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Steve Jobs

The foundation of Apple

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Steve Jobs was the co-founder and CEO of Apple. He also founded NeXT and was the majority shareholder of Pixar, both of which he was also CEO. Jobs is known as an icon of creativity and entrepreneurship. The prolific author Walter Isaacson released Jobs’ biography in October of 2011. Isaacson describes his major accomplishment as being a “creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.”

Jobs attended Reed College for a short period of time before dropping out in 1972. However, he continued to dabble with classes unofficially and came across a calligraphy course instructed by Robert Palladino. This course ended up being highly influential for Jobs as he attributed it to bringing multiple typefaces to the Mac.

Steve Jobs founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. After a drawn out power struggle Jobs was pushed out of Apple in 1985. He then founded NeXT in 1985 and also funded the move of Lucasfilm’s Graphics Group to become its own corporation, which became Pixar in 1986. Just over a decade later in 1997, Jobs returned to Apple as they acquired NeXT. His return marked the beginning of a new era of success. He took over as CEO in July of 1997 and continued on until handing the position to Tim Cook on August 24, 2011 after increasing health problems. Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011.

Isaacson describes his major accomplishment as being a “creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.”

Report: Apple considering iTunes Store for Android & on-demand streaming service

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iTunes Radio

According to a new report from Billboard, Apple is considering launching an iTunes Store app on the Android platform to combat declining music sales on the digital platform. The report also says that Apple execs are in talks with high level label executives to discuss debuting an on-demand streaming service.

Apple has opened exploratory talks with senior label executives about the possibility of launching an on-demand streaming service that would rival Spotify and Beats Music, according to three people familiar with the talks. Apple is also thinking about adding an iTunes App for Android phones, the Google rival that has been growing faster than the iPhone, these sources said.

The move to an on-demand streaming service could transform iTunes Radio from the Pandora-like radio model to the more robust on-demand model used by Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music, and others.
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Eddy Cue throws a pen at Haunted Empire/Yukari Kane’s accuracy, says story isn’t true

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Tim Cook may have called the Haunted Empire book ‘nonsense’, but the derisive comments about the book from Apple executives do not end there. Personally, I found the pen-throwing anecdote too funny and decided to ask Cue whether it was true or not. I wasn’t really expecting a reply, but to my surprise he actually did.

I asked about the story’s truthfulness:

I am slightly obsessed with the anecdote about Jobs throwing a pen in your face. Is the story true?

Cue replied rather curtly:

No it’s not.

Hard to argue with a direct reply from Cue himself. The full extract from Haunted Empire can be seen below. You can find 9to5Mac‘s full review of Kane’s controversial book here.


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Tim Cook calls Yukari Kane book Haunted Empire “nonsense”, says it fails to capture Apple or Jobs

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Today marked the debut of former WSJ Apple reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane’s book “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs” (review from this morning) and Tim Cook is not pleased.

The Apple CEO told CNBC the following:

This nonsense belongs with some of the other books I’ve read about Apple. It fails to capture Apple, Steve, or anyone else in the company. Apple has over 85,000 employees that come to work each day to do their best work, to create the world’s best products, to put their mark in the universe and leave it better than they found it. This has been the heart of Apple from day one and will remain at the heart for decades to come. I am very confident about our future.

Update: Re/Code’s telling of the email sent by Apple has an additional sentence:

“We’ve always had many doubters in our history,” he said in the e-mail. “They only make us stronger.”

Yukari Kane also responded to Re/Code:

“For Tim Cook to have such strong feelings about the book, it must have touched a nerve,” Kane said. “Even I was surprised by my conclusions, so I understand the sentiment. I’m happy to speak with him or anyone at Apple in public or private. My hope in writing this book was to be thought-provoking and to start a conversation which I’m glad it has.”
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Yukari Kane on Apple leadership styles: Jobs demanding, Cook inclusive, both intense

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The NY Times has a brief interview with Yukari Kane, author of Haunted Empire, in which she contrasts the leadership styles of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Interestingly, while many see Cook as laid-back in contrast to the driven nature of the company’s co-founder, Kane says that both share an intensity.

I don’t think of Tim as laid back. In fact, he’s extremely intense. His intensity is just more quiet and dogged than Steve’s.

There is, of course, the obligatory anecdote to illustrate the obsession with detail and demands Jobs would make on his team.

Jobs routinely made a habit of calling people back mid-vacation […] for example, people had to work on Christmas Day because he decided he wanted a different color iPod shuffle at the last minute.

Despite her book’s contention that Apple is lost without Steve, she does acknowledge the strengths that Cook brings to the role.

