RT @asymco: There are four times as many iOS users as OS X users. By this time next year the ratio might be 6.

While you wait for tomorrow’s keynote…

• 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: (more…)

Of all Steve Jobs’ keynotes I’ve collected, this one is news to me youtube.com/watch?v=3LEXae… // WWDC 1997

iSteve: The book of Jobs is already available for pre-order on Amazon: amazon.com/iSteve-Book-Jo… Check out that vintage portrait on the cover!

Steve Jobs old and rare keynote, a year before Apple bought NeXT > businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-mic… // a must see for die-hard fans, interesting for all

Steve Jobs appears on South Park

Steve Jobs appeared in a South Park episode on April 27, called HUMANCENTiPAD (Episode 1 of Season 15).

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.

Miscellaneous Steve Jobs trivia from the past three weeks

Where do I start?

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.

Acting on impulse, I just bought the ‘Steve Jobs in carbonite’ iPhone case… We’ll see if I regret it society6.com/studio/burb/St…

The Book of Jobs, version 3.0

Most of you have probably heard the news already, but it’s too important for me not to leave any trace of it on the blog.
The rumors surrounding Steve Jobs’ authorized biography have been confirmed. The book exists indeed, written by Walter Isaacson, and will be published by Simon & Schuster early next year. I will be called (hold your breath): iSteve: The Book of Jobs. The news broke out thanks to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who writes the Apple column of Fortune.com. PED makes an interesting portrait of the writer in his column. Apparently the idea was his, and he had enough nerve and talent to seduce Steve into writing his biography.

I am, as I imagine you are, incredibly excited by the coming of this book.

The biggest news is of course that the book is ‘authorized’, meaning Steve, as opposed to previous biographies, helped its making instead of blocking it. What usually happens is that whenever a journalist or writer tries to interview someone from Steve’s entourage, he faces a wall of silence, akin to an omerta. Indeed, they should be wary of what they say, because historically Steve has shown some pretty harsh un-forgiveness with indiscreet friends and relatives.

The most famous example of this trait is Michael Moritz’s 1982 piece, The Updated Book Of Jobs, which he wrote as Time Magazine’s Silicon Valley correspondent (Moritz later wrote the first good book on Apple, and arguably the first Steve Jobs biography, The Little Kingdom). Moritz had been given carte blanche at Apple to write the portrait of Steve Jobs who was a serious candidate to become Man of the Year 1983. Instead, he turned out this much more critical piece, including a testimonial from Steve’s college friend Dan Kottke: “something is happening to Steve that’s sad and not pretty, something related to money and power and loneliness. He’s less sensitive to people’s feelings. He runs over them, snowballs them”. Steve apparently broke all ties with Dan after that article was published.

But this time, Steve is said to give biographist Isaacson acces to his closest friends and relatives. I imagine among the friends there will be Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell, Bob Metcalfe, perhaps Al Gore. I am curious about Steve’s relatives. Will Laurene speak up on her husband? I’ve never found any trace of her speaking of Steve in public. Or perhaps his biological sister Mona? That’s more likely.

The active collaboration of Steve will have of course positive as well as negative effects. So far, previous biographies (such as my personal favorite, Alan Deutschman’s The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) only could be based on interviews of ghosts from Steve’s past life (I’m referring to you, Dan Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld), or of pissed off former employees who had regained their ‘freedom of speech’. This is nicely put by Chris Smith in an article I will refer to below:

In recent years, several biographers have gamely tried to chart the depths of Jobsʼ psyche, with little help from the man himself. He rarely speaks to the press, save for tightly scripted sound bites, so all these accounts are based on talks with old colleagues and Apple Deep Throats, supplemented by occasional in-depth interviews heʼs granted to a few lucky reporters over the years.

Any journalist who’s tried to go a little deeper had to endure Steve’s legendary wrath, as described by Rich Karlgaard in his 2006 WSJ article Vladimir llyich Jobs? (for the heck of me I can’t find a link to it, but I have a scanned version on my Mac): (more…)

Update on Pixar Phase II

If like me, in addition to being a Steve Jobs fan, you are an architecture buff, you will be delighted by this piece of news. The architectural firm behind the extension of Pixar’s Emeryville campus has published an extensive gallery of pictures/sketches of the project, called “Pixar Phase II”. They range from the early site analyses to the construction in progress. Check it out:

(Source)