This, for starters.
Kevin Williamson at NRO has a pitch-perfect assessment of the late Steve Jobs’ impact on technology and society. His conclusion is noteworthy:
I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.
And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?
We love our iPods and would love to have a Mac even more, but they are a tad pricey. Though here’s something to consider: if Microsoft hadn’t dumped Vista for Windows 7, we’d have bitten the bullet and migrated to Apple. A lot of other people apparently felt that way, which is the reason Microsoft rushed out Win7.
That’s why innovation and competition are good things. Even though we may have a humble HP running lowly Win7, I thank Steve Jobs for making our home PCs much better than they would be otherwise.
Because does anyone really think Windows would have improved all that much without Apple leading the way? Would Windows even exist if Apple hadn’t pioneered graphic user interfaces? Imagine still living in a world of MS-DOS. Scary, ain’t it?
The Chiles Files 