Steve Jobs' Greatest Technology Contributions

[Live Science]

Mike Wall, TechNewsDaily Contributor
Date: 06 October 2011 Time: 05:53 PM ET



Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died Wednesday (Oct. 5) at age 56 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Jobs was one of the giants of the information age, and his influence will be felt for decades to come. Here's a brief rundown of some of his greatest contributions to our increasingly tech-savvy and interconnected global society.
[Read also "Internet Mourns Steve Jobs’ Death"]

The Apple II

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Computers had been around for decades before Jobs came onto the scene, but they were primarily expensive machines used for business purposes.

Things began to change when Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computers Inc. in 1976. A year later, the pair released the Apple II, the world's first mass-market personal computer. Dens, home offices and schools around the world would never be the same.

The iMac



Under Jobs' leadership, Apple introduced the all-in-one iMac computer in 1998. The iMac looked steadfastly toward the future, becoming the first machine to eschew a floppy-disk drive (it offered only a CD-ROM slot). It was also marketed as being Internet-ready out of the box.

The iMac also drew notice for its stylishness, a recurring theme during Jobs' tenure at Apple. The iMac was sleek with rounded contours, and it came in an assortment of bright colors — quite a departure from Apple's previous desktops, which were drab, beige and boxy.

The iBook

Jobs was ousted as Apple CEO in 1985 after a power struggle with the company's board of directors. While he was gone, Apple introduced its high-end, business-friendly Powerbook laptop line in 1991.

Shortly after Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company released a cheaper, more consumer-friendly laptop. The iBook, introduced in 1999, came with Wi-Fi technology and included some style updates as well. It came in two colors — tangerine and blueberry — and had a unique clamshell design.

The iPod



Apple didn't invent the portable mp3 player, but the company developed a version so good that it came to dominate and define the field.

The iPod, first introduced in 2001, was so successful that its name has become synonymous with mp3 players, the way we call all tissues "Kleenex." Like other Apple products, the iPod was sleek, simple and stylish, with thousands of songs just a wheel-spin away.

iTunes

The iPod wouldn't have been such a smash without the help of other products backing it up. Chief among these was the media-player program iTunes, which Apple also introduced in 2001.

iTunes let people play and organize digital music and video files, both on their computers and on portable devices such as iPods and iPhones. The software forever changed the way people acquired and listened to music — especially after Apple launched the online iTunes Music Store in 2003.

The iPhone

The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 had a seismic effect on the smartphone industry that reverberates to this day. Before the iPhone, smartphones were used primarily for chatting and emailing; now they are web-surfing, do-everything machines packed full of useful (and, often, time-wasting) apps.

Every year, tech geeks around the world salivate and speculate about the introduction of a new iPhone version, like this year's iPhone 4S.

The iPad



By 2010, Steve Jobs was confident the world was ready to embrace a new type of device — a tablet computer that would be great for watching movies and playing games, but less so for cranking out reports and term papers.

He was right. The touch-sensitive iPad, which lacked a keyboard and USB port, was an instant success after its 2010 introduction. Apple sold 15 million of the devices that year and is on pace to move more than 40 million this year.

The glass staircases

In a nod to the premium Apple places on stylish design, some of the company's flagship stores around the world have glass staircases to draw customers' eyes, and wallets, upstairs.

The glass staircase incorporates some novel engineering and architectural feats. It was awarded a design patent in 2002 (with Jobs' name coming first on the document), as well as a technical patent to cover the glass and hardware systems involved.

The first glass staircases were straightforward up-and-down jobs, but some stores now have free-standing, wall-mounted or spiral versions.

This story was provided by TechNewsDaily , sister site to LiveScience.You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcomand on Facebook.

[ABC]

By GAIL DEUTSCH and DEBORAH ROBERTS

How is it that a college dropout, who landed in his parents' garage and who was once kicked out of his own company, became one of the world's foremost innovators?

Consultant Carmine Gallo, the author of "The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience," has made a career of sharing the success secrets of Steve Jobs. Below, Gallo lists the seven ways Jobs managed to triumph in the face of daunting circumstances and how you can do the same.

quicklist: 2. title: 1. Do What You Love, No Matter What It Happens to Be text: "Don't settle ... as with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it," is what Jobs told Stanford University graduates in a commencement address in 2005. Gallo says cook-turned-talk show host Rachael Ray embodies this advice.

"Rachael Ray did what she loves," Gallo says. "She was giving cooking lessons at Macy's, for nothing! She was giving free cooking classes because she loved what she did."

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quicklist: 3. title: 2. 'Put a Dent in the Universe' text: "Put a dent in the universe simply means that you have to have a big, bold, clear, concise vision. I like to say that your vision should -- fit in a Twitter post," Gallo says. Gallo referred to John F. Kennedy's "man on the moon" declaration: "We will put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade."

