14 DAY TRIAL // One of the best Steve Jobs quotes is also the last one listed in the man’s biography by Walter Isaacson. It’s about life and death and on/off switches, a typical Jobsian remark.
Jobs had many views on pretty much everything, and he was not shy to make them heard. That being said, he would also shut his mouth and listen up when someone had something smart to say. Even though that didn’t happen very often.
Being the outspoken personality that he was, his biographer had no shortage of material when he wrote down the 600-page biography that most people agree does Jobs justice. In the book, Isaacson lays down a few dozen quotes from the iconic tech entrepreneur, including one about life and death. It’s important to note that he said these things as he’d begun to lose the fight with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. The quote, excerpted from the aforementioned biography, reads:
“I like to think that something survives after you die,” he said. “It’s strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures. But on the other hand, perhaps it’s like an on-off switch. “Click! And you’re gone. Maybe that’s why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.”
Indeed, Apple products prefer to go to sleep, rather than to power off completely. Technically speaking, though, some Apple products do have physical Power ON and Power OFF buttons, but they don’t work in the way that regular on-off switches do (such as on regular PCs).