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Steve Jobs Refused to Bring iPod & iTunes to PC Without Walt Mossberg's Blessing
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That's a given. It opened up a huge market for the iPod, and enabled the iPhone ecosystem. It also is what started to kill off retail music piracy, since you could actually buy music easily instead of steal music easily.
Ah, TRON.
"Hello, Mr. Dillinger. Our boy Flynn has been sneaking around."
What a classic
. And a beautiful desk.Have seen a few All things digital interviews with SJ and Mossberg - though could anyone explain Mossberg's significance in this context? SJ was apparently keen to keep media at bay - to let them make up decisions on significant product decision seems ... odd?
The shrinking of the original multi-touch technology from ping-pong size to 3.5" is one of the very underrated achievements of the teams building the original iPhone.
Maybe you've read the recent Reddit AMA from the team that built the prototype Stellarator reactor in Germany (a house sized nuclear fusion research machine that took ten years to build). They say that to be commercially viable, it needs to be at least 4x as large - and can't be shrunken into "Mr Fusion"-size.
This is one of these things. People say "it's not possible" - and then there's somebody who says: "I know it is, you just have to try harder".
That was Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook ain't no Steve Jobs - but he never claimed to be.
He probably sees himself as somebody to keep the engines running and the ship on course until a worthy successor steps up.
Maybe you've read the recent Reddit AMA from the team that built the prototype Stellarator reactor in Germany (a house sized nuclear fusion research machine that took ten years to build). They say that to be commercially viable, it needs to be at least 4x as large - and can't be shrunken into "Mr Fusion"-size.
This is one of these things. People say "it's not possible" - and then there's somebody who says: "I know it is, you just have to try harder".
That was Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook ain't no Steve Jobs - but he never claimed to be.
He probably sees himself as somebody to keep the engines running and the ship on course until a worthy successor steps up.
Interesting on the whole 'gangly thing'
This is exactly what we see today WITH multi-touch, also to try and suppress it Apple gave *options* later to are to disable these.. Its probably a a bit of both, with also users wanting it too..
But Apple mostly i would of thought.
Don't u just like how Apple does their stuff? and all this associate round one single button...
This is exactly what we see today WITH multi-touch, also to try and suppress it Apple gave *options* later to are to disable these.. Its probably a a bit of both, with also users wanting it too..
But Apple mostly i would of thought.
Don't u just like how Apple does their stuff?
and all this associate round one single button...
To be fair, Walt Mossberg was always far more cheerleader than journalist where Apple is concerned. So maybe quite consistent with keeping the real media at bay.
Sorry, but Tim Cook as COO made Apple a giant. It's one of the reason's he was hand-picked by Steve. Also, Tim Cook has an Industrial Engineering degree. Steve had a schrewd eye for ideas and taste, but more importantly, hired people to find people to do what he thought was possible, not what he could do himself. I know, I worked at NeXT and Apple. As a Mechanical Engineer and CS grad I had friends who worked at CERN as Ph.D physicists, but haven't worked on a physics problem since leaving to work on NeXTSTEP. A former colleague was in-between jobs in NeXT Professional Services. His funding ran out. The project? SIRTI.
Talent is everywhere. What made Steve and his staff so talented was the ability to see and find it, then bring it to focus and solve the problems. That was the leadership that made a lot of people admire Steve and others hate his guts.
Like every great innovation, it has the following steps.
1) Imagined (fantasy)
2) Working prototype (exhibit)
3) First commercial offering (luxury)
4) Readily available (common)
5) Obsolescence (antique)
Smartphones went from 1 to 4 in the last thirty years.
Funny... one of the key reasons why I ended up switching to Mac from PC was that I was sick and tired of trying to get iTunes run consistently on my newly built PC with Win 7. I had several iDevices in my household at the time and basically had no way anymore of synching them with my PC. There were several other issues as well, but that was one straw that definitely broke the camel's back.