"John Kennedy, in 1961, had a clear, concise vision. If Twitter had existed that day, he could have tweeted it," he says.

quicklist: 4. title: 3. 'Say No to 1,000 Things' text: Simplifying his business was key to Jobs' success, Gallo says.

"In 1997, when he returned to Apple, Apple was close to bankruptcy. He took 300 products and condensed them to 10, within a two-year period," he says.

Simplicity also extended to Jobs' personal style, says Robert Cringely, who worked with Jobs since 1977.

"In latter years, he decided he would wear the same outfit every day, so that he, you know, didn't have to think about it, no one had to think about it, there were no decisions," Cringley says.

quicklist: 5. title: 4. 'Kick Start Your Brain' by Doing Something New text: Doing new things helped Jobs, in the word's of Apple's own slogan, "think differently."

"The inspiration for the Apple store came from the Four Seasons. That's why when you walk into an Apple store you will not find a cashier. You'll find a concierge. Walk to the back of the store and there's a bar. It doesn't dispel – dispense alcohol, but it dispenses advice," Gallo says.

quicklist: 6. title: 5. 'Sell Dreams Not Products' text: Jobs famously explained that the iPhone was not just a phone but a lifestyle.

quicklist: 7. title: 6. 'Create Insanely Great Experiences' text: "For Jobs, it wasn't just about selling 29 million iPads this summer but entertaining the customer at the same time," Gallo says.

Whether you run a multi-billion dollar tech company or a pizza parlor, innovation, he says, "means creating an experience for your customer."

[Newsweek]

Talent doesn’t cut it. Greatness requires freedom to be a weirdo.

by Niall Ferguson (/contributors/niall-ferguson.html) | October 10, 2011 1:00 AM EDT

This essay is not about Steve Jobs (/articles/2011/10/06/steve-jobs-dies-the-daily-beast-s-full-coverage-photos-video.html) . It is about the countless individuals with roughly the same combination of talents of whom we’ve never heard and never will.

Most of the 106 billion people who’ve ever lived are dead—around 94 percent of them. And most of those dead people were Asian—probably more than 60 percent. And most of those dead Asians were dirt poor. Born into illiterate peasant families enslaved by subsistence agriculture under some or other form of hierarchical government, the Steves of the past never stood a chance.

Chances are, those other Steves didn’t make it into their 30s, never mind their mid-50s. An appalling number died in childhood, killed off by afflictions far easier to treat than pancreatic cancer. The ones who made it to adulthood didn’t have the option to drop out of college because they never went to college. Even the tiny number of Steves who had the good fortune to rise to the top of premodern societies wasted their entire lives doing calligraphy (which he briefly dabbled in at Reed College). Those who sought to innovate were more likely to be punished than rewarded.

Today, according to estimates by Credit Suisse, there is approximately $195 trillion of wealth in the world. Most of it was made quite recently, in the wake of those great political and economic revolutions of the late 18th century, which, for the first time in human history, put a real premium on innovation. And most of it is owned by Westerners—Europeans and inhabitants of the New World and Antipodes inhabited by their descendants. We may account for less than a fifth of humanity, but we Westerners still own two thirds of global wealth.

A nontrivial portion of that wealth ($6.7 billion) belonged to Steve Jobs and now belongs to his heirs. In that respect, Jobs personified the rising inequality that is one of the striking characteristics of his lifetime. Back in 1955 the top 1 percent of Americans earned 9 percent of income. Today the figure is above 14 percent.

Bartholomew Cooke / Trunk Archive

Yet there is no crowd of young people rampaging through Palo Alto threatening to “Occupy Silicon Valley.” The huge amounts of money made by Jobs and his fellow pioneers of personal computing are not resented the way the vampire squids of Wall Street are. On the contrary, Jobs is revered. One eminent hedge-fund manager (who probably holds a healthy slice of Apple stock as well as the full array of iGadgets) recently likened him to Leonardo da Vinci.

So the question is not, how do we produce more Steves? The normal process of human reproduction will ensure a steady supply of what Malcolm Gladwell has called “outliers.” The question should be, how do we ensure that the next Steve Jobs fulfills his potential?

An adopted child, the biological son of a Syrian Muslim immigrant, a college dropout, a hippie who briefly converted to Buddhism and experimented with LSD—Jobs was the type of guy no sane human resources department would have hired. I doubt that Apple itself would hire someone with his résumé at age 20. The only chance he ever had to become a chief executive officer was by founding his own company.

And that—China, please note—is why capitalism needs to be embedded in a truly free society in order to flourish. In a free society a weirdo can do his own thing. In a free society he can even fail at his own thing, as Jobs undoubtedly did in his first stint in charge of Apple. And in a free society he can bounce back and revolutionize all our lives.

Somewhere in his father’s native Syria another Steve Jobs has just died. But this other Steve was gunned down by a tyrannical government. And what wonders his genius might have produced we shall never know.