Samsung’s Galaxy Note: between smartphone and iPad?

By Peter Nowak - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

Remember when the iPad first came out and Apple touted it as the device that would fill the void between smartphone and laptop? The jokes came along pretty quickly about how long it would be till someone tried to squeeze something more into the space between smartphones and tablets.

Well, laugh no more because Samsung is going there.

The South Korean electronics giant is spending a pile of money on a 90-second commercial during Sunday’s Super Bowl to promote its new Galaxy Note, a weird device that launches in Canada on all three big wireless carriers on Feb. 14.

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Apple’s China factory conditions need perspective

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Staff members work on the production line at the Foxconn complex in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. (Kin Cheung/AP Photo)

The New York Times tried to stir things up over the weekend with a lengthy investigation into the working conditions at Apple’s manufacturing plants in China. The story detailed all the gruesome details at supplier companies such as Foxconn: unsafe working environments, unfair overtime, overcrowding in dormitories, violations of employments codes and so on.

It’s a damning story, intended to appeal to peoples’ consciences when it comes to the electronics they buy. It is, after all, hard to feel warm and fuzzy about your new iPad when you think of the human cost that went into making it.

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The most influential brand in Canada? Microsoft.

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Polling firm Ipsos Reid recently picked Canadians’ brains on who they think are the most influential brands in the country. The pollster compiled a list of 100 brands, which included the brands that spend the most on advertising in Canada every year–plus a few well-known names that don’t spend much at all, like Twitter, but that Ipsos researchers thought were influential nonetheless. Brand names could be those of corporations, like Microsoft, products, like the BlackBerry, and sometimes both (like Google and Youtube). Then Ipsos asked every one of 1,000 adult responders to rank ten out of the 100 selected brands, so that, in the end, every brand had been rated 100 times, Ipsos president of market research Steve Levy told Maclean’s.

The results? Stunning.

The most influential brand in Canada turned out to be none other than Microsoft, which beat out traditionally cooler competitors Google (which came in second) and Apple (fourth). Could it be that Canadian consumers are already well aware that Microsoft is finally coming back–or, as Businessweek put it, Steve Ballmer is no longer Mr. Monkey Boy?

And the BlackBerry? Nowhere to be found in the top 10.

For more on the Ipsos Influence Index Study, click here.

There’s no easy way out for RIM

By Jesse Brown - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 1:23 PM - 0 Comments

Trendsetter/Flickr

Now is the time for all the armchair CEOs to tell Thorsten Heins how to do his job.

RIM must focus on software and kiss developers’ asses. RIM must focus on hardware and create a SuperPhone. RIM must make a better tablet. RIM must ditch tablets entirely. RIM must stop trying to look cool and focus on business clients. RIM must get cool and target hip young clients. Opinions are like smartphones–every pundit has one.

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Child labour cases revealed at Apple suppliers

By macleans.ca - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 3:56 PM - 0 Comments

Some suppliers of Apple Inc. in China are failing to meet labour standards, auditors sent by the company have found. An extensive probe of mayor Chinese suppliers conducted last year revealed at least six cases of child labor in factories where components for Apple products are made, according to a report released by the auditors today. Investigators also found that as many as 67 suppliers have used pay-retention as a punishment against workers, and that some facilities are failing to meet environmental standards. The report is sure to cause friction between Apple and its large network of Chinese suppliers. This will add to tensions with customers, who angrily egged the main Apple store in Beijing after it failed to open at seven am, as advertised, to begin sales of the iPhone 4S. Apple staff decided against opening the store upon gauging the magnitude of the crowd that had gathered outside, in order to “ensure the safety of our customers and employees,” a company spokeswoman said.

Reuters

AP

Apple’s iMothership

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Apple's proposed HQ in Cupertino

By 2015, if things go according to schedule, 13,000 employees at Apple Inc. will be able to jog to the office along a meandering path hedged by leafy trees and wildflowers. They will approach a sleek, saucer-like ring—four storeys high—that will be made of glass, with a roof almost entirely covered in solar panels. On Dec. 6, Apple announced the updated plans for its new headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.: dubbed the “spaceship,” it will be a 1,463-m loop nestled in a park-like campus, housing a 45,000-sq.-foot fitness centre and restaurant. From the nearby street, the building will be barely visible above the greenery.

The massive, futuristic design might seem over the top for most companies. But for Apple—the tech trendsetter behind the iPod and iPad, and now among the biggest companies in the world (with $81 billion in cash on its books)—it almost seems fitting.

Feuds: fightin’ words

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; CP; iStock; Corbis; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Environmentalists Vs. Keystone XL Pipeline

Environmentalists and anti-oil sands groups managed to delay U.S. government approval of a $7-billion, 2,736-km pipeline that would carry oil from Alberta to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Though pipelines are normally nothing to get excited about, TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline was singled out by those unhappy with U.S. energy policy and Canada’s development of the oil sands, a carbon-intensive source of crude. Protesters ranged from Hollywood celebrities like Robert Redford and left-leaning luminaries like Naomi Klein to concerned ranchers and residents along the pipeline’s proposed route.

Google Vs. Apple

The battle for control of the ballooning smartphone market got personal as Google’s open-source operating system, Android, overtook Apple’s iOS, which runs the iPhone. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late CEO, told his official biographer the search-engine giant didn’t play fair and accused Google of “grand theft” of the iPhone concept (among more colourful language). Google chairman Eric Schmidt, who once sat on Apple’s board, responded by saying “the Android effort started before the iPhone effort.”

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Foxconn’s robot empire

By Colin Campbell - Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Bobby Yip/Reuters

For all the love heaped on Apple’s artful products, critics have long pointed to a dark side—the working conditions at factories where iPhones and iPads are made. Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that churns out the gadgets, has struggled in recent years with over a dozen worker suicides in China. In response, it has boosted wages and even put up netting to stop employees from jumping from rooftops.

Its latest bid to solve labour woes goes a step further. Last week, Foxconn launched a $224-million project to build one million robots in the coming three years to use in its factories. The output, which has been described in Taiwan as “an empire of robots,” will double the number of industrial robots in the world and replace 500,000 Foxconn workers. The company has said the efforts will move employees “higher up the value chain.” No doubt it will also ease rising labour costs and shortages.

In conversation: Walter Isaacson

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, November 7, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

In his final months, Steve Jobs opened up all aspects of his life to his sanctioned biographer, Walter Isaacson, granting more than 40 interviews. In an exclusive Canadian interview, the author of Steve Jobs talks about the computer mogul’s genius, and his dark side.

Q: You write that Jobs was “the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination and sustained innovation,” but you could also add master salesman to that list. Wasn’t his greatest product himself?

A: No, I think his greatest product was actually Apple, because it combines his marketing skills with his engineering and design skills. At Apple, everything is integrated—all functions of the company. He was a master showman; he knew that the unveiling of a product should be a grand moment. But he personally helped design the packaging, so when you opened an Apple product you felt a bit of excitement as you saw the iPhone in the little cradle. I know that seems silly and small, but it was marketing tied in with the sort of whole aura of owning an Apple product.

Q: So was his ability to synthesize all of these various things in itself singular?

A: Yes. Look at the grand philosophy of Steve Jobs: it’s to control the user experience from the silicon chip to the shirt on the store clerk. The hardware, the software, the content and the devices are all tightly integrated, and the marketing is part of that as well. Companies like Microsoft and Google make software they license out to other people who put it on hardware and it’s sold in other people’s stores. That’s a good business model, but it doesn’t make for artistically pure and delightful products.

Q: When Jobs first approached you to write a biography about him in 2004, you turned him down. Why was that?

A: Well, in a casual conversation, he said, “Would you ever think of writing a biography of me?” And I thought, well, he’s younger than me, and in the midst of an up-and-down career, so I said: “You know, maybe 20 years from now, when you retire.” I didn’t realize that he was sick, and once I did I also realized he was transforming industries while battling cancer, and what a dramatic story that was.

Q: But the turning point came when his wife, Laurene, approached you in 2009 and said it was sort of now or never?

A: Yes, we just happened to be together, and she mentioned, “If you’re ever going to write about Steve, you ought to do it now.” It was right after he went on his medical leave that involved a liver transplant in ’09, and I hadn’t really focused on the fact that he was that sick. He had just transformed the music industry and was doing it to the telephone industry, so it was a pretty dramatic time.

Q: He was a famously controlling guy, yet he pledged that he wasn’t going to interfere with your work. Did he keep that promise?

A: Yes, except for a cover he thought was ugly. He started expressing that sentiment strongly to me, and said he would only keep co-operating if he got some say over it. I thought that was a great offer, since he had a great design sense.

Q: What did he object to about the first cover?

A: Oh, it had a little picture of him when he was young inside of an Apple logo. It was gimmicky.

Q: When he called you, was it one of those infamous Steve Jobs conversations?

A: Well, he expressed himself clearly and forcefully, but I knew enough about Steve that it neither surprised me nor worried me, because that was his way of being honest. He could be brutal, but it wasn’t something you were supposed to take personally.

Q: He was also a charismatic figure with an ability to get people to buy into his vision, which was so powerful his friends referred to it as his “reality distortion field.” How did you deal with that?

A: I tried to talk to as many people as I could. The tough thing about Jobs is that he had such a strong personality that those around him remember the exact same meeting in different ways, like the movie Rashomon. Even the scene of his resignation from Apple—I interviewed Steve and three other people, and I got four different versions.

Q: Your book is filled with examples of Jobs’s wilful cruelty to others. Is there one instance of his callousness that really stood out for you?

A: No, just the opposite. He could be tough on people, [but] it was never deeply cruel. It was all about the moment, and it ended up creating a team of brutally honest star players who loved to have strong conversations and disagreements. Once you learned to take it, it was in some ways inspiring.

Q: Inspiring for some people, right? I mean, you’ve quoted one of his friends saying that his big question for Steve was, “Why are you so mean?”

A: Right, but that’s about snapping people’s heads off, or saying rough things. You judge it by the outcome, and even the friend who said that remained close to Steve to the end, and was at the memorial service.

Q: One of his former girlfriends suggested to you that he had narcissistic personality disorder, and the former CEO of Apple called him bipolar. Do you think there was an element of mental illness in Steve Jobs?

A: He had an incredibly intense personality, and certainly felt like he was special and all the rules didn’t apply to him. But I don’t think there was a mental disorder.

Q: Jobs was adopted at birth into what was a pretty loving family, but some people still see that as an explanation for his later behaviour. Do you think he had abandonment issues?

A: He said his adoptive parents made him feel special and chosen. But I do think that there was a journey throughout his life for understanding and enlightenment that had, as one of its elements, figuring out who he was and his place in the world.

Q: You’ve dealt with that spiritual side of Jobs too, what you call “his compulsive search for self-awareness.” Was he self-aware?

A: Oh, yeah. He even had a good sense of humour about himself. If you asked, “Why are you so tough on people?” he would say, “That’s who I am. I don’t want to be one of those artificially polite people who never can make a dent in the universe.”

Q: That attitude manifested itself in a kind of binary viewpoint as well, where products were “amazing” or they were “sh—y,” and people were “enlightened” or they were “a–holes.” How was that outlook linked to his success?

A: I think it gave him the temperament of an artist, which is either “It’s perfect” or “It sucks.” That separated him from most technology executives, who put out version 3.1, then 3.2, and never try to nail it. I think that passion was also the reason he wanted end-to-end control over all the products he made. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t know what causes somebody to become such a perfectionist, but that’s the way he looked at the world. Even the original Macintosh team, he made them sign the inside of the computer case because, he said, “real artists sign their work.”

Q: In the book there are a lot of scenes of Jobs crying when he’s confronted, or told no, or even when he’s happy. Was that manipulative, or was he really that fragile underneath it all?

A: I don’t think his crying was manipulative, I think he was a very emotional person who could be deeply touched by the people he loved, such as his wife, or by a great design, or even a beautiful piece of ad copy.

Q: In 1985, he was ousted from Apple, the company he had founded. What lessons do you think he absorbed from that?

A: I think his real learning experience was after, at NeXT Computer, where he got to indulge all of his best and worst instincts. He wanted to make the product a perfect cube, and over-designed it so that it became overpriced and flopped in the marketplace. So I think that once he came back to Apple he realized he had to be more sensible and more mature. In a broader sense, that’s the whole narrative arc of the book, whether it’s in his personal life or in the way he ran Apple the second time or even the way he handled cancer, which was in a romantic and poetic way at first, but he quickly then looked for the most advanced scientific ways to handle it.

Q: What about his relationship with money? Compared to a lot of moguls, he lived a fairly simple life with a modest house in Palo Alto.

A: Yes, he lived in a normal house in a normal neighbourhood, having dinner almost every night around the kitchen table with his family. He didn’t try to become a celebrity or have an entourage. When he was very young and went to India on a pilgrimage, he was penniless, and a few years later he was worth more than $100 million. He said money didn’t matter to him much when he had none, and it didn’t matter to him much when he had all he could possibly want.

Q: He was a guy who was capable of acts of generosity, but not particularly generous. You write that his philanthropic foundation was left to wither.

A: Right. His wife is a very noted and active venture philanthropist who has started Education Track, which is a great after-school program in America, but Steve focused more on work. And I think that when we look at what’s going to transform education, all the good work of the non-profits might not end up being more important than the invention of the iPad, which could transform education for everybody.

Q: You quote Bill Gates as saying that he wished he had Steve’s taste. But in some ways Jobs’s obsession with design was almost paralyzing. You tell this amazing story about him refusing to put on an oxygen mask after his liver transplant because he didn’t like its looks. Did he care too much about form?

A: Well, he cared passionately about it. But how else do you explain why the iPod and the iPhone and the iPad were completely transformative, whereas rival products have trouble catching hold? There’s an artistry infused into them that doesn’t exist in HP tablets or Microsoft music players.

Q: You write that Jobs was a genius, but not overly smart. What do you mean by that?

A: He didn’t approach things in the rigorous, analytic way that a Bill Gates would. When Steve came back from India, he said, “I learned the importance of intuition as opposed to just relying on Western rational thought.” And that ability to use intuition, imagination and aesthetics in assessing a problem allowed him to think differently. He was ingenious more than simply being really smart.

Q: Sometimes that became a trap. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he spent nine months trying to heal himself through juices and diet. How he could he be so dumb?

A: Well, he had a poetic, alternative aspect to his personality that went back to his hippie days. His romantic side first looked for alternative ways to deal with it. Then he engaged his rational side and ended up with the most advanced cancer treatments based on DNA sequencing and targeted therapies. So, as always, with the cancer, with his work, with his personal life, the romantic side of Steve connects to the sensible side of Steve.

Q: The devices he created or helped create at Apple are a huge part of his legacy right now. But technology changes so fast that soon even the most amazing of them will be obsolete. Will his accomplishments seem so amazing 20 or 30 years down the road?

A: I think he will be judged by how well his greatest creation, Apple the company, fares. Devices come and go. The question is, can you continually reinvent the future by connecting artistry with great engineering? And I think at the moment, the people at Apple who trained under him can keep that legacy alive, just as the people who trained under Walt Disney could do it.

Q: Did the public reaction to his passing surprise you?

A: The emotion surprised me, but it’s connected to the emotion inherent in the products he made. He knew how to make a connection. I can’t imagine any other business leader provoking this outpouring upon their death. I just think people felt that Steve Jobs was able to create things that showed he had an understanding of our desires.

Q: In the book, you compare him to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, and say he’ll be the sort of business leader who will be remembered 100 years from now. But you’ve also written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, and you don’t invoke their names. Jobs doesn’t belong in that pantheon?

A: I think he’s very much like Benjamin Franklin in being inventive. Franklin knew how to tie imaginative ideas to practical products—the lightning rod being the best example. And he was always curious, always driven. As for Einstein, he’s in a different quantum orbit. He was the ultimate person who knew how to think different, to use the words in Steve’s famous advertising campaign.

Follow your heart? Get real.

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

AP; Bloomberg/Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

After Steve Jobs died, his famous 2005 speech to university graduates went viral all over again. Many find the address moving and inspiring. But in a magazine issue dedicated to students at the beginning of their adult lives, it’s worth asking: just how practical is the late Apple CEO’s advice?

Jobs began his speech by talking about his decision as a young man to quit college. Only after dropping out, he said, was he able to drop in on the classes he actually found interesting, such as instruction in calligraphy. (His knowledge of fancy lettering later paid off when Jobs was designing the typeface for the first Macintosh computer.) His point: you should always go with your gut, make bold decisions and “trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Surely we can all agree that giving up on formal education and, instead, learning how to draw pretty letters worked out well for Steve Jobs. Then again, Jobs was a genius and a once-in-a-generation creative talent, so I suspect that dropping out of school to study the banjo or grow the world’s largest pumpkin would also have done the trick.

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If you can’t beat ’em…

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Pichi Chuang/Reuters

When Jonney Shih, chairman of Taiwan’s Asustek Computer company, took to the stage this month for the unveiling of the Asus Zenbook laptop in New York, he asked for a moment of silence to honour the passing of Steve Jobs. “We have always had a great respect for him,” Shih said. “His dream will live on.”

Don’t doubt Shih was being sincere. The Zenbook bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s MacBook Air. Both laptops have sleek, metallic bodies that taper down to three millimetres at their thinnest points, and they both weigh in the area of 2.5 lb. The Zenbook, however, as Shih flaunted, is US$200 cheaper.

At the glitzy unveiling, Shih paced around onstage, dramatically touting the strengths of his new computer in an undeniably Jobs-esque manner. The computer hits stores this month, so tech junkies will soon know whether the Zenbook can take some “Air” out of MacBook sales.

Is Siri artificially intelligent or just a robot?

By Peter Nowak - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 12:26 PM - 5 Comments

Having just returned from a trip to New York on Sunday evening, I haven’t had much time to play with the week’s hottest new gadget —the iPhone 4S—but I have been able to formulate some initial impressions, especially in regards to its main new feature: the Siri personal assistant.

First, the basics. Yup, the iPhone 4S works as advertised. It’s faster, slicker and generally better than its predecessor, the iPhone 4. Some nifty additions to the operating system make things easier, like you can fire the thing up initially without having to connect it to your computer and you can share iTunes purchases between devices by turning on the iCloud storage option. Both options do a lot for eliminating cables and computers from the iPhone equation.

I particularly like the camera as well. The iPhone 4 had the best camera on any phone I’d tried so far and the 4S is yet another step up. Apple is continuing to strengthen the case for leaving the full camera behind and simply relying on a phone to take photos, at least in casual situations.

Much of the brouhaha over the new device, however, lies with Siri, the voice-recognition feature that can tell the user about everything from the weather to sports scores to scheduled meetings. Continue…

The computer as modern art

By Anne Kingston - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 2 Comments

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he did something that would have been counterintuitive for any other consumer-product company CEO: he showed the back of it first. “I’m in love with it,” he said of the elegant, shiny surface reflecting the Apple logo in matte relief. “It’s stainless steel; it’s really, really durable. It’s beautiful.” By then Apple devotees expected such attention to detail from the man in the black mock turtleneck who took computers from geek to chic—the imperative was embedded in his company’s very DNA.

In his 2009 TED lecture talk about inspirational leadership, Simon Sinek observed that Apple challenged the status quo and expressed its ability to think differently precisely by making products that are consistently “beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly.” And certainly the public’s appetite for innovative, human products is reflected in consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for Apple products. But Jobs’s greatest design legacy was reframing its parameters in the mass market. As he told the New York Times in 2003, Apple didn’t see design as product veneer: “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.”

The iPod, coveted to the point of theft, exemplified Apple’s fusion of function and form: the technology was revolutionary (“You can put your entire playlist in your pocket,” Jobs boasted), yet every user touch point was carefully considered to be familiar and seem pleasing—its gift-like packaging, playing-card proportions, intuitive scroll wheel, even the tiny clip that prevented its distinctive white earbuds cord from tangling when it was packed up. The Museum of Modern Art put an iPod in its collection and extols the device for raising expectations for all consumer products—and also “stimulating manufacturers to recognize the importance of good design and to incorporate design considerations at the highest levels of their corporate structures.”

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Turned on and tuned in: Steve Jobs as a child of the sixties

By Jay Teitel - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Apple/dpa/Corbis

In 1969, the year of Woodstock and the first moon walk, Steve Jobs was 14. A yearbook photograph from Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif., shows him with the rest of the electronics club, looking as geeky as his buddies. Three years later, the 1972 yearbook includes a grad photo that shows Jobs, virtually unrecognizable, with long hair, in a tux and bow tie. Something about the Summer of Love had gotten to him.

For the past week or so, in the instantly mythic aftermath of his death, Steve Jobs has often been characterized as a nerd who made good, but he was never a nerd: he was the coolest tech guy who ever lived, a little foppish, a little ascetic, like a combination of Oscar Wilde and St. Augustine. What Jobs was—in an American do-it-yourself, perfection-unto-arrogance tradition that few admirers today are aware of—was a hippie.

Some of the counterculture trappings of Jobs’s life were sixties stock. After dropping out of college in his freshman year, he worked at the pioneering video-game firm Atari to raise money for a trip to an ashram in India. He returned a Buddhist, complete with Indian garb and a shaved head. He took LSD, later describing it as one of the defining experiences of his life. And of course there was his legendary Jobsian observation that Bill Gates would have been “a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”

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Tim Cook: Apple’s most humble servant

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Sakuma/AP

Tim Cook took the stage, but not the spotlight. In his public debut as Apple chief at the unveiling of the updated iPhone on Oct. 4–the day before Steve Jobs died—the 50-year-old seemed comfortable enough, dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt and his trademark Nike runners (he also sits on the sportswear giant’s board). He even cracked a couple of jokes in his measured Alabama drawl. “This is my first product launch since being named CEO,” he said, the threat of a smile crossing his face. “I’m sure you didn’t know that.”

But it was the things that Cook didn’t do that garnered the most notice. There were no stirring Jobs-ian speeches about future-altering technology. The “ta-dah” introductions of the new phone, a social network, and a greeting card application were all left to other Apple executives. And the CEO’s sales pitch—such as it was—was all about the brand, rather than the vision. “I’m so incredibly proud of this company,” Cook told the assembled journalists. “I consider it the privilege of a lifetime to have worked here for 14 years and I am very excited about this new role.” The message was clear. Apple’s cult of personality begins and ends with its founder.

And all indications suggest that is just the way the new boss likes it. A lifelong number two—he even finished second in his class at high school—Cook has always preferred to stay in the background. He almost never gives interviews, or speaks in public settings. (The exception being his beloved alma mater Auburn University, where he gave the commencement address in 2010.) He was raised in Robertsdale, a small farming town near Alabama’s Gulf Coast, whose only other “celebrity” son appears to be Obie Trotter, a college basketball star now playing in Szolnok, Hungary. The middle of three boys born to a shipyard worker and a homemaker, Cook played in the marching band and was voted “most studious” by his peers. He went on to take engineering at Auburn, where professors remember him as “very quiet, very reserved.” After graduating in 1982, he took a job at IBM in North Carolina, distinguishing himself as the guy who volunteered to work over the Christmas holidays so that the company could fill its orders by year-end. In 1994, he joined the computer-reselling division of an electronics wholesaler, rising to COO before jumping to Compaq in 1997. Six months later, an executive recruiting firm came knocking on Apple’s behalf.

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Kevin O’Leary on Steve Jobs

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 11 Comments

Jessica Darmanin/Maclean's

In the mid-’80s, if you’ll recall, there was a massive rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Gates decided early on that he would license his operating system to every manufacturer who wanted it. In a matter of years he got 97 per cent of the PC market. On the other hand, Jobs said, “I’m never going to license the Mac operating system to anybody. I am going to control the hardware and the software and package it to consumers.” He lost huge. He ended up with two per cent of the market.

At the time, The Learning Company was the largest provider of educational software. I’m the guy that’s providing 80 per cent of the market for reading and math software in schools and for consumers, with brands like Reader Rabbit, Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail. It cost about $500,000 a title to develop software for Windows and $500,000 for Mac. It was very easy for me to find my Windows user—97 per cent of people who have a computer can use the software. But my cost of acquiring the Mac customer keeps going up the more share Jobs loses in the market. I’m losing about $50 million a year doing that and my board is squeezing my head saying, “What the hell are we supporting Mac for?”

We were working closely with teams at Apple and I finally said, “I’ve got to go see the big guy. We can’t go on like this.” I planned to ask him for $50 million, but was willing to accept $12 million [to continue making software for Mac]. I got there and sat down at a boardroom table; there were five or six of us on each side. It started with the pleasantries of the product management teams and then probably half an hour into it, Jobs walked in and the whole room shut down. It went silent. Nobody would say anything when Steve was in the room. He was the king.

