I’m one of the few people that don’t believe in the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. While I believe there is some magic involved, there are three factors at play:
In a normal company, milestones have dates assigned to them and ship dates are public knowledge, at least internally.
Not so at Apple. We can guess the ship date based on when our planned completion date is. But this is software. It’s perennially late, so you just never know.
One …
This is not my story and I’m sure I’ll get a lot wrong re-telling it from a good friend it happened to. But it’s a fun little anecdote that I wish were mine.
On his very first day, he was heading towards a stairway to go …
Why I chose this photo will become apparent in a moment.
This is fairly well known, but at the Infinite Loop campus, Steve Jobs used to park his car in a small lot right next to the Infinite Loop 1, often in a handicapped spot.
One …
There probably have been millions of articles written about the Apple of Tim Cook and how it differs from the Apple of Steve Jobs. I’ve always been hesitant to add to that.
Having worked at Apple for 12 years under Steve and 8 years under Tim, that gives me plenty …
…Steve used to say to me, and he used to say this a lot. Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room. And they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent
You need go no further than Scott Forstall’s Twitter feed to find a picture of his hair that had the signature flip up in the front.
Some referred to it as a ski jump and apparently Steve Jobs took note in one high-level meeting. A strong caveat to this story. …
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Steve Jobs liked to take pictures. He was even taking a picture the last time I saw him. However, many people might not know that some of his photos shipped as Desktop Pictures in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
And here they are:
There …
This isn’t a very exciting story but definitely an interesting what-could-have-been thought experiment.
When I worked in AppleCare in 1999, I worked with an engineer named Robert Esker. Years later, he became the technical support person for Steve Jobs. At the time, Steve was CEO of both Apple …
When I worked in AppleCare, I worked across the hall from a team of people called Executive Relations. Among their duties was to field complaints from “important people” about Apple products that ended up in in inbox of Steve Jobs.
Executive Relations was tasked with placating these people. I’m unsure …