<p>We’re sad about this.</p>
<p>This announcement made me so sad. </p>
<p>I was on the Macintosh development team and in 1984 got the first Mac with 128k. It was so cool. MacPaint and MacWrite were such fun to use. It was so much more user friendly than the IBM PC. It wil be interesting to see the Apple innovations in the coming years without Jobs so heavily involved.</p>
<p>One of my brother-in-laws worked at Apple for a while a long time ago and is still a fan. I’ll have to ask him for his thoughts. I’ve admired Apple and Steve Jobs for a long time for their accomplishments. I only learned about the contributions of Tim Cook back in 2008. Time Cook, IMO, made contributions to Apple that were just as big as those made by Steve Jobs. Cook has stayed out of the limelight but he’s the one that gets the gruntwork of logistics taken care of and that’s why we have breakthrough products at good prices and a high level of quality.</p>
<p>One of the best things I did for my young son was take him to Macworld SF so he could watch Jobs give his presentations for 3 years in a row. We didn’t have to be back in school during those years when the Expo was in early January right before we flew home. He even met him. What a great role model. The job my son has today is a direct result of these experiences.</p>
<p>his life is a legacy and this legacy will live forever. A great man of great determination
and courage. God bless him!</p>
<p>There are hundreds of people one can hire to do logisitcs and nuts and bolts mgt well. Finding a leader with real vision is nearly impossible. See Microsoft.</p>
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<p>I’d suggest reading the history of Tim Cook at Apple.</p>
<p>Vision is very important but Tim Cook allowed Steve Jobs to execute his vision.</p>
<p>What I have heard
</p>
<p>Also
Steve Jobs announces retirement.
Rush on pre-order retirement.</p>
<p>Still very sad.
We are Macevangelists from way back- & I would go as far to say that having iMacs/color classics in the Reed College cafeteria went a long way toward making my D feel at home.</p>
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<p>That is all wonderful, but had Apple continued to simply expand its Mac platform, it would have remained a small and unimportant company. The Amiga built by Commodore was eons more advanced than anything Apple ever produced in those years. And see what happened to them! </p>
<p>MacPaint and MacWrite might have been such fun to use but they were also pretty useless. Until a few years ago, we had a Lisa in the garage. My father claimed it was the worst equipment he ever bought since there was NOTHING that could be done with it, except that it generated oohs and aahs from the visitors in his office. It is easy to be user friendly when you only have entertainment value. Productivity and getting things actually done come at a price! </p>
<p>For all its remarkable success in the last years, Apple spent more than a decade being nothing else than a lackluster niche player when it came to computers. People forget that Apple was on the brink of extinction. At one time, Michael Dell claimed he would close it and distribute the spoils to the shareholders if he were the CEO of Apple. Of course, he was wrong! Just as Steve Jobs was attacking Dell for building boring beige boxes. The same boring beige boxes that allowed millions of businesses to run programs they actually needed! </p>
<p>This changed entirely when Jobs came back and realigned the company along the lines he learned at NeXt and Pixar. The real genius (and economic miracle) came from reinventing the way we carry our music, communicated with smartphones, and from convincing almost everyone that a product such as the iPad is a necessary or useful. Apple today is iPod, iPads, and iPhone, and a cult-like army of followers. </p>
<p>People might also look at the history (and market value) of Nokia to understand that not all fads last forever. Steve Jobs did, however, show that true innovation has a place in this world. And that true geniuses do exist.</p>
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<p>Agree with this statement completely.</p>
<p>“Never trust a computer you can’t lift!” 1984</p>
<p>One of things that Apple did that never gets recognized, but was absolute genius was that back in the late 80’s, early 90’s they worked hard to get their machines into elementary schools. It was sold as a reliable, easy to use machine that could withstand the rigors of life in a third grade classroom. They may not have had much of a presence in the business world back then, or even high schools or colleges, but they were ubiquitous in elementary schools. And as those kids grew, they took Apple computers with them. So, over the last 25 years you can watch first high schools, then colleges, start up businesses and now established businesses move to Mac’s as those kids who started on Macs back in kindergarten grow up. Smart guy that Steve Jobs.</p>
<p>The other companies used a version of this before Apple did - they provided free software to colleges and some high-schools. Sometimes they provided free hardware to high-schools and colleges too. Software was expensive back then and this provided a big incentive for schools to go with a particular vendor.</p>
<p>Apple was very strong in the educational market.</p>
<p>Right now, Apple doesn’t particularly go after the business market - their customers buy devices and bring them into the workplace and businesses have to adapt or not. Those that don’t adapt have employee user groups that share information on how to get things done.</p>
<p>It’s grass-roots computing in the corporate world.</p>
<p>On a different tangent, I did look up Jobs’ bio and learned a few things about his personal life today.</p>
<p>Did you know his father was a car mechanic? I should say his adoptive father. He was adopted. Some speculate that he is the illegitimate son of a Syrian prof.
He has four children, three with his wife, who is very accomplished (Penn BA, Wharton BS, Stanford MBA, lots of tech jobs, on a bunch of boards)- she started an organic food biz.
They all live in Palo Alto. He supposedly shops at the local Whole Foods barefoot. He drives a Mercedes without a license plate.
He almost became a Buddhist monk!</p>
<p>The thing that strikes me, as my mother died of a similar type of hepato-biliary cancer last year, he has not eaten meat since he was 19. He eats fish/sushi, and fruit and veggies. Given his eating habits, so scary that such a clean eater got cancer IMO. May he enjoy the rest of his days.</p>
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<p>No real genius there. It was all based on necessity to focus on specific markets. Facing the impossible task to sell Apple as a business computer, the niche markets of graphic design or education were lower hanging fruits. However, it is a stretch to pretend Apple computers were hardly ubiquitous in schools, where Apple was probably outsold by a formidable margin by those “IBM boxes.” And, fwiw, there is no real evidence that a six year old would go home to continue learning on a Mac. Some did, but most did not. After all, parents are tougher to corrupt than school administrators and less prone to fall for gimmicks or trips to Hawaii! Fwiw, there was (and probably still is) a huge gaming marker that appealed to tweens and teens that remained untouchable for the Mac users.</p>
<p>In the end, except for the iPod, Ipad, and iPhone very little has changed. The army of vocal Apple fans are still there … and still claiming the superiority of the Apple computers. In some ways, there are correct in terms of design, but the remaining is mostly of the domain of the mythical. The Apple computers are more expensive and their ease of use is entirely in the eye of the beholder. For many, the higher price and the market-protections idiosyncrasies are not worth putting up with most Apple products. </p>
<p>Perhaps Jobs most formidable achievement is that he was able to convince so many people that his goods were indeed better than its competition. This did only become true in the last years, when he created products that did NOT exist before.</p>
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I do not think there is much speculation about that. The story is that his biological parents are AbdulFattah Jandali and Joanne Simpson. Jobs has a sister named Mona E. Simpson who is an American novelist, essayist, and a UCLA professor of English. </p>
<p>Fwiw, you can expect Barrons to start extolling the virtues of Jobs parents at the University of Wisconsin. :)</p>
<p>BC, I would argue that Apple’s particular genius was to go into the elementary schools. It means there is a whole generation of kids whose first experience on a computer is on the Mac – so it seems to them the most natural way to work. This means that Apple literally grew its market. All those people buying Mac products and bringing them into work are forcing a change over in many places. And in may cases those people are now making the purchasing decisions, and they have an inbred bias towards Mac, cause that’s what feels natural to them. It may not follow for those places where they are doing high end programming, etc., but in places where word processing, internet connectivity, and some in-house publishing is the bulk of what the computer needs are, the Mac stands up very well. And that is a very large share of the American office Market.</p>
<p>There is no inbred balance against Mac. We look at the price for the performance.
[Apple</a> - iMac - Compare the 21.5- and 27-inch iMac.](<a href=“http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html]Apple”>iMac 24-inch - Technical Specifications - Apple)
[Newegg.com</a> - CyberpowerPC Gamer Xtreme 1311 Desktop PC Intel Core i7 960(3.20GHz) 6GB DDR3 2TB HDD Capacity AMD Radeon HD 6770 (1 GB) Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit](<a href=“Are you a human?”>Are you a human?)
I’m giving the monitor a value of 200 dollars, because they overprice everything( 21.5 inch generally is priced in the low 100’s range, even the best 21.5s are 170 max). Every component is cheaper and better, although I would not buy any of them because I build my computers, and with a 1k budget, I can build something that blows away both prebuilts, with quality components where most prebuilt manufactors skimp on (PSU, RAM, HDD, MOBO).
We are the complete opposite of biased. We have our preferences on facts alone.</p>
<p>And for your examples of regular computing, every part in the mac is overkill.
You can get by easily with a 300-400 dollar build.</p>
<p>You make a faulty assumption that everyone who had to sit in front of one those Apple computers developed a preference for them. That is simply not the case. A number of those computers were annoyingly limited. When Windows 95 came out, people had few reasons to put up with the limitations of the Apple line. </p>
<p>This is why, despite all the hooplah and proselytizing from the Apple cult, the Macs are still undersold by a factor of 9 or 10 to 1. I would not be surprised that my children will never see a Mac computer in their schools! The days of overpriced and overhyped baloney are slowly coming to an end in the education sector. And so are the days of the technology illiterates making decisions based on their own cluelessness!</p>
<p>And so are the days of the technology illiterates making decisions based on their own cluelessness!</p>
<p>Then again you have people like my engineer brother, who has observed my satisfaction with Apple products over the years and compared it to his experience with PCs both at home & at work & bought a Mac.
;)</p>
<p>“You make a faulty assumption that everyone who had to sit in front of one those Apple computers developed a preference for them. That is simply not the case. A number of those computers were annoyingly limited.”</p>
<p>I worked at a non-profit in the early to mid 80’s that had Apples that were unbelievably awful. I still remember the bright green type on these screens that constantly malfunctioned. The person who made the decision to purchase them was blind.</p>