The news this morning was sad. I woke up to the announcement that Steve Jobs, the Apple King, had given up the fight of his life. It is a sad, sad day for followers of Apple, the iPod, iPad and all things Mac.
I did learn something I didn't know before, he was adopted as well as a college drop out. Amazing! This man was ahead of his time and an innovator in technology, and has helped to change the way the world communicates and computes.
(AP) SAN FRANCISCO — Steve Jobs saw the future and led the world to it.
He moved technology from garages to pockets, took entertainment from
discs to bytes and turned gadgets into extensions of the people who use
them.
Jobs, who founded and ran Apple, told us what we needed before we wanted it.
"To
some people, this is like Elvis Presley or John Lennon. It's a change
in our times. It's the end of an era," said Scott Robbins, 34, a barber
and an Apple fan. "It's like the end of the innovators."
Apple
announced his death without giving a specific cause. He died peacefully
on Wednesday, according to a statement from family members who were
present. He was 56.
"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were
the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our
lives," Apple's board said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably
better because of Steve."
President Barack Obama said in a statement that Jobs "exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity."
"Steve
was among the greatest of American innovators — brave enough to think
differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world and
talented enough to do it," he said.
Jobs had battled cancer in
2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of
absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of
absence in January — his third since his health problems began — and
resigned in August. Jobs became Apple's chairman and handed the CEO job
over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.
Outside Apple's
Cupertino headquarters, three flags — an American flag, a California
state flag and an Apple flag — were flying at half-staff late Wednesday.
"Those
of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have
lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor." Cook wrote in an email to
Apple's employees. "Steve leaves behind a company that only he could
have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple."
The
news Apple fans and shareholders had been dreading came the day after
Apple unveiled its latest iPhone, a device that got a lukewarm
reception. Perhaps, there would have been more excitement had Jobs been
well enough to show it off with his trademark theatrics.
Jobs
started Apple with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in
1976, was forced out a decade later and returned in 1997 to rescue the
company. During his second stint, it grew into the most valuable
technology company in the world with a market value of $351 billion.
Almost all that wealth has been created since Jobs' return.
Cultivating
Apple's countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic, Jobs
rolled out one sensational product after another, even in the face of
the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.
He helped
change computers from a geeky hobbyist's obsession to a necessity of
modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just
personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.
For
transformation of American industry, he has few rivals. He has long been
linked to his personal computer-age contemporary, Bill Gates, and has
drawn comparisons to other creative geniuses such as Walt Disney. Jobs
died as Walt Disney Co.'s largest shareholder, a by-product of his
decision to sell computer animation studio Pixar in 2006.
Perhaps
most influentially, Jobs in 2001 launched the iPod, which offered
"1,000 songs in your pocket." Over the next 10 years, its white
earphones and thumb-dial control seemed to become more ubiquitous than
the wristwatch.
In 2007 came the touch-screen iPhone, joined a
year later by Apple's App Store, where developers could sell iPhone
"apps" which made the phone a device not just for making calls but also
for managing money, editing photos, playing games and social networking.
And in 2010, Jobs introduced the iPad, a tablet-sized, all-touch
computer that took off even though market analysts said no one really
needed one.
By 2011, Apple had become the second-largest company
of any kind in the United States by market value. In August, it briefly
surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company.
Under Jobs,
the company cloaked itself in secrecy to build frenzied anticipation for
each of its new products. Jobs himself had a wizardly sense of what his
customers wanted, and where demand didn't exist, he leveraged a
cult-like following to create it.
When he spoke at Apple
presentations, almost always in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black
mock turtleneck, legions of Apple acolytes listened to every word. He
often boasted about Apple successes, then coyly added a coda — "one more
thing" — before introducing its latest ambitious idea.
In later
years, Apple investors also watched these appearances for clues about
his health. Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with a very
rare form of pancreatic cancer — an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. He
underwent surgery and said he had been cured. In 2009, following weight
loss he initially attributed to a hormonal imbalance, he abruptly took a
six-month leave. During that time, he received a liver transplant that
became public two months after it was performed.
