While Mark Papermaster may yet to be confirmed in his new role as senior vice president of devices hardware engineering, one thing is certain: former iPod hardware chief Tony Fadell is still gone, baby, gone. We imagine that he’s had to pack up his office, bid adieu to all his former teammates, and even give back his top-secret iPod prototypes (like the one that can broadcast songs directly into your head). Heck, we’d even imagine that Steve Jobs has swipe-deleted Tony from his iPhone Favorites list. I wonder what that would look like? (Fast-forward to 5:15).
Cold, Steve. Ice cold.
[via Daring Fireball]
So if you've been paying attention at all to the auto industry, you'll know that no American automaker has done anything all that innovative since perhaps the Chrysler Minivan. Meanwhile, foreign models (read: Smart car, Fiat Siena, Toyota Prius) are eating our lunch while we dither with the Chevy Volt (due out in 2010!). Now when it comes to economics I'm not all that nationalistic--I don't really care where my car comes from, so long as it's cheap and has better fuel economy than my last one. I really have no attachment to Detroit at all, but I understand why a lot of people do.
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman is similarly frustrated with the state of the American auto industry and has been for quite some time now.
So what's the solution? Get someone in there who has a reputation for building smart, iconic, game-changing products--like El Jobserino himself.
Friedman writes: "Lastly, somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn't need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he'd like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I'd bet it wouldn't take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar. "
Any car conceived of by Steve Jobs is a car I'd buy in a heartbeat.
Did you know Steve Jobs can fly? Yeah, you know he has a private jet, but I meant Nathan Petrelli-style. Okay, I can’t prove it—the whole “having a jet” thing is pretty good cover for now. But consider these numbers crunched by Silicon Alley Insider in regards to Jobs’s recent travel on his Gulfstream.
Every quarter the company reimburses Steve for the amount he spends on jet fuel. Some believe there’s a connection that you can draw between said expense and the future of Apple, because Steve is so important to negotiations that he does more traveling when Apple is working on new products. Then again, Apple’s pretty much always working on new products, so that seems kind of silly. Anyway, the Insider points out that while the $189,000 reimbursement is lower than last year’s holiday quarter when Steve spent $550,000 on fuel, but more than the last couple quarters. Do you see the pattern? Because I sure as hell don’t.
We’re not going to take anything away from this until we get our hands of copies of Jobs’s latest tax returns to see how high his billable driving miles were. For all we know, he just likes to all of his shopping in London. I mean, can you blame him?
In a costume I'm sure no one outside of the Bay Area will actually try to pull off, iPhoneSavior.com reminds us that the two-year-old Steve's Outfit has put together what might be the the techiest, most-expensive and simplest costume ever: dressing up like El Jobserino himself.
For only $175, you too can have a pair of Levi's 501 jeans, New Balance shoes and a black mock turtleneck. Of course, we're assuming that you already have an iPhone and the assorted catchphrases like: "Boom!" and "One more thing..." at the ready.
If you actually do dress up like Jobs (bonus points if you can pull off a Woz!), or any other Apple-themed costume, send us a pic, yeah?
You know who we don’t hear enough out of these days? John Sculley. Now perhaps best remembered as the man who ousted Steve Jobs from Apple in 1985, Sculley was CEO of Apple from 1983 to 1993, and presided over the inception of products such as the Newton and the port to the PowerPC platform.
Sculley himself was removed in 1993 and replaced by Michael Spindler, who proved that, yes, indeed, things could get worse for Apple. So seeing as how Apple has now reached heights unseen since the early days of Mr. Sculley, who better to question about Apple’s newest iconic product, the iPhone?
“Cool devices like Motorola’s RAZR come and go; Steve Jobs’s creative methodology hasn’t changed since we worked together 25 years ago. It was, and is, all about ‘experience and beautiful design with no compromises’. I don’t see any mobile device company who has figured out how to replicate Steve’s design principles. What iPhone will be in five years only Steve knows, but I’ll bet it’s still the defining platform.”
Thanks for the support, John. Sculley goes on to say that he still misses a physical keyboard on the iPhone, and that the Newton was ahead of its time, but ultimately paid off for Apple. And what would he do if he were CEO of Apple? Well, John’s glad you asked:
“Stay the course and keep building an integrated Apple ecosystem of iPhone + iPod + iMac + iTunes + App Store + Apple TV. No one has yet demonstrated they understand how to create an ‘experience-based ecosystem’ as well as Apple.”
Hey John, don’t get any ideas about sneaking back onto the campus and arranging another removal of Steve Jobs. I don’t think you’ll be welcomed with open arms this time.
In case you weren’t following our liveblog coverage of yesterday’s Apple financial results, a few salient details may have escaped your attention. Chief among them, that a surprise guest joined the conference call: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama! Fine. Okay. It was Steve Jobs. I guess that’s almost as exciting.
Steve doesn’t appear on a lot of these conference calls—a mere handful since his return to the company—and he declined a request from an analyst to make it a regular event, saying “I AM THE STEVE! The Steve does not answer your puny questions! Mend your errant ways!” The analyst in question immediately hung up, moved to Montana, and opened an alpaca farm. Such is the power of the Steve.
That taken care of, Steve spent most of his time firing off Dan-Rather-folksy-wisecracks on the analysts’ inquiries. We’ve excerpted a few of the best, and our notes, below:
On whether or not there’s room to expand in the iPhone market.
“I wasn’t alive at the time, but from everything I’ve heard, Babe Ruth had only one home run, he just kept hitting it over and over again.” (The original off-the-cuff comment Steve practiced involved Barry Bonds, but it was dropped after Apple Legal informed him it would require an asterisk.)
On whether Apple will try to appeal to other segments of the computer market.
“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk and our DNA will not let us ship that.” (But keep your eyes peeled for the $499 iJunk, coming soon to an Apple Store near you.)
On one analyst’s proposal of what to do with Apple’s $25 billion cash reserve.
“Hiring every engineer in Silicon Valley is a good idea, though.” (Steve had originally concocted a complicated investment plan for doubling Apple’s investment, which entailed putting $25 billion “on red”.)
On the economy.
“We are not economists. Your next door neighbor can likely predict what’s going to happen as well as we can.” (Unless, of course, your next door neighbor is Paul Krugman.)
On Apple’s customers.
“[They’re] the smartest, most product-aware customers in the market.” (Added Steve, “And gosh darn it, they smell fantastic. Have you ever really smelled an Apple customer? It’s like…cinnamon and fresh C-notes.”)
On Apple’s $25 billion cash reserve.
“We’re very comfortable with our cash position in the bank and it’s not burning a hole in our pocket.” (Though, Jobs noted, if they really wanted to, they could hire Jerry Seinfield for their ad campaign 2500 times.)
On making his appearance on the call a regular event.
“Peter and Tim do such a good job that I don’t think I could add much.” (Future calls will, however, feature Apple SVP of Industrial Design Jony Ive, who will say nothing and stare unnervingly at the phone.)
And that’s it until Apple’s next call in January, at which point we will all be recovering from the post-Macworld Expo haze. My inside sources report that in order to stave off the disappointment of no Steve in the Q1 call, Cook and Oppenheimer will perfect their adaptation of Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?” routine.
Apple's known as a great technology innovator, constantly advancing the state of the art and relentlessly pushing new technologies into the market, even if said market ain't quite ready for 'em yet.
But those of us who follow Apple know the company's other epithet: the great technology killer. Anyone remember the 3.5" floppy disk? The little square thing you'd put in a drive in your computer to save files? It could store, like, 1.44MB? Predecessor to the CD? Anyone? No?
Well, Apple killed it. It killed it real good.
There's panic amongst the Mac community that Apple is setting its serial-killer sights on FireWire, a technology it helped create in the first place ("I brought you into this world, I can take you out!"). This concern is being driven by the unapologetic lack of a FireWire port on the newly-introduced MacBooks, an aspect of the notebook that has many crying foul.
I've been using a MacBook Air since they shipped--which itself lacks a FireWire port--and only now have I realized that not once in the six-or-so months that I've been using it have I ever actually needed FireWire compatibility. (Every external hard drive I use, for example (three total at the moment), has both FireWire and USB 2.0 ports--a feature I wasn't pursuing when I bought the drives.)
But there are a lot of things I don't do--video editing, for example. A Macworld reader told us his particular gripe with the FireWireless MacBooks: he can't plug in his digital camcorder to import video for editing in iMovie. Right: iMovie is Apple's consumer-level video-editing tool; the MacBook is Apple's consumer-level notebook. Now where do the consumers go if they want to edit their video? Do they have to buy a desktop Mac, too?
The reader emailed Steve Jobs (at his well-known sjobs@apple.com address) with the complaint, and "about ten minutes later" purportedly received a characteristic one-sentence response from His Steveness himself:
Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2.Steve
'Tis true, but does that really 'nix the need for FireWire? We talked about in-depth in the latest edition of the MacJury podcast, and everyone I talk to seems to have another reason why Apple should've left the port on the 'Book: target-disk mode, compatibility with mini-DV camcorders and hard drives without USB 2 ports, etc.
Let's sound off. I think this will be like the obliteration of the floppy disk, or Apple's decision to remove FireWire support from the iPods: people will hiss and moan and shake their fists in unequivocal gestures of displeasure; but in the end, few will notice and even fewer will care. And we'll all move on.
So, what say you?
