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Tim Cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran – he’d worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years – with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with […]

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 […]

What you’ll see on the following pages is hard to misinterpret: We have big issues, but the U.S. is in sounder shape than Apple was in 1997, when it lost a billion dollars. That’s the year Steve Jobs returned as CEO and took extreme measures, including agreeing to make Internet Explorer the Mac’s default browser. […]

Jef Raskin, my father, helped develop the Macintosh, and I was recently looking at some of his old documents and came across his February 16, 1981 memo detailing the genesis of the Macintosh. It was written in reaction to Steve Jobs taking over managing hardware development. Reading through it, I was struck by a number […]

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called “I’ve Got a Secret.” He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact […]

“Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac, and the other was to copy Lotus’ success in the spreadsheet—basically, the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to […]

In his controlling hands, technology became both the engine and the emblem of transcendence. But as the iPhone slips from his grasp, Jobs is making his final bid for immortality. “Steve Jobs has become Steve Jobs by doing what nobody else has done before—by treating computers not just as tools but as mirrors, by making […]

Ask Apple CEO Steve Jobs about it, and he’ll tell you an instructive little story. Call it the Parable of the Concept Car. “Here’s what you find at a lot of companies,” he says. “You know how you see a show car, and it’s really cool, and then four years later you see the production […]

“We’ve done studies that prove that the mouse is faster than traditional ways of moving through data or applications. Someday we may be able to build a color screen for a reasonable price. As to overpricing, the start-up of a new product makes it more expensive than it will be later. The more we can […]