Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com's senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late '90s and early '2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and '90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs' leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK's National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He's an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California's legendary Death Ride.
When we were kids, my brothers and I drew all the time. We drew monsters, cartoon people, and faces. Tons of faces: goofy ones, serious ones, ugly ones, and beautiful ones.
We were fanatics. We thought we had talent. We’d take anyone aside every artist we met and beg them for tips and tricks any chance we got. Our granddad, an artist by profession, was our greatest source of inspiration. Our parents proudly hung every scribble on the walls.
I wanted to go to art school, but was persuaded to go to university instead. Academia instead of art. In college, I roomed with a gal who did charcoal figure studies. Our shitty apartment in Brighton, Sussex, was covered with the black dust as she churned out image after image of human figures in various states of undress. I, of course, recalled my artsy leanings from my youth, and headed to the art store to buy pastels, charcoal sticks and reams of thick, heavy, expensive paper.
I spent tons of money that I should have used to pay rent to buy watercolor paints, brushes and paper. I found a cheap easel for sale on a student bulletin board and spent many afternoons up on the roof, smoking hash, painting sheets of rain marching slowly over the South Downs.
Then I grew up. I got a job, a wife, kids. Painting? Drawing? Who has time for that anymore? Who has the money to do it, right? The space to store all the material needed to pursue such a dream, let alone the room to actually engage in artistic endeavors.
Luckily, I have an iPad. And judging by the amazing artwork out there, and indeed in this very issue, I might very well have all I need to rekindle my early love of artistic expression.
There are apps for painting, drawing, illustrating, photo re-touching, and the like. Tons of them in every category. There are styluses and capacitive brushes that rival the analog materials you’d end up paying a fortune for in an art store, and these can be used in the comfort of your very own touchscreen.
No wonder why Roz Hall, the iPad artist we talk to in this issue says, “I turned my back on the canvas and fell in love with the pixel.”
Honestly, why didn’t I think of this before? Who needs a room full of dusty, messy crap to just produce more work that end up in the basement? Not me – I’ve got an iPad and a few inexpensive apps.
The term “planned obsolescence” has achieved negative connotations, but it originally referred to a long-standing tradition of changing designs to sell more products.
It was coined by the car industry in the 1930s to refer to annual model updates. Over the years, however, the term has taken on a darker meaning. But planned obsolescence is a good thing. It’s the driving force behind much innovation.
This morning, New York Times reporter Catherine Rampell accused Apple of breaking her old iPhone 4 with the iOS7 update, which made it unbearably slow. “It seemed like Apple was sending me a not-so-subtle message to upgrade,” she wrote in a piece entitled, Why Apple Wants to Bust Your iPhone.
According to Rampell, Apple is feeling the heat from Samsung, HTC and others, and is resorting to sabotaging older iPhones with a software update and force users to upgrade their hardware.
This is bullshit from every angle. The iOS7 upgrade isn’t obligatory, it’s voluntary, and pissing off customers isn’t a good way to keep them as customers. There’s no mention that Apple sold a record-smashing 33.8 million iPhones last quarter.
Truth is, Apple’s products are so far ahead of the curve, it’s a constant criticism leveled at the company: that it is a willing practitioner of planned obsolescence.
In the early 90s, I drove across the States in a clapped-out Mustang, from the East Coast to California. It was a leisurely drive. I was in my mid-20s and drifting.
I stayed for a stretch in a seedy motel on the Las Vegas strip, at one point sleeping one week for free in exchange for building a wall by the front entrance. I don’t know why the motel owner agreed to this. My roommate – a hitchhiker I’d picked up — and I had never built a wall before. We stretched the work out for a week. But as it grew higher, it became more unstable and we were evicted when it fell over in a shower of bricks.
The night before I’d met a French guy. He claimed to be ex-Foreign Legion. Short but muscular, he radiated fitness and strength. He told me about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Most of the injuries, he said, occurred in the week before the actual running of the bulls. People gather in the streets to drink all night and brave young men climb the lampposts to jump off, trusting the crowd will catch them. Sometimes they plunge right through the upstretched arms.
My roommate and I split up and I drove with the French guy to Death Valley. He claimed to know a remote cabin in the mountains above the Valley floor. It was a three-hour, 13-mile hike, he told me, but the cabin was full of food and we could stay as long as we liked.
Although it sounded a little fantastical, I parked the car off the highway. He advised me to hide it as best as possible – we didn’t want anyone breaking in.
As we hiked across the valley floor toward the distant mountains, he told me how he’d nearly been executed in South America. He was travelling alone in the jungle and was sleeping in the trees to stay safe from jaguars. One morning he woke to find himself covered in blood. There was sticky blood all over his body, from head to toe. At first he suspected that something had been killed in the tree above him, but then he realized it was his own blood. He had been attacked by vampire bats in the middle of the night and they’d drooled his own blood onto his skin.
Afraid of a rabies infection, he headed for the nearest settlement. But he crossed the border into a neighboring country and was locked up by the army, which was battling local rebels. In the cell, he started to exhibit the first symptoms of rabies. But he had more pressing troubles. The army accused him of being a rebel spy and threatened to execute him. They didn’t believe his cockamamie story of solo jungle hikes and vampire bats. It took days of beatings and interrogations – plus his advancing rabies — to convince them of his innocence.
We crossed the Valley floor and started to climb upwards, following a rocky dry river bed full of huge boulders. I was getting more and more nervous. The French guy was crazy! There was no cabin here. Free food and board? In Death Valley? What was I thinking? He was luring me off the road to kill me. He’d take my Mustang keys and disappear. No one knew where I was. Not a soul. The name of the place began to gnaw at me, ringing in my head like a crazy mantra: Death Valley, Death Valley, Death Valley!
When I was a kid, my friends and I hitchhiked everywhere. We hitchhiked to school most days. We hitchhiked all across the country for camping holidays. We’d just take sleeping bags – no tent – and bed down in open fields. This was Britain in the 1980s, which didn’t seem particularly dangerous. But like the US, the UK is high up on UNICEF’s ranking of countries for child abuse.
I have my own kids now, and the thought of them hitchhiking wherever they please seems crazy. I’d never allow it. But they take buses all over San Francisco, and I have no problem with them hailing a car using Uber or Lyft. Because they are using an app, they’re not getting into a car with a stranger.
Likewise, we’ve swapped our house with strangers several times (AirBnB – read on for my wife Traci’s account) and I regularly buy used goods from Craigslist and eBay.
These apps affirm my deeply held belief that most people are fundamentally decent.
I digress: back to Death Valley. I kept trying to get behind the French guy so that I could pick up a boulder and smash his skull in. But he took my falling back as a sign of tiredness and he’d wait up to help me.
I was getting desperate. Death Valley! Death Valley! And then there was the cabin. Sitting on flat near the river bed, just shy of the lip of the mountain. An old miner’s cabin built around the turn of the century. It had four cots and, as promised, it was full of dry and canned food left by previous visitors. Over the years, it had accumulated into quite a hoard. We stayed for a few days, exploring the abandoned mine and mountaintop, which had unbelievable views across Death Valley in one direction, and across the Nevada desert in another.
When we hiked back down to the car, it was just as we left it, except someone had used their finger to write a message in the dust on the back windshield: “Clean Me.”
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook bought four properties surrounding his house in Palo Alto, California. He reportedly spent a cool $30 million buying four properties surrounding his house, and is leasing them back to their former owners. Irony of ironies, he did it to protect his privacy.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, except Zuckerberg presides over the greatest intentional invasion of our privacy ever devised.
