Steve Jobs just never lets up! first
Mac OS X then my
macbook then my
iPhone and now a
MacBook Air! even
Apple TV has my attention now that it is rev 2.0...
it's like I was meant to standardized on macs while at Carnegie Mellon University!
I can forgive the ripples and interruptions between 1995 and 2005 now :)
Predictions
Apple shares have done amazingly well over the past 2-3 years - I sure wish I had the discretionary funds to take advantage of this! (all the reason to get back into the full-time work grind (maybe at Apple!) while I am sorting out my life and have a solid community of co-workers around me)
Leadership
I've been doing a lot of research on Steve Jobs and his executive team. Aside from all the great keynotes he delivers I found one particularly inspiring interview from Oct 2004:
- The Seed of Apple's Innovation
- I've got the greatest family in the world, and I've got my work. And that's pretty much all I do. I don't socialize much or go to conferences. I love my family, and I love running Apple, and I love Pixar. And I get to do that. I'm very lucky.
Release Model
I got my "Backup Now" option in my menu bar in the last 10.5.2 release of
Mac OS X
"Wow, someone over there at Apple actually thought of this!" (quoted from Seed of Apple's Innovation article above!)
I am now just starting to realize the Apple release model is wildly different from the release models of the majority of software in the past - esp Windows 2000/XP (I can't speak for Vista) What is radically different is when you pay for a license of
Mac OS X, you are not only paying for maintenance, you are also paying for new enhancements to be rolled out - he did it in time for the MacWorld conference for the 1.1.3 update for the
iPhone and as I've stated above, I see it in the last Leopard update.
Now Apple is a hardware company - you purchase a
MacBook, an
iPhone, or even an
AppleTV - it includes a software that automatically updates. Contrast this to your static DVD player which has an outdated UI to play your MP3s and will likely never get updated - thus you are stuck in stonehenge!
This is nothing groundbreaking - I saw this in my
ClearCase days when people "subscribed" to yearly maintenance fees and for the record, perhaps I just never noticed it with Windows - from my perspective - all I saw Windows Update doing was downloading patch after patch after patch! I just got done installing over 60 of them to my WinXP SP2c license I just bought - amazing!
Essays