The FT chose the moment in January when Jobs unveiled the iPad as the point when his and Apple's "rebound was complete".

"The iPad is the culmination of an approach that he has seemingly been perfecting for his entire career," stated the newspaper's opinion writers.

"A rebuttal of F. Scott Fitzgerald's much-quoted aphorism that there are no second acts in American life does not come more decisively than this," wrote Richard Waters and Joseph Menn.

"When Steven Paul Jobs first hit the headlines, he was younger even than Mark Zuckerberg is now. Long before it was cool to be a nerd, his formative role in popularising the personal computer, and Apple's initial public offering on Wall Street made him the tech industry's first rock star."