The world has once more lost an icon and original.  Steve Jobs passed away on Wednesday at age 56. From here on, we’ll never see him live and action, and we’ll never get to hear him say “one more thing…” before he concludes a product launch.  But there’s more to him than his turtleneck and master-of-ceremonies attitude. He’s a visionary and has left the world a legacy that changed our lives forever.

Steve Jobs was perhaps the first business man to ever say “don’t to listen to customers because customers don’t even know what they want.”  You build something according to their specification and then they’ll end up wanting something else.  So Steve did things his way and built products that made people want them.  He’s one of the greatest visionaries the world has ever known, next to Thomas Edison, as Steven Spielberg puts it.

Here are 5 of Apple’s products that shaped our culture, imprinting Steve Jobs’ genius and leadership in the minds of an entire generation.

Apple II

Compared to contemporary computers, Apple II had specs you’d laugh about now. But it’s actually the first successful mass-produced PC launched in 1977 and it’s designed by Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.  It features 1-MHz processor, 4KB of RAM, an external 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, and an audio cassette interface for programs and data storage. It’s pretty safe to assume that it’s the grandpa of PCs today.

Macintosh

It was the first commercially successful personal computer that features a graphical user interface and a mouse. It wavered during the early 90s but came back as iMac when Jobs made a comeback to the company 10 years after being kicked out by a successor he himself picked.

iPod and iTunes

The iPod sure looked a little different when it first took the scene in 2001. There were no other portable devices like it at the time, and the Sony Walkman was still the industry standard. The first iPod sold for $400 with 5GB of storage and it became the best-selling music player in the world to date. Of course, it’s not enough to just have a player. The right software to manage the array of personal music is also imperative, and so we have the birth of iTunes. It eventually became the largest music store on the planet.

iPhone

Though some may think the launch of iPhone 4S was a disappointment because it wasn’t an iPhone 5 and there were no radical changes in the way it looks, the first iPhone changed the way we look at mobile devices when it launched in June 2007.  It has a strong user interface with a simple mobile operating system and a 3.5-inch screen, stretching a mobile device’s possibilities to the limits.  It’s currently the single best-selling smartphone in the world with 500,000 apps in its App Store.

iPad

Sure, the idea of tablet computing was first introduced by Microsoft in 2001, but it wasn’t until January 2010 when Apple paired the tablet PC with a simple mobile operating system and an array of apps that the public patronized its concept.  It’s the best-selling tablet to date, even with competitors spawning their own version of the device. Consumers don’t want tablets, they want iPads.

Steve’s physical presence may no longer be with us, but his ideas will live on. He was a visionary, and always will be.  Even to the last few months of his life, he has played his role as CEO excellently.  And then he had set the stage for a new chief executive and for the iPhone 4S to launch before he bade everyone farewell. T hank you for touching our lives, Steve. Requiescat in peace.