Two months today. I had to actually count on my fingers this morning before I believed it, because it feels like both two weeks and two years, which I realize doesn't make sense, but that's genuinely how it sits in my head.
I wasn't going to write about this. I've got a half-finished draft sitting in my drafts folder about the Kindle Fire's UI lag (still bad, by the way, still very bad, don't let anyone tell you $199 makes up for a browser that hangs for a full second every time you swipe) and I figured I'd just post that instead this week. But I opened the blog to edit it and the whole thing felt wrong to publish today, so here we are.
I keep noticing little things. Yesterday I was setting up my mom's new iPhone 4S and showing her Siri, and she asked it something dumb like "will it rain tomorrow" and it answered and she laughed, this genuine surprised laugh, and for half a second I thought, huh, he'd have liked seeing that. Then I remembered. It's a weird kind of remembering, not the sharp gut-punch kind you get right after, more like stubbing your toe on the same table for the tenth time. You know the table's there. You still walk into it.
I never met the guy. Never worked at Apple, never had a customer service call with him personally or whatever, obviously. I'm just some person with a blog who happens to have opened a Mac laptop every single working day for something like six years. That's the thing that's strange about it, actually, how much of my daily physical routine runs through decisions this one person made, or at least signed off on, and how odd it is to keep using all of it while knowing he's not around to be annoyed at the next thing Apple ships. I wonder what he'd have thought of the 4S launch being so quiet compared to what everyone expected. I wonder if he saw the final box art before he died. Small, dumb thoughts like that keep showing up uninvited.
The keynote habit is the part that got me the hardest, honestly, more than I expected. I used to clear my evening for those. Not because the products were always earth-shattering, half the time they weren't, but because of the specific rhythm of the thing: the black turtleneck, the "one more thing," the pause before a number went up on the screen. It was a whole genre of television that existed because one guy liked doing it a certain way. Tim Cook's fine. He seems like a genuinely capable operations guy and the 4S launch went off without anything falling apart, which, given how MobileMe used to go, is not nothing. But it's a different show now. I don't think it's a worse show necessarily. It's just not the same show, and I miss the old one in a way I didn't expect to, since I never even met the host.
I went back and reread some of the obituary stuff from October, the Wozniak interview bits and some of the old D8 conference footage that got passed around again after. There's a clip where he's talking about, I think it was the Concord, the idea that sometimes the newer, faster, more advanced version of something quietly gets discontinued because it stopped fitting how people actually lived. I keep thinking about that clip specifically. It's a weirdly sad little metaphor and I don't fully know what to do with it, but it's stuck.
Anyway. I don't have a neat point here. I'm not trying to build up to some big statement about legacy or innovation or whatever word people keep reaching for in these pieces. I just noticed the date on my calendar this morning, October 5th plus two months, and it felt like it deserved more than getting skipped over for a post about Kindle Fire scroll lag.
I'll get back to the usual stuff next post, promise. Carrier IQ alone deserves a full rant and I haven't even started on it yet. But not today.