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.”
Since contacting Steve has gotten so popular lately, The Joy of Tech has created this handy web based Steve Jobs Email Reply Generator for simplifying the process…
Apple CEO Steve Jobs isn’t exactly known to mince words with his customers or employees, and his characteristic bluntness even extends as far as his conversations with other CEOs.
Take this conversation he had with eerie William Macy lookalike and Nike CEO Mark Parker upon the introduction of the Nike+ product line. Asking Parker for advice on how to run his company, Jobs bluntly replied: “Get rid of the crappy stuff.”
“I expected a little laugh,” Parker said. “But there was a pause and no laugh at the end.”
No, Mark, Jobs is dead serious about excising the crap. Well, except for the Apple TV.
In part 7 of Macworld‘s founder David Bunnell’s memoirs of the Mac, it’s clear that the machine isn’t ready for prime-time. Macworld‘s editor Andrew Fluegalman tells this to Steve Jobs, who reacts in a surprising way.
In Part 6 of his memoirs, Macworld founder David Bunnell recalls the magazine’s first cover shoot featuring Steve Jobs, who has a sudden, unexpected change of heart.
“Take a picture of this,” Steve said, holding up his middle finger. We stared in disbelief.
In Part 5 of My Close Encounters With Steve Jobs, Macworld founder David Bunnell describes seeing the 1984 Macintosh ad for the first time.
Macworld‘s founder David Bunnell’s first meeting with Steve Jobs is surprisingly genial. This time he gets to meet the REAL Steve Jobs. Plus he has one of the best ideas of his magazine career.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FW-lrMXLBE
This fierce edit of Steve Jobs’ April keynote by Neil Curtis — father of the 180-sec keynote is, like, um great. (Curtis reminds us that, uh, it’s all in good fun).
Very reassuring for anyone who has, like, uh, spoken in public, or, you know, heh, been interviewed for radio, or, um, so, done a podcast, and um been horrified at all the excess, uh, verbiage? and weird intonations? and half sentences (“We nailed?”) that, so, now, inevitably, you know, clutter up the way you, uh, talk.
In Part 2 of My Close Encounters with Steve Jobs, Macworld-founder David Bunnell tells of seeing the Mac for the first time, and why Steve Jobs parks in handicapped spaces.
This is the first installment of “My Close Encounters with Steve Jobs,” a fantastic series of stories about the early days of the Mac written by the founder of Macworld magazine, David Bunnell.
Bunnell meets Jobs for the first time. He’s nervous because Jobs is in “an extremely foul mood” says the receptionist, maybe because he had an unsuccessful date with Joan Baez the night before.
Also, Bill Gates tells Bunnell he’s going to buy a Mac for his mother. Gates and his cohorts are so excited about the Mac, they’re all buying up Apple stock (possibly in violation of SEC insider-trading rules).
Want porn on the go? Go buy an Android phone is the advice of none other than Apple founder Steve Jobs.
For the next three weeks we’re going to be publishing a series of posts called “My Close Encounters with Steve Jobs.” Written by David Bunnell, the founder of Macworld magazine, it’s a bunch of great stories about Jobs and the launch of the Mac. It’s a excellent, insightful read with a ton of previously unpublished stories and details. Starting Tuesday — Part 1: Meeting Steve.
It’s Friday and we’re all a little tired. Luckily, a surprisingly vociferous Steve Jobs has been taking to his iPad email client a lot lately to entertain us.
His latest missive? Explaining the rationale behind leaving the 13-inch MacBook Pros behind the Core i3i5 15 and 17-inchers with comparatively wimpy Core 2 Duo processors.
Steve Jobs has sent another of his off-the-cuff customer emails, this time about the not-so-fast chip in the new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Some observers are complaining that the 13-inch MacBook still sports a rather lowly Core 2 Duo chip, which also powered the previous generation machine. Meanwhile, the 15-inch and 17-inch MacBooks got speedy Intel Core i5 and i7 processors.
One MacRumors reader sent Steve Jobs a note about it, who responded that Apple chose to offer better graphics and battery life rather than an increase in CPU performance.