The legacy of Steve Jobs continues five years after his death. Picture: AFP / Frederic J. Brown

Forty years ago, Jobs, along with Steve Wozniak and the often overlooked Ronald Wayne started Apple on April fool’s Day.

Wayne sold out of the company 12 days later for US$800. Woz went on to become the world’s most loveable geek. And, five years ago, Jobs died too young, the fiery genius who left a legacy that neither his successor Tim Cook, nor anyone else, can ever live up to.

His legacy is everywhere at Apple, from the products he launched, through to the obsession with design he fostered and indeed to his portraits that still dominate the walls as you walk on to the campus of the technology giant in the city of Cupertino, California.

If you want to understand the legacy of Steve Jobs, really understand it, you just need to look at the big pot plants in front of the new flagship Apple store in San Francisco.

Any other company would have bought some pots to spruce the place up, perhaps even shopping from one of those fancy designer shops that mere mortals avoid.

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007 although the App Store which helped the smartphone soar came later. Picture: AFP / Tony AvelarSource:AFP

Not Apple. The designers who normally are kept busy working on next year’s iPhone or whatever Apple’s next big thing is were told to pause from their duties and work on pot plants. When you tour the store, the manager speaks in hushed tones about the curves on the pots and colour palette and how they tie in with the philosophy of Apple design.

That is the legacy of Steve Jobs. Apple is obsessed with the details of everything.

Jobs founded Apple. Jobs was kicked out of Apple. Jobs returned to save Apple. Even now, five years after he died, Apple without Jobs, is still the Apple that Jobs built.

Jan Dawson, of Jackdaw Research, a leading analyst who closely follows Apple, says the first step in considering Apple in the post-Jobs era is realising that anything launched in the first few years was “almost certainly” something Jobs had a guiding hand in.

“Some of the details might have been different, but the broad strokes would have been the same,” Dawson says.

“I suspect that even something like the Apple Watch, with its focus on health and fitness, might well have grown out of Steve Jobs’ own health issues.

Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at Apple HQ in 2007. Picture: APSource:News Corp Australia

“I do think there are some specifics where a Jobs-era Apple might have done things differently — both the Apple Watch and Apple Music seem to have suffered from trying to do too much out of the gate rather than being more focused and getting a smaller number of things just right. I suspect under Jobs they might both have done less, and been criticised for being too limited rather than being criticised for being muddled or overwhelming.”

When Jobs unveiled the iPhone, he talked about it being three things: a phone, an iPod and a internet communications device. He didn’t talk about apps because the App Store came later as an afterthought.

“Jobs cared a lot about focus, and that meant that first versions of products and services sometimes did less than competitors, but did them very well, whereas I think Cook is more prone to put more in, and then iterate to fix things later as Apple has done with both Apple Music and the Apple Watch.”

There are some fascinating parts of the Jobs story. He was put up for adoption by a mother who only signed the papers on the guarantee he would go to college _ and then he dropped out of college. He released a computer called the Lisa at the time he was denying paternity of his daughter, Lisa. In the early days of his working relationship with his friend Woz, he ripped him off by lying about how much Atari were paying them to create a game and pocketing the extra cash for himself. Even his friends, like Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, have said Jobs had a childish ability to get mad at people and hurt them because he felt the normal rules of social engagement did not apply to him.

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Jobs was obsessive with the details of everything. His biographer Walter Isaacson describes Jobs deliberating for an hour to decide on the particular shade of grey for the bathroom sign at the Apple Campus. Another story is how Jobs rejected 2000 shades of beige for the Apple II and came up with a new one of his own.

If Jobs was still in charge of Apple, it seems clear that some products would be different.

Jobs did not like large phones, calling the phablets of his day “hummers”. He predicted 7-inch tablets would fail, yet Apple launched the iPad Mini just a year after his death.

When he launched the iPhone in 2007, revolutionising both Apple as a company and transforming the way we communicate, he dismissed smartphones that needed a separate stylus.

“Who wants a stylus? Nobody wants a stylus. You lose them. Yuck!,” he said. But Apple does now sell the Pencil, and while Apple folk would baulk at the stylus label that is what it effectively is for the iPad Pro.

Apple is different under Cook and, in some ways, better.

“I think openness and social good are the two single biggest areas where Apple has changed culturally,” Dawson says.

Apple is still a very secretive company but not in the way it once was, and interviews with executives are now not unknown.

When, in 1997, Jobs came back to an Apple that was on the verge of bankruptcy, he shut down Apple’s philanthropic programs. Cook launched a program that has Apple matching the charitable donations of its employees which has given away more than $25 million.

Apple CEO Tim Cook shows dancer Maddie Ziegler a new iPhone during a product demonstration at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco on September 07. Picture: AFP / Josh EdelsonSource:AFP

“Jobs was focused on Apple doing good in the world through its products (rather) than through any sort of social initiatives, which was always somewhat ironic because he certainly had causes he cared about personally,” Dawson says.

“But Cook has been far more willing to swing Apple’s corporate resources behind big causes like environmentalism, social change, and privacy”.

Jobs drove vertical growth, focusing on one product. Cook grows product lines horizontally by expanding product ranges, like the iPad and iPhone, and finding new markets.

Under Cook, Apple has doubled, as a percentage of revenue, the amount of money its spends on researching and developing new products.

Steve Jobs was an impossible act to follow. But for those who have to try, the way to keep Apple like Apple Steve built is simple.

Six years before he died, Jobs gave a now famous commencement speech at Stanford University.

He was talking to a generation of future tech leaders but he could have been laying out the ground rules for Cook and others at Apple to follow.

“Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking,” Jobs said.

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

And he finished with four simple words of advice: “Stay hungry. Stay Foolish.”