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.
John Sculley, Apple's ex-CEO, talks for the first time about Steve Jobs. Illustration: Matthew Phelan
Comment of the Week comes from @Ron regarding our interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs. Going against the common wisdom that ex-CEO John Sculley was bad for Apple, @Ron has a different take on Sculley, who I feel has been unfairly demonized for his decade-long stint at Apple’s helm.
Great article. I worked with John occasionally in his last years at Apple. I didn’t realize at the time how burnt out he was, but it make sense now in retrospect. He was shy and seemed withdrawn.
John was a great CEO for the first few years. It’s easy to forget that Steve left Apple in complete disarray – it’s safe to say that he hadn’t developed his management or relationships skills at that point. Sculley held things together and got the place to run as a business. It’s only later when his lack of product vision caught up with him.
John Sculley, Apple's ex-CEO, talks for the first time about Steve Jobs. Illustration: Matthew Phelan
In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
Now, for the first time, Sculley talks publicly about Steve Jobs and the secrets of his success. It’s the first interview Sculley has given on the subject of Jobs since he himself was forced out of the company in 1993.
“There are many product development and marketing lessons I learned working with Steve in the early days,” says Sculley. “It’s impressive how he still sticks to his same first principles years later.”
He adds, “I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.”
It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.
It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple. He also admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company (and that he knows little about computers). It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such a frank assessment of their career in public.
Update: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”), but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).
It’s commonly believed that Apple wouldn’t have nearly gone out of business if it had only licensed the Mac operting system to other computer makers, like Microsoft did. But John Sculley explains why that was impossible:
With the invention of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs commercialized modern graphical computing. But he oversaw another invention from that era that was just as brilliant but no one mentions these days.
There’s a great scene at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai when Alec Guinness’ character assess his career in the British Army and admits it’s been a disappointment. Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley takes a similar look at his stint at the top of Apple, and says the company made a big mistake when it hired him as CEO. It’s the most surprisingly frank admission I’ve ever heard anyone make about their career.
One of the first things Steve Jobs did on his return to Apple was kill the Newton, the brick-sized messagepad that some blame for dragging the company towards bankruptcy. But John Sculley argues that the Newton actually prevented Apple from going out of business.
When Steve Jobs went to visit Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, the two inventors agreed that products aren’t invented — they are discovered.
Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple — and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware.
As Apple prepares to show off the next big upgrade of OS X, here’s news that its Mac hardware has cracked 10% PC market share for the first time since the early 1990s.
According to market research firm Gartner, Apple had 10.4% of U.S. PC shipments in Q3, making it the fourth largest computer maker in the U.S.
Gartner didn’t even count iPads, which are a runaway hit. But they had an effect on other PC makers’ numbers. Gartner said Q3 was weak, especially in the U.S., thanks in big part to the iPad.
“Media tablet hype around devices such as the iPad has also affected consumer notebook growth by delaying some PC purchases, especially in the U.S. consumer market. Media tablets don’t replace primary PCs, but they affect PC purchases in many ways,” said Mikako Kitagawa, principal analyst at Gartner, in a statement. “At this stage, hype around media tablets has led consumers and the channels to take a ‘wait and see’ approach to buying a new device.”
Apple is sending out invites to a special media event on October 20 to discuss the next version of OS X. Although the invite doesn’t expressly say so, the event must be about 10.7. “Back to the Mac,” the invite says, showing a lion peeking out of the Apple logo.
Surprising right? We thought it was all about iOS in Cupertino these days. But apparently the good old Mac is still alive and kicking and Steve Jobs hasn’t forgotten about it.
It won’t be the first time Apple has given a sneak peek of its operating system long before it shipped. In 2008, Apple previewed Snow Leopard at WWDC about a year before it was released.
John Sculley, Apple's ex-CEO, talks for the first time about Steve Jobs. Illustration by Matthew Phelan. Illustration: Matthew Phelan
On Thursday, we’ll be publishing an exclusive interview with ex-Apple CEO John Sculley. It’s the first time Sculley has talked publicly about Steve Jobs since he was forced out of Apple in 1993.
In the interview, Sculley reveals the secrets of Jobs’ methodology, and a few surprises:
SAN FRANCISCO — Hanging out at the big CTIA cell phone convention last week, I ran into an old friend who used to work at Apple and is now a wireless consultant.
He argues that if Verizon is getting the iPhone, it won’t be until summer 2011 at the earliest. There’s two reasons why, he says:
It describes an intelligent control unit or app that filters text messages if they contain “objectionable” content.
Designed to give parents more control over their children’s’ text messages, the system can also be set up to check spelling, grammar and punctuation. If kids grades are dropping at school, parents can block messages unless they are grammatical and free of spelling errors. Likewise, the sytem can check for foreign language words, so if the child is suposed to learning Spanish, it will only send messages that contain a minimum number of Spanish words.
UPDATED: Added a quote form Vince Tseng, SquareTrade’s VP of marketing.
Following up on our story about Glassgate last week, an iPhone insurance company says the iPhone 4 is significantly more prone to damage than the previous model. But it also found little evidence that Glassgate is a widespread problem.
This is the first TV advert from Microsoft for its new Windows Phone 7 — and it’s actually pretty good.
Well, it’s not embarrassingly strange and meaningless like Microsoft’s recent advertising.
Even if the ad has little to do with Windows Phone 7 per se, and more about mobile culture in general, it’s still eye-catching and engaging, which is more than can be said for the Vista ads.
What’s going on? The phones look pretty good and the advertising does too.
Here are a selection of videos from Microsoft introducing the Windows 7 phone software and some of the different handsets. Above: New Windows Phone 7 devices available from Dell, HTC, LG and Samsung.
It’s worth watching a couple of these videos to get an idea of how the competition for mobile is heating up. If the videos present a true picture of the Windows Phone 7 experience, it looks like a credible competitor to the iPhone.
The easy customization of the Windows Phone 7 home screen — “pinning,” in Microsoft’s parlance — looks like a compelling feature. Home screen customization isn’t something you about from iPhone users — but it is a feature you hear Android users talk about a lot.
It’s thanks to the efforts of our indefatigable designer, Craig Grannell of Snub Communications. It’s cleaner and simpler and clears the deck for a very important upgrade: BuddyPress.
BuddyPress is a WordPress plugin that adds a ton of social networking features, including extended profiles, activity streams, friend connections and groups.
Described as “Facebook in a box,” Buddypress is a like a 21-st century version of a forum. It brings a lot of the same interactivity, but cuts down on the noise and spam.
Buddypress will allow us to implement one of the longest-held ambitions of the site — making it a proper community endeavor. Among other things, it will allow you, the readers, to contribute much more to the site. You’ll be able to write about your own projects, post troubleshooting tips and advice, and recommend the products you use every day. It’ll also make it easier to find and follow the activity of your friends, follow others whose opinion you value, and share the best stories with other readers. We’ll be launching it soon.
Meanwhile, please leave any feedback about the new look (and any problems you find) in the comments. Many thanks.
