Apple’s core

STEVE JOBS, who died on Wednesday aged 56, started Apple with a high school friend in a garage in 1976. Despite a few bumps along the way, including being forced out a decade later, he built it into the biggest company in the world. During his second stint in charge, Apple unveiled a string of iconic devices including the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.

Critics claim Jobs took the credit for the inventions of brilliant engineers and designers.

People like Jonathan Ive, the former student of industrial design at Northumbria University, who is credited with creating the form of most of Apple’s products since 1997.

But it was Jobs who was the conceptual genius behind these products and it was he who turned them from curious niche appeal gadgets into modern day must-haves.

Beyond Apple, Jobs founded Pixar Animation from the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm – and backed Toy Story when Hollywood moguls said it couldn’t be done. When Pixar was bought out in 2006, he sat on the board of directors at Walt Disney.

But Apple was his first love and greatest success.

After a power struggle, he was fired in May 1985, but returned in 1996 when he was hailed as a conquering hero. Famously, he refused to take a salary – although the stock he took instead made him a billionaire several times over.

Jobs cultivated Apple’s counter-cultural values and championed the minimalist design ethic that made the iPod and the iMac huge hits at a time when other computer manufacturers were trying to out-do each other with buttons, displays and flashing lights.

The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player – it may not even have been the best – but, thanks to Jobs, it was the coolest. It was launched in 2001 and offered “1,000 songs in your pocket”. Over the next ten years its white earphones and thumb-dial became ubiquitious.

The real genius, however, was iTunes. Before iTunes, anyone who owned an MP3 player had to copy songs from a CD or illegally download them from the web. But iTunes made buying music simple and fun. It offered more music than the largest store and its payment method, allowing music fans to buy their favourite tracks rather than whole albums, made it an overnight success. The success of iTunes drove sales of iPods and vice versa.

APPLE has grown into an industry colossus.

Jobs’ visonary status ensured it did not rest on its laurels. At the height of the iPod’s success, he set his designers to work on a phone. The iPhone subsequently became the best-selling smartphone. And as the iPhone was launched he moved again – urging his teams to create a tablet device at a time when everyone else said an iPad would be a massive flop.

Jobs’ death, from pancratic cancer, comes just days after his successor, Tim Cook, unveiled Apple’s latest iPhone in California. It is a mark of his importance that US President Barack Obama led the tributes describing Jobs as a visionary figure.

Steven Spielberg hailed him as “the greatest inventor since Thomas Edison”.

Jobs was diagnosed with the cancer in 2004.

Doctors told him there was no hope. The best prognosis was that he had six months to live.

Jobs said: “I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me it was almost certainly a type of cancer that was incurable.

My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors’ code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next ten years to tell them in just a few months.

It means to make sure everthing is buttoned up so it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.”

Later that day, further tests revealed Jobs had an incredibly rare form of the disease, which was operable. The consultant who told him the news broke down in tears.

IN a moving address to students at Stanford University in 2005, Jobs opened his heart about his view on life. He told his rapt audience: “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.”

A year later, reflecting on his brush with death, Jobs said: “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.

And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

He summed up his philosophy to life thus: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary."