Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January — his third since his health problems began — before resigning as CEO six weeks ago. Jobs became Apple’s chairman and handed the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.

The news Apple fans and shareholders had been dreading came the day after Apple unveiled its latest version of the iPhone, just one in a procession of devices that shaped technology and society while Jobs was running the company.

And that’s what’s so amazing about the Steve Jobs story. It’s easy enough to rhapsodize over Jobs’ incredible track record — his accomplishments include the first great personal computer, the transformation of both the music and the telephone business, and the creation of one of the greatest movie-making studios of our time. Just writing that sentence is breathtaking. We will not see its like again. But for me, Jobs’ career signifies something more primal — his comeback saga is a story of redemption, a fantasy epic in which a great king is toppled, but through force of will and grit and brilliance fights his way all the way back to the throne, and inaugurates an even greater empire. It’s hard to think of parallels. Mohammed Ali, maybe.

America loves underdogs and comeback kids and winners. Jobs’ career arc fills all of those bills. You don’t have to be a Windows guy or a Mac guy to appreciate this. All you have to do is love a great story. And the story of how Jobs got pushed out of Apple by a man he personally hand-picked to help run his company, how the company teetered perilously close to bankruptcy, and how Jobs came back to lead Apple to unthinkable success is one hell of an insanely great yarn.

For years I watched it from afar, locked into Microsoft’s dreary ecology. When I purchased my first computer in the 1980s, I bought an IBM clone primarily because there was much better software for writing in Chinese available for PCs than Macs — an unintentional consequence of Apple’s successful war against Taiwanese hardware copycats. For years, I felt vaguely uncool in a Bay Area full of Mac cultists, but there was also a sense that I had inadvertently backed the right horse. The power of network returns made the PC/Windows world hard to beat. The availability of Chinese-language software was just the tip of the iceberg. If you were a serious gamer, you had to be on Windows, if you wanted the first rev of a breakthrough app, it was much likelier to be developed for Windows before Mac. On The Well, the online conferencing system where I started hanging out in the mid-’90s, huge flame wars would constantly erupt between Mac and Windows partisans, but I never felt the need to participate. The debate seemed moot. I felt no passion for my Windows machine, but for many years it just seemed like a default necessity.

But even from that vantage point, as a technology journalist in the Bay Area in the ’90s, I felt sad about Apple’s steady decline. Apple had character — it was cool, it had been innovative, and its early success sent an inspiring message that you could be a freak and still change the world. You didn’t have to be a button-down number-cruncher seeking to please the lowest common denominator. The slow death of Apple devastatingly undermined that narrative. As each month went by, and the news got worse from Apple, the epic “1984″ advertisement that pictured the Mac overthrowing IBM’s Big Brother seemed more and more risible. Big Brother had won.

And Steve Jobs’ exile — that just seemed grossly unfair. Every single time a company founder is forced out of his or her baby, it feels somehow wrong, even if, in many cases, it may be deserved. But the Steve Jobs debacle trumped every other example of corporate nastiness. The freak went down for the count while the button-downed sugar-water salesman took over.

Of course, no one ever said capitalism was supposed to be fair. Silicon Valley is littered with the carcasses of amazing start-ups that rose to fantastic heights and then crashed and burned. That’s the way of the jungle! Only the strong survive! As the ’90s marched on, it seemed clearer and clearer that nothing could stand against Microsoft, not even Bill Clinton’s Justice Department.

And then the cat came back. Like many, I was skeptical, even if at a very basic level I rooted for Jobs to succeed — I’m just as much a fan of the comeback kid as anyone. But I thought the iMac was a toy and became far more interested in the challenge posed to Bill Gates and company by Linux and the free software rebels. I dual-booted my Sony Vaio with Windows and Red Hat Linux and never looked back.

Oops.

Today, I work on a MacBook Pro and I love my iTunes and maybe, just maybe, this weekend I’ll finally break down and buy an iPhone. I’m certainly not crazy about everything Apple does as a company, but I cannot deny that it makes the most amazing computing products in the world, products that have profoundly improved the quality of my life.

Steve Jobs won. And in doing so, he has proved some important things in the process. You don’t have to settle for less, you don’t have to cater to the lowest common denominator, you don’t have to be ruled by focus groups and market research. You might get knocked down, but if your will is strong, if you bear down and remain committed to your vision, you can get back up stronger than ever before. Steve Jobs is the anti-Icarus. He flew high, his wings melted and he crashed, and then he made new wings and flew even higher than before.

That’s a myth I can get behind. There’s a lot of sadness in the technology world today, but just the act of recapitulating Steve Jobs’ rise and fall and rise again has me feeling inspired, and grateful. Thanks, Steve, not for the Apple or the Macintosh or the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad. Thanks for setting a great example. The world is what you make it.

Below we’ve posted a commencement address delivered by the native Alabaman at his alma mater, Auburn University, in 2010. There he discussed the important role intuition played in his decision to move from Compaq to Apple in 1998. In closing, he noted (with a deliberate, southern cadence): ”For the most important decisions in your life, trust your intuition, and then work with everything you have to prove it right.”

(Cook’s speech starts at the 2:20 mark.)

(Via the Daily Beast)

He’s the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He’s a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than “3″, and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.

In his post, Dash neglects to point to a particular liberal-values bashing source, which makes it a little difficult to understand the motivation for the sudden attempt to reclaim business for progressivism, even if we grant that there are plenty of conservatives who do believe that peace and love equals bankruptcy. And sure, on the basis of such personal attributes, Steve Jobs helps to refute “the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. ” But is Apple, the company, really all that great an example of “inclusive, creative, tolerant values”? One could just as easily argue that Apple’s ability to play the game of cutthroat capitalism as well, or better, than anyone else, derives from factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with anything “liberal.”

Is it “liberal” to exploit cheap Chinese labor in massively dehumanizing monster manufacturing complexes? Is it “liberal” to lock down absolute control over the computing ecosystem? Is it “liberal” to wield a ruthless intellectual property litigation strategy to ward off competitive threats to market share?

I’m not saying Apple is wrong to do any of these things. Obviously, it makes very good business sense for Apple to keep labor costs as low as possible while maintaining a stranglehold over exactly how its hundreds of millions of customers interact with both the innards of its gadgets and the wonders of the Internet. Taking a cut out of every financial transaction an iPhone or iPad user engages in is also a brilliant strategy — if your goal is to maximize revenues. But none of these things fits under the category of “inclusive” or “tolerant.”

An open-source operating system, like Google’s Android, which anyone can modify or copy, fits the definition of “liberal” much more closely, as do Internet technology pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, who asked for nothing in return for the creation of the World Wide Web. Fighting aggressively for higher wages and better benefits for all employees, across borders, would probably be more “liberal” than offshoring all one’s manufacturing operations in search of the lowest possible operating costs.

But that’s not Apple. Apple does a fantastic job of marketing itself as the cooler alternative to its dowdy, mainstream competitors. But cool does not equal liberal. If there’s a single quality that Apple exhibits above all others, it’s the way the company has managed to mint gold out of Steve Jobs’ totalitarian control-freakery. Creative, yes. Liberal, not quite.