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Apple Inc’s Steve Jobs is Dead

by Pinoylive on 05/10/11 at 11:14 pm

Apple Chairman and former CEO Steve Jobs is dead. The Apple co-founder who made personal computers, smartphones, tablets, multimedia and digital animation mass-market products passed away today October 5th, 2011 after a long bout with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. He was just 56 years old.

Steve Jobs has been suffering from many health issues as well after he was diagnosed and had surgery in August of 2004. Apple this year announced in January about his indefinite medical leave and eventually stepped down from his CEO role late August.

He also had a liver transplant in April 2009 while on a six-month leave of absence that year. He still worked for a year and a half after that before he announced himself stepping down as Apple CEO last August. ”I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” Jobs told his employees.

A legendary businessman in American history and technology icon in the global computing industry, Jobs has  transformed computers not just as machines that not only anyone could use, but something that we would enjoy using. He made them something that would be part of our lives. And he did that again and again with the Mac, the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Apple and personal computing originated with the launch of the Apple I in 1976. Together with Steve Wozniak, they started and formed Apple Computer in a garage. He continued developing the Mac which up to now continued to enjoy rapid market share.  In the early 2000s, legal digital music recordings were brought into the mainstream with the iPod and iTunes, then iPhone blew-up and revolutionize the  mobile phone industry in 2007. Jobs played an instrumental role in the development of all three, and still managed to find time to transform the best computer-generated movie studio Pixar. Pixar’s films were innovative and it pushed the boundaries of CGI to such an extent that even today its early films still look great.

Jobs attended Reed College in Oregon but dropped out after a year. He had a brief stint with Atari then spent some time in India furthering his interest in Buddhism. Back in California, Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple in 1976. By 1985, Apple CEO John Sculley whom he convinced to leave Pepsi and Joined Apple, removed Jobs from his position leading the Mac team. Jobs later on resigned from Apple. He founded NeXT which would later on be the development model for Apple’s software operating systems. He married Laurene Powell in 1991,  a Stanford MBA student whom he met on an entrepreneurialism speech Jobs gave in 1989. They had three children, Reed born in 1991, Erin in 1995, and Eve born in 1998. Jobs also had another daughter named Lisa whom he refused to acknowledge for the first few years but eventually reconciled with her and her mother Chris-Ann Brennan,  who was his girlfriend during high-school. In 1996, Jobs returned to Apple which is in shambles and losing money at the time. He immediately brought back glitter, buzz and profitability to the company making Apple today the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world surpassing ExxonMobil’s market capitalization in August.

n 2005, he inspirationally remarked in his transcript of speech to Stanford students: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Later, in 2007, Jobs and rival Bill Gates appeared together in a lengthy interview at the D: All Things Digital conference exchanging mutual praise with each other and prophetically quoting the Beatles: “You and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead.”

Jobs leaves behind his wife, four children, two sisters, and 49,000 Apple employees. We will surely miss him. Computing industry and technology will never be the same without him.

As a small tribute, you may want to download and use this simple wallpaper that we made for him. Goodbye Mr. Jobs. Job well done.

Steve Jobs wallpaper tribute. Click on image to download wallpaper.