Job’s Well Done. 10 Great Products from Steve Jobs

Jobs, upon rejoining Apple in 1997, catapulted the company from a nadir to the fore-front of computing. Call it Jobs-led or Innovation-led –it’s one and the same thing and the result was also the same –pure brilliance and success.

Apple computers have long been the darling of academic community and slowly the company is making inroads in the pool of home users. During his second term as the company leader –Jobs gave the world amazing products like iPod, iPhone and iPad. He revolutionized the world of music and totally changed the way we manage and listen to the music.

iPhone is the crown-jewel of Jobs-led Apple. When it was released for the first time –everyone looked at its features with eyes wide open with surprise. MacBook Air set the bar higher for thinness of computer gadgets. Apple Store became a very busy market where people come in to buy music and add-on applications for their Apple devices.

All these innovations translated into financial success as well. After Jobs resumed as CEO of the company Apple’s crawling shares skyrocketed.

Steve Jobs gave us computing devices that were master-pieces. Here is a look at 10 such products:

This is perhaps the gadget of the decade. When Apple launched it in January 2007 –it took a bit of time for people to overcome their amazement. This sleek smart-phone device completely changed the way world used to imagine mobile phones. iPhone combined an iPod (with a much wider screen), a mobile phone with touch sensitivity like never before and a cool and handy Internet surfing device. iPhone has not looked back since as it is getting better and better.

Named after his daughter, it was a computer that Steve Jobs created much ahead of its time. Result: it failed in the market simply because at $10,000 apiece it was too expensive. Nevertheless, Lisa was one of the first computer that offered graphic user interface (GUI), document creation, multitasking, an optional hard drive and an office software. Several features which Lisa offered in 1983 are still evolving and continue to be the foundation of computing devices.

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Little iPod revolutionized the world of music in a really big way. The music world had seen Sony’s Walkman and then it saw Apple iPod MP3Player. In October 2001, the first iPods was sold to end customers for about $400 each. It could store 5GB of music. iPod came with a central scroll wheel control and a screen to select musical scores. iPod demonstrated simplicity that Jobs and Apple were striving for in their products. Users could charge iPod with a docking station and fill it with songs straight from a computer.
Today, there is a wide range of iPods –from tiny iPod Shuffle to feature-packed iPod Touch –the device is just one of a kind in the market.

Although, due to its price, Lisa was a failure in market –the very next year Jobs came up with a beige-box computer called Macintosh. The computer was announced in a dramatic Super Bowl commercial. If you have watched Pirates of Silicon Valley –you would know how the delegates made fun of Macintosh and that of Steve Jobs. But the quality prevailed and soon Macintosh sold like a hot cake. After launch in 1984, the first Macintosh was sold for $2500 and was a commercial success.

The Macintosh was all-in-one-case computer. The screen and CPU were fitted inside a cuboidal box.  And it had a point-and-click device called “mouse”! Today about 60 million users rely on Mac line of computers.

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In 2010, Apple added another member to its “iDevice” family. It was a computer cross-bred from Macintosh and greatly successful iPhone. iPad is a type of computers that’s called tablet PC. Accordingly, iPad looks like a digital fancy slate which you can write on. Although the tablet PCs have not yet become very popular –but still iPad is holding the helm in the market.

Piracy has been the bane of the music industry since long time. Arrival of computers and then Internet –made the situation even worse. So, it did not come as a surprise when the music industry executives winced at the idea of an online music store. But Steve Jobs went ahead and launched iTunes online music store in April 2003. In the first week of its launch –the store sold one million songs!

By the year 2010, the number of songs purchased from iTunes crossed 10 billion. iTunes successfully rode on the popularity of iPod and entered Jobs’ name in the history books of music industry.

In 1998, after Jobs rejoined Apple, iMac computer was released. It was distinctively designed Macintosh desktop computer. The design that ended the era of beige-boxed computers was created by Jonathan Ive. He, later, helped designing most of the other products from Apple.

Apple launched this laptop computer in January 2006. It was powered by Intel microprocessor and posed a great challenge to the so-called “Wintel” machines. MacBook Pro is still hot in market and is holding the position of THE Apple Laptop.

During the launch of MacBook Air in January 2008, when Steve Jobs took the device out of a regular manila envelope used in offices –the computing world gasped in disbelief. Yes, it was indeed as “air” thin as a laptop could be –in fact even thinner than that. MacBook Air wowed the customers with its sleekest design. It was 0.16 inches at its thinnest point.

It was released in June 1977. Apple II, designed together by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, was the first successful mass-market personal computer. It featured 1-MHz processor, 4KB of RAM and an audio cassette interface for programs and data storage. Apple stopped producing Apple II computers in November 1993. But, would you believe, there are enthusiast who use Apple II even now!

These were some of the great products created by Steve Jobs. Please share your view about these products if you’ve used them. Thank you for using TechWelkin.