To keep with tradition, I initially resisted the iPhone. I (foolishly) bought a Blackberry Pearl instead of an iPhone, but less than year later bought the new iPhone 3GS when it came out. I even got Kevin, the anti-technology guy, to also get an iPhone and he has been in love with it ever since.
I now have a MacBook Pro and I can't ever see myself switching to another computer company. Although I'm not sure I am going to get the new iPhone 4S, I plan on getting the iPhone 5 if they ever come out with it. I remember that when I got my Volkswagen Beetle, a free iPod came with it as a kind of special deal they were running at the time. Having an iPod at that time (in 2003) was a big deal and I felt pretty cool and special to have one. It's amazing to see how far iPod's, iPhone's, iPad's, Apple computers, everything has evolved. To me, that's what Steve Jobs was - innovation and creativity. It seemed like anything was possible for him and he could make it all happen.
I thank Steve Jobs for what he has done, for what he has created and I hope that other people in the company can also keep his creativity going. He will never be forgotten and he has left way too soon.
This is an article from the Washington Post:
Steve Jobs dies; Apple co-founder was 56
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., who introduced simple, well-designed computers for people who were more interested in what technology could do rather than how it was done, died Wednesday at age 56.
In a brief statement, Apple announced the death but did not say where he died. Mr. Jobs suffered from a rare form of pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant in 2009, and he stepped down as Apple’s chief executive on Aug. 24.
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Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and mind behind the company's visionary products, passed away at the age of 56. (Oct. 5)
An original thinker who helped create the Macintosh, one of the most influential computers in the world, Mr. Jobs also reinvented the portable music player with the iPod, launched the first successful legal method of selling music online with the creation of iTunes, and reordered the cellphone market with the iPhone. The introduction of the iPad also jump-started the electronic-tablet market, and it now dominates the field.
He also started a chain of retail stores and pushed consumers away from their dependence on floppy disks and CDs.
Calculating that people would be willing to pay a premium price for products that signal creativity, Mr. Jobs had a genius for understanding the needs of consumersbefore they did.
He knew best of all how to market. “Mac or PC?” became one of the defining questions of the late 20th century, and although Apple sold a mere 5 percent of all computers in that era, Mac users became rabid partisans.
Mr. Jobs was the first crossover technology star, turning Silicon Valley renown into Main Street recognition and paving the way for the rise of the nerds, such as Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
As a 21-year-old college-dropout entrepreneur, Mr. Jobs led Apple to multimillion-dollar success in five years. Forced out of his own company by the time he was 30, he started another computer firm, Next, whose technology was used to create the World Wide Web. Mr. Jobs also took over a foundering computer animation company and turned it into the Academy Award-winning Pixar, maker of “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo.” He returned to Apple in his 40s, restoring the company to profitability by paring down the product line and being a leader in innovation.
Known within the technology community for his complex and combative temperament, Mr. Jobs was a private man. But in a June 2005 commencement addressat Stanford University, he talked about his pancreatic cancer, diagnosed in 2004, in a video that became an Internet sensation. He later became furious at speculation over his health in mid-2008, when he appeared in public looking gaunt. In late 2008, he took a medical leave from the company, and he had a liver transplant the following year.
In January, he took another medical leave. On Aug. 24 he stepped down as Apple’s chief executive but became chairman of board. Apple’s share price immediately dropped 5 percent on the news because Jobs was so connected to the company, but it rebounded the next day. “Steve Jobs running the company from jail would be better for the stock price than Steve Jobs not being CEO,” one stock analyst told Fortune magazine in early 2011.
His innovations led Business 2.0 to call him “easily the greatest marketer since P.T. Barnum.” One of his employees, noting that Mr. Jobs is able to persuade people to believe almost anything, coined the phrase “reality distortion field” to describe his ability to warp an audience’s sense of proportion. Mr. Jobs described the Macintosh computer, for example, as “insanely great.”
