Top 10 Apple products Steve Jobs gave the world

Steve Jobs passed away on Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, and tributes have been flooding in from the IT world.

President Obama described Jobs as a visionary and one of the greatest American innovators of all time. Although lacking in technical expertise, Jobs certainly had heavy input into the design and interface of products, and was unsurpassed when it came to presenting those designs on the world stage.

The Apple chief also transformed the telecoms and music industries, so we have rounded up the Top 10 Apple products and services that will keep the memory of Steve Jobs alive for years to come.

Honourable Mentions

Pixar
Proving that Jobs was a shrewd businessman and had the Midas touch, the Apple co-founder purchased a division from Lucasfilm for $10m in 1986.

The newly formed independent company would be known as Pixar, and would be responsible for great strides in computer animation and the entertainment of millions of children and adults.

In 1990, Locus sold Pixar's poorly performing hardware division, and then lated signed a three-movie make-or-break deal with Disney to produce computer-animated films.

The studio debuted with the hugely popular Toy Story, which was highly advanced technically and was an undisputed commercial success, generating over $360m.

Pixar followed up with A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. before being acquired by Disney for more than $7bn in 2006, making Jobs the largest single shareholder in the firm, with seven per cent of the stock.

NeXT
Having being forced out of Apple in 1985 after differences with the board, Jobs remained in the technology business, setting up another company called NeXT.

NeXT concentrated on building high-performance workstations based on a Unix-like operating system, making them a precursor of today's Mac OS X devices.

The cube-shaped systems used a 25MHz Motorola 68030 processor and 12MB of RAM, and had built-in Ethernet, which was unusual at the time. Although not a commercial success on the scale of the Apple II or Macintosh ranges, the devices played a pivotal role in the creation of the world wide web.

Tim Berners-Lee, founding father of the web, used a NeXT computer to develop the world's first web server software at CERN in Geneva. The computer was instrumental to his work, as it was used to write the first web browser and acted as the first server, meaning that Jobs played an indirect but important role in one of the most fundamental inventions of the 20th century.