Apple,Steve Jobs hit new heights in 2010

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. The iPad hit stores in the United States in April and Apple reported sales at the end of September of more than eight 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.

But none has yet to prove capable of prventing 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.