IPad Mini Parody With Rapping Steve Jobs Might Be In Bad Taste
Last fall, I mourned the passing of the late Steve Jobs as though I had known him personally—which, I imagine, was many an ardent Apple fanboy’s reaction. I recoiled when my dad, a hardcore IBM computer scientist of 30 years, muttered under his breath while trying and failing to use my Apple products or when he dared to make snippy comments about my main man.
Jobs was, to me, a relatable hyper-perfectionist, which was best epitomized in his tale of how taking a single calligraphy course at Reed College impacted his work at Apple down the road: “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
It felt like the end of an era when he finally succumbed to pancreatic cancer, and it felt stranger still when I realized three weeks back that it had been a year. So you can imagine that watching Mondo Media’s iPad Mini parody video—in which a “resurrected” Steve Jobs steals Tim Cook’s limelight to introduce the new iPad—struck me as going too far.
Cook has now helmed more than a few events as Apple CEO; enough people have made the far-from-astute observation that he isn’t Steve Jobs, but that he’s still someone who genuinely appreciates his position and doesn’t exactly crave being the center of attention. Seeing him as a fannypack-donning troll was mildly tragic—but yes, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the ghost of Steve Jobs past teabagging Bill Gates.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good laugh at almost anyone’s expense, and I particularly thrive on crude jokes. And I did chuckle a few times while watching this video, but it still felt wrong, as though it colored my interpretation of Steve Jobs. He’s amusing as a rapper whiz kid spitting rhymes at Jeff Bezos, but I’d like to remember him as the visionary entrepreneur who spoke to me with these words:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
