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.
In iOS 5, there’s a new “Music” app that combines the functions of the iTunes and iPod apps. Instead of separate apps for shopping and playback, Music is a one-stop shop for tunes. That’s the app’s icon above.
Here’s a screenshot tour showing it in action — including the new ability to download Purchased music from the online iTunes store.
He just struck a deal with the record labels to finally monetize pirated music — a move that “resets the whole music industry,” according to one music-tech CEO.
Here’s the line for this morning’s Stevenote. The video was taken at 6.15 AM; It’s as long a line I’ve see for any Apple event, including some of the massive store grand openings. The buzz for this WWDC is huge.
Check out these thoughtful mockups of iOS 5, the next version of the iPhone and iPad OS, which Steve Jobs is due to preview at WWDC on Monday morning.
They were created by Federico Bianco, a graphic designer from Rome, Italy. It’s a “wishlist” of all the things he wants to see in iOS 5, and includes some interesting ideas about notifications, widgets, Home Screen organization and bringing iPhoto to iOS.
“I have computers at Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of them and log in as myself, it goes over the network and finds my home directory on the server and… I’ve got my stuff wherever I am…”
“…we were able to take all of our personal data, our home directories we call them, off of our local machines and put them on a server, and the software made that completely transparent…”
“…so in the last seven years, do you know how many times I have lost any personal data? Zero. Do you know how many times I have backed up my computer? Zero.”
When Apple reveals iCloud at WWDC on Monday, it’ll have the kind of impact the iPod has had, predicts Kevin Fox, a Silicon Valley software veteran who’s worked at Apple, Yahoo and Google.
“The rumblings are huge,” says Fox, lead designer at Mozilla. Fox worked on Newton software before designing Yahoo’s chat service and then software for Google (including Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, and Google Reader 2.0). He continues:
… given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce [iCloud] on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.
At the close of markets on Friday, Apple had a bigger market cap than Microsoft and Intel combined — the so-called Wintel alliance that almost buried Apple a decade ago.
Here’s how much Apple, Microsoft and Intel were worth on Wall Street at the end of the week:
We have word from a trusted source that Apple is indeed adding location and travel information to iCal alarms.
Got a flight to catch? iCal takes note of your location, combines that with the route to the airport and says, “You’ve gotta leave in ten minutes if you wanna be there in time.”
MacRumors has a sneaky spy shot of the new iCloud icon, courtesy of a banner going up at WWDC. Hope Steve Jobs doesn’t see the pic. It’s pretty sloppy work by those two banner hangers. Who thinks they’ll be fired by day’s end?
Apple’s iCloud music locker will not require users to laboriously upload all the music in their iTunes libraries, but will instead rely on “scan and match.”
Business mag Fast Company had funnyman Conan O’Brien pose as eight of history’s greatest innovators for its latest issue on the 100 most creative people in business.
For the cover, Conan dressed as Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, Steve Jobs, Madonna, Moses, Socrates and Teddy Roosevelt. Weirdly, Jobs doesn’t make Fast Company‘s 2011 list, but his software lieutenant Scott Forstall does.