So in a way, yes, iTunes for PC did make me switch to Mac. But more in a "Ok, ok, I give up." way than in a "Wow, great Apple product! Please give me more of that!" way.
So in a way, yes, iTunes for PC did make me switch to Mac. But more in a "Ok, ok, I give up." way than in a "Wow, great Apple product! Please give me more of that!" way.
Apple invented nothing fundamentally new or unique in the touch world. Multi-touch, finger friendly UIs, inertia scrolling and all the rest was well known stuff. Most just hadn't been commercialized yet to the mass consumer.
Moreover, without Google's crucial help via Jobs' placement of his admirer Schmidt on his board, the first iPhone would've been missing Google Search, Maps, YouTube, and the original Google wifi/cell tower location method. Wouldn't have been very useful a device without those features.
Not your fault for getting that impression, but that didn't happen. All that Fadell meant was that Jobs had shown him an example of multi-touch on a big platform. Not that the large platform was later shrunk.
It wouldn't even have been the same hardware technology used. Not even close. A big touch table would've most likely used projectors and cameras, not the transparent conductive lines (and other methods) used in front of much smaller CRT and LCD displays.
Shrinking was not the problem. The difficulty was finding someone able to manufacture smaller screens in quantity. Although there were at least a half dozen touchscreen manufacturers at the time, most were geared only towards making desktop monitor sized touchscreens.
So when Apple needed a smaller screen multi-touch projected capacitance screen in 2006, probably only Synaptics and a Taiwanese company called TPK had the ability to ramp up enough production in time.
As it turned out, an established German company called Balda had bought half of TPK in 2006, and Balda was able to make a deal with Apple to supply the iPhone's original touchscreen.
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With Jobs long deceased, it's a typical practice for writers and the worshippers to use romanticism as a vehicle to create warm fuzzy stories and memories. Apple and others are now using these to polish Apple's image.
What an odd use of the word immoral.
Was Apple immorally copying Samsung when they came out with a larger IPhone?
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I think it's so true. I become a Mac user after I purchased the very first iPod nano. Before iPhone came out.
Walt parleyed his cheerleading relationship with Apple to great advantage.
He was the prince of the tame Apple media and played his part well.
That he had the kind of influence that this story suggests strains the limits of credulity.
That he thought it was good enough to ship, is even more incredible
As for being asked, maybe he was the only person that Jobs knew and trusted, who also owned a PC!
That he thought it was good enough to ship, is even more incredible
As for being asked, maybe he was the only person that Jobs knew and trusted, who also owned a PC!
Hmmm, good point.
Walt's no dummy and Steve might have valued his opinion
as a viewpoint from outside the company. A book about his
relationship with Steve would make for an interesting read.
I would continue that any of their "all in" propositions limit their sales. For example, the ONLY reason I can get away with using Mac in the workplace as I choose, is that I can also jump over to Windows on that work laptop and take my iCloud mail, sync content (favorites, calendar, contacts, etc) with me when I go (for short bursts). Not being able to cross-platform the services doesn't make the device sticky - I avoids giving those who haven't jumped in their "first taste" of the platform... For its real value. Even Dre and Co. gets this as they've fought for Apple Music inclusion on Android and the iTunes team continues to put out iTunes on Windows. This is getting close to a real platform to compete with Google on the services front... The BIG omission at this point is iMessage... Which is unfortunate as many Mac users I know have had to abandon it for Hangouts/Kik/WhatsApp/something since they can't connect to their entire address book with it and SMS isn't something that they can bring over to their Windows desktops, unlike all of those other services. It would be great to see Apple open up iMessage at the protocol level (as Jobs promised when it was released in 2010) and then other mobiles and desktop platforms (that some of us are FORCED to use at work) would be interoperable while allowing me to maintain my Apple ecosystem at home. Sure I could go get a job at some uber-progressive, money burning company that lets me use all Apple devices and services at work, but I still get cut off at the knees when even one colleague uses Windows or Android from an RTC perspective...
If they understood how many people they would attract, they would do this quickly.