Steve Jobs passed away!

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Both died too early... It was the kidneys which killed Jay and Liver/pancreas that killed Jobs...

"The candle that burns twice as bright, burns half as long"

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Surely we belong to the creator and to him shall we return.

Rest in peace Steve.

Actually, I think Steve was a Buddhist... So I guess he will be reincarnated (dependant on which type of buddhisim he was into)

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That was a quote from the Qur'an. It's what Muslims say whenever anyone dies, regardless of the deceaseds personal beliefs.

It's a mark of respect like "Rest in peace".

Oh! Well in that case +1

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I'd say the intel transition was one of their best moves...

MacOS before OSX was so bad it never deserved to live as long as it did!

Macintosh computers before the intel transition were overpriced and under powered...

What we now call a Mac, is actually a NeXT computer and that is a very good thing x

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Yes, that being that Motorola then IBM could not compete in either performance or cost with the relentless advances being made over on the intel side. Intel macs didn't just appear; intel builds of OSX are as old as their PPC counterparts, just kept under wraps for several years. Apple could see the writing on the wall for desktop PPC way back then and wanted to make sure they had a clean exit strategy. Apple stuck with PPC for as long as it was feasible and not a second longer. If anything, given hindsight, I am a bit surprised they never jumped sooner, considering they already had the OS ready.

I thought I would quickly add my thoughts here... Apple is a VERY "conservative" (small c) company... They will make a massive leap from time to time, but always with that leap they will ensure that they have the bare minimum feature set that works PERFECTLY. Then they will add the bare minimum features every product cycle refresh, again making sure that the added feature set is working bang on... so while it look like Apple is jumping ahead, in reality they are making much smaller but far more sure-footed steps that they know will connect. This looks good to the general public who only want to see only confident, good steps...

I think this covers the intel transition, the G5 and G4 were both just about holding their own in 2005, and this gave Apple time to really polish the x86 port of OSX and give intel time to get the new Core architecture ready... there was no way on earth Steve Jobs would have released a Mac based on the hot and noisy Netburst Pentium4s (thought the IBM 970 wasn't far off)...

And everything Karlos has said about the x86-64/x64 is totally true. From a programming perspective these new 64bit x86 chips are a delight to code for, so much power

Just to reiterate Karlos again, the two dominant CPUs now both have 16 general purpose registers and it seems like that really is the magic number... question now is how are ARM going to figure out 64bit... because that is when they'll take the desktop (at least I'm sure Apple will go that way, and maybe M$ with Win8)

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Want to know what made Steve Jobs great? He understood technology:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c&sns=em

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I think was made Steve Jobs great wasn't what he did during his first tenure at Apple... I think we all agree, and I think he probably would too, that Apple was "crap".

It is when Steve Jobs got a second chance to make mass market computers, after learning from all his mistakes that he got good. In short, he was a bright man who got very lucky and had a second chance!

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@EDanaII

I know what you are saying here, but you need to think back to 1997. The desktop market was dead, MicroSoft had the desktop. Apple had a mass of undifferentiated desktop product lines and was losing money fast (I believe the quote was "Apple had 90 days before bankruptcy").

Steve Jobs had to figure out some way to get money into Apple, and fast. The Apple clones were cheaper and "better" than anything apple could build, as they were built using standard PC parts/cases/keyboard/etc... Getting a $10 royalty per machine sold, when those machines only occupied 3% market share was not going keep apple afloat. Steve did kill the clone market but he did it by increasing the licence cost.

The next thing he did was to turn the Mac into a consumer device... The iMac... This was vital to differentiate the Mac in the MicroSoft owned market, and the only way to do that was to have total control over the whole concept of the Mac experience.

When you think about the clone market you are thinking as someone who loves technology, but that wasn't going to help Apple. For apple to survive, it needed to appeal to the man and woman in the street, people who didn't know they wanted a computer

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IIRC, Apple was getting $75 royalty for OS8 and $75 royalty for the hardware clone. $150 @ machine would easily have kept Apple a float even with their inferior hardware not to mention new hardware (PIOS 1 which had room for 4 PPC CPUs) that was in the pipeline.  Problem is Jobs was a complete control freak, that is bottom line why he killed AIM, he couldn't conceive of giving up control of Apple, even if it was going to a future winner.  I will point out that at the time Jobs killed off the AIM (renamed OS8 to OS9 which wasn't covered under the existing agreements with IBM/Motorola), Motorola's StarMax line was ready to be open for business.

My point still stands, apple make something like 30% on high price hardware... That's what they need/needed to bring the money it.

And as Kronos has pointed out, classic macos was junk... Once the clone makers had established themselves a market there would have been nothing stopping them clubbing together and working out an OS8 upgrade plan that totally excluded Apple and its licence fees... Regardless of how good or bad it was for the consumer, for Apple to survive it needed to take control and get the Mac product line out of the "Classic" era...

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@dammy and EDanaII

I am speaking with 20/20 hindsight here, at the time I was very much thinking as you were that Apple needed to clone and expand the Mac platform independant of Apple... Problem is, I couldn't see the future as well as Jobs... And let's be fair he got it right, for Apple at any rate.

-edit- I forgot to add that every Apple product line is now built on the NeXTStep platform (if we exclude the legacy iPods)... iPod touch, Mac, iPad and iPhone all built on NeXTStep, amazing when you think about it!

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'According to Tate he “regularly belittled people, swore at them, and  pressured them until they reached their breaking point. In the pursuit  of greatness he cast aside politeness and empathy.  He verbal abuse  never stopped.”'

Not quite the humility a devotee of Siddhartha Gautama should display eh?

In business, only bastards succeed.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/10/10/steve-jobs-was-a-jerk-good-for-him/

Well, if someone believes they are a follower of a particular faith who are we, as outsiders, to judge? I believe the "No true Scotsman" logical fallacy applies here...

-edit- and yes I also believe Steve Jobs was an arsehole, that doesn't alter the respect I have for how he took Apple from nothing to the most valuable company in the world

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/16/john-naughton-dennis-ritchie-unix?newsfeed=true

Oddly the article focuses on Unix... when IMHO C was his greater gift to the world... this is not to put down Unix, but rather to emphasise the importance of C.

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The more I think about this the more I feel that had Richie died at any other time, his death would have gone even more unnoticed... At least with his death so close to Jobs' the mainstream news was prepared to write about pioneers of the tech world.

Even in death, Jobs was a facilitator :lol:

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Sorry Bloodline but i don't agree that Jobs turned around and single handedly save Apple from oblivion. I think the success of the imac was just luck and nothing else. Steve Jobs did nothing. He especially didn't predict that consumers would go crazy for aesthetics over function like people claim he did.

Sorry but Apple really gets up my tickler...  

He terminated all of Apple's multitude of undifferentiated product lines, he replaced them with a pretty but simple (plug in and go) one size fits all computer, he killed off MacOS Classic development and replaced it with NeXTStep. Brought in Tim Cook to sort out Apple's production and supply lines, he pushed Apple into retail and he realised that The desktop market was basically dead... Moving Apple to mobile devices and consumer electronics, with a coherent Eco system.

Piss you off or not, these were bold moves for a nearly bankrupt computer company

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@ChuckT

People throw this crap around all the time, Apple is a small blip on Foxconn's client list... This is not an Apple problem this is an industry problem, which needs to be sorted, but won't be fixed as long as we in the rich nations demand ever cheaper computers...

Have a look inside your Amiga, you'll find Foxconn components... Have fun