Steve Jobs: the five Apple products 'that changed the world'

Steve Jobs, the Apple founder and former CEO who died aged 56, leaves a lasting legacy in the form of his revolutionary inventions. Here are the five core Apple products that changed the face of the technology, music and publishing industries.

Steve Jobs 

iPod

In October 2001 the face of the music industry was changed forever with the launch of a small palm-sized gadget called "the iPod".

The rectangular-shaped portable music device had a central-scroll wheel on the front and a small window for song selection. It could be charged with a "docking station" and songs could be loaded directly onto the music player from a computer.

There had been digital music players before, but the fresh look and simplistic usability put the Apple player in a class of its own among portable music devises.

The first iPod was available in 5GB and 10 GB models and could hold up to 1,000 songs. The name iPod for a personal music player was coined by Apple copywriter Vinnie Chieco who supposedly got the idea after watching the pods in 2001: A space Odyssey.
In pictures: Apple iPod - a history
The second generation of the iPod was launched in 2002 with a touch-sensitive scroll wheel. Throughout 2002, 600,000 iPods were sold and by the end of 2003 iPod sales hit the two million mark.
Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod in April 2007 making it the fastest selling music player in history.
To date there have been several iPod versions released including the nano, shuffle and touch. More than 275 million iPods have been sold around the world.

iTunes

In April 2003, just as the third-generation iPod was released, Apple launched its online music store iTunes with 200,000 songs.
Before iTunes, music executives had failed to be convinced about the success of an online music market. But coupled with Apple's hugely-successful iPod - launched just two years earlier - Steve Jobs proved it was a market worth exploring.
The product was an immediate success selling one million songs in its first week and by December it had sold 25 million songs. In 2010 iTune song downloads hit 10 billion.
There have been several updates of iTunes, the most significant being the introduction of film purchase and rentals in 2008. This week, Apple announced that iTunes will be accessibly across all their devices as part of their move into "cloud" computing.

iPhone

The first iPhone was released in January 2007 to a huge fanfare. The phone catapulted Apple ahead of its smartphone rivals with its multi-touch screen. A year later the iPhone 3G was released and the App Store was launched.
In July this year App Store downloads hit 15 billion with the company having launched App subscriptions just a few months earlier in February.

To date Apple have sold 125 million iPhones around the world (as of August 8, 2011). The telephone is still gaining popularity with avid Blackberry-user Barack Obama, the US president, even suggesting he may switch to the iPhone.
Yesterday Apple launched the iPhone 4S with its voice-control function Siri, which promises to revolutionise the way people use their phones (again).
Video: Apple iPhone 4S revealed

Mac

In front of thousands of laughing delegates, a tuxedo-clad Steve Jobs unveiled the first Macintosh computer in January 1984. It started as a small white box in a bag and evolved into the waffer-thin machine it is today.
A year later he was interviewed in Playboy explaining "something called a mouse".
The Mac evolved into two main types of Apple computer; the iMac and MacBook. There are now nearly 60 million Mac users around the world.

iPad

The iPad - a Mac/ iPhone hybrid - was released in 2010. Although still in its relatively early years, the iPad has been a great success; maintaining its market presence where other tablet computers have faltered.
The availability of Apps on the device has been a particular success with many newspapers and magazines having launched versions of their publications for the device. The portable tablet is currently teetering on revolutionising the publishing industry.
To date there have been two iPad versions with 28 million units sold worldwide (as of June 6, 2011).

By Amy on telegraph.com posted by Daves Solomon

Steve Jobs ‘single-handedly’ created the digital music market

Steve Jobs, the founder and former CEO of Apple who died aged 56, has been praised for revolutionising the music industry and bringing it into the digital age.

 

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Steve Jobs 

 

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Apple founder and former CEO Steve Jobs Photo: EPA/GETTY IMAGES

 

On the day of his death, music industry and technology analysts have praised the way Jobs managed to create iTunes in 2003, saying he dragged the record labels into the web age.

Mark Mulligan, digital music expert and former senior Forrester analyst, said: “Steve Jobs single-handedly pulled the music industry into the digital age. Until he created iTunes, there was no legal digital music service which was fit for purpose.

“When Jobs convinced the record labels to put their collections in his store online – it change everything. Up until that point, if you bought a track online, you could only access it on the PC you had bought it on – something inconceivable nowadays…Without Jobs’s intervention the digital music market would not be where it is today.”

In April 2003, just as the third-generation iPod was released, Apple launched iTunes with 200,000 songs.

Before iTunes, music executives had failed to be convinced about the success of an online music market. But coupled with Apple's hugely-successful iPod - launched just two years earlier - Steve Jobs proved it was a market worth exploring.

