Hopefully he has created a sustainable culture of excellence, and picked a realistic successor. The man took a company on the brink of failure and grew it to be larger than its competitors in only a decade using his force of will, based on the idea that users want an exceptional experience. In the meantime he reinvented the way computers are built, changed the direction of the music industry, and gave the mobile phone industry a jolt it still doesn't know how to recover from. RIP.