Leander Kahney's Blog, page 1523

October 24, 2011

Walter Isaacson Interview: Steve Jobs Weighed All The Options For His Cancer Treatment

Earlier today I got a chance to talk to Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs' authorized biographer. Isaacson's 620-page book hits bookstands today. He spoke while preparing to check out of his hotel in New York, where he's conducting a whirlwind media tour for the book, which promises to be one of the biggest hits of the year.

In our interview, Isaacson revealed that Jobs was actually a lot more active in his cancer treatment than previous reports have suggested. He also thinks Apple will be OK without Jobs because he spent a decade building a great team and an institution infused with his DNA. And that the man, like the company he built, was an intriguiging mix of the arts and sciences.

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Leander Kahney: It's an astonishing piece of work. I'm amazed.

Walter Isaacson: You know more about this than anybody.

LK: I didn't know so much. He was so private.

WI: He was private but he also wanted his story told.

LK: I read that you were pretty skeptical initially — or reluctant.

WI: When he first talked to me in 2004 I thought he was a young enough guy, I'll do it in 20 or 30 years when he retires. I didn't realize that he was sick. In fact, it wasn't until 2009 that we started talking seriously.

LK: He knew then that he had cancer, right?

WI: He was about to be operated on, yes.

LK: But he didn't tell you that, he kept it quiet?

WI: I don't think he told a lot of people until he had his operation.

LK: How was the experience of the last two years?

WI: It was intense. He was more intense and more emotional and more open than I expected. We spent a lot of time just in conversation walking and talking. The essence of him I think is the ability to tie a great emotional intensity to a kind of rational technological business sense.

LK: Did you like him?

WI: Yes. I liked him when I first met him in 1984 and I sort of liked him but was rather charmed by his intensity.

LK: Right. A lot of people talk about his charisma. But that's different to getting to like somebody. So you got to like him. Did he scream at you?

WI: He got mad at me when he saw a proposed design for the cover about eight months ago. He expressed himself in a full and frank manner when we were on the phone. He told me a variety of words that he thought of the proposed cover. Then he said that he would really only go forward if he had some input into the cover design and I spent about two seconds thinking about that and said sure. He's got the best design eye in the world so I was quite happy for him to have input and mentioned it in the introduction to the book so that everybody knows.

LK: This was the only input he's had in the book?

WI: Right. He told me he didn't want to read it in advance and he said that there would be a lot in there that he wouldn't like but he didn't want it to feel like an in-house book.

LK: How do you feel about it? How do you think it turned out?

WI: I think that it has a narrative arc to it of a person who is both rebellious and part of a counterculture, but who can connect to being sensible and scientific and businesslike. To me, that's the essence of his life. It's connecting these two opposing strands. That of the counter-culture and poetry and that of processors.

LK: It sort of parallels the very essence of Apple too.

WI: He told me at the very beginning in 2009 that Edwin Land (of Polaroid) had once told him that standing at the intersection of humanities and technology was a great place to be. I think that made a deep impression on Steve and it turned out to be a theme that became part of the book.

LK: One of the biggest revelations from the book was his delayed cancer treatment.

WI: Yeah. That fits into the theme in a way because it wasn't just as if he was trying counterculture cures, or whatever you want to call it — a New Age way of treating it.

He was doing that but at the same time he starts soliciting the best scientific advice, including targeted therapies and stuff at the frontiers of DNA sequencing. So it's sort of both sides of his personality become engaged and eventually they connect.

Now, it took him longer. When he decides to have the operation after people are telling him to and he's absorbed the information. I think he would have preferred, once he knew he was going to have the operation, I think he thought he should have done it sooner. But that's only in retrospect, I'm sure.

LK: So he was actually more proactive? He was looking at all the different options — alternative as well as traditional?

WI: Right. And I don't make it incredibly clear in the book but I do talk about all the DNA sequencing and frontline scientific approach. So you have that connection even with his cancer situation — the connection of that New Age rebel who resists conventional authority and the rigorous believer in technology and science. And in the end, the science wins out and he does all sorts of therapies that keep him alive wonderfully for seven years, during which he brings out iPods and iPhones and iPads. And he kept on, as he put it, being one little lily pad in front of the cancer for many, many years.

LK: I was struck that he always obsessed with death. He almost had a Freudian Thanatos syndrome.

WI: Yes, a lot of people wrote about it and talked about it. He talked about life being an arc and that were all going to die. I also think that it comes from his Buddhist training that life is a journey and that the journey is the reward.

LK: The Buddhism thing. I don't really recall him talking about it at all. Was he really a Buddhist? Did he really believe?

WI: He felt he got a lot from his Buddhist training. He told me — and it's in the book — he had gone on a quest for enlightenment to India and he comes back with the Zen Buddhist appreciation for intuition and experiential, he calls it, and wisdom. And he says not everything can be done analytically. This intuitive experiential wisdom that he learned to appreciate — and, if I might say, that too fits into the arc of the narrative that I was describing of there being two parts of Steve's personality and he's able to connect the ethereal part to the analytical part.

LK: What about the spiritual part? Believing in life after death, in reincarnation?

WI: At the very end of my book I have him talk about that, sitting in his garden. It's the last page of my book. He said he's 50/50. Sometimes he believes there's an afterlife and we all live on and the experiences we have live on. And sometimes he thinks it's a switch, when you die, 'click,' you're gone.

I think he felt that. He kept telling me, 'It's the great mystery.' And for somebody like him, he could appreciate the mystery instead of just trying to know the answer. The journey is the reward.

LK: How do you think Apple is going to do without him?

WI: I think that his goal was not just to create great products but to create a great company that had this connection between creativity and technology infused into its DNA. He felt that's why he had to be rough on people at times, to create a team that would have a company that would last for generations. That's why he was so interested in designing the new headquarters because he believed it would be an enduring expression of that. I think that he has a pretty amazing team. People say that he was hard to work with but the proof is in the pudding and people actually remain loyal to him and he created a team of A players and they stay fanatically loyal to him. For all the talk — including in my book of him being hard to work with — you also have to look at what was the outcome. You have a team in there now that ranges from Tim Cook to Jony Ive: from totally focused engineers to very artistic people. And I think that Apple is the company most likely to be around in generations from now, like Disney.

LK: Andy Herzfeld at the end of the book had a very interesting quote that he felt that Steve was sometimes unnecessarily mean.

WI: Steve answered that to me by saying, 'There's probably a more velvet-gloved way to have done things. We all talk in code but that's not who I am. I'm just some middle class kid from California. And we have rip-roaring arguments at Apple where we can each tell each other that you're full of shit and to me that creates the best team. And it makes sure you don't get the bozo explosion where there's too many mediocre people there.'

I think that there was probably a more velvet-gloved way to do things. But people who wear velvet gloves don't often make a dent in the universe.

LK: Yes there's definitely truth to that but there's also the experience with Daniel Kottke, his good friend, and how he didn't have any early shares in Apple.

WI: I talked about that on 60 minutes last night. I don't know how to say this politely but you have to make certain cut-offs. This is the two sides of Steve, which is the old rebel side but also the rigorous business side. And you have to say: "At this level people get stock options." But then you can't go and randomly say, 'But this kid was in college with me and in the garage and I love him so let's give him some.'

Eventually Kottke did get options too. But Steve has a very emotional impact on people, so when he acts in a very rational way it can upset people.

LK: I see, okay.

WI: Also, you have to judge people. You have to judge if these people are valuable to the future of the company.

LK: It always seems the company first.

WI: I think his passion for perfection drove him to care intensely about having only the best players at Apple. 'A Players' like to work with A players and that was his goal at Apple.

LK: And did he very much achieve this in your opinion?

WI: Absolutely. I mean look, and maybe I'm part of the reality distortion field, but home run after home run. People said the iPod is not going to work. Then the iPhone, the iPad. Each one of these digital hub devices becomes a home-run out of the blue.

Likewise, ten movies in a row (at Pixar) are home runs. So you have to look at the result.

How many home runs does any other company have in a row? One or two or three? But not this many. And so you know, this is the company that will be remembered a generation from now.

LK: Do you think Pixar is a good example of why Apple will be okay without Steve?

WI: Yes, once again it's a company that stands at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology. And once again he has created a great headquarters for it and he also nurtured a great team. Pixar is doing just fine and Apple is doing just fine.

LK: Well, better than just fine. Could I just ask you just one question that the readers asked? They asked about his Armenian heritage. Did he speak Armenian?

WI:-No. His mother was a refugee from Armenia. Clara Jobs was an Armenian refugee but her parents came over and as far as I know Steve never spoke any Armenian.

LK: What was his favorite App? Did he have one?

WI: He told me that he loved the newspaper apps because he really hoped the iPad would be able to save the business of journalism just as the iPod helped music.

LK: Great. Many thanks for your time.

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Published on October 24, 2011 15:16

Steve Jobs Bio on Track to Become the Best-Selling Book of 2011 on Amazon

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The official Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson went live on the iBookstore and Amazon last night, and the title hit shelves everywhere this morning.

Initial pre-orders of the bio ushered it to the top of the charts on Amazon, and after less than 24 hours of availability, the book is on track to become Amazon's best-selling title of 2011.

An Amazon spokeswoman told Reuters:

"The way things are trending, it could very likely be our top-selling book of the year," Amazon spokeswoman Brittany Turner said in a statement.

Turner did not say whether eBook versions of the biography are out-selling physical versions.

The bio is currently the top-selling title in the iBookstore as well.

Biographer Walter Isaacson was on 60 Minutes last night to talk about the book and his interactions with Jobs. The book is full of revelations about Jobs and the company he created.

We have an interview with Isaacson coming up soon. Stay tuned.

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Published on October 24, 2011 14:23

Kevin Rose Wants You to Discover The Best Things With Oink on Your iPhone

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Serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose is known for founding companies like Digg and Revision3. He now works at an app development company he started called "Milk."

Rose demoed his newest creation at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week. "Oink" is an upcoming app that lets users rank and share things with each other. Taking cues from Digg, the platform will act as an all-encompassing tool for finding the best things out there — whether you're in need of a good massage or a slice of pizza.

The whole concept of Oink is based off hastags for things like #coffee or #rollercoasters. Oink is also heavily focused on location. Location ranking from your social graph improves upon services like Google Maps, Yelp, and Foursquare that attempt to show you places to visit with user reviews.

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Oink wants to answer the question, "Where can I find the best _____ ?"

Like Quora, Oink users gain credibility as more people rank up their recommendations for different hashtags. The idea is that eventually someone will become the local 'expert' for a certain niche.

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Any type of item can be ranked with Oink. Rose gave the example of tea; you can see if it's been voted up by your friends, ranked by tag, or where the best #teas are within a 1-mile, 5-mile, or 25-mile radius.

Rose believes he has a compelling product that can compete with products like Yelp and Foursquare. Watch his presentation and be the judge:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv0xEAX3vFw

You can follow Oink on Twitter for updates on the app. A beta release should go live in a few weeks. More information on Rose's app development company can be seen on Milk's website.

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(via TechCrunch)

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Published on October 24, 2011 13:59

China Mobile Has 10 Million iPhone Users And No Partnership With Apple [Report]

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Image courtesy of The Tenth Dragon on Flickr

The world's largest carrier, China Mobile, has over 600 million wireless subscribers. 10 million of these customers have iPhones despite that fact that China Mobile is not an official Apple partner.

What's even more surprising is that the iPhone isn't currently compatible with China Mobile's TD-SCDMA 3G network, meaning that these 10 million unofficial iPhone users are all limited to 2G data speeds.

