Tag Archives: Apple

FT names Steve Jobs their Man of The Year

Posted on December 23, 2010 at 12:27 pm UK

stevejobsft

Mark Zuckerberg can be Time’s person of the year but here we have the FT’s man of the year – Steve Jobs, the man behind the continuing success of Apple and those so-gorgeous products everyone desires that include iPhone, iPad, Macbook and more.

The Financial Times says Jobs is a “Silicon Valley visionary who put Apple on top”:

[…] When Steven Paul Jobs first hit the headlines, he was younger even than Mark Zuckerberg is now. Long before it was cool to be a nerd, his formative role in popularising the personal computer, and Apple’s initial public offering on Wall Street – which came when Mr Jobs was still only 25 – made him the tech industry’s first rock star.

And this description fits well as a caption to the rather Machiavellian-looking Jobs in the FT cartoon above:

[…] Critics often talk disparagingly of the “reality distortion field” generated by the Apple boss: his ability to convince onlookers that technologies that would seem unformed in other hands have reached a peak of perfection at Apple. Generating this suspension of disbelief is essential to stirring up demand for gadgets most consumers had no idea they needed, and is an art form of which Mr Jobs has long been the acknowledged master.

A worthy winner, I say! Read the detailed story at the FT.

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Apple’s tablet as the killer e-reader

Posted on January 4, 2010 at 1:08 pm UK

appletabletEllee Seymour asked me if I’ve tried an e-reader yet, one of those gadgets that you use to read e-books. Something like a Sony Reader, perhaps, or an Amazon Kindle.

I told Ellee that I hadn’t yet.

I do read a great deal of material on a computer screen, either a laptop or desktop, but not on a device designed only for that purpose. I sometimes read content on the iPhone, especially in planes and other public transport, but that’s pretty hard work on such a small screen.

For me, the reason’s simple: devices like Sony’s and the Kindle are terrific, they’re great and do their jobs well, but that’s not enough. I want a portable device that lets me read e-books and other content as I wish. It also needs to be a window onto a wider connected and unrestricted world where I decide what I want to do, what I want to read, in a package that let’s me interact with that content in a way that I don’t have to squint to see anything. It’s got to be dead easy and a genuine pleasure to use.

It ought to be affordable, too, although I might be willing to pay a premium for an elegance of form and function from a trusted name and/or a device that really breaks new ground (as the iPhone and Apple’s App Store did.). And the package must have enough oomph to do things in a trice, more or less.

Sounds rather like any contemporary laptop computer you can think of, doesn’t it?

So that’s the logical reason taken care of. Let’s look at my emotional reason: basically, there isn’t a device I’ve seen yet that makes me think I absolutely, simply, definitely have got to have one, that I’d do literally anything to acquire one.

Then I read Impact of ‘iSlate’ Could Rival iPhone in the New York Times yesterday which beautifully captures that emotional reason:

[…] Many people like their e-readers (not least because they save them from having to haul around books, newspapers and magazines) but I’ve yet to meet anyone who loves them. That’s the key. If a really great e-reader appeared, the market would explode. The e-reader is waiting for a killer product, just as the MP3 player was before Apple’s iPod. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, it made such a sexy one that many more people wanted to buy it. That’s what it is promising to do again.

The desirability in the promise of ‘more.’ That says it perfectly.

Will Apple’s rumoured new device be called ‘iSlate’? Will it look even remotely like the image you see above that AppleInsider published last July? Will it have any major focus on e-books?

Who knows. Nobody for sure outside some at Apple. Expect news at Apple’s special event on January 26. Probably.

