Five biggest things Steve Jobs got rid of

Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and CEO, and one of the only people capable of out-staring Chuck Norris, is fond of simplicity. In the world of consumer electronics, every complexity taken away produces an equal and opposite feature.

We've collected five of the biggest things Jobs has got rid of over the last few years, and we encourage you to add your own in the comments below.

The word 'the'
Steve, oh Steve, how you enjoy fooling around with the English language. If you're not describing products as 'the funnest' yet, you're dropping words like NBC drops contracts with your store.

More specifically, it's the word 'the'. Steve likes to not use 'the'. It's always just, "We're doing great things with iPhone," not "the iPhone," just "with iPhone." And the same goes for iPod.

For those of you with no sense of humour, we expect you're already at the bottom of this page writing an aggressive comment to express your hatred for us being petty. Good. We'll use this opportunity to tell you that we wrote this with tongues firmly in our cheeks, which, funnily enough, is where yo Momma likes it too. Booyah!

ThinkSecret
Back in the day, the three best Web sites in the world were CNET, Goatse and ThinkSecret. Only two of them still exist. You see, dear reader, ThinkSecret was fond of publishing Apple rumours, many of which could only have come from employees inside Apple itself. And they were often bang on the money with their reports.

Naturally, Jobs didn't like this much, so he got rid of it using a team of covert goons. It was a sad day when ThinkSecret went offline. Some people say the worst thing that ever happened on the Internet was Fred Durst's testicles. Frankly, losing ThinkSecret was worse.

Buttons
There's only one thing Steve Jobs hates more than Joe Nocera, and that's buttons. It's true, buttons are miserable. They spend half of their life depressed, and it rubs off on Steve. He banished them from iPhone (not the iPhone, remember), from Apple's mice, and more recently from the trackpads of MacBook.

Probably the largest challenge left to Jobs is the keyboard. He didn't need one on iPhone, and could feasibly eliminate some of the less popular letters from MacBook's keyboard: X, V, Q and perhaps everyone's favourite failed vowel, the humble Y.

The next MacBook will be MacBook Binary. Just input everything in binary code and you'll only need two buttons, instead of more than 100.

DRM in iTunes store
It was in April of last year that Jobs, alongside EMI, decided it was about time to stop whipping their paying customers around the goolies, and get rid of the DRM that has for so long acted as a cancer on their music.

For those of you not familiar with DRM, let us summarise. If you steal music over BitTorrent, you get to enjoy it on any device you've paid for. If you decide to be honest and pay for your music, you're heavily restricted on what you can do with it. So if you buy from iTunes, it'll only ever work on Apple products.

Anyway, the iTunes Store from that moment became far more attractive, as EMI's entire catalogue of music was not only lifted to twice the encoding bit rate, but also snatched from the searing-hot, leprosy-encrusted jaws of demented music industry execs.

FireWire
It was bad when the MacBook Air came out without Ethernet, but there's possibly even more controversy over new MacBooks coming out without FireWire. FireWire is relied upon by photographers and video editors for its high data transfer speeds.

Perhaps one reason behind this was to make the divide between MacBook Pro and MacBook a little more obvious, particularly in light of the new MacBook's improved graphics and design.

Honourable mention: IBM chips
Macs used to run on IBM processors up until a few years ago, and it meant you couldn't run Windows on a Mac, which was inherently bad for Apple's business. You may think, "Dude, what the eff? That's like saying the problem with wearing a helmet is that you can't get stabbed in the head!"

But by switching to Intel chips, Windows could now be dual-booted or run in Parallels, and all your essential Windows apps can be used, when needed, on a Mac. Getting rid of IBM has been nothing but a benefit to Apple.