Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dies at age 56

Like a lot of brilliant people, Steve Jobs was not exactly patient. He was mercurial, demanding, and capable of profane outbursts. He would court talented new employees, flatter them, lionize them, then turn on them, berating and belittling them mercilessly. (Colleagues called it the “hero-s—head rollercoaster.”) Jobs derided people who didn’t agree with him as “bozos,” though he later came to respect intelligent dissent. And if there was a bug in a piece of software, he was the bug up your backside until it was fixed. “I want to put a ding in the universe,” he announced early in his career. If that overweening ambition put a ding or two in people around him along the way, so be it.

“He pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward,” Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull said of Jobs a few years ago. “It’s built into him.”

That tenacity became so central a part of Jobs’ public persona that Newsweek writer Daniel Lyons created a website to lampoon it in 2006 under the pseudonym Fake Steve Jobs. Labeled a “Secret Diary,” it was a wickedly satirical blog, and Lyons extended the conceit in a mock-autobiographical 2007 book, Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs. “Obviously we can’t literally put our employees’ lives at risk,” declared Fake Steve. “But we have to make them feel that way.” (The site went dormant in the last few months.)

On Jan. 17, 2011, the real Steve Jobs issued a statement pulling a metaphorical curtain around himself. “My family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy,” he said. By Aug. 24, he formally stepped down as CEO, indicating that he “could no longer meet [his] duties and obligations.” Tim Cook, the company’s longtime chief operating officer who had overseen the company through Jobs’ previous medical leaves, assumed the chief executive job.

But much as Jobs seemed to bristle at what he saw as intrusions from outsiders, he was among the toughest, least sentimental assessors of his own mortality. After his first pancreatic-cancer scare in 2004, he was keenly aware of how fleeting his own time might be. He delivered a breathtakingly blunt commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. “Death is very likely the single best invention of life,” he told the graduating class. “It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

The race is now on among Apple’s competitors to see what holes can be punched in the company’s new-media game plan. It’s time for a new wave of designers and programmers and new historical and technological forces to fill the vacuum Jobs leaves, and for us to see whether the digital revolution he spearheaded will continue as he envisioned, or shoot off in unexpected directions. The universe has pressed “shuffle play.” And for once, Steve Jobs hasn’t got the control buttons in his hands.

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