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The life and times of Steve Jobs

By Chris Sorensen, Jason Kirby, and Michael Friscolanti - Monday, October 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 4 Comments

John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images

Theo Gray was at the wheel of his car when he learned his friend Steve Jobs was dead. The call from his assistant came as a shock, not because Gray didn’t know of Jobs’s failing health—“I had some information about how bad he was”—but because it was difficult to comprehend a world without the legendary Apple co-founder. Jobs not only built one of the world’s most successful companies, with a market value of more than US$350 billion, but he elevated technology into the realm of the magical and gave us our first true glimpse of its potential. “I don’t know, maybe I was repressing the knowledge,” says Gray, who has known Jobs since 1988 and whose software company, Wolfram Research, has worked closely with Jobs and Apple for the past two decades. “I hoped maybe he would have another year or something.”

One more year. It boggles the mind to imagine what a digital dreamer like Jobs could do with 365 more days on this planet; the wonders he might conceive, or even the little annoyances of the mobile age he would inevitably solve. Jobs reshaped the world and how it communicates more in his 56 years than almost any other person of the last century.

It was why, moments after Apple Inc. confirmed Jobs’s death on Oct. 5, tributes began to pour in on sites like Facebook and Twitter, by the tens of millions. A few hours later, makeshift shrines popped up outside Apple stores throughout North America, Europe and Asia. President Barack Obama was moved to write: “Steve was among the greatest of American innovators—brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.” Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple Computers with Jobs in the 1970s, put it even more simply: “It’s like the world lost a John Lennon.”

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The dark side of Steve Jobs

By Claire Ward - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 24 Comments

In what seems like an endless stream of Steve Jobs tributes and devotions, one voice stands out as a reality check. Mike Daisey, New York-based author and monologuist, is hoping to cut through the nostalgia and remind people of the nastier side of Jobs’ legacy.

“I’m almost tired of hearing what a genius he is,” says the 37-year-old creator and performer of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a one-man show about the life and work of the former Apple CEO that opened off-broadway at the Public Theater in New York City on Tuesday. “I think he’d be disgusted by this level of nostalgia. He was a very unrelenting, unwavering person—focus was really the centre of his skill set, his genius.”

Daisey’s show touches on everything from Jobs’s mastery of industrial design to the objectionable practices of iPhone and iPad manufacturing plants in China. The monologue tells the story of Jobs’s obsessions and his impact on humanity—from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen. Daisey’s style is semi-improvised, or what he calls “extemporaneous monologing”—which means the show differs from night to night, often depending on the mood of the room. “The work happens in the room so it’s hard to say what is going to change,” says Daisey. “At the same time, the fundamentals of the story aren’t affected by his death. In fact, they’ll be amplified. The end of an era, the loss of individual personal power in the face of corporatism.” Continue…

Freedom to fail is what made Steve Jobs

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 20 Comments

David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Having paid Steve Jobs the full measure of our devotion, let us now argue about how to create the next Steve Jobs. Which choices can governments and educators make that will encourage the next miraculous hybrid of gearhead, design genius, marketing whiz and change catalyst?

It’s fair to answer, “Give up. It’s impossible.” The rise of Jobs 1.0 looks more like a happy accident than anything else. He dropped out of a liberal-arts college in Portland and then stuck around to audit the calligraphy course. And yet I’m pretty sure that if everyone in Canada were required to take calligraphy without credit, it wouldn’t spark a new renaissance. To be fair, probably people would send more and nicer thank-you notes.

But still. It’s worth spending a little time to ask what was germane and broadly applicable in Jobs’s life. After all, no matter what governments do, it won’t be long before they’re claiming to be producing a new generation of Jobses.

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Steve Jobs and Apple: somewhere between bohemia and business

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM - 18 Comments

Ian Waldie/Getty Images

When I was growing up, the world was in the grip of what was then called the Computer Age. Computers, everyone knew, were where things were going. And so we were all given training in computer science to prepare us for the Jobs of Tomorrow, which as everyone knew were in computer programming.

To program a computer meant poking little holes in punch cards, stacks and stacks and stacks of them, which you then handed in to the computer lab. When your turn came in the queue, they would feed your stack of cards into the computer; you would get your homework back the next day in the form of a printout. If, as often happened, you had made some small mistake—somewhere—and the computer, baffled, had responded with a string of hysterical gibberish, you simply repeated the whole fiddling, nitpicking exercise.

