The Steve Jobs I Knew

My favorite part:

"He looked at me like I was crazy, said there’d be many, many stores, and that the company had spent a year tweaking the layout of the stores, using a mockup at a secret location. I teased him by asking if he, personally, despite his hard duties as CEO, had approved tiny details like the translucency of the glass and the color of the wood.

He said he had, of course."

At first, when I read the headline...I rolled my eyes...and thought either Kara or Walt are just re-hashing what everybody else is saying.

But then I read it, and it was surprisingly amusing.

This paragraph had me dying:

After his liver transplant, while he was recuperating at home in Palo Alto, California, Steve invited me over to catch up on industry events that had transpired during his illness. It turned into a three-hour visit, punctuated by a walk to a nearby park that he insisted we take, despite my nervousness about his frail condition.

He explained that he walked each day, and that each day he set a farther goal for himself, and that, today, the neighborhood park was his goal. As we were walking and talking, he suddenly stopped, not looking well. I begged him to return to the house, noting that I didn’t know CPR and could visualize the headline: “Helpless Reporter Lets Steve Jobs Die on the Sidewalk.”

I can just imagine how terrified Walt must have been.

Apple's products are actually third-order innovations that use a variety of fundamental second-order innovations in the now vast realm of electronic components to assemble and to program devices whose greatest appeal has been due to their (choose your own adjective, or embrace all of them) sleek, unorthodox, elegant, streamlined, clean, functional interface design.

walk into apple store. look interested in the ipad browse for a few until an apple employee comes over to ask if you need help start a general conversation about how you were looking to buy an ipad slowly work your way into asking about its features let employee ramble on their scripted feature speech start asking if it can do stuff it cant. "can it read flash drives?" "can it read memory cards?" "can it download or upload files?" "does it have a camera?" "does it support 1080p?" "does it have HDMI support?" "does it support flash for web browsing?"

ultimately they will answer no to all of these unless they are clueless noobs, anyways once they say no to these features, say something like "well what the hell can you do with it? seems like a overpriced piece of shit to me, might as well buy a cheap laptop with more features" note look on employees face. walk out.

Love him or hate him, you know his name and he didnt give a shit about you.

>but you have to admit he was a brilliant business man and changed the entire music industry forever.

Yeah, he made it DRM infested and even easier for labels and publishers to fuck over their artists and keep raking in profits from stupid people.

Go kill yourself.

They're burying him in the iCoffin. It costs twice as much as a normal coffin with half the functionality, plus you need to dig it up and replace it every year to keep up with technology trends.

Does that make Steve Wozniak somewhat on par with Nikola Tesla?

Right, has Apple really done anything GOOD for technology? Vehemently opposing openness, ridiculously overpricing cheap, shitty products, all-in-one computers (a huge step BACKWARDS) and conning the world out of billions upon billions of dollars.

What have they really contributed? The iPhone was really just the first in an inevitable progression, it wasn't some big innovation that drew smartphones out of their dark ages. If you look at the phone models it was already coming.

As for tablets, all they did differently was use a mobile OS instead of a gimped desktop OS, which was also inevitable considering the fact that competent mobile OSs actually exist now.

What is it that Apple has done? Is making incredibly overpriced but stylized products their great achievement?

I don't understand your post. Why are you so angry about Steve Jobs' death? Misdirected grief perhaps? Take care of yourself. The next phase is depression.

The Gates anecdote is really neat (edited for brevity):

For our fifth D conference, both Steve and Bill Gates agreed to a joint appearance. But it almost got derailed.

Earlier in the day, before Gates arrived, I did a solo onstage interview with Jobs, and asked him what it was like to be a major Windows developer, since Apple’s iTunes program was by then installed on hundreds of millions of Windows PCs.

He quipped: “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to someone in Hell.” When Gates later arrived and heard about the comment, he was, naturally, enraged.

In a pre-interview meeting, Gates said to Jobs: “So I guess I’m the representative from Hell.” Jobs merely handed Gates a cold bottle of water he was carrying. The tension was broken, and the interview was a triumph.