Steve Jobs

Apple has just released an update for the 2nd generation Apple TV, version 4.4.4 (9A406a). As of now we know the update brings bug fixes, but we’re checking for more. Hit up your Apple TV to download the new firmware or hit up the direct link.

Update: Apple has also released a small update to the iPhone 4S, bringing it to version iOS 5.0.1 (9A406). Hit up the the direct link.

Update X2: Apple has dropped a note saying that this update fixes SIM card issues on the iPhone 4S.

Expand
Expanding
Close

On April Foolsday in 1976 Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne signed the founding contract for Apple Computer.  Eleven days later, Ron Wayne  decided to sell his 10% of the company for $800, which is now worth $3.9 billion.  The founding contract that made history was originally expected to sell for $150,000, but today sold for a cool $1.6 million to Eduardo Cisneros, chief executive officer of Cisneros Corp, at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, reports Bloomberg. The Cisneros family is the second wealthiest in South America according to a 2006 Forbes listing.

The story goes that apparently the consigner bought the legal papers back in the mid-1990s “from a manuscript dealer” who is thought to had acquired them from Wayne. We’ve posted the bidding after the break.

Update: we’ve confirmed the documents have sold for $1,594,500, but the $1.3 million that Fortune reported doesn’t include the buyers tax the auction house tags on. Thanks Dewitt!

Expand
Expanding
Close

Originally aired on November 2, PBS is making their 60-minute “Steve Jobs– One Last Thing” documentary available on DVD starting today. Available on Amazon now for $22.15, the documentary includes a never-before-broadcast interview with Jobs from 1994, as well as interviews with a number of those who knew and worked with Jobs such as Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne, Ross Perot, and Dean Hovey.

The video is also available to rent on Amazon Video and is free for Prime members.  It is also available (Flash) on PBS’s website, or you can grab it on iTunes here.

Here’s an excerpt from the rare Jobs interview:

Expand
Expanding
Close

An Apple television mockup by Adr-studio.it

More news concerning a rumored television set by Apple that several analysts and some media outlets have been calling for feverishly. According to a blog post published by The Tokyo Times news site, Apple has commissioned Sharp to begin manufacturing large displays for an Apple-branded television set. Sharp should ramp up production in January:

American technology giant Apple is shifting partnerships in Japan towards Sharp, eyeing the production of a brand-new TV range which may be called iTV.

The product should hit the market by the summer 2012, the story goes. And according to New York Post, which referenced the original Tokyo Times report:

Apple has taken over the entire plant — pulling out of South Korea and its former partner Samsung — to insure the quality of the new set and to protect its secrecy.

The Tokyo Times story quotes Jefferies analyst Peter Misek as saying that Apple’s rivals have already begun “a scrambling search to identify what iTV will be and do”. The analyst wrote in a note to clients, based on his visit to Japan and talk with manufacturing executives:

It’s a huge deal for Sharp because they spent significant amounts of capital to try and expand capacity and upgrade their facilities. It gives Apple a partner that they can control manufacturing and secure supply at a lower price.

Please be advised that our confidence in The Tokyo Times isn’t very high…

Expand
Expanding
Close

35 years ago, Steve Jobs invited Ron Wayne to persuade Wozniak to join him in his entrepreneurial foray called Apple Computer Co. Jobs and Wayne go back a long way and had known each other from Jobs’s Atari days. Wayne drafted the original four-page founding contract that established Apple Computer Co. on a typewriter and came up with all the legalese of their partnership agreement.

Twelve days later, Wayne left the young startup and sold his stake. 35 years later, the original founding contract goes up for auction at Sothesby’s and is expected to fetch a cool $150,000. Apparently the consigner bought the legal papers back in the mid-1990s “from a manuscript dealer” who is thought to had acquired them from Wayne, Sotheby’s Richard Austin told the publication.

