Steve Jobs - page 28

Yesterday, Nokia made it clear they wanted nothing to do with Apple’s all-smartphones-suck-at-making-calls spiel made during a press conference on Friday (a breakdown of Apple’s test can be found on the company’s website, here). Blackberry maker Research In Motion followed with much stronger words, saying that “Apple’s claims about RIM products appear to be deliberate attempts to distort the public’s understanding of an antenna design issue and to deflect attention from Apple’s difficult situation.”

Then just this morning, HTC appear to have made their position clear, telling the folks at Pocketlint HTC has only received complaints about the Droid Eris — which was one of the hapless phones demonstrated to have antenna issues by Jobs on Friday — from “approximately .016 percent of customers,” far below Apple’s claim of .55 percent of customers complaining about the iPhone 4.

While the comparison may or may not be all that significant, what’s certain is that Apple seems to have its competitors snarling at it. Expect the shouting match to get louder tomorrow.

[via Pocketlint, Gizmodo]

Apple has posted video of this morning’s press conference about the iPhone 4’s antenna. You can watch it here. However, it does not include the juicy Q&A session, where Jobs rips the tech press for creating Antennagate.

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This is a guest commentary by Bryan J. Ball, a stand up comedian and long-time Apple fanboy.

My relationship with Steve used to be such a happy one. He would create beautiful bits of electronic amazement and I would buy them, show them off and feel generally superior to my non-Apple friends and family. That’s still mostly true but I’m starting to have my doubts.

My life is pretty Apple-centric. I have an iMac, an iPad, all manner of iPods and I was literally first in line to get an iPhone 4. I’ve been pretty happy with everything I’ve had so far. My area has excellent AT&T coverage so I’m not even plagued by the death grip reception issue on my iPhone.

Yes… I’ve been called a fanboy on more than one occasion. I used to categorically deny this but after watching Steve Jobs’ behavior and listening to myself defend it over the last couple of weeks, I’m starting to wonder.

Responding to a recent New York Times piece linking the horrific warfare in the Congo with the minerals used in our gadgets, Steve Jobs wrote a new iPhone 4 customer explaining Apple’s policy in dealing with mineral purchases:

We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

That’s a refreshingly blunt admission of relative impotence: Apple’s doing what it can, but ultimately, their suppliers are in turn supplied by people who could well be lying about their source. Short of a way to independently verify where minerals are coming from, Apple’s got to take people at their words.

Jonathan Mann once wrote a tune about Paul Krugman that went wildly viral and landed him on the Rachel Maddow Show. Now he’s written one about Steve Jobs and it remains to be seen where this one might take him, but it’s at least a pretty good song by our reckoning: “he’s the best at what he does though I hardly can define/what it is and what he has and that kinda blows my mind.”

Mann is a busy, creative guy who’s led a very interesting and adventurous life so far, which you can hear more about on his YouTube site. He has been writing a song and making a video a day since January 1, 2009 and while he admits he wants to be a star, he also cops to simply “trying to make my way through life.”

In addition to Steve Jobs’ Head (song #541), he recently posted song number #543, Let’s Get Along, which he shot and edited on his new iPhone 4. A dedicated Apple fan, Mann also uses a Mac Pro and a Macbook Pro to record his material.

How come no one ever uses Windows gear to write songs about Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates?

[thanks to Derek for the tip]

It is with some regret that we close the comment thread on the open caption contest for the historic meeting of Steve Jobs and Russian president Dimitry Medvedev: you guys are killing us.

Winner “nudge” who concocted the above simple but effective headline wins an trio of cool promo codes: iAnnotate iPad app, Soduku 2 and Hangman RSS for iPhone.

Special mentions to Jeremey Laflamme, Kevin Kestler, Julie and Alfredo for the laughs.

The best corporate profile of Apple since, well, Leander Kahney’s book Inside Steve’s Brain is in the July/August 2010 issue of Fast Company, published Thursday on the magazine’s website.

Author Farhad Manjoo does a fabulous job of “capturing something that feels like magic” behind Apple and the company’s success by delving into its relationships with current partners such as San Francisco design firm Eight, Inc., by speaking with former employees and others who have watched the company for years, and coming away with 10 essential lessons for any company wanting to become the Apple of its industry.

