News tagged ‘Steve Jobs’

The New York Times has published Steve Jobs’s biological sister, novelist  Mona Simpson’s eulogy. She shared her eulogy for her passed away brother, offering an intimate look at the last moments before he died, including his surprising last words.

"Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother," she wrote.

Jobs and Mona didn’t know each other until they were both adults. In 1985 a lawyer contacted Simpson to inform her about her brother, but he refused to call his name.

"When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif," she wrote.

Jobs and Simpson had a long walk. Jobs said that he was in computer business and was working on something “insanely beautiful" at that moment. Jobs wasn't ashamed of working hard even if "the results were failures." After his resignation from Apple, he was disappointed, especially when he wasn't invited to a meeting of 500 Silicon Valley leaders with the then U.S. president.

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Earlier this month we reported that Sony Pictures had acquired rights to the recently-released Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. As the company is planning to adapt the story  for the big screen, Sony suggest that the best person for writing screenplay would be Aaron Sorkin, who had successfully transitioned the story of Facebook to film The Social Network. He also gained fame for his work on A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and most recently Moneyball with Brad Pitt.

Sony is moving forward with a Steve Jobs movie based on Isaacson's book. And one of the writers being courted by producers to pen his story, according to a person who was briefed on the project but not authorized to speak about it publicly, is Aaron Sorkin, Hollywood's chronicler-in-chief of the complicated visionary. Sony and a Sorkin representative declined to comment on the writer's potential involvement.

Noteworthy, Jobs tried to hired Sorkin to write a film for Pixar, bur he declined his proposal, giving the following explanation:

The truth is I don’t know how to tell those stories. I have a young kid who loves Pixar movies and she’ll turn cartwheels if I tell her I’m writing one and I don’t want to disappoint her by writing the only bad movie in the history of Pixar.

Reuters suggests that Steve Jobs’ authorized biography by Walter Isaacson may become the best-selling book of 2011 on Amazon. But it is not surprisingly. Apple’s fans and others show extraordinary interest in the late Apple CEO’s life, especially after his death early this month.

The book is the best-selling book on Amazon.com and is also listed as the top-selling electronic book on the company's Kindle eBook store.

"The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year," Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Turner said in a statement.

But now the book is ranked #13 on Amazon’s list of best sellers. Noteworthy, some analysts predict that the digital version of Steve Jobs’ biography outsell the print version. It is know that digital sales of best sellers are typically coming at 50-70% of total sales. Though, Amazon prefers do not comment the difference between digital and physical version of the book.

Rumors of an Apple-branded television have been circulating for years, and now have revived after release of Steve Jobs’ authorized biography, where he claims that he finally “cracked” problem. Some analysts expect that Apple may release a new television set as soon as next year. Among the newly presented evidence is a claim that prototypes of the Apple television set are now "in the works".

- Based on Jan-11 meetings in Asia (not with component suppliers), we believe Apple is investing in manufacturing facilities and securing supply for LCD displays. These displays could range from 3.5" mobile displays to 50" television displays.

- More recently, in Sept-11 we met with a contact close to an Asian component supplier who indicated that prototypes of an Apple television are in the works.

Other evidence is several patents and patent applications filed by Apple that addressing the company's work into television-related technologies.  Our expectations from Apple TV include integration with iCloud that would provide access to iTunes Store video content.  Apple is believed could sell 1.4 million television sets at an average selling price of $1800 in 2012, ramping up to 4.3 million units by 2014 as costs drop to an average selling price of $1400.

Ten years ago, on October 23rd, Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod. This music player seems to be partly responsible for Apple’s comeback and success. It also paved Apple the way to the consumer electronics market. Macworld provides a nice story detailing how the iPod came to be:

Behind every successful product lies a problem in search of a solution. The inspirational problem, in the iPod’s case, involved the pitiful state of the young MP3 player market in the late 1990s.

Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid 1990s, but Apple found that every one on the market offered a lackluster user experience. Steve Jobs had a strong term for gadgets like that: “crap”. Everyone at Apple agreed.

