I'm not a big apple fan, but he sure did know how to appeal to the masses.

I guess an apple away will keep the doctor away. Not sure that it'll make you better, though.

Now before the flaming, the first office computer I used was a Mac, and Pagemaker on it was streets ahead of its PC counterpart. We also have two iPods in my family, and they are excellent. But I am not an Apple fanboi or a Wndoze evangelist.

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Anyhoo, prepare for the hagiographies for St. Steve. But, he was not the genius people are portraying him to be, just a very clever, dyed in the wool, capitalist. I would most liken him to Thomas Edison, who also created and encouraged a mystique to grow around himself, while employing lots of very clever (e.g. Wozniak, Ives) people to actually do the hard work.
</rant>

That being said, it is very sad to see someone so influential die aged only 56.

Wow guys...way to be heartless.

No kidding. I've never been a huge Apple fan, but he sure knew how to run a company. He was, without a doubt, an entrepreneurial genius. He changed the face of technology profoundly, and lived what I would call an admirable life.

Well, I grew up on Macs. Back in the 90s my dad had a mac because he was a graphic designer, and all of his design programs ran on mac. While I of course didn't use any of these, and every computer game I ever wanted was PC only, it was still the computer that I grew up with. Only in 2010 did I start owning a PC, and this was only because I needed a laptop for school and macs were too expensive/breakable.

While I know Steve wasn't even part of Apple during the time frame in which I started using a Mac, he was still one of the founding members and one of the reasons the company is so popular today. I counted it out a while ago, and figured out that my family has owned 8 macs in the past 15 or 20 years, along with 7 ipods, so you can see how Steve and his company have impacted my life.

RIP, Steve. You will be remembered.

I've been using Apple computers since 1977. I had the privilege to meet Steve Jobs once, over a negotiating table, in the late 90s. I had a curious mix of emotions at that meeting. On the one hand, he thanked me and my partner for helping to save Apple while he was gone (we wrote ClarisWorks). On the other, the meeting concluded with a demo of a new system I was building, that I had poured my soul into, but he quickly lost interest and left. I was extremely depressed. Shortly after that I gave up on my startup and went back to grad school.

Well... 12+ years later, here I am at a new startup, resurrecting that old project. My little detour to MIT was a lot of fun, but I wish I had stuck with my original vision instead of putting it into such a long hiatus.