Cook is also a better internal communicator. He sends out more all-staff emails and holds more town hall meetings. He also understands that people need to take vacations and have down time […]

Cook brings more efficiency and organization to Apple, which is good because the company’s increased size and scale requires a professional, consistent leadership style that is more inclusive than Steve Jobs’s was.

But doesn’t waste any time in returning to her theme.

In terms of profits and revenues, there is no question that Apple continues to be a successful company. But Apple’s own definition of success is much more. Its promise is to be exceptional – to make insanely great products that change the world. The latter is difficult to do without Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field. […]  If Apple stays on the current trajectory, I think the danger is that it could turn into Sony.

Former VP of marketing at Apple talks iPhone, Steve Jobs, and more at the 99U conference

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Apple’s former Vice President of Marketing Allison Johnson talked about her time at Apple during the 99U conference, as reported by Cult of Mac. Johnson now works with companies like Jawbone and Anki.

In the video, Johnson discusses her time working with Steve Jobs, including his response to the iPhone 4 “antenna-gate” issue. Johnson describe’s Jobs as being “so sad and so angry” about the problem, declaring that Apple would not be the kind of company that people regarded negatively.

She also talks about her role (and Jobs’) in marketing the original iPhone and other key events in the six years she was in charge of the company’s marketing.

The full twenty-five minute interview is included below:


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iOS 8: Apple polishes Maps data, adds public transit directions service

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Apple is readying an upgraded version of its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Maps application for the next major release of iOS in an effort to battle Google for mobile maps supremacy, according to sources briefed on the plans. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Senior Vice Presidents Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi, and Maps head Patrice Gautier are using the new app to move toward fulfilling a promise to users that the iOS Maps application will eventually live up to the “incredibly high standard” of Apple’s customers…


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iTunes Radio beats Spotify to take 3rd place in U.S. music streaming, eyes up #2 spot

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iTunes Radio, launched alongside iOS 7 six months ago, has now overtaken Spotify to become the third most popular music streaming service in America – and looks set to take second place within the next quarter or two.

Reporting on listening data compiled by Edison ResearchElectronista estimates that iTunes Radio’s 8 percent market share gives it around 20M listeners, and says that it is the fastest-growing of the top three services … 
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Apple Campus 2 site’s demolition progress shown almost complete in latest aerial photos

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The folks over at Apple Toolbox have shared a number of aerial photos capturing the demolition progress of the future site of Apple’s Campus 2 ‘spaceship’. As you can see above, the former site of Hewlett-Packard that Apple purchased in 2010 is leveling out ahead of the expected 2016 completion date. Campus 2 designer Norman Foster discussed the project’s evolution and Steve Jobs’ involvement earlier this week, and late last month we saw a less clear shot of the plot undergoing demolition. Check below for more detailed photos.


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Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer to retire in September, Luca Maestri to take over

Apple has announced that its CFO Peter Oppenheimer is leaving Apple for retirement in September this year. Luca Maestri, vice president of finance, will take over as CFO. The transition will begin in June to smooth the changeover from Oppenheimer to Maestri.

Oppenheimer has been at Apple since before Jobs returned in 1997, as a senior director. He became Senior Vice President and CFO in 2004. Yesterday, it was announced that Oppenheimer would join Goldman Sachs as a board member. Oppenheimer was the lead of the Apple Campus 2 project; whether Maestri will take over this responsibility is currently unclear.


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Apple’s ‘Spaceship’ designer discusses Steve Jobs’ involvement and Stanford campus influence

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Image via Cupertino.org

As Apple’s Campus 2 site steadily progresses closer toward someday being complete, Architectural Record (via Mac Rumors) has shared a recent Q&A with architect Norman Foster, the designer responsible for the structure and appearance of the future campus. In the interview, Foster describes the evolution of the project and working with Steve Jobs on Apple’s Campus 2, which is currently in the midst of construction after being approved by the city of Cupertino just last fall


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Tim Cook profiled in “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs” [Video]

There wasn’t a whole lot new in this chunk of the Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, which Yukari Kane mostly focuses on Apple CEO Tim Cook and his characteristics that are often the opposite of Steve Jobs. Cook is a character but not the same character that brought Apple to its current success.

From the WSJ excerpt:

As tough as Cook was reputed to be, he was also generous. He gave away the frequent-flier miles that he racked up as Christmas gifts, and he volunteered at a soup kitchen during the Thanksgiving holidays. He had also participated in an annual two-day cycling event across Georgia to raise money for multiple sclerosis; Cook had been a supporter since being misdiagnosed with the disease years before. “The doctor said, ‘Mr. Cook, you’ve either had a stroke, or you have MS,’ ” Cook told the Auburn alumni magazine. He didn’t have either. His symptoms had been produced from “lugging a lot of incredibly heavy luggage around.”

