It’s no secret that I’ve never been a fan of Apple products or their philosophy (premium price for outdated hardware, severely locked down software), but even with that two and a half years ago I got sucked in by the marketing hype and bought my first Apple product, an iPhone. I hated it.

However, even those of us who are anti-Apple have to give Steve Jobs and the company he led a lot of credit. As far as advances in form factor and developing an intuitive GUI, Apple has always been at the forefront, and Jobs always led with a very tight control. As far as GUIs go, Microsoft Windows and Linux’s Gnome desktop environment have been moving closer and closer to the GUI found in OS X for years. The smart phone was popularized by the iPhone, which also set the design bar very high for all Apple competitors. As far as the tablet goes, that’s almost entirely thanks to the iPad. Heck, right now I’m typing this using a web browser (Chromium) that uses the Apple Webkit.

Jobs also had the foresight to use a Unix core (combination of NetBSD and OpenBSD) to develop the Darwin kernel that runs OS X and the KDE developed KHTML engine and Konqueror web browser for his Webkit and Safari web browser, respectively. That was a smart move and saved their development team from having reinvent the wheel while at the same time giving them one of the most stable and secure systems out there. Apple has been a user of open source software, and although limited, they have given some back, such as the open source Webkit.

Steve Jobs personally sculpted the face of personal and mobile computing. He died yesterday and the technology world lost one of it’s greatest visionaries.

(Thanks to Pickles for the link and video)