SOURCE

I guess things have taken a turn for the worse.

Sell stock sell sell sell!

To be honest it was expected, and has been for quite a while. Shares will fall, as they always do when something negative involving Jobs is reported, but I'd say it won't make much, if any, difference to Apples output. Also remember that Tim Cook has been running the show perfectly competently while Jobs has been on medical leave.

Trying not to sound morbid, but I guess we're now waiting on the next announcement regarding Jobs.

try harder

Output won't change, but the innovation will come to a grinding halt or at least the innovation that we've come to expect.

But, yeah, I suspect he's soon no more of this mortal coil. I'll be sad to see him go. I had such a nerd girl crush on him back in the early 80s (and beyond).

As many of you can imagine, I'm very glad he's finally resigned. I just wish it had happened under better circumstances for him.

As I personally felt that Jobs was responsible for everything that was wrong with that company in the last couple of years, this is excellent news. His guru-like behavior, the bullying, the pushing, the shoving, the suing - all of that was directly instigated by Jobs, who was slowly losing it.

I seriously doubt Cook will be CEO for long - he's a boring book-keeper - definitely not something that will do Apple any good.

While the company has been adamant over the last couple of months that Apple's (purported) innovation is coming from the company culture, rather than from its leader, this is definitely not the case. Jobs was personally responsible for every single major success the company has had over the last 15 years or so. With him gone, Apple is in serious trouble.
At the same time, hope they'll now reverse some of Jobs' more eccentric decisions - like completely leaving the business / education / creative sector.

I doubt he'll be around for more than a couple of weeks - apparently, he hasn't been able to leave his home for almost a month now.

He was always like that, it wasn't his illness. A strong, driven, creative personality is very often like this. They don't see it as bullying per se, they have a vision and it's their way or the highway.

Very much like Scully.

Apple is really, deeply in trouble as, yes, it was all Jobs. I remember vividly taking so much crap from my nerd friends at conferences, etc, for carrying a mac laptop until right after apple released the first airport base station and a couple of us brought them along to the conference and set up wi-fi in the speakers lounge and part of the conference area. Oh, the looks of envy from the PC crowd who had to dial-in or jack-in to get a network. Then OSX was released with the BSD core which led to everyone suddenly carrying apple laptops and being cool. Us old timers who were ahead of the curve just smiled.

And the NeXT! PS on the display! Laser printer! Jobs knew, as I and others knew, back when computing was something to hide, that a computer that wasn't networked wasn't as useful as one that was. This is even more true today when there's more to connect to than Usenet, Bitnet, gopher and MUDs. NeXTs came standard with an ethernet port. This was, what, 1988? Years ahead of its time.

He may be an asshole, but he's a damned brilliant one. I'm sad both for him and for what it means to Apple computers of the future. I guess I'll go snap up an iPhone5 and a new laptop this winter when I visit the states as who knows what the future will or won't bring.

I'd have to disagree here - when Jobs took over again, Apple changed into a company that actually cared about its customers. They made hardware for nerds - and they made the best possible software for their hardware. After he got sick, his knowledge of the consumer base's wishes began to dissipate. Suddenly, Apple didn't make the best possible product anymore - they deliberately crippled their products for marketing's sake. That's something the old Jobs would never have done - he would have been too proud.
His behavior (while always eccentric) became more and more compulsive and obsessive. He used to be one of the crowd - but now he started to see the crowed as a foreign body he needed to control.

For nothing else, to take a company from the precipice of collapse in the 1990s to the second largest company (stock value) in the world demands respect and admiration. Jobs and Wozniak created the true PC and the cult that followed kept their dreams alive. Of course it isn't all perfect in the Apple world, but which board of director member or shareholder wouldn't be thrilled with where the company is positioned today, with more cash available than many developed nations?

I for one, wish Steve Jobs good health and happiness in his private world. Apple will continue to innovate as they have done for years, they're just better at bolting together bits of electronics and packaging and marketing them more successfully than the competition. Something that Samsung and Toshiba can only watch in frustration as their piece parts are sold under the silver Apple logo.

I agree with all of that except for the last two sentences - Apple is probably watching it in frustration as Samsung is able to produce excellent hardware components, while Apple is only able to assemble the ones they bought from others. Also, Samsung is highly successful with their mobile phones - with the SGS 2 outselling the iPhone 4 in several important markets, including the UK, Japan and (for obvious reasons) Korea.

Wait, what? You may be the first person that I have ever heard - and I do mean ever - say that Apple built products for nerds. A lot of my nerd friends bought Apples, particularly since OS X came out, but they were clearly not the target audience - using a Unix base for your operating system doesn't mean that it's nerd-friendly. They've never been keen on people customizing their gear, they've always tried (and sometimes failed) to make their gear "sexy", they've always been against people using their operating system on non-Apple hardware... none of that really equates to nerds.

Both Samsung and Apple phones use processors with exactly the same processor core, namely an ARM one.

What was your point?

There is a risk. I bet a lot of people are worried Apple is heading back to the austere days of Sculley and Amelio when innovation was a worn-out buzzword but not something that the company lived by or even understood.

But then there is hope that the value of being innovative and thinking ahead has become so clear that no tie-and-suit style bean counter will dare steer away from that, at least not as long s the memory of Steve lives.

I'd have to agree with that as Apple never, EVER, wanted you to open the box. On the original 1984 box, you either had to know a tech or reverse-engineer a screwdriver to get it open and then, once opened, you immediately voided the warranty. The hardware was nerd-worthy, but in contrast to their Apple II days where you could build your own like a Heathkit, you were not welcome to look inside the box....and that has never changed. Apple did make the hardware sexy though. Nothing could touch the NeXT or the wall street laptops in terms of sexiness vs. any other PC on the market.

Well, youthful idealism is nearly always replaced by grim realism. You might have never experienced Jobs in his NeXT days but I can assure you that this is the same behavior as back in the day where he wanted to charge academics $10k just for the privilege of developing software for it. It is a primary reason why it failed in academia and is a pity as had he given away the dev platform, it may have eclipsed apple altogether. And the customer was and is never in control with Jobs.

It's at this point I am all like "hugh"?

have to agree here, I'm a 'nerd' and tried apple mac's and just couldn't get along with them, they thought they knew better then me what hardware I had and so none of it worked together, no matter what I did the os changed the setting back to what it thought I had, so I sold it all. Apple products are definitely for non techies, and designed to work with other apple products, put something else in the mix and you will have problems.

as for apple having vision, I think people need to read up on where things like the ipod came from

I really don't think apple look at samsung in frustration, sumsung have all the cost involved in designing and building the chips and screens etc and apple just pop along and buy them all nicely prepackaged, and as proved with there move to intel processors, if you try to play hard ball with them they'll just go somewhere else

show me another phone product line that has lasted as long (the iphone) with only minor changes and still sells for top whack, now that is pure genius

That's my point:

http://thatsbadass.com/samsung-galax...on-the-inside/


And perhaps I should ask: how many parts in an iPad are made by Samsung? And home many parts in a Tab 10.1 are made by Apple? Exactly.

Who do you think bought the first iPods, the first iMacs, the first Apple II etc.? Even the iPhone was a Nerd-Tool until it went mainstream. Perhaps once should define "nerd" here. I'm not necessarily talking about CS majors - I'm talking tech enthusiasts in general.