An earlier piece in the New Yorker online edition painted a dreary picture of Apple post Steve Jobs and the video above does delve into that viewpoint a bit.

Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, looks pretty but is full of bugs and flaws. As for innovation, the last time Apple created something that was truly great was the original iPad, when Jobs was still alive. Although the company’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, insists otherwise, Apple seems more eager to talk about the past than about the future.

From the video:

[Has Apple lost its touch? Are they still King of the Hill?]

KANE: I think the answer is obvious to me. The answer has got to be yes. This is a company who had revolved around Steve Jobs for so long, I mean that was something that Jobs himself went out of his way to make sure of. And the people there are conditioned to operate, to play off of his strengths and weaknesses. And so now you’ve got this completely opposite guy in Tim Cook, who is I think brilliant in many ways, but in different ways. But so they’re going through some growing pains in that.

Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly has the following review of the book:

Jan 27, 2014 – The globe-bestriding computer-maker loses its soul in this lively business history. Former Wall Street Journal technology reporter Kane follows Apple after the 2011 death of founder Steve Jobs as the company’s knack for conjuring breakthrough i-gadgets lapsed into a series of ho-hum upgrades, misfires like the befuddled artificial intelligence app Siri, and interminable patent lawsuits, while market share, profits, and stock price eroded. Kane makes the story a study in CEO leadership styles, contrasting Jobs’s visionary bluster with his successor Tim Cook’s icy bean-counting and the histrionics of Samsung’s “wise emperor” Lee Kun-hee, whose quality crusade involved burning an entire factory’s inventory in front of its weeping employees. Kane unearths plenty of colorful material here, including lawyerly jousting, hilariously lame new-product unveilings, and conference-room psychodramas between bullying execs and groveling underlings. The author’s great-man theory of Jobs’s “unfiltered” leadership as the indispensable motor of Apple’s innovation doesn’t explain much; her unusually rich dissection of Apple’s ugly dealings with its FoxConn manufacturing partner suggests that Cook’s merciless wringing of profits out of exploited Chinese labor is as much the soul of Apple as Jobs’s oft-hyped intuition for design. Still, this well-paced, vividly detailed narrative reveals the machine surrounding the Jobsian ghost at Apple and brings the company’s high-flying mythology down to earth.© Publishers Weekly

We’re getting an advanced copy this week which we don’t expect to be as pessimistic and the publicity-generating excerpts above.  Interesting bits will be posted here.

Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs is available March 18th from Harper Collins ($12.74 Amazon/$14.99 iBookstore)

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Ever wondered why your mouse pointer is angled, not straight?

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Here’s the reason, courtesy of a concept drawing from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where the graphical user interface was invented, and where Steve Jobs was introduced to the concept that was to lead to the Macintosh8BitFuture writes:

When the graphical user interface was later developed by Xerox, however, the team found that the vertical pointer was almost impossible to see due to the low resolution displays in use at the time.

Rather than make the pointer larger, the decision was made to turn it 45 degrees, making it easy to see. Despite the high resolution displays we have today, the concept has managed to stick for 33 years.

Tim Cook’s youth in South Alabama profiled by local paper

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Tim Cook posing for the year book in 11th grade (via AL.com)

In what is a rather interesting profile published on AL.com, Michael Finch II has uncovered some fascinating details about Tim Cook’s early life growing up in Robertsdale, Alabama.

“When it comes to Tim Cook, Robertsdale wraps him in a protective hug and keeps strangers with their curious questions at arm’s length,” Finch writes noting that Cook flew back to his hometown last Christmas through the airport in Pensacola, Florida, about an hour southeast.

The profile goes on to describe the pride Robertsdale feels for Cook’s accomplishments now and what they saw in Cook during his youth
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Commemorative Steve Jobs postage stamp to be released in 2015

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs points to a member of the audience during a Q&A session at the end of the iPhone OS4 special event at Apple headquarters in Cupertino

The Washington Post has uncovered a document (embedded below, via Engadget) that reveals the U.S. Postal Service plans to release a collectible postage stamp featuring Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2015. According to the document, the stamp is currently in the design phase.

Other individuals to appear on commemorative stamps in 2015 include musical legend Elvis Presley and former “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson. You can find the full list below:


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The spaceship is on the way: aerial photo shows demolition work on Apple’s Campus 2 site

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Apple’s new ‘spaceship’ headquarters has been a long time in the coming, with Steve Jobs presenting the plans to the Cupertino city council back in 2011, but work has finally begun. KCBS eye-in-the-sky reporter Ron Cervi took the above Instagram photo, showing that demolition work on the site is now underway.

