Sue Halpern, writing for the The New York Review of Books, dug into two movies (Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine and Sorkin’s Steve Jobs) and a book (Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli’s Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader) to explore Steve Jobs’ legacy.

On the outpouring of grief:

Yet if the making of popular consumer goods was driving this outpouring of grief, then why hadn’t it happened before? Why didn’t people sob in the streets when George Eastman or Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell died—especially since these men, unlike Steve Jobs, actually invented the cameras, electric lights, and telephones that became the ubiquitous and essential artifacts of modern life?* The difference, suggests the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, is that people’s feelings about Steve Jobs had less to do with the man, and less to do with the products themselves, and everything to do with the relationship between those products and their owners, a relationship so immediate and elemental that it elided the boundaries between them. “Jobs was making the computer an extension of yourself,” Turkle tells Gibney. “It wasn’t just for you, it was you.”

The outpouring of grief for Steve Jobs was palpable, widespread, and (in my opinion) genuine. By comparison (this in the footnote at the bottom of the article):

When Bell died, every phone exchange in the United States was shut down for a moment of silence. When Edison died, President Hoover turned off the White House lights for a minute and encouraged others to do so as well.

An interesting read. Halpern does a solid job weaving through the elements that make up Steve Jobs’ lasting legacy.