Steve Jobs

You might have thought that the health & fitness labs Apple created to help develop the Apple Watch might have been closed once the product had launched, but a piece in Time reports that they are still operating 12 hours a day, six days a week.

I was recently able to visit one of Apple’s labs dedicated to sports and health. For 12 hours a day, six days a week, Apple brings in Apple employees of every shape, condition and ethnicity to do various exercises and monitor them with the most sophisticated medical systems available. Apple has seven full-time nurses in the facility I visited, using medical monitoring equipment that can determine all types of heath related data points.

ABC gave us a look inside one of the labs in the run-up to the launch of the Watch last year, when we learned that they include climate chambers which allow the company to simulate a wide range of different environments, but this latest report does include a new claim …

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[UPDATE: Apple has issued a statement on the passing of Bill Campbell, saying he “believed in Apple when few people did.” Via Daisuke Wakabayashi:

Bill Campbell was a coach and mentor to many of us at Apple, and a member of our family for decades as an executive, advisor, and ultimately a member of our board. He believed in Apple when few people did and his contributions to our company, through good times and bad, cannot be overstated. We will miss his wisdom, his friendship, his humor, and his love for life.]

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/722137954257215488

Bill Campbell believed in Apple when few people did. We'll miss his wisdom,friendship,humor & his love for life. RIP pic.twitter.com/HA7hYgGxNM

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) April 18, 2016

Re/code today reports that Silicon Valley icon and longtime Apple board member Bill “The Coach” Campbell has passed away at age 75 after a long battle with cancer. The unfortunate news comes from “many prominent tech players,” following earlier unconfirmed reports. Campbell was a mentor to many tech leaders, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos.

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Well, the e-book case that began in 2012 when the US government accused Apple of price-fixing finally ended yesterday  when the Supreme Court declined to hear Apple’s appeal. That left the original ruling intact, meaning that Apple is officially guilty of anti-competitive behavior and will have to fork out $450M in compensation.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the correct result was reached in law. Apple did deliberately set out to fix prices, it did strike secret deals, and it did intend to manipulate the e-book market. Emails from Steve Jobs confirmed the government’s claim that Apple struck the deals in the belief that consumers would end up paying more for e-books.

Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99. [Up from the typical $9.99 at the time.]

So far, so good. If you’d brought that evidence to me at the time Apple did the deals, I’d have agreed with the government that the company’s behavior was both illegal and morally wrong. But I’d argue that by the time the case was finally brought to court, it was already abundantly clear that it was not in the public interest to pursue it …

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In a Fortune interview with Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO suggested that Apple is not yet committed to making a car, but is only exploring the idea at this stage. Asked by Adam Lashinsky why Apple wouldn’t comment on its plans given that it is known to have acquired a high-profile team to work on the project, Cook said hiring people wasn’t the point at which the company committed itself.

We don’t have to spend large amounts to explore. So I can’t talk about this certain area that you’re talking about. But when we start spending large amounts of money, we’re committed at that point. But we explore things with teams of people. And that’s a part of being curious […]

Once we start spending gobs of money—like when we start spending on tooling and things like that—we’re committed … 

Lashinsky also asked how Cook responded to ‘peak iPhone‘ concerns …

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A Bloomberg profile of Apple’s ‘chief chipmaker’ – SVP of hardware technologies Johny Srouji – talks about how the iPad Pro was launched behind schedule, and almost ended up being less powerful than the iPhone 6s.

The original plan was to introduce the iPad Pro with Apple’s tablet chip, the A8X, the same processor that powered the iPad Air 2, introduced in 2014. But delaying until fall meant that the Pro would make its debut alongside the iPhone 6s, which was going to use a newer, faster phone chip called the A9 […]

The iPad Pro would look feeble next to the iPhone 6s. So Srouji put his engineers on a crash program to move up the rollout of a new tablet processor, the A9X, by half a year.

While the piece predictably doesn’t reveal much we didn’t already know, it does contain one surprising fun fact about the original iPhone …

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Steve Jobs, the official Sony biopic film for Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography, received a muted response at the box office. The film received decent reviews from critics with an engaging story and unique approach to filming and movie-making, with Aaron Sorkin conjuring the plot around just three Steve Jobs product keynotes.

If you didn’t get the chance (or chose not to) to see the film at the movie theater, you can now buy it on Blu-ray and DVD from today. The film was also released on iTunes as a digital download last week, but it seems Apple is intentionally not promoting the movie on its store — the film has got no special placement on the iTunes storefront.

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Kate Winslet last night won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress in the Sorkin/Boyle movie Steve Jobs. The movie was also nominated for Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay, but didn’t win either.

Winslet last month earned a Golden Globe in the same category, with Aaron Sorkin also winning in the Best Screenplay category. The actress dedicated her BAFTA to teenage girls struggling with insecurity …

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Apple has been talking about the post-PC era ever since the original iPad launch in 2010, with Steve Jobs suggesting that PCs would be the ‘trucks’ of the computing world while most people would be happy with ‘cars’ aka iPads.

Tim Cook picked up the post-PC baton the following year, and has more recently presented himself as proof of the idea and argued the point more aggressively following the launch of the iPad Pro.

I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one? Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones.

It’s a stance I agree with … to some extent …

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Six years ago today Steve Jobs introduced the iPad on stage in what was arguably one of the best product demos from Apple or any other tech company for that matter. The hype was tremendous but the demo was low key.

Jobs plainly explained why the iPad needed to exist and where Apple believed it fit between iPhones and Macs, then offered an almost hypnotizing demonstration of what using an iPad was like. Highlighting the intimacy of the tablet, Jobs demoed the iPad on stage while comfortably seated for a full 12 minutes. If you’ve never watched the demo or haven’t seen it lately, queue it up and see for yourself how much it stands out from nearly every other product introduction.

Six years in, the iPad has matured from a single product to a whole product line with multiple screen sizes, price points, and even accessories specific to the tablet. iPad sales peaked two years ago, though, and that peak’s clearly not temporary like many believe it is with the iPhone. Even with a whole new display size with the iPad Pro, Apple saw year-over-year declines with iPad sales last quarter.

So how exactly have iPad sales been changing over the years, what has Apple done to address the product category, and what opportunities remain for the tablet family?

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Aaron Sorkin’s mixed reviewed Steve Jobs movie already won a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay and was nominated for even more. Now the film is showing up on the 2016 Oscar nominees list with the Steve Jobs biopic up for two Oscars at the upcoming 88th Academy Awards.

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Phil Schiller said in 2013 that “education is in Apple’s DNA,” and it’s no exaggeration. The company’s commitment to the education sector was there from the very beginning. Steve Jobs told the Smithsonian that he wanted to donate a computer to every school in the U.S. as long ago as 1979.

I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life. We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can’t wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America.

The company couldn’t afford it in those days, but Steve lobbied Congress to introduce a bill that would have created sufficient tax breaks to make it possible. That attempt failed, but Apple did succeed in brokering a tax deal in California that saw the company donate an Apple IIe to every school in California. Apple led the PC market in education for a time, and even created education-specific Mac models.

More recently, Apple appeared set to bring its educational success into the iPad era in 2013 when it announced a $30M deal (that would eventually have been worth a quarter of a billion dollars) to equip every student in the LA Unified School District with an iPad. If that program had succeeded, it would have created a template for rolling out similar ones across the whole of the USA. Instead, it failed catastrophically, and it now appears that Chromebooks are winning where iPads have failed …

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The movie Steve Jobs last night won two of the four Golden Globes awards for which it was nominated. Aaron Sorkin picked up the award for Best Screenplay, and Kate Winslet won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role. However, Michael Fassbender lost out to Leonardo DiCaprio in Best Performance by an Actor. Daniel Pemberton, who wrote the score for the movie, was also beaten by Ennio Morricone for The Hateful Eight.

Fassbender being beaten to the best actor award by DiCaprio had a certain degree of irony: DiCaprio had previously been offered and turned down the title role in Steve Jobs.

Despite claiming to be lost for words, Sorkin managed a wry acknowledgement of the fact that the movie bombed at the box office …

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The view that Apple lost its innovative edge with the sad loss of Steve Jobs has been one of the oft-repeated criticisms of the company in recent years. But this idea is based on an entirely mythological view of Apple as a company that was constantly launching ground-breaking new product categories.

The reality is a little more mundane. The Macintosh, a truly revolutionary computer, was launched in 1984. We had to wait 17 years for the next groundbreaking product: the iPod in 2001. We had to wait six years after that for the next major product category: the iPhone in 2007. And a further three years for the iPad in 2010. (If you wanted to push things a little, you could argue that the MacBook Air was also so revolutionary that it deserves to be included; if so, we’re up to five new product categories in 26 years.)

Note, too, that none of the product categories were invented by Apple. Xerox, of course, invented the graphical user interface for personal computers. There were MP3 players before the iPod; touchscreen smartphones before the iPhone; tablets before the iPad. What Apple did in each case was what the company does best: take something clunky and used only by techies, and turn it into a slick product that will appeal to the masses.

So no, Apple never has churned out revolutionary new products on an annual basis. If we’re going to assess its performance today, it has to be against a realistic background. Zac recently reminded us of Apple’s product timeline for 2015. Looking at this in the context of a company whose true history is occasionally taking a new product category and doing it better than anyone else – and in between times merely refining its existing product ranges – how did Apple do this year … ?

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Apple, which was accused by the Italian government of failing to declare more than $1.3B of income when paying corporation tax in the country, has now agreed to pay the full €318M ($347M) claimed by the Italian tax office. The company has 16 Apple Stores in Italy.

Apple was accused of funnelling profits from Italian sales through its Irish subsidiary in order to benefit from the lower tax rate the company had agreed there. (Those tax arrangements are the subject of a separate EU investigation.)

La Repubblica (via The Local) reports Apple Italia was listed as a “consultant” for Apple Ireland, enabling the company to book profits through Ireland, paying just 2.5% tax under the terms of an agreement said to have first been reached with Steve Jobs back in the 1980s …

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