sold computers.
The greatest inventor since Thomas Edison, Steven Spielberg called him - and he is quite possibly right. Maybe if Edison’s era had access to the technology Jobs invented, his death might have been mourned in the same way; but I doubt it. Human spirituality was different then; less inclined towards overwrought outpourings of grief, such as those that follow celebrity death in modern times.
We do not know where to erect the next shrine; our grief is shiftless and often based as much on notoriety as worth to mankind.
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