The original Mac. It was pretty incredible for the time. Weird starting price though, right? How did he pick that, does any one know?

Also I'd like echo again what Mr K said last time: I think your wringers are great, but should be <30 min. I'm not trying to be a whinger, just giving some constructive feedback. The 16 bit gems have video clips, etc, in addition to the introspective thoughts so the time passes much more quickly, but this is a straight up monolgue. It should be shorter.

Great observations though, cheers

I think a lot of people will go with the iPod, which has turned the music industry completely upside-down, but I think that Steve Jobs' greatest contribution is that he made being a computer nerd more mainstream and acceptable.

As much as people in the computing industry may have mocked the iMac's garish pastel colors, it reached out to a subset of individuals, telling them that being on an iMac was stylish, hip and even a fashion statement.  While I don't know the timeframes exactly, my guess is that led to such ad campaigns as the "Dude, you got a Dell" guy and other campaigns designed to open up the computer market to generations computing had not been exposed to in years past.  The iMac was a paradigm change for a lot of people, and its legacy continues today.

Bringing the mouse to the masses.

Per your inquiry Mr. Commodore I am not the same Llama you had mentioned.  It's been my handle for many many years (I like to think I'm the first :D).

I personally feel Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO is almost like the end of era.  He has been iconic in the tech world, and it's difficult viewing him as not being at the head of Apple.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out for the comapny in the future.

I feel the iPod is a very easy choice for the greatest contribution.  It was a spring board for apple to enter the handheld device market.  Without the iPod, we would have no iPhone or iPad.  What I think is more important, was the implementation of iTunes.  This was really the first application I was aware of that you could use to purchase music over the internet.  To me, iTunes created an industry.  While it was cool that you could move your CD collection onto an iPod, with one click I could buy new music on my computer, instantly upload it to my device, and immediatly be able to take it with me.  Instant gratification.  It's done to the music industry what Steam has done to PC gamming.  iTunes created this concept where I could immediatly get the media I wanted, whenever I wanted it.  Netflix and Amazon use a very similar concept with their media streaming.  iTunes is the cornerstone for how many people organize music, movies, and podcasts on their computers, and it's also how you're able to link all of your Apple devices together.  It's hard to imagine Apple being what it is today without iTunes.

And I know it isn't as mainstream as it used to be, but Quicktime was really something when it first came out.

And @iloveoldgames, the $666.66 pricetag of the Apple I had to do with how Steve Wozniak liked the way repeating digits looked, and it was also $500 with a 1/3 markup for profit.  I was curious myself and did a little research.

Hey, Commodore, the 3DS *does* have an internet browser. It doesn't do Flash yet, but for some reason Nintendo doesn't like to support it when they first launch their browsers; look at the Wii as an example. They probably just don't want kids caught watching porn on their 3DS or something. It'll support Flash eventually. It could use a bit more memory for web browsing, as well as compatibility with more types of WiFi (although the 3DS is the most compatible I've seen Nintendo's consoles get so far), but it does a decent job at web browsing. You know, I posted a topic on the forum from a 3DS. If you want online anywhere, well I don't think Nintendo wants to get into bed with cell phone companies and subscription plans. They really just need a mode where the 3DS automatically connects to any open WiFi hotspots.

I can't really say what Steve's contributions are because I don't know enough about him. And attributing the tech of Apple to him seems a bit silly. I have no idea what decisions were made by a board, what designs individual employees came up with, or what parts of Apple culture various people were responsible for. I don't think Apple will change much, though, because so many people practically worship Steve that they'll put someone like him in charge - or someone who WANTS to be like him.

Jobs is now the Chairman of Apple Board of Directors, so I wouldn't start flying the flags or calling this the end of an era. The company started with him and the Woz, and it will keep going on their legacy for the forseeable future, seeing as how well they've done for themselves.

What would I say that legacy is?

Well, back in the day, mice existed. GUI existed. Integrated disk drives existed. A lot of innovations were around, in and of themselves. But it wasn't until Apple that all these things were available to the consumer.

Apple did a lot of mining of talent, especially from the Xerox company Palo Alto Research Center, so they were always on the cutting edge of technology, but they were always the first to take all the new ideas, and try to figure out how to sell them to people, and not just companies. All the other computers out there, even to this day for the most part, are just beige boxes. Apple took all the innovations, and looked at how to integrate them into people's lives. They realized back when computers took up entire rooms that it wasn't always going to be like that, and they worked to make them presentable, and eventually fashionable.

The entire ad campaign of the original iPod basically told you nothing about the capabilities of the thing, but you saw those white wires, and the outline people dancing, and you wanted some of that.

Basically, it was the first attempt to be a consumer computer electronics supplier.
And looking at market share of MP3 players, Smartphones, and Tablets, I'd say they have no plans to change any time soon, mostly thanks to Steve Jobs.

the greatest thing he did was team up with Woz now i dont care about apple that much i like the ipod i care more about a super nintendoi want one really bad keep in mind i was born 7 years after the release of the system

never had a mac. never heard about steve jobs until the second week of tuesday tech talk and your blog on apple and macs. no idea. see you next week

I do not have anything to say about this week's wringer.

