Wow! What an impact this is going to have on the tech world. Love or Hate Apple they have been profoundly influential on modern technology and Steve Jobs was the core of Apple - pun intended. Sucks for anyone to pass at such a young age.
I just watched a short CNN storyline. A huge loss for the tech world. He was certainly a tech prodigy and will be sadly missed. Apple will suffer from this loss…
I have an iPhone and a couple iPods. Fabulous products IMHO.
RIP Steve Jobs. I totally agree with both of you. I don’t own any Apple products but their influence on the computer/tech industry has been huge.
I knew it! Have not turned on the TV all day. Felt like something significant happened. That’s too bad.
Sad sad day. I was first introduced to Macs in 2000 and never looked back since, becoming a more and more hardcore Mac Addict. Such a loss for the tech world. Apple should be in good hands though, and hopefully will not suffer too badly from this
We should commemorate him by making ciders or some apple beers.
I’ve been trying really hard not to be bummed out by this, and mostly failing. I can’t say that I knew Steve personally, though I met him a couple times. But I’ve been an Apple fan for as long as I can remember (I’m the same age as the Macintosh) and I can’t help but feel like it’s the end of an era. One of those constants that we take for granted has been taken away from us before its time.
I knew this was coming, but ergh.
I don’t even have a mac (have an iPod and an iPhone), but my second computer as a kid was an Apple ][ e enhanced with a whopping 128k of memory and two 5.25" floppies and eventually a 300 baud modem.
It would be hard to under state just how important that computer was to me becoming the nerd that I am.
Good thing is that now his memories are ready to return to the world.
Take heart. He’ll join the pantheon of American heroes.
R.I.P. Steve and thanks for the iPod.
sad day for apple fans such as myself, I think we all knew this day was close once he resigned but it just seems way too soon. His contributions to tech, business, design, art, typography, movies, architecture and music were astounding to say the least.
Just take a look at some of the patents that bear his name, everything from adapters to staircases, truly amazing.
Good-bye Steve and thanks for everything.
Tonyp
In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey blew me away. In the opening sequence showing life aboard the spaceship Discovery two astronauts are sitting at a desk, eating breakfast/dinner while watching a TV broadcast on flat rubber mat-like “newspads.” When I saw this in the movie I thought it was amazing, and just about the coolest thing I’d ever seen (it is described in greater detail in the book). It seems that Clarke and Kubrick foresaw what Jobs would do, or perhaps, inspired Jobs to do it.
Either way, it’s 2011 and I have one of those newspads, only way cooler… my iPad 2.
Yeah this sucks, Steve Jobs helped drive technology to what it is today, I am dedicated Windows and Android user and I still feel his influence.
iSad
I am an admitted Apple bandwagon guy - I do the phones, the ipods, the imacs, the apple tv… I think the real genious of Steve was his ability to make people think they had to have something that they never thought they needed before. I don’t know if Jobs was more of a tech genious or a marketing genious but he definetly had an impact on my life with the products he turned out.
This comes as a surprise to me. Was he sick or something? I really don’t read the news these days as there’s nothing I really need to know or positive to read. All I’ve ever had was an iPod that I’ve recently ditched because I got sick of iTunes and my iPod. Music goes on the phone now. Drag & drop, which you couldn’t do with an iPod. Hated not being able to do that.
He was a rare breed and a visionary that at least one commentator has compared to Edison and Ford.
What they all had in common were ideas based on intuition , wishful thinking and who knows…maybe even some cosmic intervention. In any case, they made ideas actually happen even though they weren’t engineers or scientists. They did it by assembling the right talent to actually implement what seemed like far fetched or even impossible ideas.
Whether you’re running Mac or Windows OS (which Bill Gates is on record having said that the aim was always to make it “Mac like”), it was Jobs, Woz, and the talent that they assembled at Apple that practically invented personal computing, or at the very least, personal computing as we know it today, by making it a LOT more user friendly.
It can be said of so few people that “…they changed the world”.
Jobs changed it bigtime.
I think that what made Jobs great wasn’t inventing technology, it was taking technology and finding a way to bundle it in a package that was useable by the common man.
Think he’d been dealing with cancer (pancreatic?) for the last several years
Since 2003. Had a liver transplant in 2006, etc.
He made it a hell of a lot longer than pancreatic cancer patients normally do. Guess the money helps in that regard.
Steve Jobs had little impact on any kind of invention–Apple isn’t particularly innovative and just sells crap that other people invented.
That happens to be a big thing.
I’ve seen tons of technology come and go in my time. In fact, a lot of Apple’s products are technology that failed. Smart phones? the iPhone sucks; i had an iPaq PDA with Microsoft PocketPC 6, phenomenal handwriting recognition … you could open PocketWord, sit down, and just write, and write… write 50 page reports, write novels, whatever … on a 3 inch screen. One day they shoved a cell phone chip into it and called it a “Smart Phone.”
It flopped.
There was no 3G.
Palm’s stuff flopped. Blackberry would be the pathetic state of the art FOREVER if Apple didn’t break into the market with the iPhone. Google Android wouldn’t have come about as a response. I’m still confused about the industry’s vocal and obvious attempt to get rid of the stylus (the first statement directly of this I saw was Samsung’s), as I find it both immediately useful for high-accuracy applications (stylus typing is faster than finger typing on 3.5 inch screen keyboards) and important for handwriting recognition input (which PocketPC 6 did phenomenally circa 1998).
Tablets … remember in 2001, Windows Tablet Edition… laptops with swivel screens … a complete flop. Again, with phenomenal handwriting recognition. The iPad did it 10 years later … again, with 3G connectivity; wifi wasn’t big back then, much less 3G. Laptops are still worthless in college, although every college student “needs a laptop” (it has to go with them to class, somehow … something I haven’t figured out yet).
The iPod showed up when MP3 players looked popular, but were really crappy. The technology would have peaked, then died off. Apple figured out how to leverage that perfectly.
And that’s what Apple does.
That’s what Steve Jobs was good at.
The tech industry tends to lock up a lot. There is so much technology that never makes it because businesses simply don’t know how to leverage it. a lot of Apple’s products are a step up, and a lot are a step down; but in pretty much all cases, Steve Jobs was pulling tech that was going nowhere and putting it in a shiny box in a form that was actually useful.
Steve Jobs drove the industry.
That’s what he was good at.
Now we need a new one, and it’s hard. It’s hard because it’s hard; and it’s hard because whoever gets that job will be too busy trying to be Steve Jobs instead of trying to do what Steve Jobs did. If you are trying to emulate a person, you have no idea what you’re doing; if you actually get it, you only have to be yourself.
Technology may stagnate for a while…