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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 […]

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 […]

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh—the mouse and the […]

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. […]

It’s intriguing, if depressing, to imagine what the digital world would have been like if Kobun had given Jobs the opposite advice, along the lines of Jobs’ own now-infamous challenge to Pepsi CEO John Sculley: “Do you want to sell stylish electronic gadgets for the rest of your life, or come with me and vow […]

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, […]

Now, more than a year later, he insists that he has managed to put Apple behind him. Surely, this is wishful thinking. Apple had always been a reflection of Jobs’ personality, a mirror of his eccentricities and passions. He used to talk, for instance, about making Apple an “insanely great” place to work, but he […]

“Everything at Apple is as much about perception as about reality,” the company’s former C.E.O. John Sculley said to me a few days after his old partner and rival, Steve Jobs, unveiled the alliance he had engineered with Microsoft. Since Sculley was deposed, in 1993, after running Apple for ten years, he has rarely spoken […]

I was on sabbatical when Jason got his hands on the iPhone prototype. An hour after the story went live, the phone rang and the number was from Apple HQ. I figured it was someone from the PR team. It was not. “Hi, this is Steve. I really want my phone back.” He wasn’t demanding. […]

It had taken a while for the world to realize what an amazing treasure Steve Jobs was. But Jobs knew it all along. That was part of what was so unusual about him. From at least the time he was a teenager, Jobs had a freakish chutzpah. At age 13, he called up the head […]