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" I do not want to sentimentalize Steve Jobs. I just came off Facebook, where people are mourning him as though he were their kindly uncle, and making particular note (as even the president did) of the fact that they are mourning him on products he ushered into the world. I am, too. But doesn&amp;#039;t mean that I knew him, nor does it mean that the Steve Jobs I knew and wrote about wasn&amp;#039;t anything but one of the most sneeringly unsentimental men to ever touch a chord with the great American public.  I miss him now. But I first missed him last week, when Jeff Bezos introduced Amazon&amp;#039;s tablet to the world, and Steve Jobs didn&amp;#039;t step up to dismiss it. Bezos got away with a feat of technological showmanship, which is something Steve Jobs never allowed. And that was when you knew he was gone. That&amp;#039;s when you knew there wouldn&amp;#039;t be any surprise appearances at Tuesday&amp;#039;s unveiling of what turned out to be the iPhone 4S. Of course, a lot of us were disappointed that Apple failed to unveil an all-new iPhone, and our disappointment is what&amp;#039;s haunting in light of the death of its creator.  Steve Jobs taught us to be disappointed. Even as he was dying of a disease characterized by its inexorable progress, he embodied the faith that technology had an inexorable progress of its own, one that could keep pace with mortality itself. He made great products because he both identified and was identified with them, and so when his successors announced the arrival of the iPhone 4S, they were also acknowledging what everybody knew. It was not only Jobs&amp;#039;s absence, and the silence that gathered around it, that made the introduction of an innovative new Apple product feel like a posthumous event; it was the absence of the iPhone 5. And on the next day, a thunderclap death \u2014 the kind that is followed by more silence, and then rain. Over the next few weeks, we may well discover that Apple made a frantic push to bring the iPhone 4S into existence, so that its progenitor could breathe a sigh of relief before breathing his last, and that the Moses marooned on the mountaintop could taste fruit from the Promised Land. But there will never be an iPhone 5, in the sense that there will never be an iPhone 5 introduced by Steve Jobs. There will never be an iPhone introduced by a man who always used his introductions to teach us that there is no Promised Land \u2014 and no mountaintop. There was only a relentless and remorseless American faith that we wanted what Steve Jobs wanted, and that if Steve Jobs liked something, so would we. That&amp;#039;s why we all miss him: Steve Jobs produced technology that he believed in, but managed to convey that it was the product of his belief in himself, and in us. He made machines, but he never stopped struggling to shape the machine more than the machine shaped him. For all his optimism, for all his refusal to heed the lessons of the past in his attempt to write the lessons of the future, he also seemed to be fighting a deeply personal rearguard action \u2014 he was John Henry, if John Henry had decided to go ahead and invent the damn steam engine, instead of fighting vainly against it. We like to think that Steve Jobs&amp;#039;s fight was against death, and indeed while no one we know has lived like Steve Jobs, everyone we know should have the courage to die like him. But the fight he&amp;#039;ll be remembered for is the one he was fighting from the beginning \u2014 his fight against the ugly and inhuman aspects of the very world he helped create. We will miss him, but not because he was the first to stake his life on that battle. We will miss him because he might very well be the last.  REQUIRED READING: \u2022 &amp;quot;Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible&amp;quot; (By Tom Junod, October 2008) \u2022 &amp;quot;Steve Jobs Is Dying for Us All&amp;quot; (By Tom Junod, August 25, 2011) \u2022 &amp;quot;The Second Coming of Steven Jobs&amp;quot; (By Joseph Nocera, December 1986) \u2022 &amp;quot;God of Music?&amp;quot; (Interview by Andy Langer, July 2003) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a11174/steve-jobs-obituary-6507035/>