Results tagged “stevejobs”

As I started reading this Co.Design post on the Nest thermostat, the first paragraph reminded how slippery the area of product attribution is:

When we first sat down with Tony Fadell, the CEO of Nest and the inventor of the Nest Learning Thermostat, we asked him what made Steve Jobs so great. Fadell is, perhaps, one of the best-qualified people on the planet to answer. He's the one who first pitched the idea of an iTunes/iPod ecosystem. He's the one who Steve Jobs hired to bring the iPod to life.

Depending on what you're reading and where, you will hear different named given to an inventor, designer, creator or "father" of a product. With the iPod, sometimes it's Steve Jobs, other times it's Jony Ive and in this case it's Tony Fadell.

It's important to understand all these answers are correct and all these answers are wrong. Jobs, Ive and Fadell (among others) are all responsible for bringing the iPod to market. The iPod would not be the classic, easy-to-use, iconic, digital music it is if any one of those men were removed from the equation.

shoot&scribe on how Steve Jobs cracked the innovation code:

Apple's growth has been astronomical because Steve Jobs has, in effect, solved the Innovator's Dilemma. Apparently, during his hiatus at Next, he read the Innovator's Dilemma and cited it as one of the most important books he ever read.

Essentially it turns around Apple's complete willingness to destroy its own revenues. It built a phone that destroyed it's major source of revenue, the iPod. It built Macbook Airs that have now disrupted another major source of revenue, their Macbook Pros. It built the iPad, which is already beginning to disrupt the Macbook itself.

If you dig innovation and disruption but haven't read The Innovator's Dilemma or know about Clayton Christensen, get on it.

Ben Brooks responding to MG Siegler's post on why he hates Android and how Google doesn't put the customer first like Apple does:

The relationship Apple has with carriers is fascinating to me -- Apple seems to outwardly despise them, while knowing that carriers are (currently) necessary for Apple.

I wonder if Mr. Brooks remembers when Steve Jobs was interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D8 Conference in 2010 (around the 4-minute mark):

Mossberg:And another time you talked about, you weren't going to do a phone because you had to sell them through, I think you called them, 'The Five Orifices' at the time.

Jobs: Four, I think.

Good times.

I love as more and more details and clues are leaked regarding Apple's future product plans, things become so obvious to these brilliant, insightful analysts.

Shaw Wu of Sterne Agee talks about Apple's (supposed) entry into the television market (via paidContent.org):

Frankly, we are not surprised and believe AAPL should enter the TV space as this is arguably the only major end market the company is not currently participating in a bigger way.

"Moreover, we have picked up several data points indicating activity from component makers to manufacturing partners as well as AAPL's own patent filings from at least 2005.

"We believe it makes sense for AAPL to produce Apple TV in both a set-top box as well as an integrated all-in-one version to give users choice.

Wu wasn't surprised at all. Wonder if he was expecting this 6 months ago, or a year? I'm sure that part in Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs where Jobs talks about cracking the TV market didn't help you at all either.

Analysts are about as reliable as weather people. It's only when they see the clouds on the horizon can they predict the rain.

Newsflash - I can do that too.

Susan Kare created this image, but I needed a bigger version to post, so I made one.

It's crazy, because it does look like the post-hippie Steve.

This morning I launched a Kickstarter project, Bicycles For The Mind. It's a poster series inspired by Steve Jobs' belief that "the computer is like a bicycle for our minds."

I've spent a lot of time on the poster as well as putting together everything on Kickstarter. Go check it out.

I have a handful of amazing screen printers I plan to pick from if the project gets funding. I really want these posters to look amazing.

If you dig it, donate. No matter what tier you choose, you'll get something in return for your support.

via the D8 Conference (around the 44 minute mark)

via AllThingsD

The recently released biography of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs isn't the only thing that's selling well in recent weeks. Apparently shoppers are snatching up the tech icon's favorite eyeglasses too.

via news.cnet.com

I always wondered how Steve Jobs remained above the law with his license plateless Mercedes.

iTWire has the story:

Steve (or someone close to him) spotted a loophole in the California vehicle laws. Anyone with a brand new car had a maximum of six months to affix the issued number plate to the vehicle.

So Jobs made an arrangement with the leasing company; he would always change cars during the sixth month of the lease, exchanging one silver Mercedes SL55 AMG for another identical one. At no time would he ever be in a car as old as six months; and thus there was no legal requirement to have the number plates fitted.

I could never do this. When I get car, I get it for the long haul. I want it to become an extension of me. But I guess if you don't have a passion for cars, this is no big deal.

via The Loop

Dave Caolo vents about iCloud in iOS 5 (via The Loop):

iCloud's Photo Stream feature is handy, in that it pushes photos shot with a compatible iPhone, iPad or iPod touch to Apple's servers and then back to other authorized devices. Meanwhile, iOS 5 has tweeting built in, so there's a temptation to shoot photo with Apple's Camera app and then tweet it from the Camera Roll.

That's fast and convenient, but also a hindrance. Specifically, my iPhone, iPad and Mac are now cluttered with space-hogging one-offs I shot for the sake of a tweet or a Facebook update. 1 What's worse is that you can't delete such throw-away photos from your Photo Stream with an iDevice. Instead, you've got to visit icloud.com and click "Reset Photo Stream," which nukes the lot, good and bad. That's why I've started using Camera+ again for tweeting pictures.

I've noticed this too as someone who recently upgraded his first gen iPad and iPhone 4 to iOS 5.

The chain of my reactions to said iCloud issue/feature/bug has been:

1) Awesome! Everything is synchronized!

and then:

2) Shit, everything is synchronized.

The glass-half-full side of me sees this as the iCloud '1.0'. Which it is. Like iOS 1.0 (aka iPhone OS), iCloud has issues. It's missing features, but as far as this specific gripe about synchronization, from the Apple side of things, this is great. Everything is working as it's supposed to. The foundation has been laid.

I'm not trying to spin things as iCloud being perfect, because it's not, but things could be a lot worse. This could be MobileMe all over again. Remember, we just learned in the last week of Steve Jobs trying to buy Dropbox in 2009 and being turned down. This meant Apple had to figure out file synchronizing on their own.

So yes, things are very raw right now with iCloud and how it handles photos, but improvements are en route.

I guarantee it.

Remember, that's how Apple rolls.

Created by 19-year-old Jonathan Mak Long.

My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better. My job is to pull things together from different parts of the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it could be.

via @johnmaeda

Randy Murray gets poetically hyperbolic on Steve Jobs and the future of Apple:

Isaac Asimov wrote a very interesting series of novels called "The Foundation." In them, his character, Hari Seldon, developed a science called psychohistory, with which he was able to accurately predict the large scale course of human events. It's a great series, and was added to by some other popular science fiction writers over the years.

This idea, that one man could both predict and influence human events, is both fascinating and incredible.

And yet we have our own Hari Seldon. It's Steve Jobs.

Influencer: Steve Jobs announces the iPhone, January 2007

Influenced: Jeff Bezos announces the Kindle Touch, September 2011

Ars Technica: HP to follow IBM, ditch its PC business

Hewlett-Packard is scheduled to hold its third quarter earnings call later this afternoon, but if a report from Bloomberg is to believed, dollars will be the least interesting topic of the call. Bloomberg is saying that multiple sources are indicating that HP will spin off its PC business to focus on enterprise services. As part of that change in focus, it will be acquiring the Cambridge, UK-based data analysis company Autonomy for about $10 billion, a healthy premium over the company's current market cap.

What was all that bullshit Steve Jobs was spewing last year about post-PC era and PC's becoming trucks?

Man Steve, you're crazy.

I like you, but you're crazy.

MacNN: PC makers gripe: Intel ultrabooks can't undercut MacBook Air

Intel's ultrabook spec is triggering frustration among Taiwan-area PC builders used to having cheaper machines than Apple, local contacts claimed Wednesday. Chassis guidelines requiring metal shells, solid-state drives, and very efficient lithium-polymer batteries to replicate the MacBook Air prevent the companies from undercutting Apple on price. Unless Intel cuts its own prices, there's no real way to beat the Air, Digitimes was told.

The Intel hardware in a $1,000 system would make up a third of the price by itself.

Some are also supposedly complaining about having to change their notebook manufacturing processes. Not being used to the unified, soldered on designs Apple has been making since 2008, they would have to retool to get away from the traditional, bulkier, piece-by-piece manufacturing they're used to. Intel has been holding workshops with companies to improve methods and the parts themselves.

Steve Jobs said Design is "not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." (fourth paragraph, last two lines)

It's not much of a stretch to say Design is also about how it's made.

This video of Steve Jobs giving the closing keynote of the 1997 Worldwide Develops Conference (via) is awesome on 2 levels.

First, it's awesome on the macro level. Jobs on the mic - showing clarity of vision, expressing that vision clearly and concisely and showing he understands the technology space. For anyone who's seen any of his other keynotes over the years, this isn't shocking, but it's just fun to watch him command the stage.

The second level of awesome is on the micro level and it happens at around the 14:40 mark (my emphasis):

Ok, let me describe the world I live in. About 8 years ago we had high speed networking connected to our now obsolete NeXT hardware, running NeXTSTEP at the time and because we using NFS, we were able to take all of our personal data, our 'home directories' as we called them, off of our local machines and put them on a server. And the software made that completely transparent and because the server had a lot of RAM on it, in some cases it was actually faster to get stuff from the server than it was to get stuff off your local hard disk because in some cases it was cached in the RAM of the server if it was in popular use.

But what was really remarkable, was that the organization could hire a professional person to back up that server every night and could afford to spend a little more on that server so maybe it had redundant disk drives and redundant power supplies. And you know, in the last seven years, you know how many times I have lost personal data? ZERO. Do you know how many times I have backed up my computer? ZERO. I have computers at Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar and at home. I walk up to any of em, and log in as myself. It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I've got my stuff wherever I am.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he's just described iCloud. But in 1997. I understand what he described in the keynote was networked storage, and not actually downloading things locally to your device(s), but the experience he describes is the heart of iCloud - "It goes over the network, finds my home directory on the server and I've got my stuff wherever I am."

Here we are in 2011, just now catching up to Jobs' vision.