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BREAKING NEWS: SAN FRANCISCO – Steve Jobs, the innovative co-founder of Apple who transformed personal use of technology as well as entire industries with products such as the iPod, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh computer and the iTunes music store, has died. The Apple chairman was 56.
Apple says the company's co-founder Steve Jobs has died. He was 56. In a brief statement the company said Jobs died Wednesday. He had been battling pancreatic cancer.
Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up an Apple iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, in this Jan. 9, 2007 file photo.
The iconic American CEO, whose impact many have compared to auto magnate Henry Ford and Walt Disney— whom Jobs openly admired — abruptly stepped down from his position as CEO of Apple in August because of health concerns. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died, Apple said. Jobs was 56.
The homepage of Apple's website this evening switched to a full-page image of Jobs with the text, "Steve Jobs 1955-2011."
"We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today," read a statement by Apple's board of directors. "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts."
Apple's Steve Jobs vs. Died At 56 vs. Pancreatic Cancer
Apple: Company Co-founder Steve Jobs Has Died
Steve Jobs Dead at 56
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Full speech transcript
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself -- at the university's 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1
In their rare joint appearance at All Things Digital 5, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates discuss their contributions to the technology industry, the qualities they most respect in one another. D/All Things Digital text.
Steve Jobs Dead At 56 vs. Interesting Facts
and watch at: Steve Jobs Dead at 56.
Special Report: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dead at 56
Jobs 'set the agenda' for tech industry
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, a former Apple board member, called Jobs the best CEO of the past 50 years — perhaps 100 years.
A seminal business and technology leader, Jobs' success flowed from a relentless focus on making products that were easy and intuitive for the average consumer to use. His products were characterized by groundbreaking design and style that, along with their technological usefulness, made them objects of intense desire by consumers around the world.
He was known as a demanding, mercurial boss and an almost mystical figure in technology circles as well as American popular culture. Author and business consultant Jim Collins once called Jobs the "Beethoven of business."
He was one of the figures who made Silicon Valley the capital of technological innovation and related venture capital fortunes.
His creation of iTunes as an online way to purchase music digitally helped transform the music industry and delivered a blow to the standard industry practice of packaging music in albums or CDs. With iTunes, consumers could buy individual songs for 99 cents. The music industry didn't welcome the change at first, but, after waging an intense battle against illegal music downloads, it came to rely on the business model iTunes created.
Jobs' work at Apple and other projects made him a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 2011 at $8.3 billion. He was No.110 on Forbes' list of billionaires worldwide and No.34 in the United States, as of the magazine's March 2011 estimates.
Unlike tech rival Bill Gates of Microsoft or business leader Warren Buffett, Jobs did not make a practice of public philanthropy. While he may have made anonymous gifts to charity, he did not publicly embrace Gates' and Buffett's call for the wealthiest Americans to pledge to donate half their fortunes.
Jobs was married to Laurene Powell Jobs, 47. He had four children, three with Powell Jobs. A fourth child, Lisa, had an early Apple computer -- a predecessor to the Macintosh -- named after her. though the family succeeded in keeping the children out of the spotlight and largely unknown to the public. He was Buddhist.
Jobs dropped out of Reed College to build computers with high school friend Steve Wozniak, creating what became the Apple I computer in 1976.
With sales lagging by the 1980s, Jobs was ousted from the company's leadership in a 1985 boardroom coup led by then-Apple CEO John Sculley. He returned in 1996 after Apple bought his technology start-up, NeXT, for $400 million. Within months, Jobs took over as Apple CEO for the ousted Gil Amelio and led a major corporate turnaround.
Five years later, with the release of the iPod personal digital music player, Apple had leaped from computer maker to become the leading consumer electronics giant worldwide.
Millions of its computers and gadgets were produced in Asia and sold to U.S. and worldwide markets, making the company one of the most recognizable and beloved brand names ever.
Once on the brink of financial abyss, Apple had a market value of $350 billion — not far behind No.2 Exxon Mobil — by the time Jobs resigned as CEO in August 2011.
After his forced departure from Apple, Jobs bought what became Pixar from filmmaker George Lucas. The digital animation movie company has produced box-office hits including Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Disney bought the company for $7.4 billion in 2006. Jobs held a 7.3% ownership stake in Disney.
He was known for creating a culture of secrecy at Apple that fueled intense media speculation about the company's next product. Jobs himself introduced major products with flair at highly anticipated events that proved to be one of the company's best marketing tools.
Jobs didn't hesitate to level caustic comments at competitors, particularly Microsoft in earlier years and later Google, which he ridiculed as evil, mediocre and lacking in taste. His skewering of Microsoft was parodied in a series of TV ads featuring the characters "Mac" and "PC."
Jobs was known for firing employees in profanity-laced tantrums and reducing some subordinates to tears. Yet many of his top deputies at Apple and Pixar worked with him for years.
Jobs is listed as an inventor or co-inventor on 313 Apple patents, including the iPod's user interface.
Though he brought simple, elegant technology to the masses, the reclusive Jobs was often uncomfortable around people and rarely spoke publicly. On rare occasions when he spoke with reporters, Jobs offered few or no personal insights.
Jobs' reluctance to appear publicly led to questions about his health, as did a dramatic loss in weight and gaunt appearance.
Jobs was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer in 2003. He informed Apple employees in 2004.
"No one wants to die," he said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. "And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it."
Jobs' status as a corporate star put him on the covers of Time, Fortune and Forbes.
"Jobs led an enormous cultural shift of the businessman as a creative, even artistic, force," says Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs.
"When Jobs first came on the scene, it wasn't cool to be in business," Deutschman says. "Through the 1970s, the Dow hardly moved. Being in business was seen as being a total sellout. But Jobs was young and glamorous, and gave business that image. Now, young people aspire to be in business."
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, to unwed parents. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Calif.
The young Jobs contacted William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to ask for parts for a class project. Impressed, Hewlett offered Jobs a summer internship.
Upon graduating from Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., in 1972, Jobs briefly went to Reed College in Portland, Ore. After a stint as a video-game designer at Atari, Jobs trekked to India in 1974, where he embraced Eastern culture and religion. Shortly after that, he lived in a commune in California.
