Steve Jobs - page 27

In an effort to appease the angered politicians in Washington, Apple is sending VP of Software, Bud Tribble, to the Senate hearing to discuss the storage of location data on iPhones. Location-Gate became one of the hottest topics concerning privacy and the use of cellular phones recently. At the center of the controversy, Apple quickly released an update to iOS (4.3.3) to amend the issue of iPhones storing user’s location data, which could possibly be acquired via a third-party to discern everywhere the user has been over the past few months. Senator Alan Franken has been the most vocal opponent of the recent discovery and was the one to initiate the hearing.

Bud Tribble has been with Apple since the 80’s, but as a Jobs loyalist, he left the company when Steve was ousted and became one of the founding members of NeXT, serving as the company’s VP of Software Development where he worked on projects that would later become the foundation for OS X.

The front page of the gossip rag The National Equirer February 17 shouted about the untimely demise of Apple’s founder and CEO Steve Jobs: “APPLE BOSS 6 WEEKS TO LIVE.”

That headline was derived from a medical source quoted by the newspaper: “One of our experts – Boca Raton, Fla., critical care physician Dr. Samuel Jacobson, who has not treated Jobs – told The ENQUIRER: ‘The poor guy! Judging from these photos, he is close to terminal. I would say he has six weeks.'”

Well, needless to say, the doctor was wrong and the whole “six weeks to live” thing was just sensationalist baloney. Jobs is very much alive. And since his paparazzi death sentence more than six weeks ago, he has dined with the president and launched the iPad 2.

Steve Jobs famously once quoted Picasso as saying: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” And by that metric, Apple is a lousy artist.

Apple is stolen from by just about everybody. Microsoft and other companies steal design and interface ideas from Apple’s OS X. Cell phone handset makers steal Apple’s iPhone design elements. The new tablet market is essentially Apple’s iPad plus the tablets that steal ideas from the iPad. Everybody has stolen Apple’s approach to app stores.

There’s a difference between stealing ideas and stealing intellectual property. Stealing winning general approaches to doing things like multi-touch gestures on a tablet device is good. Stealing the code to do that is bad.

Microsoft has long been accused of stealing Apple ideas in the many designs of Windows that have occurred over the years. Windows has tended to be more challenging to use than OS X over the years, and Windows products tend to be less elegant. Because of all this, Apple fans often dismiss Microsoft as a company without innovation.

In fact, the opposite is true. Microsoft’s research wing is an under-appreciated engine of invention, in my opinion. And while Microsoft fails to productize some of its best inventions, it’s also occasionally successful at implementing new ideas in real products.

I’ll go further. Apple and its customers would benefit enormously if Apple were to steal the following five key ideas from Microsoft.

Apple just posted the full length video from this morning’s keynote. Users wanting to view the event can now stream the entire 72 minute video of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad 2 by going to Apple’s website (click here for video). Also, if you’d like to download the video it’s been made available on iTunes (click here for iTunes download).

Many people have seen the 1984 SuperBowl commercial introducing the Macintosh to the masses. In the fall of 1983, Jobs gave a preview of this spot to an enthusiastic crowd of Apple shareholders and insiders. With full Reality Distortion Field in place, a young, passionate Steve Jobs describes the history of computing, IBM’s missed opportunities, and their current threats to Apple and the computing industry.

Happy Birthday, Steve – you haven’t lost your touch! Apple SuperNerds will notice a few soundtrack differences between this preview and the commercial that actually aired – can you spot them?

For people like me, and the other 28 million living with cancer, people like Steve Jobs are incredible role models. When I was undergoing chemotherapy three years ago, I was often tempted to think “why me?” But then I asked myself, “Why Steve Jobs? Why Lance Armstrong?” And I reflected on the remarkable things that they went on to achieve after their treatment. Their inspirational example helped me more than I can say.

Steve Jobs chooses not to talk about his cancer. He prefers to focus on his work. We should respect his choice.

Rebutting the National Enquirer’s morbid rumors that he is near death, Steve Jobs will be among the attendees at President Barack Obama’s dinner with tech industry leaders in San Francisco tomorrow, an inside source tells ABC News.

At today’s White House press briefing, press secretary Jay Carney said that the focus of the event will be “innovation and job creation” with business leaders “who know a lot about private sector job growth.”

The full list of attendees has not yet been released, but it has been learned that outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Paul Otellini of Intel are also on the guest list.

Institutional Shareholders Service, an independent proxy-advising service, and the Laborers’ International Union of North America have endorsed a shareholders’ proposal to require Apple, Inc. to disclose a succession plan for Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, according to a report Thursday at Bloomberg’s Businessweek.

Apple shareholders will consider the proposal, which would mandate Apple’s board disclose a CEO succession plan annually, at the next shareholders’ meeting on February 23.

