Ah, my first editorial. I felt the need to write this after being at a small social gathering last Friday with a group of friends, none of them being Apple Geeks like myself.
Posts tagged with "apple"
Think Different. Always Feel Connected.
So This Would Be Steve Jobs’ Business Card in 1979
Business cards used to be simpler, and even Steve Jobs used to have one. This comes straight from the 1979 archives, discovered by a couple of techies somewhere in California.
Mozilla Labs director and tech-enthusiast Pascal Finette photographed Jobs’ groovy card after a colleague brought it into the office. According to Finette, Apple still uses the phone number seen on the card, but don’t give it a ring thinking you’ll get a direct line to Steve.
I can confirm that number is still active, but it’s definitely not Steve’s number anymore. As Finette also reports (but you can’t notice by the photo), Steve wanted an embossed Apple logo in the business cards.
Apple Forums Reveal iLife ’11, New MacBook Air, Mysterious Product
Spider Web dug through the Apple discussion boards and found out what we all imagined: confirmation of a new iLife, a MacBook Air and, wait, a “reserved” product to be announced today.
It turns out Apple has already set up some discussion boards for the new stuff as placeholders:
Category 277 - Reserved 10 20
Category 278 - iMovie ‘11
Category 279 - GarageBand ‘11
Category 280 - iPhoto ‘11
Category 281 - MBA (Need official name)
I have no idea what “reserved” could ever be, and it’s strange that the MacBook Air, which already has its own category, is getting another one. [via MacRumors] Read more
Apple in Business Land→
Apple in Business Land
Rex Hammock:
I’ve watched closely (as both a customer and writer) as Apple has made attempts to better serve small business and corporate customers.
But I have a hard time believing Steve Jobs has ever obsessed over the B2B marketplace the way he’s obsessed over the materials that go into the glass staircases of major Apple Stores.
Perhaps because he has (in my opinion, brilliantly) focused the company’s products so much on great design that delights consumers, Apple’s varsity squad of product designers may have lacked the bandwidth to apply such attention to designing products that display such a deep understanding of how businesses use technology.
I just wonder if Jonathan Ive has ever sat in on a meeting where a discussion was taking place on how small business managers want to share contacts and calendars among their employees, for instance?
It’d be nice to see an update to this tomorrow, but I think the whole event will be focused on “OS X Lion Sneak Peek”. Just for the sake of comparison, this is how Apple promotes the upcoming enterprise features in iOS 4.2 for iPad, business apps, iPhone in business and profiles.
Who’s The Best Apple Analyst?
They predicted. They estimated. Many of them failed, some of them got the facts right. Being an analyst predicting numbers about a fast moving company such as Apple is not easy, but these guys get paid for this, right?
So here’s a chart for you to see who did well, who miserably failed at estimating Apple’s sales, and who to keep an eye on in the future. Read more
60 Percent Of Apple’s Sales Come From New Products
Oh, would you look at that. With blockbuster iPhone sales and more than $20 billion revenue in the last quarter, you would expect Apple to be happy about its latest product line. But the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad to represent 60 percent of Apple’s sales?
As Horace Dediu of Asymco noticed, 60 percent of Apple’s sales come from products that did not exist three years ago. I guess that’s a good definition of “reinventing a company”.
“Integration” As A New Way To Define iOS
In case you missed it, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at today’s Apple Q4 earnings call. What he had to say about 7-inch tablets, Android, Nokia, RIM and Apple’s philosophy is all over the internet. You can read a full transcript here.
Reading between the lines, what strikes me is the focus Steve put on the word “integrated”. The iOS platform is integrated, Android is fragmented. With the iPhone, you get an integrated device. You don’t have to mess with hundreds of different devices running multiple versions and variations of the Android OS. But that’s not really the point, we get Steve’s thoughts on Android. Tweetdeck’s developers get them even more.
What interests me is the use of the term “integrated” as a new way of defining iOS, and thus the devices is runs on, against competitors. By definition, to integrate means to “combine two or more elements so that they become a whole”. So it’s clear that, in Jobs’ mind, Apple deeply integrated the hardware with the software to create a new, reliable, user-friendly experience. Read more
Complete Transcript Of Today’s Steve Jobs Statements→
Complete Transcript Of Today’s Steve Jobs Statements
This one pretty much sums it all up:
Nokia makes $50 handsets, and we don’t know how to make a great smartphone for $50. We’re not smart enough to have figured that one out yet, but believe me I’ll let you know when we do. And so our goal is to make really breakthrough great products, make the best products in every industry that we compete in, and to drive the cost down while constantly making the products better at the same time. That’s what we did with iPod. We updated our products many times every year with better functionality, often times at same price and sometimes at a lower price. And it was the relentless improvement at in some cases a lower price, that was able to beat our competition and yield the market share that it did.
At Apple’s Q4 Earnings Call, Steve Jobs’ Rant Sets The Record Straight
So here’s what happened: at the Q4 earnings call Steve Jobs grabbed the mic and started talking. No one expected Steve Jobs to be available at the conference, because Steve Jobs doesn’t usually attend earnings calls.
But it happened, and he went on a 10-minute long “rant” where he set the record straight about overly discussed arguments such as Google’s openness, Android’s sales numbers, Apple’s App Store and closed system and the rumored 7-inch iPad form factor. He’s still taking questions at the moment of writing this. Read more