Maybe it was. It was designed for the home and creative professional user, not the computer-science nerd or the bottom-line-oriented businessman. During a famous 1979 visit to Xerox Parc, the hotbed of innovation where the computer mouse, networking and graphical user interface were invented, he and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak learned that computer users did not have to type in a series of arcane commands to get the computer to perform; they could simply point their mouse at a picture of a file and click the mouse to get the file to open.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and mind behind the company's visionary products, passed away at the age of 56. (Oct. 5)
That recognition sparked a flurry of innovations, unmatched in technology until designers of Microsoft’s operating software copied the look and feel of their California competitors in Windows 95.
Years later, discussing computer design in another context, Mr. Jobs said: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer, that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
He could control how it works because Apple “makes the whole widget,” as Mr. Jobs repeatedly said — software and hardware. The company introduced monitors with color screens long before others. Locked out of many retail chains because of its small market share, Apple responded with its own distinctively branded stores, to which users flock like pilgrims. The Mac, Mr. Jobs saw, could become the hub of a digital lifestyle.
Not everything has worked out. A 1983 computer, Lisa, failed miserably. Even the “insanely great” Macintosh, sold without a letter-quality printer and incompatible with other computers, had a difficult start, although it nevertheless launched the desktop publishing revolution. But that wasn’t the first rough start in Mr. Jobs’s life.
Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to unwed parents, University of Wisconsin graduate student Joanne Carole Schieble and a Syrian exchange student, Abdulfattah Jandali. He was adopted shortly after birth by Paul and Clara Jobs.
He grew up in the Northern California suburbs that would later be dubbed “Silicon Valley,” and he showed an early interest in electronics and gadgetry. As a high school student, he boldly asked William Hewlett, co-founder and president of the Hewlett-Packard computer firm, for some parts he needed to complete a class project. Hewlett was impressed enough to give Mr. Jobs the parts and offer him a summer internship at Hewlett-Packard.
Mr. Jobs attended Reed College in Portland, Ore., for six months before dropping out, although Mr. Jobs continued to drop in on classes for 18 months. He worked part time at Atari Computers to raise money for a trip to India in the summer of 1974, studying meditation and shaving his head. But within months, he became ill with dysentery and was forced to return to the United States.
For a short time, Mr. Jobs lived in a California commune, but he soon became disenchanted. In 1975, he began associating with a group of computer aficionados known as the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak, a technical whiz, was trying to build a small computer and Mr. Jobs became fascinated with its potential. In 1976, he and Wozniak formed their own company.
The Apple I was sold as an all-in-one device, unlike other computers that required customers to separately buy a screen, a hard drive and a keyboard. It carried a price tag of $666, and about 200 were sold.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and mind behind the company's visionary products, passed away at the age of 56. (Oct. 5)
Mr. Jobs saw a huge gap in the existing computer market, with no product targeted for home use. While Wozniak improved the technology, Mr. Jobs lined up investors and bank financing. The redesigned computer — christened the “Apple II” — came out in 1977, with impressive first-year sales of $2.7 million. In one of the most phenomenal cases of corporate growth in U.S. history, the company’s sales grew to $200 million within three years and almost single-handedly created a market of home users.
The Macintosh was introduced in 1984 with a third-quarter commercial during the Super Bowl. The advertisement, designed by ad agency Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off his classic science-fiction film “Blade Runner,” ran just once, but it was named by Advertising Age as the commercial of the decade.
As controversial as he was creative, Mr. Jobs enforced a culture of secrecy at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. Mr. Jobs, who grew up idolizing the Hewlett-Packard ideal of an egalitarian workplace where employees were highly valued, was known in his younger years for playing mean pranks on underlings, reversing direction without ever acknowledging he changed his mind and yelling at even company directors.
In his private life, he refused to acknowledge paternity or pay child support for his first daughter for years. He threatened to sue teens who published Apple gossip on their Web sites. He refused to put license plates on his Mercedes-Benz and parked in handicapped parking spots at the company until the public ridicule became too great.