 

The product was an immediate success selling one million songs in its first week and by December it had sold 25 million songs. In 2010 iTunes song downloads hit 10 billion.
There have been several updates of iTunes, the most significant being the introduction of film purchase and rentals in 2008. This week, Apple announced that iTunes will be accessible across all their devices as part of their move into "cloud" computing.
Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and chief executive, (another digital music service which has been highly praised for disrupting the existing model with its streaming offering), tweeted this morning; “Thank you Steve. You were a true inspiration in so many parts of my life, both personal and professional. My hat off to our time's Da Vinci.”
Musician and technology PR, Christian Ward, tweeted that Jobs’s music intervention had “sped up the demise of an industry, but created a lifestyle from the ashes”.
Moreover, in a 2009 edition of Fortune Magazine, Jimmy Iovine, founder and chairman of Interscope Records, said: “Whatever anyone says about Apple, if it wasn’t for Steve Jobs there would be no legitimate music online.”
However, Mulligan thinks Apple’s love affair with music has started to wane, as the record labels have been increasingly difficult to work with.
“Apple is not in the business of selling content – its focus is selling devices. It doesn’t get the best return of investment from music and the labels are tough to deal with. Consequently, it has found other pieces of content, such as apps, videos and games, which have become better tools to market its latest devices on. I suspect the music industry’s window of opportunity with Apple has closed.”

By Emma Barnett, posted by Daves Solomon

Steve Jobs, a modern-day Christopher Wren

Steve Jobs, the visionary founder of Apple, has died aged 56.

Steve Jobs was often thought of as a modern day Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison during his life, an archetypal American inventor of the most revolutionary kind who was able to not only create new products that changed people's lives, but to also market them with equal zest.
There's no doubt that Jobs deserves a front-row seat in the pantheon of great inventors and entrepreneurs in history. In the 35 years since he founded Apple, he created the Apple II, the iMac, iPod, iPhone and most recently, the iPad – five products that transformed the technological, music, film, TV, gaming and publishing industries. Few could claim to have even developed a single such product.
But there's another person whom we could compare Steve Jobs to who's a little closer to home: Sir Christopher Wren. One of the greatest architects in history, Wren was responsible for building St. Paul's Cathedral as well as dozens of other churches, libraries, palaces, and hospitals across the country. Like Wren, who had interests in astronomy, biology, and physics, Steve Jobs was not 'only' a computer engineer or a programmer, but he had a deep love and appreciation of the importance of design and the humanities when it came to making objects that real people had to use.
The easiest way to see Jobs' instincts at work is to simply watch Apple's TV commercials; not the just iconic 1984 Macintosh announcement, but a couple showing off the iPad 2 entitled We Believe and Learn. In stark contrast to other electronic companies' efforts which typically highlight processor speed and screen size with incomprehensible acronyms, Apple – and Steve Jobs – prefers to stress focus on what people can do with their products. We see children learning how to write Chinese by drawing on the screen, or flying around a 3D solar system, or playing a piano on the screen.
It's not that you can't do these things on other tablets or computers, because you can – it's that Jobs understood that these very human activities were the singular purpose for why his products were important and why people would want to buy them, and he made absolutely sure that they were designed with humans in mind. No interface could be too simple, no icon too lovely. If he was going to sell a computer that would be used by a hundred million people, he wanted it to be more like an exquisitely balanced pen or paintbrush rather than a brutish, functional hammer. How could he not, given his grounding in art and design?
Job also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios. Originally, he imagined the company would build computer hardware and software for other film studios, but Pixar consistently lost money for several years despite many groundbreaking creative and technical advances in computer animation. Jobs frequently found his co-founders' insistent desire to make their own movies more than a little frustrating, but the company eventually signed a deal with Disney to produce three computer-animated films, with the first being Toy Story.
Other businessmen might have cut their losses far earlier than Jobs, either selling or liquidating Pixar in favour of risky bets, but he clearly had enough confidence in the technical and artistic abilities of his employees to keep on going. It's safe to say that whatever you think of Apple's products, you'd need a heart of stone to not be impressed or moved by any of Pixar's movies like Up or Wall-E or Ratatouille.
I came to Apple comparatively late in my life; we were a PC household and Macs had no place there. But when the iPod was first announced, I rushed to immediately buy one straight from the US. Portable MP3 players had already existed for years, and the iPod not only didn't have a radio or recording capabilities like the others, but it had far less storage space. The only two things going for it were that it was far smaller – the size of a pack of cards – and that it was far easier and more fun to use. It turned out that these two things were enough to effectively demolish every single competitor. Once again, Jobs had proved that technical specifications alone were not enough, that you needed to focus on the human experience to succeed.
Everywhere you look, you can see people playing games and talking on their iPhones, reading books on their iPads, and browsing the web on their MacBooks. But Jobs didn't want to make devices that were only fit for consuming content, he wanted to help people make it. What we can't see are the countless books, artworks, movies, websites, apps, and songs that were made on Apple products and have enriched the world. He combined technology and the liberal arts.
Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph at St. Paul's Cathedral was si momumentum requiris circumspice: if you seek his monument, look around you. Steve Jobs more than earned those same words to describe his legacy.

By Adrian Hon Computing Last updated: October 6th, 2011, posted by Daves Solomon