Blog | all about Steve Jobs.com

Celebrating Steve

5 Oct 2021 | in Updates

Very touching homage from Apple honoring Steve Jobs’ memory on the 10-year anniversary of his passing today.

I have very little to add – I’m still sad he is no longer with us.

Here’s the video reposted on YouTube for posterity, as well as the letter from Laurene & the kids:

Statement from the Jobs family
For a decade now, mourning and healing have gone together.
Our gratitude has become as great as our loss.
Each of us has found his or her own path to consolation,but we have come together in a beautiful place of love
for Steve, and for what he taught us.
For all of Steve’s gifts, it was his power as a teacher that has endured.
He taught us to be open to the beauty of the world, to be curious around new ideas, to see around the next corner, and most of all to stay humble in our own beginner’s mind.
There are many things we still see through his eyes, but he also taught to look for ourselves. He gave us equipment for living,and it has served us well.
One of our greatest sources of consolation has been our association of Steve with beauty. The sight of something beautiful — a wooded hillside, a well‑made object — recalls his spirit to us. Even in his years of suffering, he never lost his faith in the beauty of existence.
Memory is inadequate for what is in our hearts: we miss him profoundly.
We were blessed to have him as husband and father.

23 Mar 2021 | in Updates

Quick update — I finally got around to publishing two long way-overdue pages of the website: the Bibliography, with an up-to-date & almost-exhaustive list of books and movies about Steve Jobs; and the About Us page, which tells the story of the website (which turned 15 last month!). Do let me know your feedback on both.

Introducing video transcripts

20 Mar 2021 | in Updates, Updates/Announcements

I’m proud to share an exciting update that I’ve been working on for a while. Have you ever found yourself wondering: I swear I heard Steve Jobs say this in a keynote, or an interview, or was it a speech? One of those in the early 2000s, but… which one was it?

Well, you need not worry about this anymore — as some of the videos in our collection now feature transcripts! You’ll identify them thanks to the small CC ( ) icon next to their name in the video galleries, as per below. You’ll notice we also include timestamps at each speaker change or narrative breaks, so you can easily jump to the right point in the video.

The vision is to eventually have ALL of Steve Jobs’s recorded words transcribed, so they can all be searched and found in a few seconds. I am planning to adding search to the “Watch” section of the website to that effect (and of course, Google is still your friend in the meantime).

It will take a while to get to that end state though, and I’m starting with a small collection of some of my favourites videos, as well as the most recent additions:

1983 Macintosh introduction at the Boston Computer Society
1988 NeXT Cube introduction
1990 NeXTstation introduction
1990 Library of Congress video
1991 internal NeXT strategy
1991 “Ten Years of the PC” interview
1992 NeXTSTEP 3.0 demo
1995 Triumph of the Nerds interview (aka “The Lost Interview”)
1997 WWDC closing chat
1998 iMac introduction
Of course, the 2007 Macworld (iPhone introduction)
2007 D5 Interview by Walt Mossberg
And last but not least, the Joint interview with Bill Gates from that same conference.

I’ve added these new transcripts I made to the couple ones that have already been done — right now this only includes the Stanford commencement speech, the Smithsonian 1995 interview and another 1990 interview.

I hope you’re as excited as I am! Please share your feedback in the comments or on Twitter.

PS: while working on this, I discovered a great website called NotesKey, which references all speakers, demos, videos, memorable moments or jokes, for almost all Apple events (I noticed a couple Apple Expo keynotes are missing) from 1997 to 2018. It also lets you search for a particular speaker or demo across all of them. This is something I had thought of building originally, but there is no need as the site does it perfectly (here’s Macworld 2007 as an example) — make sure to check it out!

Steve Jobs gems keep surfacing on YouTube

19 Mar 2021 | in Updates

Finding myself with a bit more free time on my hands than usual, and this being the year where we’ll be mourning the 10-year anniversary of Steve’s passing, I decided to update the website with content that I had been coming across recently.

After Steve passed in 2011, I fully expected things about him to come out (say, books that would not have been dared to be written while he was alive), but I also expected this to taper down after a few years. I certainly didn’t expect super well preserved, full-length interviews from 30 years ago to emerge. Well, boy was I wrong. I’ve been amazed at the content that YouTube (All Bow to the Almighty Algorithm!) surfaced to me this past week. Take a look!

1981 Interview

Last month, this amazing interview from 1981 emerged. It’s actually raw footage that was probably done for a TV segment — it’s complete, and includes small talk with the interviewer (including Steve saying “TV always shoots for the lower common denominator”, a view he held throughout his life and repeated on a few occasions), as well as SJ making faces (shot from his back unfortunately) to distract the interviewer as he repeats some of the questions to facilitate the editing. Overall the theme of the interview is where Personal Computing came from, where it is going, and how it’s like to run a fast-growing Apple.