I'm not sure if anyone else did this, but back in the 80s in Alabama, there was a campaign to help public schools get Apple II/Es. The goal was to buy groceries at Delchamps and Food World (also not sure if you guys have ever heard of those grocery stores either). On your grocery receipt, which was colored red, a portion of what you spent was donated to schools.

You had to take your receipts to the school. All of the red reciepts were added up and the total was used to buy X number of Apple II/Es for the school. My school ended up with four computers.

I think the program was sponsored between the grocery stores, the state and the Apple Corp. Though I could be mistaken. I just remember amassing as many red reciepts as possible.

I think that was what got me on board with how awesome Apple is. From an early age.

In this week's wringer Commodore, you mentioned that Apple was cool with the concept of "cannibalization", or eating into its sales of previous products with the release of new products; I think this is Jobs' greatest contribution to Apple.  It'll be interesting to see if this trend continues...

After last weeks wringer, I went out to see if I could find an HP Touchpad. Turns out that even in the technological sieve of South Dakota the stupid thing disappeared the day the price drop was announced. This is that state that is commonly thought of as being populated by incestuous hillbillies and their tractors. That's even more remarkable than the internet being sold out. That got me thinking a bit about this fire sale that was happening. I looked at HP's website regarding the touchpad, and they had a spot where you could sign up to be emailed when more Touchpad's became available. If they are not making these things anymore, how are more going to become available? Now this is simply specualation on my part and clearly too bat-shit insane to have been done on purpose, but what if this price drop actually sold so well that it convinced HP to turn the production lines back on? Just a thought.

On a loosly related note, when I decided that I wasn't going to find the touchpad, I did find something that is comparable in the sense that it covers most of the bases that made the tablet somewhat enticing to me. For $200, I picked up a Pandigital ebook reader, supported by Android, that will do most of the same functions, just with less processing power behind it. It's worth a look if that's the kind of thing you're interested in.

On another related note, I'm growing to hate touchscreens and there is a very simple explanation as to why. I'm not a small guy. In fact, at 6'3 and around 300 lbs, I'm generally considered a person of exceptional size. In keeping with that size, my hands have been replaced by bear claws. No, not those donut-like things you jerk. I'm not THAT fat. Sometimes the link that I want to push isn't the link that my touchscreen thinks I should push apparently. Suffice it to say, touchscreens were not designed for those of us with well endowed hands.

As for the thing about Steve's job, or whatever, if him stepping down causes the eventual fall of Apple then it is his greatest contribution to anything ever. I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for that statement, but I have a lot of hate for Apple and anything it's done in the last decade. I know that seems kind of ironic after the previous parts of this post, but whenever Apple pushes out some "new" idea I always look at it and decide I'll wait until somebody else makes it better and sells it cheaper.

Prime example comes in the form of the iPod. While it may have been revelutionary in the sense that your pirated music didn't have to be burned onto CD's anymore, my PSP was cheaper and is as good or better than the iPod in the "Look at me! I play music!" area. I'm simply not impressed by anything that Apple does. At least not once I see the price they want for it.

I would also like to point out a bit of misinformation in this weeks wringer. You stated that there wasn't a difference between the HD DVD's and BluRay's other than the format. BluRay didn't win this format war because Sony threw money at it, because we all know how much Microsoft likes to throw money at things, which they did even though they weren't the ones who developed it. I think they were just trying to kick Sony in the nards, but ended up pulling a Charlie Brown instead. It won because it offered higher definition than HD DVD's and has a butt load more storage space to it. BluRay has a maximum of 50 GB vs HD DVD's 30 GB space. I think the only advantage that HD DVD might have had was being cheaper to produce, but when the same movie on either format has the exact same price, I'm going with the higher quality of the two, and that's why HD DVD lost.

This is that state that is commonly thought of as being populated by incestuous hillbillies and their tractors.

THIS IS ALABAMAAAAAAAAAAA!

I'm in the same boat as Knightcrawler here. I don't know much about Steve Jobs or Apple. My Mom has a mac and an iphone, but I don't know much about Apple. So I guess I don't have much to say, although from what I've read, even if the products arn't great they are revolutionary and make many others to begin thinking in that same field.

Also, Josh, what is your problem with SNES? I understand you want one, but why bring it up? I noticed your brought it up last week and I just thought of it more as a "I don't really care about either, I prefer to spend my money on older things." Now you're bringing it up here, and I have to ask why? We're trying to keep a normal discussion and you just bring up SNES like a child who can only talk about one thing for months until he finds something else to talk about constantly. I'm not trying to be an ass, hell I'll do it now- *HUGS!* But we are trying to stay on topic for the conversation, if you would like to discuss SNES you could find an SNES website and discuss you wishes there, and you could begin discussing the Weekly Wringer here.

P.S. I just now realized how annoying this comment form is about making color and size changes. I've known it before but this time it was really difficult to change it back to normal text, because if I miss type and backspace to start over then my text returns to the color and size change. So I have to go back in, change it, miss type repeat. Ugh. Just thought I'd point this out in case anyone else is kind of annoyed with it as I am.