Actually, maybe that’s the NSA, but nonetheless, Facebook is built on the idea that our digital lives should be public. Facebook’s default mode is to expose as much information about you as possible. All your pictures, vacation plans, school graduation ceremonies and what products and services you “like,” which are mined by commercial interests to sell products and services back to you.
I discovered the dangers of unfettered social sharing while researching my upcoming book on Jonathan Ive and Apple’s industrial design department. Digging around in Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I found a LOT of personal information about Apple’s designers. Stuff they no doubt want to keep on the down low. These are people who are intensely private. They have very low public profiles. They intentionally keep their identities and jobs out of the public eye.
This is partly because of Apple’s draconian secrecy policies and partly to shield them from headhunters. But there’s also a large measure of just keeping their lives private. Apple’s twenty or so industrial designers are somewhat public figures, thanks to their amazing success as Apple’s primary innovators and the growing international fame of their boss. They don’t want their lives examined by a nosey snoop like me.
Some keep their Instagram feeds private, but a surprising number don’t. Some of the designers have registered Facebook and Instagram accounts under nicknames or pseudonyms. They weren’t too hard to find with a bit old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting.
Looking through their pictures — cyberstalking them — you can see their vacations, their houses, their cars and kids and spouses. You see weddings and nights out at clubs. Skiing adventures by helicopter and surfing excursions. Trips to London or Italy’s Amalfi coast. It’s all very enviable. In fact, the pictures look just like the staged photos Apple uses on the computers at the Apple Stores. They are the real version of the picture-perfect California life.
I won’t reveal the pictures or the Instagram feeds. Although their pictures and feeds are very much out there in public, the designers are entitled to their privacy. They’ve made attempts to keep them private — or semiprivate — and I won’t violate that. There’s no reason they should be forced to hide their feeds. There’s little harm in exposing your pictures to the public. It’s easy for friends and family — or the public even — to get a glimpse of your life and activities. There’s nothing very serious that’s exposed. I could figure out exactly where they live, I suppose, but there are probably easier ways.
But it shows that we should all be aware of what we’re exposing online. My kids are quite savvy about privacy. They are careful about what they post to Facebook and tend to keep pictures with their faces offline.
In 2011, even Zuckerberg’s puppy got into the act. Beast, a white mop of a sheepdog, has his own page on Facebook. He can be seen waiting patiently for steak bits, blending in with a shaggy rug and rushing about the yard. His “mom” (Zuck’s wife Priscilla) is often incidentally pictured – maybe over a morning cuddle or carrying him down the stairs. Since August, though, the four-legged wonder has not posted a single status update. And can you blame him? Even a dog with 1.6 million likes needs a little privacy once in awhile.
I came home from work to find my sons and their friends killing a prostitute with a baseball bat.
I was horrified. They were laughing their heads off.
But they were right and I was wrong. It was funny. They were just having some taboo fun. Their reaction was super healthy, and I’m not at all worried about what they were doing.
They weren’t supposed to get hold of my copy of Grand Theft Auto. I’d hidden it away; but not very well. They’re in their early teens, and too young, I felt, for the adult pleasures of the GTA franchise.
Not only are there prostitutes in the game. You can kill them. And killing them, for a kid, is a source of amazed amusement that you can do such things. It’s like finding dad’s Playboy’s under the bed, only worse. It’s naughty. Transgressive. I still kinda regret that they played it, but I am relieved by their reaction to it.
The fact that they were squealing with delight and laughing their heads off at the ability to do something so outrageous was a very clear and gratifying affirmation of their emerging humanity. I’d have been worried if they had been silently and grimly killing off the other characters.
A lady of the night from Grand Theft Auto. Fan art by CCPD.
Oddly, it’s the non-violent games that turn them into little monsters. They got Rock Band for Christmas, and they were soon attacking each other with the plastic instruments. One of my boys smashed his brother over the head with a guitar in frustration. Wii tennis has resulted in several controllers thrown against the wall. Candy Crush induces epic rages fits. My wife and I concluded that it’s true what say: video games make kids violent.
But it’s not the content of the games that morphs them into little rage monsters. It’s the mechanics of the game. They get frustrated when a sibling screws up a song, or they are killed before the end of a level.
It’s not blasting zombies’ heads off that makes them violent. It’s frustration with the game itself, the inability to complete a task or challenge.
They encounter these same frustrations in every aspect of their lives: with homework and classmates, playing soccer or being told to brush their teeth. Frustration and rage are a normal part of our makeup. I’m consumed by it whenever I drive to Safeway.
I believe that games are an important learning environment. Better that my kids try to deal with their rage while mashing buttons now than behind the wheel of a car in a few years.
As Rob Lefebvre reports in this week’s issue, there’s a new generation of games called “empathy games” designed to help us understand other people better and hopefully make us nicer to be around.
In a roundabout way, I think GTA has a similar effect. GTA’s not Shakespeare, but it incorporates elements of good literature and cinema – complex story-lines, character development, moral choices, atmosphere, and sometimes jaw-dropping beauty.
The moral choices are gleefully the wrong moral choices, but choices they are. My daughter, the eldest of the lot, is a great example of this. When she plays GTA, she drives within the lines and stops for red lights. She gets pleasure from following the rules, not breaking them.
GTA has much more to contribute than the gleeful killing of streetwalkers. It’s a sly and fascinating satire of America, courtesy of its Scottish developers, who are obviously both amused and appalled by this country. My kids are fans of Colbert and Breaking Bad, too. They get it.
Although he was a billionaire and a legendary jerk, Steve Jobs could be surprisingly accessible and even friendly.
He might take your family photo, dress up like Frankenstein for a haunted house or tell a group of interns that he spends his free time bonking his wife.
Here are some of my favorite stories and anecdotes about everyday encounters with Jobs.
After leaving my job at Apple, I dropped in for lunch one day. I was exiting the main building, Infinite Loop One, and just ahead of me was Steve Jobs, walking with the usual spring in his step that never seemed to go away even as he started looking more frail. Bumping into Steve was a surprisingly common occurrence for such a large company as Apple. Steve was heading towards a car parked next to the curb with its door open, waiting for him. If you want to see where Steve Jobs’s tombstone rests, take a look at this piece onsteve jobs tombstone.
A family was standing near the Apple sign outside the building, a common site for people to take photos on their pilgrimages to Apple. The father turned to Steve as he passed close by and asked, “Excuse me, sir, would you mind taking our photo?”
Steve paused for a moment as an iPhone was extended to him, realizing that they didn’t seem to know who he was. With a hint of enthusiasm, he said “Sure!” as he took the iPhone into his hands.
Steve took a great deal of care composing the photo, backing up a few steps several times, tapping the iPhone screen to lock focus, then said “Smile!” as he snapped the photo, grinning a little bit himself to encourage the family to follow suit.
He handed back the iPhone and they said “Thank you, sir” as Steve stepped into his car, closed the door and was driven away. The family looked at the photo that Steve had taken and all agreed that it looked great. Then the iPhone was pocketed and they were on their way.
Before I met the wife I had a girlfriend named Rebecca. Rebecca had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It was a rough time in her life and she was very depressed by it, even though chemotherapy was healing her over time.Rebecca was a big fan of Pixar films.[…]
I sent a letter to Steve Jobs telling him about Rebecca and her situation. I asked for an autograph for her, hoping that could be something positive for her and encourage some positivity. I never thought I would get a reply, but i thought it was worth a try.
