Apple dethroned Microsoft as the world’s most valuable technology company this year as its cofounder Steve Jobs soared to new heights with the touchscreen iPad tablet computer and the latest iPhone.
Britain’s Financial Times (FT) last week named Jobs its “Person of the Year” and even US President Barack Obama joined in the plaudits to the 55-year-old chief executive of the Cupertino, California-based gadget-maker.
Jobs’ appearance on a San Francisco stage in January to unveil the iPad capped what the FT called “the most remarkable comeback in modern business history.”
“It wasn’t simply a matter of the illness that had sidelined him for half the year before, leaving him severely emaciated and eventually requiring a liver transplant,” the newspaper said.
“Little more than a decade earlier, both Mr. Jobs’ career and Apple, the company he had co-founded, were widely considered washed up, their relevance to the future of technology written off,” it said.
Obama, at a White House news conference on Wednesday, held up Jobs as an example of the virtues of the “free market.”
“We celebrate somebody like a Steve Jobs, who has created two or three different revolutionary products,” Obama said. “We expect that person to be rich, and that’s a good thing.”
The iPad hit stores in the US in April and Apple reported sales at the end of September of more than 8 million of the devices that the FT said offer a glimpse into a world without a computer mouse or Windows.
Other technology firms are trying to match Apple’s success with tablets of their own, including South Korea’s Samsung, Canada’s Research In Motion, maker of the Blackberry, and US computer giants Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
None has yet to prove capable of preventing Apple from establishing the same dominance over the tablet computer market that it exercises over the MP3 music player scene with the ubiquitous iPod, introduced in 2001.
The iPad wasn’t Apple’s only hit product this year. The iPhone 4, the latest version of the touchscreen smartphone introduced by Apple in 2007, sold 14.1 million units in the quarter which ended in September, up 91 percent over the same quarter a year earlier.
Even Apple TV, a product Jobs once dismissed as a “hobby,” is notching up strong sales. Apple said last week that sales of the latest model of the set-top box that can stream content from the Web had topped one million units.
Apple shares gained around 60 percent this year, closing at more than US$320 on Thursday.
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