Meanwhile, it’s fun to speculate. Think about this as well:

  • Publishers Struggle with Strategies on When to Release Their E-Books (Daily Finance). For all their sound and fury, e-book sales accounted for no more than 4% of all book sales in 2009. That figure will certainly rise in 2010. With all manner of e-readers on the market (or about to hit), the boom of reading-related smartphone apps, and Apple appearing to prepare a tablet device (rumored name: iSlate) for its debut on January 26, e-book sales may hit $500 million in the next 12 months, Forrester Research projects. […]
  • Amazon e-book sales overtake print for first time (The Guardian). Spare a thought for the humble hardback this Christmas. It seems the traditional giftwrapped tome is being trumped by downloads, after Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day. As people rushed to fill their freshly unwrapped e-readers – one of the top-selling gadgets this festive season – the online retailer said sales at its electronic book store quickly overtook orders for physical books. Its own e-reader, the Kindle, is now the most popular gift in Amazon’s history. […]

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Apple’s corporate omerta and share price growth

Posted on August 17, 2009 at 3:51 pm UK

appledark At lunchtime, I was reading “Steve Jobs: The man who polished Apple,” a most excellent feature about Steve Jobs and Apple written by Times journalist Bryan Appleyard and published in the Times Online (and probably in the newspaper itself as well).

While there’s copious biographical, anecdotal and other information about Steve Jobs and Apple almost anywhere you care to look, to me Appleyard’s feature presents some absorbing information in a way that’s new to me, and makes for compelling reading.

And while it’s a fascinating picture of the narcissistic Jobs, what really focused my attention were a few explicit paragraphs about Apple itself:

[...] Apple Inc is worth around $140 billion. But is it worth anything without Jobs? It is a company formed around his personality and inspiration. It is also the most watched, envied, admired and adored company in the world. So how, you may wonder, was it possible for Jobs to put out such a statement four months before a liver transplant? And how was it possible for consumer capitalism’s greatest hero to pull off the Memphis Liver Caper in absolute secrecy?

The answer is that, along with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta – the mafia code of silence – is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”

Here’s a chart showing Apple’s share price over the year to date:

aapl09ytd

If I were an investor in Apple, I wouldn’t be too unhappy. For the moment.

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When Apple asked about O2

Posted on January 17, 2009 at 4:28 pm UK

applesurveysm I had an email from Apple this morning, asking me to take a brief survey regarding my recent sorry experience with my iPhone which was replaced under warranty last week.

“Dear Apple Customer,” it began. “Apple would like to get your feedback regarding your recent iPhone service experience at your local Phone Network Provider,” they said. “The responses you provide in this survey will be used to improve our support services and our products.”

The phone network provider Apple refers to is O2, which is the exclusive mobile operator for the iPhone in the UK.

If you’ve followed my travails with the iPhone since Christmas, you’ll know what I think of O2’s iPhone support structure.

So I thought, here’s a great opportunity to tell Apple what I really think of O2.

Yet I ended up choosing responses in the survey that were more positive about my overall service experience: after all, the service I eventually received via the O2 store in Reading ultimately did resolve the issue, ie, I received a new iPhone replaced free of charge under the Apple limited warranty.

My dissatisfaction with O2 – the negative feeling about which is as strong today as it was a week ago – is mostly to do with the useless telephone support service for iPhone. That’s my whole experience of it: useless.

So I did take the opportunity of letting Apple know my thoughts about that part of O2’s service.

10a. Is there anything else that you would like to share with Apple about your recent service experience with the Phone Network Provider? (Note: 2000 character limit)

The iPhone telephone support service offered by O2 in the UK is the worst of any mobile operator that I have experienced. Before visiting the O2 store for help, I made three attempts to contact O2′s iPhone support line, each of which was unsuccessful: all I experienced was 100 minutes of being on hold. A useless service.

I hope Apple shares that with O2. But will that make any difference to anything?

My final thought: nice to hear from Apple asking for my opinion. Not a word from O2, though, since the warranty replacement. I did get some sympathetic noises from the PR on Twitter at the time, but that was it.

A Comcast Cares O2 is definitely not.

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The Hobson and Holtz Report – Podcast #367: July 31, 2008

Posted on July 31, 2008 at 9:30 pm UK

Content summary: HARO update; Dan York reports on Phweet, Dropio, Tweetio, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits – launching social media in a crisis: Apple and Exxon Mobil, social media gains SEC approval for Reg FD, BlogWorld hosts certification workshop for journalist-bloggers, Blog Council launches disclosure best practices toolkit; listeners’ comments discussion; a word about FIR #366; news about next week’s shows; music from Mojomama; and more.

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For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for July 31, 2008: A 64-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

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So, until Monday August 4…

(Cross-posted from For Immediate Release, Shel’s and my podcast blog.)