A week later I receive a package in the mail. In this thick envelope was a letter from Steve Jobs speaking of his cancer fight and how he wished Rebecca a quick recovery.
Also in this envelope was six Pixar prints signed by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Mike Doctor, and Joe Ranft (a fellow cancer sufferer). Each of these men had written a letter to Rebecca wishing her well.
Jobs did not have to go to this kind of trouble, but he did anyway. Steve Jobs was not a man known for his public charity and many people think he was driven by selfishness and greed. But this act goes against that idea for me. This was most certainly a positive, selfless, and charitable act.
One of my friends did an internship at Apple. Apparently Apple has a day where the interns get to meet Steve Jobs (this was obviously a few years back) and ask him questions.
Two questions that were asked stuck in her mind:
1.“What do you wish for the most?”Steve Jobs:“I wish people would stop asking me stupid questions.”
Prior to his return to Apple, it was obvious that the company was in trouble. […] I wrote an impassioned email to Steve at Pixar, pleading with him to find something else to do with his time. “Please,” I implored him, “don’t come back to Apple, you’ll ruin it.”
At the time, I really thought Steve and Larry were just twisting the knife into an already struggling company. As I made my living on Macs, I wanted the company to survive and not be distracted by Steve and Larry’s games.
Shortly thereafter, Steve emailed me. He explained what he was trying to do, and that he was trying to save Apple.
And then he wrote the words I’ll never forget: “You may be right. But if I succeed, remember to look in the mirror and call yourself an asshole for me.”
Consider it done, Steve. I could not have been more mistaken.
In 1988, I was self-employed as a recruiter and had referred a number of candidates to Steve at NeXT Computer, which he subsequently hired. I had also worked at Sun Microsystems as a contract recruiter. In September of that year, Steve invited me to his offices on Deer Creek Road in Palo Alto for an informal interview. He was 45 minutes late. As soon as Steve led me into his office and closed the door, he turned and said, “You recruited for Sun and Sun hires shitty people.”
“Well,” I retorted, “You hired the ones Sun didn’t want.”
At that point, Steve cracked a big smile and exclaimed, “Touche!”
After that, we had a nice chat for about twenty minutes. During this time, a crowd of NeXT employees gathered and paced outside. When Steve opened the door to escort me out, he was mobbed like a celebrity, while I was shoved aside.
As I was about to exit the lobby, I heard Steve call out my name. I turned and saw Steve bending down and waving to me, childlike. I walked away thinking to myself, “That guy can be a real jerk, but he sure is charming.”
Growing up I was a huge Apple fan-boy (fine, still am.) The first NY Apple store in Soho opening was probably the coolest thing that happened to me between the ages 6 and 12. For a while I would spend almost every weekend there.
Every year for halloween I was a Mac, and I made a habit of shaving the Apple logo into my head to celebrate every OS launch.
My neighbor Brooke mentioned that Steve Jobs, busy as he is, always reads email sent to his public address.
I think I was around 10 or 12, and I sent a very enthusiastic and grammatically incorrect message including a picture of my shaved head [with an Apple logo in the back].
Apparently he forwarded it to the head of Public Relations, Katie [Cotton], and I got invited to the opening of the 5th Avenue Cube. I can never thank them enough. This was probably the high point of my childhood.
Jobs would regularly park his Mercedes in a handicap spot on Apple’s campus
[…] He almost ran me over. As I walked back from the campus fitness center, a silver Mercedes S-Class launched a wheel onto the sidewalk and nearly took me out. I whipped around and threw a dirty look at the driver. The door opened, and the driver spat an expletive at the curb as he exited.
I recognized the face immediately. It’s him, I thought. Oh God, he’s pissed. […] I kept walking. DO NOT ENGAGE, I thought. DO NOT MAKE EYE CONTACT. But I couldn’t help myself. He kept walking briskly behind me, staring at the ground, visibly irritated about his car and whatever made him come into the office.
After I looked back for the third or fourth time, he cracked a smile that said, This kid doesn’t even have the balls to talk to me. It was a week before Macworld New York. I took a deep breath and spoke.”Ready for the show?”
He looked up and smiled for real. “Yeah, we’ve got a lot of great stuff. It’s going to be fun.”
“Well, I grew up in New York. Say hi for me.”
Another smile. “OK.”
He walked past me and held the IL1 lobby door open. Steve Jobs. Holding the door for me. What?
That moment changed my life, and other former and current employees surely have moments like it. Whatever Steve was upset about that day was almost certainly more serious than anything I have faced in my career. Yet he still had the good sense to give me a smile and an act of courtesy. It taught me to never lose perspective and never forget who you’re dealing with, no matter what else is going on.
I was an intern and one day the head of the intern program gathered the almost 100 interns into the Town Hall auditorium in Infinite Loop 4 for a “surprise guest speaker” that wasn’t really much of a surprise: Steve Jobs.
The meeting had no agenda but I had a hunch that when Steve (everyone who has ever worked at Apple just calls him “Steve”) ended his remarks there would be a Q&A session.
[…] Steve got to about his 4th question from the audience and by this point almost every single intern had their hand up. [Steve pointed to me] I was nervous. “Steve, many years ago you left Apple to start NeXT. But recently you returned to Apple. Why did you come back to Apple?” […]
“When I was trying to decide whether to come back to Apple or not I struggled. I talked to a lot of people and got a lot of opinions. And then there I was, late one night, struggling with this and I called up a friend of mine at 2 a.m. I said, ‘should I come back, should I not?’ and the friend replied, ‘Steve, look. I don’t give a fuck about Apple. Just make up your mind’ and hung up. And it was in that moment that I realized I truly cared about Apple.”
[The friend Steve called was Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO]
As the conversation went: “I hear you’re not really one to give autographs, but I just gotta ask….will you sign my iPod? It’s fine if you don’t want to. I’m not normally one to even ask for autographs.”
Steve: *chuckling* “It’s quite alright. You heard that about me?? Well, I wouldn’t say that I don’t like giving autographs, I guess I was never comfortable with the idea solely taking credit for something, which is to me what an autograph might imply. To be honest, I think I’m the last person who should sign something. A writer signing a book I can understand, but I think if anybody within our company should sign something, it should be members from our R&D team and all the others responsible for product innovation. It’s unfortunate that they all can’t receive the same level recognition. But I suppose it’s easier this way though?… you would need a pretty big iPod to fit all those signatures”.
I wanted to share with you a memory of my friend Steve Jobs, a memory that in the days since his passing has come to represent how great of a guy he was, and how good he was to me.
I first met Steve in 2003, over the phone, when I cold-called him to tell him I was a devout fan of all things Apple and would love to be involved in whatever way I could with the company. I remember the call extremely well; me on my hotel room bed, fidgeting and doodling and circuitously explaining that all I could really explain was that I wanted to have a relationship. I got nervous at one point and started second guessing myself and my intentions for calling, to which Steve replied “don’t worry, I have a very good bullshit detector.” I found it very comfortable to be myself around him from that moment on.
The bullshit detector must have stayed silent because In the following months and years I was invited to help introduce products and software at several Macworld keynote addresses in San Francisco. I got to know him a bit in our time together on and off the stage. I remember Steve as being almost iridescent; one second he would be talking to you about “architecture” as it related to digital data flow, and then in a microsecond turn his head a different way and mention Bob Dylan or a killer sushi place and just be the biggest rock star on the planet.
in Spring of 2008, RIM (makers of the Blackberry) approached me about sponsoring my upcoming summer tour, and as I got closer to accepting the offer I knew I had to call Steve to give him the heads up. I explained to him that the money they offered would allow for a better stage design and an all around higher level of production. I also told him that the contract with Blackberry would mean using their products exclusively. He thanked me for calling him, praised the people at Blackberry and told me he would send me an iPhone to at least play with on the bus.
