I could tell what Sonos and its PR firm thought about the product as I walked in.

Festooned over a thousand square feet of penthouse atop one of San Francisco’s finest boutique hotels were samovars of fresh coffee, pitchers of fresh-squeezed juices and a banquet table overflowing with edibles under picture windows filled with panoramic views of Union Square and the San Francisco skyline. The layout was also outfitted, front-to-back, in a couple thousand dollars worth of Sonos gear — including the subject of this review, the Sonos Play:3 ($299).

Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder of Apple and perhaps the most influential American CEO of his generation, died Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jobs may or may not have graced more magazine covers than any CEO of the last century (eight times on the cover of TIME magazine, alone), may or may not have been responsible for more changes to the consumer electronics landscape than any other businessman, and may or may not have single-handedly saved the music industry with Apple’s iTunes.

What is certain, however, is that in the coming days more ink and more pixels will be dedicated to his life, his career, and his influence on modern culture than that usually reserved for heads of state and the most popular figures of stage and screen.

Here then, is a Cult of Mac round-up of some of our favorite images of Steve Jobs, from his early days until some of those toward the end of his all-too-brief journey with us in this life.

Enjoy.

Believe it.

While Ashton Kutcher’s high-end Ooma gets all the sexy VoIP publicity and some people remain intrigued by the incomprehensible magicJack, for those looking to seriously leverage telephone calls using voice over IP, the OBi110 and OBi100 adapters from Obihai Technology continue to impress with their feature range and flexibility.

When I heard about Steve Jobs’ resignation as Apple’s CEO on Wednesday afternoon I mentioned casually to a friend my assessment that “he’s probably the most influential human being of the past one hundred years.”

My friend laughed and said, “no way, you really think so?”

Editor’s note: This code in this post has been updated from the original to reflect a more targeted animation-disabling conmand line defaults write string.  Thanks to reader Phillip Ridlin for the alert.

Are you running Lion on your desktop and finding the new window animation functionality in Mail.app annoying? You’re not alone, apparently.

Sonos, already highly regarded for its lineup of great sounding home audio products, this week released the Play:3 Wireless HiFi System, which could — as the marketing materials suggest — make you forget everything you’ve heard before.

One look at this vintage pic of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates from the early days of each man’s career says a whole lot about the ultimate trajectories of both their businesses and their customers, dont’cha think?

The original provenance of the photo is unknown, though it clearly predates the historic conversation the two tech titans had at the All Things D conference in 2007.

From the looks of it, we’ll hazard a guess here it’s from a visit Gates made to Jobs’ California home back when the battle between Microsoft and Apple was more of a fair fight. What do you think?

[Awesome People Hanging Out Together]

Images © 2011 Lonnie Lazar · All Rights Reserved

Lost in the hoopla of Apple’s WWDC software revelations this week — from iMessage, to iCloud, to iTunes Match — has been coverage of what may prove to be the company’s most enduring revolutionary influence, which is the one it’s having on the Art world.

As promised, Steve Jobs and Apple made sweeping software-related announcements at the WWDC keynote in San Francisco Monday.

While much of the functionality previewed by the Cupertino, CA technology behemoth will not be available to users until sometime this fall, several companies and technology purveyors have got to be quaking in their boots as a result of seeing Apple’s roadmap to the future.