Steve Jobs, the Apple Computer founder and longtime CEO who also served as CEO of Pixar from 1986 (when he bought it from LucasFilm for $10 million) until 2006 (when he sold it to Disney for $7.4 billion), passed away Wednesday following a long fight with pancreatic cancer.
Under Jobs, Pixar became the most successful motion picture company in history.
I won’t leave the house -- I won't even walk to my mailbox -- without my Apple iPhone. This amazing device downloads and plays Adam Carolla’s podcasts, it plays every song I ever owned, it holds dozens of photos of my friends and my poodle, it’s a motion picture camera, it tells me how my stocks are doing, it lets me text my girlfriend, it lets me watch HBO shows, it lets me play Monopoly, it lets me listen to Howard Stern on SiriusXM, it tells me turn-by-turn how to find a Starbucks with a drive-in, it lets me look up Chales Napier's filmography, it allows me to record audio interviews, it scans barcodes and allows me to find the best price on virtually anything, and it once let me call an ambulence when my brain felt funny.
My iPhone is TINY, just a little more than a quarter-inch thick. It can share any pocket of my pants with my wallet.
It is a miracle from the future.
You may not own an iPhone, but you may own a device that does some or all of what an iPhone does. And I wonder how many of us would have an iPhone or an iPhone-like device in our pockets right now had Steve Jobs never walked the Earth.
It’s hard to remember that Jobs was fired by Apple in 1985, the year after he introduced the Macintosh computer. He was brought back in 1996, after which the company introduced iTunes, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad.
This stuff is everywhere.
Steve Jobs changed the world, and changed it for the better.