Reuters reports:

"China Mobile, the world's largest mobile carrier by subscribers, has 10 million iPhone users even though it does not yet have an agreement with iPhone maker Apple, its chairman told Reuters on Monday.

Wang Jianzhou also said Apple had promised to make an iPhone compatible with China Mobile's TD-LTE standard when its next-generation model comes out. He could not say when this would happen."

Apple has acknowledged its potential business in China multiple times in the past. The company has called China "very key to our results," and Tim Cook sees Apple as "just scratching the surface right now" when it comes to market penetration in Asia.

China Mobile obviously represents a huge opportunity for Apple. The Cupertino company has taken the issue so seriously that Tim Cook visited carrier execs in China recently. Even Steve Jobs himself became personally involved in an attempt to reach an agreement.

Rumors have been circulating for months that China Mobile will be getting the next-gen iPhone in 2012, and Wang Jianzhou's comment seems to corroborate that story. It makes sense for Apple to introduce a LTE-compatible iPhone next year, and a launch on China Mobile in Asia would undoubtedly result in landmark sales. But like all Apple rumors, only time will tell.

At the moment, China Unicom is the only official iPhone partner in China. The nation's other two major carriers, China Mobile and China Telecom, are allegedly in talks with Apple to offer the iPhone as early as next year.

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Published on October 24, 2011 12:59

How to Hide App Store Purchases [iOS Tips]

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One of the new features Apple added in the App Store alongside iCloud and iOS 5 is the ability to re-download all of your purchases on any authenticated iOS device. This means that all of your purchased apps are available to see and download in the App Store at any time.

If having a concrete record of all your past app purchases isn't really your thing, you can actually hide specific App Store purchases.

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It's very easy to hide purchases in the App Store. On the iPhone, navigate to the "Updates" section of the App Store app and tap on the "Purchased" menu. You will then see a list of previously purchased apps categorized into "All" and "Not On This iPhone."

Swipe with your finger on each app to bring up the option to hide that purchase. Tap "Hide" and the desired app will be erased from your purchase history. The same option can be used in the "Purchased" section of the App Store on the iPad.

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If you want to unhide an app, swipe to the bottom of the "Featured" section of the App Store and tap on your Account ID. You'll be able to unhide previously hidden purchases from your account page.

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Published on October 24, 2011 12:13

This LSD Love Guru Gave Steve Jobs His "Reality Distortion Field"

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Steve Jobs was a man who adopted many mentors in his life, but one of his mentors deserves more than a passing look: Robert Friedland, a charismatic, free love wacko who dealt LSD and had his own free love commune on the same apple orchard that

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Published on October 24, 2011 09:12

This LSD Love Guru Turned Gold Mining Billionaire Gave Steve Jobs His "Reality Distortion Field"

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Published on October 24, 2011 09:12

Smartphone Sales Decline: Good News for Apple, 'Ominous' Trend for Android

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Source: Morgan Keegan

A first-ever drop in smartphone sales could be good news for Apple but portend 'ominous signs' for the many companies tied to the Android mobile operating system. Despite launching several Android-based phones, carriers AT&T and Verizon both reported a drop-off in smartphone sales during the September quarter, one analyst noted Monday.

"We believe slowdown in Android/Blackberry/[Windows Phone] sales at AT&T/Verizon likely indicates a reasonable number of customers choosing not to upgrade in Q3, but rather waiting to switch to the iPhone in Q4," Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt told investors Monday.

McCourt adds that the drop-off in smartphone demand could especially hurt Android vendors, "given that there were a number of Android launches in the quarter."

Both Apple and Android vendors also must readjust to a maturing smartphone market. Now that nearly half (45 percent) of paid-paid AT&T and Verizon Wireless subscribers have smartphones, the companies will need to experiment with "lower priced plans" to continue to grow smartphone sales, the analyst notes. Already Verizon is testing its BlackBerry Social plan to entice lower-cost plan owners to purchase the RIM smartphone.

