The deeply moving libretto by Mark Campbell is animated by the brilliantly wide-ranging electronic and acoustic music of Mason Bates, and the result is an opera as carefully calibrated and elegantly designed as an Apple product-and as innovative. These complexities are portrayed in the new opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs. Unlike the designs of his products, Jobs was complicated. No praise is too high for Isaacson's 2011 Steve Jobs, which explains the development of products and innovations while exploring Jobs's business acumen, all-consuming ambition, prodigious energy and discipline, and does not skip his often-fractured relationships, as well as his well-known disregard for and downright cruelty toward others. The most comprehensive biography is by Walter Isaacson, former managing editor of Time magazine and the CEO of the Aspen Institute, who also authored books on Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, and Kissinger. Jobs has become a mythic figure, his life and achievements explored in several documentary films, a Hollywood biopic, and many books. Even for those without Apple products, Jobs has profoundly changed what we expect from our electronic gadgets. Though I am not an addicted screen-gazer, I confess that what Jobs dubbed the "one device" has changed my habits of communication and digital consumption.
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While on the road, I am writing this on my MacBook Air it is being saved to iCloud so that I can access it on my two iPads or the MacBook Pro back in my office. Only recently have I begun to realize the extent to which Jobs affects my everyday life. I was stupefied by the enormous outpouring of grief at his death in 2011. During his lifetime, I found myself bemused and puzzled by news accounts of the hysteria surrounding the annual Macworld event that unveiled the latest and greatest product, as well as by the sheeple who camped out overnight in order to be among the first to own Apple's latest iteration. I missed out on the Steve Jobs fan phenomenon.
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In his lifelong pursuit of streamlined design in all aspects of his businesses, he solved the problems of how to distribute digital entertainment (iTunes), how to share data across platforms (iCloud), how to create with digital animation (Pixar), and how to design a brick-and-mortar retail site that efficiently moves tech merchandise (the Apple Store). He demanded simplicity over and over from engineers, designers, artists, inventors, manufacturers, marketers, and the thousands of employees who, under his autocratic leadership, created such innovative products as the iMac, iPod, iPad, and the iPhone. He demanded it from himself in his stripped-down lifestyle, his uniform of jeans and turtleneck, and his restrictive diet. Jobs had many talents, including a genius for simplification. In the third, he revealed his cancer diagnosis, adding that knowing he would be dead soon "is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." No big deal, indeed. Just three stories." The first two dealt with the life lessons obtained when he dropped out of school and later got fired from Apple. He began, "Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. In 2005, when Steve Jobs was secretly battling the cancer that would kill him six years later, he delivered a startling commencement speech at Stanford University.