We had to expect it sooner or later, and sooner or later turned out to be today. Just a couple of hours ago, Steve Jobs announced he is resigning as CEO of Apple. He will be succeeded in that position by Tim Cook. However, Jobs is not going into retirement just yet—he will take up the position of Chairman of the Board, and continue to be very involved in the new product development process.

As ever, Jobs was notoriously tight-lipped concerning his reasons for the move. The closest he came to explaining was in the first paragraph of his letter, in which he said he “could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO.” Those who read tea leaves might take that as confirmation his health has taken a turn for the worse, but it’s all so vague that I don’t think we can really make any determination from it.

This is actually the second time that Jobs has left the position of CEO for Apple. He was originally forced out in the 1980s, after which he founded NeXT and pioneered a number of user-interface improvements that were eventually incorporated back into Apple when it bought NeXT in 1996.

After a troubled decade, Apple was glad to take Jobs back as CEO in 1997, and rightly so: just a few years later, Jobs’s brainchild the iPod changed the face of mobile music forever—and then iTunes did the same for music sales. The iPhone gave smartphones a new face, and the iPad essentially became tablet computing. Few enough people get to create even one game-changing gadget, but Jobs took part in the birth of at least four of them—and that was just in his second go-round. His and Steve Wozniak’s first years with Apple, with the Apple I, II, and Macintosh, shaped personal computing just as his more recent years shaped mobile technology.

But it’s still too soon to start writing Steve Jobs’s obituary. He’s still going to be around at Apple as Chairman of the Board. He must think he’s got at least a few good years left. And who knows what he’ll come up with next?

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