Here’s what I put aside for you:

• July 9: A weird video surfaces from Taiwan. A tea brand shamelessly used an actor to play Steve Jobs and sell bottled tea in a TV commercial. See for yourself:
  
  
  (via Cult of Mac)

• July 8: French magazine Le Point reveals that Steve almost purchased a castle in the South-East of France. Pictured below, the property is valued at around €25m ($36m). Apparently Steve’s wife, Laurene, toured the property herself.
  The article also relates that back in 1985, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a French journalist close to President Francois Mitterrand, apparently asked of the head of state a special present to Steve Jobs for his 30th birthday. I’ve read many stories about that famed birthday, where tons of celebrities attended, including Ella Fitzgerald who was the party singer. Anyway, JJSS (as he is often called) reportedly suggested that the French nationality was offered to the Apple co-founder as a special gift. The French President nonchalantly refused. I think Steve would have appreciated the gift, as he has often testified of his love of France (I have made a compilation of the many times he uses France in Apple demos).

• July 11: a new Tshirt made it to the Apple Gift shop in Cupertino… making fun of the company’s cult of secrecy. I’m buying it next time I go there! (via Macrumors).
  
• July 21: John Gruber of Daring Fireball spotted a nice anecdote about Steve and his legendary curtesy. I am quoting the same thing he did:
  

  The story goes that ESPN president George Bodenheimer attended the first Disney board meeting in Orlando, Florida, just after the company had bought Pixar, the innovative animation factory, and spotted Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a hallway. It seemed like a good time to introduce himself. “I am George Bodenheimer,” he said to Jobs. “I run ESPN.” Jobs just looked at him and said nothing other than “Your phone is the dumbest fucking idea I have ever heard,” then turned and walked away.

• July 21: Philip Elmer-Dewitt dug out a nice chart that compiles all the public data about Apple’s reiumbursements of the expenses of Steve’s famed private jet airplane. I think it is worth mentioning that Steve can use the jet for his personal use, but then of course the company doesn’t reiumburse him of the cost of operating it. The chart is below:

• July 23: after all the nonsense we’ve come to read about Steve’s succession lately (which did grant us a new Steve Jobs quote: “it’s hogwash”, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal) — John Gruber wrote a very good article, the kind that only he knows how to write, on the topic: On Succeeding Steve Jobs. His conclusion: “the obvious structure for a post-Jobs Apple is simply Apple as we know it, without Steve Jobs.” I believe he is 100% right and that’s what we will see, perhaps as early as next year. BUT, and it’s a big BUT, I am not sure Tim Cook can keep the fire alive as Steve did for the next decade. And as I’ve stated before, I think he will have trouble running the company unchallenged the way only the genius-founder Steve Jobs can. His authority to run the super-disciplined fruit company will probably be challenged a couple of years after Steve is gone… Time will tell.

• Steve Jobs to be subject of an awful- and cheap-looking comic
  Cult of Mac published on June 15 comics from an upcoming comic book inspiredly entitled Steve Jobs: Co-Founder of Apple… It’s so ugly I am not reposting anything on this blog. Probably zero creativity in the narrative either.
• The Return of the Doll
  After the original Steve Jobs doll, another doll manufacturer was inspired to build this a 1/6th scale, 12-inch collectible Steve Jobs figurine. Obviously it’s gonna be taken down in the upcoming weeks, if not days. I’m not buying it. 

  
  

• Candid new email from Steve Jobs
  Australian newspaper Herald Sun published a story (again we heard it from Cult of Mac) yesterday about a girl from Melbourne, Hollie, whose difficult life — due to vision problems — was changed thanks to iPad and how easy it makes zooming in on text materials. Steve acknowledgedly replied back the following;

  Thanks for sharing your experience with me. Do you mind if I read your email to a group of our top 100 leaders at Apple?
  Thanks, Steve

  And even asked for a picture of the girl, reproduced below:

  

  This makes some sense, now that Steve’s habit of taking what he considers to be “Apple’s top 100 people” to a yearly offsite retreat was unveiled in Fortune’s Inside Apple piece. It’s also an habit of his to read his favorite emails to an audience, he’s done so repeatedly in past keynotes.

   

• iGod
  Last but not least, I stumbled upon a comic last week (can’t find the source, sorry) that echoes to one of my favorite themes, the Apple/religion-Steve/God metaphor. See for yourself:

  

As you may or may not know, I often receive emails at my webmaster email address that are destined to Steve Jobs. The reason is quite simple: people who have little knowledge of Apple’s CEO think all about Steve Jobs.com is his official website. They just click on the ‘Contact’ link thinking their message will go straight to Steve’s famed iPhone email inbox, even though it would take them a 15-second visit to Google to figure out his real and hyper-famous email address.

Anyway, on May 26, I got the following email:

To which was attached the very interesting PDF below:

The PDF can be downloaded here for the most curious/visually challenged of you. To summarize: this is an email claiming that Steve Jobs owes DHL $107.06 of duty taxes for the import of a sweater worth $1630, from a German company called Von Rosen AG & Co.

Here’s how I reacted to this in chronological order:

• I noticed that, despite orthographic inconsistencies, the mail address really was that of Steve Jobs’ home. But this one is not hard to find either.
• I then visited Von Rosen’s website and figured that, yeah, their turtlenecks and sweaters kinda looked like Steve’s, but they clearly weren’t. First, their logo, though small, is easily recognizable from a distance and I’ve never seen any picture of Steve with a turtleneck sporting it. Second, I know for a fact his turtlenecks are by Issey Miyake.
• As a last check, I quickly Googled some of the DHL email addresses, mail addresses and phone numbers on the bill to see if they were fake or not. This was quite puzzling:  the @dhlar.com did not redirect to their website; its Whois record was anonymous; their Chicago address was real, as their Florida one. But the phone numbers seemed fake, as I read on this scam alert website
• I went to DHL.com to double check and tried to enter the shipment numbers, which din’t fit any standard format and kept returning errors.
• I concluded it was a scam and wrote back the following:

But it didn’t end there. As all of you (I assume), on Monday night, I watched eagerly Steve’s WWDC 2011 keynote. And my jaw dropped when I noticed the following:

For those of you not following, this is Von Rosen’s trademark logo!!! See below:

That’s right, it’s that German fashion designer on the ‘fake’ DHL bill I had gotten the week before! And sure enough, the guy posts on his blog that finally Steve publicly admits to wearing his turtlenecks (well posted anyway, because as I can see the post’s been removed – I guess the iHand has intervened in this matter, sorry Von Rosen but I don’t think Steve will be wearing your shirt for some time to come).

Of course, I went back to Google and re-did the check I made about the scam alert, in a more thorough way. The scam alert website had a post saying the number was in fact real. But as of this writing I can’t find it… I guess it’s been removed too because identified as made by the scammers themselves. Still, I’m puzzled:

• if the bill really was aimed at Steve (which I now seriously doubt), 1. why did it end in my inbox? (some guy from DHL would have looked it up online?) – 2. why is the price $1630 not the $420 listed on the website?
• why was Steve wearing a turtleneck vs. the simple sweater even Von Rosen told TechCrunch he was wearing?
• most important of all, if it really is a scam, how come the scammers knew Steve was using that German brand? I insist, it never happened before. Do they have an inside man at DHL who informed them of the real shipment of a sweater to SJ from Berlin?
• if it is a scam, again, why would such elaborate scammers be stupid enough either to think my e-mail address was Steve Jobs’, or that (if I was their target) I would be stupid enough to give them my credit card number just because there was Steve’s name on the bill?

The story itself is not that interesting but since even big-time tech blogs post about Steve’s iWear now, I thought I’d jump on that wagon. What do you guys think of all this? The only thing I can be sure of is, it mustn’t be easy being Steve Jobs every day.

• The New Yorker did a story on the history of the computer mouse, back to Xerox PARC and the famous Steve Jobs visit that supposedly inspired Lisa then Macintosh. One of the mouse’s inventors, Malcom Galdwell, recalls what we already know, that Apple didn’t “steal” the mouse from Xerox. Unfortunately the story can only be accessed by subscribers — I didn’t subscribe just to read it. The abstract is here (not very well done). It contains interesting old sketches and pictures of prototypes, as well as quotations from the piece, such as this one:
  

  “I had a series of ideas that I wanted to bounce off [Jobs], and I barely got two words out of my mouth when he he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got to do a mouse.’ I was, like,‘What’s a mouse?’ I didn’t have a clue,” Hovey told Gladwell.

  (via Cult of Mac)

 

• We’ve talked about it earlier: the building of the extension of Pixar’s Emeryville campus, Pixar Phase II, is now over. Check it out on the excellent Pixar blog.

