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| Meta Title | Steve Jobs, Poet Of Computer World, Dies : NPR |
| Meta Description | Long before the MacBook and the iPad, the Apple co-founder and former CEO dreamed that computers could be used to help unleash human creativity. He spent much of his life bringing that dream to fruition. |
| Meta Canonical | null |
| Boilerpipe Text | In his last public appearance after stepping down as Apple CEO, Steve Jobs introduces Apple's iCloud storage system in San Francisco, June 2011.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Flags fly at half staff after the death of Steve Jobs at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Chinese exchange students from nearby De Anza College use candles to create a makeshift memorial for Steve Jobs at the Apple headquarters.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Graffiti pays homage to Jobs outside Apple's flagship store in New York City.
Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
In 1984, then chairman of the board of Apple Computer, Jobs introduced the new Macintosh personal computer.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs (left) with John Sculley (center) and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, unveil the new Apple IIc computer in San Francisco, 1984.
Sal Veder/AP
After having left Apple in 1985, Jobs rejoins as an adviser in 1996.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs poses with the first iMac in 1998.
John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images
Jobs jokes about his health at Apple headquarters in 2008; in 2004, he revealed that he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Jobs reveals the new iPad in San Francisco in 2010.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO in August 2011. Tim Cook, the company's chief operating officer, was announced as his replacement.
Mark Lennihan/AP
A screengrab of Apple's website on Wednesday.
1
of
12
Steve Jobs β the man who brought us the iPhone, the iPod and the iMac β 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.
Steve Jobs (1955-2011)
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com
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 Los Altos, 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.
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 β a California boy β 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 β 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 β read IBM β is talking. The minute-long reference to George Orwell's
1984
became one of the most famous television commercials of all time.
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."
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2010.
Paul Sakuma/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul Sakuma/AP
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2010.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs was eventually fired in a 1985 boardroom coup led by John Sculley β 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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β and images β in a tabloid-style layout.
And in January 2011, Apple reached a milestone by surpassing 10 billion downloads from its App Store β 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. |
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**Steve Jobs, Poet Of Computer World, Dies** **Long before the MacBook and the iPad, the Apple co-founder and former CEO dreamed that computers could be used to help unleash human creativity. He spent much of his life bringing that dream to fruition.**
[**Special Series** Remembering Steve Jobs (1955-2011)](https://www.npr.org/series/141136744/remembering-steve-jobs-1955-2011)
# Apple Visionary Steve Jobs Dies At 56
October 5, 20117:44 PM ET
Heard on [All Things Considered](https://www.npr.org/programs/all-things-considered/2011/10/05/141074760/)
By
[Laura Sydell](https://www.npr.org/people/2101272/laura-sydell)
#### Steve Jobs, Poet Of Computer World, Dies
******Listen****Β· 7:49******
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- 
Hide caption
In his last public appearance after stepping down as Apple CEO, Steve Jobs introduces Apple's iCloud storage system in San Francisco, June 2011.
Previous
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Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
- 
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Flags fly at half staff after the death of Steve Jobs at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
Previous
Next
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
- 
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Chinese exchange students from nearby De Anza College use candles to create a makeshift memorial for Steve Jobs at the Apple headquarters.
Previous
Next
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
- 
Hide caption
Graffiti pays homage to Jobs outside Apple's flagship store in New York City.
Previous
Next
Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
- 
Hide caption
In 1984, then chairman of the board of Apple Computer, Jobs introduced the new Macintosh personal computer.
Previous
Next
Paul Sakuma/AP
- 
Hide caption
Jobs (left) with John Sculley (center) and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, unveil the new Apple IIc computer in San Francisco, 1984.
Previous
Next
Sal Veder/AP
- 
Hide caption
After having left Apple in 1985, Jobs rejoins as an adviser in 1996.
Previous
Next
Paul Sakuma/AP
- 
Hide caption
Jobs poses with the first iMac in 1998.
Previous
Next
John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images
- 
Hide caption
Jobs jokes about his health at Apple headquarters in 2008; in 2004, he revealed that he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Previous
Next
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
- 
Hide caption
Jobs reveals the new iPad in San Francisco in 2010.
Previous
Next
Paul Sakuma/AP
- 
Hide caption
Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO in August 2011. Tim Cook, the company's chief operating officer, was announced as his replacement.
Previous
Next
Mark Lennihan/AP
- 
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A screengrab of Apple's website on Wednesday.
