The iPhone 5c has barely been out for two weeks but a couple of retailers are already offering promotions on Apple’s plastic handset in hopes of getting more foot-traffic into to stores. RadioShack informed us that it will start offering the iPhone 5c for $50 starting Saturday, October 5th, matching Best Buy’s offer that was announced yesterday.
RadioShack’s discount isn’t a true price cut, but the store is giving customers a $50 gift card to use toward the price of their purchase to knock it down to 50 bucks. It’s similar to Best Buy’s iPhone 5c deal, except Best Buy’s $50 gift card can only be applied to future purchases. Like Best Buy, RadioShack’s offer is only valid when signing up for a new two-year contract, but if you want to drop the price even lower you can use RadioShack’s Trade & Save program and apply the value of your old smartphone to your new 5c.
Update: Not one to be outdone, Walmart just decided to drop the price on the iPhone 5c to $45 from now throughout the holidays.
This is Cult of Mac’s exclusive column written by an actual Apple retail store genius. Our genius must remain anonymous, but other than “Who are you, anyway?” ask anything you want about what goes on behind that slick store facade.
Answers will be published first in Cult of Mac’s Magazine on Newsstand. Send your questions to newsATcultofmac.com with “genius” in the subject line.
Gold iPhone 5s units have been in low supply, but our Genius dishes tips on how to swap a space gray 5s for gold one, along with what it’s like to work at the Apple Store and how to get iLife for iOS free, even if you haven’t bought a new iDevice in years.
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Braven’s 855S is the companion speaker to the 850. The internals are much the same, but the cases are as different as can be, with the heavy, rubberised 855S looking more like something you’d find in a military tank rather than on a tasteful shelf next to your fish tank.
That said, it looks and feels great. But how does it sound?
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.
As we reported last night, the OS X Mavericks GM (Gold Master) seed is now available for developers to test the final version of the operating system before it is ready for general distribution later this month.
The Los Altos family home that Steve Jobs grew up in will soon become a historical site, if the seven-member Los Altos Historical Commission approves a recently scheduled “historic property evaluation” on the home.
Steve Jobs and his foster parents moved into the house on 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, when he was in 7th grade and continued to live there though his high school days.
Amazon is gearing up to launch a new set-top box that hopes to compete with the Apple TV and other video streaming devices this holiday, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s understood the device is small and resembles a Roku, and it will run apps and provide content from a variety of sources, including Amazon’s own Prime service.
You now have to pay more to become an App Store developer. Photo: Apple
Apple has contacted developers to inform them that Mac applications will soon be eligible for its Volume Purchase Program, which gives businesses and educational institutions the ability to purchase software in bulk at a discounted rates.
I’m big on saving time, no matter what you do. So when an offer pops up that allows you to go to one place to get everything you need, I’m all for it – especially if the quality is top-notch. So if you’re a designer, there’s an offer available right now that gives you a “one stop shop” for plenty of your design needs.
Thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iOS devices and the Cupertino company’s knack for product marketing, you don’t have to be a regular Siri user to recognize her voice. Two years ago today, she made her debut alongside the iPhone 4s, and she’s been our virtual personal assistant ever since.
But who is the real Siri? Who provided that voice that we’ve all become so familiar with?
Her name is Susan Bennett, and she’s been a voice actress since she was young. She recorded the Siri voices back in 2005 — six years before Apple unveiled the feature — but she had no idea they would ever end up in the iPhone.
One of the things we get a lot here at Cult of Mac, especially in our coverage of games, is folders full of promotional images. Now, for a variety of reasons, we often need to change the type of those images from, say, PNG to JPG files.
You can use Preview, of course, opening them all at once, and then selecting them all, then exporting them all to a new folder with a new image type. It’s workable, but it’s tedious.
Using Pixelmator, an affordable image editing program for the Mac, Automator (no relation), a scripting app bundled in Mac OS X, and Alfred, a pretty slick app launching application, you can make these changes much faster.
Gameloft has announced that it has been forced to postpone the launch of Modern Combat 5 for Android and iOS until 2014 to “fully achieve [its] vision” for the game. The first-person shooter was first confirmed in an impressive teaser trailer back in June, and we initially expected it to be available before the end of the year.
Microsoft is trying to persuade HTC to make new smartphones that run both Android and Windows Phone, and it’s willing to cut or eliminate its own license fee to make it happen. The software giant is hoping the move will encourage consumers to try out the Windows Phone platform and eventually make the switch to it — but could the scheme backfire?