 

• A curious piece of trivia, some study was made to prove that Apple had actually the same effect on fanboys that a religion (or, more appropriately, a cult) on its followers:
  

  As discussed in the new BBC documentary “Secrets of the Superbrands”, when you put an Apple fanatic under an MRI and start mentioning iPhone 5s and iPad 3s, neuroscientists found that Apple tends to stimulate the same parts of the brain as religious imagery does in people of faith.

  No news to me.

 

• And I thought I would never be able to find new keynotes… but no, two oldies came up this past month to add up to my impressive collection. I hope you guys take time to check them out, because they’re both pretty interesting.
  First, an interesting one (and in high quality, too) from 1996, where Steve Jobs still spoke as CEO of NeXT Inc. — but already famed CEO of Pixar — at a Microsoft Developers Conference, about NeXT’s server technologies, WebObjects. In the video he is a late speaker, which is a testament to how unimportant he seemed to be. He is also very casual and humble, as depicted in a number of articles from that time (he was just coming out of his wilderness years). Watch the keynote here (via Daring Fireball).



• The second one I just found, and on YouTube, too! it’s a casual chat Steve Jobs had with then-struggling Mac developers at the end of the 1997 WWDC! Definitely worth a look if you’re interested in Steve Jobs history. Again, it is a testament to Steve’s unchanging character and principles. He stands by the same rules now as he did then,  including the most important one: building great products. He also mentions something I knew from a 1999 interview, quoted below:
  

  About 10 years ago I put in a T1 to my house. I’m actually getting ready to put a 45 mg fiber to my house, because I want to find out what that will be like, because everybody’s going to have that someday. But I have a pretty sophisticated setup; whether I’m at Apple or at Pixar or at my home, I log in and my whole world shows up on any of those computers. It’s all kept on a server. So I carry none of it with me, but wherever I am, my complete world shows up, all my files. Everything. And I have high speed access to all of it. So my office is at home too. And when I’m not in meetings, my work is fundamentally on email.

  in the aforementioned video, we discover Steve’s been working in such an environment since 1990. This is thanks to NeXT’s very advanced ‘inter-personal computing’ (i.e. networking) technology. So basically Steve’s been living ‘in the cloud’ for over 20 years, while we mere mortals will probably find out  what it’s like thanks to a product that he will introduce (if rumors are to be verified) tomorrow. The advancement of NeXT’s technology still continues to amaze me.

 

• Business Insider has published a thorough interview of Apple’s first CEO, Mike Scott. Honestly I haven’t had time to read it yet, so I wo’nt comment on it, but you can be sure I will pretty soon. (via TUAW) Same goes for the Fortune article Inside Apple, which I finally got my hands on last week, but haven’t yet had time to write about.

 

• Conan O’Brien dressed as  the iLeader in a baroque fresco by Fast Company:

 

• I am still waiting for AllThingsD to put up all their sessions’ videos online, but so far of all the extracts I’ve seen, one was particularly funny. It was an extract from the opening interview with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt (disclaimer: my current employer) in which Kara Swisher told him a Steve Jobs anecdote about Android phones being ‘probes in your pocket‘. The funny part was how Steve called the Google search engine: ‘The Borg’, a Star Trek reference, but also a term often used by Fake Steve to describe Microsoft. Once more, in search of satire, he was actually depicting the truth of Steve’s mind.

 

• Some guy did the One More Thing Rap Song. I hate rap but here goes. Weird.

 

• The biggest news hit this morning (French time): iSteve, The Book of Jobs, the much anticipated authorized Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, is already available for pre-order on Amazon. I won’t pre-order it because I’m sure that by March 2012 I will have an iPad 3 to read it on via the iBookStore… I was pleasantly surprised with the picture on the cover, a vintage portrait of Steve from the Macintosh heyday. I have no idea whether the iLeader was involved in this design or not — although I assume he was. The cover in high res is below:

Disclosure: I am a huge South Park fan. However, I have to admit that when I try to convince friends or colleagues that it’s one of the best TV series ever, I always have to fight the misconception that it’s just an obscene show for teens that became popular by its heavy use of curse language and scatological humor.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned episode will not help my case. Its plot revolves around a new Apple device, the HumanscentiPad, which basically consists of three human beings tied together by a mouth-to-anus connection, tied to an iPad, as such:

Overall, the episode gives a friendly look at Apple and its customs and peculiarities. I especially liked the Apple Geniuses Council and the way they join their forces with one another:

This is actually the second time that Steve Jobs is featured in a South Park episode. Last time it was The Entity (Episode 11 of Season 5 in 2001), in which Mr. Garrison invents a revolutionary new means of transportation to compete with air travel. IT is actually propelled by sucking on a tube and putting another tube in your behind… yeah (You’re not helping me South Park here!) In that episode, Steve Jobs is one of the investors Garrison invites at his home to demonstrate his machine. He appears only for a dozen seconds and has just one line of dialogue (pretty badly cast actually, but at the time barely nobody knew what his voice sounded like).

