The Atlantic
Brian Lam, who was editor of Gizmodo during the 2010 iPhone 4 leak saga, says that “sometimes, I wish we never found that phone at all” because in the end “it caused me a lot of grief, and stopped writing almost entirely.” He adds: “It made my spirit weak. Three weeks ago, I felt like I had had enough. I wrote my apology letter to Steve.”
Steve, a few months have passed since all that iphone 4 stuff went down, and I just wanted to say that I wish things happened differently. I probably should have quit right after the first story was published for several different reasons. I didn’t know how to say that without throwing my team under the bus, so I didn’t. Now I’ve learned it’s better to lose a job I don’t believe in any more than to do it well and keep it just for that sake.
I’m sorry for the problems I caused you.
Lam says he never expected to get a response, and he never did. “But after sending that I forgave myself. And my writer’s block lifted. I just feel lucky I had the chance to tell a kind man that I was sorry for being an asshole before it was too late.” More tributes:
> Mossberg: I was fortunate to see the personal side of Jobs
> Auletta: “He wasn’t a great human being, but he was a great, transformative, and historical figure”
> Pogue: “The story of Steve Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow”
> Biggs: Everything he touched was a masterpiece in a world where “just OK” is increasingly the norm
> Obama: “He achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world”