What’s interesting about the documents are the terms of Wayne’s withdrawal from Apple. So, how much did the two Steves compensate Wayne for his ten percent stake of the company, now worth $35 billion? According to Bloomberg:

On April 12, Wayne withdrew as partner. The move is documented by a County of Santa Clara statement and an amendment to the contract, both of which are part of the Sotheby’s lot. Wayne received $800 for relinquishing his 10 percent ownership of Apple, according to the document. He subsequently received another payment of $1,500, according to Sotheby’s.

Included right after the break is a video interview of Ron Wayne with The Next Web’s Matt Brian from September highlighting why he left Apple after just twelve days. One of the reasons is Wayne’s realization that he would be standing in the shadows of geniuses.

The original legal document that established Apple Computer Company (left) and signatures of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne (right).

Expand
Expanding
Close

When author of the official ‘Steve Jobs’ bio, Walter Isaacson, sat down for an interview with Fortune earlier this month, we learned that Steve Jobs had three key industries he wanted to reinvent: the television, textbooks, and photography. We’ve certainly heard a lot of rumors about an iTV in the works, and Apple has arguably already done a lot for the textbook business, despite Jobs having loftier goals for the industry as a whole. While the iPhone 4S’s redesigned camera might be good enough to get an endorsement from photographer Annie Leibovitz, the guys at ADR Studios have created this new ‘iCam’ concept imagining a separate accessory that would turn the iPhone 5 into a full-fledged point-and-shoot.

Keeping rumored iPhone 5 specs in mind, ADR’s concept would include a 10.1 megapixel sensor and provide an “ISO range from 100 to 3200 (extendable up to 6400 equivalent)” for full HD at 60fps. Imagined specs for the accessory include an aluminum unibody, interchangeable lenses, a small touch-screen on the front, LED flash, pico-projector, SD UHS-i slot, motion sensor, and bluetooth. We’re guessing a few companies are already at work on a similar accessory after seeing these gorgeous mock ups.

[slideshow]

Expand
Expanding
Close

Image courtesy of AnimationMagazine.net

According to E! Online, screenwriter, producer and playwright Aaron Sorkin is “strongly considering” writing a screenplay for a rumored Sony movie about the life and work of Steve Jobs. Sorkin was quoted as telling the publication at the P.S. Arts Express Yourself 2011 event in Santa Monica:

Sony has asked me to write the movie and it’s something I’m strongly considering. […] He was a great entrepreneur, he was a great artist, a great thinker. […] He’s probably inspired my 11-year-old daughter Roxy more than he’s inspired me. She plays with all his toys.

Sony Pictures recently acquired feature rights to film a flick based on Walter Isaacson’s authorized bio. As we already informed you, someone from ER is likely to play Steve Jobs. The choice could come down to George Clooney (50) and Noah Wyle (40). The latter played Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley and recently said he would give his eye teeth, in the heartbeat, to play Apple’s charismatic co-founder.

Sorkin’s work includes the well-received television show The West Wing. He also wrote screenplay for the controversial movie The Social Network which covers how Facebook came to be while portraying its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg as a ruthless young entrepreneur  who stole an existing idea from the Winklevoss brothers, tweaked it and made it his own.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple has begun a search to find senior-level executives for their cloud services. According to the report, Apple already has one Internet entrepreneur in their sights, but it hasn’t been disclosed who. To assist with their search, Apple is also reportedly looking into hiring out a recruiting firm to find solid talent.

The hopes in finding new leadership for their cloud products is undoubtedly to strengthen Apple’s already existent iCloud, but to also build new web-based applications. The report mentions that Apple is working towards building these web-based applications to limit the amount of hardware a single person needs on them at one time. The details aren’t final, though lower-level positions have already been filled to begin work. Arguably, Apple has already begun this push with iCloud.

Apple is also considering building new apps that leverage the Web to reduce people’s need to carry around numerous devices at once, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

To assist with their movement to the cloud, Steve Jobs announced the new data center was operational in North Carolina during this year’s WWDC. The data center is home to powering all of Apple’s current cloud services, like iCloud, and presumably will power what’s coming up next.

It’s obvious that Apple will need to begin an aggressive attack on the cloud if they want to be on terms with where Google’s currently headed. It will be interesting to see how Apple will attack making web-based applications, and what else they plan to do in the cloud — but it seems they’re already off to a pretty solid start.

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOlqqriBvUM]

Walter Isaacson, in his  biography on Steve Jobs, didn’t go terribly in-depth on the NeXT era of his subject’s life. Luckily, incredible videos from the series Entrepreneurs have become available online and show Steve Jobs working with his team at NeXT. The videos really highlight Steve Job’s leadership style, at least at that phase of his career and show how hard it is to start a company. (via The Next Web)

Check out a few others after the break:

Expand
Expanding
Close

The 13-inch MacBook Air of today

Had Apple’s “next-generation of notebooks” announcement in October 2010 played out as planned, the MacBook family of today would look very different. In October 2010, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple Cupertino campus to unveil a preview of OS X Lion, FaceTime for Mac, iLife ’11 and the latest MacBook Air design as the closing “one more thing” announcement. That MacBook Air brought with it an all-new and thinner form-factor, a higher-resolution display, an incredibly light body, a large Multi-Touch single-button trackpad, flash SSD storage, and battery life improvements. 

Those aforementioned features, according to Apple, are what constitute the future of notebooks. This notebook announcement not only brought the successor to the previously available 13-inch MacBook Air, but brought along with it an 11-inch MacBook Air for the first time.

But these new notebooks weren’t the only planned pieces of the late 2010 MacBook Air story, though. Reliable sources have told us that not only were 13 and 11-inch models planned, but a groudbreaking new 15 inch MacBook Air was scheduled for a late 2010 release. Read on to learn about what could have been: 

Expand
Expanding
Close

If it isn’t Noah Wyle, who played Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley, it might be George Clooney, Wyle’s co Star in the hit TV show from a decade ago, ER according to the Sun.

The actor, 50, is reportedly battling it out with his former ER co-star Noah Wyle, 40, for the role.The biopic, which is expected to start filming next year, will chart the life of the amazing entrepreneur, who died last month from pancreatic cancer at just 56. According to Now magazine, filming on the project is due to start next year.

Noah Wyle, who frankly looks a lot more like Jobs, said of the opportunity to play Steve Jobs again:

“Are you kidding? I would give my eye teeth, in the heartbeat”

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nOdc5knf-M]

Computerworld/IDG reports that wireless industry pioneer John Stanton (founder of of Western Wireless, VoiceStream wireless and former CTIA chairman) worked with Steve Jobs prior to the launch of the iPhone on becoming a carrier using unlicensed spectrum…

Stanton, chairman of venture capital firm Trilogy Partners, said he spent a fair amount of time with Jobs between 2005 and 2007. “He wanted to replace carriers,” Stanton said of Jobs, the Apple founder and CEO who died Oct. 5 after a battle with cancer. “He and I spent a lot of time talking about whether synthetically you could create a carrier using Wi-Fi spectrum. That was part of his vision.”

The one that got away…
Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2C2oCsrqcM]

Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s former head of Macintosh product development between 1981-1990, has commented on Apple’s crucial choice of Steve Jobs’s NeXTSTEP as their operating system back in 1996 instead of BeOS, his own creation. Much of NeXTSTEP code would make possible Mac OS X, later adapted for Apple’s mobile devices.

Speaking at a Churchill Club “Steve Jobs’ Legacy” talk event (which is fantastic the whole way through – above) in San Jose yesterday, Gassée remarked (at about an hour in):

Thank god that didn’t happen, because I hated Apple’s management.

BeOS was pretty good, mind you. Positioned as a multimedia platform, BeOS benefited from symmetric multiprocessing, pervasive multithreading, preemptive multitasking and BFS, a custom 64-bit journaling file system known as BFS. It too was developed on the principles of clarity and an uncluttered design.

So why did Apple side with NeXT and acquired the company on February 4, 1997 for  $429 million? In hindsight, even though beOS was pretty good, it was the aquisition of Jobs that was worth to Apple more than the NeXTSTEP software. Or, as Gassée put it, “Jobs’s acquisition of Apple”.

Expand
Expanding
Close

A rendition of an Apple-branded television set.

The WSJ reports that amid losing money on every television set they make, Sony somehow has a strategy for redemption. Stringer declined to provide details about what Sony is developing but said “there’s a tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set”.

He he has “no doubt” Apple’s Steve Jobs also was working on changing the traditional TV set. “That’s what we’re all looking for”, he noted, warning “it will take a long time to transition to a new form of television”. Slim margins, low prices and little innovation make the business of researching, developing and marketing high-definition television sets a cutthroat one, he remarked:

We can’t continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money.

His company, Stringer said, spent the last five years creating an ecosystem to take on Apple, even though the company had seen little success with the Google TV platform and other connected television efforts:

Expand
Expanding
Close

Steve Jobs’s authorized biographer Walter Isaacson and Fortune’s managing editor Andy Serwer on stage at NASDAQ | Photo: Tanner Curtis

In a series of tweets, Fortune released some interesting new quotes by Steve Jobs’ authorized biographer Walter Isaacson, who sat down for a “breakfast conversation” with the magazine’s managing editor Andy Serwer.

“It’s good that we’ve made a big deal out of a creative business leader, rather than a celebrity,” Isaacson told Serwer, describing his rock star status as a cultural icon of our time. “There’s an emotional connection Steve Jobs made across the world – like a rock star or a prince”.

“Steve thought the digital hub had moved from the computer to the cloud,” Isaacson said. Over the years, Jobs changed as a manager in a way that “he didn’t become sweeter or kinder, he learned to channel his energy and passion.”

Walter Isaacson signing books in Times Square | Photo: Tanner Curtis

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPbkB8yvCiw]

(video link)

Steve Jobs has been nominated for Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” by NBC’s “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams. If Steve Jobs were to receive the award, he would be the first person to receive it after their death. Mark Zuckerburg was 2010’s winner, who recently told reporters he was inspired by Steve Jobs while building Facebook. Brian Williams said in his nomination speech:

“One guy, who changed our world, and I said to Seth Meyers as we walked across Sixth Avenue, ‘Just look with me on this one block walk at how he changed the world around us. Look at how he changed the world.’ Not only did he change the world, but he gave us that spirit again that something was possible that you could look at a piece of plastic or glass and move your finger– that’s outlandish. You could make things bigger or smaller like that. ‘Oh the places you’ll go’ and oh the way you will change forever the music and television industries. So may he rest in peace, Steve Jobs, and the spirit he represents, are my nominee for Person of the Year.”

[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rsyOlwmHt5E”]

A video has also surfaced this evening (above) showing a segment of the never before seen interview of Steve Jobs by Robert Cringely. The interview is due out in theaters soon, but Cringely has revealed a few parts early.

Expand
Expanding
Close

Ron Johnson, Apple’s former vice president of retail and the creator of the Apple Store, left for J.C. Penney November 1 and already he is picking industry veterans to join his leadership team at the Plano, Texas-headquartered department store chain. The Wall Street Journal reports that Johnson is tapping former Apple talent, including former chief financial office of Apple Retail Michael Kramer and Apple’s chief talent officer Daniel Walker.

Interestingly, it was Walker who helped Steve Jobs hire Ron Johnson to head Apple’s retail efforts. Both men served at Apple from 2000 to 2005. Granted, Walker and Kramer are both long-exited Apple people, but the temptation for current Apple talent to somehow make its way to Penney will always linger.

Sure, you might say who would  rather work at J.C. Penney rather than the most powerful, cool technology company in the world. But on a granular level, there might be high paying jobs with Johnson that Apple won’t match that could draw some top Apple talent.  Johnson himself is probably the best example of that.

There is also likely a non-compete clause in Ron Johnson’s severance agreement barring him from poaching Apple employees, but those are easily circumvented.  Just as Steve Jobs poached a bunch of his top Apple engineers to build out NeXT…

Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KQlPCflWP9k]

Last month, after the passing of Steve Jobs, the media exploded with stories and interviews of the former CEO of Apple. In the 60 Minutes interview with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs had some rough things to say about his competitors Google and Microsoft. However, in an outtake that didn’t make the televised segment, Steve Jobs expressed some respect for Mark Zuckerberg and his social networking giant Facebook.

“We talk about social networks in the plural,” Jobs said to Isaacson, “but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there. Just Facebook, They are dominating this. I admire Mark Zuckerberg . . . for not selling out, for wanting to make a company.  I admire that a lot.”

In an interview with Charlie Rose that’s airing later today, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerbeg reveals that Steve Jobs didn’t just respect Zuckerberg, but coached him on how to build the right management team and focus his company.  “I had a lot of questions for him,” Zuckerberg says. The topics include, “how to build a team around you that’s focused on building as high quality and good things as you are.” 
Expand
Expanding
Close

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vejMDbyrj4]

From the Series Machine That Changed the World, The Program Paperback Computer. Via Openvault.

Another ‘lost interview’ is hitting movie theaters in a few weeks…
Expand
Expanding
Close

A few Apple execs have been departing over the past few weeks which might lead some to believe that Apple could have a talent retention problem in the wake of the recent leadership transition.

Perhaps hoping to put that kind of talk to rest, Apple just dropped fat bonus stock on their heavy hitters according to SEC filings.  With Apple’s stock riding at 400-ish per share, the below bonus shares are certainly a great incentive to stay – worth $60 million/each at today’s value.

Bruce Sewell — 150,000 shares, 50 percent vest on June 21, 2013, 100 percent on March 21, 2016
Jeffrey Williams — 150,000 shares, 50 percent on June 21, 2013, 100 percent on March 21, 2016
Philip Schiller — 150,000 shares, 50 percent on June 21, 2013, 100 percent on March 21, 2016
Peter Oppenheimer –150,000 shares, 50 percent on June 21, 2013, 100 percent on March 21, 2016
Robert Mansfield — 150,000 shares, 50 percent on June 21, 2013, 100 percent on March 21, 2016
Scott Forstall — 150,000 shares, 50 percent on June 21, 2013, 100 percent on March 21, 2016
Eddy Cue — 100,000 shares, 25 percent vest September 21, 2014, 100 percent September 21, 2016.

Strangely, there is no mention of Jonathan Ive who could be considered “on a different level” since Steve Jobs made him untouchable (though there have been rumors that he may want to retire).  Perhaps that’s why he’s the only guy without a big fat smile, above. (Ha, actually Apple isn’t required to file bonus paperwork with the SEC for Ive –

…Jonathan Ive, the company’s senior vice president for industrial design, whose position at the company does not trigger S.E.C. rules requiring public disclosure of stock awards.

– Because his role isn’t important to Apple’s well being?!)

CEO Tim Cook already has a huge bonus package (1 million shares) if he sticks around to 2021.
Expand
Expanding
Close

During their earnings call this afternoon, CBS’s Les Moonves made comment (via GigaOm) that the media company turned down a partnership with Apple for a streaming deal on the Apple TV. Moonves says that the deal was turned down because of the ad-split revenue that Apple was trying to reach an agreement over.

It has been long rumored that Apple has been working on reaching subscription deals with media companies. In Steve Job’s official biography by Walter Isaacson, it was revealed that Steve Jobs “cracked the TV”. Today’s comments reveal that Apple is indeed going after media companies for agreements. But why?

These types of agreements will be implemented into the rumored “iTV” that is supposedly coming in 2012. From the D8 conference:

Then you get into another problem. Which is there isn’t a cable operator that is national. There is a bunch of cable providers. There isn’t like a GSM standard like with phones. Every country has different standards, different government approvals. It’s very balkanized. I’m sure smarter people than us will figure this out. That’s why when we say Apple TV as a hobby we use this phrase.

Expand
Expanding
Close