Top Stories - page 43

The world had never seen anything like the iPhone when Apple launched the device on June 29, 2007. But the touchscreen device that blew everyone’s minds immediately didn’t come about so easily.
The iPhone was the result of years of arduous work by Apple’s industrial designers. They labored over a long string of prototypes and CAD designs in their quest to produce the ultimate smartphone.
This excerpt from my book Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products offers an inside account of the iPhone’s birth.

What if you could type out any of your email addresses just by tapping on the same key a few times? Or do Google searches over and over on a favorite website just as easily? What about easily typing that special symbol that’s so hard to reach on the iOS keyboard that you usually never bother?

All this, and more, can be yours — if only you’ll spend a minute or two setting up some text replacement shortcuts. Let’s do it right now.

July 7, 1997: Apple CEO Gil Amelio officially steps down from his role, turning the company over to the returning Steve Jobs, who immediately begins making his presence felt.

If you’re looking to pinpoint a turning point when Apple began the transition from the ailing company it was in the first half of the 1990s to the powerhouse it is today, this is it!

June 23, 2003: The Power Mac G5 goes on sale. Affectionately nicknamed the “cheese grater” due to its distinctive perforated exterior, it’s Apple’s fastest-ever machine — and the world’s first 64-bit personal computer.

“The 64-bit revolution has begun and the personal computer will never be the same again,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release describing the beastly machine. “The new Power Mac G5 combines the world’s first 64-bit desktop processor, the industry’s first 1 GHz front-side bus, and up to 8GB of memory to beat the fastest Pentium 4 and dual Xeon-based systems in industry-standard benchmarks and real-world professional applications.”

June 9, 2008: In the music industry, they talk about the “difficult second album.” Fortunately, that doesn’t hold true when Apple unveils the highly successful second-gen iPhone.

Adding GPS, 3G data and a higher-quality build than its predecessor, the iPhone 3G is arguably just as revolutionary for what it does on the software side. iOS 2 introduces push email, turn-by-turn navigation and, most significantly of all, an App Store — something Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said the company wouldn’t allow.

Check out the debut of the iPhone 3G below.

June 7, 2010: Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone 4 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

“For 2010, we’re going to take the biggest leap since the original iPhone,” Jobs says, addressing a crowd inside Moscone Center. “So today, we’re introducing iPhone 4. Fourth-generation iPhone. Now, this is really hot.”

He then touted the device’s all-new design — and cracked a joke about the sensational leak that revealed the iPhone 4’s look in the preceding months.

“Now, stop me if you’ve already seen this,” Jobs said, to raucous applause, before cannily reclaiming the narrative. “Well, believe me, you ain’t seen it. You’ve gotta see this thing in person. It is one of the most beautiful designs you’ve ever seen.”

Apple finally showed the world today what the media has been calling an “iWatch” for months. Apple Watch is the first new product category to come out of the company since the original iPad.
It marks a “new era” for Apple, according to CEO Tim Cook, and introducing the Apple Watch was even deemed worthy of a “One more thing” tease (as made famous by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs).
There’s a lot to digest about Apple’s first wearable, so we’ve made it easy for you. Here are the 10 most important things you need to know about the Apple Watch.

My first impression on seeing iOS 7 on my iPhone was: What is this, a My Little Pony theme?

But after scrutinizing, analyzing, deconstructing and living with the new version, I’m ready to declare iOS 7 an unambiguous masterpiece, a stroke of genius, really.

That may sound like a weird thing to say about a fruity, copycat platform that crashes constantly. But it’s true, and I’ll tell you why.

Once you download BetterTouchTool and start to explore what this powerful Mac utility offers, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

The app lives up to its name. It greatly enhances your experience of using a Mac by letting you add your own custom trackpad gestures. But despite the name, it works beyond your Mac’s trackpad or Magic Mouse. You can use it for keyboard shortcuts too, or with a standard USB mouse. Even an Apple Remote.

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. He also 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 a 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…”).