Steve would become interim CEO in July of 1997 and full time CEO again on January 5th, 2000. Mac OSX (built on the foundation of OpenStep) launched in 2001 and continues to power macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS today.

Which made me reflect on the amazing run of products that he would oversee over for the next decade at Apple. So here's the list of major products released from 1999-2011 as seen on the front page of the Apple website (fun aside: next.com still redirects to apple.com).

iMac G3

Apple Website November 17th, 1999

Absolutely iconic. Launched in 1998 512 Pixels calls it The Macintosh that Saved Apple.

iBook G3

Apple Website August 27th, 1999

The iBook G3 was released in July and was the portable companion to the iMac.

Mac OS X

Apple Website April 21st, 2001

One of the main reasons that Apple acquired NeXT in 1997 was because they needed an operating system. It came down to NeXT and BeOS, and NeXT came with Jobs.

25 years later and Mac OSX now powers macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS.

iPod

Apple Website October 31st, 2001

The original Scroll Wheel iPod announced on October 23rd 2001.

iPod Mini

Apple Website January 13th, 2004

The iPod mini introduced the Click Wheel and brought a smaller, colourful aluminium design to the iPod family. It was replaced in 2005 by the iPod nano.

Intel Macs

Apple Website January 18th, 2006

The switch to Intel isn't a product per se but without it I don't know if Apples Mac business survives. Without the Mac business it's hard to say how their other products would have faired.

"What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's ever done in a PC."

Man that's a killer tag line. Steve Jobs was never shy about criticising the competition. As seen in this 1995 interview where he praises Microsoft for being opportunists and then goes on to say that their biggest problem is that they have no taste. Ouch.

iPhone

Apple Website June 30th, 2007

Say hello to iPhone. At this point Blackberry was riding high and the carriers thought their monopoly would last for ever.

Nearly 20 years later and the iPhone is Apple's biggest revenue line, generating over $200 billion in 2025, and accounting for 50% of the companies total revenue.

MacBook Air

Apple Website January 8th, 2008

The original MacBook Air released in 2008. It's tapered unibody design set the laptop design gold standard. And it fit in a manila envelope!

iPad

Apple Website April 4th, 2010

iPhone 4

Apple Website June 8th, 2010

If you know you know. The best iPhone ever made. Despite the fact that it didn't work if you held it wrong.

Conclusion

There were other products and you may not agree with the signifigance of my personal choices. Regardless this was an incredible time of innovation and would set the course for the decades to come.

Given the numerous stories about how difficult he could be this made me smile and I wanted to share it.

It was September 1995, just a couple of months before Toy Story would be released and Pixar would hold their IPO. Toy Story was the first computer generated feature length film and the first film released by Pixar.

In making Toy Story, Pixar's technical team had developed considerable expertise in computer graphics. Jobs had mentioned this to Intel CEO Andy Grove and offered to help Intel improve their graphics rendering.

When an engineer at Intel contacted Steve to set up a meeting however, Jobs pointed out how valuable their "secrets" were and that they weren't just going to give them away for free. The Intel engineer was polite but declined to provide any compensation to Pixar.

Andy,
Maybe it's just me, but I find [Engineer 1]'s approach extremely arrogant, given Intel's (his?) dismal showing in understanding computer graphics architectural issues in the past…

Maybe this initial response is what we've come to expect from Steve, he doesn't hold back. Andy is firm in his support for his engineer though, and just as firm at pushing back.

Steve,
I am firmly on [Engineer 1]'s side on this one. He is taking your offer to help us very seriously, rounded up the best technical people and was ready to go when you introduced a brand new element into the discussion: money.

You may remember, that from time to time I offered suggestions that pertained to your business. Examples range from porting NextStep to the 486 - - which was in our interest too - - to my presentation to your staff on repositioning NextStep beyond that. I am not suggesting that these are comparable in value to your expertise in graphics, but I gave what I had, put some thought into the problem I saw you were facing - - and it never entered my mind to charge for it. In my view, that's what friendly companies (and friends) do for each other. In the long run, these things balance out.

I am sorry you don't feel that way. We will be worse off as a result, and so will the industry.

Jobs clearly reflected on the exchange and took Grove’s words to heart. Just four days later, he replied that he had changed his position 180 degrees.

Andy,
I have many faults, but one of them is not ingratitude. And, I do agree with you that "In the long run, these things balance out."

Therefore, I have changed my position 180 degrees - - we will freely help [Engineer 1] make his processors much better for 3D graphics. Please ask [Engineer 1] to call me, and we will arrange for a meeting as soon as the appropriate Pixar technical folks can be freed up from the film.

Thanks for the clearer perspective.
Steve

It's a great example of his ability to self-reflect and his willingness to change course when necessary.

You can read the full text of all the email correspondence in Make Something Wonderful. Use the timeline on the right hand side to jump to 1985-1996.

"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?"

Fun aside. After portraying Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley, Noah Willey appeared on stage at the 1999 New York MacWorld, as Steve Jobs. He delivered the first few minutes of the keynote before the real Steve Jobs took the stage. You can still watch it on YouTube.

After the Macintosh launched, and failed to meet sales expectations, Jobs and Sculley clashed over the best course of action. Sculley wanted to continue focussing on selling the Apple II while Jobs wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh.

In John Sculley's own words in an interview with the BBC in 2012.

I was brought to Apple not because I knew anything about computers - building them - but because the company had to keep the Apple II commercially alive, it was near end of life, for three more years to generate enough cash so that Steve could build the Macintosh and have time to do that and launch the Mac successfully.

So during that time Steve and I got along great.

When the Macintosh Office was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company.

When Sculley was due to be away on a trip Jobs went to the board and tried to stage a coup. Ultimately the board sided with Sculley and Jobs was taken off the Macintosh team and, in his words, sent to Siberia.

Siberia was a building accross the street where he had no staff, no projects, and no day-to-day responsibilities. During these months he travelled to Europe, visiting Italy, Sweden, and finally Moscow.

While in Italy he would see the gray-blue sandstone used in Florentine sidewalks that, many years later, he would have imported to use for the floors in Apple stores.

You can read more about The Soviet Adventures Of Steve Jobs in the RadioFreeEurope article.

Jobs resigned from Apple on September 16, 1985. His letter of resignation gives some insight into how dissapointed and "perplexed" he was by some board members behaviour. He had informed them a week earlier that he intended to start a new venture and tended his resignation as Chairman of the Board. There was some suggestion that Apple may invest in his new venture but ultimately that wasn't to be and he left Apple.

Upon finding out that Jobs was taking five employees with him to start his new company, Next Inc, Applied filed a lawsuit against him. According to the Los Angeles Times:

Apple Computer filed a $5-million-plus lawsuit Monday against its co-founder and former chairman, Steven P. Jobs, charging that he breached his fiduciary responsibility and that his planned new company would use confidential information.

The legal battle was short-lived and settled out of court in early 1986. As part of the settlement, Jobs agreed not to hire any more Apple employees for a six-month period, and agreed not to directly compete with Apple lest they would sue him again.

Paul Rand

In 1986 Steve Jobs engaged Paul Rand to design the companies brand and logo.

Rand was already a highly acclaimed art director and designer at this time, having designed IBM's brand identity in 1956, and having been inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972.

Some of his most well known work include IBM, Westinghouse, UPS, and abc.

He did so many more than this and you can view them all on his website which is fantastic.

1993 Interview

Jobs described Rand as perfecting the exterior of a curmudgen but with a heart of gold.

You go visit him in the house that he designed and had built for himself decades ago and you get a sense that this is a very deep thoughtful person who has tried to express in every part of his life what his principles are and you don't meet so many people like that today

When Jobs asked hime for a few options, Rand told him that he would only provide one.

