Steve Jobs And The Idea Of Letting Go

Hank Stuever: Remember a few years ago, when your Apple store on any given Saturday afternoon ceased being the clean, technological zendo you once admired — the place you bought your iMac — and instead became a crowded bazaar of idealized wonder and hopeless waits at the Genius Bar?

The movement spread. People built their lives around the objects Steve Jobs gave them: the MacBook, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. What happened with Jobs and Apple over the past decade is one of the rare participatory phenomena of our disconnected and no-longer-common culture. It was as if this generation's defining event took place in a shopping plaza and then up in the "cloud," and this time everyone (that is, everyone who could afford Apple products) got to go to Woodstock.