While we heard last month that the demolition phase was starting, this is the first visible evidence we’ve seen. Apple also recently constructed a full-size mockup of one small section of the building in order to test construction methods and enable the company to see how the concrete elements would look in real life … 
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Apple M&A met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk last spring, to partner in battery ‘Gigafactory’?

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Those ongoing analyst predictions that Apple would buy Tesla may have been based on some sort of reality.  According the the SF ChronicleAdrian Perica, Apple’s head of mergers and acquisitions, met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk last spring.

A source tells The Chronicle that Perica met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Cupertino last spring around the same time analysts suggested Apple acquire the electric car giant…

Six months before Ahmad’s letter, Musk met with Perica and probably Cook at Apple headquarters, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. While a megadeal has yet to emerge (for all of its cash, Apple still plays hardball on valuation), such a high-level meeting between the two Silicon Valley giants involving their top dealmakers suggests Apple was very much interested in buying the electric car pioneer.

But it is unlikely that Apple wanted to buy the car company and even more unlikely that Musk would sell it. In response to the acquisition rumors at the time, he tweeted the following:

But it’s highly likely that Apple would want to buy into one of Tesla’s major upcoming projects.


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Analyst suggestion of converged iOS/OS X device flies in face of Apple statements

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CNET reports that JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz forecasts that Apple will release a converged iOS/OS X device he has dubbed the iAnywhere.

While not a new idea, our global tech research team believes Apple could be on the cusp of introducing a new category with iAnywhere, a converged MacOS-iOS operating system that allows an iPhone or iPad to dock into a specially configured display to run as a computer

This is a variation on earlier claims that a larger iPad – widely dubbed the iPad Pro – could also run both operating systems. I’ve written at length about this idea, so won’t rehearse the arguments again here, I shall simply counter with a few quotes from Apple … 
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Original Lisa mouse used by Steve Jobs dug up from buried time capsule [Video]

A Lisa mouse used by Steve Jobs to give a presentation at the Aspen International Design Conference in 1983 and then buried in a time capsule has been dug up, reports CNET.

The capsule was originally due to be unearthed in 2000, but landscaping work meant that conference organisers lost track of its position and had to call in help from the National Geographic Channel show Diggers to locate it.

The capsule was retrieved back in September, but the video has just been made available.

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Former WSJ Apple reporter has a dreary take on life at Apple after Steve Jobs in this excerpt

haunted-empire-yukari-kaneFormer WSJ Apple reporter/scoopster Yukari Iwatani Kane is coming out with a new book called Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs ($12.74 Amazon/$14.99 iBookstore). 

We’re not sure how the book reads quite yet but this excerpt of her New Yorker piece via Fortune, doesn’t take on a very optimistic tone for the company where she once had some solid sources:

When Jobs was ousted in 1985, the impact of his absence on Apple’s business was not immediately obvious. After a slow start, Macintosh sales began rising. Two years after Jobs left, Apple’s annual sales had almost doubled compared to three years earlier, and its gross profit margin was an astonishing fifty-one per cent. Outside appearances suggested that Apple hadn’t missed a beat.

Inside Apple, employees knew differently. Something had changed. “I was let down when Steve left,” Steve Scheier, a marketing manager at Apple from 1982 to 1991, recalled. “The middle managers, the directors, and the vice presidents kept the spirit alive for a long time without his infusion, but eventually you start hiring people you shouldn’t hire. You start making mistakes you shouldn’t have made.” Scheier told me that he eventually grew tired and left. The company had “become more of a business and less of a crusade.”

So what about now? Apple’s supporters point to the company’s billions of dollars in quarterly profit and its tens of billions in revenue as proof that it continues to thrive. But Apple’s employees again know differently, despite the executive team’s best efforts to preserve Jobs’s legacy. People who shouldn’t be hired are being hired (like Apple’s former retail chief, John Browett, who tried to incorporate big-box-retailer sensibilities into Apple’s refined store experience). People who shouldn’t leave are leaving, or, in the case of the mobile-software executive Scott Forstall, being fired.

