Steve Jobs

SophosLabs: Steve Jobs has now done what many of us thought would happen sooner or later – stepped off the very prestigious CEO plinth, taking a less taxing role as chairman of the Apple board. The new CEO will be Jobs’ right-hand man Tim Cook. Despite Jobs having been on medical leave since January this year, the markets were all a tumble once the news of his resignation hit the markets, with Apple share prices dipping at one point by 5%. ...

Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin considered hiring Apple CEO Steve Jobs as the company’s first CEO, according to a new documentary. After interviewing a dozen unsuitable candidates during Google’s early years, Page and Brin went to meet Jobs, a personal “hero” of theirs. The pair then asked investor John Doerr, “Why can’t he be our CEO?” The anecdote comes from an episode on Page and Brin from the Bloomberg documentary series “Bloomberg Game Changers.” Earlier this month, the Bloomberg series, which looks at “today’s most influential leaders,” aired an episode on Jobs. ...

During a 90-minute presentation on Wednesday at Apple headquarters, Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s latest thinner MacBook Air 11-inch and 13-inch models, along with the new operating system. The redesigned Mac notebook combines features from the iPhone and iPad with those of a MacBook. The new MacBook Air features a multi-touch that offers you an iPad/iPhone-like experience. Instead of a hard drive, the new thinner, lighter and expensive Mac laptop uses flash storage. Jobs said that all notebooks will be like this someday and added that the Air is the future of the MacBook and all laptops. ...

Mashable: After iOS 4.2, iPad’s screen rotation lock switch, located on the upper-right edge of the device, will become a mute switch, similar to the mute switch on the iPhone. According to Steve Jobs himself, who answered one of 9to5Mac’s readers in an email, the change is permanent, and – although it’s just a matter of a software tweak – users won’t be able to switch between the two functions. ...

Peter Kafka at All Things Digital thinks that Steve Jobs might want to buy Facebook. His reasoning is that Jobs, when asked what Apple plans to do with its now $51 billion in cash, said, “We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we’ll be in a position to take advantage of it.” Kafka believes that one such “unique strategic” opportunity is called Facebook. ...

Apple’s CEO says that Android is fragmented and that the open vs. closed dilemma is not important as long as Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system manages to provide a better user experience. “Many Android OEMs install proprietary user-interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The user is left to figure it all out. Compare this with iPhone where ever handset works the same. (…) We think the open vs closed is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is: What’s best for the customer? Fragmented vs. integrated. We think Android is very very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day.” ...

Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, said that Google’s mobile platform was “fragmented” and bad for developers and consumers. Steve Jobs launched in to an astonishing five-minute critique of rival companies, operating systems and platforms during the earnings call, in which Apple announced record profits of $20bn for the quarter. He said that the Google Android platform was “fragmented”, and not as open as some people made out, while also saying that iPad-style tablet computers with smaller 7in screens would be “dead on arrival”. ...

Lately, it’s not that hard to get a direct answer to your query from Steve Jobs himself; he responds to burning questions via e-mail quite often. Unfortunately, his answers rarely contain more than a few words. Macrumors reports that a reader asked Steve Jobs via e-mail why the iPad cannot print documents. Steve’s answer? “It will come.” Even if we disregard the possibility that the e-mail may be fake, Steve’s answer gives us very little to be happy about as we have no idea when printing to the iPad will come. Will it come this summer? When the next version arrives? Sometime in the next decade? We’re optimists, so we’ll just pretend that Steve meant “soon.” ...

The CEO of Apple is certainly no stranger to the stage, being known for giving keynotes that typically have the effect of rendering tech geeks into little piles of goo after the announcement of a new product. But now Mr. Jobs — or at least, the story of his career — will be gracing a new stage: an Off Broadway theatre. Playwright Mike Daisey wasn’t scheduled to perform his new monologue about the Apple head honcho until next year, but popular demand from New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre has pushed up the premiere of Notes Toward the Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs to a one-night-only run on April 22. The venue’s artistic director was reportedly so excited about the work that he commissioned a one evening run even though the play is officially a “work in progress and not ready for review.” ...

In an e-mail to a German customer, Steve Jobs confirmed what most of us surmised last week: There will be no iPhone OS 4.0 support for original 2G iPhone owners. At last week’s iPhone OS 4.0 announcement, Apple let iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod touch owners know that those devices will not support multitasking, although they will support other new features. For owners of the nearly three-year-old original iPhone, it looks like iPhone OS 3.1.x will be the end of the line in terms of official OS updates. Jobs didn’t explain why Apple is no longer going to offer software updates for the original iPhone, though we suspect it’s part of a plan to phase out the product line. ...