Ebook subscriptions are on their way, and I don’t know whether to be happy or terrified. The newest service to let you pay a flat monthly fee for as much as you can read is Scribd, the popular ebook and document sharing site.
The Mission Cycling Wallet is a lot like those iPhone card wallets you see all the time, only this one zips your iPhone safely inside, and lets it face out through a see-through screen so you can read it and use it without taking it out or opening the case.
DP review has tested the iPhone 5S’s camera and – surprise – it’s awesome. At ten long pages (all requiring a click to reach, as is DP Review’s annoying style) it’s an epic read that you’ll probably want to add to your Instapaper queue, but you can always skip to the conclusion and read the rather amusing list of “bad” points that the reviewers have come up with to make the article “balanced.”
What color is that lovely jacket your friend is wearing? And that movie poster up there on the side of that building? Wouldn’t that blue make the perfect color for your new website’s background?
But how can you make sure you’re getting the exact color? After all, your cellphone camera is affected by all kinds of external factors, including the color of the light falling on the jacket/poster, as well as the colors of the surrounding items. What you need is a handheld, iPhone-controlled colorimeter.
Apple has released the Golden Master (GM) version of OS X Mavericks to developers ahead of the software’s reported launch later this month. The GM build of Apple beta software is always the version that ends up shipping to the public.
I live in a part of the world where the permissible alcohol levels for drivers is very low. Now I’m not condoning drinking and driving, but I will say that many folks in my area – especially restaurant owners – have been particularly critical of these levels because what it’s done has caused patrons to not order anything to drink at all to have with dinner. Not even a small glass of wine or beer. Why? Because they’re afraid they’ll “blow over” the legal limit, even though it’s possible that they’ll be well below it.
With this Cult of Mac Deals offer, you can get a good idea of where you’re at on that front with the BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer. You’ll save 25% on this product through this promotion, as it’s only $112.49 for a limited time – including free shipping!
Looking for a crop of holiday deals to popup before making your decision on the iPhone 5c? Well the iPhone 5c has only been on the market for two weeks but Best Buy is already offering a deal on Apple’s plastic beauty.
Customers can get the iPhone 5c for $50 from your local Best Buy store from now until Sunday. The price drop isn’t a true price cut though as Best Buy is offering a free $50 giftcards that can be applied to drop the price from $99 – the deal is also available for the Samsung Galaxy S4 if you’re interested in a $150 Android handset. Not necessarily the greatest deal ever, but it’s certainly one of the best we’ve seen for the iPhone 5c during its short life thus far.
Steve Jobs passed away on October 5th, 2011, but his influence is sure to be felt for decades to come. As such, many artists across the globe have created mural, statues, paintings and other tributes to Steve Jobs and his amazing contributions to the tech world.
More statues and works of art are in the works for the man who revolutionized the personal computers, music, animation, smartphones and tablets, but here are some of the best coolest Steve Jobs memorials we’ve found.
Inventions of Steve Jobs – Exhibit at WIPO
The United States Patent Office Museum in Alexandria, Virginia created a monument of 30 gigantic iPhones to celebrate the 300 patents held by Steve Jobs. Each iPhone displayed 12 of Jobs’ patents certificates. The exhibit aimed to display the far-reaching impact of Steve Jobs’ entrepreneurship and innovation on our daily lives, while also serving as an example of the role intellectual property plays in the global marketplace.
Wax Model of Steve Jobs at Madame Tussauds
Madame Tussauds Wax Mueseums are renowned for their life-like representations of famous celebrities, so to mark the first anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death, the Hong Kong branch unveiled a wax statue of his Steveness himself. The wax figure was modeled after the photos taken for his iconic Fortune Magazine cover in 2006.
To create this wax figure of a cutting-edge technologist, sculptors used methods that have been around for over 200 years, rather than embracing modern methods that remove a sculptor’s ability to manipulate each aspect of the design personally. The estimated cost of the figure is just under $200,000.
Steve Jobs Statue in Budapest
Hungarian sculptor Erno Toth unveiled his 6 1/2 feet tall bronze statue of Steve Jobs a few months after he passed away in 2011. The statue was commissioned by Gabor Bojar, founder of Hungarian software company Graphisoft. Steve Jobs and Bojar actually had a history of working together that stretched back to 1984, when Jobs came across Bojar’s software and was impressed enough to help the fledgling company out with cash and computers.