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Published on October 24, 2011 08:43

iOS 5 Allows You to Save Videos to Your Camera Roll

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If you received a video file via email or stumbled across a clip in Safari that you wanted to save under iOS 4, it just wasn't possible. You could watch it, but you couldn't save it. However, one feature you may not yet have noticed in iOS 5 is that you can now download videos to your camera roll.

As long as you have iOS 5 installed on your device, you can save a video to your camera roll in the same way that you'd save a picture — simply by holding your finger down on the clip until you get the option to save it.

This feature isn't available everywhere — such as in YouTube, where you cannot download videos — but will work for video files you receive in Mail and Messages, or discover in Safari and other apps.

Are you pleased that you can now save videos in iOS 5?

[via TiPB]

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Published on October 24, 2011 08:01

The Best Revelations, Quotes & Stories From Steve Jobs' Official Biography [Live Updating]

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Walter Isaacson's much anticipated biography of Steve Jobs is releasing today, and we're already busy poring through it, gaining new insight into the life and philosophies of Apple's volatile, sometimes enigmatic co-founder.

Throughout the morning, we'll be live updating this post with some of the best revelations, funniest stories, most interesting quotes and most enjoyable tidbits of the biography.

• Jobs' birth mother was sent to San Francisco when she was pregnant with him to arrange a closed adoption, and her only requirement was that the adoptive parents be college graduates. But the adoptive parents backed out after the birth because they wanted a girl, so the parents Jobs did end up with were high school dropouts.

• There was apparently a standoff for weeks because the birth mother wouldn't sign the adoption papers after learning about their level of education, and only relented when the couple had to promise they would set up an education fund for Steve. She was also holding out hope that her father would die soon so that she could marry Jandali and take her baby back.

• One of the homes Steve Jobs' family moved into when he was a kid was an Eichler home. Joseph Eichler specialized in clean lines and open aesthetics for common people. Jobs has cited him as a direct inspiration. In fact, he described the clean elegance of those homes as the "first vision for Apple."

• Daniel Kottke's girlfriend at Reed didn't like Jobs because the first time they met he spent the whole evening grilling her over how much money it would take to get her to have sex with another man.

• Apparently in college Jobs and Kottke liked to play a 19th-century German variant of chess called Kriegspiel, in which the players sit back-to-back; each has his own board and pieces and cannot see those of his opponent. A moderator informs them if a move they want to make is legal or illegal, and they have to try to figure out where their opponent's pieces are.

• After Jobs dropped out of Reed and began auditing classes, he took a calligraphy course after seeing beautiful posters on campus. He became interested in serif and sans serif typefaces, the space between letters, and typography in general. He said that if he had never taken that course, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. "And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no computer ever would have had them."

• At Atari, Steve Jobs was assigned to work with a straitlaced engineer named Don Lang. The next day Land complained, 'This guy's a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why did you do this to me? And he's impossible to deal with.' Jobs clung to the belief that his fruit-heavy vegetarian diet would prevent not just mucus but also body odor, even if he didn't use deodorant or shower regularly. "It was a flawed theory."

• In 1982, Apple's interim president Mike Marakkula's wife told him to find a replacement. Steve Jobs knew he was still too immature to be Apple's president, so they went for Don Estridge, the man behind IBM's PC business, which was outselling Apple's . He turned down Apple's offer because "he enjoyed being a part of the establishment, a member of the Navy instead of a pirate."

• At Apple, John Sculley said that most Apple employees were more badly dressed than Pepsi's maintenance men.

• Sculley described Pepsi's marketing success with the Pepsi Generation campaign as one in which a lifestyle was sold, an optimistic outlook, not a product.

• Steve Jobs was fascinated by the three hundred pound oak doors at Sculley's Greenwich mansion, so carefully hung that they swung open with the touch of a finger.

• In 1983, Apple's ad salesmen would say: "What's the difference between Apple and the Boy Scots? The Boy Scouts have adult supervision."

• Sculley's first meeting with Apple's management at Pajaro Dunes, California was absolute chaos. Steve Jobs attacked the Lisa team for an unsuccessful product while they openly taunted him about his failure to deliver the Macintosh. During the bickering, a small earthquake rumbled the room. "Head for the beach!" someone shouted. When they all got to the beach, though, someone screamed that a tidal wave was coming, so they all ran the other way. This was a team that needed some management.

• The famous 1984 ad was originally used to rally Apple's demoralized sales force, who were soundly being beaten by IBM in the PC market and had two products — the Lisa and Apple III — dead in the water. It was only months later that video was broadcast as an ad.

• Steve Jobs knew he had abandoned the hacker spirit, and the Macintosh was a machine that violated many of the spirits of the hacker code: it was expensive, couldn't be expanded and it took special tools to just open the case. "It was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by Big Brother rather than by a hacker." The 1984 ad was Steve's way of reaffirming to himself his desired self-image.

• Sculley got cold feet about the 1984 ad, but when Woz saw it, he was blown away, even offering to pay half the ad rate to get it shown at the Super Bowl out of his own pocket.

• Although Steve Jobs thought Microsoft made terrible applications, Jobs became so enamored of Excel that he made a secret deal with Bill Gates to have Excel exclusively on the Mac for two years. In exchange, Apple would indefinitely license Microsoft's BASIC and shut down their own team. This gave Microsoft a real lever in future negotiations. Steve Jobs was so confident that he'd locked Microsoft in as an Apple-only developer he said that "we'll all be dead" before Microsoft would release Excel for IBM PCs.

• When Microsoft announced Windows, Steve Jobs hauled Bill Gates down to Cupertino to scream at him in front of his employees. "You're ripping us off!" he shrieked. Gates coolly responded: "Well, Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal a TV set and found out you had already stolen it."

• Steve Jobs' obsession with aesthetic details could be taken to ludicrous extents. For example, when they built a state-of-the-arty factory in Fremonth to manufacture the Macintosh, Jobs wanted all the machines repainted in bright colors. Apple's manufacturing director, Matt Carter, fought him on it, because this was precision equipment, and repainting them could make them not work right. Steve persevered, and one of the most expensive machines broke, being known as Steve's folly.

• Steve's cavalier attitude towards factory working conditions started early: in 1984, when showing off Apple's Macintosh factory to the first lady of France, Jobs became angry when more time was spent asking about overtime and vacation them than admiring the fancy machines, causing Jobs to quip: "If she's so interested in their welfare, tell her she can come work here any time."

• According to Jean-Lous Gassée, "the only way to deal with [Steve] was to out-bully him." Gassée once grabbed Steve's lapel and told him to shut his mouth.

• Burrell Smith (who designed the Macintosh's motherboard) decided to leave Apple in early 1985, and figured out the perfect way to quit that would "nullify the reality distortion field." He proposed just walking into Steve's office, pulling down his pants, then urinating on Steve's desk. "What could he say to that? It's guaranteed to work." Unfortunately, Steve heard about it before hand, and seemed more excited about whether Smith would actually do it than upset about him leaving.

• After John Sculley confronted Steve Jobs about a planned coup Jobs had orchestrated in 1985, he was such a wreck that he came back absolutely shattered, with a stutter that he had conquered in childhood suddenly re-emerging. Sculley's wife was so upset she drove down to Cupertino and confronted Jobs, where she said: "When I look into most people's eyes, I see a soul. When I look into your eyes, I see a bottomless pit, an empty hole, a dead zone."

• After being all but fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs went to Florence, where he fell in love with the paving stones, which came from Il Casone quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. Twenty years later, Steve was finally able to use this stone in an Apple product: the Apple Store.

• The first NeXT Computer had its roots in a product Jobs had headed up at Apple called the Big Mag, which would be a machine for academic researchers and have a UNIX operating system by the friendly Mac interface.