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Apple Businesses

NYT on Apple's Digital Way of Life 81

Posted by pudge from the do-you-know-the-way-to-cupertino dept.
sinalet writes "The New York Times is running an article on Apple's 'digital way of life'. Most interestingly are some comments about the history of the iPod and its developers. 'Apple says it developed the iPod in just six months, faster than any major product in the company's history. The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together starting in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.'"
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NYT on Apple's Digital Way of Life More

NYT on Apple's Digital Way of Life

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  • FP (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But isn't the NYT the same rag that supports ass sex for monkeys?

  • No need to register! Here's the Text! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Muda69 ( 718162 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @12:13PM (#8973248)
    Oh, Yeah, He Also Sells Computers
    By JOHN MARKOFF

    Published: April 25, 2004

    STROLL the corridors and the atriums on Apple Computer's corporate campus these days and you will notice that something is missing. Gone are the posters and graphics accenting the company's sleek personal computers. In their place, in the main lobby, is a striking, three-story-high billboard celebrating Steven P. Jobs's brand-new billion-dollar consumer electronics business - the iPod digital MP3 music player.

    In just two and a half years, Mr. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has managed to take a well-designed hand-held gadget, add software connecting it to Macintoshes and Windows-based personal computers and convince the recording industry that he has found an elegant solution for ending its nightmare of digital piracy. In doing so, he has shifted the emphasis of Apple from what made it famous - hip, even lovable computers - to what he hopes will keep it relevant and profitable in the future: products for a digital way of life.

    In fact, the wild success that Mr. Jobs has enjoyed with the iPod may have come in the nick of time. For all the acknowledged design and ease-of-use advantages of the Macintosh, Apple's overall PC business is still growing more slowly than that of its Microsoft- and Intel-based competitors.

    Moreover, it was obvious at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January that a horde of consumer goods and computing companies is preparing a fresh assault aimed at bringing computerized gadgets into every nook and cranny of the home. In particular, two powerful Apple rivals, Sony and Microsoft, are betting that Mr. Jobs is wrong when he says, "It's about the music!" This year, both companies plan to release more expensive, hand-held combination video and audio players that their executives hope will blow the iPod away.

    So will Apple eventually be overwhelmed by its bigger, better-heeled competitors? Throughout the technology world, there seems to be a simple, uniform answer to that question: Never underestimate Steve Jobs.

    With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.

    AND, helped by his growing prominence in Hollywood through his second company, Pixar Animation Studios, Mr. Jobs has attained a level of influence over how life is lived in the digital age that is unmatched by even his most powerful computer industry rivals. "He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era," said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.

    Since returning seven years ago to Apple, the computer maker he helped to establish in 1976, Mr. Jobs has created a fusion of fashion, brand, industrial design and computing. He has opened a chain of 78 retail stores to showcase Apple's consumer-oriented designs and to surround the company's computers with an array of digital consumer products. The stores themselves have become another billion-dollar business, a feat all the more impressive considering that one of Apple's chief competitors, Gateway, failed with a similar retail strategy during the same period.

    As a result, Apple is acting less like a computer company and more like brand-brandishing, multinational companies such as Nike and Virgin. The iPod's success is also the clearest indication that Mr. Jobs, if he is to successfully revamp Apple, will ultimately win not by taking on PC rivals directly, but by changing the rules of the game.

    The Apple that is starting to emerge may be a harbinger. The company's growth may no longer be defined by its PC market share, now a declining sliver of the PC industry, but instead by Mr. Jobs's ability to create consumer markets.

    Mr. Jobs, who says he has a 70 percent share of the market for legal music downloads and a 45 percent share of the MP3 market, see

  • WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Elwood P Dowd ( 16933 ) <judgmentalist@gmail.com> on Monday April 26, 2004 @12:22PM (#8973323) Journal
    With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.
    Say what? Did anyone else think that came out of left field? And Pattern Recognition is contemporary fiction. Not even sci fi, let alone cyberpunk. Say Jobs was born with "a technological queer eye" and you'd be making ten times more sense.

    Glad to know John Markoff still can't write his way out of a paper bag. Some of the research in this article is interesting, but... that's assuming that it's the truth.

  • The occasional period might help. (Score:5, Funny)

    by dFaust ( 546790 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @12:36PM (#8973443)
    The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together starting in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.

    Wow, I never realized that Tony Fadell, who worked briefly at RealNetworks, which is led by Rob Glaser, who of course developed the Rhapsody music service, was the one responsible for leading the iPod design team, whom developed the iPod, which has more computing power than an early mac, in just six months, or that you could have this many commas holding a sentence together, for this long, and not think back to yourself, "Perhaps this sentence is a bit long", or something to that effect, so now you can flame away, if you want.

    • Re:The occasional period might help. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I though the NYT had editors. Oh right they're too busy being political.

    • Re:The occasional period might help. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The comma should precede the closing quotation mark, and you're using "whom" improperly. If it's the subject of the sentence, use "who." See the usage note at dictionary.com.

      If you're going to be an ass, at least make sure you do it right.
    • The way it's written, it suggests that perhaps Glaser was hired from Rhapsody and is the fons et origo of the iPod/iTunes link - you don't realize that "RealNetworks" and not "Tony Fadell" is the antecedent for "led by Rob Glaser." So now there's a few million NYT readers who think that RealNetworks was the real genius behind the iPod. Nice.
    • hmm. Grammar nazi agrees.

      Hmm. Grammar nazi has to type something this sentence for 20 seconds before /. lameness filter allows her to post a comment.

