Jon Rubinstein

on Rubinstein's hardware team at Apple Computer has certainly been busy this year, contributing the breakthrough iPod and the Power Mac G5.

"Innovation is in our DNA, so we'll continue to lead the industry with breakthrough products," Rubinstein says.

The hardware engineering guru brings more than 25 years of industry experience to Apple, where his team is responsible for the development, design and low-level software contributions for all hardware products.

Prior to joining the vendor, long known for its legendary design and innovative hardware, Rubinstein served as executive vice president and COO of FirePower Systems, a developer and manufacturer of PowerPC-based systems. At FirePower, Rubinstein had his hand in all aspects of the business.

Along the way, Rubinstein also designed the HP 9000 series and 300 families of Unix workstations for Hewlett-Packard, and he was vice president of hardware engineering at NeXT,like Apple, another Steve Jobs startup. He also was in charge of processor development for the Titan graphics supercomputer family at Stardent Computer.

Rubinstein holds several patents and has been published in a number of industry peer publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery.