Steve Jobs

Tim Cook has told the WSJ that hundreds of the company’s employees have been affected by Trump’s executive order on immigration, and says that Apple is considering taking legal action. He also said that the company would be supporting employee fundraising efforts for organizations providing relief to refugees.

Cook said that he hopes that the White House can be persuaded to rescind the order, but that the company may resort to the courts if not …

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Looking back at Steve Jobs demonstrating the first iPhone in 2007, it all looks so slick that it’s hard to believe just how close it came to falling over. The Internet History Podcast has done a nice job of pulling together the inside story of how much preparation went into ensuring that the demo worked.

In practice demos, the iPhone – which was nowhere near complete – kept failing in various different ways.

Jobs rehearsed his presentation for six solid days, but at the final hour, the team still couldn’t get the phone to behave through an entire run through. Sometimes it lost internet connection. Sometimes the calls wouldn’t go through. Sometimes the phone just shut down.

Engineers came up with a combination of three things that allowed the prototype iPhone to make it through the demo …

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It’s ten years since the launch of the famous ‘Get a Mac’ ad campaign, admired even today as one of the most entertaining and effective series of ads ever produced. The team responsible for it – from creative directors to Mac & PC actors – have been looking back at the series in a two-part feature in ad industry journal Campaign.

The piece describes the campaign as the end result of ‘an excruciating seven-month quest for an idea that Steve Jobs didn’t hate.’ The campaign ended up running for three years, with 66 ads making it to air, though the team actually shot a total of 323 …

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A politician in Paris has proposed that a street in the city be named after the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Jerome Coumet, a member of the Socialist Party and mayor of the 13th district in Paris, suggested that four lanes surrounding the Halle Freyssinet area be named after Steve Jobs (via Le Bonbon).

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When Phil Schiller used the term ‘courage’ to describe Apple’s decision to remove the 3.5mm headphone socket from the iPhone 7, his choice of that particular word was probably not accidental.

It’s likely a reference to a comment by Steve Jobs when he was asked to explain another controversial omission of an established standard: the lack of support for Flash in the iPhone and iPad …

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Designer Bryan Thompson with the prototype V-Vehicle

The Guardian has an interesting piece on a prototype car that caught the interest of Steve Jobs in the spring of 2010. Called the V-Vehicle, it was an attempt to create a lightweight, low-cost, gas-powered car whose secret was cheaper materials.

Working with designers Tom Matano and Anke Bodack, Bryan Thompson had developed a car body made of polypropylene and glass fibre that was 40% lighter than a conventional steel vehicle and would cost 70% less to produce. The creamy white hatchback had unpainted, upgradable body panels and a “space frame” body, a design technique usually reserved for high-end cars like the Ferrari 360 or Audi’s line of cars.

Within a few hours of receiving an email saying that Steve wanted to see it, Thompson and the team had taken the car to Steve’s house – where Apple’s co-founder had plenty of advice to offer during the 15 minutes he spent sitting in the car …

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Update: I referred to the rather misleading headline the Guardian had chosen, and Segall has now posted on his own site that “the Guardian chose to give it a click-bait headline that contradicted my point of view.”

Ken Segall, the former Apple ad consultant who coined the iMac name, wrote the copy for the famous ‘Think different’ campaign and authored the book Insanely Simple, says that Apple is beginning to lose touch with its heritage of simplicity. He gave his assessment of Apple’s ‘state of simplicity’ in a piece for the Guardian.

Though Apple’s customers remain fiercely loyal, the natives are getting restless. A growing number of people are sensing that Tim Cook’s Apple isn’t as simple as Steve’s Apple. They see complexity in expanding product lines, confusing product names, and the products themselves.

While the Guardian‘s headline makes the piece seem entire critical, it’s actually very balanced …

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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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