I don't own any Apple products, and at least for most of them I wouldn't have any real interest in owning. But I do feel Steve Jobs was a visionary... Why? Find any other company as large as Apple that hasn't imploded or become so bureaucratic that it can't design and innovate.
Apple has surpassed Microsoft, IBM, and all the rest to become the largest company in terms of valuation in the world, and yet it still has a strong brand, a strong image, and releases sought after products. The design and the finish of Apple products are still its ethos, they sell the user experience. A company like HP or Dell just sells something slapped together by various non-communicating departments within a bureaucratic entity, and the product they end up with shows that... something I had underscored to me recently when someone bought an HP laptop I had to work on.
A brand new laptop, where marketers decided design, and costs decided quality. The laptop looked great and had perfect specs on paper, but in the real world the design was a headache, and I had to gut it just to repair design flaws fresh out of the box. And their website division couldn't find its backside with both hands even if it had a map with directions.
Other reasons I feel he was a visionary... he founded Apple, and he founded Pixar Studios. Both revolutionized the markets they were in. When Apple's board took the company away from him and fired him, he founded NeXT, which became successful enough that Apple later bought the company to integrate it as a core part of their OS, giving him a foot back in the door. Just like many other major cooperations, Apple's board proceeded to implode the company in its quest for the bottom line, but when they gave up and asked Steve to return he fixed the company to the way it had been. Apple is one of the few company's that will place design and quality above price considerations, it almost feels like any other company is so focused on the bottom line they can't see the bigger picture by comparison.
Probably most tangible reason I feel he's a visionary, is Steve and Wozniak gave us the Mac, and the Mac gave us the mouse. At the time the only thing the mouse was good for was paint programs, the PC industry thought it was a useless novelty and left it alone, yet Steve knew better. The computer industry didn't see even see the "PC", they didn't see anything "personal" in home users owning a computer. Steve was the one that really put the personal in "PC", ironically enough as that sounds.
He did it long before IBM released a system called a "personal computer"
Edit: I do have to say, the more I watch his speeches and read quotes from him, the more I like the guy. He may not have been a philanthropist and he was certainly protective of his company and designs to potentially a fault, but the guy had a gift few do. Here's the text of his Stanford commencement address in 2005, form the WSJ.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576520690515394766.html
