Of course, the assorted transitions during Jobs's reign as CEO weren't confined to the Mac. Perhaps the greatest transition Jobs initiated was moving Apple away from being just a software and computer maker and into the lucrative world of consumer electronics. The shift became official in 2007 when Apple dropped the word "Computer" from its name, simply calling itself Apple Inc.

The shift began with the iPod. When Apple unveiled its music player in the fall of 2001, the market for MP3 players was in its early stages. Devices at the time relied on small amounts of flash memory that could hold only a handful of songs. In short, it was a field that was ripe for innovation--and innovate Apple did with the iPod. The device's 5GB capacity gave it the storage space to, in Apple's words, "put 1000 songs in your pocket." And while not the first hard-drive-based digital music player on the market--Creative's Nomad series beat it to the punch--the iPod had something going for it that no other company could match: software integration. Though iTunes debuted earlier in 2001, it was with the iPod's fall introduction that the pieces clicked into place and Apple's ecosystem started to take shape.

Still, at the time, the iPod met with heavy skepticism. Why was Apple, a computer company, making a portable music player? "We love music," Jobs said during the iPod's introduction. "And it's always good to do something you love."

It proved to be lucrative for Apple, too. The company has sold hundreds of millions of iPods in the last decade, and though sales growth slowed and then declined in recent years, Apple continues to enjoy a 70 percent share of the MP3 player market. Part of the reason for the device's success? Apple's repeated willingness to reinvent the iPod line. Take 2005's decision to kill off the popular iPod mini and replace it with the smaller, flash-based iPod nano. That kind of thinking, utterly foreign to most companies, was second nature to Steve Jobs: Why not kill a product at the height of its popularity if you're going to replace it with something even better?