Jobs announced his most recent medical leave of absence from the company on January 17, which led to new rounds of speculation in the media and blogosphere as to the Apple CEO’s health and his long-term prospects for continuing to lead the giant technology enterprise.

Tim Cook, Apple’sChief Operating Officer, has taken over responsibility for day-to-day operations in Jobs’ absence, but the board has offered no guidance as to who might take over in the event Jobs is unable to return to work.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggQQwNbkmmo

The news of Steve Jobs’ health problems has saddened a lot of Apple fans. Rather than sit around speculating what may or may not be wrong with Steve’s health, we want to do something to try and lift his spirits. But we need your help.

We’re asking all our readers and anyone else who’s a fan of Steve Jobs to use their creativity and join us in making an awesome Get Well Soon video message.

Click on the YouTube video above and submit your own video reply. You can upload video or record a quick message with your webcam. It’s the easiest way we can think of to get a bunch of video messages that we can edit together into a big group message.

Uniquely express your well wishes to Steve and upload it. The more video replies we can get the better. It’s your choice if you wish to make your message funny or dramatic or sincere. Just make it you. Spread it on Twitter with #getwellsteve.

Let’s let the world’s best CEO know that we care about him.

Here are step-by-step instructions showing how to use YouTube’s Video response feature. And again, please spread the word.

[polldaddy poll=”4404003″]

With the announcement of his leave from day-to-day operations at Apple, Steve Jobs set off a flurry of speculation and sent some stock prices skittering.

Jobs once again asked for privacy and respect — some believe he should have it, others believe Apple will be under too much pressure from shareholders to maintain much reserve.

Do you think Steve jobs will get the privacy he has asked for? And how much does he deserve?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs and design head Jonathan Ive are so close they are called “Jives” around the Cupertino campus for short.

The dynamic duo have been inseparable since the mid-1990s, when Jobs returned to Apple to find a young Ive stuck in a basement surrounded by hundreds of prototypes. Jobs recognized immediately that the company had a great resource that should be put to work.

NPR did a nice piece delving into how Jives have been working together to create some of Apple’s most memorable products.

Even though he’s a pretty reserved and deeply private individual, Steve Jobs sure does churn out great lines every year. Here are the 10 Ten Steve Jobs Quotes of 2010

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a hands-on kind of guy, but usually, that hands-on approach tends to pop up as dashed-off emails from his iPhone in response to customer queries than telephonic reach-outs.

That’s not to say the latter can’t happen, though: A Seattle-based iPad developer was recently called by His Steveness himself after his app was rejected for using private APIs.

With his usual fanfare, Steve Jobs has just strutted onto the stage at Apple’s own Cupertino headquarters for today’s Back to the Mac event.

Steve’s looking confident, and he has every reason to be with $50 billion in the bank. The big question is, what will Apple be announcing today to add to the corporate coffers? iLife ’11 and OS X 10.7 are definites, as is a new MacBook Air… but could we also see a Verizon iPhone, refreshed MacBooks and maybe the slam dunk of a totally new product that Apple has somehow managed to keep completely secret by the end of the next hour and a half?

Place your bets in the comments, but best do it quick: Steve’s about to open his mouth, and that’s when the bets begin to close, one by one.

[image via Engadget]

In 1983, Steve Jobs wooed Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Jobs and Sculley ran Apple together as co-CEOs, blending cutting edge technology (the first Mac) with cutting edge advertising (the famous 1984 ad) and world-class design. But it soon soured, and Sculley is best known today for forcing Jobs’ resignation after a boardroom battle for control of the company.

Now, for the first time, Sculley talks publicly about Steve Jobs and the secrets of his success. It’s the first interview Sculley has given on the subject of Steve Jobs since he was forced out of the company in 1993.

“There are many product development and marketing lessons I learned working with Steve in the early days,” says Sculley. “It’s impressive how he still sticks to his same first principles years later.”

He adds, “I don’t see any change in Steve’s first principles — except he’s gotten better and better at it.”

Here’s a full transcript of my interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.

It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

UPDATE: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”) but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link; or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).

There is a great video of Steve Jobs giving an interview to 60 Minutes in which he states – rather boldly – that the problem with Microsoft is that they “simply have no taste.” He goes on to say that the Windows firm has “no originality” and “no culture infused into products.”

It took Athens, Greece-based artist Charis Tsevis about a week of 16-hour days to create this trippy mosaic portrait of Steve Jobs for Brazilian magazine ALFA.

Tsevis is an old hand at innovative Apple collages, whose work has appeared in Fortune and inspired a send-up of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

This one is something of a departure, taking us back to the colorful early days of Apple history. More on the inspiration behind it and close-ups after the jump.

Steve Jobs joined California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in signing legislation to establish the U.S.’s first nationwide kidney donor registry.

Jobs, who received a liver transplant in 2009, has been credited with providing the impetus for the bill.

