Steve Jobs

Obsessed with the customer experience, Jobs envisioned a retail space where only Apple products would be sold. After building a prototype in 2001 in Virginia, Apple stores started emerging everywhere, and as of 2004, they were averaging over 5,000 visitors a week. The Apple stores were the first of its kind, tech retail stores that were curated to highlight the uniqueness of its company’s products. They were yet another example of Jobs’s innovative thinking, of his uncanny ability to give customers an experience they didn’t even know they wanted.

In the early 2000s, as people were burning music from their computers onto blank CDs, Jobs was convinced that music was going to be a huge part of a computer’s functionality. This led him to develop iTunes, followed by the iPod, which became a revolutionary portable music player, and which marked the beginning of Apple’s hegemony in the tech space. Moreover, since the iPod was connected to the iMac, he believed that the more people bought iPods, the more they would end up buying iMacs. The combination of design and functionality caused the iPod to stand out in the marketplace. As Isaacson writes, “when you took an iPod out of the box, it was so beautiful that it seemed to glow” (393).