I Cracked It
The rumors are flying about Apple rolling out a game-changing TV, because of Walter Isaacson quoting Jobs as saying ‘I cracked it’. Some level of reserve is appropriate, I guess considering how old and entrenched the TV industry is. But, isn’t that a perfect recipe for disruption?
I’ve been talking about Apple’s push to win ‘the battle for the livingroom’ for years. Given Apple TV, and the rise of the post-PC world, Apple will obviously continue the push into the living room. Apple TV is to the next Apple Television as Newton was to the iPad. A foray, an exercise: a hobby, as Jobs said.
I like to think that in the run-up to his final keynote, Steve made time for a long, peaceful walk. Somewhere beautiful, where there are no footpaths and the grass grows thick. Hand-in-hand with his wife and family, the sun warm on their backs, smiles on their faces, love in their hearts, at peace with their fate.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
The World That Steve’s Hands Built
by Stowe Boyd
1
I recall my first mac, pushing in
the floppies, and them pushing back out.
It was like a rowing machine, or
kicking a can down the road.
And the modem sound, connecting
to the office or AOL.
Pushing a sound wave off into the ether, and an echo back:
the shape of a looming world,
pinging in the desktop.
2
Steve Jobs must have been that kid
sitting alone on the back porch,
taking apart his yo-yo and looking, looking
to find where the sleep came from, or
talking to the grease-spotted old men
at the gas station about spark plugs or
what makes trains go so so fast.
Two million years ago, a kid like Steve
debugged fire, chipped flint,
shaped a wheel, and changed
everything. Every last thing.
3
My sons caught a cascade
of my manhandled Macs,
one by one by one. I handed
Keenan a beat-up fifteen inch
some months ago, with peeling
stickers on the steely case, where
he pours and pulls his fiction. Now,
I live on this teeny tiny macbook air,
as close to me as breathing,
as close as my own fingerprints.
It’s been a tie between us, my
hugely-used laptops in their hands,
off at college, in a library, typing,
typing. Conrad dancing dub step
to Youtube, gaming deep in the night.
A custom now, a way of passing on
the well-handled tools of a booming world,
almost at random: once in a blue moon.
Somehow timed to Apple’s calendar,
but mostly touching ours.
‘You make your tools, and they
shape you’ I read in McLuhan.
Jobs shaped our connections, the way
we touch the tempo and ties of
a strung-together world.
We could draw the graph of Macs passed on
from one to another, out past my sons,
across a sprawling world, out
past a hundred billion hand-offs.
We’d see a net of worn connection,
the world that Steve’s hands built.
More than anything else, Jobs’s genius is in managing the creative process. Here’s his playbook. By Leander Kahney.
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
Steve Jobs has resigned as CEO of Apple. In a letter to the board, he writes, “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.” Above, we’ve pulled three Newsweek covers of the visionary Apple co-founder from over the years.
(via thenextweb)
Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO - Reuters
2105:
Letter from Steve Jobs:
To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee. As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.
I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role. I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.
- Steve
(via journo-geekery)
Liquid: The Mobile, Social, Connected, Webbed World
We are clearly at the tipping point of a new era in computing, and we haven’t got a great name for it. Steve Jobs used a ‘post-’ characterization recently, saying that the iPad represented the gateway to the post-PC world. But we need a term to characterize what this is, not what it isn’t.
And what is it? It’s a convergence of a number of trends, some of which are more-or-less independent, but all are coming together in a class of new devices and the tools and practices that are popping up around them.
What are these trends?
Social — The emergence of the social web — as typified by Facebook, Twitter, and ten thousand other tools — has led to the rewiring of our economy and probably our minds. The streaming metaphor of communication and connection will be the dominant motif of all important software of the next decade.Mobile — The most interesting and explosive devices being designed and released are mobile, like the iPhone, Android phones, tablets, and the miniaturized MacBook Airs. People are increasingly using these smaller and more capable devices in ways that formerly required stationary desktop devices. This is opening up new classes of software based on geolocation, as well as the ephemeralization of many other devices and their markets, like music players, cameras, and GPS devices.
Connected — Whether sitting at a desk or standing in line at Starbucks, we are beginning to take connectivity for granted, and so will the next generation of software. We can remain connected though social tools to our family, friends, and colleagues. Although earlier solutions — cell phones, pagers, and cell modems — made this a 90% possibility, in the near future we will be 99.96% connected. (Consider that 10% of the US 25 year old and younger crowd think it’s OK to text during sex, for example.)