The fact Steve now has a full episode dedicated to Apple and him is quite a sign of how far we’ve come in Apple’s renewed popularity and increeasing penetration of popular culture.

Watch the full episode here.

April 25: a super-weird Chinese video emerges of a totally-fake-and-not-one-bit-realistic Steve Jobs incarnation, supposedly rehearsing the iPhone 5 introduction. Wait for it, the iPhone 5 would have… scent recognition. Who could be confused about that? I mean, please. (via TUAW)

April 28: Cult of Mac reports a ‘Steve Jobs lookalike’ contest in which none of the participants look anything close to Steve Jobs. The guys (and the gal for that matter) just put on black turtlenecks… See for yourself:

It was actually a PR stunt for the Seattle premiere of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs by Mike Daisey.

May 2: from Cult of Mac again – one of many comics with Steve Jobs helping out in the Bin Laden hunt:

(this one for those of you who speak French is even funnier to me).

Last but not least: your fellow webmaster got his Steve Jobs in Carbonite iPhone case today

Thank God an interesting article about Apple from FORTUNE: Inside Apple, is coming soon. I still haven’t been able to read it! But what I’ve read about it from Cult of Mac or Horace Dediu looks very promising. Looks we are going back to the old and delighting Good Steve/Bad Steve metaphor.

It’s been quite a while, as usual, since the last time I wrote on Steve Jobs news. But then the aforementioned news have been kinda slow lately, so I don’t feel that guilty after all.

Here’s my news rondup of the past 3 weeks:

Serious news

• Steve’s authorized biography is still in the works
  Kara Swisher of the WSJ (you know, the gal that interviewed Steve at D5 and D8 with Walt Mossberg) reassures us all about the upcoming Steve Jobs authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. I imagine that just like me you cannot wait to get your hands on that book (metaphorically speaking of course, since to pay a proper homage to Steve we should buy all it on the iBooks Store . I have recently been contacted by a French journalist who will soon publish his own biography of Steve in France. I told him how I felt about printed books, such an old fashioned way to tell the story of Steve. this is actually one of the reasons I built alla bout Steve Jobs.com. We are gifted with thousands of pictures and hundreds of videos of Steve Jobs and his work, why limit ourselves to text on paper? Moreover, the story will be outdated as soon as it’s published, since Steve keeps surprising us month after month…
• Latest Steve Jobs glorification
  Last month, both Waren Buffet and Richard Branson had their say about Steve — and he is an inspiration even to them.
  Waren: “Admitting he didn’t know that much about the company, Buffett equated Jobs to Steven Spielberg, and his effect on his company. He said the talents of Jobs is a main reason for the company’s success over the past 15 years.”
  Richard: “He’s the entrepreneur in the world I most admire and I think [Apple] is the brand I most admire. He’s the greatest come-back artist as well. He’s twice been down and out and he’s fought his way out and created a brilliant global company.“
  You should watch the video of Branson (wait a minute… Virgin Apple.. that reminds me of something: ah yes, one of Fake Steve’s earliest posts )
• Nice website by the Computer History Museum
  The Mountain View museum has a new website with a very interesting and rich timeline on the history of computing, you should definitely check it out. It’s got some pretty interesting pictures of young Steve, including one I’d never seen before.

Steve Jobs trivia

• Emails from Steve
  If one relates to the frequency of his emails, Steve is still actively running Apple. He wrote two emails in the past 4 weeks: in the first one, from March 23, he confirmed that “We have no plans to” discontinue the iPod classic. The following day, he wrote a much-discussed email to an iPhone app developer whose ‘radiation measurement app’ (sounds like BS to me) was rejected on the App Store: “No interest”, the email said simply. 

  

• TUAW made a funny analysis of Steve’s apparent age based on photographs of him using the iPhone app PhotoAge. I think the job is biased because of the quality of the picstures they picked, especially for 2010
• Minyanville did an interesting and pretty complete piece entitled Apple’s Steve Jobs: Myth Vs. Reality. I checked it out, and surprisingly it’s error free. The end paragraph (“Rumor: Steve Jobs is dead”…) is a little borderline IMHO… but it’s worth checking out anyway.

