Jobs was a man with a real sense of technological dynamism and creativity, making products far more technologically advanced that anything else on the market, seen from the first Macintosh, released in 1984. Following some dips in company profits following overwhelming competition from Microsoft, and various attempts of reinvention over the next two decades, including the Newton platform and the Macintosh portable laptop, Jobs finally managed to bring Apple back to the forefront of popularity with the creation of the first iPod, a sleeker, visually appealing take on the trending market of MP3 players. With the ability to store 10GB of music, it was an instant hit, and as the years progressed the iPod models got sleeker and the memory amounts larger, Apple became one of the most successful and richest brand s of the modern age, with a Net income of 14.01 billion US dollars, with over 297 million iPods sold worldwide.
Along with the introduction of the iPod came, with the iTunes Store, a mass online distribution store of music, films, television shows, games audiobooks and many other items, that has revolutionized the way we purchase media forever. It allows us to purchase entire albums with the click of a button, the option to purchase only one song from an album, plus has played a major influence in the aiding of a song to reach the top of the charts, serving in 2009 as the main place where mass amounts of the British public purchased Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name, allowing it to gain the Christmas No. 1 spot, beating that years X Factor winner Joe McElderry's single The Climb. A true victory and moment of union for rock fans nationwide.
Jobs took his technological expertise to a further level following the overwhelming success of the iPod, updating the technology for a brand new design in 2007, with the iPod Touch and the further improvement on that, the first iPhone. Once again, with the touch screen technology, genuinely decent phone cameras and a wide range of "apps", designed to help with any task imaginable, or just provide us with endless amounts of fun addictive gaming had seen Apple revolutionize the world.
Jobs' final big creation with the initially critical iPad, who many saw as an unnecessary oversized version of the iPod Touch, however have come to fall in love with it's true ideal of a portable personal computer and became popular enough for a second model, the iPad 2 to be launched.
However, it was in 2004 that Jobs was sadly diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which did not affect him until 2009, in which he had to go on medical leave which involved the undergoing of a liver transplant. At the start of the year 2011, illnesses had further affected him causing him to have to step down as Chief Executive of Apple, feeling he could not cope with the demands of his role anymore. Last night, at his home in California, Steve Jobs sadly passed away at the age of 56.
Though Jobs was not a main inspiration to me, I'm very much in debt to his creativity and the items produced as a result of his creativity. It was only when I received my first iPod that I truly started to develop a severe interest for music, and the endless hours of browsing the iTunes store looking for bands I could fall in love with which no one else knew about has given me the diverse rock taste that I am known for and thrive on today. Of course without my iPod I'd have no way of showing all my friends this music, no way of having something cool to listen to during endless amounts of traveling, nothing to help me persevere through all my sessions in the gym and you can forget all prospects of this blog existing if I never had something to allow me to play music endlessly. So, the iPod has allowed me to achieve and easily maintain the life I lead as a rock fan, and for that, I thank you Steve.
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