I accepted the offer with Blackberry, and in the months leading up to the July 29th release date, the iPhone became the most desired item on the planet. Everybody wanted one, and nobody had yet to see one in person. It was mythical. That day I was playing an ampitheatre in Indianapolis, and sometime in the afternoon the production office got a call over the radio that a sales associate from the local Apple Store was standing at the outermost gate of the venue with something addressed to me. A few minutes later someone knocked on my dressing room door and handed me an Apple Store bag. Inside was an iPhone, and taped to it was a card; it belonged to Steve Jobs, CEO, 1 Inifinite Loop, Cupertino, California. Handwritten on the backside of the card was one word: “Enjoy!”
Just the greatest thing.
I used to think that when you died, everything you ever learned and amassed along the way in your life just stopped existing, all of it returned into the universe and repurposed for something else completely. Steve’s passing made me realize that can’t be true, because every bit of energy and intellect he spent his life to collect is still here with us, as vital as it was when it was with him. I can’t think of a better way to measure a life well lived.
I once forwarded an email from Steve Jobs to a friend, adding a snarky comment. Steve’s reply informed me that I’d replied, not forwarded. Steve was extremely cool about it. He said he’d been emailed FAR worse things accidentally. And many not so accidentally…
Here in Palo Alto, Steve Jobs isn’t just an icon, he’s also the guy who lives down the street.
I first met Steve years ago at a backyard pool party. I was so flummoxed by the off chance I was breathing in his DNA, I could barely say a word. I am sure I made a winning first impression as I stumbled over my own name when we were introduced.
I watched as he swam in the pool with his son. He seemed like a regular guy, a good dad having fun with his kids.
The next time I met him was when our children attended school together. He sat in on back-to-school night listening to the teacher drone on about the value of education (wait, isn’t he one of those high-tech gods who didn’t even graduate from college?) while the rest of us sat around pretending having Steve Jobs in the room was totally normal.[…]
It was at Halloween not long after when I realized he actually knew my name (yes, my name!). He and his wife put on a darn scary haunted house […]. He was sitting on the walkway, dressed like Frankenstein. As I walked by with my son, Steve smiled and said, “Hi Lisen.” My son thought I was the coolest mom in town when he realized The Steve Jobs knew me. Thanks for the coolness points, Steve.
From then on, when I saw him holding his executive meetings in our neighborhood, I didn’t hesitate to smile and say hi. Steve always returned the favor, proving he may be a genius, but he is also a good neighbor.
In time, things changed. The walks were less frequent, the gait slower, the smile not so ready. Earlier this year when I saw Steve and his wife walking down our street holding hands, I knew something was different. Now, so does the rest of the world.
While Newsweek and the Wall Street Journal and CNET continue to drone on about the impact of the Steve Jobs era, I won’t be pondering the MacBook Air I write on or the iPhone I talk on. I will think of the day I saw him at his son’s high school graduation. There Steve stood, tears streaming down his cheeks, his smile wide and proud, as his son received his diploma and walked on into his own bright future leaving behind a good man and a good father who can be sure of the rightness of this, perhaps his most important legacy of all.
I remember being at a talk he gave shortly after returning in 1997 as Interim CEO. A bunch of us employees (I was at ATG at the time) were in Town Hall in Building 4 at Infinite Loop to hear him, and he was fired up. Talked a lot about how Apple was going to completely turn things around and become great.
It was a tough time at Apple — we were trading below book value on the market — our enterprise value was actually less than our cash on hand. And the rumors were everywhere that we were going to be acquired by Sun. Someone in the audience asked him about Michael Dell’s suggestion in the press a few days previous that Apple should just shut down and return the cash to shareholders, and as I recall, Steve’s response was: “Fuck Michael Dell.” Good god, what a message from a CEO!
He followed it up by admitting that the stock price was terrible (it was under $10, I think — pretty sure it was under $2 split-adjusted), and that what they were going to do was reissue everyone’s options on the low price, but with a new 3 year vest.
He said, explicitly: “If you want to make Apple great again, let’s get going. If not, get the hell out.” I think it’s not an overstatement to say that just about everyone in the room loved him at that point, would have followed him off a cliff if that’s where he led.
I was at a Bjork concert at Shoreline back in 2007 when I met an engineer at Apple called Skip Haughay. We stayed in touch and I visited him a few weeks later at the Apple campus, the day before iPhone launched. There was an incredible buzz around Campus and we saw Jobs walking tall with his iPhone. Skip ushered me out to the parking lot, said “I could be fired for this” and showed me the iPhone the day before it launched.
That evening, Skip calls me to say that “My date has cancelled, do you want to join me at the iPhone launch party?” It still ranks as maybe the dumbest question anyone has asked me in my life… and this was only a few weeks after we met. I raced to get ready and joined him at the exploratorium in San Francisco.
The big surprise was that Apple was so secretive, that most employees hadn’t seen or touched an iPhone themselves (Skip was one of the few entrusted with one). Since I’d bought an iPhone earlier in the day, many of the employees wanted to touch and play with mine. So I spent much of the evening giving iPhone demonstrations to other Apple employees!
Then there was Steve Jobs on the stage. The only private speech I’ve ever seen him give. He thanked all the Apple employees and particularly the partners and families of all the people working at Apple. He was gracious to a fault… it sounded like he’d matured a great deal from when I’d read Insanely Great. He was mesmerizing and quite clearly he cared, not just about the product but also the people.
I saw Jony Ive and spoke with him briefly. Then I also saw Steve Jobs. Skip was hesitant to say hello, so I just went up to him myself. Steve responded with a “I’ll talk to you in a moment” and then shortly thereafter walked off. It might’ve been a casual brush off but honestly I wasn’t bothered at all. Skip just laughed at the whole thing. It was one of the most amazing evenings of my life.
I’ll never forget the passion, ingenuity and spirit of the group that evening. All of which was so wonderfully embodied in Skip. The two of us stayed friends for many years afterwards. Just recently, my girlfriend and I visited him in Morgan Hill on his farm. Skip said it was “The Farm that Jobs built.” He was in his element with nature and the farm animals. I was delighted to see him so happy.
Skip passed away himself only a month ago (https://www.mercurynews.com/crime…). So for it to be followed by Steve Jobs just compounded the tragedy. While Steve Jobs was an icon, I will most remember Skip as my friend.
My wife and me were walking in downtown Palo Alto one afternoon when I notice a man walking towards us. I immediately recognized Jobs and nudged my wife. Nobody noticed him as we walked down the pavement The year must have been 2003 and I had just ordered a pair of Keen sandals off the Keen website. Back then Keen was not well known and you hardly saw anybody wearing Keens.
As Jobs got closer, there was moment when he looked at my feet and noticed the Keens I was wearing. He was wearing an identical pair. He looked up at me and gave me a smile and a nod. He then walked passed us and stopped to take a look at the Apple store from the other side of the street. A minute later he turned and continued on his way.
Not much of a story at all…..but something I will never forget.
I had left a company called Taligent with a few other folks in the mid-90s and we had been cooped up in a small office in a strip mall in Los Altos working on the idea we thought was pretty cool.