He went on
another medical leave in January 2011, this time for an unspecified
duration. He never went back and resigned as CEO in August, though he
stayed on as chairman. Consistent with his penchant for secrecy, he
didn't reference his illness in his resignation letter.
Steven
Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Simpson,
then an unmarried graduate student, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a student
from Syria. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption, though she married
Jandali and a few years later had a second child with him, Mona Simpson,
who became a novelist.
Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs
of Los Altos, California, a working-class couple who nurtured his early
interest in electronics. He saw his first computer terminal at NASA's
Ames Research Center when he was around 11 and landed a summer job at
Hewlett-Packard before he had finished high school.
Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 but dropped out after six months.
"All
of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college
tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it," he said at a
Stanford University commencement address in 2005. "I had no idea what I
wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me
figure it out."
When he returned to California in 1974, Jobs
worked for video game maker Atari and attended meetings of the Homebrew
Computer Club — a group of computer hobbyists — with Steve Wozniak, a
high school friend who was a few years older.
Wozniak's homemade
computer drew attention from other enthusiasts, but Jobs saw its
potential far beyond the geeky hobbyists of the time. The pair started
Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. According to
Wozniak, Jobs suggested the name after visiting an "apple orchard" that
Wozniak said was actually a commune.
Their first creation was the Apple I — essentially, the guts of a computer without a case, keyboard or monitor.
The
Apple II, which hit the market in 1977, was their first machine for the
masses. It became so popular that Jobs was worth $100 million by age
25.
During a 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center,
Jobs again spotted mass potential in a niche invention: a computer that
allowed people to control computers with the click of a mouse, not typed
commands. He returned to Apple and ordered his engineering team to copy
what he had seen.
It foreshadowed a propensity to take other
people's concepts, improve on them and spin them into wildly successful
products. Under Jobs, Apple didn't invent computers, digital music
players or smartphones — it reinvented them for people who didn't want
to learn computer programming or negotiate the technical hassles of
keeping their gadgets working.
"We have always been shameless
about stealing great ideas," Jobs said in an interview for the 1996 PBS
series "Triumph of the Nerds."
The engineers responded with two
computers. The pricier Lisa — the same name as his daughter — launched
to a cool reception in 1983. The less-expensive Macintosh, named for an
employee's favorite apple, exploded onto the scene in 1984.
The
Mac was heralded by an epic Super Bowl commercial that referenced George
Orwell's "1984" and captured Apple's iconoclastic style. In the ad,
expressionless drones marched through dark halls to an auditorium where a
Big Brother-like figure lectures on a big screen. A woman in a bright
track uniform burst into the hall and launched a hammer into the screen,
which exploded, stunning the drones, as a narrator announced the
arrival of the Mac.
There were early stumbles at Apple. Jobs
clashed with colleagues and even the CEO he had hired away from Pepsi,
John Sculley. And after an initial spike, Mac sales slowed, in part
because few programs had been written for it.
With Apple's stock
price sinking, conflicts between Jobs and Sculley mounted. Sculley won
over the board in 1985 and pushed Jobs out of his day-to-day role
leading the Macintosh team. Jobs resigned his post as chairman of the
board and left Apple within months.
"What had been the focus of
my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating," Jobs said in his
Stanford speech. "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.
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."
He got into two
other companies: Next, a computer maker, and Pixar, a computer-animation
studio that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million.
Pixar,
ultimately the more successful venture, seemed at first a bottomless
money pit. Then in 1995 came "Toy Story," the first computer-animated
full-length feature. Jobs used its success to negotiate a sweeter deal
with Disney for Pixar's next two films, "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story
2." Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Co. for $7.4 billion in stock in a
deal that got him a seat on Disney's board and 138 million shares of
stock that accounted for most of his fortune. Forbes magazine estimated
Jobs was worth $7 billion in a survey last month.
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