In 1975, Jobs began hanging out with the Homebrew Computer Club and a friend from high school, Steve Wozniak. Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak — the "two Steves," as they became known — co-founded Apple Computer in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976.
By 25, Jobs was a millionaire. Jobs' first go-around at Apple was highlighted by the creation and introduction, in 1984, of the Macintosh, a revolutionary personal computer with an inviting graphical user-interface and mouse that popularized PCs for the masses.
The influence of the Beatles ran deep to Apple's core, too. Jobs presented a Mac to Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon, and was ensnared in a long-running trademark lawsuit with the music group's Apple Corps label. It was settled in 2007.
In a 1996 interview in San Francisco, Jobs offered a glimpse of his hopes to mirror the success of Walt Disney and George Lucas. "Computers are commodities with a six-month shelf life," he said. "Classics like Snow White and Fantasia are passed from generation to generation."
Wozniak said Apple is a reflection of Jobs' creative daring.
"He helped it achieve incredible things in music, smartphones, tablets and retail, while still making great computers," said Wozniak, who said he and Jobs occasionally talk.
Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve's Brain, said Jobs reconciled conflicting personality traits into an eclectic business philosophy.
"Jobs embraced the personality traits that some considered flaws — narcissism, perfectionism, total faith in his intuition — to lead Apple and Pixar to triumph against steep odds," Kahney says. "In the process, he became a self-made billionaire."
"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."
His family, in a separate statement, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family...We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief."
During his more than three decade-long career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry's innovation center. In addition to laying the groundwork for the modern high-tech industry alongside other pioneers like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed intuitive products over the sheer power of technology itself and shifted the way consumers interact with technology in an increasingly digital world.
Unlike those men, however, the most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs' career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of innovative and wildly successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad fundamentally changed the PC, electronics and digital media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and its retail stores, in the meanwhile, helped turn the company into a pop culture icon.
At the beginning of that phase, Mr. Jobs once described his philosophy as trying to make products that were at "the intersection of art and technology." In doing so, he turned Apple into the world's most valuable company.
Mr. Jobs was 56 years old. After exhibiting significant weight loss in mid-2008, he took a nearly six month medical leave of absence in 2009, during which he received a liver transplant. He took another medical leave of absence in mid-January without explanation before stepping down as chief executive in August.
Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.
Although his achievements in technology alone were immense, Mr. Jobs played an equally groundbreaking role in entertainment. He turned Apple into the largest retailer of music and helped popularize computer-animated films as the financier and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he later sold to Walt Disney Co. He was a key figure in changing the way people used the Internet and how they consumed music, TV shows, movies, books, disrupting industries in the process.
Mr. Jobs also pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern business history, returning to Apple after an 11-year absence during which he was largely written off as a has-been and then reviving the then-struggling company by introducing products such as the iMac all-in-one computer, iPod music player and iTunes digital music store.
The company produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ending September 1997. Apple has become one of the world's premier designers of consumer-electronics devices, dropping the "computer" in its name in January 2007 to underscore its expansion beyond PCs.
Although Mr. Jobs officially handed over the reins of the company to long-time deputy Tim Cook in August, his death nevertheless raises a high-stakes question for Apple of how the company—which has been in the vanguard of technological creativity for most of the past decade—will sustain its success without his vision and guidance. Other icons of American capitalism, including Walt Disney, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., experienced some transitional woes but eventually managed to thrive after their charismatic founders passed on.
But few companies of that stature have shown such an acute dependence on their founder, or lost the founder at the peak of his career. Several years after Mr. Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company began a steady decline that saw it drift to the margins of the computer industry. That slide was reversed only after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.
Mr. Jobs also leaves behind innumerable tales about his mercurial management style, such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas "dumb" when he didn't like something. He was even more combative against foes like Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. When Adobe Systems Inc. waged a campaign against Apple for not supporting Adobe's Flash video format on its iPhones and iPads in April 2010, Mr. Jobs wrote a 1,600 word essay about why the software was outdated and inadequate for mobile devices.
The CEO maintained uncompromising standards about the company's hardware and software, demanding "insanely great" aesthetics and ease of use from the moment a consumer walked into one of Apple's stylish stores. His attention to the smallest details in the development and design process were instrumental in shaping some of the most distinctive features of Apple's products, while his meticulously planned onstage demonstrations helped fuel excitement that was unmatched by his peers.
At event after event to introduce new Apple products, Mr. Jobs often puckishly proclaimed "There is one more thing" before revealing the most significant news at the very end of a speech. He enforced strict secrecy among Apple employees, a strategy that he believed heightened anticipation for upcoming Apple products.
Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in Palo Alto, Calif., was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group's Apple records label, according to the book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton.
The pair came out with the Apple II in 1977, a groundbreaking computer that was relatively affordable and designed for the mass market consumer rather than for hobbyists. The product went on to become one of the first commercially successful personal computers, making the company $117 million in annual sales by the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980. The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.
Not all of Mr. Jobs's early ideas paid off. Apple's Apple III and Lisa computers that debuted in 1980 and 1983 were flops. But the distinctive all-in-one Macintosh--foreshadowed in a ground-breaking TV ad inspired by George Orwell's novel "1984" that famously only aired once -- would set the standard for the design of modern computer operating systems, in which users point and click on icons with a mouse rather than typing in commands.
Even then, Mr. Jobs was a stickler about design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Mr. Jobs was adamant than the keyboard not include "up", "down," "right" and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens.
Mr. Jobs's pursuit for aesthetic beauty sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers beautiful. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.
Many ideas in the Macintosh came from a visit in 1979 to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research, where Mr. Jobs saw a machine called the Xerox Alto that had a crude graphical user interface and a mouse. The episode underscored his recurring role as a refiner and popularizer of existing inventions.
"Picasso had a saying, 'Good artists copy. Great artists steal,'" Mr. Jobs said in a PBS documentary on the computer industry from the mid-1990s. "I've been shameless about stealing great ideas."
Even in his appearance, Mr. Jobs seemed to cultivate an image more like that of an artist than a corporate executive. In public, he rarely deviated from an outfit consisting of Levis jeans, a black mock turtleneck and New Balance running shoes.
As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from Pepsi Co. to be Apple CEO in 1983, famously overcoming Mr. Sculley's initial reluctance by asking the executive if he just wanted to sell "sugar water to kids" or help change the world.
