News tagged ‘Steve Jobs’

A UK user wrote an email to Steve Jobs asking about Picasa Albums on the Apple iPad. Steve Jobs answered. However instead of just telling him that Apple (obviously) wouldn't support Google's Picasa library format, Jobs writes that iPhoto has a "much better Faces and Places features" than Picasa.

Here is the header infomation below and yes Steve Jobs is still using the old 3.1.2 firmware.

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Two days ago Steve Jobs joined the meeting with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at the Lucile Packard Hospital for Children in Palo Alto, California. The event was aimed to  help advance organ donation legislation.

In 2009 Jobs received a liver transplant in Tennessee. He said he was fortunate he could get a new organ, because without it he could die.

So now Jobs, obviously, wants to help save more people's lives. If the legislation will be passed, Californians will be able to affirm their preferred organ donor status much easier. Apple's CEO says the current system is an obscure process.

For the last few months we have been witnessing the competition between Google and Apple that becomes more and more significant. We tried to analyze some facts and made a conclusion that the confrontation is more personal than corporate.

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Forbes ranked Steve Jobs the 136th Richest Man in the World. He has a net worth of $5.5 billion and shares his ranking with 5 other rich men.

Carlos Slim Helu tops the list with a net worth of $53.5 billion. More information here.

During the iPad presentation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs noted that it would offer a better experience than a smartphone and a notebook computer in the following areas:

• Browsing
• Email
• Photos
• Videos
• Music
• Games
• eBooks

Apple recently aired iPad ad during the Oscars, which perfectly reflects this. Tuaw analyzed the video based on the on-air time dedicated to a particular function. It showed that a particular focus was on media consumption appeal and differentiation.

About 80% of all 720 frames (30 seconds * 24 fps) of the iPad's ad showed an app being used. And within this time, the photo app was shown the most (26%), the mail app came in second (22%). iBook app used 20% of time to position the iPad as a perfect eBook reader.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs attended the Oscars. No surprise, Jobs previously was CEO of Pixar Animation Studios and is now a member of the Walt Disney Company's Board of Directors.

Here are several pictures taken with Steve on the red carpet:

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This week Steve Jobs answered an email question from Sweden. The question was from Jezper Söderlund:

I'll keep it short.

I'm Jezper from Sweden, a long time Apple fan, currently about to replace the very last computer at home with a brand spanking new iMac i7. I'm also awaiting the release of the iPad. However, I have one question:

Will the wifi-only version somehow support tethering thru my iPhone?

Two devices, based on the same OS, with already built-in technology to share one data plan suggests a secondary contract could possibly be redundant.

From the look of your keynote, where the iPad sits well between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone, I was hoping the three of them could interact as seamless as possible.

All the best,
Jezper Söderlund

This is a very interesting question, since iPad's network settings with tethering were found recently. Here is Jobs' answer:

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On the iPad's presentation Steve Jobs noted that the iBookstore will be available only in the USA at launch. But few days ago new Apple job listing confirmed that company is planning to extend its book-selling business to other countries. Their new vacancy for manager of "Asia Pacific & Canada" iBooks divisions shows that in the nearest future their efforts will be concentrated primarily on Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

The role includes: working with management, regionally and in Cupertino to determine strategies and priorities for iBooks in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries; identifying content providers to target, establish and develop relationships; working with legal and production teams to finalize relationships and secure content; and coordinate launches with partners, production, and marketing. This role will also be responsible for marketing the books offering on the iBooks store by coordinating with Apple's production teams, the marketing team, and the production and marketing teams of partners.

The successful employee will work in Sydney, Australia or Markham, Ontario.

It is possible that Apple looks for the possibilities to expand in other countries, though there are no open positions for that at the moment.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently traveled to meet with executives at The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Today The Wall Street Journal reports that Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of parent company News Corp., confirmed that the newspaper will be present on the iPad. He also mentioned that Apple gave access to one of the tablet devices.

Mr. Murdoch said the Journal planned to be on Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet computer. "In fact, we've been allowed to work on one, and it's under padlock and key. The key is turned by Apple every night," he said in response to a question. "But we will be on that with The Wall Street Journal." Mr. Murdoch said he believed in a year or so there will be a half dozen or more devices on which consumers will be able to receive newspapers and other media.

When HTC found out about Apple's actions, the company told Gizmodo website they will defend their technologies:

"We only learned of Apple's actions based on your stories and Apple's press release. We have not been served any papers yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years."

Steve Jobs expressed his opinion in the official press release:

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

It is interesting, that 14 years ago it was Steve Jobs who said: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.".

Wow! It looks like Steve Jobs totally changed his mind?

As you remember, Steve Jobs clearly said at the iPad's presentation that the device will have a 1 GHz A4 Chip. But after that event there was no information given about this secret two-letter name "A4". And this isn't usual, as almost every company reports the specification of every announced device before it'll come to market.

Later it was rumored that the chip is based on Cortex A9 with dual cores. But finally Arstechnica author Jon Stokes revealed that A4 is a 1 GHz custom system-on-chip with a single Cortex A8 Core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. Though the information is not announced publicly, the author is sure it is true.

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Since only one month remains to iPad's launch, such hardware manufacturers as SDI Technologies, Gelaskins Inc., Sanho Corp. and Griffin Technology gear up their production of chargers, sticker covers and other accessories for a new device. And it is not surprising - according to Poper Jaffray & Co, overall sales of iPod and iPhone accessories in 2009 were about $3.7 billion.

But while these companies want to release their products as soon as possible, some other accessory manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see approach. Jonathan von Rentzell, a representative for Blue Microphones commented on this:

"If you're making it for a product, you want to make sure there's a market."

Steve Jobs already showed 2 key accessories for the iPad - a case and a keyboard dock with charging function. Both of them are created by Apple and will be sold separately with iPad.

What firmware version do you expect Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, to use on his iPhone? Probably something like 3.2 beta or 4.0 beta with many new unannounced features.

Mike from Macsoda got a response from Steve Jobs to his email wondering about the future of Final Cut Pro (40 Final Cut Pro developers were recently let go). Typically brief, Steve Jobs said:

No worries. FCP is alive and well.
Sent from my iPhone

Now let's look at the header information from the email as well:

The email looks legit as it originates from an internal Apple 17.x.x.x IP address. Here is an interesting part: Steve Jobs iPhone is listed as iPhone Mail (7D11) which means he's using firmware 3.1.2. That's not even the current version of the iPhone OS (3.1.3 - 7E18), let alone the 4.0 Beta we're were hoping to see.

Shareholders meeting started at 1 p.m. EST Thursday. For almost 2,5 hours they discussed different topics and revealed some interesting information.

First of all, Apple is going to open 25 retail stores in China. As you know, the first Chinese store was built in 2008, and since then only plans about revealing another store were announced.

Secondly Steve Jobs told Apple will build its reserves to make big investments in the future. He also mentioned it is a better way of dealing with profit than paying dividends or doing stock buybacks. At this moment Apple has ~40 billion dollars in their chest.

Few days ago we wrote about Steve Jobs' biography that will be written by Walter Isaacson. While most of the people are waiting for the book to be published, one of the Flickr members decided to think about how would its cover look like.

Here is a series of the cover mock-ups for the rumored forthcoming Job biography by Flickr member flypig:

The last one is commented by its author like this:

No matter what design style the English version will be, after importing to China, the cover will look this way.