Posts filed under 'Steve Jobs news'

---

Steve, a star for today’s teenagers

TechCrunch reports the results of a survey by Junior Achievement about entrepreneurs.

Junior Achievement surveyed 1,000 teens in the United States by telephone to get an idea of which entrepreneurs they admire most. Nearly a quarter of respondents named Jobs as the most admired entrepreneur, albeit down from 35% in the 2009 survey.

Even with Facebook at more than half a billion users, and the movie The Social Network taking the world by storm, Mark Zuckerberg only received 9% of votes for most admired entrepreneur, tying with skateboarding legend Tony Hawk.

Although it’s obvious to almost everybody, I’m still stunned by how mainstream Apple and Steve have become. The same thought came to my mind a couple of days ago. I was sitting at Starbucks in Paris, enjoying my morning latte. Next to me was a group of 5 teenage boys (probably in high school) They were talking about a parody of Steve Jobs that was broadcast on the most famous French satirical TV show (it’s a puppet show) last week. The piece showed Steve selling common objects by just putting an i in front of their name.

One of the boys said: “They’r exaggerating. We don’t buy anything Apple makes. It’s just that they make great stuff…”. He was identifying himself as part of that crowd ready to buy anything Apple. When I was their age, I was the only one in junior high who even knew the name of more than one Apple product. The PC was the norm and Macs were seen as expensive, weird-looking computers that were too slow and had no software. As for Steve Jobs, no one knew who he was – they only knew Bill Gates. I’m talking about 2000-2002 here.

Wow. Things really change fast in this world. I wonder what people will say of Apple and Steve ten years from today.

---

Steve Jobs makes two public appearances

The old time where Steve Jobs would make public appearances several times a month are back!!! Yippie yeah!

Yesterday (October 5), he appeared twice in public: in the morning, at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto, attending the ceremony for the creation of the nation’s first living donor registry for kidney transplants. And in the evening again, at the AT&T Wireless Hall of Fame, where Stan Sigman was inducted. He was CEO of AT&T when Steve introduced the first iPhone.

It’s interesting to see how Steve seems to embrace this cause of organ donations. He was known for not giving to any charity before that near-death experience happened to him.

As a side note, I have to get used to journalists/bloggers doing a bad job and never checking their sources. I have seen on several news sites, including mainstream ones, pictures of his speech from last March mixed up with this story in a very confusing way.

---

The lowdown on Steve Jobs’ future Woodside home

OK, so for about two whole weeks, the WWWW (Whole World Wide Web) has been a-buzzing about the supposedly exclusive plans that Gizmodo unveiled of Steve’s future home in Woodside. Now that the story is a little more behind us, I thought I’d recap and use the occasion to come back on the whole Woodside affair, that’s been going on for years.

1. Context

As most of you know, Steve has owned a mansion in Woodside since 1984. He bought it with the money he made at Apple after the company’s IPO in 1980. The mansion — 14,540 sq.— was built in the 1920s by a copper magnate, Daniel Jackling, hence its nickname “the Jackling house”. It is located in the exclusive neighborhood of Woodside, not too far from Larry Ellison’s Japanese estate. Steve lived in it when he was a bachelor, roughly from 1984 to the early or mid-1990s (shortly after his marriage with Laurene). You can see pictures of Steve inside his mansion on all about Steve Jobs (I chose one of my favorites here).

One thing you will note is that most of the rooms are devoid of furniture. As a matter of fact, the only room that was fully furbished inside the mansion was the kitchen — not that Steve was a great cook, he hired a couple who cooked for him.

Understandably, Laurene refused to live in this empty mansion, and had Steve and their new family move to a less reclusive — and slightly more furnished — house in Palo Alto. The Woodside mansion has been abandoned since then. (more…)

---

Pictures of the expansion of Pixar’s campus

The best Pixar online resource I know of (if you know a better one, let me know in comments) reports new pictures of the expansion of the Pixar campus in Emeryville.