After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led its board's decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30. "What can I say – I hired the wrong guy," Mr. Jobs brooded in the same PBS documentary. "He destroyed everything I had spent ten years working for."
Mr. Jobs then created NeXT Inc., a closely watched startup that in 1988 introduced a distinctive black desktop computer with advanced software that was initially targeted at the academic computing market. But the machine was hobbled by its exorbitant price tag and some key design decisions, including its use of an optical disk drive and a Motorola Inc. microprocessor at a time when Intel Corp. chips and floppy drives had become the norm.
NeXT eventually stopped selling hardware and failed to make money as a software company. But its operating system would become a foundation for OS X, the software backbone of today's Macs, after Apple purchased NeXT for $400 million in December 1996.
In 1986, using part of his fortune from Apple, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million to acquire the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The company he formed out of those assets, Pixar Animation Studios, first sold hardware, then software, and later turned to feature films. Pixar went on to create a string of computer-animated hits, from "Toy Story" to 2008's "Wall-E." Mr. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in January 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal that gave him a Disney board seat and made him the entertainment company's largest shareholder.
Meanwhile, Apple began foundering. Computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software grew to dominate the market, a trend that accelerated after Microsoft's Windows emulated many elements of the Mac's visual interface.
Apple, by contrast, had to finance both hardware and software development internally. Fewer developers of application programs created products to make the Macintosh more useful. Apple would eventually decide to license its operating system to other hardware companies, but it was too late to reverse the swing to Windows-based machines.
By 1997, Apple had racked up nearly $2 billion in losses in two years, its shares were at record lows and it was on its third CEO--Gil Amelio--in four years. Eight months after the deal to buy NeXT in December 1996, Mr. Amelio was ousted and Mr. Jobs appointed interim CEO, a title that became permanent in January 2000. One former Apple employee recalls Mr. Jobs joking soon after he returned that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want."
Mr. Jobs, who was given a salary of $1 a year along with options to Apple stock, made a series of changes that started paying off quickly. He ended the nascent software licensing program that created Mac clones, killed the struggling Newton handheld computer and trimmed a confusing array of Mac models to a handful of systems focused on the consumer market.
In May 1998, he introduced the iMac, an unusual one-piece computer that sported a colorful casing in translucent turquoise and gray. The popular machine--which sent competitors scrambling to improve their own designs—was embodied by a bold ad campaign that featured the phrase "Think Different," with the picture of one of Mr. Jobs's heroes, such as Albert Einstein and Muppets creator Jim Henson.
While shareholders cheered the changes, Mr. Jobs flexed his power on Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus. Within months of taking over, he had replaced four of the five top executive positions with former NeXT underlings. He issued emails forbidding employees on the famously laid-back campus to bring pets to the office, smoke even in parking lots, and threatening to fire anyone caught leaking company documents.
One personal assistant became a target when he failed to arrange the installation of a high-speed digital data line to Mr. Jobs's office fast enough to suit the interim CEO. The worker said Mr. Jobs fired him for the delay, but rescinded the firing the next day after he had cooled down. (The worker ended up resigning soon afterwards).
Apple had some stumbles during Mr. Jobs's second coming, including a cube-shaped Macintosh that failed to catch on and was scrapped in 2001. The failure was one reason that Apple posted a quarterly loss and warned it would miss estimates several times in 2000 and 2001.
But big hits followed. In 2001, Apple introduced a PowerBook laptop made from titanium, a metal more frequently found in fighter airplanes. The same year, it introduced the iPod, which transformed digital music players with features such as its smooth shape and DJ-like wheel for navigating through songs. As of Sept. 2010, Apple had sold more than 275 million iPod devices since its introduction, and it has more than 70% market share in the market for digital music players.
A key differentiator was the iTunes Music Store, opened in 2003. At the time, the music industry was largely sitting on the sidelines of the digital revolution, badly wounded by illegal downloads but unable to agree on an easy, inexpensive way to sell songs online. But Mr. Jobs helped convince major record labels to sell recordings for 99 cents each, along with antipiracy restrictions that most consumers found acceptable.
The store, which has sold more than ten billion songs, became the largest music retailer in the U.S. in 2008. It also became an incentive for consumers to buy iPods because, for much of its history, songs from the iTunes store could only be downloaded to Apple's music player and not devices made by other companies.
At the same time, Mr. Jobs was building a deep bench of executives. He recruited former Compaq Computer Corp. executive Tim Cook in the late 1990s to straighten Apple's operations and promoted him over time to chief operating officer. Ron Johnson, senior vice president of Apple retail, was hired from Target Corp. in 2000 to launch Apple's stores worldwide. Apple's lead industrial designer Jonathan Ive took charge of the physical look-and-feel of the company's products and is said to share in Mr. Jobs's sensibilities about design.
In 2004, Mr. Jobs had to lean on this bench when he disclosed that he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. Apple revealed the procedure in early August 2004, but a person familiar with the situation said Mr. Jobs first learned of the tumor during a routine abdominal scan nine months earlier. The board and Mr. Jobs said nothing to Apple shareholders as the Apple executive, during that time, dealt with the tumor through changes to his diet, the person said.
In June 2007, Mr. Jobs made another splash when Apple introduced the iPhone. The cellphone pushed the envelope in the mobile phone market with features that included a touch-screen interface, allowing tricks such as blowing up images by spreading a thumb and finger on the phone's surface.
Mr. Jobs was typically hands on in the creation of the iPhone. People familiar with the matter say the CEO was the one that made a decision to change the screen of the iPhone from plastic to glass after he unveiled the product at the Macworld trade show in 2007. The iPhone team scrambled to procure glass that would meet his exacting standards, so the devices could be manufactured in time for the launch, which took place just seven months later.
Despite skepticism about Apple's ability to enter an already-competitive market dominated by the likes of Research in Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry devices, Apple quickly became a force in the mobile phone market, selling 92 million iPhones as of December 2010. The product kicked into a higher gear earlier this year when Apple said it would begin selling iPhones through Verizon Wireless in addition to carrier AT&T.
