PERSON
Steve Jobs
Co-founder of Apple. Together with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, he founded Apple Computer in 1976 and stood at the centre of the product lineage that ran from the Apple II through the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Forced out of Apple in 1985, he ran NeXT and Pixar before returning to Apple in 1997. He died in 2011 of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor.
Profile
- Born
- 1955
- Died
- 2011
- Span
- 56 years
- Appearances
- 06
- Name
- ENSteve JobsJAスティーブ・ジョブズ
Appearances
- January 24, 1984The Macintosh — The GUI Goes MainstreamApple introduced the Macintosh, bringing the graphical user interface invented at Xerox PARC—windows, icons, mouse—to a US$2,495 mass-market price. After the commercial failure of the more expensive Lisa the year before, Apple deliberately moved the balance of simplicity versus extensibility hard toward the former. The Ridley Scott Super Bowl ad introducing it has its own place in television history.
- March 24, 2001Mac OS X 10.0 ReleasedThe release that replaced Apple's Classic Mac OS with the descendant of NeXTSTEP—the Mach-microkernel-plus-BSD UNIX environment Steve Jobs had developed at NeXT after leaving Apple in 1985, and brought back through Apple's 1996 acquisition of NeXT. It gave the Mac UNIX-derived robustness and process separation, and laid the foundation for the Aqua UI, iOS, and modern macOS.
- June 29, 2007The Original iPhone Goes on SaleUnveiled by Steve Jobs at Macworld in January 2007, the iPhone went on sale in the United States on June 29 of the same year. By dropping the physical keyboard in favour of capacitive multi-touch and putting an OS X-derived operating system on a phone, the device rewrote the grammar of the product category that would later be called the smartphone.
- July 10, 2008The App Store OpensLaunched alongside iPhone OS 2.0, the App Store opened with roughly 500 applications. The structure—official Apple distribution, a 70/30 revenue split between developer and platform—would form the spine of mobile economics for the next decade and a half. At the iPhone's original unveiling, Steve Jobs had argued that web apps were enough; eighteen months later, that policy was quietly abandoned.
- June 24, 2010iPhone 4 — Retina Display and 'Antennagate'Apple branded the new 326-ppi panel the 'Retina display', claiming the human eye could not resolve individual pixels at normal viewing distance. The industrial design shifted to glass front and back with a stainless-steel sidewall—an aesthetic vocabulary that defined every iPhone that followed. The same stainless-steel band, however, doubled as the antenna; certain grips caused noticeable signal loss, triggering the 'Antennagate' affair, one of the most prominent PR failures in Apple's history.
- October 14, 2011iPhone 4S and Siri — Jobs' Last LaunchDual-core A5, an eight-megapixel camera, and the Siri voice assistant. Steve Jobs died on 5 October, the day after the unveiling—the 4S effectively became his last product. Siri, derived from a startup spun out of SRI International and acquired by Apple, pushed the idea of operating a smartphone through natural language into the mainstream.