He repeatedly took an existing but half-formed idea—the mouse-driven computer, the digital music player, the smartphone, the tablet computer—and showed the rest of the industry how to do it properly.

The creative team behind "Apes" used motion capture technology to create digitalized animals, spending tens of millions of dollars on technology that records an actor's performance and later processes it with computer graphics to create a final image.

It helped make the Mac the computer of choice in education, the arts, academia and among literary and creative professionals - or consumers who wanted to feel like one.