Aestola may have the record in the Weekly Wringer, but she's got nothing on how Arkus and I bitch at each other across the rest of the site.

Making computer technology hip, elegant, (maybe even „high society“), and kind of a status symbol.

I'm sorry, but that is really all I have to say about this question*.

BTW:  Never type something longer than 100 words in a browser. And avoid backspace. I did that last wringer and I was too lazy to recreate my  ~300 word answer.  Firefox doesn't have an auto save feature. From now on, I type all my wringer answers in open office.

* No. This week, it didn't happen. I really don't have anything else to say. I swear by Koji Kondo.

 One of the most memorable things that Steve Jobs will be remember for not only in the tech world, but also the business world. Over the past 10-15 years, Apple has gone into an industry in which is compleltey homoginized by a single company and turned that specific industry on its heels. Some exampls are:

Home Computers:   For the better part of two decades, Microsoft had a strangle hold on the home computer market with all the Windows operating systems it seemed that it would be near impossible for someone to even challenge them in that market. Then Apple came out with their newest generation of Mac and Macbooks. Having been dominated by Mircosoft in this market for a very long time they needed to make their operating system more easier, stable and efficient than windows. Fast forward 10 or so years Macs are now on par if not ahead of the market in the home computer market and it has Mircosoft on its heals trying to make their operating systems more like the Macs in order to compete with them (see Windows 8 beta on YouTube).

Portable Music Players: About 10 years ago most people were walking down street holding on to their Sony CD walkmans. Then Apple came out with the iPod. With this device, you could  store 1000's of songs on this device, you never needed to buy batteries for it because all you need to do is plug it into your computer and the best part of all it fits into your pocket. With all these features on one device, it made all the other devices basically obsolete and the iPod took over the portable music player market.

Smartphones and Portable Gaming Devices: Before the iPhone came out most of the phones that people had were  made by Nokia  and really only good for basically one thing, making phone calls. Since then, with the advent of the iPhone, cell phones now are epected to have many features such as a music player, internet browser, camera, video player and play games in order to compete in the market(Android Phones and Windows Phone 7).

The iPhone has also had a huge impact on the mobile gaming industry. Nintendo has basicaly owned the portable gaming market since the comcept exsisted with the Game Boy, GBA and DS and no one doing anything much except put a dent into their market share, it seemed like no one would ever topple them. With the iPhone poeple are now able to play games on their phones for small price and they don't have to bring whole other device with them just to play games. This has made Nintendo very uneasy as they just had to drop the price on the Nintendo 3DS with it only being on the market for less than 6 months.

The impact that Steve Jobs has with me is that has made compnaies who have had dominate market share of a certain product fall to his knees in a realativly short time. It is hard to image that Apple was close to bankruptcy 20 years ago, now they own a sizable share if noot a majority share in at least three big major consumer electronic devices. We can only dream of what Mr. Jobs had in mind to what was next for his company to move forward. I am not a big Apple fan myself but I can appreciate and respect what Steve Jobs has done to the consumer electronics industry as a whole shook the whole industry up in a relativly short amount of time.      

Mr. K,

That's cause you and Arkus are both crochety old grumps!

If I have to say something nice about Steve Jobs...  His greatest contribution was inspiring the MS Windows OS.  Other than that, he really just convinced people they needed stuff they really didn't need like tablet computers and mp3 players. I'm just glad he didn't start a war against cheap chinese "knock-offs".  I have several mp3 players that look like ipods but aren't.  I'm happy with them.  They may not have the features and OS of an ipod, but I can play music and even listen to the radio on them.

Word of advice when typing on this site and making a mistake; Notepad is your friend.

"Word of advice when typing on this site and making a mistake; Notepad is your friend."

...Just don't make mistakes, people.

But yeah, if I'm typing anything of sufficient length, as I tend to do, I do it in a word processor doc, then move it to the browser in question.

As far as home computing, another thing I thought of was quality control. Until very recently, all the hardware that Apple was using was made by Apple. They never had nearly the amount of driver issues and compatibility problems the PC crowd had, because the OS and all the equipment were designed and made by the same team.

I have had countless conniptions over the years from updating various Windows software, only to have the hardware not work anymore.

This wasn't always cost effective for Apple to do, which is why they've started using various other companies like Intel for some of their innards, but it gave them an early and lasting reputation for reliability.

although I dont have all the details in front of me im going to mention Jobs contribution to organ donation.

Many are aware of his liver transplant, but less may be aware of the changes he helped along regarding transplant lists. Jobs discovered during his own ordeal that organ lists are effectively local, and a person with his means can fly from city to city and be put on  multiple lists. Steve, through a relationship with Arnold and his wife, ended up changing laws in California to unify the donation lists, levelling the playing field for everyone waiting for organs. Again, I may have details wrong. As a non tech human contribution, this is rather huge.

I also believe the fashion element of gadgetry is immensely important. Sites like this, retrogaming, and many other kinds of nerdery, may not have ever existed without the "fashionization" of technology.

this weeks wringer watched and commented on my HP Touchpad, typing on a touchscreen is the worst.

and Commodore, you nailed my name of the first try. Jason Tyo  (tie  oh) its just my real name, not very creative