Apple CEO Steve jobs has died

　　Steve Jobs, who built the world's most valuable technology company by creating devices that changed how people use electronics and revolutionised the computer, music and mobile phone industries, died. He was 56.
　　Jobs, who resigned as Apple chief executive officer on August 24, 2011, the Cupertino, California-based company said today. He was diagnosed in 2003 with a neuroendocrine tumour, a rare form of pancreatic cancer, and had a liver transplant in 2009. Apple disclosed Jobs's passing in a statement.
Jobs embodied the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He was a long-haired counterculture technophile who dropped out of college and started a computer company in his parents' garage on April Fool's Day, 1976. He had no formal technical training and no real business experience.

　　Charming ... Steve Jobs. Photo: AFP
What he had instead was an appreciation of technology's elegance and a notion that computers could be more than a hobbyist's toy or a corporation's workhorse. These machines could be indispensable tools. A computer could be, he often said, "a bicycle for our minds." He was right - owing largely to a revolution he started.
Visionary to virtuoso
On his watch, Apple came to dominate the digital age, first through the creation of the Macintosh computer and later through the iPod digital music player, the iPhone wireless handset and more recently, the iPad tablet.

　　Steve Jobs unveils the iPad in January 2010. Photo: AFP
With each product, Jobs confronted new adversaries - from International Business Machines Corp. in computers to Microsoft in operating systems, to Sony in music players and Google in mobile software.
And Jobs would prove himself not just a techie visionary, but the virtuoso executive who built the world's second-most valuable company after Exxon Mobil.
The opening act of Jobs's professional ascent stretched from 1976 to 1984. He scored his first hit with the Apple II computer, a device that resonated with schools and some consumers and small businesses, and made Apple an alluring alternative to IBM, then the world's largest computer maker. Apple had its initial public offering in 1980 and the graphical Macintosh was born just over three years later.