“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Steve Jobs was not a maker of machines. Never mind that I am writing this very post on a MacBook. I’ve been using an Apple since it’s early days, with a brief, completely unsatisfying affair with Dell. I wrote my college thesis about the civil rights movement at the University of Virginia on a Macintosh that had a nine inch screen (a small screen for a narrow topic). Learning to use the mouse was tricky, but much easier than hunting and pecking on an electric typewriter with White Out all over my fingers.
Back then I listened to records on a turntable and had speakers bigger than my end tables. My beige phone was at the end of a curly cord that didn’t reach past my bed and didn’t even have a keypad. All my creativity was confined to the purple carpeted room bedecked with a twin bed and a poster of Paris at night hanging above my heavily grained oak desk. It was from this room that I stared out across the sidewalk at an uninviting scape of cinder block walls and bike racks that I wrote letters, papers, poetry. I listened to Mozart to feel erudite, Sinead O’Connor to fuel my emo moods, and Oingo Boingo when I needed to bop my head.
Steve Jobs expanded my universe. He helped unleash my creativity and enabled me to tote it around. Years later when I worked for The Man, he freed me from the squeeze of cubicles and industrial paint in varying shades of seafoam green. Steve Jobs made me feel competent, smart, creative, stylish. With MacBook in hand, I was am a definitive modern girl. To be a Mac Girl is to own a certain sensibility and credibility. Steve Jobs filled my world with confidence and music and verve.
I am not a gadget girl. I don’t own an iPad (though I covet one!). I don’t even have an iPhone (I know, I know). What I value most about Apple are not its machines. I value what these machines enable me to do, rather easily and stylishly. It’s remarkable that a girl like me with no tech smarts at all can even operate my MacBook and iPod without a user manual. Never have design, functionality, and ease of use been so beautifully mastered together to give us true harmony.
Steve Jobs gave me a voice and a song and a peek into what can be.
As a marketer, I must give props to the Apple brand. The marriage of consumer promise and brand delivery has never been so seamless. Apple’s branding stands on its own with Steve Jobs inextricably linked to it, yet he stands on his own too. The style and vision that embody the Apple brand are what every other brand aspires to be. Apple, the gold standard. Tales of lore tell us that the golden apple possesses the ability to captivate gods and mortals alike; it was even believed to have the power to grant immortality.
Here’s to you Steve Jobs, our generation’s Golden Apple. 
It is also worth noting that Steve Jobs had the vision to rescue Pixar from the garbage bin. And from that we have the Toy Story movies, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., Cars, etc. etc.