What would the world be like if Steve Jobs had never existed?

It is February 24 1955. AT&T has justcreated the first transistor, the Pentagon has just started developing the first nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, and in San Francisco… in a hospital in San Francisco, Steve Jobs is born.

When a person dies a vast, incalculable legacy is left behind, an opus of work that can not be measured in standard, human units. The web today, tomorrow, and possibly for months, will try to make sense of Steve Jobs’ death with stories about his inspirational ideas and innovations and how they touched every one of us, how they made the world a richer and more fun place to live. But instead of paying homage with perfect hindsight, a more insightful story can be told. What if Steve Jobs had never lived? What would the world be like today? It is easy to point to the iPhone and say that it revolutioni ed computing, that Jobs is a genius, that everything else is a weak simulacrum – but what if, on that fateful February day some 56 years ago, Jobs hadn’t been born?

You wake up, and rather than check your phone for the latest news or email, you would watch the TV or listen to the radio. On the way to work, you don’t have satnav in your car, either, because car manufacturers never had any competition and in-dash units would still cost as much as a small house. Instead, you listen to the radio, or perhaps a CD.

Once you get to the office, there’s no personal computer sitting on your desk, no beautiful, wondrous, unibody fondleslab of magnesium alloy. There’s a thin client hooked up to a mainframe in another room and a calculator of some kind, but that’s it. During your lunch or smoking break, you can play Angry Birds on your calculator with a stylus, or you talk to your coworkers about current affairs and their hot date last night instead. To check your plans for the afternoon you whip out your Filofax and leaf through a few pages.

At the end of the day you decide to cycle home, but unfortunately you forgot to bring another CD, so you have to listen to Queen’s Greatest Hits yet again. You don’t bother skipping through the first few tracks because the CD player has too many little buttons and an incomprehensible display. You set your stop watch and look at a map when you get home to work out how many calories you burnt during the ride.

Back at home, you have another thin client that can connect to the office mainframe, but you can forget about playing games on a PC or editing images with Photoshop. The one saving grace is that you would have a video game console, but you wouldn’t have access to digital downloads of music, videos, or games. Both your console and thin client have a horrible, counterintuitive interface, though, so you generally spend your evenings outside in the garden reading books made from dead trees, or listening to music on your 100-CD auto-changer.

When it’s finally time to go to bed, you don’t have the means to watch a movie with your wife or husband, so it’s either more reading, an early lights out, or perhaps some love making. When you wake up, your 1950s, steampunkesque life begins all over again. When will those computers stop sitting on the periphery and actually start helping humans, you wonder?

Alternate universe

Of course, this is an overly-simplistic view of what life without Steve Jobs and Apple would be like. Jobs might have invented the all-in-one PC, PDA, smartphone, and tablet, and redefined how we consume digital content, but it is naive to assume that Microsoft or IBM or Google, given enough time, wouldn’t have arrived at roughly the same creations.

In such a parallel universe, though, a world without Steve Jobs would be intrinsically different. We would have personal computers, but the IBM PC might have been less successful at pushing into the home, and MS-DOS and Windows might enjoy its 95% share of the market. Through Moore’s law, we would have smaller, PDA-like computers, but they would have do ens of buttons, have a complicated interface, and crash all the time. The music, TV, and movie industry would probably still be exactly the same as the ’60s: Digital? What’s digital?

Perhaps most importantly, though, the world would be less joyous, less functional, and less beautiful. PCs would be beige boxes with gangly wires and buttons running everywhere; PDAs would be cheap, silvered, plastic affairs with cluttered, unresponsive interfaces; Portable MP3 players would be square and dull-looking and be a pain to use. Almost every modern gadget and tool has been touched by the Jobsian aesthetic and it is painful to imagine an Earth without him.

Fortunately we don’t have to entertain such a planet: Steve Jobs lived! He created and innovated with a visionary flair that has indelibly altered society, and then… he left us. So it goes.

 

What would the world be like if Steve Jobs had never existed?