Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple who repeatedly transformed the way people use and think about technology, died Wednesday at 56.
His death was announced by Apple, which did not give a specific cause. Jobs had fought a long and public battle with pancreatic cancer, undergoing surgery in 2004 and receiving a liver transplant in 2009. He took three leaves of absence from Apple for medical reasons before resigning as CEO in August.
Tim Cook, Jobs’ successor as CEO, announced Jobs’ death to Apple employees in an email Wednesday.
“Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being,” Cook said in the email, which was released by Apple. “Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
Jobs founded Apple with his high school friend Steve Wozniak in 1976 in a suburban California garage, and eight years later revolutionized personal technology with the Macintosh computer. He left Apple in 1985 in a falling-out with then-CEO John Sculley, and during a 12-year period away from Apple bought what would become Pixar Animation Studios. He would go on to serve as chairman and CEO of the company before selling it to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion.
Jobs returned as Apple CEO in 1997, and enjoyed a remarkable string of successes over the rest of his tenure with the creations of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
He was known throughout his career for his ability to fuse technology and art, making products that were as beautiful as they were simple to use. But his life also centered around a constant desire to make the most of every opportunity, which he told Stanford University graduates in their 2005 commencement speech.
“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?'” Jobs said. “And whenever the answer has been ‘No’for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
Jobs’s death marks the passing of one of America’s great innovators, in the eyes of many. But Jobs himself sought to keep his inventions in perspective.
“We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die,” he said in the February 1996 edition of Wired magazine. “It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all.”