Initial reaction to the iPod wasn’t favorable. Customers complained against lack of wireless and space. They called it “lame” and thought that the iPod would never start taking off. But time tells that all those critics were wrong. Now iPod line of  portable music players is one of the most popular worldwide. Ten years after the launch, the iPod has sold over 304 million units.

The Steve Jobs biography as it was promised have been released today and is available now in all regions. You may download the book on Apple's iBooks or purchase via Amazon.com. The book is an authorized biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. Steve Jobs, himself, reached out to Isaacson to suggest the author write a biography on Jobs. Due to the unprecedented level of candor Jobs extended to Isaacson, the book has already made plenty of waves ahead of its public release, which was moved up to Oct. 24 after Jobs passed away on October 5th. Isaacson had asked Jobs prior to his passing why he had agreed to participate:

In order to mask my emotion, I asked the one question that was still puzzling me: Why had he been so eager, during close to 50 interviews and conversations over the course of two years, to open up so much for a book when he was usually so private? “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said. “I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

A couple of days ago, we already posted some quotation from the forthcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. The other interesting thing, we have recently known, related to Jony Ive, Apple design chief. The book claims that Steve Jobs grated Ive nearly complete freedom to do as he sees fit.

He [Steve Jobs] called Jonathan Ive, Apple's design chief, his "spiritual partner" at Apple. He told Isaacson that Ive had "more operation power" at Apple than anyone besides Jobs himself - that there's no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do. That, says Jobs, is "the way I set it up."

Ive, Apple's Senior Vice President for Industrial Design, has been at Apple for nearly twenty years, the last fifteen of those as design chief. Ive's team is said to operate out of a secretive high-tech lab on Apple's campus where he is given ultimate flexibility in his work.  Such freedom in works obviously helps to guard against a watering-down effect that could occur if his designs were subject to the approval of and revision by others in the company.

Expecting the release of the Steve Jobs’ authorized biography that is set for release next Monday, its author Walter Isaacson was interview by a correspondent of CBS show 60 Minutes  where he revealed that Steve Jobs had regretted an early decision to delay surgery for his pancreatic cancer back in 2004.

"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, 'I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way,'" Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by [60 Minutes correspondent Steve] Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

Isaacson noted that Jobs receive cancer treatment after the surgery, telling people that he had been cured. As far as Isaacson knows, an earlier surgery would give Steve Jobs much better change or at least more time.

In October 2008, long before the iPad made its debut, then Apple CEO Steve Jobs said this:

There are some customers which we chose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. But we can continue to deliver greater and greater value to those customers that we choose to serve. And there’s a lot of them. We’ve seen great success by focusing on certain segments of the market and not trying to be everything to everybody. So I think you can expect us to stick with that winning strategy and continue to try to add more and more value to those products in those customer bases we choose to serve.

But Apple finally launched a $500 computer - the iPad.  The least expensive model costs $499. But the iPad average selling price for the three calendar quarters of 2011 was $628 that is more than the average price of Windows PC. For the same period the iPhone ASP was $653.

These numbers prove that the average selling price for all three Apple’s most profitable categories – the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad – is higher than average selling price of Windows PC that sold at U.S. retail (for the first three quarters of 2011) for $491.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Samsung Chief Operating Officer Lee Jae-yong are said to have discussed their long-term component supply relationships during a two-hour meeting that took place earlier this week.

Lee Jae-yong, chief operating officer (COO) of Samsung Electronics said Wednesday he had discussed long-term parts cooperation arrangements with Apple Inc.'s chief Tim Cook.

The meeting took place Monday after Lee attended a memorial service for Steve Jobs, Apple's late co-founder, and as Samsung and Apple remain locked in fierce legal disputes to control the global smartphone and tablet computer markets.

