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Apple Devotes Entire Home Page To Jerome York Obituary

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If ever you needed a sign that Apple was a different kind of technology company, this is it.
What other computer manufacturer would remove its top-selling, hype-inducing, industry-altering new product from the prime spot on its website home page, and replace it with an obituary to an investor?
This is one of those “Here’s to the [...]

Coming Soon: Steve Jobs, the Sitcom

Fake Steve creator Dan Lyons just signed a deal to bring Steve Jobs to another small screen near you.
The half-hour series called “iCon” is billed by the presser as “a savage satire centering on a fictional Silicon Valley CEO whose ego is a study in power and greed.”
Making sure the barbs prick will be the [...]

What’s Next For the iPad? A Tabletop iPad, According to Xerox PARC Circa 1991

Way back in 1991, just as Apple was transitioning from 68k to PowerPC chips, the braniacs at Xerox PARC were predicting it’s entire iPod, iPhone and iPad strategy. And next up for the iPad is a blackboard-sized device.
Nearly 20 years ago, just as personal desktop computers were taking off, researchers at Xerox started thinking about [...]

iPhone App Arms Users With Silent Panic Button

A new app called Silent Bodyguard features a panic button that sends an SOS distress signal with GPS coordinates to potential rescuers without alerting onlookers.
While the $3.99 app, available on iTunes, isn’t the first ICE (in case of emergency) app, this one is backed by Dr. Clint Van Zandt, former FBI chief hostage negotiator and criminal [...]

Fake Steve Nails New York “iGod” Profile to the Wall

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I just finished reading John Heileman’s rather critical profile of Steve Jobs, and I have to say I didn’t think it was too bad. It’s definitely written for an audience that has barely even heard of Steve Jobs, so the rehashing of young Steve’s mean temper and early folly seem a bit over-done to the average Apple observer.

Still, I think a lot of the skepticism in the article is fair, even if I do think Heileman misunderstands what drives Steve to continually enter new businesses. Steve loves to make things that he wants to use — it just so happens that Steve’s tastes are often quite compatible with our tastes. And I guarantee that years ago, he started complaining that there wasn’t a single cell phone he could stand to use. Now we have the iPhone. This isn’t really about legacy — Steve has done everything he ever wanted to and more. Now it’s just the continual drive to make cool stuff that he wants.

But a lot of other people have a problem with the piece, particularly Fake Steve, who publishes the funniest critique I have ever read:

Sorry, John Heilemann, but when you set us up with a big cover calling me iGod and making me look like shit, and when you get half the magazine for your story, we expect you to deliver something new, something interesting, something jarring, something smart. In short, something we didn’t know before. We’d also expect you to maybe find out something bad, or to at least have the balls to say you think the iPhone is going to flop, instead of saying “maybe it will, maybe it won’t.” For that matter you might do your readers the courtesy of admitting that you hate me for arousing such feelings of man-lust in your tiny heart, and that your obsession with El Jobso is a way of masking (and, paradoxically, indulging) the hard-on you have for me. You might also just admit that New York magazine is just trying to cash in on the hype around the iPhone and looking for any excuse to put my face on your cover so you can sell more copies; but you think you can look cool if you dress it up as some kind of cynical, pseudo-psychological deep-think business piece.

Instead, John, you just come off looking like some guy who wishes he still worked at the New Yorker.

Right. As if. Friend, you’re getting an Azzie award.

Ow. I mean, OW.

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About the author

Petemortensen

Pete Mortensen is a design strategist for consulting firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

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4 comments

    [...] its announcement in January. And then I get out of bed every day, and a national interest magazine does a cover story, and then Apple ups the battery life and even shows how it works in 3D. I have a feeling it’s [...]

    I think the piece could have used some more research and a few caveats (most of the sourced and unsourced people were competitors). It felt like the author just read iCon, made a couple calls and wrote the article without any due diligence. The whole “Google might buy Apple” thing conveniently neglected the fact that Apple’s current market valuation is about 70% of Google (with some analysts seeing Apple going to a greater valuation by the end of this year) and Google doesn’t want to deal with the potential anti-trust headache and ill-will it would create with its partners.

    The part about the iPod having reached its “high-water” is blatantly ignorant of the fact that Apple’s profitably has increases by half a billion from iPod sales during that time period a year ago – with a greater net profit margin.

    [...] its announcement in January. And then I get out of bed every day, and a national interest magazine does a cover story, and then Apple ups the battery life and even shows how it works in 3D. I have a feeling it’s [...]

    That New Yorker comment may not be in the pantheon of great barbs (#1: Churchill, “If you were my wife, Madam…”), but it still cuts to the quick. Nice job (or is that Fake Job?), Fake Steve.

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