SJ talking about higher education, 1987

Excerpts from an interview by the BBC about the higher education’s need — and Steve Jobs’ vision — for personal computers and workstations. This was done at a critical time in the early days of NeXT, one year before the NeXT Cube came out. Steve talks about the promise of rapid development of custom apps, thanks to object-oriented programming, that would be one of the founding blocks of NeXTSTEP.

1988 TV feature about NeXT

A short and fun to watch TV segment where Steve Jobs (self-introducing with the classic line “I’m Steve Jobs, and I make computers”) talks about his lifelong goal of having technology be at the crossroads with the humanities, and exemplifies how the recently introduced NeXT computer can help do that, with its Digital Librarian and advanced music software. The demo ends with a violinist playing Bach in duet with the NeXT Cube, the same demo that ended the computer’s introduction at the SF Davies Symphony Hall.

1991 Interview at NeXT

This interview was uploaded just one month ago. It’s a rare interview of Steve Jobs at NeXT’s office where he talks about both the history of the PC, the market landscape in the early 1990s and where he sees it going in the future. Based on what I could gather in the interview, I suspect it was done by Brent Schlender for his coverage of the Ten Years of the [IBM] PC for Fortune Magazine (though he hasn’t confirmed nor denied it). He ended up doing a joint interview with Bill Gates for this piece, which you can read here.

To wrap up, here are three gems from Steve Jobs’ Web Objects period i.e. the late stage of NeXT in 1995-96, when it was purely a B2B software company and finally found product-market fit with the use of its software to build dynamic web pages, at a time when the web was mostly static HTML.

The first two videos are from The Sharper Image’s historical channel. The Sharper Image was a sort of pre-Internet Amazon, a go-go consumerism catalog with a crazy range of things you could buy that you never knew you wanted. They embraced the Web early when it came out and arguably built one of the first e-commerce sites, using NeXT’s Web Objects, which Steve Jobs was very grateful for.

The Sharper Image SF store demo

In this video, Steve Jobs attends the inauguration of The Sharper Image’s Sutter Street store in 1996, and demoes the power of Web Objects on the online catalog (demo starts at the 17:40 mark).

1996 Internet World keynote

Steve Jobs gives a keynote at the Internet World expo, where he explains the value of Web Objects for building webpages on the fly (and uses Dodge, Reebok, and The Sharper Image websites for the demo). Unfortunately, the screen of SJ’s PC wasn’t captured in the video.

1996 WEBMANI A keynote

A classic SJ keynote given at the WEBMANIA expo, where he talked about NeXT’s Web Objects and gives a few demos. It’s notable for at least two reasons: seeing SJ demoing on a PC, and wearing a denim jacket on stage.

To wrap up, I also uploaded short excerpts from a few recordings I had laying around my hard drive:

1983 – A montage of the few excerpts I have of the Fall 1983 sales conference in Hawaii where Steve Jobs first showed off the “1984” Macintosh ad, and held a fake “Software dating game” featuring Mitch Kapor of Lotus and a young fellow named Bill Gates.
1985 – Again, a montage from a TV feature on Apple’s struggles in the 1985 downturn, including rare footage from Apple’s shareholders meeting that year (if you have more footage of that keynote, where Apple Talk and the Macintosh Office were introduced, do reach out!)
Feb 1987 – Excerpt from a BBC documentary showing Steve Jobs being interviewed at Pixar’s first anniversary party
Sep 1998 – Amateur footage of the Apple Expo 1998 keynote in Paris (the official recording seems lost!). The keynoted ended with a failed attempt at an impressive demo of iMacs’ networking capabilities — 49 iMacs were mounted on a huge rack to show it off, but it resulted in a blunder on which SJ ended the keynote abruptly (not sure if it was the plan or he was too pissed off to continue!)

Enjoy!

Steve Jobs Stories on Clubhouse

14 Mar 2021 | in Steve Jobs personality, Steve Jobs trivia

Most of you have probably seen this by now, but for the record — journalist Steven Levy, investor Esther Dyson, and First Round partner Chris Fralic (a board member of the Computer History Museum) hosted a Clubhouse on February 23, the day before what would have been Steve Jobs’ 66th birthday, inviting people to share stories about him.

People who follow this know I’m a sucker for Steve anecdotes — in fact, we have a whole section of the website filled with them. So this is perfect clickbait for me of course.

