Steve Jobs passed away.

Yup. But it's always sad to see a guy so young go (55 is young when we're talking death!). I might not have cared for the direction he wanted the industry to take, but his passing is sad, nonetheless. RIP Jobs!

Indeed.

This made my day. It's hilarious and at the same time a testament to the visionary he was and the legacy he has left.

Beautiful.

App stores existed before the iPhone one did, so did digital music distribution.

It was not about the core concepts, but more about the delivery. Too large of a topic to go into here. Jobs was just great at getting together, and leading, the right people to streamlilne processes and products for mass consumption, and always knew when to set a firm foot and not allow something to go through until it was streamlined well enough.

Horrible missconception.

Jobs was always a big proponent of consumer rights. He managed to get music studios to get rid of DRMs. He made software distribution remove device limiting licenses.

Apple is still working on doing what they did with music, for TV and Movies.

You may think an iPhone (the device in the mind of any that claim this) is locked down, but compared to what? I was never able to get any software into my old Blackjack Win Mobile phone. Never was able to upgrade a phone's OS without being forced into buying a new one, still true outside of Apple. Look at Android phone manufacturers that add specialized chips to restore or lock down if they detect a rooted OS.

Look at it as a gaming device and say it's more locked down than a Nintendo Wii, Xbox or PS3.

Apple's "battle" against Jailbreaks has always been extremely weak and just barely enough to make sure grannie can't accidentally have her phone jailbroken and starts getting viruses and other malware.

I don't think this is the thread to discuss these things, but I would like at least to make sure the man is seen in perspective and try to dismiss the myth of him being against consumer rights. I can think of fewer people in positions of power that are truthfully as pro-consumer rights as he was.

Edit to add:
He also was the biggest proponent of consumer privacy rights there is in the industry. In a tech world, where companies are either neutral or pro extremist tracking, his stance is one that I hope Apple continues to hold.

Unfortunately, it wasn't. The man had been battling cancer for quite some time.

Hater's gonna hate. Sorry Nox, but the man never peed in your Cheerios, so you can let the grudge go.

iTunes didn't JUST start off as a music shop and then JUST expanded. That's why they call Jobs a visionary. He never intended to just make a music store. The man set out to change the way music was heard/bought/experienced by everyone. And he did it. Not that I think you're trying to short-sell the man's accomplishments, but I don't think you've truly wrapped your head around the impact he had on the world.

I'm confident that the electronic world (computers, portable music, communications, tablets) would not be as far along as it is today if not for Steve Jobs. We'd have gotten to this point eventually, no doubt, but his vision made it happen at a pace no one ever conceived. We could use more Steve Jobs in this world, and being reduced of one will surely be a loss.

When it suits him.

I don't think this thread is the right place either. But Apple is currently the worst proponent of the walled garden methodology and are doing their best to move that from their phones to their iPads and onwards to their computers. Its not about user experience and is all about 30%

The biggest long term impact the App Store might ultimately have, and its something some of us in the industry have been thinking about for a while, is how Windows works. It goes like this: AppStore for iPhone logically leads to AppStore for Mac. OSX is based on Next, and its easy to update OSX apps because of that Next-like application structure: applications tend to be self-contained packages, just like on the iPhone. That's not true for Windows: Windows apps have a lot more scattered moving parts: registry settings, DLLs in different directories, lots of dependencies.

But the AppStore on the Mac is likely to be successful, and one reason will be not just the impulse shopping aspect of it, but also the fact that its so much easier to patch software through something like an AppStore. The apps are self-contained packages, and they can be modularly updated, and that can happen automatically in the background with little chance of messing up your other apps or your OS. Microsoft is going to have to follow suit: they are going to have to make a Windows App store eventually, and they will have to be able to compete with a platform that can security patch all its apps unattended overnight in relative safety. And that means restructuring apps to work that way in the long run: apps that can't work that way on the Windows platform will be at a significant disadvantage.

The long-term strategy, or error depending on your point of view, of tightly coupling apps to the OS under Windows will have to change to resemble the smartphone/OSX model of much lighter coupled, modular, independent apps. And you can already see hints of that in Win8.

A Windows OS that updates and patches like a smartphone without people worrying about the whole thing breaking, may be one of the largest legacies of Steve Jobs. That's how far his vision may ultimately reach. Microsoft would not have gone there without Apple changing the rules of the game, and the result of that competition will probably be better computers for everyone.

It's the apple I-dead.

These kind of jokes are all too Zune.

Ouch

I'm a Mac, and I refuse to be PC heh.