Con Jobs

Well, it's now been almost 60 days since Steve Jobs shed his earthly shackles.  The fawning obituaries have thinned, but holiday shoppers still clog the retail shrines he left behind.  It remains impossible to speak his name without cueing a choir of earthbound apostles, all chanting the obligatory 'genius!'.  And thanks largely to the work of biographer Walter Isaacson, we have a better understanding of how best that description should be applied.  And now, I would like to add my tribute.

But first, a little stage setting.

For those not fully aware of the man behind the curtain, it must be stated for the record that Steve Jobs did not invent the computer.  Or the laptop.  Or the MP3 music player.  Or the mobile phone.  Or the tablet.  He didn't write the software that makes all the Apple miracles blink to life. When he was fired from his own company, he ran the animation studio Pixar, but never penned a movie script.  Or as far as we know, any song or novel or sitcom available on his App Store. The man's genius was not making things...but making people want things.  And then, wanting that same thing...over and over again.

We are now four years into the era of the iPhone.  And already, we're on the fifth iteration of that product line.  Increasingly, differences from the preceding model are approaching imperceptibility.  Each of the millions ever sold is an implied ticket into the not-so-exclusive world of techno chic.  And each is not so good at actually making phone calls.
The mysterious iPad is setting an even faster pace, with the first model surpassed by a successor less than a year out of the box, and a third version already rumored.  Apple has perfected the devil's brew of consumer amnesia.  One day, you are convinced they have created the single best thing that ever was; and the next, you are certain it must be replaced.  In the pantheon of planned obsolescence, Jobs is a demanding deity.

We also know that he was capable of being a downright nasty human being.  He would belittle and fire employees for fun.  But because he was adopted, and hardly the first megalomaniac of technology, some find those sins easy to forgive.  Maybe harder to accept was his fierce denial of paternity for his eldest daughter.  He went to court and swore under oath he could not have sired her, because he was infertile.  He scoffed at the idea that there was a connection between her name and that of his first line of consumer computers, both called 'Lisa'.  Three more children and many years later he had admitted it was a lie, but by then, 'genius' had conquered all.

So yes, he was not a man without faults, but one gift remains unquestioned--his singular, relentless, crazed pursuit of perfection.  It is not the marketing or the industrial design or the cool cachet that consumers crave.  It is the realization that every aspect of everything bearing the Apple name not only works better than any competitor's...but exists, in effect, on a higher plane of consciousness.  They are simply better--and they are better because of Steve Jobs.

Which brings me to the power cord for the MacBook Pro.

It is so hip it almost makes one weep.  The power unit itself has those iconic prongs that pivot in or out of the body depending on need.  On the other side, there are those adorable little ears that also appear when the cord itself needs to be carried.  And on the other end of the cord, there's a little tube that doesn't actually plug into the computer so much as magnetically merge with it.  Thus, before the power switch is even  activated, several sensory thrills have already occurred.  It is the magic of Apple...applied to the same electricity that powers everything else.

But other than that...this cable is a piece of crap.

And you don't have to take my word for it.  You can go to the Apple website and read the consumer reviews for yourself.  At this writing, 707 people (not including me--yet) have combined to give this little power cord a whopping 1.5 stars out of a possible 5.  And really, five is really just a given, isn't it? After all, this is Apple we're talking about.  But people hate it for all the right reasons. Because it fails without reason or warning.  Because, when you drop it, it displays all the tensile strength of Humpty Dumpty.  In fact, its design ranks right up there with the Xbox 360 as among the least reliable consumer products ever sold.  But at least no one refers to Steve Ballmer as a 'genius'.  It is simply wretched.  And when it inevitably and prematurely dies, you can redeploy your laptop as a fashionable paperweight.  Or you can buy a replacement for the low, low price of $80, plus tax.

So we are left to ponder one of two unthinkables.  Either Jobs was not the perfectionist he was said to be.  Or he personally authorized the manufacture of a criminally sub-standard power cord--one any graduate EE student could better in a day--simply to further reward all the happy Apple shareholders.

I don't have definitive proof either way.  But I'm pretty sure when Jobs made his lateral move over to the Pearly Gates, someone was there to ask him, 'how in hell did you get off charging $80 for this?!'