Search Results for: Apple

‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit

Longreads Pick

A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:

“A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:

“‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’

“The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’

“I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: Jun 17, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,287 words)

How Tim Cook is Changing Apple

Longreads Pick

Nearly one year after taking over for Steve Jobs, a report card for the new CEO. The company has never been more efficient, or fun, but some are wondering about the future of the products:

“The ultimate ‘tell’ of tectonic changes at Apple will be the quality of its products. Those looking for deficiencies have found them in Siri, a less-than-perfect product that Apple released with the rare beta label in late 2011, a signal that the service shouldn’t be viewed as fully baked. Siri’s response time has been slow, meaning the servers and software powering it are inadequate. ‘People are embarrassed by Siri,’ says one former insider. ‘Steve would have lost his mind over Siri.’

“Obviously, no one can say for sure how Steve Jobs would have reacted to anything that’s going on at Apple, and Cook seems increasingly comfortable leading the company where he thinks it should be going. Jobs was opposed to dividends and stock buybacks, for example. Yet Cook repeatedly prepared investors for a coming dividend by stating publicly that he had no ‘religious’ opinion about them. Apple announced on March 19 that it would begin paying a quarterly dividend of $2.65 a share and buy back $10 billion worth of stock.”

Source: Fortune
Published: May 24, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,939 words)

Apple’s War on Android

Longreads Pick

Steve Jobs pledged to go “thermonuclear” in Apple’s battle against Google’s Android and device manufacturers like Samsung who he claimed ripped off the iPhone and iPad designs. But bringing a patent fight to court comes with significant risks:

“Several Asian manufacturers were noodling around with similar-looking rectangular smartphones before the iPhone came to market. Tipping its hat to a fellow Korean manufacturer, Samsung notes that in 2006, nearly a year before the iPhone appeared, LG Electronics (066570) announced the round-cornered LG Chocolate, with ‘virtually all of the [design] features Apple claims’ to have patented. In December 2006, before Apple released images of the iPhone, Samsung itself filed a design patent in Korea for a similar rectangular phone called the F700. Smartphone and tablet-computer design was ‘naturally evolving’ in the direction Apple claims it has exclusive rights to use, according to Samsung. If true, that matters because basic patent law states that if an idea is ‘obvious’ to an ‘ordinary observer’ at the time of its invention, it doesn’t deserve patent protection. By attacking Samsung, Apple has inadvertently put its own patents into play.”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Mar 29, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,578 words)

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

Longreads Pick

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone manufacturing work, and what it means for the future of job creation in the United States:

“But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?

“Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

“Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

“Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. ‘Those jobs aren’t coming back,’ he said, according to another dinner guest.”

Published: Jan 21, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,734 words)

Scott Forstall, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice at Apple

Longreads Pick

In many ways, Forstall is a mini-Steve. He’s a hard-driving manager who obsesses over every detail. He has Jobs’s knack for translating technical, feature-set jargon into plain English. He’s known to have a taste for the Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG, in silver, the same car Jobs drove, and even has a signature on-stage costume: black shoes, jeans, and a black zippered sweater. (He favors Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirts for normal days at the office.) Forstall is like Steve in one other important way: He can be, in what some of his co-workers might call an understatement, a polarizing figure.

Source: Businessweek
Published: Oct 12, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,075 words)

Xerox PARC, Apple, and the Truth About Innovation

Longreads Pick

Apple was already one of the hottest tech firms in the country. Everyone in the Valley wanted a piece of it. So Steve Jobs proposed a deal: he would allow Xerox to buy a hundred thousand shares of his company for a million dollars—its highly anticipated I.P.O. was just a year away—if parc would “open its kimono.” A lot of haggling ensued. Jobs was the fox, after all, and parc was the henhouse. What would he be allowed to see? What wouldn’t he be allowed to see? Some at parc thought that the whole idea was lunacy, but, in the end, Xerox went ahead with it. One parc scientist recalls Jobs as “rambunctious”—a fresh-cheeked, caffeinated version of today’s austere digital emperor. He was given a couple of tours, and he ended up standing in front of a Xerox Alto, parc’s prized personal computer.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: May 16, 2011
Length: 23 minutes (5,814 words)

Jonathan Ive: How Did a British Polytechnic Graduate Become Apple’s Design Genius?

Longreads Pick

It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that Ive is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false—he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs’ role when the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or what—or perhaps more accurately who—propelled him to leave for the U.S. in the first place and deny Britain the talents of one of the most influential designers of the modern age.

Author: Rob Waugh
Source: Daily Mail
Published: Mar 21, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,079 words)

'Apple and Google have the most distinct propositions for your exobrain'

‘Apple and Google have the most distinct propositions for your exobrain’

Das Racist: ‘We’re Not Racist, We Love White People: Ford Trucks, Apple Pies, Bald Eagles’

Longreads Pick

last week Das Racist’s new mixtape got a glowing review and a score of 8.7 out of 10 on pitchfork, and a coveted Best New Music designation, and then the next day i was in central park seeing Pavement and when Pavement was finished playing, i texted Himanshu, one of the rappers in Das Racist, to see if i could ask him some questions.

Source: The Awl
Published: Sep 28, 2010
Length: 22 minutes (5,721 words)

Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere

Longreads Pick

On Wednesday, May 26, 2010, just after 2:30 p.m., the unthinkable happened.

Source: Fast Company
Published: Jul 1, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,774 words)