Of course it’s well known the secret to Apple’s success — notwithstanding Steve Jobs’ personal direction — is nothing more than “discipline, focus, long-term thinking and a willingness to flout the rules that govern everybody else’s business.” And yet, as Manjoo discovers, it’s also much more.

There’s a great series of photographs showing everyday, normal people dressed in the Steve Jobs “uniform” of jeans, running shoes and long-sleeve black mock turtleneck, from which one comes away amazed that only Jobs himself doesn’t look like a total dweeb wearing it. There’s a fabulous graphic by Jeremy Caplan, the iCensus (possibly available only in the print article), depicting who matters (and who doesn’t) in Apple Nation.

And in the end we learn how clues to the future are already built in to Apple’s most current products, and why “we’ll only be able to spot them in retrospect.”

Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmZkrdhOjeQ

It’s hard to remember when one of Steve Jobs keynote speeches WWDC had a glitch, but the Demo Gods weren’t smiling on Jobs today. Thanks to network problems, Jobs had to ditch on a demo because of Wi-Fi trouble. But maybe it’s not some luckless Apple engineer’s fault: The same thing happened to Google during its developers conference last month at the same venue.

This is a guest commentary by Shawn Ahmed, a anti-poverty campaigner. It was originally published here.

Last week, Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world’s biggest tech company. As someone who used to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign, I can’t believe what I’m about to say: this is a bad thing for the world.

Never one to let an opportunity to explain a technology with a metaphor pass him by, Steve Jobs compared the transition from PCs to tablets as similar to when people stopped buying trucks and started buying cars (which is a dubious view of history, but let him run with it). From Engadget:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.

I actually think Steve is both right and wrong about this. What’s more likely is that a lot more households will again become one-PC homes as the need to do intense writing, coding or other keyboard horsepower activities gets more evenly distributed as other kinds of applications migrate to tablets. Only time will tell, of course.

The subject of Google and Android’s major in-roads in the mobile space inevitably came up during Steve Jobs’s interview during the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference this evening. Steve’s take? Google went after Apple, not vice versa. Per Engadget:

Walt: But how about Google? Something has changed. What happened?
Steve: They decided to compete with us… so they are.

Jobs noted that Apple hasn’t gone into the search business and has no plans to. He claimed that he kind of woke up one morning and heard about Android. Given his feelings about loyalty (and the fact that the iPhone was well-underway and had Google working on apps for it), it’s no real surprise that Steve is showing some signs of feeling hurt about the situation. I think he genuinely believed Google wouldn’t try to eat his lunch, even if he’s as ruthless as they come himself.

He ultimately got tired of the line of questioning and tried to end the conversation with a non sequitur: “My sex life is great!”

For the very first time, Steve Jobs spoke publicly at the Wall Street Journal’s D8 conference about the much-discussed prototype iPhone that found its way into the hands of Jason Chen at Gizmodo last month. Without going into much detail (and certainly not acknowledging that the model that was being tested had final industrial design, Steve shared more than anyone else from Apple has to date about the incident. As reported on Engadget’s live-blog:

There’s an ongoing investigation. I can tell you what I do know, though. To make a product you need to test it. You have to carry them outside. One of our employees was carrying one. There’s a debate about whether he left it in a bar, or it was stolen out of his bag. The person who found it tried to sell it, they called Engadget, they called Gizmodo.

The person who took the phone plugged it into his roommates computer. And this guy was trying to destroy evidence… and his roommate called the police. So this is a story that’s amazing — it’s got theft, it’s got buying stolen property, it’s got extortion, I’m sure there’s some sex in there (huge laughs)… the whole thing is very colorful. The DA is looking into it, and to my knowledge they have someone making sure they only see stuff that relates to this case. I don’t know how it will end up.

If I recall correctly, the details about trying to destroy evidence and the roommate calling police is news. It’ll still be awhile before we know the whole truth of the situation, but it’s certainly been fun keeping an eye on the brouhaha…

If you’re interested in keeping abreast of Steve Job’s new hobby of personally answering customer emails (though some of us here at Cult of Mac still maintain it’s a Robin-type assistant or robo-prototype), check out sent by Steve.

It’s a growing, searchable collection of emails Steve sends with just the copy of the exchange, plus links to the source.

Hat tip: Johnny Makkar

Back in 2003, Steve Jobs decided to cancel his “nearly worthless” stock options at Apple in exchange for $75 million.