Fortunately, the session was recorded and shared on the Computer History Museum’s YouTube page, you can watch it below. For those short on time, here is a brief walkthrough to help you navigate the video:

At 0:06:07, Esther Dyson recalls when she met Steve Jobs at an event hosted by Regis McKenna.
At 0:07:30, Regis McKenna talks about how he got to work with Steve Jobs as he was hired by him and Mike Markkula (who knew him from Intel) to handle Apple’s marketing.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley jumped in at 16:00, and retold for the umpteenth time the story of how Steve Jobs seduced him to join Apple with the sugared water line. (I wish he had told a new one, considering how much time he spent with Steve in 1983-84).
At 0:24:00, Steven Levy recounted his first story on Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team.
At 0:27:40, Andy Cunningham, who used to run Apple marketing in the 80s, talked about how she had to play Billie Jean to get Steve Jobs to smile during a photoshoot. She compared Steve Jobs to “a big baby”.
At 0:30:45, Andy Hertzfeld told the story of his first meal with Steve Jobs, where Steve said that after fasting, eating a pea could make your stomach explode, then refused to pay the bill despite having recently become a centimillionaire.
It was Bill Atkinson’s turn at 0:33:00, explaining how Steve wooed him to join Apple in 1978.
At 0:36:35, Dan’l Lewin, who ran education sales for Macintosh, then became a founding member of NeXT (and is now president of the Computer History Museum), told the story of the lunch in London where NeXT and Canon celebrated their partnership, and the chair of Canon’s chairman collapsed (there was nothing particularly about Steve Jobs in his story unfortunately).
At 0:41:40, photographer Doug Menuez, who documented the early days of NeXT, explained how one time he was challenged by Steve Jobs (and screamed at) on a photo shoot.
At 0:48:00, Mike Slade, who left Microsoft to join NeXT in the 90s, told the story of how Steve wooed him to move to the Bay Area to work at next with a line he stole from the Il Fornaio restaurant menu.
At 0:52:30, Steven Levy told another story about when he wanted to make a cover story about the iPod, and Steve berated him for having put a case on his iPod.
At 0:54:45, Mike Slade told a moving story of when Steve Jobs told him about his cancer.
At 0:59:07, Esther told the story when Steve Jobs told her he’d make up for a missed public appearance by speaking twice the next time.
At 1:01:20, analyst Tim Bajarin recalled when Steve Jobs told him he would save Apple with industrial design in early 1997.
At 1:05:15, Steven Rosenblatt, formerly of iAd, talked about his first meeting with Steve Jobs and how he later pushed him to sign ever-bigger ad deals in the early days of the product.
At 1:14:00, Chris Fralic told of the story when Steve Jobs refused to sign his Apple II (even though Woz had signed it already).
At 1:15:30, angel investor Bill Raduchel, formerly of Sun, told the story of when he met Steve Jobs at NeXT to negotiate a potential acquisition (probably in the 1994-96 timeframe).
At 1:20:00, Buzz Wood, who worked in Apple’s education sales, told of when he attended a Steve Jobs Q&A in 2002, where Steve told one of the audience members who suggested to run an ad for education that Apple could do it with the money they’d save by firing him.
At 1:23:00, music industry mogul Ted Cohen told a story of a Steve Jobs meeting with a McKinsey consultant and the ensuing email followup.
At 1:25:30, Sonal Chokshi, formerly of Xerox PARC, told of an email she sent out of the blue to Steve Jobs and his brilliant response.
From 1:30:50, Steven Levy shared the last story, that of his last meeting with Steve.

It was overall quite an enjoyable discussion, and definitely worth your time.

More about Lisa

12 Sep 2018 | in Updates

Two interviews of Lisa came out that are worthy of your time:

the Guardian interview, which also includes some excerpts at the end. This sentence caught my eye: She understood, at some level, that his heart was elsewhere, that it was the people he worked with – or the work itself – that got the very best of him.
the below video interview with Today (NBC News). First time I see a video of Lisa. While her resemblance with Steve is striking, her style of communication is not as polished yet. The Guardian interviewer put this well: Brennan-Jobs talks very quickly and often backtracks to undercut what she has said – not, I think, because she is unsure of herself, but because she is operating in a constant mode of simultaneous translation: there is the meaning of what she says in the moment she says it, and there is the use to which it will be put, at some unspecified date in the future, in service to the myth of Steve Jobs.

Early views of Lisa’s book

29 Aug 2018 | in Updates

Will write in more detail about Lisa’s book when I get a chance – or maybe once I’ve read it – but in the meantime, for those that haven’t been following, check out these three stories…