The product was a browser with built-in multimedia/animation support so you could build the sort of full-screen animated experiences you had on CD-ROMs (except with markup) and transmit it across the web. This was in the days when HTML barely had support for gifs and way before Flash, so we thought it could open up a lot of new possibilities.
Once we had a decent running demo I started showing it around. At some point I had the notion that I’d like to get feedback from Jobs. I had been a big fan — one of my first applications in college was on an Apple IIe and my first consulting job ever was working on the C++ compiler at Apple in the 80’s.
He was at NeXT by this time. So I wrote him there and mentioned what we’d been working on and asked for advice. To my surprise I got a note back from his secretary saying Steve wanted to meet.
I showed up at the NeXT offices a week later and was shown to a meeting room down the hall from his office. I set up my demo and waited. And waited. He walked in 1/2 hour late, put his feet up on the table and asked me what I had. I introduced myself and mentioned that a couple of the engineers were ex-Apple people. Then I ran through the demo, stopped, and asked him what he thought.
For the next half an hour he went on to rant pretty much non-stop… about the arrogance of Apple (!!!), the quality of their products, and anything unsavory you could think of. There were a lot of ‘you Apple people’ in there. I tried to break in and mention that we weren’t really related to Apple (except the demo was running on a Mac Powerbook) but there was no stopping him.
“Boy, what a dick,” I remember thinking. It went on and on.
At some point a secretary stuck her head in and said he had a call. So I figured that was that. Instead he asked if I could stick around. I remember hesitating for a second, thinking if I really wanted to hear more of that abuse. But for some reason I said yes. He walked out and I sat there. And sat. And sat. For a good 30-45 minutes, I sat there and got more and more steamed about this predicament. Do I pack up and walk out or do I wait and hear more about how Apple sucks?
Then he comes back in. I was sitting down. He gets in front of the whiteboard and starts drawing notes. For the next I-don’t-know-how-long he mapped out precisely how the product could be rolled out, the strategy for taking it to market, how it should be positioned, what other parts would be needed to fill in the gaps, all the way down to the features that should be taken out or added. It was the most amazing, useful, spot-on, and entertaining display of product management erudition I’d ever seen. He completely understood the product, the space, and what it could be used for.
I remember asking him if he wanted a job :-)
We both laughed at that. I remember him saying some nice things about the idea and the product itself. There was no trace of the nasty anti-Apple bile left. I thanked him profusely and he asked me to stay in touch. I walked out with my head still buzzing in the clouds.
As it happened it turned out my ex-Apple cohorts weren’t too happy with my having gone over to see him either. There were choice words about Jobs, so the feelings seemed to be mutual.
A few months later word came that Apple was acquiring NeXT and the rest is history.
My cohorts went on to out-vote me and eventually the company got sold to Microsoft. The product was never released publicly and they all went to work up at Redmond.
I still remember that meeting with Jobs to this day.
A few years ago I was working on another software product that I thought could benefit from his advice. By then he had been back at Apple and the iPhone was a huge hit. I kept holding off until the product was a bit more solid before sending him a note. Then I read that he was sick and a little while later he passed away.
I really wished I could have shown him the new product. I imagine he would have made me wait around for a long while then taken me on a rant on how great Apple products are :-)
And then he would have no doubt gotten up and shown, once again, exactly how he would have done it.
Prior to his return to Apple, it was obvious that the company was in trouble. Larry Ellison had floated the idea of a hostile takeover of the company, but it seemed to some of us Apple watchers that then-CEO Gil Amelio’s turnaround plan might work.
I wrote an impassioned email to Steve at Pixar, pleading with him to find something else to do with his time. “Please,” I implored him, “don’t come back to Apple, you’ll ruin it.”
At the time, I really thought Steve and Larry were just twisting the knife into an already struggling company. As I made my living on Macs, I wanted the company to survive and not be distracted by Steve and Larry’s games.
Shortly thereafter, Steve emailed me. He explained what he was trying to do, and that he was trying to save Apple.
And then he wrote the words I’ll never forget:
“You may be right. But if I succeed, remember to look in the mirror and call yourself an asshole for me.”
Consider it done, Steve. I could not have been more mistaken.
This was in June ’10 just a few days before Apple’s WWDC. I was working late out of a cafe and was testing one of my apps on the iPad. This was in India and at that time the iPad hadn’t been officially launched here, so was something that would definitely catch someone’s eye.
There was this girl sitting on the next table and was pretty curious about this new thing, moments later she stopped by and we had a nice chat about how cool the iPad is, and was pretty impressed that I could actually write an app that could run on it.
I went home and before going to bed wrote a short email to Steve about how an iPad got a girl interested in me and almost forgot about it until…. Days later, it was his WWDC keynote and I was following a few live blogs that night as I always do (I was GMT +5:30), then suddenly I saw something that was very familiar, it was my email that Steve displayed on the huge screen behind him. He said “It is magical, I know it because I got this email: I was sitting in a cafe with my iPad, and it got a girl interested in me!.” “So there’s proof.”
About five years ago, one evening, just as I had sat down with my wife and daughter at Saravana Bhavan, a South Indian vegetarian restaurant in Sunnyvale, in walked Steve Jobs with his wife and son. They sat down on the table behind us. It was a busy school night and the place was packed with loud kids and hungry Indians vying for attention of the woefully inadequate staff. Like the clientele at this hangout – mostly Indian techies looking for cheap but authentic food – the staff is also authentic Indian: many speak limited English only and are not aware of the rich and famous of the Silicon Valley.
So, it was with great amusement, we watched Steve raise his hand several times to attract the attention of the waiter, who summarily ignored him. As the only white guy in the restaurant, we thought he would be instantly recognized and served with special attention. Instead, he had the worst table in the house. A bored waiter passed plastic menu cards at his family without giving a second glance. Eventually, he did get served with the mass efficiency of an overworked staff. And, no one bothered him during his dinner either.
My wife and I observed in awe as Steve and his family enjoyed a quiet meal in the riotous, inexpensive place in the heart of Silicon Valley. It dawned on us that no one in the restaurant had recognized Steve in his low-key attire and stubble. At the end, when no one came to his table to present the check, Steve rose up, dropped a few cash notes on the table and walked out, as the server wiped his table.
Just then, the manager walked by, and I asked him, “Did you know that was Steve Jobs?” He smiled and gave me the Indian head shake – a cross between yes and no. To this day, I don’t know what he meant.
I was an intern at Apple in 2004. I saw Steve Jobs in IL3, on the second level. He was just walking away from a couch. I said hello, folded my hands and told him how much I admired him. I then told him how much I learn at Apple, and how I would love to learn from him. I said to him – “Teach me, teach me.”
At a recent Self-Realization Fellowship Sunday morning service, Brother Bhumananda, a Self Realization Fellowship minister, said that a few years back the phone rang up at Self Realization headquarters (in Los Angeles).
The caller said, “This is Steve Jobs.” The person answering initially thought it was a prank call, but it really was Steve Jobs calling personally to say, “I want to get permission to put ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ on iTunes. It’s my favorite book!”
Steve Jobs said that he had read ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’ over 30 times. It was the first audiobook to become available on iTunes.
A bunch of us were in the old screening room in Point Richmond with Steve early the morning of the Pixar IPO. We were watching the financial news for that PIXR ticker to go by. So we witnessed the moment that Steve became a billionaire. Quite the payoff for $50 million and almost a decade of hanging in there.
He didn’t say anything. No fist pumps or whoops. But I’ve never seen him happier. That was one beaming smile.
