Farewell Steve

A class act, Steve Jobs bows out at the top. Maybe as Chairman he'll see the company go on to more great things.

About the patent trolling I don't agree - but if that's all there is to complain about, his success is amazing.

All the best Steve.

I personally don't own or even like Apples products, but at the same time wish Steve Jobs all the best and hope that he beats the odds (the transplant he had gives at most an extra three or so years to people) and remains strong and healthy for a long time.

Heaven forbid somebody should express the positive

Could you be any more acerbic?

Whatever is next Steve

I hope you're still that same 100% bulldog you've always been. I gotta say, I disagree, a lot, with the way Apple goes about things but you've always made me money. I'm not sure I'm better off than I would be without all the lawsuits but I am sure it could be worse. Thanks Steve, be well.

Now Tim, we expect more of the same but lighten up a bit. Well, at least until I pass the patent bar.

Might not like Apple

but I wouldn't wish the health issues Steve Jobs has had (or may be having) on anyone.

Don't like the guy.....

Don't like his "software requirements". Don't like his pathetic patent lawsuits. Don't like his attitude.

However, I wish him all the success in the world for his health battle.

Like many here - especially here, of all places

By no means an apple fan, but this sounds pretty bad.

Hope things go well for him.

Best of luck

While I may not entirely agree with the direction Apple has taken recently, it is at least profitable, successful and forward-looking.

If we recall the Apple of 15 years ago, and if we had written an article back then about Apple being trendy, fashionable, releasing mobile phones that are ubiquitous, controlling a large library of music sales and kickstarting the tablet market, while becoming the most profitable tech company and only 2nd behind ExxonMobil overall, you would've been sectioned!

Back then Apple was known for quirky little computers for the education market, seemingly doomed to go the way of the Acorn.

So while everytime some trendy young thing who thinks he is the next Damien Hirst / Moby / Banksy pulls out a MacBook or an iPad in the cafe a little bit of me dies inside, I still respect the work that Jobs has put in to make the company what it is today.

Not that big of a deal.....

......change the name of your CEO.

Good luck...

Like many others here, I'm not impressed with Apple's latest forays into the realm of the I.P. Troll, but you do have to respect what Jobs has achieved, and I do wish him luck.

Apple will be fine; the global supply of brushed aluminium and smoked glass hasn't dried up yet...

Hmmm

Personally, I wish him well. Health issues are Not Fun and no one should have to deal with them.

Professionally - I guess the Cult of Apple became a creepy thing, almost from the start. The Mac vs PC thing was adolescent, and my personal experience of Macs has been of poor hardware and software design - not as poor as Windows was until XP, but still badly flawed - disguised by excellent industrial design and laser-sharp marketing.

Steve personally didn't invent things like the iPod. He did what Apple does as a company - took other people's ideas and marketed the crap out of them.

So where MS's main product was corporate marketing, Apple's main product was always consumer marketing, selling a largely illusory feel-good factor through clever story-telling and a relentless appeal to consumer narcissism.

I can't really thank Jobs for that. It worked, but... hey.

Back in the 80s the Amiga was running a full multitasking OS with excellent (for the time) graphics and sound, and Atari was the cheap consumer option. Somewhere left field Acorn were doing cool things with the Archimedes.

Those lines could have been developed. Instead Apple and MS flooded the market with technology that was relatively underpowered and not so relatively unimaginative - but, in Apple's case, nicely packaged.

Between them Jobs and Gates probably held IT development back by ten or fifteen years. Developing ecosystems was good, but developing such slow-moving and flawed ones was a disappointment.

Without that conservatism we might well have had physical and tactile computing so much more quickly.

Jobs gets props of sorts for realising Apple was a content company rather than a tech company a good few years before anyone needed that realisation.

But Apple has always presented stinginess as opportunity. App development and iTunes are both ways to generate content without having to pay people as employees. And Apple has a mountain of cash, but isn't using any of it for sponsorship or talent support programs for new ground-up content or innovation.

At least record companies and publishers find talent and then sponsor it through advance payments for projects.

The new content companies - Apple, Google, Facebook, MySpace (as was) - don't need to, so they don't.

The world is a poorer place for it. There's more content, but it's hard to argue that (say) Angry Birds is really innovative.

So Jobs doesn't get props for innovation. Apple could have done so much more with its position, and could still do more. But an integral corporate tight-fisted conservatism means that it didn't, and never will.

That's a shame - a real shame. For everyone.

Despite not being a big fan of Apple...

... I am surprised at how sad I am to hear this.

(I owned a couple of Macs in the System 7 days, more to have some variety at home as I worked with PCs and Unix than anything, but was put off them when I worked for a couple of years at a company full of Apple cultists - I remember just before I left the company's tech guru saying we didn't need to upgrade the company's Macs or switch to PCs, as everyone would be switching to OpenDoc based components within a year and everything would become more slimline)