Steve Jobs’ career is usually discussed in two major segments – his early years when he co-founded Apple with Woz, and then the latter end of his life when he returned to Apple and resurrected the company with one hit product after another. But 11 years passed between the time that Steve was kicked out of Apple and the time he returned to save the company. Many people call those his “Wilderness Years” as he struggled to cope with getting kicked out of Apple.

What many view as a dark period of exile, Brent Schlender claims it was actually one of the happiest periods in Jobs’ life. Writing a new article for Fast Company about Steve Jobs time in exile, Schlender rediscovered his trove of lost interview tapes he recorded with Jobs during those “Wilderness Years.”

The entire article is riddled with new Steve Jobs quotes and ideas that haven’t been heard before, but here are the eight best:

The dirty secrets surrounding Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram have remained relatively unkown, until now. Many were taken aback by the incredible amount of money Facebook dropped on the photography app, but it turns out that Instagram wanted more than $1 billion. It’s been revealed by The Wall Street Journal that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom originally pitched his app to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a price tag of $2 billion.

The notorious Flashback trojan infected 600,000 Macs over the last year. We’ve been following Flashback closely, and Apple started waging its war on the botnet earlier this month. After releasing two security updates and one final tool to remove Flashback from infected Macs, Apple has nearly killed Flashback once and for all.

According to new research from Norton Symantec research, Flashback now infects around 140,000 Macs. That’s a significant drop considering Apple’s removal tool was only released 4 days ago.

Many started speculating about the possibility of a 4-inch iPhone when a guy named Colin made a very interesting argument for such a device one week ago. The rumor mill has been saying for months that a larger iPhone is coming, but no one had really thought about how it would actually work. Colin proposed that Apple would need to simply change the aspect ratio from 3:2 to a stretchy 16:9. Brilliant, right?

Not so fast. There are multiple reasons why an elongated iPhone screen would not work.

One of the big discussions around enterprise mobility this year has been whether companies need to completely lock down iPhone, iPads, and other devices for security reasons or is creating a secure data store on the device that IT can remotely wipe enough? With the ever-expanding BYOD trend, the idea removing corporate data without wiping any personal data is an attractive one. Put more simply, does IT need to manage the device or just the corporate data on it?

MokaFive is a company that has always focused on securing business data rather than computers themselves. The company has made a name for itself in providing secure Windows virtual machines that can provide a fully functional and secure environment on any supported device including Macs as well as PCs. MokaFive even allows such virtual machines to be fully customized while still being secure and managed.

This week, MokaFive introduced its first iOS solution. Not surprisingly, it’s centered around securing data rather than restricting the functionality of the device.

Time is running out on this Cult of Mac Deals offer — and it’s one that will allow your creativity to go wild!

The Creative Design Bundle contains over 1000 icons, vector elements, Photoshop templates, an essential designer’s strategy guide and a lot of useful bonus files for just pennies on the dollar! With a total download size of 1.4GB, you’ll get all of this bundled together at an insane price – just $49! The items in this bundle are valued at over $1,000 – meaning you get a whopping 95% off!

Almost every cloud storage service on the Internet operates using a freemium model. Anyone who signs up gets a certain amount of storage for free. When someone uses up all their free storage, they can add more for a fee. Cloud providers usually layer on a few extra features for paid customers like the ability to stream audio files or the ability to restore deleted files or older versions of documents. Just like most companies now, they to outsource the support process making it easy for clients to resolve issues easily. Netzen is a company that provides IT support to businesses in the UK, consider checking them out if you need help with your IT.

With so many free options, however, it can be tempting to use multiple services simultaneously. Add files to a free Dropbox account up till the free 2GB, then create an account with Box for the next 5GB (Box’s free limit), then create a SugarSync account and on and on.

This approach, known as cloud squatting, effectively nets users unlimited free storage so long as they’re willing to play an ongoing game of musical chairs with their data. iOS and other mobile apps that can access and edit files across different services make it surprisingly easy for users to become cloud squatters – and it’s surprisingly difficult for a business or IT department to prevent or deal with cloud squatting employees.

Apple and Samsung have been trading body blows in their legal war-on-the-street for awhile now, suing and countersuing each other the Earth over for patent and IP violations. Now U.S. Judge Lucy Koh has ordered Apple CEO Tim Cook and Gee-Sung Choi to stop suing each other for a second and meet to try to talk it all out.

Do you remember when Twitter patented the pull-to-refresh tech they acquired from Loren Brichter when they purchased Tweetie and made it their official, thereby effectively putting all the apps that use pull-to-refresh (like Tweetbot or even Facebook) in their legal crosshairs?

Pull-to-refresh inventor Loren Brichter said there was no reason to worry, and it seems like he was right, as Twitter has today announced an awesome initiative in which they have promised that their patents will only ever be used defensively… even if they sell them to another company down the line!

Saved email drafts in iOS are ridiculously cumbersome to get back to. You have to tap all the way back out to the main Mailboxes page, scroll down, tap the mailbox you want, scroll down again, and then tap (finally!) the Drafts folder. This is rather cumbersome, right? Well, we found something that is MUCH faster.

When the iPhone launched, “pundits” said that it would fail thanks to the lack of a physical keyboard. Then the iPad debuted to the same knee-jerk whine. Years passed, and tens of millions of units were sold, yet there are still people who think they want a keyboard to take up half the face of their device, all the time. For you, my dear Luddite friends, there is the TK-MBD041, a tiny Bluetooth keyboard that will mimic your precious (and tiny) BlackBerry buttons, and packs a special secret function (spoiler – it works as a phone handset).

The International ($350), from Think Tank Photo, is similar to every other piece of rolling luggage you’ve probably used, with a retractable handle and rolling wheels, but on the inside, instead of keeping your dirty drawers stowed, it secures treasures of a different kind: your plethora of expensive camera gear. And it does so admirably.

One of the most annoying things about Apple’s Bluetooth implementation in iOS is that turning it on or off is a four-step process involving digging deep into Settings. Considering the battery drain associated with just leaving Bluetooth on and the wide variety of devices you can connect via Bluetooth to your device, it’s a constant irritation for many.

Jailbreak utilities like SBSettings make turning bluetooth on/off on the fly a fairly simple proposition, but unfortunately, Apple hasn’t borrowed inspiration from any of them when it comes to baking better Bluetooth toggling into iOS. A new $0.99 app on the App Store, though, makes it much easier to toggle Bluetooth on the fly on your device even without a jailbreak. Launch the app once to toggle Bluetooth on, launch again to toggle off. Simple.

A couple of months ago, The Wall Street Journal raised a huge stink when they reported that Google was tracking millions of iOS & Mac Safari users against their wishes using a loophole in the way that Safari’s cookie handling algorithm.

Google on its parts always said it had done nothing wrong, and used known functionality in Safari to make sure their advertising cookies were always stored locally on users’ machines, even if their cookie settings were set to private. Looks like that might not have been enough for the FTC, though, who are now looking to start doling out fines to Google over the issue.

Gemini is a Mac app that does one thing: Find duplicate files on your Mac. You just point it at a directory (your home folder is a good place to start) and sic it on your files. After a few moments it gives a list of anything that is doubled-up on your machine, and then the fun begins.

Verizon continues its onslaught of 4G LTE rollouts across the U.S. and after expanding a slew of California markets last week, they’re back at it again. This next bombardment of 4G LTE is a huge one and reaches across various markets from New York to Colorado. Hopefully by April 19th, your city/town will have been added to the coverage list and you’ll be able to ditch that 3G in favor of the fast lane speeds of 4G LTE. Rollouts and expansions are expected to start Thursday and will cover the following markets:

This is Readdle‘s PDF Expert 4 for iPad, and a more full-featured PDF reading and editing app you’ll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Earlier today, the Space Shuttle Discovery took its final flight on the back of a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Washington, D.C. where it will go on display in the Smithsonian.

As it flew over the U.S. capitol, Instagram user Adam Wells took this totally sweet shot of the Discovery being piggy-backed to her final home at the Smithsonian’s Air & Space facility in Chantilly, Virginia. Beautiful.

[via ObamaPacman]

This is the world’s biggest and heaviest iPhone case. How big and heavy? Well, it’s chunky enough to stop any door in your home from closing, and heavy enough (2.1 kilos) to cause serious damage if hurled into an enemy’s face. In fact, the seller – Marudai – warns that “Serious injury and will certainly drop on top of the foot”. Ouch.

Apple has been increasingly interested in powering its operations with that happy old sun, working on a 20-megawatt solar farm coupled with a 5-megawatt fuel cell facility at its data supercenter in Maiden, North Carolina. But that’s not nearly good enough, according to Greenpeace. In fact, the environmental activist group has gone so far as to call Apple out for using “asthma-inducing, climate-destroying coal” which makes the iCloud “the dirtiest thing on the internet.”

BYOD programs are popping in workplaces of virtually every shape and size. One of the big advantages of these programs is that you can decide what kind of mobile device (iPhone, iPad, or other device) and what apps make the most sense for your job and how you work. Some companies even offer reimbursement of some of the expenses associated with using your personal tech in the office – an example being your iPhone or iPad’s data plan (or a portion of it).

That sense of freedom is very empowering, but it often comes with the tradeoff of your company’s IT department enrolling your device in a mobile management system. This means that certain features of your device are likely to be restricted for security purposes. It also means that your company will be able to monitor and track how you use your iPhone or iPad and can wipe data remotely at any point. 

Yesterday, Microsoft announced its Windows 8 product lineup. The lineup includes just three editions as opposed to Windows 7 and Vista, which offered twice as many options though some were targeted at developing and niche markets. In addition to streamlining the overall offerings, Microsoft also drew a sharper line between Windows 8 for desktop, notebook, and tablet PCs with x86/64 processors and Windows for ARM-based tablets.

If the dividing line between a full-fledged version of Windows and a version designed for low cost tablets seems vaguely familiar to you, it’s because the strategy is pretty similar to the distinction between Apple’s OS X for Macs and iOS for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

In fact, the entire desktop and mobile lineup that Microsoft is developing seems to borrow pretty heavily from Apple’s playbook.

UPDATE: This post incorrectly stated that the SlingShot’s inventor, Charles Waugh, was also responsible for the AirClip iPhone grip. He is not.

It seems that there’s an almost infinite number of ways to stabilize your iPhone while taking photos and video, but possibly the most absurd – and at the same time extrmely practical – method so far is to drop it into this catapult-shaped tripod/slingshot.

I chuckled when I first saw it. And then I thought, “that’s actually pretty damn clever.”

Remember the MagnaDoodle? If you fall on my side of the Great Age Divide, then your answer will be an excited “yes!” The re-usable screen of the Magna Doodle was just about the closest thing that us 70s-born youngsters had to the touch-screen iPhone which you ungrateful kids enjoy today.

If you’re on the wrong side of the Great Age Divide, your answer will be all like “WTF old man you suck LOL.” To which I would respond with the following punishment: You will be forced to use this Magna Doodle for a week. Without the iPhone inside.

Read It Later, the most popular way for users to save content they find on the web, has just received a new name, stacks of new features, and lost its price tag in a major update released today. Now called Pocket, the new app is free across Android and iOS devices, and delivers a new user interface, video and image filters, favorites, and much, much more.