What is the secret to Apple’s success? After introducing the iPad 2 in March, Steve Jobs offered one answer:

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing — and nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices.

Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple leaves the company without its founder and lead visionary, but still in very capable hands. As I’ve written, Tim Cook is better suited than anyone in the tech industry to run Apple and lead the company into the future.

The talents of Jony Ive, Phil Schiller and Ron Johnson (or Johnson’s successor) will ensure that Apple’s design, marketing and retail needs are well-met. The software teams have great talent and a clear road map, and Jobs’ attention to detail and passion for perfection permeate Apple’s culture from top to bottom.

Without Jobs, Apple’s only missing piece is the role he unofficially filled for years: chief advocate for media, humanities and liberal arts. If that sounds trivial, remember this: At several key points in its history, Jobs’ skill in this role saved and transformed the company.

Jobs famously isn’t a trained programmer, engineer or MBA, or even a wunderkind dropout steeped in any of those fields like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. (The New York Times even did a discussion panel earlier this year titled, “Career Counselor: Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?,” contrasting the two founders’ engineering vs. liberal arts approach to education — something of a false dilemma, even for Gates and Jobs, but a revealing one all the same.)

Instead, Jobs dropped out from Reed College after a semester, lingering only to crash on friends’ dorm room floors and audit classes in topics like calligraphy that he found interesting in themselves, as he recounts in his 2005 Stanford commencement address:

I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

In the short term, this choice and this focus helped kick off desktop publishing, computational-graphic and architectural design, and a hundred other businesses and developments tied to personal computing. It helped make the Mac the computer of choice in education, the arts, academia and among literary and creative professionals — or consumers who wanted to feel like one. But it’s also even a level higher than that.

The first Mac did more than just make Xerox’s file-and-folders desktop metaphor popular; it transformed it from the WYSIWYG of office printers and copiers to a genuine graphic user interface, where richly visual creative activity could actually be made and experienced on the computer itself. As Wired contributing editor Steven Johnson writes, it “made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.”

The creative side of that equation played out most spectacularly at Pixar, Jobs’ other great business success story. At NeXT, Jobs was able to learn about and experiment with the future of computing, focusing on networks and developing the software that would become iOS and OS X. But because of Pixar, Jobs returned to Apple with a hit company and better knowledge than anyone in the tech industry of how the creative industry worked, and even more importantly, how it didn’t:

One of the things I learned at Pixar is that the technology industries and the content industries do not understand each other. In Silicon Valley and most technology companies, I swear most people still think the creative process is a bunch of guys in their early 30s, sitting around on an old couch, drinking beer and thinking up jokes. That’s how television is made, they think. That’s how movies are made.

And I’ve seen at Pixar that that couldn’t be further from the truth. The folks on the creative side work as hard as any technology folks I’ve ever seen in my life; they’re just as disciplined; the process is just as difficult and disciplined as an engineering process is.

The contrapositive is true, too. People in Hollywood and the content industries think technology is something that you just write a check for and buy. They don’t understand the creative element of technology…. They don’t understand that this stuff is created by people working extraordinarily hard, and with passion, just like the creative talent that they have.

These are like ships passing in the night. One of the greatest achievements at Pixar was that we brought these two cultures together and got them working side by side.

Jobs’ ability to bring these two cultures together and translate between them contributed directly to Apple’s transformation from a computer company to a media company. It helped Apple position the PC as a digital hub, storing, syncing and connecting post-PC digital devices like cameras, camcorders and MP3 players.

As much as the iPod, it allowed the company to succeed where everyone else had (and largely has) failed, as the iTunes store turned Apple into a digital media retailer. Finally, Apple’s strength in media and software sales is largely what turned post-PC from a device category into an industry.

That’s a much bigger deal than admittedly charming stories about weekend calls from Jobs complaining about the wrong yellow gradient in an iOS icon.

So where does Apple’s post-PC, liberal-arts–and–technology spaceship go without Jobs at the helm?

Let me tell you what I hope is true.

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