The outside ad agency dedicated to Apple marketing was hit with a big round of layoffs this week.
Media Arts Lab cut about 50 employees across multiple divisions of the company. Owned by Apple’s longtime ad partner TBWA Worldwide, Media Arts Lab counts Apple as its only client. The Los Angeles based company helps Apple come up with advertisements for many of its popular products, but is facing changes as Apple’s needs evolve.
Excerpted from Live from Cupertino: How Apple Used Words, Music, and Performance to Build the World’s Best Sales Machine by Michael Hageloh and Tim Vandehey.
When I set out to write this book, one of my goals was to see if I could insult fifty million people in one sentence. Here goes. Years ago, before I was excommunicated from New York City and became a resident of Texas (a state so backward that someone in our town once asked my wife and me if being Jewish was like being Catholic), I lived in Florida, which is so appealing to the unbalanced that when I took the “Florida Challenge” (where you google “Florida man” and your birthday to see what kind of headlines pop up) for April 24, the first result read, “Florida man kisses venomous snake and is immediately bitten on the lips.”
Mission accomplished. Now, let’s move on.
During the latest episode of the brilliant hot sauce-based interview show Hot Ones, Ashton Kutcher opened up on the topic of Steve Jobs. Kutcher played Jobs in the 2013 biopic, which landed with a thud at the box office.
Kutcher told the story of how he was hospitalized before filming, after trying to follow Jobs’ fruitarian diet. “Don’t drink too much carrot juice is the moral of the story,” Kutcher said.
Disney CEO Bob Iger finally spoke about his recent resignation from Apple’s board of directors in an interview with Mad Money host Jim Cramer.
Iger resigned from Apple’s board earlier this month. As many people speculated, Iger says he felt it was time for him to step aside because of Apple TV+.
Departing Apple board member and Disney CEO, Bob Iger, opened up about his relationship with Steve Jobs in an excerpt from his new book of life lessons coming out next week.
Iger and Jobs became close friends after Disney bought Pixar, making Jobs Disney’s biggest shareholder. According to Iger, he felt that if Jobs were still alive Apple and Disney would have combineded into one company, or at least been very seriously discussed.
Apple’s VP of communications is stepping away from the company after leading Apple’s public relations efforts for the last five years.
Steve Dowling, who worked at Apple for 16 years, sent out a memo to staff saying that now is the time for him to step away from the company. The news comes right after Apple’s biggest PR week of the year, the fall iPhone keynote, but Dowling’s note to employees is full of optimism for the iPhone-maker.
Apple is investing $250 million in Corning, the company behind Gorilla Glass. Corning has worked with Apple on every iPhone since the original.
The money comes from a $5 billion fund that Apple set aside to advance U.S. manufacturing. Corning produces its screens at its plant in Harrodsburg, Kentucky.
Apple’s always been a relatively flat company in terms of corporate structure. But that may be posing a challenge, as a new report on the company’s leadership suggests.
As a result of Apple’s employee growth and changes in the leadership team, many executives now have large numbers of people reporting directly to them. According to a former Apple exec, that structure may not be “particularly effective.”
Tim Cook isn’t the only tech icon with something big coming out on September 20.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is the subject of a new Netflix documentary series that premieres on iPhone 11 launch day. Inside Bill’s Brain connects chapters of Gates’ personal life with his philanthropic work. Gates does more than other tech luminaries to make the world a better place. Still, he says there’s one skill Steve Jobs possessed that would prove immensely helpful for his current work.
A Toy Story poster signed by Steve Jobs has sold at auction in Los Angeles for $31,250 — more than $6,000 more than its starting price.
The 24-inch-by-36-inch poster was signed by Jobs back in 1995. Its high price tag was due to the relative scarcity of Jobs’ autograph. While Toy Story isn’t widely thought of as one of the most important moments of Jobs’ life, it was actually a major turning point for him.
This week on The CultCast: Apple’s September 10th has just been announced—don’t miss our hardware and software predictions! Plus: comparing Disney’s new streaming service to Apple TV Plus; Steve Jobs is spotted in Egypt; and one of Earth’s greatest Steve Jobs artifacts hits the auction block.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain..
Any iconic person who dies before their time occasionally gets photos shared of look-alikes, raising the faintest shred of possibility that they’re alive after all and just enjoying life out of the spotlight.