I met Steve Jobs randomly while working as an intern at Apple in the summer of 2010. I had stepped into an elevator on the main Apple campus when, just as the door was closing, Steve Jobs strolled in. He saw that I had an intern badge on, and asked me what I was working on over the summer.
When he asked me this question, I wasn’t sure what to say. Should I tell him what I was working on, and risk getting in trouble for disclosing what I was working on (as we had been instructed not to do during orientation), or should I just tell him that I wasn’t allowed to tell him?
I went with the latter, telling him, “Sorry, but I’m not supposed to tell you.” Steve flashed a smile, chuckled a little, and stepped out of the elevator.
This story was told to me by the not too bright guy who used to run the Palo Alto retail store at Helio (Helio wireless carrier), a now-extinct Korean smartphone company that combined a music player with a phone. This was in 2007, right when the first iPhone came out. Given that their store had opened directly across the street from the existing Palo Alto Apple Store on University Avenue, a lot of people were curious as to what Helio did and how their product compared to the iPhone. One day the manager noticed a guy wearing a black turtleneck, blue jeans, and glasses staring at the “Helio: don’t call it a phone” window display outside the store for quite some time. When the manager came out to ask if he could help him or give him a demo of the product inside, the guy in the black turtleneck stuck his head in and peered into the store, but deliberately did not set his foot inside. It took some time, but finally he responded to the manager by shaking his head and saying the words “You guys just don’t get it, do you…” and continued walking down the street. The manager had no idea who this guy was and thought nothing of it.
Two weeks later, the same manager was inside the store giving a demo of the amazing Helio smartphone to some prospective customers when he was interrupted by someone at the door. It was the same guy in the black turtleneck and blue jeans. “You guys STILL just don’t get it, do you???” the guy said in an elevated voice from the entrance of the store. Then before the manager could respond, the guy was gone again.
The manager was visibly annoyed and said to his customers “Who is this guy and who the hell does he think he is???”
“That’s the founder of Apple,” replied the customers.
Suffice to say, Helio moved out of the retail store only a year later, replaced by a much more popular Lululemon store.
Whole Foods in Palo Alto. Image courtesy of Whole Foods.
It was hard not to run into Steve Jobs if you spent anytime in downtown Palo Alto. While I never had a conversation with him, my chance encounters reminded me just how human this innovator was.
Once, I drove up behind his car on the way to Whole Foods. (pretty easy to spot his car, especially with his “license plate.”) As I drove up behind him, I could see the gas cap dangling from the side of his car. I tried to grab my phone to snap a picture before deciding that stalking him as he went into Whole Foods would be bad. Chalked it up to a mad genius sometimes forgetting the small stuff.
A month later, driving by his house, glanced to see his car parked out front and the GAS CAP DANGLING AGAIN.
Loved it. Not because it had some profound effect on me, but just because it showed me we’re all human. Even the brightest of us all.
About ’82 or ’83, I and 5 others, including Steve, had dinner together in NYC. The now legendary, late Jay Chiat, then CEO of Chiat-Day Advertising, invited his client Steve, and his other client, Pioneer Electronics CEO Jack Doyle and his wife Ann, Pioneer’s ad manger, and me, Pioneer Senior VP Marketing and Product Development, to dinner.
Never mind the fact that much older Jay and Jack had accomplished so much more at that point than had Steve, he dominated the conversation, brusquely brushing aside anything he didn’t agree with, which, as I recall, was most everything said by the rest of us.
Dinner was over and while we waited for desert, Ann lit up a cigarette (remember this was the early ’80’s in NYC), holding it away and blowing smoke away from the rest of us at the table. Steve, who was seated next to Ann, gave no indication that this bothered him. He simply went on talking animatedly as he had all dinner.
At one point Ann put her lit cigarette in an ashtray the opposite side of Steve. He never looked at it but must have seen her put it down because without so much as a glance toward her or the cigarette, without breaking from whatever topic he was currently holding forth on at that moment, he reached across her, picked the cigarette up from the ashtray, and dropped it in her half full water glass.
I can still see the stunned looks on everyone’s face except Steve who continued to educate the rest of us on . . . I have no idea.
No doubt Steve was a genius given all he and Apple, under his direction, later accomplished. However based on what I’ve heard about him personally, and witnessed that night, he’s not a person I would care to spend time with. One dinner was more than enough.
I bumped into Steve at the Palo Alto Whole Foods near both of our homes. He was in front of me in line paying for his groceries. It was the express checkout and he was wearing his traditional black turtle-neck. This was back in the early 2000s.
Here was a very wealthy, smart guy arguing with the cashier about what the correct change was for his purchase. He was demanding that he got another quarter ($0.25) for his change. This discussion went on for several minutes and held up the line so much that everyone behind him (including us) were getting annoyed.I guess Steve had to be right. The cashier gave him a quarter and he walked away.
In the early 1980s, Steve used to eat lunch at “The Good Earth,” the now-defunct Cupertino restaurant where I waitressed when I was sixteen.
I remember this nerdy young guy who always ordered the Good Earth tostada, served in a whole-wheat tortilla and topped with sprouts. He smiled shyly at me when he asked for more Good Earth tea and drank gallons of the stuff.
Steve always sat alone, devouring books and manuals way beyond my limited teenage understanding along with his food. […]
I called my mom the moment I heard Steve Jobs had died. She was sitting in front of her iMac, from which she has a view of the Cupertino Valley, The Apple headquarters nestled in the middle like a brilliant white palace. She was crying.”There was a rainbow one day,” she sobbed, “that ended right on top of Apple.”
My mom snapped a photograph. “I wanted to send it to him!” she added. “I meant to send it to him. And now,” she stopped suddenly, struggling for control. “Now, he’s dead.”
I miss Steve Jobs. He made tech reporting a lot of fun. The world of technology is dull without him.
Larry Ellison skips his own conference to watch the America’s Cup? Boring! Steve Ballmer steps down from Microsoft without taking anyone with him? Yawn.
Life was never so dull when Jobs was around. He said crazy stuff. He was rude to people. He insulted competitors. He was unpredictable.
Jobs was always up to something. He was either trying to destroy historical landmarks (like his derelict Woodside mansion) or put them up (Apple’s spaceship campus). He could turn a kill-me-now planning meeting at Cupertino city council into something fascinating.
His public presentations were always interesting. I went to almost every one from the late 1990s onwards. I’d be lying if I said they were all great. Some were routine, although it was always amusing to see him get lathered up about small things, like sending email postcards from iPhoto. But they were often fascinating, and some felt important. His iPhone introduction in 2007 felt like history being made and I was thrilled to see it firsthand.
It’s been two years since he died and I miss the excitement he brought to tech. There was always a lot of drama around Jobs. Illegitimate children. Secret liver transplants. Coffeeshop dates with Google’s Eric Schmidt. Parking in handicapped spots.
People talked about him, and not always in a good way. He was constantly criticized. For most of his career, almost everything he did was doomed to failure by the press: the iMac, Apple retail stores, the iPod, the iPhone. Each was greeted with withering, dismissive criticism. It was only after the iPhone became a hit, around 2009, that the world woke up to his genius. He’s lionized now, of course, but for most of his life he was a loser (remember the NeXT years?) or a slick marketer who got lucky.
The last couple of years of his life, as Apple rode the iPhone and iPad explosion, Jobs tended to get all the credit. Now that he’s gone, Apple is doomed without him.
I’m not worried about the future of Apple. It’s still too early to tell, but by all outside measures the company is doing just fine. Nine million iPhones sold in a single weekend is not a sign of a company in trouble.
There’s been only one major executive departure –Scott Forstall, the man in charge of iOS– and few have mourned his passing. The iPhone’s Touch ID has the potential to be as revolutionary as iTunes or the App Store were when they launched. And there are signs of some very exciting products being cooked up in the design lab, especially a wearable iWatch that measures your biometrics. And I’d love to see an Apple TV that brought some smarts to the tube.
This past year I’ve been working on a book about Apple’s top designer, Sir Jonathan Ive. Ive is a genius and he’s responsible for a lot more of Apple’s success than he’s been given credit for. But the best stories belong to Jobs. He’s by turns fascinating, funny or horrifying. He was colorful. A huge character.
This issue of our Newsstand magazine collects a few stories about Jobs. As you’ll see, he wasn’t always a jerk. Some of these anecdotes show a rather kind and thoughtful man. Some portray a runaway monster. But none of them are boring.
Two days after getting my brand new iPhone 5s, the fingerprint scanner stopped working. I couldn’t believe it. The iPhone wouldn’t recognize my thumb print, no matter how I caressed its button. I tried training the system to recognize my other thumb and my two index fingers. That didn’t work either. The new iPhone’s marquee feature was already a write-off. “Just works,” my ass.
The iPhone’s hottest new feature is as reliable as my cat.
Then the news broke that the Chaos Computer Club in Germany announced that it had “hacked” the sensor with a photo of a fingerprint. At first glance, this story looked really bad. Some German anarchist coders had used a slight of hand to crack a “foolproof” biometrics system with a simple picture? Before the phone flew into our eager hands, everyone imagined that more elaborate methods would be needed to fool Touch ID, like hacking someone’s finger off. But a simple picture? It was the biggest story of the weekend: “Apple’s Touch ID hacked in less than 48 hours.”
But turns out the “hack” — which is more correctly called a “spoof” — was anything but simple. It was a multi-step process that required considerable skill, specialist equipment and almost 30 hours of hard work.
Firstly, a clear, un-smeared fingerprint has to be found. This looks easy on CSI, but is tricky in real life. The fingerprint has to be “lifted” using standard crime scene techniques: cyanoacrylate fumes, fingerprint powder and fingerprint tape. Not stuff you’re likely to have on hand, in other words.
The lifted print is photographed at very high resolution (~2,400 dpi) and cleaned up in software. It’s printed on transparent sheet at 1,200 dpi using a laser printer with the toner settings turned way up, to ensure the maximum amount of toner is deposited. This creates a mold. Liquid latex or wood glue is poured into the mold and carefully peeled off when it has cured. The hacker breathes onto the mold to make it warm and moist and then presses it against the sensor. This method is well-known in the biometrics world and has a long history of fooling many other fingerprint sensors on the market.
So should you be worried? Not at all. On one hand, Touch ID will *not* protect your iPhone against a determined hacker. If a crook has the time and resources to target you, steal your phone, lift your fingerprints and create phonies, the fingerprint sensor will not prevent them from gaining entry.
But the average opportunist who finds your iPhone on the bus? Rest assured, your phone is safe.
As for my non-functioning sensor, I just retrained the system. The problem was my dry, scaly hands. If all journalists have thick skins, mine is really something else. (When my hands get really bad, a steroid cream thins it down and curbs cracking and bleeding.) I’d been using the cream and my hands looked like Heidi Klum’s when I first got the phone. But over the weekend my hands dried out like SpongeBob in Sandy’s dome. By Sunday, the sensor wouldn’t recognize any of my fingers or thumbs. I tried licking them and moisturizing my thumb, to no avail. So I deleted the five finger/thumbprints I’d trained the system on and started again. No problem! Touch ID now works flawlessly.
I just have to keep the moisturizer handy if I want to unlock my digital life.
Talk show host Conan O’Brien asked comedian Louis C.K. why his his kids won’t be getting “phones with the apps.” Louis C.K explains — pretty convincingly — why smartphones are “toxic” and bad for your soul. It’s pretty funny.
The gold iPhone 5s is in very short supply. Apple has already sold out, and is unlikely to get them in volume for weeks to come. They are hard to come by. Many of Apple’s flagship stores received only a few units while many stores had none.
The rarity is reflected on eBay. there are a handful of gold iPhones for sale, ranging from $1,6 One gold iPhone 5s on sale is priced at a whopping $1,800 on eBay. Another is a tad cheaper at $1,699.
Jony Ive with Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.
With the launch of two new iPhones, Apple’s top designer Jonathan Ive granted very rare back-to-back interviews with USA Today and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Having read everything he’s ever said in preparation for my book about him (due mid-November), I recognized the usual Jony Ive talking points; the striving for simplicity, the importance of caring, and so on.
But there are a couple of paragraphs in the USA Today that especially gave me a strong sense of Deja vu.
When I was a kid, my dad had a book of record covers called “The Album Cover Album.” It was a big, glossy coffee table book of the classic LP covers from the 50s to the 70s.
My brothers and I spent hours copying the trippy Grateful Dead covers by artist Rick Griffin or making paper models of the San Francisco Victorians on Jefferson Airplane’s “After Bathing at Baxter’s.”
Growing up in Britain in the 70s, at the height of Two Tone and punk, everyone was music mad. Music was everywhere. It determined how we dressed (as punks), where we went (punk concerts) and who our friends were (other punks). Culture rotated around music.
These days, culture is defined not by music, but technology. The bull’s-eye logo of The Who has been replaced by the Angry Birds icon. The cover of “London Calling” is the cosmic wallpaper on your iPhone.
Apple’s iOS 7 is a big step forward in that evolution. Gone forever are the vestiges of interfaces of old; the skeuomorphic references to desktops, trashcans, leather and wood. iOS 7 is another step towards interfaces of the future. And with 500 million almost-overnight downloads, it’s going to be everywhere.
For me, one of the most interesting things about iOS 7 will be watching it bleed out into the wider culture. Just as the iPod launched a million gadgets in white plastic, iOS 7 will inspire countless website redesigns and scores of apps with minimalist interfaces. We’ll see lots more of that fashionably slim Helvetica Neue font and transparent tickers on TV shows.
Earlier this year I talked to Professor Andrew Hargadon, a design and innovation professor at University of California at Davis. Hargadon told me that when the iPod came out, it showed everyone what a good MP3 player should look like. Likewise with the iPhone. Everyone hated their cell phones before the iPhone. Not any more.
“Nowadays, we expect many things to have better designs,” he told me. “Because of Apple, we got to compare crappy portable computers versus really nice ones, crappy phones versus really nice ones. We saw a before-and-after effect. Not over a generation, but within a few years. Suddenly 600 million people had a phone that put to shame the phone they used to have. That is a design education at work within our culture.”
I’m hoping that iOS 7 will also be a design education. I’m hoping it’ll inspire new DVR menus and the telemetrics system in my car. I’m hoping it’ll inspire my kids to make paper models of their favorite app icons.
They’re already fans of The Clash.
Leander’s new book about Jony Ive and the Apple design studio is out in November.
“Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products” is available for pre-order on Amazon.
Behind the scenes, it’s been a long time coming, but welcome to the first issue of Cult of Mac Magazine!
Cult of Mac Magazine is a weekly news magazine devoted to the world of Apple. Every Saturday, we’ll bring you the best of what the Cult of Mac blog does on the Web, in an iPad-friendly format.
Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner has been welcomed as a “major step forward” by Biometrics expert Philip Smith, whose company pioneered the technology a decade ago.