Last year, Mr. Jobs also unveiled the iPad tablet computer to great fanfare, billing it as "magical and revolutionary". In the first nine months of the product's release, Apple sold 14.8 million iPads as consumers snapped them up to use as a casual multimedia device for activities such as emailing, watching video and reading. People who work closely with Mr. Jobs said the project was so important to him that he was intimately involved in its planning even while recovering from his 2009 liver transplant.
A major selling point for both the iPhone and iPad has been the App Store, which allows developers to easily make application programs that users can download for free or for a small fee; the store meanwhile has seen more than seven billion downloads as of the end of 2010.
One cloud to Mr. Jobs's reign came in 2006 when Apple also disclosed that an internal investigation had discovered that stock option grants to Apple executives between 1997 and 2002-- including to Mr. Jobs-- were improperly dated. Apple became the most high-profile technology company caught up in a broad series of options backdating scandals that helped inflate the profits executives made from their stock awards.
Apple later disclosed that Mr. Jobs helped select the favorable option dates, but denied that he did anything wrong since he didn't understand the accounting implications of his actions. Apple's investigation ended up blaming two ex-Apple executives – former general counsel Nancy Heinen and former chief financial officer Fred Anderson – for their role in the backdating. Both were later charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission. They ended up settling the charges. Mr. Jobs was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Those who knew Mr. Jobs say that one reason why he was able to keep innovating was because he didn't dwell on past accomplishments or legacy but kept looking ahead and demanded that employees do the same. Hitoshi Hokamura, a former Apple employee, recalls how an old Apple I that was displayed by the company cafeteria quietly disappeared after Mr. Jobs returned in the late 1990s.
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.
Steve Jobs — the man who brought us the iPhone, the iPod and the iMac — has died. The co-founder of Apple was 56 years old. Jobs had been battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer for years.
"It boggles the mind to think of all the things that Steve Jobs did," says Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee, who worked with Jobs.
McNamee says that in addition to introducing us to desktop publishing and computer animated movies, Jobs should be credited with creating the first commercially successful computer.
"Any one of those would have qualified him as one of the great executives in American history," McNamee says, "the sum of which put him in a place where no one else has ever been before. To me he is of his era what Thomas Edison was to the beginning of the 20th century."
Jobs was just 21 when he co-founded Apple Computer in his garage in Cupertino, Calif., in 1976. The following year, when Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, released the compact Apple II, most computers were big enough to fill a university basement or came from do-it-yourself kits for hobbyists with soldering irons.
Steve Jobs
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Steve Jobs, The Man At Apple's Core
With sound and cutting-edge color graphics, Apple II was the first blockbuster desktop computer. Users could hook it up to their TV sets to play games, and its spreadsheet program made it popular with small businesses.
"It made Apple the biggest computer manufacturer in the nascent computer industry," says Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve's Brain.
But in 1981, Apple got its first taste of serious competition, when IBM released its own personal computer. IBM had the advantage of a well-known, trusted name, and Jobs — a California boy — loathed the kind of conformist East Coast culture it represented.
So he countered with the Macintosh, the first computer to feature a mouse, pull-down menus and icons — thus eliminating the command-line interface.
"Jobs' idea was that we'll make it easy enough that anybody can do it ... a grandmother, a kid, people who don't have any experience," Kahney says. The Mac was an example of the kind of product that would come to define Jobs' entire career: easy-to-use computers.
That's the message Jobs sent to millions when he released the Mac in 1984. In an ad that aired once during the Super Bowl, a woman dressed in brightly colored shorts runs into a room of gray-looking people and throws a sledgehammer at a screen where Big Brother — read IBM — is talking. The minute-long reference to George Orwell's 1984 became one of the most famous television commercials of all time.
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
Enlarge Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
It also illustrated Jobs' belief that computers were tools to unleash human creativity. In an interview for the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Jobs said, "Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
In many ways Jobs was the poet of the computer world. He'd gone to India and become a Buddhist. He took LSD and believed it had opened his mind to new ways of thinking.
But Jobs' iconoclastic ideals did not always make him easy to work with.
"He was just a terrible manager and a terrible executive," says Trip Hawkins, the marketing director of Apple until 1982. "At that point in time I never really thought that he could be a CEO."
Jobs was eventually fired in a 1985 boardroom coup led by John Sculley — the man Jobs himself had hired to be CEO of Apple. But Jobs was driven to make computers vehicles for creativity, and after he left Apple, he purchased a little-known division of Lucas film and renamed it Pixar.
In 1995, Pixar released the first animated feature to be done entirely on computers. That film, Toy Story, was a huge success, and Pixar followed it with other big hits including Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.
But Apple didn't exactly thrive in the years after Jobs' departure. With less than 5 percent of the computer market in its possession and analysts predicting the company's demise, the board invited Jobs to come back and run his old business.
In 1998, as interim CEO of Apple, Jobs introduced the iMac and once again helped remake the computer industry. According to venture capitalist McNamee, the iMac was the first computer made to harness the creative potential of the Internet.
"The iMac reflected the transition of consumers from passive consumption of content to active creation of entertainment," McNamee says. "People could write their own blogs, make their own digital photographs and make their own movies. Apple made all the tools to make that easy and they did at a time when Microsoft just wasn't paying attention."
Three years after the iMac, Jobs announced Apple's expansion into the music industry with a breakthrough MP3 player — the iPod.
"This is not a speculative market," he said as he introduced the iPod in 2001. "It's a part of everyone's life. It's a very large target market all around the world."
The iPod was a classic Jobs product — easy to use and nice to look at. Apple sold tens of millions of iPods, and the iTunes store became the No. 1 music retailer.
Six years later, Apple released the iPhone — a device whose elegance and user friendliness blew other phone/music players out of the water.
In 2010, Apple created yet another groundbreaking device with the introduction of the iPad. With its color touch-screen, the tablet gave users the ability to surf the Web, send e-mail, watch videos and read e-books.
Book publishers weren't the only ones to embrace the new tablet. A host of magazines, newspapers and broadcast news organizations, including The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and NPR, created iPad-specific apps that helped showcase stories — and images — in a tabloid-style layout.
And in January 2011, Apple reached a milestone by surpassing 10 billion downloads from its App Store — a sign of just how popular the company's devices have become with consumers.
"Simplifying complexity is not simple," says Susan Rockrise, a creative director who worked with Jobs. "It is the greatest, greatest gift to have someone who has Steve's capabilities as an editor and a product designer edit the crap away so that you can focus on what you want to do."
