Natural speed please
For millions, Steve Jobs was the man whose technology changed the way we live.
January 2007, and a classic Steve Jobs performance. A simple product launch turned into a
major event by a man with a sense of theater and a charisma rare in the technology world. The
iPhone was after all just a phone, but its success was the latest triumph of a company which
proved that good design was essential to good computing. The Apple story started at an
amateur computing club, where in the early seventies Steve Jobs met Steve Wozniak and they
were soon working on their first computers. It was in 1984 that Apple really shook things up
with the launch of the Mac, the first personal computer to be navigated via a mouse.
But soon afterwards, Steve Jobs was forced out of the business he had founded.
Away from Apple, he didn’t stand still.
Pixar, the animation firm which went on to create films like Toy Story made Jobs a very rich
man. But in 1997, he returned to Apple whose very survival was then in doubt.
The iMac was the first product that signalled a resurgence, a computer with a design very
different from the beige boxes which until then had been almost the only choice. But it was
the arrival of the iPod that showed that Apple could move beyond computing, and transform
another industry: music. As recently as last year, Jobs unveiled the iPad which promises to
change the way we use technology once again.
He was the man who cared about what products look like, not just what they did. Steve Jobs,
a visionary? He saw the power of technology to change the way we live.