Previous
Next
1 of 12
i
View slideshow
[Steve Jobs β the man who brought us the iPhone, the iPod and the iMac β has died.](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/05/141096090/steve-jobs-has-died-apple-co-founder-was-56) 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.
### Apple's Statement:
[Steve Jobs (1955-2011)](http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/)
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com
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 Los Altos, 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.
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.
Sponsor Message
"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 β a California boy β 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 β thus eliminating the command-line interface.
[](https://www.npr.org/2011/08/26/139952936/steve-jobs-the-man-at-apples-core)
### [Technology](https://www.npr.org/sections/technology/)
### [TIMELINE: The Man At Apple's Core](https://www.npr.org/2011/08/26/139952936/steve-jobs-the-man-at-apples-core)
"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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8) 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 β read IBM β is talking. The minute-long reference to George Orwell's *1984* became one of the most famous television commercials of all time.
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."
Sponsor Message
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."
Enlarge this image
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2010.
**Paul Sakuma/AP** ****hide caption****
****toggle caption****
Paul Sakuma/AP
![]()
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2010.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs was eventually fired in a 1985 boardroom coup led by John Sculley β 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."
Sponsor Message
Three years after the iMac, Jobs announced Apple's expansion into the music industry with a breakthrough MP3 player β 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 β 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 β 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 β and images β in a tabloid-style layout.
And in January 2011, Apple reached a milestone by surpassing 10 billion downloads from its App Store β 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.
Sponsor Message
### Related NPR Stories
### [The Two-Way](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/)
### [REACTIONS: Jobs Remembered](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/10/05/141096090/steve-jobs-has-died-apple-co-founder-was-56)
### [All Songs Considered Blog](https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/)
### [MUSIC: How He Changed Way We Listen](https://www.npr.org/sections/allsongs/2011/08/24/139929797/how-steve-jobs-changed-the-way-we-listen)
### [Business](https://www.npr.org/sections/business/)
### [WHAT'S NEXT?: Can Apple Fly As High?](https://www.npr.org/2011/08/25/139948757/can-apple-fly-as-high-without-steve-jobs)
##### Correction Oct. 6, 2011
Previous versions of this story incorrectly said that Apple Computer was founded in a garage in Cupertino, Calif. The garage was actually in Los Altos.
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| Readable Markdown | - 
In his last public appearance after stepping down as Apple CEO, Steve Jobs introduces Apple's iCloud storage system in San Francisco, June 2011.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Flags fly at half staff after the death of Steve Jobs at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
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Chinese exchange students from nearby De Anza College use candles to create a makeshift memorial for Steve Jobs at the Apple headquarters.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
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Graffiti pays homage to Jobs outside Apple's flagship store in New York City.
Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images
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In 1984, then chairman of the board of Apple Computer, Jobs introduced the new Macintosh personal computer.
Paul Sakuma/AP
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Jobs (left) with John Sculley (center) and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, unveil the new Apple IIc computer in San Francisco, 1984.
Sal Veder/AP
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After having left Apple in 1985, Jobs rejoins as an adviser in 1996.
Paul Sakuma/AP
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Jobs poses with the first iMac in 1998.
John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images
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Jobs jokes about his health at Apple headquarters in 2008; in 2004, he revealed that he had a rare form of pancreatic cancer.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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Jobs reveals the new iPad in San Francisco in 2010.
Paul Sakuma/AP
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Jobs resigned as Apple's CEO in August 2011. Tim Cook, the company's chief operating officer, was announced as his replacement.
Mark Lennihan/AP
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A screengrab of Apple's website on Wednesday.
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[Steve Jobs β the man who brought us the iPhone, the iPod and the iMac β has died.](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/05/141096090/steve-jobs-has-died-apple-co-founder-was-56) 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.
[Steve Jobs (1955-2011)](http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/)
Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
If you would like to share your thoughts, memories, and condolences, please email rememberingsteve@apple.com
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 Los Altos, 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.
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 β a California boy β 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 β 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](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8) 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 β read IBM β is talking. The minute-long reference to George Orwell's *1984* became one of the most famous television commercials of all time.
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."
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2010.
**Paul Sakuma/AP** ****hide caption****
****toggle caption****
Paul Sakuma/AP
Steve Jobs holds up an iPhone at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June 2010.
Paul Sakuma/AP
Jobs was eventually fired in a 1985 boardroom coup led by John Sculley β 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 β 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 β 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 β 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 β and images β in a tabloid-style layout.
And in January 2011, Apple reached a milestone by surpassing 10 billion downloads from its App Store β 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. |
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