Rockrise believes Jobs touched pretty much anyone who has ever clicked a mouse, sent a photo over the Internet, published a book from a home computer or enjoyed portable music or a computer-animated movie.
She says they all have Jobs to thank for making it happen.
Via Apple, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, ABC News & NPR
BREAKING NEWS: SAN FRANCISCO – Steve Jobs, the innovative co-founder of Apple who transformed personal use of technology as well as entire industries with products such as the iPod, iPad, iPhone, Macintosh computer and the iTunes music store, has died. The Apple chairman was 56.
Apple says the company's co-founder Steve Jobs has died. He was 56. In a brief statement the company said Jobs died Wednesday. He had been battling pancreatic cancer.
Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”- Steve Jobs
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart"
Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up an Apple iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, in this Jan. 9, 2007 file photo.
The iconic American CEO, whose impact many have compared to auto magnate Henry Ford and Walt Disney— whom Jobs openly admired — abruptly stepped down from his position as CEO of Apple in August because of health concerns. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died, Apple said. Jobs was 56.
"We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today," read a statement by Apple's board of directors. "Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts."
Apple's Steve Jobs vs. Died At 56 vs. Pancreatic Cancer
Apple: Company Co-founder Steve Jobs Has Died
Steve Jobs Dead at 56
Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Full speech transcript
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself -- at the university's 114th Commencement on June 12, 2005.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1
In their rare joint appearance at All Things Digital 5, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates discuss their contributions to the technology industry, the qualities they most respect in one another. D/All Things Digital text.
Steve Jobs Dead At 56 vs. Interesting Facts
and watch at: Steve Jobs Dead at 56.
Special Report: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dead at 56
Jobs 'set the agenda' for tech industry
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, a former Apple board member, called Jobs the best CEO of the past 50 years — perhaps 100 years.
A seminal business and technology leader, Jobs' success flowed from a relentless focus on making products that were easy and intuitive for the average consumer to use. His products were characterized by groundbreaking design and style that, along with their technological usefulness, made them objects of intense desire by consumers around the world.
He was known as a demanding, mercurial boss and an almost mystical figure in technology circles as well as American popular culture. Author and business consultant Jim Collins once called Jobs the "Beethoven of business."
His creation of iTunes as an online way to purchase music digitally helped transform the music industry and delivered a blow to the standard industry practice of packaging music in albums or CDs. With iTunes, consumers could buy individual songs for 99 cents. The music industry didn't welcome the change at first, but, after waging an intense battle against illegal music downloads, it came to rely on the business model iTunes created.
Unlike tech rival Bill Gates of Microsoft or business leader Warren Buffett, Jobs did not make a practice of public philanthropy. While he may have made anonymous gifts to charity, he did not publicly embrace Gates' and Buffett's call for the wealthiest Americans to pledge to donate half their fortunes.
Jobs was married to Laurene Powell Jobs, 47. He had four children, three with Powell Jobs. A fourth child, Lisa, had an early Apple computer -- a predecessor to the Macintosh -- named after her. though the family succeeded in keeping the children out of the spotlight and largely unknown to the public. He was Buddhist.
Jobs dropped out of Reed College to build computers with high school friend Steve Wozniak, creating what became the Apple I computer in 1976.
With sales lagging by the 1980s, Jobs was ousted from the company's leadership in a 1985 boardroom coup led by then-Apple CEO John Sculley. He returned in 1996 after Apple bought his technology start-up, NeXT, for $400 million. Within months, Jobs took over as Apple CEO for the ousted Gil Amelio and led a major corporate turnaround.Millions of its computers and gadgets were produced in Asia and sold to U.S. and worldwide markets, making the company one of the most recognizable and beloved brand names ever.
Once on the brink of financial abyss, Apple had a market value of $350 billion — not far behind No.2 Exxon Mobil — by the time Jobs resigned as CEO in August 2011.
After his forced departure from Apple, Jobs bought what became Pixar from filmmaker George Lucas. The digital animation movie company has produced box-office hits including Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Disney bought the company for $7.4 billion in 2006. Jobs held a 7.3% ownership stake in Disney.
Jobs didn't hesitate to level caustic comments at competitors, particularly Microsoft in earlier years and later Google, which he ridiculed as evil, mediocre and lacking in taste. His skewering of Microsoft was parodied in a series of TV ads featuring the characters "Mac" and "PC."
Jobs was known for firing employees in profanity-laced tantrums and reducing some subordinates to tears. Yet many of his top deputies at Apple and Pixar worked with him for years.
Jobs is listed as an inventor or co-inventor on 313 Apple patents, including the iPod's user interface.
Though he brought simple, elegant technology to the masses, the reclusive Jobs was often uncomfortable around people and rarely spoke publicly. On rare occasions when he spoke with reporters, Jobs offered few or no personal insights.
Jobs' reluctance to appear publicly led to questions about his health, as did a dramatic loss in weight and gaunt appearance.
Jobs was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer in 2003. He informed Apple employees in 2004.
"No one wants to die," he said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005. "And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it."
Jobs' status as a corporate star put him on the covers of Time, Fortune and Forbes.
"Jobs led an enormous cultural shift of the businessman as a creative, even artistic, force," says Alan Deutschman, author of The Second Coming of Steve Jobs.
"When Jobs first came on the scene, it wasn't cool to be in business," Deutschman says. "Through the 1970s, the Dow hardly moved. Being in business was seen as being a total sellout. But Jobs was young and glamorous, and gave business that image. Now, young people aspire to be in business."
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, to unwed parents. He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Calif.
The young Jobs contacted William Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, to ask for parts for a class project. Impressed, Hewlett offered Jobs a summer internship.
Upon graduating from Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., in 1972, Jobs briefly went to Reed College in Portland, Ore. After a stint as a video-game designer at Atari, Jobs trekked to India in 1974, where he embraced Eastern culture and religion. Shortly after that, he lived in a commune in California.
In 1975, Jobs began hanging out with the Homebrew Computer Club and a friend from high school, Steve Wozniak. Jobs, then 21, and Wozniak — the "two Steves," as they became known — co-founded Apple Computer in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976.
By 25, Jobs was a millionaire. Jobs' first go-around at Apple was highlighted by the creation and introduction, in 1984, of the Macintosh, a revolutionary personal computer with an inviting graphical user-interface and mouse that popularized PCs for the masses.
The influence of the Beatles ran deep to Apple's core, too. Jobs presented a Mac to Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon, and was ensnared in a long-running trademark lawsuit with the music group's Apple Corps label. It was settled in 2007.
In a 1996 interview in San Francisco, Jobs offered a glimpse of his hopes to mirror the success of Walt Disney and George Lucas. "Computers are commodities with a six-month shelf life," he said. "Classics like Snow White and Fantasia are passed from generation to generation."
Wozniak said Apple is a reflection of Jobs' creative daring.
"He helped it achieve incredible things in music, smartphones, tablets and retail, while still making great computers," said Wozniak, who said he and Jobs occasionally talk.
Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve's Brain, said Jobs reconciled conflicting personality traits into an eclectic business philosophy.
"Jobs embraced the personality traits that some considered flaws — narcissism, perfectionism, total faith in his intuition — to lead Apple and Pixar to triumph against steep odds," Kahney says. "In the process, he became a self-made billionaire."
"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."
His family, in a separate statement, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family...We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief."
During his more than three decade-long career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry's innovation center. In addition to laying the groundwork for the modern high-tech industry alongside other pioneers like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed intuitive products over the sheer power of technology itself and shifted the way consumers interact with technology in an increasingly digital world.
At the beginning of that phase, Mr. Jobs once described his philosophy as trying to make products that were at "the intersection of art and technology." In doing so, he turned Apple into the world's most valuable company.
Mr. Jobs was 56 years old. After exhibiting significant weight loss in mid-2008, he took a nearly six month medical leave of absence in 2009, during which he received a liver transplant. He took another medical leave of absence in mid-January without explanation before stepping down as chief executive in August.
Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.
Although his achievements in technology alone were immense, Mr. Jobs played an equally groundbreaking role in entertainment. He turned Apple into the largest retailer of music and helped popularize computer-animated films as the financier and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he later sold to Walt Disney Co. He was a key figure in changing the way people used the Internet and how they consumed music, TV shows, movies, books, disrupting industries in the process.
The company produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ending September 1997. Apple has become one of the world's premier designers of consumer-electronics devices, dropping the "computer" in its name in January 2007 to underscore its expansion beyond PCs.
Although Mr. Jobs officially handed over the reins of the company to long-time deputy Tim Cook in August, his death nevertheless raises a high-stakes question for Apple of how the company—which has been in the vanguard of technological creativity for most of the past decade—will sustain its success without his vision and guidance. Other icons of American capitalism, including Walt Disney, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., experienced some transitional woes but eventually managed to thrive after their charismatic founders passed on.
But few companies of that stature have shown such an acute dependence on their founder, or lost the founder at the peak of his career. Several years after Mr. Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company began a steady decline that saw it drift to the margins of the computer industry. That slide was reversed only after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.
Mr. Jobs also leaves behind innumerable tales about his mercurial management style, such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas "dumb" when he didn't like something. He was even more combative against foes like Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. When Adobe Systems Inc. waged a campaign against Apple for not supporting Adobe's Flash video format on its iPhones and iPads in April 2010, Mr. Jobs wrote a 1,600 word essay about why the software was outdated and inadequate for mobile devices.
The CEO maintained uncompromising standards about the company's hardware and software, demanding "insanely great" aesthetics and ease of use from the moment a consumer walked into one of Apple's stylish stores. His attention to the smallest details in the development and design process were instrumental in shaping some of the most distinctive features of Apple's products, while his meticulously planned onstage demonstrations helped fuel excitement that was unmatched by his peers.
At event after event to introduce new Apple products, Mr. Jobs often puckishly proclaimed "There is one more thing" before revealing the most significant news at the very end of a speech. He enforced strict secrecy among Apple employees, a strategy that he believed heightened anticipation for upcoming Apple products.
Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in Palo Alto, Calif., was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group's Apple records label, according to the book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton.
The pair came out with the Apple II in 1977, a groundbreaking computer that was relatively affordable and designed for the mass market consumer rather than for hobbyists. The product went on to become one of the first commercially successful personal computers, making the company $117 million in annual sales by the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980. The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.
Not all of Mr. Jobs's early ideas paid off. Apple's Apple III and Lisa computers that debuted in 1980 and 1983 were flops. But the distinctive all-in-one Macintosh--foreshadowed in a ground-breaking TV ad inspired by George Orwell's novel "1984" that famously only aired once -- would set the standard for the design of modern computer operating systems, in which users point and click on icons with a mouse rather than typing in commands.
Even then, Mr. Jobs was a stickler about design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Mr. Jobs was adamant than the keyboard not include "up", "down," "right" and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens.
Mr. Jobs's pursuit for aesthetic beauty sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers beautiful. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.
Many ideas in the Macintosh came from a visit in 1979 to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research, where Mr. Jobs saw a machine called the Xerox Alto that had a crude graphical user interface and a mouse. The episode underscored his recurring role as a refiner and popularizer of existing inventions.
"Picasso had a saying, 'Good artists copy. Great artists steal,'" Mr. Jobs said in a PBS documentary on the computer industry from the mid-1990s. "I've been shameless about stealing great ideas."
Even in his appearance, Mr. Jobs seemed to cultivate an image more like that of an artist than a corporate executive. In public, he rarely deviated from an outfit consisting of Levis jeans, a black mock turtleneck and New Balance running shoes.
As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from Pepsi Co. to be Apple CEO in 1983, famously overcoming Mr. Sculley's initial reluctance by asking the executive if he just wanted to sell "sugar water to kids" or help change the world.
After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led its board's decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30. "What can I say – I hired the wrong guy," Mr. Jobs brooded in the same PBS documentary. "He destroyed everything I had spent ten years working for."
Mr. Jobs then created NeXT Inc., a closely watched startup that in 1988 introduced a distinctive black desktop computer with advanced software that was initially targeted at the academic computing market. But the machine was hobbled by its exorbitant price tag and some key design decisions, including its use of an optical disk drive and a Motorola Inc. microprocessor at a time when Intel Corp. chips and floppy drives had become the norm.