Pixar expansion construction photos (Sept. 2010)

I am writing on this because it gives me the occasion to go back on three things:

1. I was a little skeptical in 2006, when the Pixar/Disney merger occurred, that Pixar would lose its identity. Apparently, it’s not the case — not only are the movies still great, but the company still enjoys the paradise-like environment of its genius-filled Emeryville campus, far from the bean counters of Burbank. I think it’s a powerful statement of independence. For the record, Steve himself could not force the then-small Pixar team to move to the South Bay in the early 1990s. They refused because being away from him gave them greater freedom to work on what they chose to. History proved them right.
2. The “fence-gate”, so to speak. Perhaps you don’t know, or don’t remember, but this expansion was first blocked by the neighbors of the Emeryville campus. They complained that Pixar lived in its own world, isolated from the city community by the huge fence surrounding their campus. Tom Carlisle, in charge of Pixar’s facilities, made Pixar’s case pretty simply: ““If the city takes away our fence, we will not stay in Emeryville.” I am quoting the guy because he’s known Steve for a long time. He was in charge of NeXT’s headquarters back in the 1990s, as you can see on the pic on the right.
3. Pixar’s campus is great, but what about Apple’s planned new campus? Gee, it takes even longer than the future Woodside home to appear 😉 (more on that soon btw). So far, no sign of progress whatsoever. Apple has moved to the former HP offices that they were supposed to tear down, well, for four years… My opinion: Steve doesn’t have enough time to concentrate on both new Apple products and a perfect new campus. Not to mention his own home. This will take years, perhaps construction will not even start before he’s retired.

I’d also like to point out again that this blog is really about Steve Jobs, not Apple. Pixar, though less important, is Steve’s other company, and deserves to be mentioned on this blog just as much. Who doesn’t love Pixar anyway?

---

Steve emails about Apple TV shipment

MacRumors reported yesterday that Steve sent an email to one of their readers about the soon-to-begin shipment of the new Apple TV. The style is Steve-ish to say the least.

Any update on shipment of your hobby project? Looks like it will have to ship early next week for delivery before the end of this month.

Yep.

Sent from my iPhone

Amazing, isn’t it? 🙂
Seriously, I will report here any email Steve sends or is rumored to have sent. I was planning to open an “emails from steve” page on all about Steve Jobs.com but this blog is the perfect place for that. I can’t believe Emails from Steve Jobs thought of it before I did.

---

Steve Jobs worth $6.1 billion, ranked 42nd richest American by Forbes

Forbes released yesterday their 2010 ranking of the 400 richest Americans. This year Steve Jobs is ranked the 42nd richest American (136th worldwide) with a net worth of $6.1 billion.
The graph on the right shows that despite the worldwide crisis, Steve’s worth has kept growing over the recent years. Ironically, most of that wealth comes from Steve’s involvement with Pixar (now $4.4 billion in Disney stock). As far as political donations are concerned, do not trust the  $26,700 figure given here. For years, Steve has given to the Democratic party using his wife’s name, as can be seen here.

In the tech world, nothing is really new under the sun. Steve’s good friend and future neighbor (in Woodside) Larry Ellison is now worth $27 billion, the 3rd richest American behind Warren Buffet and of course Uncle Bill (worth $54 billion). The Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth $15 billion, while Eric Schmidt is down to $5.5 billion. The talk of the town is more about Mark Zuckergerg, whose net worth is valued at $6.9 billion — hence more than Steve’s.

Venture Beat interestingly comments by saying:

The dichotomy between the two CEOs points to an interesting fact: where as Jobs was fired from his company back in 1985, Zuckerberg has done a commendable job of keeping in power, still controlling an unprecedented 25 percent of the company and the majority of board seats. The young CEO probably learned a thing or two from Jobs’ mishap, and it seems to have paid off. He also had good counsel from Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and Plaxo, who had been booted out of his companies. Parker, who was Facebook’s first president until he was ousted, was determined to raise funding in a way that would preserve Zuckerberg’s control of Facebook, and that strategy has by and large panned out.

My comments: (more…)

---

Steve interrogated by the police about Gizmodo-gate

CNet reports that the San Mateo county DA is nearing the final stages of the case of the lost/stolen prototype iPhone 4 that ended up on Gizmodo in March. The name of the student who stole the prototype is given in the article: it’s Brian Hogan, old of 21. The DA told the press he had interviewed “a number of Apple employees and other people connected to the case, including Apple CEO Steve Jobs”.

Useful quote at the end of the article :

Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be–but “appropriates such property to his own use”–is guilty of theft. In addition, a second state law says any person who knowingly receives property that has been obtained illegally can be imprisoned for up to one year.

---

Steve most powerful man in tech

The magazine T3 is like the Forbes of technology : each year, they make a ranking of “the 100 most influential people in tech”. Guess who ended up #1 this year? That’s right, Uncle Steve. Check it out here.

However, I have to say the rest of the ranking makes me doubtful about its quality. For example, Steve Ballmer is #2 *before* the Google guys. Similarly strange, Foxconn CEO Terry Gou ranks #3, before Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. However important Foxconn is in manufacturing gizmos of all sorts for us to enjoy, I doubt the world would be any different if the company were run by another CEO. It’s a different story with Facebook…

---