By Andray Abrahamian

I bought my first Apple computer exactly one week before Steve Jobs died. I like it a lot. It's a MacBook air, which I decided to buy after a lot of hemming and hawing over the price.

But really, I wonder if the decision was made in 2008, when Jobs strolled on stage with a manila envelope and slid the ultra-thin machine out of it. I couldn't justify the price then, bought a Netbook and hated it for the next three years.

Will I love this machine? It's too early to tell. I hope so, and if my friends' experiences are anything to go by, I'll be truly head-over-heels soon enough. This was Job's gift: he gave us machines that we love. Devices that previously were troublesome became experiential. Tasks that took hard work to understand became intuitive.

And when he didn't improve on existing things, he helped invent new ones. One can't imagine a computer without pointing and clicking. And not too far in the future, the "smart" will be dropped from "smartphone": they'll all be this way and we'll laugh about when they weren't.

But these gifts came ― as everything does ― with drawbacks. Some were functions of Jobs' personality, some of corporate strategy, and the biggest one was not really Jobs' fault: It is how we come to own goods in modern society. The sad part is that he ― perhaps above all others ― had the power to improve the last one and it would have been visionary.

Apple's sometimes draconian, oppressive atmosphere of secrecy along with Job's own tendency to belittle employees and throw tantrums when unsatisfied have become legend. (Though really, other CEOs should probably be thinking, "how can I combine infantile rage and inspiration with the balance that Steve Jobs did?")

Also well explored is the irony that a man who is celebrated for thinking differently, challenging convention and being creative has chosen a model for his mobile devices that is a closed platform. The app store acts as a custodian, filtering out software that the company deems undesirable. Apple chooses what we can install, giving the company enormous power over what we can see and do on our iPads, iPods and iPhones.

The deepest sadness, however, comes from the way in which we get our Apple products, which is by no means unique. We are, by and large, completely divorced from the processes by which our things are made. It's what makes capitalism a system of a billion tiny sins, none of which is on its own significant, but add up to create injustices the world over.

Let's say I have to take the kids to play soccer. They put on their socks and soccer shoes, grab the ball. I don't pause to wonder if Pakistani kids made the ball, though they probably did. We fill up the car on the way and I don't think about how the gas may have rendered Bolivian farmlands toxic or created private armies in Nigeria, who violently impose corporate interests over those of the local population.

I'm just being a good parent, taking my kids to exercise and socialize. Yet contained in so much of what we buy, some kind of injustice and unfairness exists, we're just not aware of it. Or when we are we can kind of shrug it off, as when Foxconn employees ― the people who make Apple stuff ― started committing suicide in shocking numbers.

This lack of awareness is encouraged by the companies that sell us our stuff. Why draw attention to the back-end of the global supply chain with its yucky factories, chemicals, dormitories, autocracies and wages? And that disconnect is understandable, because we tend not to love our things too much.

For most of us, a car is just a way to get to work, a TV is something to watch when we're tired after a long day of work and a computer is something on which to do that work, while suffering through virtual memory allocation problems, DVD drives freezing and blue screens of death.

Not so for Apple users. We love our machines. The connection between us and them is a singular one. As Jobs' death demonstrates, our connection to his company's products is deep, emotional and above all, personal. This was his gift to us, this transcendence of function, to where we have relationships with our devices.

The irony is, then, we're encouraged to have personal connections with our devices, while discouraged from thinking about the way in which those products are made and supplied to us. We love the packaging, the interface, and the smooth lines.

But we couldn't give a crap about what it took to get it all too us, the miseries that may have been created along the way. How divorced we are from the people who made our MacBooks is called into relief by how deeply we love the products themselves.

The tragedy here is a legacy that Jobs could have made. Having secured our love, getting us to pay more than any other company for the equivalent computing power, of all CEOs, Jobs could have unilaterally levied a "life improvement fee" or "factory bump-up fee," or whatever you might call it.

(I'm sure they could come up with a better name: they are creative geniuses after all) State that an additional $20 from each product will be charged, and will go to subsidized Apple products for Foxconn employees and to improve the dorms and cafeterias and toilet breaks. Make it so other outsourced factories are put to shame, so that workers in China fight for positions at the Foxconn factory, the way creative talent fights to get into the Cupertino campus.

The way we make and get our products isn't natural or set in stone. It's culturally crafted. And we know Jobs had the power to impact cultures around the world when he had a vision of something.

Outside a cafe in Ulsan, an industrial city in southeastern Korea, a small shrine had been set up, with a cappuccino, red apples with bites taken out and notepads on which to scrawl messages. One said, "Thank you for changing our lives!" And he did. We should take his passing to reflect on the lives we could yet change, not only by following his example, but by surpassing it.

Andray Abrahamian teaches international relations at the University of Ulsan.