NeXT eventually stopped selling hardware and failed to make money as a software company. But its operating system would become a foundation for OS X, the software backbone of today's Macs, after Apple purchased NeXT for $400 million in December 1996.
In 1986, using part of his fortune from Apple, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million to acquire the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The company he formed out of those assets, Pixar Animation Studios, first sold hardware, then software, and later turned to feature films. Pixar went on to create a string of computer-animated hits, from "Toy Story" to 2008's "Wall-E." Mr. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in January 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal that gave him a Disney board seat and made him the entertainment company's largest shareholder.
Meanwhile, Apple began foundering. Computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software grew to dominate the market, a trend that accelerated after Microsoft's Windows emulated many elements of the Mac's visual interface.
Apple, by contrast, had to finance both hardware and software development internally. Fewer developers of application programs created products to make the Macintosh more useful. Apple would eventually decide to license its operating system to other hardware companies, but it was too late to reverse the swing to Windows-based machines.
By 1997, Apple had racked up nearly $2 billion in losses in two years, its shares were at record lows and it was on its third CEO--Gil Amelio--in four years. Eight months after the deal to buy NeXT in December 1996, Mr. Amelio was ousted and Mr. Jobs appointed interim CEO, a title that became permanent in January 2000. One former Apple employee recalls Mr. Jobs joking soon after he returned that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want."
Mr. Jobs, who was given a salary of $1 a year along with options to Apple stock, made a series of changes that started paying off quickly. He ended the nascent software licensing program that created Mac clones, killed the struggling Newton handheld computer and trimmed a confusing array of Mac models to a handful of systems focused on the consumer market.
In May 1998, he introduced the iMac, an unusual one-piece computer that sported a colorful casing in translucent turquoise and gray. The popular machine--which sent competitors scrambling to improve their own designs—was embodied by a bold ad campaign that featured the phrase "Think Different," with the picture of one of Mr. Jobs's heroes, such as Albert Einstein and Muppets creator Jim Henson.
While shareholders cheered the changes, Mr. Jobs flexed his power on Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus. Within months of taking over, he had replaced four of the five top executive positions with former NeXT underlings. He issued emails forbidding employees on the famously laid-back campus to bring pets to the office, smoke even in parking lots, and threatening to fire anyone caught leaking company documents.
One personal assistant became a target when he failed to arrange the installation of a high-speed digital data line to Mr. Jobs's office fast enough to suit the interim CEO. The worker said Mr. Jobs fired him for the delay, but rescinded the firing the next day after he had cooled down. (The worker ended up resigning soon afterwards).
Apple had some stumbles during Mr. Jobs's second coming, including a cube-shaped Macintosh that failed to catch on and was scrapped in 2001. The failure was one reason that Apple posted a quarterly loss and warned it would miss estimates several times in 2000 and 2001.
But big hits followed. In 2001, Apple introduced a PowerBook laptop made from titanium, a metal more frequently found in fighter airplanes. The same year, it introduced the iPod, which transformed digital music players with features such as its smooth shape and DJ-like wheel for navigating through songs. As of Sept. 2010, Apple had sold more than 275 million iPod devices since its introduction, and it has more than 70% market share in the market for digital music players.
A key differentiator was the iTunes Music Store, opened in 2003. At the time, the music industry was largely sitting on the sidelines of the digital revolution, badly wounded by illegal downloads but unable to agree on an easy, inexpensive way to sell songs online. But Mr. Jobs helped convince major record labels to sell recordings for 99 cents each, along with antipiracy restrictions that most consumers found acceptable.
The store, which has sold more than ten billion songs, became the largest music retailer in the U.S. in 2008. It also became an incentive for consumers to buy iPods because, for much of its history, songs from the iTunes store could only be downloaded to Apple's music player and not devices made by other companies.
At the same time, Mr. Jobs was building a deep bench of executives. He recruited former Compaq Computer Corp. executive Tim Cook in the late 1990s to straighten Apple's operations and promoted him over time to chief operating officer. Ron Johnson, senior vice president of Apple retail, was hired from Target Corp. in 2000 to launch Apple's stores worldwide. Apple's lead industrial designer Jonathan Ive took charge of the physical look-and-feel of the company's products and is said to share in Mr. Jobs's sensibilities about design.
In 2004, Mr. Jobs had to lean on this bench when he disclosed that he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. Apple revealed the procedure in early August 2004, but a person familiar with the situation said Mr. Jobs first learned of the tumor during a routine abdominal scan nine months earlier. The board and Mr. Jobs said nothing to Apple shareholders as the Apple executive, during that time, dealt with the tumor through changes to his diet, the person said.
In June 2007, Mr. Jobs made another splash when Apple introduced the iPhone. The cellphone pushed the envelope in the mobile phone market with features that included a touch-screen interface, allowing tricks such as blowing up images by spreading a thumb and finger on the phone's surface.
Mr. Jobs was typically hands on in the creation of the iPhone. People familiar with the matter say the CEO was the one that made a decision to change the screen of the iPhone from plastic to glass after he unveiled the product at the Macworld trade show in 2007. The iPhone team scrambled to procure glass that would meet his exacting standards, so the devices could be manufactured in time for the launch, which took place just seven months later.
Despite skepticism about Apple's ability to enter an already-competitive market dominated by the likes of Research in Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry devices, Apple quickly became a force in the mobile phone market, selling 92 million iPhones as of December 2010. The product kicked into a higher gear earlier this year when Apple said it would begin selling iPhones through Verizon Wireless in addition to carrier AT&T.
Last year, Mr. Jobs also unveiled the iPad tablet computer to great fanfare, billing it as "magical and revolutionary". In the first nine months of the product's release, Apple sold 14.8 million iPads as consumers snapped them up to use as a casual multimedia device for activities such as emailing, watching video and reading. People who work closely with Mr. Jobs said the project was so important to him that he was intimately involved in its planning even while recovering from his 2009 liver transplant.
A major selling point for both the iPhone and iPad has been the App Store, which allows developers to easily make application programs that users can download for free or for a small fee; the store meanwhile has seen more than seven billion downloads as of the end of 2010.
One cloud to Mr. Jobs's reign came in 2006 when Apple also disclosed that an internal investigation had discovered that stock option grants to Apple executives between 1997 and 2002-- including to Mr. Jobs-- were improperly dated. Apple became the most high-profile technology company caught up in a broad series of options backdating scandals that helped inflate the profits executives made from their stock awards.
Apple later disclosed that Mr. Jobs helped select the favorable option dates, but denied that he did anything wrong since he didn't understand the accounting implications of his actions. Apple's investigation ended up blaming two ex-Apple executives – former general counsel Nancy Heinen and former chief financial officer Fred Anderson – for their role in the backdating. Both were later charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission. They ended up settling the charges. Mr. Jobs was never charged with any wrongdoing.
Those who knew Mr. Jobs say that one reason why he was able to keep innovating was because he didn't dwell on past accomplishments or legacy but kept looking ahead and demanded that employees do the same. Hitoshi Hokamura, a former Apple employee, recalls how an old Apple I that was displayed by the company cafeteria quietly disappeared after Mr. Jobs returned in the late 1990s.
"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.
Steve Jobs — the man who brought us the iPhone, the iPod and the iMac — has died. The co-founder of Apple was 56 years old. Jobs had been battling a rare form of pancreatic cancer for years.
"It boggles the mind to think of all the things that Steve Jobs did," says Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee, who worked with Jobs.
McNamee says that in addition to introducing us to desktop publishing and computer animated movies, Jobs should be credited with creating the first commercially successful computer.
"Any one of those would have qualified him as one of the great executives in American history," McNamee says, "the sum of which put him in a place where no one else has ever been before. To me he is of his era what Thomas Edison was to the beginning of the 20th century."
Jobs was just 21 when he co-founded Apple Computer in his garage in Cupertino, Calif., in 1976. The following year, when Jobs and his partner, Steve Wozniak, released the compact Apple II, most computers were big enough to fill a university basement or came from do-it-yourself kits for hobbyists with soldering irons.
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Steve Jobs, The Man At Apple's Core
With sound and cutting-edge color graphics, Apple II was the first blockbuster desktop computer. Users could hook it up to their TV sets to play games, and its spreadsheet program made it popular with small businesses.
"It made Apple the biggest computer manufacturer in the nascent computer industry," says Leander Kahney, author of Inside Steve's Brain.
But in 1981, Apple got its first taste of serious competition, when IBM released its own personal computer. IBM had the advantage of a well-known, trusted name, and Jobs — a California boy — loathed the kind of conformist East Coast culture it represented.
So he countered with the Macintosh, the first computer to feature a mouse, pull-down menus and icons — thus eliminating the command-line interface.
"Jobs' idea was that we'll make it easy enough that anybody can do it ... a grandmother, a kid, people who don't have any experience," Kahney says. The Mac was an example of the kind of product that would come to define Jobs' entire career: easy-to-use computers.
That's the message Jobs sent to millions when he released the Mac in 1984. In an ad that aired once during the Super Bowl, a woman dressed in brightly colored shorts runs into a room of gray-looking people and throws a sledgehammer at a screen where Big Brother — read IBM — is talking. The minute-long reference to George Orwell's 1984 became one of the most famous television commercials of all time.
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
Enlarge Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs leans on the new Macintosh personal computer following a shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, Ca., in 1984.
It also illustrated Jobs' belief that computers were tools to unleash human creativity. In an interview for the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds, Jobs said, "Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
In many ways Jobs was the poet of the computer world. He'd gone to India and become a Buddhist. He took LSD and believed it had opened his mind to new ways of thinking.
But Jobs' iconoclastic ideals did not always make him easy to work with.
"He was just a terrible manager and a terrible executive," says Trip Hawkins, the marketing director of Apple until 1982. "At that point in time I never really thought that he could be a CEO."
Jobs was eventually fired in a 1985 boardroom coup led by John Sculley — the man Jobs himself had hired to be CEO of Apple. But Jobs was driven to make computers vehicles for creativity, and after he left Apple, he purchased a little-known division of Lucas film and renamed it Pixar.
In 1995, Pixar released the first animated feature to be done entirely on computers. That film, Toy Story, was a huge success, and Pixar followed it with other big hits including Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles and Finding Nemo.
But Apple didn't exactly thrive in the years after Jobs' departure. With less than 5 percent of the computer market in its possession and analysts predicting the company's demise, the board invited Jobs to come back and run his old business.
In 1998, as interim CEO of Apple, Jobs introduced the iMac and once again helped remake the computer industry. According to venture capitalist McNamee, the iMac was the first computer made to harness the creative potential of the Internet.
"The iMac reflected the transition of consumers from passive consumption of content to active creation of entertainment," McNamee says. "People could write their own blogs, make their own digital photographs and make their own movies. Apple made all the tools to make that easy and they did at a time when Microsoft just wasn't paying attention."
Three years after the iMac, Jobs announced Apple's expansion into the music industry with a breakthrough MP3 player — the iPod.
"This is not a speculative market," he said as he introduced the iPod in 2001. "It's a part of everyone's life. It's a very large target market all around the world."
The iPod was a classic Jobs product — easy to use and nice to look at. Apple sold tens of millions of iPods, and the iTunes store became the No. 1 music retailer.
Six years later, Apple released the iPhone — a device whose elegance and user friendliness blew other phone/music players out of the water.
In 2010, Apple created yet another groundbreaking device with the introduction of the iPad. With its color touch-screen, the tablet gave users the ability to surf the Web, send e-mail, watch videos and read e-books.
Book publishers weren't the only ones to embrace the new tablet. A host of magazines, newspapers and broadcast news organizations, including The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal and NPR, created iPad-specific apps that helped showcase stories — and images — in a tabloid-style layout.
And in January 2011, Apple reached a milestone by surpassing 10 billion downloads from its App Store — a sign of just how popular the company's devices have become with consumers.
"Simplifying complexity is not simple," says Susan Rockrise, a creative director who worked with Jobs. "It is the greatest, greatest gift to have someone who has Steve's capabilities as an editor and a product designer edit the crap away so that you can focus on what you want to do."
Rockrise believes Jobs touched pretty much anyone who has ever clicked a mouse, sent a photo over the Internet, published a book from a home computer or enjoyed portable music or a computer-animated movie.
She says they all have Jobs to thank for making it happen.
Via Apple, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, ABC News & NPR
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