Steve Jobs Memorial

On Saturday afternoon Sam and I walked over to the Eaton Centre so I could check on the autumn merchandise at Williams Sonoma. I’ve been carrying around a gift card for that store for literally years and it was burning a hole in my wallet.

While we were at the mall, we stopped at the Apple store. My iPad has been acting up; the home button works only intermittently and the power pack no longer functions to charge the device.

We immediately noticed all of the colourful post-it notes on the windows of the store. “Oh, is that for Steve Jobs?” Sam asked. We looked more closely at the notes that people in Toronto had left for him.

RIP

I love my iPhone

You will be missed

Good bye

iSad

You’ll always be an inspiration

Thanks for making my life easier

That last one touched me…I thought of my friend and her son who is autistic, now able to learn and communicate well through the use of his iPad, and I understood.

Sure, my iPhone makes my life easier in the sense that I can use it to keep in touch with my friends and family, to play around on social media networks, to share photographs and make phone calls, but I don’t consider the ability to accomplish these tasks life-changing. The fact that the home button on my iPad has been acting up doesn’t profoundly impact my daily life. In fact, I probably take my iPhone for granted. But Steve Jobs meant something to some people, people whose lives have been made easier in more profound ways because of the devices he had a hand in creating, not in spite of them.

I’m glad some of those people found a simple, poignant way to express that.