Interactive Jobs Memorial in St. Petersburg, Russia
If you happen to wander into the courtyard of St. Petersburg’s National Research University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (quite the mouthful), you will now find a giant iPhone. The monument stands about as tall as a fully grown man and a huge screen displays photos, videos and text about the late Apple co-founder.
The monument was unveiled to the public after the Progress IT Fund held a competition last year to see who would design the tribute. The winner was designed by Gleb Tarasov and named “Sunny QR Code.” The name refers to a QR code on the monument itself that links to a memorial website for Jobs. Not sure what the “Sunny” stands for.
Steve Jobs Monument in Odessa, Ukraine
Crafted by Ukranian artist, Cryil Maksimenko, the monument was installed in Odessa, Ukraine on the one year anniversary of Steve Jobs’s death. The hand features an Apple logo in the middle and is comprised of numerous gears, screws, bearings and other pieces from bicycles, motorcycles and cars, which took over a year to fashion together. Pretty fascinating when you look at it up close.
A Post-It Note Memorial Portrait of Steve Jobs at the Munich Apple Store
In the wake of his death, thousands of admirers flocked to Apple Stores across the globe and wrote their thanks to Steve on Post-It notes. A team of Apple fans took their tribute a bit further by creating this Steve Jobs portrait comprised of 4,001 stickies on the glass facade of an Apple Store in Munich, Germany.
The Steve Jobs Building at Pixar
Steve Jobs is mostly associated with Apple, but before he made his triumphant return to Apple and introduced the iPod, Jobs poured millions of his own money into Pixar. By keeping the company financially shored, John Lasseter and his team of animators were able to change movies forever with hit after animated hit. Now, Jobs has a permanent home on Pixar’s campus now that the studio’s main building has been renamed in his honor.
Graffiti Mural of Jobs in Buenos Aries
Mario Calvo created this Steve Jobs graffiti portrait in tribute to Steve Jobs’ legacy. The mural is located on the front of an advertising agency in Palermo district of Buenos Aries Argentina and took more then five days to paint.
Steve’s star at the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame at MIT
Modeled after the Hollywood Walk of Fame in California, the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame at Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, opened for the first time in 2011. Included among the seven inaugural inductees were Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Bill Hewlett, David Packard, Bob Swanson, Bill Gates and Mitch Kapor.
Steve Jobs Avenue in Jundiai, Brazil
The small city of Jundiai is located near São Paulo, honored Steve Jobs by renaming one of its streets ‘Steve Jobs Ave.’ The street’s name isn’t the town’s only tie to Apple though. The avenue is the route that connects the small city to Brazil’s largest city — Sao Paulo, where Apple supplier Foxconn opened a iPhone assembly plant and is home to Foxconn’s new iPad plant, too.
Recreation of Steve Jobs Time cover made of apples
Artist Olivier Lefebvre created this Steve Jobs tribute by using over 3,500 apples to recreate one of Steve Jobs’ portraits from Time magazine. The enormous portrait is 22 feet tall by 15 feet wide. Olivier brought in crates of deer apples and used a 2’x2′ grid system to guide his creation. The project took about 50 hours to complete and was left intact after completion but the orchard’s three resident deer eventually ate the remains.
“Bad Apples Spoil The Bunch” in Cincinnati
At some point between the time Steve passed away on October 5th and the morning of October 6th, a mural celebrating his life was created in a local neighborhood. The original art on the wall originally read ‘Bad Apples Spoil the Bunch’ but it was changed to read ‘Good Apples Better The Bunch’ with a picture of the 80s Apple Icon.
Pixar’s Steve Jobs Tree
Not only did Pixar decide to name its main building after Steve Jobs, but if you wander the campus grounds you’ll come across this tree in front of the Steve Jobs Building which was also dedicated to Steve Jobs by John Lasseter and the rest of the employees at Pixar.
An official app called gMusic has been working with All Access for months.
If you’re a user of Google Play’s “All Access” music subscription service, then you’ll be excited to learn that Google has an official iOS client slated to arrive later this month.
Today Apple released a supplemental update to OS X Mountain Lion version 10.8.5. The update is available now in the Mac App Store and addresses a number of issues, including a bug that keeps the FaceTime HD camera on the 2013 MacBook Airs from working.
What you’ve always dreaded is about to come true. Get ready for ads in your Instagram feed.
Facebook’s photo sharing giant confirmed today that photo and video ads are indeed on the near horizon. Expect them to “occasionally” start appearing within the next couple months.
