Steve Jobs working on Apple’s next product day before his death
Steve Jobs was never known to be a man who sat still and, even while being away from the company for nearly 1/3 of its history, still lived and breathed Apple. That’s why this account isn’t incredibly surprising, even as it reaffirms how dedicated he was to making the company’s products the best they could be. Apparently, according to PC Mag, the day of the announcement of the iPhone 4S, Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank was talking to Apple CEO Tim Cook, when Cook got a call: I visited Apple for the announcement of the iPhone 4S [at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California]. When I was having a meeting with Tim Cook, he said, ‘Oh Masa, sorry I have to quit our meeting.’ I said, ‘Where are you going?’ Since this was after the announcement of the iPhone 4S, it is likely that Cook was referring to another product in Apple’s pipeline, although it’s unclear whether that was a new iPhone or another upcoming product. I personally find it very telling that Cook refers to Jobs as ‘my boss’.
Face to faith: How western Buddhism has changed in 50 years
It's 50 years since Buddhist teachers started arriving in the west in the early 60s and Buddhism crash-landed into the counterculture. So what have we learned about western Buddhism? 1. It's not all about enlightenment. Many who found Buddhism in the 60s saw nirvana as the ultimate peak experience. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Steve Jobs
Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it. One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive.
Buddhists’ Delight
If you really want to hear about it (to borrow a phrase from Holden Caulfield), I was on retreat. Perhaps I should say, I was in retreat, from a frenetic Manhattan life, hoping to find the balance and harmony that have formed the basis of the Buddhist tradition ever since Siddhartha Gautama discovered enlightenment around 2,500 years ago while sitting under a Bodhi tree in Northern India. The fundamental insight of the Buddha (the Awakened One) is this: life consists of suffering, and suffering is caused by attachment to the self, which is in turn attached to the things of this world. Only by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of perpetual wanting can we be truly free. Not that I am ready to renounce this world, or its things. I wasn’t eager to end like the Buddhist couple who went on a retreat in Arizona and turned up, one dead, one nearly dead from dehydration, in a remote cave. Many converts are what Thomas A. So who are these — dare I coin the term?
How Steve Jobs transformed the tech industry
It's difficult to overstate how dramatically Steve Jobs reshaped how we interact with computers. The irascible, brilliant impresario led a transition from minicomputers and IBM PCs squashed into beige metal boxes to the Macintosh, the iPhone, and the concept that technology should be fun to use. Thanks to more than a dozen books about the Apple co-founder, and movies like Pirates of Silicon Valley, much of Jobs' life has become well-known. He started Apple with legendary engineer Steve Wozniak, at a time when the personal computer industry barely existed, after dropping out of Reed College. Jobs returned to Apple in 1996--CNET's headline at the time quipped that Apple had "acquired" Steve Jobs--and then went on to reshape the music industry and the mobile phone business. With the iPad, Apple validated, or perhaps even created, the tablet business. But what's not as well-known is how Jobs' later successes arose from his previous failures. The cube was a flop. "What would I do? The irony?
The Buddha
This documentary for PBS by award-winning filmmaker David Grubin and narrated by Richard Gere, tells the story of the Buddha’s life, a journey especially relevant to our own bewildering times of violent change and spiritual confusion. It features the work of some of the world’s greatest artists and sculptors, who across two millennia, have depicted the Buddha’s life in art rich in beauty and complexity. Hear insights into the ancient narrative by contemporary Buddhists, including Pulitzer Prize winning poet W.S. Merwin and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Join the conversation and learn more about meditation, the history of Buddhism, and how to incorporate the Buddha’s teachings on compassion and mindfulness into daily life. Two-thousand-five-hundred years ago in northern India, Prince Siddhartha left his palace where he had spent twenty-nine years indulging in pleasures. He was determined to comprehend the nature of human suffering. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - )
Two quotes that explain why Steve Jobs built products the way he did - Blog - Jason Hiner
This was originally published in May 2010, but I'm republishing it in light of Steve Jobs' passing because it helps to illustrate why he did things the way he did. Apple has come under fire recently for its approach to product secrecy that led Apple to push police to investigate Gizmodo for how it handled the lost/stolen iPhone prototype. The issue has also shined the spotlight on Apple's whole approach to a closed ecosystem with iTunes and the iPhone/iPad App Store. This is often attributed to Apple CEO Steve Jobs being a control freak and Apple being greedy. There are certainly elements of both of those things driving Apple's behavior. But, I recently ran across an article about Jobs in Success Magazine that had a collection of quotes from Jobs about innovation, including the following two quotes that shed an interesting light on how Jobs justifies the closed ecosystem: 1.) 2.) I'm not posting this to defend Apple.
We are perfect Buddha Mind
9 things you didn’t know about the life of Steve Jobs | Technology News Blog
Steve Jobs leans against his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs (Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis) For all of his years in the spotlight at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs in many ways remains an inscrutable figure — even in his death. Fiercely private, Jobs concealed most specifics about his personal life, from his curious family life to the details of his battle with pancreatic cancer — a disease that ultimately claimed him on Wednesday, at the age of 56. While the CEO and co-founder of Apple steered most interviews away from the public fascination with his private life, there's plenty we know about Jobs the person, beyond the Mac and the iPhone. 1. Later in life, Jobs discovered the identities of his estranged parents. Reed College2. In his famous 2005 commencement speech to Stanford University, Jobs said of his time at Reed: "It wasn't all romantic. Breakout for the Atari3. 4. 5. After reuniting, Jobs and Simpson developed a close relationship. Joan Baez6. 7. 8. 9. More from Tecca:
The Life of Steve Jobs