Mistakes, in turn, are being made: Apple Maps was a fiasco, and ads, like the company’s short-lived Genius ads and last summer’s self-absorbed manifesto ad, have been mediocre. Apple’s latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 7, looks pretty but is full of bugs and flaws. As for innovation, the last time Apple created something that was truly great was the original iPad, when Jobs was still alive. Although the company’s C.E.O., Tim Cook, insists otherwise, Apple seems more eager to talk about the past than about the future. Even when it refers to the future, it is more intent on showing consumers how it hasn’t changed rather than how it is evolving. The thirtieth anniversary of the Macintosh—and the “1984” ad—is not just commemorative. It is a reminder of what Apple has stopped being.

It is tough to replace the legend, but hopefully this is just the pessimistic take. We’ll have more from Kane and the book as it becomes available. It debuts March 18th from HarperCollins.

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Post-PC era in full swing, as Sony exits PC business and Apple leads in combined devices

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Sony has confirmed earlier rumors that it is exiting the PC business, selling both its computer division and the VAIO brand to a Japanese investment fund which plans to use the brand only within Japan, at least initially.

Once the coolest laptop brand around, VAIO notebooks were admired even by Steve Jobs for their slim form factors and sleek designs, and it was to Sony that Apple turned for help in designing its early PowerBook models. Sony, however, failed to maintain its design momentum, and found itself increasingly overtaken by smaller companies.

We described yesterday how Sony in 2001 turned down an offer from Steve Jobs to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops.

Sony is also restructuring its TV business, announcing that it will be focusing much more on high-end models. Sony is the current market leader in 4K TVs, a market Apple is expected to enter.

The news coincides with a report by Canalys that if you measure PC and tablet sales as a single category, considering both to amount to personal computers, then Apple is the leading computer manufacturer, with a 19.5 percent market share – more than HP and Dell combined.

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Combining Macs and iPads, Apple sold just over 87 million personal computing devices last year (excluding iPhones).

The backstory: Sony’s 2001 offer from Steve Jobs to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops [Updated]

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Update: the rumor was true, Sony confirmed that it is selling its PC business and the VAIO brand to Japan Industrial Partners, with the deal set to complete by the end of March.

Former Sony President Kunitake Ando says that Sony turned down an offer from Steve Jobs back in 2001 to allow it to run Mac OS on Vaio laptops, several years after the original Mac clone program ended in 1998.

Speaking to freelance writer Nobuyuki Hayashi, Ando described the moment Steve Jobs met senior Sony execs to make the offer.

Most of Sony’s executives spent their winter vacation in Hawaii and play golf after celebrating the new year. In one of those new year golf competitions back in 2001, ” Steve Jobs and another Apple executive were waiting for us at the end of golf course holding VAIO running Mac OS”

But there is an interesting Backstory told through Quora by the wife of an ex-Apple Engineer working on the Marklar project… 
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Steve Jobs was almost Clippy and other things learned from prototype Twiggy Macs

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Just months before the original Mac debuted 30 years ago, it was deeply troubled by an in-house 5.25″ flimsy floppy-disk drive it relied on called the Twiggy (you know, for it’s flimsiness). This was replaced by a more stable 3-inch Sony drive before shipping, but the Twiggy Macs had more than just a different drive.

Interestingly, the operating system featured a Steve Jobs rendtion of Microsoft’s dreaded, now retired Clippy assistant. The Ashton Kutcher resemblance has never been clearer… er… pixelated.

Check out the full article for other tidbits at Cult of Mac (via Daring Fireball). 

Jobs biographer Isaacson back-pedals on innovation comments, says ‘execution is what really matters’, Apple is best

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A couple of weeks after describing Google as more innovative than Apple, and suggesting that Tim Cook was vulnerable to a shareholder revolt if he didn’t quickly release disruptive new products, Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson has downplayed his remarks in a round-table discussion on Bloomberg TV.

I think [Google is] very innovative. I was not trying to contrast it to Apple or something. I know, all the Apple fans got mad […]

The one thing I will say is innovation is great, but it ain’t everything. It’s not the holy grail. Execution is what really matters, and Apple is the best at execution … 
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AAPL Investors won’t wait forever for new Apple product categories, warns analyst

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While Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple board may be content for Apple to take its time in launching new product categories, investors may be less patient, warns BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk. He also argued that neither the Mac Pro nor a rumored larger-screen iPhone 6 would meet market expectations of innovation.

When we upgraded the stock in March, we assumed Apple could announce a new product that would generate $5 billion of revenue in Fiscal 2014.  That new product never materialized.  We can’t say we are not concerned.  For example, when Apple announced the new Mac Pro at WWDC in June, Phil Schiller proudly boasted, “Can’t innovate, my ass”.  If that is what the company considers to be innovative then there should be some concern for EPS growth.

In the investment note, Piecyk cautions that Tim Cook could face renewed investor scrutiny if he doesn’t deliver … 
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