Leave no fingerprints. That's the way corporate security is supposed to work. But John Theriault left big, messy ones when his Apple security agents penetrated the home of an innocent San Francisco man. Now Theriault is out of a job, and his creepy security department will probably be a lot more careful—about getting caught.
Today's New York Times features a contribution from Steve Jobs' sister, the novelist Mona Simpson: the eulogy she gave at her brother's funeral. It's one of the better things we've read in the wake of Jobs' death—if we have to read platitudes, we'd rather they be written by someone who knew and loved him personally—and in it Simpson writes about her brother's final hours:
Steve Jobs was a true obsessive. He pored over every tiny detail of every product, every ad, every store, every thing related to Apple.
There is only one Apple. It is big and powerful and it rules our lives, elegantly. So don't fuck with them. That's what the owners of Apfelkind, a small, family-owned café in Bonn, Germany, have come to learn.
Rupert Murdoch must have imagined Steve Jobs would be a feisty dinner guest. Even still, the News Corp. chairman couldn't have foreseen that, in one night at the mogul's Carmel, California ranch, Jobs would call his tech people incompetent, get a guy fired, and say that Fox News was literally destroying the world.
A video of the star-studded tribute to Steve Jobs held October 19th on Apple's Cupertino, Ca., campus has been posted to the Apple website. (It plays smoothly on Safari, while other browsers give you an "Available soon. Please check back later" message.) Running 81 minutes, the video begins with an address from CEO Tim Cook, who reveals what his boss's dying wishes for his company were: avoiding the same fate as The Walt Disney Co.
In her New York Times Sunday Book Review critique of the hottest book on the planet, Walter Issacson's 630-page biography, Steve Jobs, Janet Maslin quotes a passage in which the author extolls the triumph that is the iPad, as well as the tens of thousands of apps that can run on it. "One that he mentions," Maslin writes, "which will be as quaint as 'Pong' some day, features the use of a slingshot to shoot down angry birds."
Everyone else wanted Steve Jobs to move quickly against his tumor. His friends wanted him to get an operation. His wife wanted him to get an operation. But the Apple CEO, so used to swimming against the tide of popular opinion, insisted on trying alternative therapies for nine crucial months. Before he died, Jobs resolved to let the world know he deeply regretted the critical decision, biographer Walter Isaacson has told 60 Minutes.
If you set aside the five or so hours it took to download Apple's iOS 5 this weekend, you were richly rewarded with a suite of new functions for your favorite brain-cancer-hastening communications device. And none were niftier than "Find My Friends" — appointed in the finest iNaugahyde, it's an app that allows you to plot your friends on a map as if they were enemy ships on a blinking radar screen.
Steve Jobs had a mild form of cancer that is not usually fatal, but seems to have ushered along his own death by delaying conventional treatment in favor of alternative remedies, a Harvard Medical School researcher and faculty member says. Jobs's intractability, so often his greatest asset, may have been his undoing.
Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks helped make him the world's most recognizable CEO. But the Apple co-founder wouldn't have worn them if his employees had accepted the nylon jacket he proposed as a corporate uniform instead. Before he died, Jobs himself explained his sartorial signature to biographer Walter Isaacson, in an interview published for the first time below.
Minnesota company St. Croix, which makes the mock black turtlenecks that Steve Jobs famously wore, is having a banner sales week.
In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.