No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don't have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I'll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that's up to you — you're the client — but you pay me.

Jobs cited the 1981 "Eye-Bee-M" Rebus as his favourite work by Rand. And I have to personally agree; it's absolutely incredible. It manages to bring fun and whimsy to a company that had a very serious and corporate image. It connects the brand with nature and humanity.

Jobs agreed to pay $100,000 for what he considered to be a 10 year and $100M problem. He didn't just want a logo, he wanted a sort of "jewel", that customers would instantly associate with the company. The NeXT cube logo did this by serving both as a logo and a logomark.

Presentation Book

Paul Rand didn't just deliver a logo though, he presented a 100 page book.

I. M. Pei

Jobs hired another famous deigner, architect I. M. Pei, to design the NeXT offices.

Pei was a Chinese-American architect who came to the United States in 1935 to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Even though he was realtively unknown at the time, Jackie Kennedy commissioned Pei to design the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in 1964. (source National Gallery of Art)

Probably most famously Pei was chosen to redesign the entrance to the Louvre in Paris. In late 1983 and early 1984 he designed the now instantly recognisable glass pyramid.

The Miho Museum in Japan has a more extensive list of Pei's achievements, amoung them the design of the museum itself.

Japan's architects in the distant past strove to bring their buildings into harmony with their environment and the surrounding view. Of course, I don't want to be a copycat but do want to respect the thinking of the Japanese people and their culture and traditions.

It is not an exaggeration to say that light is the key to architecture.

NeXT Offices

The most striking element that Pei designed for the NeXT offices was the floating staircase. Jobs would later re-use this idea in Apple stores (along with the marble that he saw in the streets of Florence).

You can also see Pei's influence when it comes to letting light flood the space.

The NeXT Computer was introduced by Steve Jobs on October 12, 1988. It came housed in a 1ft x 1ft x 1ft die-cast magnesium chassis and used a Motorola 68030 processor, ran at 25 MHz, and came with 8MB of RAM as standard. For storage, the NeXT Computer came with a 256MB magneto-optical drive.

This was replaced by the NeXTcube and the lower cost NeXTstation in 1990.

Where the Web was born

If you're reading this you likely know that the web was created by Tim Berners-Lee. But did you know that the first web server ran on a NeXT computer?

By the end of 1990, Tim Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser up and running at CERN, demonstrating the ideas behind the proposal. He developed code directly on the NeXT computer hosting the first web server and kept it in his office. To prevent it being accidentally switched off, the computer had a hand-written label in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

NeXTSTEP

The NeXTSTEP Operating System was an object-oriented multitasking operating system based on the Mach microkernel and BSD-derived Unix and it ran a custom GUI.

The strap line for NeXTSTEP was: The premier object-oriented software that dramatically simplifies developing and deploying client/server business application.

As well as premiering the shelf and dock on the desktop, NeXTSTEP also utilised the Objective-C programming language.

From the computing history NeXTSTEP page:

NeXTSTEP also originated or innovated a large number of other Graphical User Inteface (GUI) concepts which became common in other operating systems: 3D "chiseled" widgets, large full-color icons, system-wide drag and drop of a wide range of objects beyond file icons, system-wide piped services, real-time scrolling and window dragging, properties dialog boxes called "inspectors", and window modification notices (such as the saved status of a file). The system was among the first general-purpose user interfaces to handle publishing color standards, transparency, sophisticated sound and music processing (through a Motorola 56000 DSP), advanced graphics primitives, internationalization, and modern typography, in a consistent manner across all applications.

Despite receiving praise for their innovations the NeXT hardware was expensive and had limited sales primarily amoung Universities and large companies.

Why don't we just become a software company?

During this 1992 MIT talk Steve Jobs was asking this question (at the 18:15 mark).

Jobs explains why they have decided to be a software and a hardware company. His answer was well thought out and convincing, but ultimately he changed that opinion, and not long after, they pivoted to being a software company.

The following year, in February 1993, the New York Times ran this story. After months of speculation, NeXT Inc was leaving the computer hardware business, and was going to concerntrate on its Operating System software.

During a phone interview following the announcement Jobs said that:

We understand that we could work really hard for the next few years and emerge as a good second-tier hardware company. But people are telling us that there are just three competitors for the software and we have a chance to be a first-tier software company.

Apple acquires Next, Jobs

That headline is courtesy of this CNET story from December 21, 1996.

Apple will pay about $350 million in cash and stock for the privately held Next to purchase that company's shares and an additional $50 million to cover its debts.

Apple were looking to aquire an Operating System and it came down to NeXT and BeOS.

During his keynote at Macworld in January 1997, then CEO Gil Amelio, describes how Mac OS needed to be modernised with an amazing analogy involving a Cessna airplane.

The last slide in Gils presentation talking about the gains of aquiring NeXT simply says this:

You can watch the full Keynote below, Steve Jobs comes out after 7 mins, to a standing ovation.

Steve would become interim CEO in July of 1997 and full time CEO again on January 5th, 2000. Mac OSX (built on the foundation of OpenStep) launched in 2001 and continues to power macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS today.

Corner Radii

Let's start with a change that received a round of applause from those in attendance at WWDC. They've reduced the corner radius and all applications will, once again, have the same radius.

Sidebar

The weird island is gone and the sidebar once again stretches to the edge of the window. All of the icons in the sidebar are coloured now. In Tahoe the unselected icons were all white.

Menu Icons

The additional menu icons that were added in macOS Tahoe have been removed. Menu icons are once again used sparingly, where they add real meaning. Otherwise simple text items are used.

App Icons

App icons have been updated as well. They have stronger, more defined edges, as well as having reduced faux glass effect. For me it's a somewhat rare case, where a new design immediately makes the old design look dated. The app icons in macOS Tahoe look blurry in comparison.

Liquid Glass Slider

Your level of preferred glassiness is now adjustable under Appearance in System Settings. My preference is to set it all the way to the right.

Conclusion

Taken individually these are all small things. But collectively they show an attention to detail that was missing in Tahoe. This level of attention to detail is what we've come to expect from Apple and it's what makes the Mac's user interface a joy to use.

Apple blew it with Siri in 2024. Announcing features that weren't ready and eventually having to do a deal with Google to use Gemini to finally deliver on those promises in 2026.

Earlier in 2026 they announced, and subsequently released, the MacBook Neo, the first truely exciting product they've released in a long time.

They also blew it with macOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass. But they've since unveiled macOS 27, reversing all of the most harshly criticised decisions, and focussing on making this a bug fix and stability release.

They received applause at WWDC when they announced that windows in macOS 27 would have a uniform border radius.

John Ternus is a product guy and I think we're all hoping that that means a return to focussing on products, details, and the things we all love about Apple.

Like I said, it feels like an interesting time to start writing about Apple.

So who am I anyway?

I'm sitting here writing this on a iMac M4 in Yellow. Just beyond that on a bookshelf is a Macintosh with Model Number: M0001 P. That was my first ever computer and was brought home by my dad when I was only 6 years old. A few years later, the first computer that would really get me hooked, was actually a Commodore 64.

After several years running Windows and Linux on various PC's I returned to Apple when they made the switch to Intel in 2006. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What to expect

I'm going to keep things focussed on Apple. Beyond that it's most likely to be be product and consumer focused, since that's what I am, and that's where my interests lies. I'd like to keep things positive and upbeat. I'm going to try and take my time and write articles that are well researched and that add something to the discourse. Prioritising quality over quantity.

The site is designed to evoke the feel of classic Apple manuals design from the 1980's. And for now I'm writing the HTML by hand, trying to get each posts layout just right.