The crazy rumor of the month

This month it’s from Cult of Mac: Steve Jobs Is Rumored To Be Resigning From Apple. At first I thought it was a (bad) April Fool’s Day joke… but I don’t see any such disclaimer. I hope this is the usual BS we Steve Jobs fans have grown accustomed to these recent months.

Although it’s mostly accurate (gee, all about Steve Jobs.com is quoted twice in the source list), it has its shares of mistakes. Where would the fun be if it hadn’t?

• Steve Jobs is NOT dyslexic. This is a recurrent fantasy that was never verified.
• the brand of his turtleneck is not St Croix but Issey Mikake (whole story here or here on Quora). Who knows how many pairs of jeans he has? I doubt it’s a hundred.
• he is not a fruitarian. He certainly *has been* a fruitarian, during his hippie days, when he was 19. But those days are long gone

Here’s the infographic anyway (source):

One day I was watching Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and a phrase caught my attention. It’s a line when Augustus Gloop starts eating out the river, and Johnny Depp/Willy Wonka asks him to stop, insisting his chocolate must stay ‘untouched by human hands’. The phrase reminded me of Steve during his NeXT years. He used the exact same phrase to describe the robots that built the NeXT Cube in his automated factory (see an example here).

This got me thinking of the many similarities that could be found between Steve Jobs and the Willy Wonka character. The most obvious are:

• they’re both widely-acknowledged geniuses at their art (respectively, creating chocolate and great technological products)
• their products are magical and admired all around the world
• they both work in super-secret environments (the chocolate factory, and Apple), and everyone wonders what must be going on behind the doors
• they both have kind of a quirky personality (of course this is more obvious in Willy Wonka, but still, Steve Jobs is not your typical Fortune 500 CEO)

I didn’t think about that metaphor much back then… But it came back to me four times, the latest of which was yesterday.

First, of course, Fake Steve wrote about it in one of his earliest posts. The Bono character said to FSJ:

Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, you’re like Willy fookin Wonka in his fookin chocolate factory, out there baking up your fookin iPods, and meanwhile the fookin planet is fookin meltin, ya fooktard. I tell him, Bono, look, we all gotta do what we do, right?

The second instance was from more ‘respectable’ sources. It was the flurry of articles that got published when Steve was seen in Manhattan in early 2010 to pitch publishers about iPad. They all mentioned he was wearing “a very funny hat — a big top hat kind of thing” that evoked Willy Wonka (see here). Unfortunately there were no pictures — that’s why the caricature above was drawn, to compensate for this lack.

Then there was Mike Daisey, the now-famous writer/comedian who is currently playing a show in Berkeley entitled The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. The show has been greatly covered in the tech press/blogosphere, and I wish I could give my own opinion on it. Unfortunately as you know I am a student in France, so I can’t afford to buy airplane tickets just to see one show in California… so I didn’t see the show. I hope it’s been recorded and we’ll see the video pop out at some point.

What’s interesting is the way Mike pitched his own show:

In The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, Daisey dives into the epic story of a real life Willy Wonka. He examines how the CEO of Apple and his obsessions profoundly shape our everyday lives—and travels to China to investigate the factories where millions toil to make iPhones and iPods.

The metaphor finally reached its climax in the video I discovered this week, from CollegeHumor.com. They have gone all the way with a 4-minute video portraying Steve as Willy Wonka. He let 5 Golden iTickets in iPhone boxes to let children discover his magical Apple factory… It’s very fun and enjoyable: so, enjoy. It’s even got Oompa-Loompas/Apple Geniuses

What do you think?

• Steve Jobs was proposed then refused British knighthood in 2009: good summary from TUAW How Steve Jobs missed knighthood in 2009. Steve has never been very fond of prize and awards, so I’m not surprised he declined, I don’t think that being used politically is the main reason. Although he has always been careful never to make any public statements on his political orientations. Actually he never personally donated to the Democratic Party, it was always his wife Laurene who used her name for the donations.
  Reminds me of this funny incarnation Fake Steve/Dan Lyons did when Steve ‘received’ a Crunchie in 2008: Fake Steve Jobs Crunchies Acceptance Speech
• Nice hidden tribute to Steve in OS X Lion, spotted by Cult of Mac: