Apple’s innovator Steven P. Jobs dies at 56

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Eden Prairie, Minnesota, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) October 6, 2011 -- Today, when I search some news, and so sad, the news tells “Apple’s innovator Steven P. Jobs dies at 56” Steven P. Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple who helped usher in the era of per- sonal computers, died Wednesday at age 56.

The death was announced by Apple, the company Jobs and his high school friend Stephen Wozniak started in 1976 in a suburban California garage. Under Jobs, the company led a cultural transformation in the way music, movies and mobile communications were experienced in the digital age.

Jobs had waged a long and public struggle with cancer, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment. He continued to introduce products for a global market in his trademark blue jeans even as he grew gaunt and frail.

He underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2004, received a liver transplant in 2009 and took three medical leaves of absence as Apple’s chief executive before stepping down in August and turning over the helm to Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer.

Jobs had come to define the personal computer industry and an array of digital consumer and entertainment businesses centered on the Internet. He had also become a very rich man, worth an estimated $8.3 billion.

Eight years after founding Apple, Jobs led the team that designed the Macintosh computer, a breakthrough in making personal computers easier to use. After a 12-year separation from the company, prompted by a bitter falling-out with his chief executive, John Sculley, he returned in 1997 to oversee the creation of one innovative digital device after another — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. These transformed not only product categories such as music players and cellphones but also entire industries, such as music and mobile communications.

During his years outside Apple, he bought a tiny computer graphics spinoff from director George Lucas and built a team of computer scientists, artists and animators that became Pixar Animation Studios.

Starting with “Toy Story” in 1995, Pixar produced a string of hits, won several Academy Awards for artistic and technological excellence, and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form.

Jobs was neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, nor did he think of himself as a manager. He considered himself a technology leader, choosing the best people possible, encouraging and prodding them, and making the final call on product design.

“He was the most passionate leader one could hope for, a motivating force without parallel,” wrote Steven Levy, author of the 1994 book “Insanely Great,” which chronicles the creation of the Mac.

“Toy Story,” for example, took four years to make while Pixar struggled, yet Jobs never let up on his colleagues.

“You need a lot more than vision — you need a stubbornness, tenacity, belief and patience to stay the course,” said Edwin Catmull, a computer scientist and a co-founder of Pixar. “In Steve’s case, he pushes right to the edge, to try to make the next big step forward.”

Jobs was the ultimate arbiter of Apple products, and his standards were exacting. Over the course of a year he tossed out two iPhone prototypes, for example, before approving the third, and began shipping it in June 2007.

To his understanding of technology he brought an immersion in popular culture. In his 20s, he dated Joan Baez; Ella Fitzgerald sang at his 30th birthday party. His worldview was shaped by the ’60s counterculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he had grown up, the adopted son of a Silicon Valley machinist. When he graduated from high school in Los Altos in 1972, he said, “the very strong scent of the 1960s was still there.”

He attended Reed College, a stronghold of liberal thought in Portland, Ore., but dropped out in 1972.

Apple’s very name reflected his unconventionality. In an era when engineers and hobbyists tended to describe their machines with model numbers, he chose the name of a fruit, supposedly because of his dietary habits at the time.

Coming on the scene just as computing began to move beyond the walls of research laboratories and corporations in the 1970s, Jobs saw that computing was becoming personal — that it could do more than crunch numbers and solve scientific and business problems — and that it could even be a force for social and economic change. And at a time when hobbyist computers were boxy wooden affairs with metal chassis, he designed the Apple II as a sleek plastic package intended for the den or the kitchen. He was offering not just products but a digital way of life.

He put much stock in the notion of “taste,” a word he used frequently. It was a sensibility that shone in products that looked like works of art and delighted users. Great products, he said, were a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Jobs’s own research and intuition, not focus groups, were his guide. When asked what market research went into the iPad, Jobs replied: “None. It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco. He leaves his wife, Laurene Powell; their three children, Reed Paul, Erin Sienna and Eve; plus daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from another relationship.


Steve Jobs’ hit products
•Apple II (1977): The machine that launched Apple and the personal computer industry.

•Macintosh (1984): With a revolutionary graphical interface and mouse, the Macintosh immediately was easier to use than the command-based IBM personal computer. About 70,000 sold in the first 100 days.

•iMac (1998): The iMac computer debuted in translucent plastic “bondi blue,” followed in 1999 by five candy colors. About 2.7 million sold in the first two years.

•iPod (2001): The portable player introduced the possibility of carrying an entire music collection in your pocket. Apple has sold more than 300 million iPods.

•iPhone (2007): The revolutionary device merged phone, music player and computer into a stylish package. About 130 million have been sold.

•iPad (2010): Despite skepticism about the market for a tablet-style device, iPad was a hit from the start, with 7 million sold in less than a year.

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