And for most of us, that was that. The premise, that we were all going to be computer programmers, was false, and we knew it. Computers were for geeks, science fiction enthusiasts and others even further beyond the pale. Though in some ways my own mildly obsessive-compulsive nature made me a natural for it, my teenage identity was even then coalescing around the idea that I was actually some kind of artsie, or at least destined for the humanities.

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How Steve Jobs rescued old media

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM - 4 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It seems strange to think of Steve Jobs as the man who saved traditional media. After all, everywhere you look, his products are wreaking havoc on old media formats: people are watching TV shows on their iPads instead of staying home to watch them live; people are reading e-books instead of lugging around paper; bookstores and record stores replace much of their shelf space with iPhone and iPod sections. But never mind the shakeups that are occurring in businesses like music: if it hadn’t been for Jobs and iTunes, there might not be a music business to shake up. Jobs’s fellow corporate tycoon, Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, put it very simply in a 2007 speech at Boston University: iTunes “resurrected the music industry.”

Think back to 2000, before the iPod and iTunes existed. Napster had cut deeply into music sales, and while the service itself was shut down, there was no shutting down the concept of music piracy. The ’80s and ’90s compact disc boom, when people ran out to buy physical albums in little plastic jewel cases, was over, and music companies couldn’t accept that: Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in technology issues, told Maclean’s that “they sought to sue the MP3 player out of existence. Any sort of innovation that left someone other than the industry with control was something to be feared and stopped.” But no lawsuit could change the fact that people wanted music that they didn’t have to stuff into suitcases and carry from place to place, and they wanted it for free.

Computer Weekly proclaimed in 2000 that “the battle against piracy may be lost completely,” and that “mass copyright infringement over the Internet” would be the future. The music companies countered by trying to create their own music services, which bombed because, as Geist puts it, “They were label-specific, they only played on a limited number of MP3s. It was just so consumer-unfriendly.” Jobs realized that no one was going to sign up and pay for only the music that Sony or Universal was willing to give them. “People don’t want to buy music as a subscription,” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “They want to own their music.”

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The $30 tablet is here. But you can’t have one—yet.

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 19 Comments

The Aakash is a pretty crappy tablet computer.  Made in India, the Android gadget’s touchscreen is small, with no multitouch functionality. Its battery only lasts for a few hours, its processor is fairly slow, it has no camera, and though it has WiFi, you’ll need a USB dongle to connect to the mobile Internet when away from wireless broadband. Compared to the iPad, the Aakash is a piece of junk—except for the one stat where it blows Apple completely out of the water: price.

The Aakash costs $37.98 to manufacture. Ten thousand units are currently in the hands of Indian students. Thanks to a government subsidy, they cost $30 each. A retail version of the Aakash is expected soon, with 90,000 units shipping to Indian stores bearing a sticker price of $50 to $60. There’s no word on a North American release just yet.

Here’s a short video report on the Aakash from NDTV: Continue…

Björk is crazy, like a fox

By Elio Iannacci - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 1 Comment

Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

Many have tried—and failed—to figure out the thinking behind singer-songwriter Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s sometimes magical, sometimes questionable career moves. In 1994, for instance, Madonna asked the Icelandic talent to collaborate on the pop queen’s sixth studio album. Björk repeatedly declined Her Madgesty’s requests but, as a consolation, sent Madonna one song—which ended up becoming the most obscure hit of her career: Bedtime Story.

Six years later, after a critically praised performance in the movie Dancer in the Dark, for which she won the best actress prize at Cannes, Björk announced that she would never act again. Most confounding of all is her walk on the red carpet at the 2001 Oscars: she managed to stupefy Hollywood by wearing a dress that resembled a stuffed swan. Joan Rivers demanded Björk be “put into an asylum.” (Ellen DeGeneres further mocked the singer by wearing a version of the frock when hosting the Emmys later that year.)

Her latest disc, Biophilia, to be released Oct. 11, maintains Björk’s status as the weirdest—and craftiest—kid at the school of pop. “I feel technology has finally caught up with humans,” explains the 45-year-old via phone from New York. “That’s why I got this guy in Iceland who makes instruments to make me a small pipe organ that I could connect directly into an iPad touch screen. He reworked my old celesta [a keyboard that resembles a glockenspiel in sound] this way—which made composing much more tactile and impulsive.”

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Steve Jobs and iEverything

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 6:20 PM - 1 Comment

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Steve Jobs and iEverything

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