25
Aug
2011
Engadget: A major development out of Cupertino: Apple CEO Steve Jobs has stepped down, the board naming Tim Cook as his replacement. The company said “Steve’s extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world’s most innovative and valuable technology company.” (more…)
29
Oct
2010
TG Daily: Is the venerable Steve Jobs and his trusty band of acolytes plotting a hostile takeover or acquisition of Sony with Club Cupertino’s $51 billion war chest?
Although many analysts doubt that such a deal would ever take place, reports of a potential acquisition sent Sony stocks up nearly three percent at one point.
Unsurprisingly, Sony has declined to comment on the rumors, which were kickstarted by a recent Barron’s report endorsing the plausibility of an acquisition engineered and executed by Apple.
As AppleInsider’s Sam Oliver notes, another possible source for the frenetic rumors may be a recent Bloomberg interview with former Apple CEO John Sculley.
“I remember (Sony co-founder) Akio Morita gave us one of the first Sony Walkmans. None of us had ever seen anything like that before, because there had never been a product like that,” Sculley told Bloomberg.
“This was 25 years ago and Steve was fascinated by it. The first thing he did was take it apart, and he looked at every single part. How the fit and finish was done, how it was built.”
However, despite Steve’s obvious admiration for Sony, Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw, remains convinced that Apple has absolutely no intention of buying the Japanese-based company.
“We [really] don’t see any acquisitions of any size,” Kumar told Reuters.
“[Firstly], Apple is happy to keep its cash under the pillow. [And secondly], it would [obviously] be a [clear] cultural miss.”
23
Jun
2009
Guardian: Apple says it has sold a million of its new iPhone 3GS model (and we’ll come back to the “3GS” there in a moment) in the first three days since its worldwide launch on Friday.
The press release is also interesting for including a “quote” from Steve Jobs, who you might recall is the company’s chief executive, and who in an interesting development was said, by a mysteriously unsourced story in the Wall Street Journal, to have had a liver transplant earlier this year.
“Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With over 50,000 applications available from Apple’s revolutionary App Store, iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.”
Certainly no dispute about the momentum. Even the precipitious price for the new model doesn’t seem to be putting people off, despite this hefty recession. For those still stuck on the old iPhone 3G, or even the old old iPhone, there’s now a handy table to show you what things you can and can’t do on each phone.
10
Sep
2008
Crave: Steve Jobs has unveiled a new iPod classic, packing 120GB — that’s 30,000 songs by Jobsy’s maths.
But all eyes are on the new iPod nano, the thinnest iPod yet, boasting an oval profile.
It has a curved aluminium design with curved glass in the screen, which is the same high resolution screen as the current wider model.
Features include voice recording when it detects a mic and the ability to use the newly-announced Genius feature in the nano itself.
If you push and hold the centre button, a menu pops up that lets you start genius playlists, add songs, and browse artists or albums.
One clever addition is the accelerometer, which allows for assorted cool business such as Cover Flow appearing when you turn the nano on its side.
07
Aug
2008
PC Advisor: Apple CEO Steve Jobs has admitted that the company made numerous mistakes during the launch of its MobileMe internet service, saying that the service “was simply not up to Apple’s standards” and that it “clearly needed more time and testing”.
Jobs’ memo to Apple employees also indicated that he has now transferred responsibility for the service to a different Apple executive.
MobileMe’s launch was fraught with problems, including large initial downtime, an extended email outage including lost messages, the inability to contact the service to sync, corruption of data, time delays in syncing the computer to MobileMe, and more. In the aftermath, Apple set up a status page on the MobileMe website.
14
Jun
2007
Macworld: One of the biggest questions surrounding the iPhone since its January preview was whether developers outside of Apple would be able to create software that would run on the phone.
And just 18 days before the iPhone’s June 29 release, Steve Jobs stood on stage at the Worldwide Developers Conference and told software makers that Apple had found an answer: a “sweet” way to support outside iPhone development.
Unfortunately, if you’re thinking that Apple really addressed third-party development in Steve Jobs’s keynote, you’d be wrong. While many people have clamored for support for widgets and applications, Monday’s announcement actually did nothing at all to address either issue. Instead, it told developers that since Safari on the iPhone is a full-fledged web browser, they can use Ajax and CSS to make nice, pretty Web-based applications.
Now, don’t get me wrong, you can do quite a bit with Ajax and CSS, as the demo of an Apple-created address book lookup tool showed. However, tools created using this solution are not true applications.
