Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography of Steve Jobs is releasing today, and we’re already busy poring through it, gaining new insight into the life and philosophies of Apple’s volatile, sometimes enigmatic co-founder.
Throughout the morning, we’ll be live updating this post with some of the best revelations, funniest stories, most interesting quotes and most enjoyable tidbits of the biography.
I thought the 60 Minutes interview broadcast just now with Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson was great. Absolutely great.
It covered a lot of ground I was familiar with and is familiar to most other Apple fans too. But it fresh and fascinating because of the accumulation of small details and revelations. Like the fact that Jobs rarely locked his back door in Palo Alto, and that anybody could have walked in off the street, because he didn’t want to pervert his life by being rich. Alternatively, he looked his childhood friend Daniel Kottke in the eye and denied him the shares in Apple that would have made him a millionaire. So many contradictions.
But there were three profound revelations for me, which really shed light on Jobs’ life and work:
US carriers — specifically AT&T — have been buckling under the weight of hundreds of thousands iPhone 4S activation requests today. Since the 4S went on sale worldwide this morning, many customers have been trying to activate Apple’s newest handset to no avail.
While Sprint and Verizon activations seem to being going smoothly, AT&T has been failing all day.
If you can’t activate your iPhone 4S on AT&T, we’ve got a few tips to help get your 4S up and running.
Lots of people are asking why Woz, Apple’s cofounder and still Apple employee number 1, is first in line to buy an iPhone 4S on Friday morning.
I just caught him on the local news, and he has a very good reason.
Each year, the lines for Apple’s iPhone become more of a circus. Last year, it was pro line-sitter Greg Packer at the head of the line, giving tons of TV interviews.
This year, app developer Dillon Horowitz has brought a cow, a calf and a goat to Apple’s flagship NYC store.
Obviously, the best way to make sure you got an iPhone 4S on launch day was to order one online, but that ship has sailed, and if you didn’t get your order in, braving launch day lines is your only option at this point. After four iPhone launches though, we’re now pros at the line-waiting game. Here are our killer tips and tricks for not just surviving the iPhone 4S line-waiting madness and walking away with the model you want.
Apple’s iWork suite of apps for iOS have been updated along with seemingly every other in-house piece of software in Cupertino today, bringing iCloud support to each of Apple’s productivity apps: Numbers, Pages and Keynote. Here’s a complete list of what’s new.
We’ve seen the first rash of iPhone 4 reviews coming in, and they all agree on one thing: Siri is very impressive.
It works because it does several things all at once. It understands what you’re saying, irrespective of your accent, and without a lot of initial training. And it understands what you mean, because it has the built-in smarts to know that if you say “Tell my wife I’m running late,” you mean “Send a text message to this particular contact with text that says I’m running late.”
But this is just the start for Siri (which Apple’s acknowledged by calling it a beta). The iPhone 4S is the first Apple device that supports it – it certainly won’t be the last. Where might Siri go next?
Stuff.tv’s video hands-on with Siri is even more impressive than Apple’s demo videos. Not only do they show it opening websites, sending IMs, checking the weather both locally and across the world, setting a wake-up alarm, doing currency conversions and finding the distance to the moon, Siri even changes its accent according to whether it is talking to a Yank or a Brit.
Pretty awesome. Who said this wasn’t a killer feature for the iPhone 4S?
According to Deadline, Sony Pictures is working on a “hefty deal” to secure the rights to Walter Isaacson’s official Steve Jobs biography for a major feature film.
The movie will allegedly detail the story of how Jobs built Apple from the ground up in the heart of Silicon Valley. The biography that the movie will be based on features over 40 official interviews with Jobs, as well as hundreds of personal anecdotes from his friends and competitors.