Lee noted that the companies made agreement for 2012 and would like to prolong their cooperation for 2013-2014. Apple has been keen to make long-term supply agreements with component suppliers, sometimes prepaying billions of dollars in advance to secure massive supplies looking over several years and overcoming or better to say excelling its competitors.

This weekend a memorial service for Steve Jobs was held at Stanford University's Memorial Church. A number of famous personalities attended the service as well as close friends and family members.

Steve Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs, sister Mona Simpson and three of his children spoke at the memorial service held for the Apple co-founder on Sunday, according to two people who attended…

Both people who attended described the service as incredibly moving and a fitting tribute to Mr. Jobs, who was known as a tech visionary, demanding boss and a fanatic for design. One person mentioned that many speakers cracked jokes about Mr. Jobs, who died on Oct. 5 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Jobs' private funeral was held two days after his death and an event for Apple employees will be held this Wednesday and will include temporary closure of Apple’s retail stores.

Steve Jobs' death certificate has been released, according to Blumberg. It claims that the causes of death were respiratory arrest and a pancreatic tumor.

Steve Jobs died at home of respiratory arrest and a pancreatic tumor at about 3 p.m. on Oct. 5, according to his death certificate. His occupation was listed as “entrepreneur.”

The Santa Clara County Public Health Department in San Jose, California, released the document today.

Many had believed that Steve Jobs' death was a result of a rare form of pancreatic cancer for which he was initially treated back in 2004 he also underwent a liver transplant in April 2009. Early that year he  had to go on medical leave. The official cause was "hormone imbalance" and continued his battle with pancreatic cancer until October 5th. A private funeral for Jobs was held last Friday. And recent information we’ve received tells us that Apple will be holding a celebration of his life for employees on Wednesday, October 19th.

Samsung and Google announced that they would cancel a special event which is scheduled for Tuesday and at which the companies were going to introduce their new handset Nexus Prime. The particular feature of this smartphone is the brand new software, Google's latest "Ice Cream Sandwich" version of Android. Rumors immediately turned to the possibility that the companies postponed the launch in respect for Steve Jobs who passed away on October 5th.

Samsung and Google decide to postpone the new product announcement at CTIA Fall. We agree that it is just not the right time to announce a new product. New date and venue will be shortly announced.

AllThingsD has confirmed that speculations. The site claims that Samsung and Google did indeed cancel the event due to Jobs' death.

The decision to postpone things was made late last night at the top levels of both companies, sources said, with Jobs’ death being the reason. There are no delays with the product itself, sources insisted.

But Apple is not going to cancel its plans for the iPhone 4S, having started accepting pre-orders for the device.

Sony Pictures is reportedly working to acquire right for a film that will be based on Steve Jobs authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, according to Deadline.

I’ve just learned that Sony Pictures is making a hefty deal to acquire feature rights to Steve Jobs, the upcoming authorized biography by former CNN chairman and Time Magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson.

History of Apple and Steve Jobs were already the topic of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. The movie tells us about founding of Apple and covers events up to the return of Steve Jobs at Apple in the late 90s. And now Sony Pictures is said want to shoot a movie about Steve Jobs. It is unclear whether the movie will indeed shoot and when such a film might be targeted for release.

The LA Times provides some new details about "Apple University", an internal project at Apple, designed to provide successful future for the company without Steve Jobs. First information about the project appeared in May, when Steve Jobs hired dean of Yale School of Management Joel Podolny, who  was personally influenced by Steve Jobs and Apple and even described writing his first computer program on an Apple II. Podolny runs an internal group of business professors and Harvard veterans to prepare employees for life at Apple after Jobs.

"Steve was looking to his legacy. The idea was to take what is unique about Apple and create a forum that can impart that DNA to future generations of Apple employees," said a former Apple executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company. "No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful."

Jobs reportedly personally oversaw the creation of courses and believed that he was responsible for Apple’s future success. He even identified specific tenets for the company such as accountability, attention to detail, perfectionism, simplicity, and secrecy. Pixar, the Job’s another successful company, is believed to use the same corporate University model.