“As a transplant recipient, I know how precious this gift of life is,” Jobs said at the signing ceremony in Palo Alto. “And on behalf of those future transplant recipients who will now receive organs because of this new law, I want to thank governor Schwarzenegger, Senator Elaine Alquist and all of the legislators who voted for this law. Thank you all very much.”

Schwarzenegger said the registry will vastly increase the number of donors and make it much easier to find recipient matches. Only one quarter of qualified donors in California are currently signed up on registries, he said.

Donors can sign up here: Donate Life California.

There’s a webcast of the signing ceremony here.

Plans for Steve Jobs’ new house have been dug up. They show a fairly modest 5,000-square-foot house with five bedrooms and a private vegetable garden.

If anything, the conceptual plans submitted to the Woodside Town Council depict more of a small, private retreat than any towering glass-and-steel tech chapel or totem of wealth. According to these initial designs, Jobs intends to populate the 6 acres with an assortment of indigenous flora; a simple three-car garage; a modest 5 bedroom home with plenty of windows and decks; a network of lighted stone walkways; and even a private vegetable garden. Everything is neat, tight, pragmatic, and in its place.

Gizmodo: The Plans For Steve Jobs’ New House

Never letting a good opportunity go to waste, Scoopertino reveals that Steve Jobs’ recent incident at Japan’s Kansai International Airport was actually a field test of Apple’s newest product:

“iPod ninja fits into that sweet spot between the iPod touch and a small handgun,” says Apple spokesperson Ted Wetmore. “It gives you peace of mind. You can either enjoy your music on the device — or you can fling it at anyone who looks at you funny. With a little practice, you can take down a foe at 50 feet.”

However, there is a dark side to the new iPod. As iPod ninja sales boom, some blogs are already reporting a “death grip” problem even worse than the one that plagued iPhone 4. If you hold iPod ninja in a certain way, you may require immediate medical care.

“There is a learning curve,” admits Mr. Berry, “and Apple does recommend the use of a protective case.” [Scoopertino]

Credit card, photo ID and criminal background check required for purchase.  This could have the potential to be a real killer product….

[via iPhoneSavior]

The value of a dollar just keeps on climbing.

Though Apple CEO Steve Jobs is still paid only a buck a year for his Cupertino duties, the latest Forbes list of the top 400 wealthiest Americans pegs his worth at $6.1 billion… up a billion dollars from last year.

As usual, most of that wealth does not come from Apple, but rather Jobs’ position as the primary shareholder of the Walt Disney Corporation: his stocks there are valued at roughly $4.4 billion. That fact alone never ceases to amaze me. From a pure income and valuation perspective, Apple is basically Jobs’ hobby. None the less, Apple’s stock has continued to soar over the last year, closing at a record high of $287.55 per share just this Wednesday.

All in all, Jobs managed to claw his way up a spot in the rankings from last year, now coming in as the 42nd richest American and 136th richest man in the world. Rather embarrassingly, however, Jobs was overtaken by several ranks in this year’s list by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s hoping Steve smacks that sweaty, frog-eyed little upstart down the rankings a few dozen spots in the years to come.

What’s that you say? Not enough work stress in your life? We’ve got something that’ll ramp it right up, courtesy of Dutch graphic designer/cartoonist Metin Seven: a half-foot, 3D-printed bust of a glowering Steve Jobs. Try positioning it on your desk facing you, somewhere off in your peripheral vision, for maximum effect.

Steve can be ordered from cutting-edge craft-site Shapeways for $116.81 in a color option described as “white strong & flexible.” Obviously.

At least he was polite, but it’s obviously not customers for whom Steve Jobs has little regard — it’s journalists.

When Long Island University senior Chelsea Kate Isaacs, 22, emailed Jobs Thursday asking why Apple’s PR department wasn’t responding to her questions about about the use of iPads in academic settings, she claimed she wasn’t expecting a response, according to a report at Valleywag.

But she got one, several in fact, and in the end Jobs said, simply, “Please leave us alone.”

Ms. Isaacs should have emailed us about why Apple PR doesn’t respond to questions like hers; there’s a whole staff here with lots of experience in that area.

[Gawker]

According to the most recent edition of SPA! magazine, Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t intend to revisit Japan anymore. Also, he’s a secret ninja.

As reported and translated by F’ed Gaijan, the temperamental Apple founder apparently became furious when passing through security at the Kansai Airport on his way out of the country after a quiet vacation near Kyoto with his family.

The problem? Japanese security found shuriken, or ninja throwing stars, in his carry-on luggage, and insisted upon confiscating them. Since Kansai Airport does not have any procedures in place for dealing with private jets and other VIPs, so Jobs was going through security the same as anyone else.

According to SPA!, a red-faced Job tantrumed: “I’m hardly planning to hijack my own private jet! What a country! I’m never coming back!” Then, calling upon his incredible kuji-kiri ninja abilities, Jobs melted into the shadows, never to be seen in Japan again.