When Steve Jobs died, exactly ten years ago on October 5, 2011, many feared that Apple would not have come very far without him. However, this was not the case at all, even if today Apple is a very different company from the one founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 (among the founders there was also Ronald Wayne, but he left after just two weeks).
Jobs, ill for some time with pancreatic cancer, had left the role of CEO of Apple on August 24 of the same year: his position went to the director of sales at Apple, Tim Cook, who still heads the company. Steve Jobs, however, already in 2007 had laid the foundations of the digital revolution by presenting the world with the first iPhone, a smartphone with multi-touch screen that, although not having much more than other valid competitors, had a huge commercial success: in just 200 days Apple managed to sell 4 million units. But Jobs’ history is not only made of successes, nor a life spent entirely in Apple: the company he founded, in fact, was the same to fire him in 1985.
Steve Jobs: between successes and failures
That Jobs was an eccentric character, with a vision of the world and technology very different from that of the average American, is now beyond doubt. This led him to great successes, as in the case of the iPhone, but also to resounding failures.
Famous, for example, the case of the Apple III computer presented by Jobs in May 1980. It was supposed to be the successor of the Apple II, a computer that had been quite successful among small American companies.
Jobs made a huge mistake: he ordered the designers not to mount a fan to cool the inside of the machine, as he believed it would ruin the design of the computer. The result was disastrous: out of about 120,000 units produced, Apple had to recall 14,000 because they overheated and, often, the motherboard burned.
In 1985, due to frequent disputes with the managers of the company (now listed on the stock exchange), Jobs was ousted from all ongoing projects at Apple and “left” the company (in reality it was a real dismissal, but disguised). After a while he founded a new company, NeXT, which produced both computers and software.
Once again, however, hardware did not give Jobs the commercial satisfaction he was looking for and in 1993 NeXT closed the division to focus on software and, in particular, on the NeXTSTEP operating system.
This time the decision was the right one, because NeXTSTEP was the Trojan horse that brought Jobs back into Apple: the Cupertino company, in fact, in order to solve the problems of its operating system Mac OS, in 1996 bought NexT for 400 million dollars: the NeXTSTEP operating system soon became the technical basis for the new macOS.
The story was not all roses on the iPhone front, too. The commercial success of almost all the models is undoubted, but more than one version of the applephone proved to be not up to the blazon. Famous is the so-called “antenna-gate” of the iPhone 4: if holding the phone the user covered the lower left corner of the device the call dropped. Also in these cases to ruin the product was the priority given to the design and not to the technical aspects.
Jobs, however, has been and still remains a reference point for technology lovers. Either you love it or you hate it, it certainly doesn’t go unnoticed, but all its mistakes have been dictated by a very precise characteristic: that of always looking ahead. Sometimes too much.
Ten years without Steve Jobs (and with Tim Cook)
Finding another Jobs, in 2011, was therefore impossible (and would probably be impossible even today). The choice of the replacement, Tim Cook, was made under the banner of business continuity: Cook knew Apple inside out, he had joined in 1998 and then climbed the ranks up to the appointment as director of global sales. Inside Apple Cook knew practically everyone, he was on good terms with everyone, everyone would have listened to him. Even if no one thought of him as being a talent of Jobs’ caliber.
Fact is that, despite what many initially thought, Cook was not a transition man but remained firmly in charge to this day and, in 2018, Apple was the first Wall Street-listed company to surpass $1 trillion in capitalization.
Today, Apple is the most valuable company in the world, followed by Microsoft and Amazon, and this says a lot not only about Tim Cook’s skill, but also about the goodness of Steve Jobs’ vision: the future is digital, technological and personal, just as good Steve thought.
In ten years, after Jobs, Apple has presented a slew of successful products without, however, renouncing the mentality (and mistakes) typical of the founder: the iPhone 6 Plus of 2014, for example, bent with embarrassing ease. Yet, at the end of 2015, Apple announced that it had set a sales record with this model.
More recently, last year, Apple set another record with the iPhone 12 range, inside of which, however, was one of the biggest flops in the company’s history: the iPhone 12 mini. In theory, a revolutionary project: small and compact, with 5G connectivity and with the same excellent technical features as the standard iPhone 12.
Steve Jobs would have loved it with its sleek design and its ability to fit comfortably in a pants pocket, but production was stopped: no one wanted it, because the too-small battery didn’t keep the phone on long enough.
But it doesn’t matter, because Apple has already unveiled its new jewels: the iPhone 13.