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Long profile of Steve Jobs on the eve of his fourth act written by John Heilemann, who is one of my favorite technology/culture writers. I’m dying to find out what past Jobs-championed Apple product the iPhone will most resemble: the Lisa or the iPod?
Stuff from Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote this morning: new version of Safari for Mac *and* Windows (downloadable beta), developing for iPhone can be done with HTML & JavaScript…just like Dashboard widgets, new Finder and Desktop, and Apple’s web site is completely redesigned.
Update: From the reaction I’m hearing so far, it’s difficult to tell what was more disappointing to people: Jobs’ keynote or The Sopronos finale. Also, a Keynote bingo was possible (diagonally, bottom left to top right)…no report yet as to whether anyone yelled out during the show.
Update: TUAW is reporting that someone in the crowd yelled “bingo” 35 minutes into the keynote, but if you look at the card, a bingo was only possible when the iPhone widgets were announced towards the end. Disqualified for early non-bingo! (thx, alex)
Today we once again get to hear the gospel straight from the source; Steve Jobs will be keynoting Apple’s WWDC at 1pm ET. MacRumors, Mac Observer, and Engadget will have live coverage. My predictions: better .Mac, iPhone something, and Jobs will announce that Paulie’s gonna whack Tony Soprano but not before Tony squeals to the Feds. Oh, and a pony.
Nice summary of the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates conversation at the D: All Things Digital conference. “Asked to give advice for others considering starting their own businesses, Gates explained that in the early days, he and his colleagues never considered the value of the company they were developing. ‘It’s all about the people and the passion, and it’s amazing the business worked out the way it did.’” Here’s a briefer summary with context and a transcript and video of the entire interview is available on the conference site.
Profile by Ken Auletta of Walt Mossberg, the WSJ’s technology columnist. It was interesting reading Mossberg’s opinion of the Sprint/Samsung UpStage. A couple friends of mine were testing this phone before it came out and it was one of the most poorly designed technology products that I’ve ever held in my hand. Who knows if the iPhone will actually be worth a crap, but Steve Jobs must rub his hands together with glee when he sees his competitors come out with stuff like this. Mossberg was too easy on it. Auletta has previously profiled Barry Diller, Pointcast, Andy Grove, and Nathan Myhrvold for the New Yorker.
Steve Jobs’ thoughts on music and DRM. Sounds like he’d rather that music sold via the iTMS didn’t have DRM built in.
Antony Hare is one of the few people from the olden days (i.e. 8-10 years ago) that I still check in on regularly…I really dig his simple illustrations. For the past few months, he’s been putting time-lapse videos of some of his drawings on YouTube, including a drawing of Steve Jobs, one of Robert Altman, and another of David Lynch.
1993 New Yorker piece on Barry Diller’s search for his future and that of television, cable, and technology. This article is a time capsule of the optimism surrounding technology in the early 90s. Note that no one saw the internet coming then…the word doesn’t even appear in the article even though most of the things hoped for by the media barons came to pass on the web without their involvement. This interesting exchange between Diller and Steve Jobs happens about halfway through: “After studying NeXT’s brilliant software and graphics — ‘It’s the most magical computer,’ Diller says — he recalls telling Jobs, ‘You’ve made this thing too hard. It shouldn’t be this hard.’ ‘No,’ Jobs answered. ‘It’s like learning to drive. It takes two months.’ ‘No, it takes very little time to drive,’ Diller said. ‘A computer is not that — it’s hard. Why make it harder?’”
David Pennock on the steep rise of Apple’s stock after announcing the iPhone: “Jobs’s speech could not possibly have revealed over $8 billion in previously undisclosed information”.
Update: On the other hand, analysts think that Steve Jobs’ mere presence at the company is worth $20 billion.
Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Here’s how MacRumors did their livecast of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote. At one point, the site had 213,000 simultaneous visitors.
By now you’ve all heard about the iPhone and read 60 billion things about it, so I’ll get straight to it. I’ve been tracking some of the best points from around the web and jotted down some thoughts of my own.
Caveat: Evaluating an interface, software or hardware, is difficult to do unless you have used it. An interface for something like a mobile phone is something you use on the time-scale of weeks and months, not minutes or hours. There are certain issues you can flag as potential problems, challenges, or triumphs after viewing demos, descriptions of functions, and the like, but until you’re holding the thing in your hand and living with it day-to-day, you really can’t say “this is going to work this way” or “I don’t like the way that functions” with anything approaching absolute confidence. With that said:
The touchscreen text entry is the biggest issue with the iPhone. If it works well, the iPhone has a good shot at success, and if not, it’s going to be very frustrating for those that rely on their mobile for text…and every potential customer of the iPhone is going to hear about that shortcoming and shy away.
What *is* fantastic about the iPhone is the way that they’ve put it all together; features are great, but it’s all about the implementation. Apple stripped out all the stuff you don’t need and made everything you do need really simple and easy. (That’s the way it appears anyway…see above caveat.)
One reason there’s limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. “A lot of times, to be honest, there’s some hubris, where they think they know better,” Jobs says. “They dictate what’s on the phone. That just wouldn’t work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn’t worth doing.” Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone’s unique voicemail scheme. “They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen,” says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple’s iPod division. “They were infected by this product, and they were like, we’ve gotta do this!”
Several people have speculated that the iPhone’s version of OS X is actually a preview of what we’ll be getting with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and “OS X”, the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
Apple has figured out a way to retain a hold on hearts and minds in a business previously based on bytes. I applaud its designs, I worry about its tactics and what they mean for the future of marketing and group think. A group that wants our devotion but doesn’t need the press, doesn’t want the press, can’t keep the press off its backs, is a group that’s more interested in mind control than in improving lives with its products.
And that’s enough, I think.
Yesterday a weird smell descended on New York City, a miasma of natural gas odor. Today you might sense a low hum emanating from all over the Earth, localized in households whose inhabitants spend unhealthy portions of their paychecks on consumer electronics. Geeks the world over are vibrating in anticipation of Steve Jobs’ keynote at MacWorld starting in, oh, 5 minutes. Since I too am slightly vibrating and won’t be able to get anything done for the two-hour duration of his talk, I’ll be following along here, sipping from MacRumors’ live coverage. (Gizmodo, Engadget, and Twitter have coverage too.)
As an appetizer, here’s a few of the less hysterical predictions for what Our Fearless Leader is going to provide us with today:
- MacWorld Expo 2007 Predictions from John Gruber at Daring Fireball.
- Jason Fried’s Apple phone predicitons (I especially liked this one).
- Macalope’s predicitons.
- Some thoughts from Steven Frank.
- Regarding MacWorld 2007 by Dan Benjamin.
Ok, here we go….
- BREAKING NEWS: Attendees still taking their seats!
- Started. Gizmodo is stumbling badly. Zero updates.
- Sales updates. Apple now sells more music than Amazon.
- The Zune has 2% market share, the iPod has 62%. What brown can do for you, apparently.
- Apple TV in September. Not an actual TV, but a device that hooks to a TV. Here’s some specs: 802.11b/g/n, 40GB HD, 720p HD, component rca, usb2, ethernet, HDMI. Retails for $299. Shipping in Feb.
- New product: internet communicator, mobile phone, and widescreen ipod all in one. Steve is very excited about this one. Called the iPhone. No buttons. Multi-touch screen. (WHOA!) Runs OS X. Jobs: “Software on mobile phones is like baby-software.” It does all the stuff that OS X does. Calendar, mail, movies, music, podcasts, etc. Turns off the display and sound when you bring it to your ear to talk. It’s got an accelerometer (motion sensor) and a proximity sensor. 2 megapixel camera. Screen resolution is 160 ppi. Here’s what it looks like (photos from Engadget):
- Free IMAP email from Yahoo for iPhone customers. (Shot over Google’s bow.) And it’s “push-IMAP”…works just like a Crackberry.
- The iPhone has a full copy of Safari. Just browse away.
- Jobs just prank-called a Starbucks, attempted to order “4000 lattes to go”.
- Google and Apple pushing hard to partner. “Merging without merging.”
- Apple doing stuff with Yahoo too.
- Apple’s stock now at +$4.51.
- iPhone ships in June in the US. $499 for 4 gig, $599 for 8 gig. Available only with Cingular as the carrier. (Can you unlock?) Can purchase either at Cingular or Apple stores. Have to sign up for a 2-year contract.
- RIM stock is down more than 8 points. RIM makes the Blackberry. Palm, Motorola, and Nokia are all down as well. (thx, eli)
- Apple is changing their name from “Apple Computer, Inc.” to “Apple, Inc.”
10 Zen Monkeys has an interview with Gina Smith about iWoz, her book on Steve Wozniak. “Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer.” (thx, david)
John Gruber’s latest piece contains a keen insight on Steve Jobs and his legendary reality distortion field. “Jobs, in my opinion, is a terrible liar and a poor actor. When he’s able to convince people of things that aren’t true, or that are exaggerations of the truth, it’s because he believes what’s he saying. The reality distortion field isn’t something he projects willfully; it’s an extension of his own certainty.”
Lest we forget, Steven Frank reminds us that for quite a few years (which period roughly coincides with Steve Jobs’ absence from Apple), the Macintosh experience wasn’t all it could have been. In the midst of those dark times, I made a post about how frustrated I was with the Macintosh.
I’ve never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs’ faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don’t get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.
At my first web design job — at a company that used to sell and service Macintosh computers — they had Macs on all the desks. When I left a year and a half later, everyone had Dells running NT 4.0 instead; the difference in speed, stability, and price was not even close at that time. I didn’t use another Mac until I bought an iBook after the second coming of Jobs and the advent of OS X.
