In conversation, he would always be unfailingly polite (if not always prompt in recent years), a gentle soul in the body of a rugby player. He’d shimmer with intensity as he dove into the tiny things that were always paramount in bringing his visions into physical form. Like Carl Sagan awed at some mind-bending celestial wonder, he’d extol the sound that a laptop made when it closed shut, or praise the way concrete had been poured in the parking garage at Apple headquarters. When we talked about the iPod, he would launch into reveries about its whiteness. “It’s not just a color. So brutally simple and so … pristine … so shocking.” That word again.

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