Decades later, he attempted to stop the publication of two unauthorized biographies; he persuaded Vanity Fair to cancel the serialization of one, and after the publisher of the second book refused to stop publication, Mr. Jobs yanked all that publisher’s books from Apple’s retail stores.
In 1985, after tangling with John Sculley, the Pepsi executive he brought in to run the company, Mr. Jobs sold $20 million worth of stock and resigned from Apple. He and Wozniak had just received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan, and he was 30 years old. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me,” he told Stanford University graduates in the 2005 commencement address. “The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
After several months of discontent, Mr. Jobs hired some of his former employees to begin a new computer company, called Next.
During that period, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million for a small computer animation firm, and over the next six years Mr. Jobs poured another $40 million of his own money into the company as it set out to make the first computer-animated feature film, “Toy Story.” It was a huge box-office hit, and Pixar's initial public stock offering was an enormous success.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple and mind behind the company's visionary products, passed away at the age of 56. (Oct. 5)
In late 1996, Apple bought Next for more than $400 million. Within months, he was back in charge of Apple.
Greeted by the Mac faithful as the second coming, Mr. Jobs soon stunned them with two decisions. He revoked agreements with “clone makers,” companies that licensed and built their own Apple-compatible hardware. That cost bargain-seeking consumers many hundreds of dollars and put several successful clone makers out of business, but it returned much lost revenue to Apple.
Then, at a Macworld conference in August 1997, he announced a partnership with arch rival Microsoft, accepting a $150 million investment in exchange for preloading Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser on Apple’s computers. An unprecedented alliance between rivals, the deal ultimately saved the company by reassuring customers that they could use Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office software on Macs. “We want to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose,” Mr. Jobs said, to shouts of dismay from his normally adoring audience. “Madman at the wheel, eh?” he added, laughing, as he walked off the stage.
That was just the start of his revival of the company. The “Think Different” advertising campaign got the world’s attention again, followed by the 1998 introduction of the colorful iMac desktop computer, which sold a million in a year. In 1999, the iBook appeared, a brightly colored, clam-shaped laptop that enabled wireless Web surfing.
Consumer releases came out in a rush. An overlooked technology called FireWire, a tool for quickly moving large amounts of data between digital devices, allowed the creation of iMovie, software that encouraged non-experts to make their own home videos. The iPod, an MP3-like player with room for thousands of songs, was introduced in October 2001 and has sold hundreds of millions of units, dominating the field. The iTunes application, which allowed consumers to legally buy and download music, started in April 2003 and revolutionized the digital music industry — more than 6 billion songs have been sold.
Mr. Jobs and Apple were suddenly cool again. The iPhone’s debut in 2007 generated a huge buzz, and it soon rolled over the competition from Palm Computing and BlackBerry, despite its higher cost. The iPad, a tablet-based computer introduced in January 2010, sold more than 10 million units its first year.
Although Mr. Jobs’s salary was $1 per year, his stock options made him rich. His fortune was estimated to be $5.4 billion by Forbes magazine in its 2008 survey of the richest people in the world.
But nothing came without controversy. Even as Apple’s stock was booming and its business thriving, Mr. Jobs faced scrutiny in a scandal about Apple’s backdating of stock options. Like many companies, Apple had given out stock options with effective dates chosen later, after it was known that the price was low on those dates, making the stock more valuable once it was sold. Mr. Jobs wasn’t the only employee who benefited, but the company said his options were approved at a special board meeting that never took place. The company was forced to restate its earnings, but a special company investigation concluded that Mr. Jobs had done nothing wrong. Survivors include his wife since 1991, Laurene Powell; a daughter from a previous relationship, Lisa Brennan-Jobs; three children from his marriage, Eve Jobs, Erin Sienna Jobs and Reed Paul Jobs; and two sisters, Mona Simpson and Patti Jobs.
Thank you, Steve! Rest in Peace.