“It’s a huge milestone in bringing fingerprint-based biometrics to the mainstream,” he said. “I’m thrilled to see this.”
Spot the difference. Some ideas are good enough to use twice.
Sir Jonathan Ive likes to recycle good ideas, as the Counternotions blog notes with the image above. The “Blue Dalmatian” iMac from 2001 is “separated at birth” from the brand new iPhone 5c.
Likewise, Jony Ive wanted the original iPhone to be a glass-and-metal sandwich with the antenna running around the middle. But his design and engineering teams couldn’t get the electronics to work. Everything was too new and untested. The design was shelved until things could be made to work, and it was reborn four years later as the iPhone 4.
A new European patent reveals how a fingerprint Home Button in the iPhone will likely work.
A newly discovered Apple patent reveals how the iPhone’s redesigned Home button will work as a fingerprint scanner.
It’s widely rumored the iPhone 5S will include a fingerprint scanner built into the Home button. But putting a fingerprint scanner into the Home button presents Apple with a problem. The Home button is used as the primary navigation device. Pressing the Home button quits apps and returns the user to the Home screen. If the fingerprint Home button is used as an authentication device, to conduct a secure online purchase say, the user needs to avoid accidentally pressing it. The last thing they want is to quit the browser and be returned to the Home screen.
The solution is a capacitive ring built around the Home button that detects the user’s finger without a button press.
This article first appeared in Cult of Mac’s weekly Newsstand magazine. Check it out here.
Apple takes color very seriously. You might say the Cupertino company is obsessed with it. Sir Jonathan Ive, the head of industrial design, is most famous for his restrained approach to color.
After the first iPod in 2001, most of Apple’s products come in plain colors: black, white or silvery aluminum. But behind the scenes, his design department has long created prototypes in a dizzying array of hues, including hot pink. Some prototypes are mocked up in up to 64 different shades.
“You can imagine a Crayola box with 64 colors in it,” Gautum Baksi, a former Apple engineer who worked closely with Jony Ive’s industrial design group (IDg), told Cult of Mac. “They’ll go through the gamut of making prototypes of all 64 to iterate until they find the ones that they want.”
Welcome to Cult of Mac Magazine: a weekly newsmagazine devoted to the world of Apple. Every Saturday, we’ll bring you the best of what the Cult of Mac blog does on the Web, in an iPad-friendly format.
But there’s a twist.
Cult of Mac Magazine is the first news magazine devoted to the world of Apple technology. It’s like a Sunday newspaper magazine, but focused on Macs, iPhones and iPads and the people behind the news.
We’ll be doing a lot of original, long-form journalism. The world of technology is changing at a breathtaking pace. We’re in the middle of one of the biggest technology shifts ever; from desktop to mobile. Apple, of course, is at the very heart of it.
To help you with this change, we’ll have special editions devoted to different topics, from iOS gaming to cooking with an iPad. These special editions will be a mix of reported features, product reviews, app roundups and killer how-tos.
We’ll have new weekly features, like our “Ask a Genius” column, in which a genuine Apple Genius answers your thorniest technical questions.
We think a weekly iPad magazine is a great way to package and organize the stuff we are publishing every day on the website.
With news about Apple breaking 24 hours a day, it’s easy to miss stories on the web and hard to find something once it’s cycled down the site’s front page.
There are several forces at work that make it a great time to be publishing a blog-like magazine. The iPad is a reading machine. We’re already seeing tens of millions of page views in apps like Flipboard and Zite that syndicate our content. The web is good for breaking news or brief product reviews. The iPad is better for deep dives that explore a subject in depth.
We’ll be publishing four issues a month for a $1.99 monthly subscription. We think it’s going to be great. We’d love for you to check it out.
Want proof that Scott Forstall blocked Jony Ive’s vision for iOS? Here’s an early prototype for the iPhone, made in 2005 by Jony Ive’s industrial design lab. On the back it says “iPod” because it was based in the design of the old aluminum iPod Mini. Remember that dinosaur? But check out the icons on screen. Look familiar? The icons on the prototype’s screen look just like iOS 7!
Apple’s Find My iPhone led San Francisco police on a 90MPH car chase last night which ultimately led to the arrest of three suspected armed robbers.
My normally sleepy neighborhood in San Francisco has been plagued recently with a string of violent and scary armed street robberies.
For the last week or so, a gang of violent perps have been robbing people of gadgets like their iPhones at gunpoint. But last night, an iPhone hit them back.
Actor Ashton Kutcher tweeted out this photo from Sundance, where his new JOBS biopic is premiering. It’s a montage of Kutcher and the iconic picture of the older Steve Jobs. It’s an uncanny picture.
MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis just announced the Replicator X2 at CES, a more advanced 3D printer that can make 2-color models from ABS plastic.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – MakerBot just announced the Replicator 2X, an advanced 3D printer that’s can print complex 2-color models and is optimized for ABS plastic.
In addition, MakerBot released a printer API and expects third-party software makers to create software for the iPhone and iPad to run its printers.
“I expect we’ll be building the moon base with them,” said Bre Pettis, MakerBot CEO after introducing the Replicator 2X to a scrum of press. “That’s where it’s going.”
Marware's director of marketing, Ronnie Khadaran shows off the MicroShell Folio for iPad mini.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – Poor Ronnie Khadaran.
It’s the first day of CES, and already visitors are destroying his booth. They keep ripping the display items from their stands. Instead of talking up his company’s new products, Marware’s director of marketing is busy trying to stop CES showgoers from destroying his booth.
One of the new items on display is Marware’s MicroShell Folio, a $35 hard plastic shell with a magnetic cover that doubles as a stand.
It shares the same name as an earlier product, but is a better design. I got a chance to play around with one on the show floor, and thought it was a nice, relatively inexpensive case for the iPad mini.
LAS VEGAS, CES 2013 – The biggest problem I have with my iPad is the speaker volume. Every time I try to watch a movie or TV show, I have to cup my hand around the bottom by the speaker. I feel like an old codger in reverse: cupping my hand around my iPad instead of my ear.
Here at the Consumer Electronics Show, Kubxlab is showing off an iPhone case that works really well at boosting volume acoustically.
Apple's biggest manufacturing partner making preparations to turn this thing into a reality.
On Tuesday I went to a party at San Francisco’s Cafe Du Nord to celebrate the launch of Fuze For Mac, a nifty cloud-based videoconferencing tool from FuzeBox.
I heard several interesting things about Steve Jobs and some intriguing Apple TV rumors. One of the rumors made me think that Tim Cook’s new Mac — the one that is going to be made in the U.S.A. — might actually be a big-screen Apple TV.
Here’s what I heard:
The software was developed at the behest of Steve Jobs himself, who persuaded FuzeBox to make the software not just for the Mac, but for an upcoming Apple TV.
Steve Jobs gave the company a special dev lab on Apple’s campus.
According to FuzeBox’s CEO, the upcoming Apple TV has a 60-inch screen. It has no inputs whatsoever, except an AC power cord. No wires. You can’t plug in a cable box or a game console. Nothing.
It does have Gigabit wireless Wi-Fi and gesture controls, equivalent to Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox.
And finally, the story of how FuzeBox got an ultra rare meeting with Steve Jobs is worth telling — details below.
Now, I’m the first to admit that not all of this adds up. I got it from Jeff Cavins, FuzeBox’s CEO, who told a good tale, especially after I’d had a couple of pints. While I was fascinated and entertained, it didn’t get to pin him down on details. The party was loud and crowded, and we were constantly interrupted. So mostly for entertainment purposes, this is what he said:
