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Steve Jobs - page 20

Today in Apple history: Toy Story arrives in theaters

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A still from Pixar's animated movie
The movie which helped make Steve Jobs a billionaire.
Photo: Pixar

November 12: Today in Apple history: Toy Story November 22, 1995: Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature-length movie, lands in theaters. The charming film wows the world with the wonders of computer animation.

The most successful of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs‘ business ventures during his wilderness years away from Cupertino, the box office smash makes his belief in the power of computer graphics pay off in a big way.

How big? A cleverly timed decision to sync the movie opening with Pixar’s public offering turns 40-year-old Jobs into a billionaire.

Jony Ive’s design book is much more than an ego trip

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Designed by Apple in California book
Apple's Industrial Design team has published a book of its work over two decades: Designed by Apple in California.
Photo: Leander Kahney/Cult of Mac

Increasingly, some Apple fans think Jony Ive has lost it.

He’s killing ports and headphone jacks left and right. The latest MacBooks value form over function. He’s designing gold watches for the 1 percent.

And now his glossy new photo book, Designed by Apple in California, looks like a $300, linen-bound ego trip.

Jony Ive goes inside Apple’s design lab in new video

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macbook pro
Not a single detail goes unnoticed at Apple.
Photo: Apple

Going inside Apple’s design lab is a rare privilege some Apple execs don’t even get, but Jony Ive is giving the world a glimpse inside his lab to celebrate the company’s new book.

In Apple’s latest video, Jony Ive’s disembodied voice floats through his Industrial Design Studio while describing the processes for making the company’s iconic gadgets. Shots of Apple’s prototyping machines can be seen, as well as the product benches where every single detail of a product is analyzed and reconsidered.

Take a look:

Steve Jobs’ advice for being a good CEO? Throw tantrums.

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Steve_Jobs_2007
Who wouldn't take business advice from this guy?
Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC

At yesterday’s DealBook Conference in New York City, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi related the advice Steve Jobs gave her when she took over as CEO.

That advice? That sometimes the best way to get what you want is to throw tantrums.

How this money man helped Steve Jobs turn Pixar into a powerhouse [Kahney’s Korner podcast]

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Lawrence Levy former Pixar CFO
Lawrence Levy, Pixar's former CFO and author of To Pixar and Beyond.
Photo: Lawrence Levy

In the early ’90s, Pixar was in the middle of creating its first movie, Toy Story, but the company was in disarray. It was bleeding cash and floundering around looking for a business model.

To help turn it around, Steve Jobs hired Lawrence Levy, a former corporate lawyer, to help figure out how to make Pixar a real business.

In this week’s episode of Kahney’s Korner, I talk to Levy about how exactly he and Jobs made Pixar into one of the most successful movie studios in history.

New book paints intimate portrait of Steve Jobs at work [Review]

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To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy
In To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy offers an insider look at Steve Jobs' early struggles at the animation studio.
Photo: Lyle Kahney/Cult of Mac

After his death, Steve Jobs became mythic. He’s remembered as an asshole and a technology seer: a Tony Stark-like figure who could uniquely divine the sci-fi future, conjuring magical products from whole cloth almost single-handedly.

He’s also seen as infallible: a business and technology genius with powers of divination beyond those of us mere mortals.

But To Pixar and Beyond, a new book by Lawrence Levy, the former CFO of Pixar, paints a very different picture.

Steve Jobs exhibition will take place on Samsung’s home turf

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Steve Jobs, creator of the iPad and created on the iPad.
Staging a Steve Jobs exhibit in South Korea is like bringing a Note 7 to an Apple keynote.
Photo: Jeremy Martin

South Korea is Samsung country, but that’s not stopping a local museum in Guri, Gyeongg from staging an honorary exhibition to the late founder of Apple, Steve Jobs.

Featuring a range of Apple computers starting with 1977’s Apple II and running through to the iMac models Jobs oversaw upon his return to the company in the late 1990s, the exhibition will run until November 27.

How Steve Jobs’ swimming failure became unlikely inspiration

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Steve King never would've guessed that he would be designing products to go with computers created by an old swim club teammate, Steve Jobs.
Steve King never would've guessed that he would be designing products to go with computers created by an old swim club teammate, Steve Jobs.
Photo: PRISM

Cult of Mac 2.0 bug Two people couldn’t have been further apart as they sat close to each other on carpool rides to swim meets. Steve King was a jock. The other kid was a geek.

But the geek did something one day that King would never forget. King watched as his teammate made a horrific turn at the wall in the backstroke and popped up in a neighboring lane.

Steve Jobs was immediately disqualified. He got back in his lane and finished the race.

Marketer once pleaded with Jobs and Woz to change Apple’s name

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The rainbow Apple logo on the back of a modern iMac.
Things could have been very different.
Photo: ColorWare

Given that it’s currently the world’s most valuable brand, few people would suggest that Apple should give up its name in favor of something a bit more, well, geeky.

But that wasn’t the case when the company launched, as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently revealed.

Buy Steve Jobs’ first Apple stock certificate for just $195,000

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applestock
It's not quite the equivalent of getting Jobs' 1980 fortune, but it's not too far off.
Photo: Moments in Time

If you’re a fan of rare Apple memorabilia, how about this for a collector’s piece: the first ever AAPL stock certificate given to Steve Jobs after Apple went public in 1980.

Yours for the house-remortgaging price of $195,000, this genuine slice of tech history reportedly hung on Jobs’ office wall at Apple until he left/was booted out of the company in 1985.

You can now pick up rare fine art prints of Steve Jobs during his NeXT days

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screen-shot-2016-09-21-at-13-42-47
Jobs celebrates a visit to the NeXT Computer factory.
Photo: Doug Menuez

If you’ve ever wanted to populate your home with rare fine-art prints of Steve Jobs, this is your lucky day!

That’s because Doug Menuez, an award-winning documentary photographer who made an unprecedented number of pictures of Jobs between 1985 and 1994, is selling a limited quantity of black-and-white prints for the first time.

Animators try their hand at telling the Steve Jobs story

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YouTube is a repository for animated features on the life of Steve Jobs.
YouTube is a repository for animated features on the life of Steve Jobs.
Photo: Adam Holownia,

Cult of Mac 2.0 bugWith all there is to marvel about Steve Jobs and the story of Apple, it’s easy to forget what Jobs meant to animation.

So it’s not surprising that several animators have sought to capture the near-mythological character of Jobs in animated shorts that can be found all over YouTube.

A school for homeless kids gets backing from Steve Jobs’ widow

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RISE High co-founder Eric Whalen works with a student.
RISE High co-founder Eric Whalen works with a student.
Photo: XQ Institute

A kid moving from shelter to shelter or in and out of foster case has more immediate needs than getting to school regularly. But what if the school could come to them?

Two educators in Los Angeles have a plan to do just that and their bold idea has earned them a $10 million grant from a school redesign competition funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Today in Apple history: Coldplay gives Apple one of its first music exclusives

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Photo of British rock band Coldplay performing onstage.
Coldplay's charity EP benefited Hurricane Katrina victims -- and demonstrated Apple's growing clout in the music biz
Photo: Yahoo/Flickr CC

Sept14September 14, 2005: Apple embraces exclusive music releases by debuting a digital EP from Coldplay on iTunes, featuring four previously unheard tracks from the enormously popular band.

100% of profits from the charity EP go to support victims of Hurricane Katrina. However, Apple’s ability to broker exclusive music deals with major record labels and popular artists shows that the company’s current exclusives-driven Apple Music strategy stretches back more than a decade.

Michael Fassbender considered breaking his own arm to avoid Steve Jobs movie

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Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs movie is coming to Netflix
Alternatively he could have just quit.
Photo: François Duhamel/Universal Studios

Actor Michael Fassbender, who played Apple’s late CEO in last year’s movie biopic Steve Jobs, has said he was so worried he had been miscast that he started planning some slightly extreme ways to get out of the role.

“In rehearsals, I was trying to find a way to get out of the job,” he told reporters at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I remember telling my driver, ‘If I put my arm in the door, you should slam it. It should cause a break and it should get me out of this gig.’”

Eddy Cue, Walter Isaacson to speak at Vanity Fair summit

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Eddy Cue
Will he be wearing an Hawaiian shirt?
Photo: CNBC

Eddy Cue is among a list of high-profile speakers that will feature at this year’s New Establishment Summit held by Vanity Fair. Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs’ biography, is also in the lineup, alongside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Apple board member Bob Iger.

Apple’s secret strategy: Underpromise and overdeliver

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iPhone 7 colors
Why the critics are wrong who think Apple's lost its touch.
Photo: Apple

Apple’s always been the company that promised us the world. Steve Jobs’ genius was his ability to convince us that every single thing Apple did shifted the Earth on its axis.

Recently, that feeling of magical futurism has faded. Apple events have been preceded by a feeling of “been there, done that.”

Forget the “wireless future” that Apple talked up at yesterday’s iPhone 7 event as it tried to convince us that we really want AirPods and a dongle rather than a headphone jack. If Apple has a strategy in 2016, it’s underpromise and overdeliver.

And it’s working great!

Will Apple Pencil come to iPhone? Tim Cook suggests so

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Apple Pencil
Apple Pencil could make the leap to iPhone 7.
Photo: Apple

After insisting nobody wanted a stylus, Apple went ahead and made the best one money can buy. It’s the perfect companion to iPad Pro if you like writing and drawing on touchscreens, but will it ever be compatible with iPhone? One interview with Tim Cook seems to suggest so.

Steve Jobs’ leather jacket and black turtleneck go up for auction

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Photo of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs flipping off the IBM logo.
This jacket can now be yours.
Photo: Andy Hertzfield

Want to own a bunch of Steve Jobs’ old crap from the ’80s and ’90s?

Some of the Apple co-founder’s personal items have just hit the auction block, giving some Jobs-obsessed nerd the first opportunity ever to drape his or her naked body in the same bathrobe as the dude that invented the iPhone.

Extremely rare Apple I sells for $815,000

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The Celebration Apple I didn't break any records.
The Celebration Apple I didn't break any records.
Photo: CharityBuzz

Bidding for the extremely rare “Celebration Apple I” being auctioned by CharityBuzz closed today and while the lot failed to break the record for the most amount paid for an Apple I computer, the winning bid nearly topped $1 million dollars.

Report card: How has Tim Cook fared after five years as CEO?

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Tim Cook
Tim Cook has now been officially running Apple for half a decade.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

The flip side to the news that today marks five years since Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO is the fact that it also marks Tim Cook’s ascendance to Apple’s top position.

So how has Cook done at the seemingly impossible task of following one of the most-revered business executives in history? Putting on our teacher hats and picking up our best red marking pens, here’s how Tim Cook’s report card reads so far.

Could Tim Cook be doing a better job at Apple? [Friday Night Fights]

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fbf
Do you think Apple is in a good place under Tim Cook?
Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac

It’s been almost five years since Tim Cook was named Apple CEO, and during that time the company has seen some pretty incredible highs. But there have been some significant lows, too.

Friday Night Fights bug The recent fall in iPhone demand is perhaps the most significant setback, leading to Apple’s first quarterly decline in revenue in 13 years. Cupertino has also been criticized for releasing unpolished products and buggy software in recent years.

So, is Cook doing enough to keep Apple one step ahead of the competition, or does he need to do more? Join us in this week’s Friday Night Fight as we discuss Cook’s first five year’s as Apple CEO.