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Steve Jobs … the Apple CEO shows an image of the new storage centre for iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, June 2011. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo
Perhaps the funniest passage in Walter Isaacson’s monumental book about Steve Jobs comes three quarters of the way through. It is 2009 and Jobs is recovering from a liver transplant and pneumonia. At one point the pulmonologist tries to put a mask over his face when he is deeply sedated. Jobs rips it off and mumbles that he hates the design and refuses to wear it. Though barely able to speak, he orders them to bring five different options for the mask so that he can pick a design he likes. Even in the depths of his hallucinations, Jobs was a control-freak and a rude sod to boot. Imagine what he was like in the pink of health. As it happens, you don’t need to: every discoverable fact about how Jobs, ahem, coaxed excellence from his co-workers is here.
As Isaacson makes clear, Jobs wasn’t a visionary or even a particularly talented electronic engineer. But he was a businessman of astonishing flair and focus, a marketing genius, and – when he was getting it right, which wasn’t always – had an intuitive sense of what the customer would want before the customer had any idea. He was obsessed with the products, rather than with the money: happily, as he discovered, if you get the products right, the money will come.
Isaacson’s book is studded with moments that make you go “wow”. There’s the Apple flotation, which made the 25-year-old Jobs $256m in the days when that was a lot of money. There’s his turnaround of the company after he returned as CEO in 1997: in the previous fiscal year the company lost $1.04bn, but he returned it to profit in his first quarter. There’s the launch of the iTunes store: expected to sell a million songs in six months, it sold a million songs in six days.
Sam Leith
Guardian
When does an iPhone or an iPad cease to be a mere consumer gadget and enter the rarefied world of visual art? How about when someone willfully destroys it, turning it into an abstract, brutalized husk of its former self?
A series of smashed, mangled, shot up and melted Apple products are the subject of a recent photography project by a San Francisco-area graphic designer who said he’s trying to make people think about their relationship with these universally beloved gadgets.
Michael Tompert said he had spent the last several months purchasing the newest in Apple consumer technology and then creatively destroying the pricey toys. The results, which he photographed, briefly went on display at a gallery exhibition that ran over the weekend at the small Live Worms Gallery in San Francisco. (The art show was first reported on the site Cult of Mac.)
Speaking on the phone, Tompert said the idea for the project came to him after he gave each of his two sons an iPod touch for Christmas. He said the two boys fought over one of the devices, which had a certain game on it. Fed up with the quarrel, Tompert said he grabbed one of the iPods and smashed it on the ground.
“They were kind of stunned — the screen was broken and this liquid poured out of it. I got my camera to shoot it,” Tompert said. “My wife told me that I should do something with it.”
David Ng
Los Angeles Times
Slow Painting 