There’s no shortage of shots of Tupac and Elvis years after their apparent demise. But this week, the Twitterverse exploded when a photo looking a whole lot like Steve Jobs popped up. The Apple co-founder’s doppelganger is in Egypt, FYI.
August 25, 2016: An ultra-rare Apple-1 computer raises $815,000 in a charity auction, one of the highest prices ever paid for one of the machines. Bidding actually reaches $1.2 million in the auction’s final minutes. However, that bid gets pulled seconds before a winner is announced.
The reason for the super-high price? This “Celebration” Apple-1 boasts a feature that did not appear on any production models of the computer.
A less-than-stellar credit score may not stop you from bagging a shiny new Apple Card.
“Subprime” applicants are being accepted for credit, issued by Goldman Sachs, because Apple wants as many of its iPhone users as possible to be approved.
And it’s what Steve Jobs would have wanted.
Whether it’s as the subject of a rap t-shirt or a manga comic book, the likeness of Steve Jobs pops up in some pretty unusual places.
The latest? As a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “cameo” in an Australian ad aimed at reducing car accidents as a result of texting behind the wheel. The ad depicts Jobs, alongside the likes of John Lennon and Shakespeare, in a discussion set in the afterlife. Seriously.
Apple is hoping to inject some inspiration into the lives of college students around the country with a new ad celebrating the return to school this month.
The fantastic new Behind the Mac ad celebrates the creation of art by telling students that they have no idea what they’re doing. And this is great.
Prepare to be inspired:
Despite his sometimes prickly reputation, Steve Jobs was well known for mentoring select young tech entrepreneurs. When it comes to Spotify, however, he may have taken a different tact.
According to a new book, Spotify Untold, Jobs freaked out Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek by calling him up and breathing deeply down the phone. (Then again, it may have all been Ek’s imagination!)
Breaking news: Steve Jobs was kind of a perfectionist when it came to design.
OK, so that’s not exactly the world’s best-kept secret. But a new story about the creation of Pixar’s headquarters highlights Jobs’ obsessive attention to detail. For anyone who remembers hearing about the creation of Apple Park, it will sound eerily familiar…
Looking for a dose of Monday nostalgia? If so, then you might enjoy checking out the 1989 fall catalog for NeXT, the company started by Steve Jobs during his years outside Apple.
Loving scanned by amateur computer historian Kevin Savetz, it’s a fun look at computing 30 years ago.
Bidding was apparently hot and heavy for a computer manual for the Apple-1, this company’s very first computer. In a multi-day online auction for this rare bit of tech history, the top bid was under $10,000 only a few days ago but in the end the document sold for $12,956.
It’s been more than a week since the shocking news that Jony Ive is leaving Apple, and everyone is still trying to make sense of what it means for the company’s future.
According to some, it’s an internal coup: Tim Cook’s operations team finally wrested control from Ive’s industrial design crew, and the company‘s glory days of innovation are over. Others claim Ive’s days have been numbered ever since his dream of a solid gold Apple Watch flopped.
How can there be so many conflicting accounts of one man’s departure? Surprisingly, it may be for the same reason that the final season of Game of Thrones sucked. It all boils down to how we tell stories.
American business magnate and politician Ross Perot died yesterday at the age of 89.
However, while the world probably remembers Perot best for his 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, Perot also played a crucial role in Apple history. Here’s how.
Walter Isaacson says Apple has lost “these two spiritual soulmates who just lived and breathed the beauty of products.”
The Steve Jobs biographer believes the company still know how to execute, but that it has missed out on a number of opportunities for exciting new products — including an Apple TV set.
There are plenty of words used to describe Steve Jobs, but “wizard” isn’t one of the ones we hear too often.
That’s exactly what Jobs was, however, according to Microsoft co-founder and long-time Jobs frenemy Bill Gates. Speaking on CNN, Gates said that Jobs accomplished his Apple-correcting wizardry by “casting spells.” But Gates, as a “minor wizard,” was immune to Jobs’ hocus pocus.
This week on The CultCast: A new report details why Jony Ive is departing Apple, and it paints a troubling picture. Plus, Leander tells us about the “fiddle factor,” the unique quality that made Ive our time’s greatest designer.
Our thanks to Squarespace for supporting this episode. Easily create a beautiful website all by yourself, at Squarespace.com/cultcast. Use offer code CultCast at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain..