Actress Natalie Portman is the latest name to be thrown in the mix of potential stars in the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic written by Aaron Sorkin. The information comes courtesy of Deadline, which reports that Portman is “in talks to join” the project in a leading role although the specific character is unknown. It’s possible Natalie Portman is being considered to portray Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Expand Expanding Close
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has not worked at the company he created with Steve Jobs for nearly three decades, but his thoughts are still well respected within the tech community. In a recent interview with CNN at Capital One’s new Innovation Center in Plano, Texas, he offered up his latest opinion: Apple should have made a larger iPhone three years ago. Expand Expanding Close
Variety reports that actor Seth Rogen has been cast to play Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic from Sony:
Seth Rogen has been set to star as Steve Wozniak opposite Christian Bale in Sony’s Steve Jobs biopic.
We learned earlier this month that Christian Bale, who starred in the recent Batman trilogy, will portray Steve Jobs in the Aaron Sorkin directed film. Sorkin later confirmed the report adding that Christian Bale didn’t have to audition for the role in the film.
For those that missed Jobs in the theaters it is available today in iTunes and on DVD. Through iTunes, Jobs is available to purchase for $19.99 in high definition or for $14.99 in standard definition, or it is available to rent for $4.99 in high definition or $3.99 in standard definition. For those who want it on DVD, Jobs is available for $22.99 and comes in Blu-ray, DVD and Digital HD with UltraViolet. This version also contains deleted scenes, feature commentary with Director Joshua Michael Stern and the legacy of Steve Jobs.
With permission from Apple, The Computer History Museum and the Digibarn Computer Museum announced today it is publishing the original DOS source code for Apple’s 1978 Apple II. The Apple II was the first fully assembled computer with a monitor that Apple sold following the Apple I and originally retailed for $1298 for the base model with just 4K of memory.
A blog post from The History Computer Museum explains that Apple contracted Paul Laughton of Shepardson Microsystems to write the Disk Operating System for the Apple II in just seven weeks. In April of 78, Steve Jobs and Shepardson signed a contract (pictured below) that would see Apple pay $13,000 for a file manager, a BASIC interface, and utilities. The source code being released today is scans of original documents that Laughton kept over the last 30+ years: Expand Expanding Close
A recent auction of an Apple 1 computer has allowed an image to surface of 50 cardboard boxes containing early Apple computers from 1976 in a rare photo believed to be taken by Steve Jobs himself, according to The Daily Mail. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, of course, built the first Apple computers together in Jobs’ parents home, and the photo depicts Jobs’ bedroom at the time. The company behind the iPhone and iPad has certainly come a long way.
Check below for a photo of exactly what was inside those boxes: Expand Expanding Close
Over its lifetime, Apple has introduced hundreds of products that have displayed revolutions and evolutions in design from the 70s to the modern technology era. The company has had more than its fair share of extremely successful products and some other devices that the company might want everyone to forget (remember the Bluetooth headset that came out with the original iPhone?). For the first time ever, photographs of over 500 devices have been taken and brought together into one beautiful book: “Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation”. Expand Expanding Close
CNN reports that the childhood home of Steve Jobs could soon become a protected historical site as a Los Altos Historical Commission is set to perform an evaluation of the property today. The property, located at 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, was Jobs’ childhood home since the seventh grade and its garage later became the location where Jobs, Steve Wozniak and other early employees would build the first Apple computers before officially forming the company in 1977.
The seven-member Los Altos Historical Commission has scheduled a “historic property evaluation” for the single-story, ranch-style house on Monday… If the designation is ultimately approved, then the house on 2066 Crist Drive in Los Altos, California, will have to be preserved… Expand Expanding Close
The long-awaited Jobs movie opened this weekend, with Box Office Mojoreporting that it took seventh place in the weekend openings, grossing $6.7M against top-grossing movie The Butler at $25M. Distributor Open Road Films had expected Jobs to gross $8-9M.
Playing at 2,381 locations, Jobs opened in seventh place with an estimated $6.7 million. While it was never expected to match The Social Network, it’s still very disappointing to note that the Steve Jobs biopic earned less than one-third as much as the Facebook story. This is also one of star Ashton Kutcher’s lowest openings ever—among nationwide releases, it’s only ahead of 2003’s My Boss’s Daughter ($4.9 million). Jobs had plenty of issues, including awful reviews and a comedy star playing dramatic (almost never a good idea). Most important, though, was the movie’s apparent tonal issues: while plenty of people enjoy their Apple products, the deification of Steve Jobs is a bit of a turn off. Jobs received a weak “B-” CinemaScore, and all indications are that it will disappear from theaters quickly …
With the new Steve ‘Jobs’ biopic starring Ashton Kutcher set to hit theaters nationwide today, Slashdot just posted an interview with two former Apple employees who gave their take on some of the inaccuracies in the film and what it was really like working at Apple in the early days. There has been a bit of controversy surrounding the film with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak expressing that a lot of scenes in the movie never happened and Ashton Kutcher firing back in a recent interview claimingWozniak is being paid by another company to support their Steve Jobs film. Daniel Kottke and Bill Fernandez, two early Apple employees that worked with Woz and Jobs in the garage days, talk about a few scenes that the movie got wrong.
According to the Kottke and Fernandez, the scenes in the garage, the scene with Wozniak quitting Apple, and Jobs’ big speech at the West Coast Computer Faire, all happened quite differently than portrayed in the film: Expand Expanding Close
Ahead of its upcoming August 16th debut in theatres, Open Road Films just released a new clip from the JOBS film starting Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs. In the latest clip, Jobs and and Steve Wozniak, played by Josh Gad, come up with the name “Apple Computer,” a story that we’ve heard straight from the real Jobs and Wozniak in the past.
Tomorrow Ashton Kutcher and Josh Gad will also be hosting a live YouTube Hangout at 11am PST/2pm EST to answer questions about the JOBS movie submitted using #AskJobsMovie. The event will be hosted on the JOBSthefilm YoutTube account.
If you want to hear the story of the Apple name straight from the source, the real Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs give their versions of events in the videos below: Expand Expanding Close
Ahead of its August 16th opening, the creators of the “Jobs” biopic starring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs have released the first official trailer (via MR). The trailer gives a peak at the film, demonstrating that the movie will cover early Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to Steve Jobs’s departure to Steve Jobs’s return in the 1990s. Earlier this year, the film premiered to a small audience which gave the movie mixed reviews. Following this, the film was delayed from its original April opening date. Below is another clip from the film (from January):
The Loop spotted that YouTube channel EverySteveJobsVideo has uploaded a previously-unseen video of Steve Jobs answering a question about what would be his legacy.
Rather ironically, one of the statements he made – that in a few years it wouldn’t even be possible to fire up an Apple I to see what it was like – was proven wrong by the other Steve yesterday doing just that. Mercury News reports that Steve Wozniak fired-up not just one but three Apple I computers at the History San Jose centre. Given that one recently sold for $671k, that’s about $2 million worth he powered-up …
TNW pointed us to this video of Atari founder Nolan Bushnell giving a speech at Campus Party Brazil. On top of talking about the early days of Atari and the video game industry, Bushnell also told a few stories about Steve Jobs’ days as an employee at Atari in promotion of his upcoming book “Finding the next Steve Jobs.” Around 13 minutes into the video, Bushnell spoke about giving Jobs and Woz Atari parts for the first Apple computers, Jobs’ work ethic, and told a few other Apple-related stories throughout his talk.
We’ll attend Macworld to bring you the latest on the newest products and announcements that happen during the show. Kutcher and Gad will hit the stage and possibly take questions on Jan. 31 at 9 a.m.
USAToday recently published a few stills from the upcoming “jOBS” movie set to premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival later this month. Actor Ashton Kutcher certainly looks the part, but we’re not so sure about Josh Gad as Woz. An image of the real Steve Wozniak from the same time period (pictured next to David Lee Roth) is in the gallery below for comparison.
Reporting for Gizmodo, Cord Jefferson has a great account of what it is like to be an extra in the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, “jOBS“, featuring Ashton Kutcher. While Jefferson was able to meet Kutcher, he described the experience as being long and boring. One part of the gig included listening to Kutcher give Jobs’ speech against IBM in Honolulu. Jefferson said he heard the speech 26 times:
I’ll remember those lines for the rest of my life. Not because I find them particularly profound, but because I heard Kutcher say them, by my count, 26 times over the course of about three hours. If you have any assumptions that the work of making movies is glamorous or exciting, kill them now.
As for the biopic’s success, the writer was not able to give a firm answer. He said Kutcher sounds serious about the gig (Kutcher looks close to Jobs, just saying). He talked about Sorkin’s upcoming film, too:
We previously told you about the “jOBS” biopic staring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs that is currently in production, and we brought you some early images of Kutcher on set. The film was previously confirmed to star Josh Gad as Steve Wozniak and Matthew Modine as John Sculley, but a new report from HollywoodReporter announced more additions to the cast including Giles Matthey (pictured right) as Jony Ive:
Kevin Dunn and J.K. Simmons have joined the cast of Jobs, the biopic about the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, starring Ashton Kutcher. Also rounding out the cast are Elden Henson, Lenny Jacobson, Giles Matthey, Ahna O’Reilly and Victor Rasuk… Dunn, who recently co-starred in HBO’s Luck, will play Apple chairman Gil Amelio. Simmons, known from his nine seasons on Law & Order, will appear as venture capitalist and Apple investor Arthur Rock. Among the other additions to the cast, Henson plays computer scientist and Macintosh developer Andy Hertzfeld; Jacobson portrays Apple engineer Burrell Smith; Matthey is iPod designer Jonathan Ive; O’Reilly plays Jobs’ girlfriend Chris-Ann; and Rasuk is Apple’s first employee and user interface architect Bill Fernandez.
The biopic is now shooting in Los Altos and Los Angeles, and it is expected to release later this year. Other cast members previously confirmed include James Woods, Ron Eldard, John Getz, Lukas Haas, Dermot Mulroney, and Lesley Ann Warren.
Steve Wozniak traveled to upstate New York recently to visit a farm of rescued horses, and the local paper managed to snag a brief interview with the co-founder of Apple, where he discussed the criticism surrounding Siri.
Apple’s little personal assistant in iOS can handle questions, give recommendations, and delegate requests, but many wonder if it really lives up to expectations. The folks in Cupertino like to roll out commercials that show Siri capable of compiling individual preferences with personalized results, and even completing basic tasks like finding a nearby restaurant, but the software met very mixed reactions after it débuted on the iPhone 4S in October. Those who felt misled by Siri’s beta functionality depicted in ads eventually sought reimbursement by filing a class action lawsuit against the company earlier this year.
While in Patersonville, N.Y., Wozniak described his strong opinions on the voice-recognition application.
“A lot of people say Siri. I say poo-poo,” Wozniak said. “I was using it to make reservations long before Apple bought it.”
“I would say, ‘Siri, what are the five largest lakes in California?’ and it would come up, one, two, three, four, five. And I would ask ‘What are the prime numbers greater than 87?’ and they would come up all in a row. That was pretty incredible,” Wozniak said.
He said he told family and friends about Siri and how “This was the future: speaking things in normal ways, feeling like you’re talking to a human and how Siri was the greatest program,” Wozniak said.
“Then Apple bought Siri,” he said. He then paused, lifted his right hand and gave it a big thumbs down.
“‘What are the largest lakes in California?’ I’d get all these lakefront properties. And I’d say ‘What are the prime numbers greater than 87?’ And I’d get prime rib,” Wozniak said.
“I’m really disappointed, but it’s still a market for the future,” Wozniak said. “I think voice recognition for all the platforms is going to get better and better and better at putting together complete sentences and phrases. What did a human really mean? Like, if you said ‘Five, I mean six.’ It will understand a backup, the little faults in our speech that humans understand. It will understand that eventually.”
Wozniak iterated similar rumblings to a developer at FourSquare earlier this year. He even used the same lake/prime rib example. The reporter in this interview should have asked him, “Perhaps Siri knows you like prime rib?”
Despite Wozniak’s criticism of Siri, the quirky businessman seemed enthusiastic about Apple’s latest developments revealed at the Worldwide Developers Conference. He specifically said he is excited about Apple’s new computer lineup and app called “Passbook,” which essentially turns a user’s iPhone into a digital wallet.
“People are always going to be disappointed,” he added, when asked if Apple let down consumers at WWDC. “I really like the new MacBook.”
