By Jan Kingsbury

Logging on for a last check of news and email Wednesday evening, my home screen gave me a jolt. Safari opens automatically to apple.com because I’m using my husband’s computer and he loved Apple. My husband, Erron Evans, died last fall. Some things, like the Safari home screen, will take a while to change.

It took only a moment to fully absorb what I was seeing: “Steve Jobs, 1955-2011.” The phrasing is as classic as a Mac. I had used it myself. I couldn’t help but think that Erron would be glad to finally meet Steve.

It is too easy to lionize Steve Jobs, and easier still to wonder that I should feel the universal pang of loss at his death. His declining health meant more to the stock market than it did to me, but isn’t that just the time when the humanist in each of us should feel for one another? And really, Apple itself has been little more than a curiosity to me, though its products have become increasingly ubiquitous in my life. But still, I feel the loss.

Erron was passionate about Apple and about Steve Jobs in the rave fashion of knee-jerk politics. He practically foamed at the mouth if someone were to suggest that Apple products were simply over-priced versions of an array of alternative devices. He lived through his Apples and the awesome power they gave him to push into ever-expanding creative territory.

With every new system and new OS, he discovered new potential. Coupled with Adobe, in particular, his Apple systems offered an almost boundless playground of possibilities. Every time he ventured up to the edge, a new OS was in the wings, or a new suite from Adobe that integrated beautifully with Apple software tools — as long as you upgraded. It has all been so seamless.

That, I think, is the true beauty of Steve Jobs’ legacy: He made things seamless. He (Apple) did the hard work so that users didn’t have to. We are not all techno-wonks, looking to dismantle our systems and customize them with lift kits and dual exhaust and turbo-charged this-es and thats. Some of us just want to get in and drive. But we don’t want to drive where everyone else goes; we want an entire photo studio and darkroom in a 2,952-cubic-inch box. Or smaller.

Oh, and by the way, we want to animate what we create and set it to music that we compose and record on board. Then we want to package it for DVD and compress it for our personal website and do whatever else it takes to share this marvelous creation with the universe.

There are certainly those among us who would wish to build the system that enables them to do all that, but for the rest of us, Steve Jobs was the man. The fact that his company could design off-the shelf systems that met — nay, exceeded — the expectations of millions, from home users to power professionals, speaks to his profound genius.

For rabid fans and even those of us less so, Apple’s marketing has been part of that seamless experience. From the earliest ads in the mid-’80s, when Big Brother took a hammer to the frontal cortex, the marketing has been smart, poetic, even sexy. But never over the top. It’s been consistent with exactly the power of the machine.

It didn’t attempt to over-sell, only expose the imagination to what could be possible — with a Mac. Or an iPod. Or an iPhone. Or an iPad. The marketing inspired consumers to expect more of their computing experience and the products (for the most part) stayed a few paces ahead of the rising expectations.

Even for those who are not Apple-philes, the point cannot be lost that Steve Jobs moved the personal computing marketplace from beige-box-engineering domination to user-experience domination. To market consistently on the basis of user experience is itself an extreme achievement. Product specs are never discussed, only the potential of what one could achieve.

To do this on a massive scale requires tapping into a common language about fears, limitations, desires and dreams. It requires an ability to reference and depict the allegories that are most salient to a national and even international conscience, because the message is not in what is said, it is in what is left unsaid for the imagination to fill in.

That we can all fill the blanks of Apple marketing with a shared understanding of what we want to experience through its products is precisely its power. To do that (mostly) consistently for three decades speaks to the sincerity of the promise.

So the loss of one who could energize and inspire a world in need of a bit more seamlessness is certainly a loss that I feel, even without ever knowing the guy. A part of him sits on my lap as I write and feeds into my ear as I groove.

Groove on, Steve Jobs.

— Jan Kingsbury is a Davis resident.

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