27
Apr
2007
CNN: Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple’s wildly popular iTunes online music store.”Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters in an interview after Apple reported blow-out quarterly results. “The subscription model has failed so far.”
His comments come as the company he co-founded gears up for contract renewal negotiations with the major record labels over the next month.
Since Apple launched iTunes in 2003, it has sold more than 2.5 billion songs and now offers increasing numbers of television shows and movies. (…)
03
Apr
2007
Reuters: Apple and EMI’s landmark deal to sell EMI songs at higher audio qualities and stripped of copy protection on iTunes raises as many questions as it answers.
The agreement marks the first for one of the world’s most popular digital media retailer. It is also part of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ call to dismantle restrictions on digital music to boost sales and allow media to be played on devices other than its iPod devices.
EMI will be making copy protection free music available at other online outlets in the coming weeks.
A couple of key points from the companies’ statements:
Here are a couple questions that come to mind:
07
Feb
2007
New York Times: Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, jolted the record industry on Tuesday by calling on its largest companies to allow online music sales unfettered by antipiracy software.
The move is a gamble for Apple. Its iPod players and iTunes Store have defined the online music market, and they have much at stake in the current copy-protection system.
Under terms reached with the major record labels, online music stores embed software code into the digital song files they sell to restrict the ability to copy them. Because Apple uses its own system, the songs it sells can be played only on the iPod. That limitation has drawn increasing scrutiny from European governments, pressure that Apple has recently begun to acknowledge.
Mr. Jobs’s appeal, posted on the company’s Web site Tuesday, came in the form of an essay titled “Thoughts on Music,” but in essence it was a letter to the “Big 4” music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI.
11
Jan
2007
Reuters: iPhone is an interesting product, but its sales goal is not very high, Anssi Vanjoki, the head of the multimedia unit at Nokia was quoted as saying on Thursday.
Apple unveiled its much-anticipated take on the smart phone on Tuesday, presenting a sleek device with a large screen that combines a phone, an iPod and instant messaging.
“It is quite an interesting product but it is lacking a few essential features, such as 3G, which would enable fast data connections,” Vanjoki, whose multimedia unit is a direct rival to Apple, was quoted as saying by Finnish business daily Taloussanomat.
Apple’s Chief Executive Steve Jobs said it could sell 10 million iPhones in 2008. This would be roughly 1 percent of the number of mobile phones forecast to be sold that year.
“Apple’s objective is not at a very high level,” Vanjoki was quoted as saying. Vanjoki said Apple’s entry would give an additional boost to the market and that the iPhone proved Nokia’s multimedia strategy was right. “This is another piece of evidence that we have been on the right track from the beginning,” he said.
Nokia said earlier this week it had sold close to 70 million phones with integrated MP3 players last year but analysts say sales of Nokia’s music-focused devices account for only a small share of that total.
04
Jan
2007
Slashgear: Word from Gizmodo is that Jobs will hold special meetings with Telefonica’s top guy Cesar Alierta about computers and the Apple Phone product. Gizmodo claims that word first came into Gizmodo Spain, but the reliability of the source is not noted in the article. The article then goes on to claim that the meetings will take place in February or even by the end of the month, but that this also means that the phone would not have a launch at MacWorld.
(…) Also, whatever is launched at the MacWorld keynote, it’s gotta be good. Jobs’s keynote has been lengthened to 2 hours instead of the regular 1 hour. (…)
21
Nov
2006
Yahoo: The long-rumored arrival of a hybrid mobile phone and iPod music player from Apple Computer Inc. has morphed from a question of “If” to “When” among fans and analysts.
(…) Chief Executive Steve Jobs and Apple are poised to roll out what has been dubbed the “iPhone,” perhaps as soon as January next year at the Macworld conference that kicks off every new year, analysts say.
“From a technical standpoint, the phone is pretty much done,” said American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu. “It’s a big endeavor and we believe it’s beyond speculation.”
Speculation has simmered since even before the introduction of the ROKR phone from Motorola that uses a slimmed-down version of the iTunes digital music jukebox to play 100 songs. But sales were lackluster as users complained the phone did not hold more songs.
Jobs and Apple are famously tight-lipped about unannounced products. But company Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer did hint about a possible mobile phone with iPod-like functions during a conference call with analysts in July to discuss third-quarter financial results.
Asked to comment on how Apple would compete with offerings such as Sony Corp.’s popular Walkman phone, Oppenheimer said he believed Apple would do just fine. “We don’t think that the phones that are available today make the best music players,” he said. “We think the iPod is. But over time, that is likely to change. And we’re not sitting around doing nothing.”