The Raft.

I finished the Steve Jobs bio on the train this morning (in an awkward tribute, I read it as an iBook on my phone). I’m not the type to analyze something, especially this soon after consuming it, but something struck me:

Towards the end of his life, Jobs was building a boat. It was to be his escape for him and his family, a perfectly realized vision of simplicity and design, a craft where every facet and mechanism had his input, down to the finish on the light switches. Jobs being Jobs, designs were blown up and changed multiple times in the process, and it’s unclear whether he ever got it finished before his death.

There couldn’t be a more perfect metaphor for Apple post-Jobs than that boat. The book never specifies, but I come from a sailing family, so I imagined Steve’s yacht as a massive sailing vessel, and that’s how I picture Apple now, too. Jobs made sure that before he died, every detail was in place, every mechanism and system and rudder aligned for Apple to sail onward without him (He even literally designed the vessel in the Apple Spaceship).

He built a perfect machine in Apple, his best machine - but the thing that sunk in as I read his biography is that that craft was designed for a single operator. Every system within Apple is designed to respond to his input, so he can stand at the wheel and trim the sails with a touch, towards the horizon HE saw. 

Now that he’s gone, that ship is without a captain, set on a course with the wind at their backs. But how long will the memory of the hand on the wheel remain?