    • Wow, looks like the New York Times has outsourced their journalism to overseas, apparently to people who learned English by reading IRS instructions. Of course, given their recent record of plagiarism and people lying on resumes, why wouldn't they pay less for the same incompetence?

  • New Airport to facilitate latest Apple device?? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Not much interesting in the article until one gets to near the end and the speculation as to where Jobs is going next... Why release an Airport with voIP and power over ethernet if you don't plan on releasing a new product to make good use of those features. hmm.

  • Close One (Score:5, Funny)

    by ravenspear ( 756059 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @01:10PM (#8973840)
    Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service

    It's a good thing these people's amazingly successful software business principles didn't carry over to hardware.

  • Jobs and the Zen Computers Thing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:16PM (#8975883)
    There was one passage that struck me in the NYT article, a quote from this guy:

    The success of the iPod doesn't seem to have significantly changed Apple's market share," said T. Michael Nevens, a director at both Borland Software and Broadvision and the former director of McKinsey & Company's technology consulting practice. And Mr. Nevens said that there was "no support for the theory" that the new digital appliances would bolster computer sales.

    T. Michael Nevens is completely missing the point, I think.

    I am reminded of an earlier interview with Jobs - I don't have the link, I believe it was maybe a Time article around the launch of the flatpanel iMac - and the interviewer kicked off the story with a description of his arrival. He came into the room that Jobs was in, sitting on the floor yoga-style, with a powerbook, and he was going through fonts. He sat there for 10 minutes looking at these various fonts, not speaking to the reporter. Then he looked up and said something like, 'Aren't these just beautiful? I love the fonts we licensed for OS X.'

    This is a funny insight into Steve Jobs. I think he's just really bent on the idea of these seamless computers. When you really think about it, that real plug-and-play sort of mentality has always dominated the Mac experience. I think Jobs, Zen Weirdo that he is, fucking hates the whole Windows scene because to him it is just really really tacky. Too many options that are crap, none of it consistent, none of it forming something totally coherent from top to bottom.

    So when T. Michael Nevens, or Random Slashdot Angrybot, says something about iPods not selling more Macs or affecting Mac sales, or not inreasing market share which clearly they have, just not appreciably in Macs, they are missing the context. Jobs' whole Seamless Vision Thing flows down from his input into the designs. The reason that iPods talk to iTunes so well, which talks to iPhoto and iDVD and all the other iCrap is because he just insists that it should work that way.

    Then Rob Glasner talks about opening the iPod up to Rhapsody users, of course Jobs balks because he already has made the concession to market forces in selling the iPod for Windows at all. That is his mea culpa for keeping the original Macintosh project clamped down.

    If Jobs had his way all of these little projects would make money - but if some of them have to act as bridges, or enabling mechanisms - the physical stores, the iTMS - then they will do so. The fact that all of the software and hardware work perfectly together is just the way Jobs wants it to work.

    • This story is much more intriguing than that. Bushnell assigned Steve Jobs to design the circuitry for Breakout, but it was too difficult for Jobs. He asked his friend (and Apple co-founder) Steve Wozniak to help, and promised to split the payment from Bushnell. Wozniak did it in four days and was paid $350. But it turned out that Bushnell actually paid $5,000 for Breakout -- Jobs pocketed the remaining $4,650.

      Ironically, Wozniak's design was so complex that no one at Atari could figure out how it worked.
    • When returning to apple he had a Toshiba running NT

  • What if my iLife extends beyond the headset? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Monday April 26, 2004 @04:30PM (#8976051)
    I have a Canon digital camcorder, a Fuji digital camera, an Apple iPod (mini). I don't care about making music so garage band isn't for me but if I did it would be a non-Apple keyboard.

    My point? Where is Apple going with this digital hub thing? They make great software (that they give me) for all these other pieces of equipment, so where the heck is Apple going?

    a couple thgoughts:

    The PDA/Phone - Jobs said he isn't interested in a PDA and they are way behind on cell phone tech (not to mention, everyone has one or three) but there are few good options for BOTH and if Apple could do for the PDA-Phone what they did for the digital music player, it would really shake up the market. So the chipset is Mororola or whatever, as long as the interface is from Apple they would control the experience.

    The Digital A/V Player - I don't know about you but I don't own a DVR yet because I want a device that will manage music, broadcast / captured broadcast video, and prerecorded media (CD/DVD). Another area where Apple could use iPod lessons learned and make something to build into TVs and stereo systems. It is high time HDTV's started coming with Eithernet and Airport Extreme!
    • You bought a Mac, didn't you?

      That's where Apple's going. They don't so much care about your non-Apple keyboard, and they want your digital music player to be the iPod -- but just so that it plugs in right with their software.

      iTunes sells iPods. iLife sells Macs.

    • For you Sony Ericsson P800/P900 owners out there, you might want to have a look at this page:

      clicky [google.com].

      It shows a software that turns your Symbian device into an Apple PDA phone. The automatic google translation makes it sound a little weird, but should be legible.

  • Remember how his largely untrue article about Kevin Mitnick led to a lucrative book-writing deal for himself. Watch the 2600 documentary "Freedom Downtime" [2600.com] to see their take on Markoff too. They interviewed him and tried to give him a chance, but it turns out he sucks.
  • It'll be a sad day for everyone if apple decide their 'embedded lifestyle device'-thing is more lucrative, more fun than the mac; which they then discontinue.

    They have in the past brought a lot of small things to the consumer desktop that have made life easier for everyone who uses a GUI. You don't have to use a mac, or ever have used one, to benefit from that. I think we'll see Expose-like features on everyone's desktop soon, for instance.

    Anyone else get the impression that Jobs is a little unhinged? If
  • I can't believe I actually wasted my time reading the entire article hoping it might get better.

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