BTW, that Mac sucks post has become something of a meme on Slashdot. It’s been used to call out Java 1.4.2 fanatics, TI fanatics, SGI lava lamp fanatics, Apple laywers, Mac Mini hard drive performance, cat fanatics, Google fanatics, Amiga fanatics, Pittsburgh professors, Apple I fanatics, trolling losers, and so on.
Steve Jobs to Apple shareholders: I have no interest in running Disney. He also said that he’ll be spending less time at Disney than he did at Pixar, which is good news for Apple.
Short remembrance by Rob Janoff about designing the logo for Apple Computer. The logo was to be black & white to save on printing costs, but “Jobs was resolute, arguing that color was the key to humanizing the company”.
A list of the best Steve Jobs quotes ever. A contradictory fellow, this Jobs.
On The Steve Jobs on Magazine Covers page, you’ll find, uh, … See also the curl commands for sucking down all the images automagically.
An account of how Pixar came about that goes back a little further (Xerox PARC, circa 1973) than the one I linked to a few days ago.
Some interesting photomosaics. This one of Steve Jobs is made of OS X icons and this woman is a collage of Macs and other Apple products.
It’s a done deal…Disney is buying Pixar. This bums me out in a lot of different ways. The big winner? Apple Computer.
A brief history of Pixar. “Even with the animation group generating income Pixar was still a money pit. That was about to change. Disney had decided they were willing to give a computer-animated movie a shot.”
Going to try doing an live update of what Jobs is announcing at MacWorld. If you’d like to drink right from the firehose, here’s the MacRumors feed. (Note, I’m not at MacWorld, so I have no idea why I’m doing this except it’s kinda fun and old school in a way.)
- 32 million iPods sold in 2005
- Selling at the rate of a billion songs a year on iTunes Music Store
- Offering SNL skits through iTunes, all your old favorites
- Remote control for iPod with an FM tuner in it…listen to FM radio with the iPod
- 40% of the cars sold in the US in 2006 will have iPod integration
- Announced some new Dashboard widgets, including one for snow conditions for skiing
- 10.4.4
- Update to iLife….iLife ‘06
- New iPhoto will handle 250,000 photos (!!!), full-screen editing, more printing options (postcards calendars)
- Photocasting - podcasting for photos (Flickr competitor?), uploads photos to .Mac to iPhoto, people can subscribe, anyone can view photos via RSS
- Create video podcasts with iMovie, dump video to iPod
- iDVD creates widescreen DVDs, something called Magic iDVD that makes it super easy to create DVDs…drag and drop and push a couple buttons
- use iChat to record audio interviews with GarageBand (I think….), ah, ok, GarageBand has a Podcast Studio in it, use it to produce podcasts
- Announcing iWeb. Share photo albums, publish blogs, podcasting, Apple-designed templates. One-click publishing to .Mac. RSS, of course (lots of RSS stuff in iLife). A bit hard to see what this is exactly when you’re not watching these demos in person. Also includes some sort of online media browser w/AJAX…works in any browser. “integrated with your music library”, whatever that means.
- iWork ‘06…. (nothing really new here)
- Talking about new hardware. Intel update…looks like OS X on Intel is ready. New Mac today with Intel chip. It’s the iMac. Ahead of schedule (Apple originally said mid-year).
- Intel iMac is 2 to 3 times faster than the G5, Tiger (10.4.4) is native on the Intel processor, all of Apple’s apps are too.
- Microsoft will make new versions of office for the Mac for a minimum of 5 years
- New Intel iMacs shipping today. They will be doing Intel versions of all their hardware this calendar year.
- Famous Jobs’ “one more thing”….MacBook Pro, Powerbook with Intel chip, 4-5 times faster than the G4 Powerbook, magnetic power adapter
Ok, all done. Check out Apple.com for all the new stuff. Apple’s stock price is up 5 points (~6%) on today’s news.
US News & World Report has a list of 25 of America’s best leaders. Condoleezza Rice, Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Bill & Melinda Gates, etc.
How the iPod nano came to be. Lots of Jobs and Apple haters out there, but you have to admire the shooting from the hip that’s going on here…too many American companies minimize their risk so much that the possible reward dries up almost completely.
As much as I enjoyed reading the transcript of Steve Jobs’ commencement address to the graduates at Stanford (here’s an audio version), I preferred the similar** sentiments of David Foster Wallace in his Kenyon College commencement address:
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
As in his writing, Wallace has a knack for depicting the world as a pretty messy place that one must navigate with a certain amount of uncertainty in order to really experience anything, which, for me, holds a little more truth than Jobs’ “grab the tiger by the tail and live, dammit” thoughts.
See also some other graduation speeches:
Conan O’Brien’s Harvard Class Day 2000 speech
Will Ferrell’s Harvard Class Day 2003 speech
Jon Stewart’s William and Mary 2004 commencement address
** Yeah, I know, all commencement addresses are pretty much the same.
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