If he had kept them? They’d be worth $10.3 billion dollars in profits today.

Bill Maher might be on to something. The politicomedian made a bold statement last night that suggested Steve Jobs (aka Sven Jorbs) should make a run for the Oval Office.

Last week, President Obama admitted to being technologically challenged. Maher, noting that the President’s historic run for office was fueled primarily by social networking, refused to take Barry’s ignorance as adorable. Video and transcript after the jump.

Steve Jobs and Gawker haven’t seen eye-to-eye lately, so it’s somewhat surprising to see the Apple CEO engage in a lengthy email exchange with Gawker’s Ryan Tate over the App Store’s walled garden ecosystem and Apple’s ongoing feud with Adobe and other intermediary APIs.

Less surprising is the fact that Gawker’s Tate, in response to Jobs’ polite, reasonable and clear-headed replies, quickly resorted to disrespectful dickhead mode (partly fueled, it seems, by one too many cocktails.

The exchange begins with a simple question by Tate: how does Jobs think Bob Dylan would feel about Apple if he were still 20 today? “Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with revolution? Revolutions are about feedom.”

Jobs’ response is to say that the iPad is about freedom: freedom from spyware, freedom from poor performance and (lamely) “freedom from porn.”

“Some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is,” Jobs wrote.

One year after his liver transplant, Steve Jobs is back to his old self. While he still struggles with low weight as a result of health issues, insiders and analysts say he’s “invigorated,”  and “fully operational” partially as a result of the iPad launch.

“Except for the fact that he’s lost a lot of weight, he’s the Steve Jobs of old,” said Tim Bajarin, who has followed Apple for more than two decades as founder of technology consulting firm Creative Strategies in Campbell, California told Bloomberg.

“At the visionary level, technology and design level, he seems to be working at the same level as he was before he was sick. If I was an investor, I’d be thrilled.”

In this highly-entertaining final installment of his series about Steve Jobs, Macworld founder David Bunnell is taken by Jobs to his favorite lunch spot (you’ll never guess where it is). And for once, Jobs changes his parking habits.

At Steve Jobs 30th birthday party, the jazz great Ella Fitzgerald sings him happy birthday. She seems to have no idea who he is.

Part 14 of “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs,” Macworld founder David Bunnell’s personal history of the Mac.

Steve Jobs is at it again — emailing Apple customers with answers to their questions.

This one was sent to CultofMac.com by reader Paul Greenberg, who asked Jobs about a missing MobileMe feature that’s been bugging him for three years: the inability to sync notes via MobileMe.

At a posh dinner party, Steve Jobs eats a plate of raw vegetables with a blonde bombshell sitting on his knee. Instead of going to Macworld and plugging the Mac, he’s too busy partying with Tina the nymphette.

Part 13 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s personal history of the first Mac: “My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs.”

Steve Jobs is very serious about HTML5 being the future of the web, and in Jobs’ view, H. 264 is an integral part of that formula. Google and Microsoft agree: they’ve committed to MPEG LA’s video codec as the new standard for online video. That puts the three biggest players all in the same corner when it comes to H. 264.

But Opera and Firefox aren’t fans of the standard. Instead, they back a codec called Ogg Theora, which is royalty free and open source, while H. 264 is closed source and only royalty free until 2015. Their fear is that mass adoption of H. 264 will cause MPEG LA to “flip the switch” on royalties five years down the line, leaving companies no choice but to pay exorbitant licensing fees.

So why isn’t Apple on board with Ogg Theora? Apple fan Hugo Roy wrote Steve Jobs over the weekend, asking him about Apple’s backing of the H. 264 standard. Jobs informative and surprisingly length reply follows:

In part 12 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s story of the early Mac, Bill Gates is the only developer to actually deliver on his promises of software for the Mac. Microsoft’s Excel literally saves the Mac just when sales drop to nil, but at the same time Gates’ engineers are reverse engineering the GUI for the first version of Windows.

In Part 11 of Macworld founder David Bunnell’s memoirs, Steve Jobs triumphantly introduces the Mac to the world. “It sang to us. It performed mathematical calculations with the blinding speed of a Cray mainframe. It drew beautiful pictures. It communicated with other computers. It bounced rays off satellites and sent a subversive message to the Soviet Union.”