Today marks 15 years since Steve Jobs died, an anniversary that offers a moment to look back at the Apple co-founder whose ideas helped reshape personal computing, music, phones and digital media.
Jobs died on October 5, 2011 at the age of 56. Apple announced his death that day, describing his brilliance, passion and energy as the source of innovations that had enriched and improved lives around the world.
His death came just weeks after he resigned as Apple CEO and recommended Tim Cook as his successor. By then, Jobs had overseen one of the most remarkable corporate turnarounds in technology, taking Apple from a company struggling for direction in the late 1990s to the creator of the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. The Apple II helped establish the young company, while the Macintosh introduced in 1984 brought a graphical user interface and mouse-driven computing to a much wider audience.
After leaving Apple in 1985, Jobs founded NeXT and became closely involved with Pixar. Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, bringing Jobs back to the company. He soon became interim CEO and later permanent CEO, beginning the era that produced many of Apple’s best-known products.
The colorful iMac arrived in 1998, followed by iPod in 2001. Jobs introduced iPhone in January 2007 as a phone, widescreen iPod and internet communications device in one, before unveiling iPad in 2010.
His influence also went beyond individual devices. Apple opened its first retail stores under Jobs, launched the iTunes Store and App Store, and developed an increasingly integrated approach to hardware, software and services that remains central to the company today.
Jobs made his final Apple keynote appearance at WWDC in June 2011, where he helped introduce iCloud alongside iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion. He resigned as CEO that August and died less than two months later.
Fifteen years on, Apple is marking its 50th year as a company. Many of the product categories that define Apple in 2026 can still be traced directly to the period Jobs led the company, while the Mac, iPhone and iPad remain at the center of its hardware lineup.