Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington has written a nice essay giving thanks this Thanksgiving — to Steve Jobs.
Arrington rightly points out that our world would be very different if Jobs hadn’t returned to Apple 12 years ago. Mobile phones would still be horrible, computers would still be ugly and the music industry would have collapsed.
“… What would our world look like without him? We’d likely still be in mobile phone hell. Chances are we still wouldn’t have a decent browsing experience on the phone, and we certainly wouldn’t be enjoying third party apps like Pandora or Skype on whatever clunker the carriers handed us. Even if you use an Android, Palm Pre or newer Blackberry today, you must thank Apple for pushing open the doors to mobile freedom. Think back to the phone you had in 2006, and then tell me you don’t love Apple for the iPhone alone (yes, I’ve moved on, but the iPhone was the genesis).”
I’m with Arrington. Let’s give thanks for Steve Jobs.
Isamu Sanada’s day gig is photography, but his passion is Apple mock-up design.
An amateur designer of fantasy Macintoshes with a website that showcases dozens of his speculative designs for Apple gear, Sanada got his mock-up cred back when he posted an amazingly prescient take on the Titanium G4 PowerBook months before the real deal was released.
Though he’s gotten lots of praise for his designs, Sanada has been quoted regarding his design chops humbly, saying, “Apple’s thought is more splendid than my thought.”
Hit the jump for more Steve Jobs lookalikes and if you find one out and about — or happen to be one yourself — send us a pic or post it on our Facebook wall and we may feature yours in a gallery post down the road.
Is this Steve Jobs driving a tank in a classic Apple TV spot from the late 1990s? That was the rumor at the time: Jobs was making cameos in Apple commercials.
Ken Segall, the TBWA ad man responsible for naming the iMac and Think Different, reveals the truth after the jump. He also shares some rare behind-the-scenes photos he took during the filming of this commercial and another from the same era.
Meet Ken Segall — the man who dreamed up the name “iMac” and wrote the famous Think Different campaign.
Segall is a veteran creative director who worked at Apple’s agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day, back in the day.
“I’ve put in 14 years working with Steve Jobs on both Apple and NeXT,” says Segall. “I’m the author of the Think Different campaign and the guy who came up with the whole “i” thing, starting with iMac.”
Segall collaborated closely with advertising legend Lee Clow, chief creative officer of TBWA\Chiat\Day, whose retirement was widely — but prematurely — reported last week.
In this exclusive interview, Segall talks about working with Steve Jobs, how Jobs initially hated the word “iMac,” and the importance of the Think Different campaign to Apple.
Print and cut-out your own scary Steve Jobs Halloween mask, courtesy of Dan Draper. http://www.flickr.com/photos/macobyte/2302719050/
Forget Balloon Boy and Billy Mays this Halloween. Dress up as your favorite demonic CEO instead.
You’ll scare the pants off work colleagues when you walk in the elevator, and the neighboorhood kids will be in a bag of hurt when you give them apple slices instead of sickly sweet candy.
Hit the jump for a full-size mask that you can print and cut out.
The singer Beyonce Knowles -- one of the biggest celebrities in the world -- uses her MacBook at the pool.
When you’re among the top achievers in your given field of endeavor it only stands to reason you probably choose the best tools available to do whatever it is you do, both professionally and personally.
Our survey of some of the best of the best across a wide range of endeavors shows lots of those at the top of their games choose Apple gear when it comes to computing and entertainment and we offer here a gallery of 10 top machers from the fields of media, sports, entertainment, politics and elsewhere who choose Apple products to enhance and enable their achievements.
There’s a reason the game is called Follow the Leader, isn’t it?
Jobs has a net worth of $5.1 billion, Forbes says, thanks mostly to nearly $4 billion worth of stock in Disney. Jobs became the largest individual Disney stockholder after the company bought Pixar in 2006.
“Best investment: bought Pixar from George Lucas in 1986 for $10 million; created string of hits (Finding Nemo, Toy Story). Sold to Disney in 2006 for $7.4 billion in stock,” says Forbes. “Today is Disney’s largest shareholder; stake worth $3.9 billion.”
Last year, Jobs placed 61st on Forbes’ list, and despite a decline in net worth of about $600 million, he comes inside the top 50. The economic climate hasn’t been as kind to other billionaires, poor souls. His previous highest showing was 49th place in 2007.
Jobs climbed up the ladder thanks to a massive 90% rebound in Disney’s stock price, and a similar doubling of Apple’s. Just six months ago, in the middle of the slump, Jobs slipped to 178th place.
Jobs has drawn only a $1 annual salary from Apple since returning to the company, although he has received massive stock option grants and a private Gulfstream jet.
The Apple tablet is 10.7-inch device that runs the iPhone OS and is ready to go, subject to Steve Jobs’ final approval, iLounge reports.
Citing a rock solid source with a proven track record, iLounge says the “iPad” looks like a jumbo iPhone with a curved back and an approx. 720p touchscreen. The device will be announced on January 19 and ship in May or June — the delay is designed to build iPhone-like hype.
It will come in two configurations: One with built-in 3G networking and another without. “Think of the 3G version as a bigscreen iPhone 3GS, and the non-3G version as a bigscreen iPod touch,” iLounge says.
The device is not designed for a work or productivity. It’s for media consumption.
“It’s a slate-like replacement for books and magazines, plus all of the media, gaming, app, and web functionality of the iPhone and iPod touch,” iLounge says. “It is not meant to compete with netbooks. It’s an iPhone OS media player and light communication device.”
And Steve Jobs is 80 percent likely to give the green light for a January 19 launch.
Steve Jobs made a welcome return to the public eye last week at a special music event to introduce Apple’s 2009 holiday iPods.
“The September music event was classic Apple. It marked the return of the world’s greatest corporate storyteller,” says communications coach, Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.
Gallo’s book will be published later this month by McGraw-Hill and can be pre-ordered now from Amazon. Gallo’s written some insightful analyses of Steve’s presentations in the past, so we asked him to take a look at last week’s event. After the jump, Gallo breaks down his top ten presentation tips from Jobs’ latest speech.
Apple has posted some nice, high–res video of today’s “Rock & Roll” special press event. The video is available here and has been added to Apple’s Keynote podcast, although it isn’t yet linked from the iTunes front page.
It’s worth watching for four reasons:
* To see Steve’s heartfelt thanks to his liver donor, to Apple’s staff, and the Apple community, whose best wishes seems to have genuinely buoyed and touched him.
* The gaming demos. The iPhone/iPod touch platform is maturing into an important and fun game platform. The demos make this very clear. It isn’t for hard-core gamers, but the rest of us — the millions of casual gamers that only Nintendo seems to know how to engage.
* To see the preview of iTunes LP, and look for clues what the format might be like on a multitouch device (which I think is what project codename Cocktail is really about).
* To see Steve, who’s magnetic and charismatic and utterly watchable even when he’s very unwell. Who knows how many more times we’ll get to see him? These opportunities are getting rarer and rarer. Here’s hoping he makes an appearance at CES in Las Vegas in January to introduce the Apple tablet. And that he puts on 30lbs eating ice cream. I know it worked for me.
The third coming of Steve Jobs, by Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5355422/steve-jobs-is-back-in-the-game-reappears-in-ipod-event
Remember John Lennon’s famous quip that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus?
Well, now Steve Jobs is bigger than the Beatles, says music-industry pundit Bob Lefsetz.
“Steve Jobs’ appearance today is the biggest story in the world,” he wrote today.
“What kind of crazy, fucked-up world do we live in where the biggest rock star doesn’t even play an instrument? I don’t know if you were online at 10 A.M. (1 P.M. on the east coast), but a roar was heard on the Internet louder than any audience explosion ever noted on a dB meter. Steve Jobs hit the stage!”
Lefsetz has banged on about Jobs being a rock star before, but he is absolutely right.
Who’s heard a peep all day about the Beatles? It’s all been about Steve Jobs. And that’s because Apple has got someting new and fresh and honest, while the music industry is once again repackaging something old, something “that meant something once,” Lefsetz says.
Why doesn’t the new iPod touch have a camera? And why can’t the nano take still pictures? Steve Jobs gave David Pogue of the New York Times some answers…
Steve Jobs received a standing ovation at the beginning of today’s “Rock&Roll” special event. Watch the video after the jump and hear him thank the donor whose liver saved his life. It’s humble and touching.
Steve Jobs has just taken the stage and is getting a long standing ovation. “I’m vertical, back at Apple, loving every day of it,” he said.
“I’m very happy to be here with you all. As some of you might know, I had a liver transplant,” he told reporters and Apple staffers gather at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
His voice is very soft.
He said he now has the liver of a 20 year old who died in a car crash, and he thanks him for his generosity, says Gizmodo.
“I’d like to thank everyone in the Apple community for the heartfelt support — it meant a lot. I’d also like to thank Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple team, they really rose to the occasion.”
Twitter user livelovelight just posted this picture of Steve Jobs’ car in a handicapped spot at Apple’s campus. The snap was posted at 2.43 PST — about half an hour ago. Steve’s car is probably still there.
Forty minutes earlier, livelovelight tweated that he’d just missed Jobs: “At apple headquarters. Just missed steve jobs by 2 minutes,” he said.
Jobs is famous for parking in the handicapped spots (check out this hilarious gallery), but perhaps now he’s recovering from a liver transplant he has a genuine handicapped permit. I don’t see it hanging off the mirror though. He must have taken it with him.
And here he is talking to Jonny Ive. This picture was uploaded to Skitch about 33 minutes ago.
If Apple wanted to stand the world on its ear next Wednesday at the It’s Only Rock and Roll But We Like It event in San Francisco, the company would announce it is opening iPhone software development to all comers and is dropping the facade of exclusive distribution through the iTunes App Store.
Heresy, you say? Perhaps in the eyes of some, but read on to learn why those two moves would be best for the company, the platform, for developers and – most of all – consumers.
Coinciding with Steve Jobs return to the public eye next week, Penguin Portfolio is reissuing my book Inside Steve’s Brain with a new chapter about how Apple will cope without its dynamic CEO.
Published in April 2008, Inside Steve’s Brain was a New York Times best-seller and an international hit (translated into 15 languages and a best-seller in Brazil and Italy). But the book was written before Jobs’ recent liver transplant, so the publisher asked me to update it for a second edition.
Jobs will take the stage next week at Apple’s special press event to show off new holiday iPods to the press. He has to: If he doesn’t show up Sept. 9, there’ll be a media shitstorm and Apple’s stock will tank.
Jobs’ last public appearance happened exactly a year ago. Last Sept. 9, he presided over a similar iPod event at the same venue. Bloomberg had accidentally published Jobs’ obituary, and when he appeared onstage he flashed a slide with Mark Twain’s famous line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
Indeed. One liver transplant later, Jobs is still with us, thank God. But there will be a time when Apple will have to do without its supreme leader, and as I explain in the new chapter of Inside Steve’s Brain, the company will be both royally fucked and totally OK when the inevitable happens.
Now that he's back at work full time, Steve Jobs is focusing 100% on the upcoming tablet. He's also up to his old trick of parking in handicapped spaces. This picture was snapped a couple of weeks ago, on August 11, 2009, by Nicholas Brown, who has removed the original from his Flickr stream. There's a copy here though: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12905355@N05/3814193390/in/photostream/
Now that he’s back at work full-time, Steve Jobs is focusing his full attention on the Apple tablet, the Wall Street Journal reports. And he’s kickin ass!
“Mr. Jobs’s focus on the tablet has been jarring for some Apple employees, who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave, said a person familiar with the matter. “People have had to readjust” to Mr. Jobs being back, this person said.”
This is excellent news. Nothing is better for Apple products than Jobs throwing a fit over them. It’s such an important part of the cooking process.
Also important is the ritual killing of the project during the development process. Almost every major project at Apple has been killed before it was started over, from the iMac to Apple’s retail stores. Killing a project and starting over is Jobs’s MO. The Journal says Jobs has already killed the tablet twice. The first time because the battery life was too short, and the second time because “there was insufficient memory,” the Journal says. (This last one’s a puzzler. Presumably it refers to solid-state memory (SSD hard drives), which until recently have been pricey. Perhaps earlier prototypes used SSD drives that were too small and crippled the device?)
Though the Journal report uncovers few new details, it does say that Jobs is currently working on the tablet’s advertising and marketing — which suggests the tablet’s launch is imminent. The Journal has no time line though: “The people familiar with the matter declined to give details on the tablet or disclose when the device would come out.“
Also, it’s stating the obvious, but the Journal notes that Jobs’s focus on the tablet is a clear sign of its importance. Although Apple has released several important pieces of hardware recently, the last product to get Jobs’s full attention was the prototype iPhone back in 2006/2007.
The report doesn’t detail what OS the device will run, which is perhaps the key unanswered question. Nor does it name the price: It’s somewhere between $399 and $999, the Journal helpfully reports.
Jobs is also recovering well from his liver transplant, the Journal says. “People close to Apple said Mr. Jobs is still thin as he recovers from the liver transplant, but his health has improved significantly.”
In his first interview since performing Steve Jobs’s liver transplant earlier this year, surgeon James Eason spreads some interesting light on the case.
Namely, he denies Jobs gamed the transplant system; Tennessee has lots of livers for transplantation; the surgeon is the leading experts in recurrences of Jobs’s rare cancer; he treats far more poor blacks than billionaires; Jobs has a pretty good survival prognosis; and the CEO is a “genuinely nice person.”
* Trained at Harvard, Eason is THE leading expert in treating recurrences in the rare type of cancer Jobs had. This is why Jobs went to Tennessee to get a transplant. Jobs always seeks out the best in the field.
* Jobs did not cheat the system to get a transplant. “It’s not gaming the system,” Eason says. “It’s people choosing where they want their health care.”
* Jobs’s prognosis looks good. Eason only performs a liver transplant if he’s certain he can eliminate all the spreading cancer. About 70 percent of patients have healthy organs five years after surgery.
* Memphis has more livers than patients. Or did, until Eason ramped it up. His Memphis hospital performed 35 transplants in 2005 (before he arrived). In 2008, he jacked it to 120 transplants, and 90 so far this year.
* Jobs is “really a genuinely nice person” and “a special person,” says the surgeon. Perhaps he also performed a personality transplant? Or more likely, Jobs made sure not to piss off the man who held his life in his hands.
Apple is planning a special media event for the week of September 7, MediaMemo reports, citing “multiple music industry sources.”
But Apple won’t tell anyone exactly when the event is. Apple always holds keynote presentations on Tuesdays, so the likeliest date is September 8.
Apple has held a keynote event every September for the last four years to introduce its consumer-focused holiday offerings, typically new iPods and new versions of iTunes.
At this event though, Apple could be introducing several things:
* Cocktail: The presence of multiple music execs suggests a music focus. Apple’s rumored Cocktail project is a secret skunkworks rethink of the LP for the digital age. But it is rumored to be part of the secret tablet project though…
* The Tablet: Many expect the fabled Apple tablet as early as September.
* New iPods: New iPod Nano and iPod Touch with cameras. This seems the most likely.
* iTunes 9: The next version of iTunes is tipped to get Blu-ray, social software support and iPhone app organization. Also seems likely.
* Steve Jobs: Will Jobs make his first public appearance since returning from medical leave?
Artist's impression of a new Apple Store in "Emporium Melbourne," a contorversial shopping center being planned in Australia.
Just weeks after getting permission to tear down his historic mansion, Steve Jobs is embroiled in more wrecking ball controversy.
Preservationists in Melbourne, Australia, are up in arms about the imminent destruction of a historic art deco building in favor of a new Apple store.
Developers have just received permission to rip down Lonsdale House — described as one of the city’s finest examples of art deco architecture.
In its place they’re building a new shopping center called “Emporium Melbourne,” and are angling for Apple to be the anchor tenant. See the artist’s impression above.
Apple already has four stores in Australia, most notably the huge landmark store on Sydney’s George Street, which drew a huge crowd when it opened last year.
The Save Lonsdale House campaign say there’s no reason the building should be demolished, except to make more room for delivery trucks. In the past Apple has been sensitive to historic buildings. The Apple Store in New York’s Soho district, for example, is housed in a historic post office.
Last month, Jobs reached a deal to save his historic Jackling House mansion in Woodside California, which he’d been trying to demolish for years. Jobs will pay $600K to angel investor Gordon Smythe to have the mansion dismantled and moved.
Melbourne's finest example of art deco, Lonsdale House, is going under the wrecking ball to make room for a new Apple store. More info at https://blog.adonline.id.au/lonsdale-house/
“It’s the first time we’ve seen Jobs back in action since January, when he took a leave of absence for a liver transplant,” says TMZ. “Jobs has reportedly been back at work for about a month.”
The picture was taken at 3PM on Wednesday at Apple’s campus in Cupertino. Jobs looks very thin — but, hey, he’s back at work!
Jobs is crossing the road that loops around the campus — Infinite Loop. He’s walking towards one of the car parks that surround the buildings. The photo was taken from inside a vehicle as Jobs crossed in front of it.
The person walking in front of Jobs is likely a bodyguard, but one that looks remarkably like Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head designer. Jobs is reportedly guarded these days, and is driven around in a big black SUV.
The bodyguard is pretty burly, so he’s not the best person to be photographed with if you’ve lost a lot of weight.
Steve Jobs is back in charge at Apple HQ after a liver transplant. CC-licensed photo by Andy.
Steve Jobs is officially back at work after six-month’s medical leave, an Apple spokesperson just told Bloomberg reporter Connie Guglielmo in a phone interview.
“Steve is back to work,” said Apple spokesman Steve Dowling on Monday. “We are very glad to have him back.”
Jobs is working at Apple a few days a week and working from home the remainder of the time, Dowling added. Jobs reportedly returned to work last week, but Monday’s statement is Apple’s first official word.
Jobs took six month’s medical leave in January, promising to return by the end of June. Monday is June 29. During his absence, Jobs had a liver transplant in Memphis, TN.
Warren Buffett has criticized Apple for keeping Steve Jobs's liver transplant a secret. Illustration by MacBlogz.
Joining other experts, billionaire investor Warren Buffet says Apple might have violated the law by keeping quiet about Steve Jobs’s liver transplant.
The head of Berkshire Hathaway said Jobs’s life-saving operation was a “material fact” that Apple was legally obliged to report to investors. The Securities and Exchange commission requires public companies to report material facts to shareholders. Failure to do so is in breach of the law.
“It’s a material fact,” said Buffett on CNBC on Wednesday. “Whether he is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact. Whether I’m facing serious surgery is a material fact. Whether (General Electric CEO) Jeff Immelt is, I mean, so I think that’s important to get out. They’re going to find out about it anyway so I don’t see a big privacy issue or anything of the sort.”
