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Steve Jobs Manga

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:08:18 +0000

Posted online is a preview of the first installment of Manga Taishō and Mari Yamazaki's manga bio of Steve Jobs.

A bizarre Steve Jobs "Groucho" photo and the story behind it

Rob Beschizza — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:42:19 +0000

John Brownlee tells the story of "a photograph of Steve Jobs so incredible, so deserved of being considered iconic, that you simply can’t believe that no one has ever even heard of it."

Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs biopic will be three half-hour-long real-time segments

Jamie Frevele — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 22:51:11 +0000

Aaron Sorkin, who is one of the only qualified people (in my opinion) for the job of writing about the late Steve Jobs, has told The Daily Beast at their Hero Summit today that his screenplay will have some pretty ambitious stuff in it. Namely, three thirty-minute segments that will take place backstage at three different Apple product launches, each of them to be filmed in real time. And that's the whole movie! Sorkin's hope is to end the movie on the memorable line, "Here's to the crazy ones," mentioned in the 1997 "Think Different" ad narrated by Richard Dreyfuss. (Here is a longer, unaired version with Jobs narrating.) But only, he says, if he can "earn" that ending. (Ahhhh... capital "W" Writing.) Sorkin also revealed which product launches the movie will feature: the Mac, NeXT, and the iPod, meaning that the movie will span Jobs' career from 1984 to 2001. Expect a lot of walking and talking, hectic backstage shenanigans, Josh Malina, many mentions of the word "thing" (don't make it a drinking game since Jobs was well-known for his inventions of things), and a long speech about how important and noble technological progress really is.

In the same talk, Sorkin also revealed that while he wasn't close acquaintances with Jobs, he did get a request from him to write a Pixar movie. So, I'll let that marinate with everyone for a while -- an Aaron Sorkin-scripted Pixar movie.

(via /Film)

Steve Jobs, Romantic

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 18:14:05 +0000

At O'Reilly Radar, Doug Hill with a worthy read on the late Apple CEO: "I’d like to talk here about a spirit that Jobs carried within himself. It’s a spirit he relied on for inspiration, although he seemed at times to have lost track of its whisper. In any event, what it says can tell us a lot about our relationship to machines. I refer to the spirit of Romanticism. I spent much of this past summer reading about the Romantics — the original Romantics, that is, of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — and it’s remarkable how closely their most cherished beliefs correspond to principles that Jobs considered crucial to his success at Apple."

Searching for Magic in India and Silicon Valley: An Interview with Daniel Kottke, Apple Employee #12

Avi Solomon — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 14:58:09 +0000

Daniel Kottke lives and works in Palo Alto, Ca. Here, he talks about the genesis of his 1974 trip to India with Steve Jobs.

Daniel Kottke was one of Apple's first employees, assembling the company's earliest kit computers with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in a California kitchen. In 1974, Jobs and Kottke backpacked across India in search of themselves; now, they are industry legends. Along the way, he debugged circuit boards, helped design the Apple III and the Mac, and became host of Palo Alto cable TV show The Next Step.

Silicon Valley

Avi Solomon: Why is Silicon Valley home to so much innovation?

Daniel Kottke: You could ask why Silicon Valley exists in the first place!

Hewlett-Packard is the obvious story. Fred Terman was the head of electrical engineering at Stanford and he was a mentor to Hewlett and Packard and the Varian brothers. Varian was a very early Silicon Valley startup. Steve Blank gave a talk called 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley'. I've been here for 30 years and I never knew this stuff. It's all about how the roots of the magic of Silicon Valley came from the war and the need to develop radar. Because I would have thought, "Oh, it's Intel and the integrated circuit".

I was just reading about the 4004, the first ever processor, born right here at Intel 40 years ago. So in World War Two the most important thing in the entire war effort was radar because the Germans had really good bombers and they also had the best radar anti-aircraft scenario. The allies couldn't effectively bomb Germany because the Germans would shoot them down. So there was this huge allied crash program to develop radar and it was based at MIT in Cambridge. Fred Terman had been there during the war, but came west to Stanford at the end of World War Two and brought a whole bunch of the radar guys. At the time radar wasn't digital it was all analog and it was radio, it was microwave.

In fact, the Varian Brothers had invented the Klystron tube, which was essential for radar.

Steve Blank: The Secret History of Silicon Valley

Then you can trace it to Shockley. Shockley invented the transistor at Bell Labs on the East Coast. He came west too and Shockley spawned Fairchild, the traitorous eight engineers who left Shockley because he was such an asshole. Fairchild really was developing the first integrated circuits. Intel was a spinoff of Fairchild. In a sense Apple is a spinoff of Intel because Mike Markkula was the business planner and funder for Apple, and he was an Intel engineer. That's where he made his money from.

So you can trace it all back to Shockley in that sense, on the digital side of the story. Anyway now it's 40 years later, and because there's so much money here and so much venture capital that so many people who want to be entrepreneurs tend to come here more than any other place. That's a large part of it but then there's also the availability of expertise and materials, the parts and pieces that you need. And there's long lead times. I read something recently about how London was the center of world commerce for a very long time through the 1800s but continued to be central long after trading activity had really moved to New York. There's just a long lag time.

In the same way with entrepreneurial activity - I think Bangalore is a huge center of entrepreneurial activity and so is the Boston area, but probably Silicon Valley is still the number one.

Avi: You were talking about sitting at Pete's Coffee shop in Palo Alto and interesting people walking by.

Daniel: Yes, and that's very inspiring. In the same way that the cafes of Paris were a spawning ground for the whole literature movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s now Silicon Valley's a little bit like that for high tech. I think there is a very healthy culture of innovation here that just really took off in the last couple of years. One thing that Silicon Valley has going for it since it's such a nexus is that there's a meet-up going on every single day of the week here in the Bay area, depending on whether it's biotech or whether it's neuro tech or whether it's social networking stuff.

In fact, I went to a meet-up a couple days ago at the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute. Howard Lieberman is the founder, he's a friend of mine. Howard's an old-time guy and he's actually charging $30 for people to come, so he's making money on this. But he doesn't seem to have any problem getting people to come. The meet-ups are a very important component because they bring people together. And you can trace the meetups back to the Home Brew Computer Club.

The Hacker Dojo, founded by David Weekly, which is kind of modeled after the Home Brew Computer Club, is very exciting and is sprouting up in other cities. Then there's Noisebridge and Hacker Spaces which is a generic movement. Anyway, there's so many gatherings like that. You've got the whole Quantified Self movement now, which is all about bio-monitoring tying in with health, and that's a huge growth area. That's all very exciting.

Steve Jobs

Avi: What was Steve Job's unique contribution to Apple?

Daniel: Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person. But, even to look back at the Apple ][ that was a lot about product design. That was kind of the seeds of Steve Jobs developing his design talents with the lightweight plastic case, even though it was never intended as anything portable.

The Apple I came right out of the Home Brew Computer Club. Woz wanted something he could bring to the computer club and show off to his friends, and portability was not even a factor except that they were comparing it with big machines that were not going to be portable. The previous generation depended on a big, heavy teletype to interface to the computer and there was no way any of that was portable. So that was what was fueling the excitement back in the Seventies. So then it comes to the Apple ][ and it was definitely Steve Jobs' idea. The Altairs, the Cromemcos, all of that generation were heavy metal boxes. It was brilliant of Steve to find Rod Holt to make a switching power supply, which was a lightweight power supply with no big heavy transformers, and to put the plastic case on it.

So you could actually take the Apple ][ under your arm and carry it somewhere. We never really advertised that but it was part of the appeal. And Steve never forgot that.

Rod Holt's Switching Power Supply for the Apple ][

You can trace the portability aspect into the Macintosh, which had a handle built right into it; that was pretty obvious. Steve also paid a lot of attention to and took a lot of inspiration from Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of Frog Design. The mouse for the Lisa was by Frog Design and they were mocking up Macintosh cases for us in 1982. Then Steve left Apple and Apple lost its way into a profusion of beige boxes.

If you remember the history the next big thing on the landscape was the Macintosh IIcx. That was a highly modular, highly manufacturable computer and that was a landmark. But it wasn't about portability and it wasn't about industrial design, it was about manufacturability. At the same time Compaq was a big success making the PC highly manufacturable and highly modular, and so the Mac IIcx was kind of Apple's answer to that.

But then the next wave was when Steve came back to Apple and now it was the iMac, which had the bubble-shaped plastic. And that was designed by Jonathan Ive, and how fortunate for Steve that he had Jonathan Ive. Jonathan Ive was already on the staff at Apple when Steve came to Apple. So Steve just saw a good thing and latched onto it. Steve's a self-taught guy. But Woz didn't have that kind of vision.

Woz was more about making do with parts; it's all about functionality. Steve Jobs brought the design aspect to it.

Avi: Did your trip with him to India influence his design choices?

Daniel: That's a good question. We didn't encounter any technology at all. I regret that I didn't even have a camera with me, but it's because we were kind of focused on a spiritual journey and getting away from materialism, and didn't want to carry a camera because that was kind of materialistic, right?

Nowadays I would say capturing a story is more about the essence. So whatever it takes to capture stories - video, audio.

Avi: Could you tell us a bit about that trip.

Daniel: That trip came about because Steve and I both got copies of 'Be Here Now' at the same time. 'Be Here Now' was breakthrough book, kind of like the psychedelic culture of America goes to India looking for holy men. That's what 'Be Here Now' represented. They rushed it into print, it came out quite early in 1972. It was a brand new story, and I had never seen anything like that and it just completely blew me away.

Personally I was always a voracious reader; I had never even been exposed to Eastern literature at all; I knew nothing about Buddhism, philosophy, that kind of thing.

'Be Here Now' by Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert

Avi: By Ram Dass, right?

Daniel: Yes, Richard Alpert. He was associated with Tim Leary. In fact the big book that came out recently was 'The Harvard Psychedelic Club'. That was Andrew Weil and Tim Leary and Richard Alpert.

Avi: So you both read 'Be Here Now'?

Daniel: Yes. We both got it in the book store at Reed College. It was such an amazing thing: there was lots to talk about. I can remember asking people, "Well this is very interesting; what else should I read next?" I really had no idea. The next book that showed up was 'Autobiography of a Yogi', which is a very compelling book. I had never seen anything like it, even though it was from the Fifties. That was Paramhansa Yogananada. Very readable book. And then the next one was 'Ramakrishna and his Disciples'. And now we're like in India!

This is the Indian current, right? And then it was Aurobindo and Sai Baba and Ramana Maharshi, right? So that was the genesis of my trick to India with Steve. We had read all these books. Robert Friedland was the head of the student body at Reed and he was part of the 'Be Here Now' scene. I don't even know how he got hooked up with them but he was. Robert had gone to India the previous year in 1971 just before the book came out. And there was a big scene of American hippies in India around Neem Karoli Baba. And it was Robert who told us we should go, and it was the Kumbh Mela.

Robert alone telling us that wouldn't have been quite enough for us to go; the fact that Robert gave us personal references of where to stay in New Delhi, that helped a lot. And add the fact that there was a Kumbh Mela - we were going! Yet still I didn't have any money. It was really Steve, who had now dropped out of Reed and he was earning money at Atari, he had money for a ticket. So Steve says to me, "We should go to India; Robert's fixed us up and it's the Kumbh Mela." And I said, "That sounds great. I don't have any money!"

And Steve said, "Well, I'll lend you the money for the ticket." And I said, "All right!" And that was the trip. It was thanks to Nolan Bushnell, who started Atari and gave Steve his job.

The Haidakhan Baba

Avi: So did that trip change you both in a major way or was it a disappointment or a widening experience?

Daniel: It was a widening experience, because we were 20 years old and traveling the world is an important thing to do.

So it was just in the category of general good travel experiences. In terms of actual real-life experiences there was nothing so earth-shaking. We went to ashrams. The Neem Karoli ashram was completely deserted, so that was a little bit of a disappointment. We went and found Haidakhan Baba who was like a Paul Bunyan. He's like this mythical reincarnating avatar you've probably heard of called Hariakhan Baba. And it was a young guy, and he was a little bit gay, he was wearing his pastel-colored saris and changing his clothes four times a day.

It was funny. It was slightly disappointing in the sense we didn't have a Neem Karoli Baba experience. The story in 'Be Here Now' was all about Bhagavan Das, who was like a stoner hippie from California who went to India and was smoking lots of ganja and he had long dreadlocks, but he had hooked up with Neem Karoli somehow, and there was a scene around Neem Karoli because he was such a popular holy man and Neem Karoli was a very remarkable human being, obviously. Richard Alpert was traveling around India, trying to figure out what it was that LSD did because they just didn't know.

They didn't have any Neurochemistry models for what LSD did except that it mimicked psychosis. But people had religious experiences, of course. Richard Alpert had miracle experiences with Neem Karoli Baba. And then when you got into Autobiography of a Yogi it's all about miracle experiences. And then when you got into Sai Baba and...

Avi: ...It's way exciting when you're in your twenties!

Daniel: Yes, it's very exciting because you're young and you don't know what the world holds in store. I personally was a scientist, very skeptical of psychic phenomenon, very dubious. But I had an open mind. And I thought, "Well if there's something going on here this is very interesting; let's go look at it." So I was disappointed in the sense that I didn't find anything tangible with regard to psychic abilities. You read those Sai Baba books and they're just gushing with all kinds of wild stuff. And now, of course, Sai Baba's passed and the biographies are coming out about what a fraud he was.

Avi: And how much gold he had under his pillow!

Daniel: Yes! So actually that whole era is just now coming to an end because Sai Baba was the last of that generation. You had Maharishi, Rajneesh, Yogi Bhajan, Gururaji.

Avi: They all rode the wave of Westerners!

Daniel: They all rode the wave, right? Sai Baba was the last. My girlfriend at Reed, Elizabeth, who was also very good friends with Steve, and I suspect that she and Steve had a little affair going at one point - because she grew up here in California - anyway, she joined Da Free John's commune, he just died a couple years ago. And the books are coming out about him now. He had a big sex scandal in his life, and he's the one who bought the island in Fiji. He went to Fiji and he knew they would never extradite him, so he just never came back. Anyway, Elizabeth was an insider, and she was very jaded about that whole thing.

So in a sense this is kind of like the end of childhood about the miracle stories about holy men. And yet - here's a good theme: now technology, between the iPhone and the internet and wi-fi and Google, all the knowledge of the world is here in your hand anywhere you are.

That's a complete miracle. The miracle is now happening, and it's technology. If you had somehow missed the last 20 years, what someone can do with their iPhone is magic.

Psychedelics

The Shulgin Index by Alexander Shulgin

Avi: Did the availability of Psychedelics trigger this technological creativity?

Daniel: Going back to the Sixties LSD definitely had an influence on my world view and Steve Jobs has been quite outspoken about the value of LSD on the evolution of his thinking. And interestingly Woz definitely never took psychedelics; he may have never even smoked pot. But he's a very unusual case; he's a mutant in a sense. I think the effect of psychedelics on the general culture is well acknowledged. There's a whole shelf full of books: 'What the Dormouse Said', John Markoff's book, that's all about psychedelics and technology. MDMA was just the later wave of that.

MDMA was so powerful because it's not an intoxicant; it leaves you lucid but the reason why it is so valuable for PTSD as a powerful therapeutic tool is because it's not an intoxicant; it's a little bit of an upper, it's related to methamphetamine but it also has some amazing ability to promote empathy, including empathy for yourself, which is what PTSD needs.

My background is in hardware. I always thought I would have a very long, busy career building prototypes and it hasn't been the case. Why? Because the world of technology has just blown past hardware - it's relentlessly moving forward. Personally I was always more identified as a technologist, and I was always very focused on my technical career. I just started going to psychedelics conferences recently, in the last couple years. Why? Because I'm kind of giving up on my technical career. We have a limited time in our lives. I used to always be focused on technical conferences and trying to get my next job but now I go to psychedelics conferences and I find it very invigorating. The people who are interested in psychedelics are the people who are interested in consciousness, which is the most interesting topic of all. It's the biggest overarching topic, okay? Because really when you talk about technology, technology is about communication more than anything. I mean it's about getting things done, but if you look at the meaning of it, from the telegraph to the radio to the telephone to the television, that's all communication. So technology in the service of human communication, that's an immense thread of life on Earth. And it's more true now than ever. If you look at what's happening right now with social networking it's all about communication. And it's very exciting.

Avi: You find the people you want to hang out with and that's a big deal!

Daniel: Yes. It's a huge deal.

Psychedelics and Brain Imaging: Dr Robin Carhart-Harris

I did a show with James Fadiman, whose book is called 'The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide', and one of the topics that came up is that psychedelics are just now having a renaissance in the sense that the very first government-sanctioned studies are just happening now. And Neuroscience has taken so many leaps forward because now we can give psychedelics to people and map their brain second by second and you can see exactly what's going on with functional MRI. So it's just now that the promise of psychedelics from 40 years ago is now still just coming to fruition.That's tremendously exciting.

So it's almost not even about the psychedelics anymore, it's about the confluence of technology and neuroscience in conjunction with the kind of work that Alexander Shulgin does. Shulgin's just published the Shulgin Index, which is a landmark event. You know what that is? It's the first ever large-scale compendium of all psychoactive substances. And he's the man to do it. Shulgin personally synthesized like 240 to 250 new substances and took them himself and wrote about what they did in his notebook.

Avi: It's ironic that the VA is now an early adopter of psychedelics for treating PTSD.

Daniel: It was the VA, which is part of the military that was giving psychedelics to the volunteers in whatever year it was, gave it to Ken Kesey and that had a huge ripple effect on the culture. And the other big huge part of the story is that we now know to take a different tack. The war on cancer has been a huge failure. The war on drugs has been a huge failure, but the war on cancer has also been a huge failure. Even though there's been immense steps forward in medical technology cancer is at an epidemic right now. Brain cancer is now just amazingly high incidence. And many types of cancer nobody even knows.

It's a huge challenge, but what we do know is that the psychedelics are proving very valuable in end of life treatment for terminal cancer - Psilocybin's especially good for that. And Aldous Huxley started that, taking Mescaline when he was dying. Anyway that's a big quality of life issue.

There's a book called 'The Biology of Belief' by Bruce Lipton which makes a very good case that everybody has cancer all the time. Everybody. We have very complex bodies and there are mutations happening all the time. We all have cancer. Your immune system does an amazingly good job dealing with it as a normal course of events. So the immune system is constantly repairing the damage. By the time your cancer shows up as a tumor it means your immune system has not been keeping up with the job.

Well, guess what? What we also know is that your immune system is very responsive to your subconscious, and when you are stressed you're shutting down your immune system because it's the fight or flight system. You're stressed and it's now, "Oh, we can't heal because we have to be fleeing," right? That's what Bruce Lipton is talking about. So psychedelics play an important part of that story because within the picture of learning to relax and promote healthy function of your immune system psychedelics have an important role to play.

Matthew Modine to play John Sculley in Jobs biopic

Mark Frauenfelder — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 23:30:11 +0000

Matthew Modine will play the man who fired Steve Jobs.

Film actor Matthew Modine has signed on to the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic entitled jOBS, which stars Ashton Kutcher as the late Apple founder. Directed by Joshua Michael Stern (Swing Vote), the film will chronicle Jobs' life from 1971 through the 21st century. Modine has been tapped to play John Sculley, the former Pepsi-Cola CEO whom Jobs recruited to lead Apple in 1983. Sculley has longbeen known as the man who "fired" Jobs two years later. The two had clashed in their respective roles at Apple, leading up to Jobs' removal fromthe company in 1985. Sculley served as Apple CEO from 1983 to 1993. Book of Mormon star Josh Gad will portray Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the film, due out this fall. The movie began principal photography in June. Early scenes will be shot in the actual Los Altos home where Jobs grew up and in thehistoric garage where he founded Apple.

Matthew Modine joins Steve Jobs biopic

Apple iMac was almost named "MacMan," until this guy stopped Steve Jobs

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:16:15 +0000

Fast Company has published an excerpt from Ken Segall's new book Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success. The excerpt recounts the tale of how former ad exec Segall helped steer then-Apple-CEO Steve Jobs away from a bad branding decision for what would eventually (thankfully!) be named the iMac.

Segall was part of the team that came up with Apple's famous "Think Different" campaign. In 1998, his agency was at One Infinite Loop one day for a dramatic unveiling of a new line of candy-colored home computers. The Apple device code-named "C1" looked like nothing else on the market at the time:

Steve gave us a challenge: We needed a name for this thing. C1 was on a fast track to production, and the name had to be decided quickly to accommodate the manufacturing and package design process. “We already have a name we like a lot, but I want you guys to see if you can beat it,” said Steve. “The name is ‘MacMan.’ ”

Read the rest here. Spoiler: Blame Phil Schiller for the awful almost-name!

The FBI file of Steven Paul Jobs

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:12:14 +0000

In 1991, the FBI began interviewing Steve Jobs and people he worked with, as the CEO of Next Inc. "began to be considered as a candidate for sensitive, presidential appointments."

Here is Steve Jobs' FBI file, released under the Freedom of Information Act.

"Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs' honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals," reads the FBI summary.

Other elements of note: as a student, he had a 2.65 GPA. There was a bomb threat against him in 1985. There's a passing reference to a "hippie friend" on whose apple orchard the man who would later co-found Apple worked. And there's an excellent specimen of early 1990s FBI fax art, page 129.

You'll be shocked, shocked I say, to learn that Apple has declined to comment on the file's release. More context: WaPo, Wired, LA Times, SF Chron.

(Photo: Jobs beneath a photograph of him and Apple-co founder Steve Wozniak from the early days of Apple during the launch of the iPad in San Francisco, January 27, 2010. REUTERS.)

Steve Jobs, the Inhumane Humanist

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:11:41 +0000

The current print issue of Reason has a wonderful, thoughtful piece by Mike Godwin about the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. I know it's hard to imagine there's anything new to say about this hyper-covered book about a hyper-covered popular figure, but: Godwin shows that yes, there is.

Mona Simpson's eulogy for her brother, Steve Jobs

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:32:11 +0000

Make some time for yourself, and maybe someone you love, to read all the way to the end. "A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs," delivered on Oct. 16 at his memorial service at the Memorial Church of Stanford University, and reprinted this weekend in the NYT.

What Kind of Buddhist was Steve Jobs, Really?

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 23:26:40 +0000

Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs' Zen teacher. Courtesy kobun-sama.org.

At PLOS, Steve Silberman goes in depth into the influence that Steve's Buddhist teachers had on Apple's mission and its products.

"I found myself in a unique position to write it, since I knew Jobs' teacher Kobun Chino, and studied at Zen Center around the same time that Steve did," Silberman tells Boing Boing. "I include a quote from a never-published interview with Steve at the end."

As a young seeker in the ’70s, Jobs didn’t just dabble in Zen, appropriating its elliptical aesthetic as a kind of exotic cologne. He turns out to have been a serious, diligent practitioner who undertook lengthy meditation retreats at Tassajara — the first Zen monastery in America, located at the end of a twisting dirt road in the mountains above Carmel — spending weeks on end “facing the wall,” as Zen students say, to observe the activity of his own mind.
Why would a former phone phreak who perseverated over the design of motherboards be interested in doing that? Using the mind to watch the mind, and ultimately to change how the mind works, is known in cognitive psychology as metacognition. Beneath the poetic cultural trappings of Buddhism, what intensive meditation offers to long-term practitioners is a kind of metacognitive hack of the human operating system (a metaphor that probably crossed Jobs’ mind at some point.) Sitting zazen offered Jobs a practical technique for upgrading the motherboard in his head.

Read the full article here.

Steve Jobs bio out early for downloads; "60 Minutes" devotes entire episode to book

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 15:21:14 +0000

As every blog and news site everywhere has already reported (including Boing Boing), the definitive biography of the late Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, is out today.

Actually, it's out today in paper, but was released yesterday for download via Amazon and iTunes. I'm willing to bet it breaks some sort of download sales record.

Last night's edition of the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes was devoted entirely, 100%, to stories on Jobs and his products.

As Mike Godwin noted on Twitter, Steve Kroft asks during the segment how Jobs, "who dropped LSD and marijuana," goes off to India and returns to become a businessman. LOL @ "dropping marijuana." The show sure does know their demo. At least they didn't say he smoked acid.

Snarking aside, the 60 Minutes pieces are worth watching. Here's part 1, here's part 2, and here's 3 (!), on iPad apps for autism. In other news this week, Obama says we're bringing troops home from Iraq, and Qaddafi's dead.

Related: Dan Lyons, former Fake Steve Jobs, on the backlash.

The Steve Jobs biography.

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:08:44 +0000

Walter Isaacson's definitive biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is out Monday.

All week long, excerpts have been leaking out, with little snippets of the late Apple CEO's reported thoughts on alternative medicine, Android, Bill Gates, being strategically mean to people, Obama, what apps Obama's staffers had on their iPads, cancer, teachers' unions and labor rights, Issey Miyake turtlenecks, the adoptive parents he loved and rebelled against, and the biological parents who gave him up for adoption (whom he is said to have referred to as "sperm and egg donors").

The first real review, by Janet Maslin in the New York Times, is out today.

You can read all 630 pages of the book for yourself soon. [Amazon].

My "Story About Steve" in Business Week

Mark Frauenfelder — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 23:06:48 +0000

[Video Link] BusinessWeek asked me to write my "Story About Steve." I never met Steve, but I had a story to tell. Here it is.

In May 2002 I got a call from my friend Alberta who asked if I'd like to be in an Apple TV commercial. Alberta had a friend who was an art director at Apple, and he needed people in Los Angeles who'd switched from a Windows machine to a Mac. That was me.

The next day, I got calls from Apple and Chiat/Day, and they e-mailed me a thick stack of forms to sign. Most of them swearing me to secrecy.

The day after that, I drove 15 minutes to a soundstage in Hollywood. At least 100 people from Apple and Chiat/Day were on the set. Errol Morris, the director, was hiding inside a white tent on the far end of the warehouse-like soundstage. I could hear his voice booming through an amplifier. Someone on the set told me he was using his invention called the Interrotron to interview the switchers. "Just wait until you see how it works," she said.

My taping was scheduled for 12 p.m. I was a little early, so I grabbed a bagel from craft services and looked for a place to sit. All the chairs on the set were occupied, but not by people. The Chiat/ Day workers had set their laptops and backpacks on all the chairs with hand-drawn signs that said "DON'T TOUCH." I asked a young woman in a smart gray outfit where I could sit. "Someplace outside," she said.

Read the rest: Mark Frauenfelder: My Story About Steve

Remembering Steve Jobs: how those who covered his life observed his death.

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:13:24 +0000

A brief roundup of some of the pieces observing the passing of Steve Jobs, by journalists who covered Apple and Jobs, and peers who knew him.

Steven Levy's piece in Wired was beautiful. Levy first interviewed Jobs in the mid-1980s.

At the New York Times, John Markoff wrote the obituary. Markoff has been at it in Silicon Valley for about the same number of years, and he wrote the book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer , in which Jobs is a central figure.

Brian Lam, the former Gizmodo editor who now runs Wirecutter, wrote a very personal story about his interaction with Jobs around the infamous "stolen" iPhone 4 prototype.

John Gruber's piece is a must: "Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot".

Walt Mossberg shared some personal observations at the Wall Street Journal.

PBS NewsHour hosted a panel last night with Vint Cerf (Google), Steve Case (AOL), and me. The video for that segment is here. Both Cerf and Case knew the man personally, and had interacted with him and the company he ran, for decades. Just before we went on-air, a member of the NewsHour team pointed me to this amazing 1985 NewsHour segment on Apple and Jobs, during a time when the company was fumbling. John Sculley was CEO. "I believe there is no such thing as a home computer market," he says in the piece. Things were different then. Lots of mullets and mainframes.

Rachel Maddow led the Rachel Maddow Show with coverage of Steve Jobs' passing on the night he died. Video here. I was a guest on the show that night. Video is embedded below. John Sculley was a guest last night on Maddow. "He was an artist," Sculley said. Don't miss that interview. Video also below.

And finally, Boing Boing developer Dean Putney, who is 21, wrote this observance as we switched off our site's temporary "skin" (an early Mac OS "emulator") to memorialize Steve's passing. Dean covered a couple of the last Apple launch events for Boing Boing, where Steve was present. I thought what Dean wrote was beautiful.

(thank you, Rachel Maddow, and Jenny Marder, Dave Gustafson, and Patti Parson of PBS NewsHour)

Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:00:27 +0000

Mike Daisey wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times arguing against Jobs hagiography. Some might say "too soon," but it's a compelling piece, with much to think about.

The Steve Jobs who founded Apple as an anarchic company promoting the message of freedom, whose first projects with Stephen Wozniak were pirate boxes and computers with open schematics, would be taken aback by the future that Apple is forging. Today there is no tech company that looks more like the Big Brother from Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial than Apple itself, a testament to how quickly power can corrupt.

For Steve

Dean Putney — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:59:52 +0000

Here I am, days after I was born, being held by my father in front of the family Macintosh.

Our family has spent an enormous amount of time and effort growing with Apple. My brother and I spent years playing with Kid Pix and Shufflepuck Café. We stayed up late reading through the manuals for Myst and plotting our progress in the provided journal. We collected the bunnies in Power Pete.

My dad bought the iLife suite as soon as it came out. It was a regular joke at home that we were "living the iLIFE!" I made videos for class. We started saving photos on the computer and sharing them with family. Recently, my dad finished scanning all our family photos and videos. It's an invaluable gift to be able to smoothly find photos of my parents' wedding, or to watch my brother being silly at the kitchen table before a cub scout meeting.

When I chose to go to boarding school in northern Maine for my last two years of high school, I bought my first iMac to celebrate. I would never have survived the unexpected challenges of living with a hundred other students surrounded by fifteen feet of snow had I not been able to retreat online and to talk to my mom on iChat on a daily basis. I still IM my mom nearly every day.

And when things went wrong, it was okay to expect perfection from Apple. They made things right for us, every time. We knew Steve– through his company –would take care of us. They replaced computers for us, gave us time and space at the stores when we needed it, and patiently answered our questions or let us vent. When I was too far away to bring my computer into a store, they sent a repairman straight to my bedroom to fix it there. Three times.

I have long felt the details and deep thought that goes into these experiences. This guided experience has made me appreciate technology and business for what it can be, and the good beyond itself that it can do. This touch towards the better and the flexibility and tools for others to expand upon it. The reassurance that someone I trust has held everything to the highest standard. I value this even more now that I work with tech professionally.

Last night the employees at the 1 Stockton Street Apple Store gave me space to mourn, and a place at their table to upload my photos so I could share that process with Boing Boing's Twitter followers. I am deeply grateful to them for that. I am also enormously grateful to Boing Boing for helping me to see my idol, a man I consider practically a family member although I never said one word to him, the last few times he appeared publicly.

I return Boing Boing back to its normal design now, and as a company we end our vigil. Now we must all pick up that uncompromising care for beauty and excellence and push the world forward ourselves.

Steve Jobs has died.

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:44:18 +0000

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, passed away today after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56. Here is the statement from Apple's Board of Directors.

Editorial note: For one day after we received this news, Boing Boing devoted its design to mimic the original Mac OS interface. Here we preserve an image of Boing Boing as it appeared at the time.

Exciting Silicon Valley startup to launch new 'telecommunications' device

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:59:38 +0000

Apple has gathered gadget bloggers and tech journalists to unveil an update to the iPhone. Gizmodo, GDGT, and Engadget have boots on the ground and/or liveblogs in the ether (some are covering remotely). Ars Technica and MacWorld liveblogs are down at the time of this blog post. Oh, wait, Gizmodo and GDGT liveblogs are down intermittently too. Geez.

Steve Jobs shills green tea and Sony hardware in Taiwan

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:48:08 +0000

Andy Ihnatko explains what's going on in the image above, which was snapped and submitted to him by a reader in Taiwan.