Sotheby’s plans to auction two pieces of Apple history on June 15 in New York, including a rare document penned by Steve Jobs while working at Atari and an operational Apple I motherboard expected to fetch up to $180,000 USD. An excerpt from Sotheby’s description for the Apple I lot is below, and it claims less than six Apple I’s in working condition are known to exist:
As the first ready-made personal computer, the Apple I signaled a new age in which computing became accessible to the masses. The interface of circuitry and software that Woz created enabled users to type letters with “a human-typable keyboard instead of a stupid, cryptic front panel with a bunch of lights and switches,” as he explained to the Homebrew Computer Club. Even so, it was sold without a keyboard, monitor, case, or power supply, An exceptionally rare, working example with original Apple cassette interface, operation manuals and a rare BASIC Users’ Manual. It is thought that fewer than 50 Apple I Computers survive, with only 6 known to be in working condition. Expand Expanding Close
The folks behind the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, now dubbed “jOBS,” which stars Ashton Kutcher as the late CEO, released a presser this evening to announce the production’s June start date for filming. They also confirmed shooting will begin in the “historic garage” where Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple. The film’s early scenes will even feature Jobs’ Los Altos home where he grew up to maintain “accuracy and authenticity” during the movie-making process. Expand Expanding Close
Josh Gad, who currently stars in the Broadway play “Book of Mormon,” is in talks to play Steve Jobs’ sidekick Steve Wozniak for the Indie movie about the early years of Jobs’ career. Variety said Gad would star opposite Ashton Kutcher in the Joshua Michael Stern production called “Jobs.”
Written by Matt Whiteley, pic chronicles Steve Jobs from wayward hippie to co-founder of Apple, where he became one of the most revered creative entrepreneurs of our time. Gad is making a deal to play Wozniak, who created the Apple I computer and co-created the Apple II computer in the mid-1970s.
The famed Photoshop-maker will “showcase new software and innovations that improve how broadcasters, filmmakers and video professionals create, deliver and monetize high-quality productions across multiple screens,” according to a press release.
Vice President and General Manager of Video Solutions Jim Guerard said the company plans to feature the upcoming softwares’ fast performance and firm integration that allows video professionals to effectively streamline workflows:
“This is a perfect opportunity to show off the new and breakthrough performance innovations in Creative Suite 6 Production Premium and demonstrate how it’s possible to work at the speed of your imagination, making workflows more efficient and audience experiences more compelling. From planning to playback, Adobe and its broadcast and media customers are leading the industry and reshaping how the digital video industry creates and consumes rich media.”
UPDATE [Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 7:35am ET]: Steve Wozniak commented on the original article on Facebook, saying he’s been misinterpreted (again). His full comment can be found at the bottom of this article.
Journalist Dan Lyons (aka Fake Steve Jobs) filed a report with The Daily Beast on Saturday that highlights Steve Wozniak’s thoughts on the iPhone 4S’s widely reported battery woes (that did not go away with iOS 5.1 Beta 3):
With the iPhone, something happened with the new OS or the new phone, and it just started running through the battery so fast. I’ve had a lot of issues with things I have to turn off just to save the battery life.
Wozniak, 61, who cofounded Apple with Jobs in 1976, also has gripes with Siri. The engineer thinks Siri is cool, but at times impractical compared to Android’s voice action. This is mostly due to Siri’s architectural reliance on network connectivity that is required to complete functions.
I have a lower success rate with Siri than I do with the voice built into the Android, and that bothers me. I’ll be saying, over and over again in my car, ‘Call the Lark Creek Steak House,’ and I can’t get it done. Then I pick up my Android, say the same thing, and it’s done. […] On the 4S I can only do that when Siri can connect over the Internet. But many times it can’t connect. I’ve never had Android come back and say, ‘I can’t connect over the Internet. […] Plus I get navigation. Android is way ahead on that.
Apple is thought to be creating its own navigation and mapping solution stemming from the company’s three mapping-related acquisitions: C3 Technologies, Poly9 in 2010, and Placebase. Wozniak is also good friends with Andy Rubin who heads the Android project and one said, “There’s more available [on Android] in some ways.”
Although Apple did not detail Siri, its voice recognition and artificial intelligence systems run on Apple’s servers rather than the phone itself. Siri may also infringe old Excite patents, said to be changing hands soon as a valuable asset in order to compete with Siri. In case you are wondering, the iPhone remains Wozniak’s primary phone. He loves “the beauty of it,” and he is first to recommend it to friends. However, Wozniak sometimes wants the iPhone to do “all the things my Android does.”
We previously told you about the “jOBS” biopic staring Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs that is currently in production, and we brought you some early 