Webbed — The most well-established operating systems today — Mac OS X and Windows — treat the Web as an afterthought. Consider the role of the browser: a specialized program that allows us to wander around the Web reading HTML documents, following links, all of which is done in a completely different way than we wander around on our own hard drive. We use different search tools, different editors, and different conventions for accessing files and applications in these divided worlds. The rise of mobile and ubiquitous connectivity is making this look amazingly archaic, and the next generation of operating environments — like iOS, Android, and Windows Phone — will rapidly pivot into being webbed platforms, where applications will take advantage of always on connection to the web, and through the web. Among other things, this will mean the browser will decrease in importance, down to something like the Terminal utility on Mac OS X.
What is over the near horizon is a liquid world, in which social nets, ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, and web are all givens, forming the cornerstones of a vastly different world of user experience, participation, and utility. This is the new liquid world, just a few degrees away.
The result of these trends all swirling together will be an increasingly fluid and immersive experience, where both services and our expectations lead to an increasingly ambient mode of interaction with devices, that will increasingly just be on and working all the time. We will opt for notification of all sorts — like updates from friends, status changes in business and perconal appointments and plans, offers from nearby stores and restaurants. We won’t have large billboards calling our names, a la Minority Report, but we will be pinged a thousand times a day by dozens of apps on a dozen dimensions of our increasingly liquid life.
I’ve written recently about liquid media, and I think the term can be expanded beyond the narrower media sense, into something broader and more pervasive. We are sliding into a liquid state from a former, more solid one. Our devices and software is where we are seeing this first, but it is already transforming the media world. Witness the headlong transition from solid media (media destination sites with their proprietary organization, with inward-focused links, concrete layout, and editorial curation) to liquid media (media content is just URL flotsam in the streaming apps we use, rendered by readering tools we choose and configure, and social curation).
What is over the near horizon is a liquid world, in which social nets, ubiquitous connectivity, mobility, and web are all givens, forming the cornerstones of a vastly different world of user experience, participation, and utility. This is the new liquid world, just a few degrees away.
The Post-PC World
The handwriting has been on the wall for some time, but now that Apple has served up the ‘post-PC’ handle for what’s going on, it has people buzzing:
Joshua Topolsky, It’s Apple’s ‘post-PC’ world — we’re all just living in it
This week, Apple stepped into the “post-PC” era of computing — and there’s no looking back, at least not for the folks in Cupertino.
By joining the company’s ongoing vision of a “different” kind of computing with a soundbite friendly piece of marketing-speak, Apple has changed the rules of the game, and made the competition’s efforts not just an uphill battle, but — at least in the eyes of Steve Jobs and co. — essentially moot. But what exactly is the “post-PC” world? And why is it significant? Let me explain.
In this new world, Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to. There is no Mac vs. PC here — only “the future” versus “the past.” It won’t be a debate about displays, memory, wireless options — it will be a debate about the quality of the experience. Apple is not just eschewing the spec conversation in favor of a different conversation — it’s rendering those former conversations useless. It would be like trying to compare a race car to a deeply satisfying book. In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It’s not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device. What that means is that while Motorola and Verizon will spend millions of dollars advertising the Xoom’s 4G upgrade options, CPU speed, and high-resolution cameras, Apple need only delight consumers and tell them that specs and and speed are the domain of a dinosaur called the PC. Apple isn’t claiming victory in the Space Race — it’s ceding space to the competition.
But guess who gets Earth all to itself? Apple’s not saying that it beats other tablets on the market. It’s saying “we do one thing, and these guys do something else altogether.” They’re not competition — they’re not even playing the same game!
That’s not to say Apple has given up on PCs, and in fact, the company’s laptop sales are consistently exceeding expectations. But take a look at what’s creeping around the corner. There’s Lion, with its iOS-like interface, its simplified experience. If Apple has its way, and if the sales of its mobile devices carry on in the manner they have up until now, a post-PC outlook will even fit devices that look alarmingly like… PCs.[…]
Apple isn’t just challenging perceptions of the PC — they’re saying that the age of the PC is over (at least for most people). The company is forcing consumers to ask if they even still want or need something called a PC (while of course making sure to point out that the competition is playing the same old game). And really, that’s all part of the plan. Apple is in the process of making the iPad the de-facto standard for what the next stage of computing looks like, from the look and feel to the kind of software and experiences you have on the device. Apple doesn’t just want to own the market — it wants to own the idea of the market.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
