Steve jobs about iphone

Steve Jobs and the Apple Story

The legacy and lessons of Apple’s co-founder

On Aug. 2, 2018, Apple (AAPL) made history by becoming the world’s first publicly traded company to achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion. On April 30, 2019, Microsoft (MSFT) joined Apple’s exclusive club, also catapulting past the $1 trillion mark. On Jan. 16, 2020, Alphabet (GOOGL) became a $1 trillion company, followed by Amazon (AMZN) on Feb. 4.

Key Takeaways

• Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1977, introducing first the Apple I and then the Apple II.
• Apple went public in 1980 with Jobs the blazing visionary and Wozniak the shy genius executing his vision.
• Executive John Scully was added in 1983; in 1985, Apple’s board of directors ousted the combative Jobs in favor of Scully.
• Away from Apple, Jobs invested in and developed animation producer Pixar and then founded NeXT to create high-end computers; NeXT eventually led him back to Apple.
• Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s and spent the years until his death in 2011 revamping the company, introducing the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, transforming technology and communication in the process.

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Investopedia / Bailey Mariner

On Oct. 5, 2011, Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56. He had just left the CEO post at Apple, the company he co-founded, for the second time. Jobs was an entrepreneur through and through, and the story of his rise is the story of Apple as a company, along with some very interesting twists. In this article, we’ll look at the career of Steve Jobs and the company he founded, as well as some of the lessons Apple offers for potential entrepreneurs.

As to be expected, the market value for each of these companies has swung up and down as prices fluctuate, and maintaining the $1 trillion valuation can be elusive. However, the fact that Apple was the first company to surpass the $1 trillion mark is in no small part connected to the legacy and lessons learned from Steve Jobs.

From Blue Boxes to Apple

Steve Jobs got his start in business with another Steve, Steve Wozniak, building the blue boxes phone phreakers used to make free calls across the nation. The two were members of the HomeBrew Computer Club, where they quickly became enamored with kit computers and left the blue boxes behind. The next product the two sold was the Apple I, which was a kit for building a PC. In order to do anything with it, the customer needed to add their own monitor and keyboard. 

With Wozniak doing most of the building and Jobs handling the sales, the two made enough money off the hobbyist market to invest in the Apple II. It was the Apple II that made the company. Jobs and Wozniak created enough interest in their new product to attract venture capital. This meant they were in the big leagues and their company, Apple, was officially incorporated in 1976.   Steve Jobs was a month shy of turning 22 and would be a millionaire before his next birthday.

The Roller Coaster Ride Begins

By 1978, Apple was making $2 million in profits solely on the strength of the Apple II. The Apple II wasn’t state of the art, but it did allow computer enthusiasts to create and sell their own programs. Among these user-generated programs was VisiCalc, a type of proto-Excel that represented the first software with business applications.

Although Apple did not profit directly from these programs, they did see more interest as the uses for the Apple II broadened. This model of allowing users to create their own programs and sell them would reappear in the app market of the future, but with a much tighter business strategy around it.

By the time Apple went public in 1980, the dynamic of the company was more or less set. Steve Jobs was the fiery visionary, with an intense and often combative management style, and Steve Wozniak was the quiet genius who made the vision work. Apple’s board of directors wasn’t too fond of such a power imbalance in the company, however. Jobs and the board agreed to add John Sculley to the executive team in 1983. In 1985, the board ousted Jobs in favor of Sculley.

The Gap Years

Steve Jobs was rich and unemployed. Although he wasn’t working at Apple, he was far from idle. During this time, from 1985 to 1996, Jobs was involved in two big deals; the first of which was an investment. In 1986, Jobs purchased a controlling stake in a company called Pixar from George Lucas. The company was struggling, but their eventual success in digital animation led to an initial public offering (IPO) that earned Jobs around $1 billion.

The second was a return to his old obsession with computers, founding NeXT to create high-end computers. These were expensive machines with an operating system representing the best attempt yet at making the power of UNIX fit into a graphical user interface. When Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, he did so using a NeXT machine. 

Of these two deals, NeXT proved the most important, as it turned out Apple was looking to replace its operating system. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 for its operating system, bringing Steve Jobs back to the first company he founded.

The critical year in which Steve Jobs sold NeXT, the computer maker he had founded, to Apple, returning him to the company eleven years after he had been ousted.

Getting Apple Back on Track

When Jobs returned, the company wasn’t in a good place. Apple had begun to flounder as cheap PCs running Windows flooded the market. Jobs found himself in the driver’s seat again and took some drastic steps to turn around Apple’s decline. The company asked for and received a $150 million investment from Bill Gates.   Jobs used the money to ramp up advertising and highlight the products Apple already offered while choking off research and development (R&D) money in non-producing areas.

The NeXT operating system was used to create the iMac, Apple’s first hit PC in a long time. Jobs followed this up with a list of successes from the iPod in 2001 to the iPad in 2010. The years between saw Apple dominate the smartphone market with the iPhone, open up an e-commerce store with iTunes, and launch branded retail outlets called, what else, the Apple Store. When Jobs stepped down as CEO, Apple was scrapping with Exxon for the world’s largest market cap.

Starting with the iPod in 2001, and then continuing with the iPhone and iPad over the next decade, Jobs rejuvenated the ailing Apple, putting it at the forefront of technology and communications.

The Bottom Line

It’s impossible to sum up Jobs’ career in a single article, but a few lessons stick out. First, innovation counts for a lot, but innovative products fail without proper marketing. Second, there are no straight paths to success. Jobs did get wealthy very early on, but he would be a footnote today if he didn’t return to Apple in the 90s. At one point, Jobs was kicked out of the company he helped create for being hard to work with. Rather than change, he bided his time, then took over again, and this time his attitude was seen as part of his genius.

There is much more to be learned from the life of Steve Jobs, as there is in the life of every successful entrepreneur. The sheer hubris of the entrepreneurial spirit, the idea you can do something bigger and better than it has ever been done before, always bears watching and studying, whether to imitate it or just to marvel at what that hubris can create.

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Apple sells its 2-billionth iPhone, with Steve Jobs legacy still evident

— Sep. 22nd 2021 4:40 am PT

Apple recently sold its two-billionth iPhone, according to a new analyst report, which argues that the Steve Jobs legacy is still evident in the iPhone 13.

In one way, Apple has greatly departed from a principle Steve demanded when he returned to the company in 1997: simplification of the product lineup. But an analyst argues that it’s another of Steve’s beliefs that is still driving Apple’s success today …

No Steve-like simplicity in the iPhone lineup

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he famously trashed the complex lineup of Macs sold at that time, and said he wanted a simple quadrant: a consumer desktop, a consumer laptop, a pro desktop, a pro laptop. Looking at the company’s current iPhone lineup, however, it’s more like the “before” than the “after.”

At the bottom end, you can buy an iPhone SE with 64GB storage for $400. At the top end, you can pay $1,600 for an iPhone 13 Pro Max with 1TB storage. All in, there are a total of 24 different iPhone SKUs at 18 different prices.

What’s particularly stark in Horace Dediu’s impressive pricing chart above is that, 14 years after the original iPhone sold for $400, you can still buy a brand-new iPhone from Apple for that same $400 – but you can also pay up to four times that.

Things are even more complex than that, says Dediu, when you also factor in carrier promos, trade-in deals, and the secondary market.

Just recently, the 2 billionth iPhone was sold. Unlike the 1 billionth, there was no announcement, no celebration. Partly this is because Apple stopped reporting unit shipments, but partly it’s because it’s not as interesting to talk about 2 billion as it is about 1 billion. There is a desensitizing when numbers get that big […]

The spread of phone price points is wider than ever. Reaching $1600, the range still starts at $399 in the US (excluding taxes.) The total range (number of lines in each year) is increasing also, now 24 mainly due to the addition of a 1TB storage option. NB: There are now two iPhone minis (12 and 13) and one SE bringing up the rear.

Carrier incentives are picking up again. There are tremendous trade-ins and incentives for financing new iPhones which is bound to create retail traffic. Also with the opening of more economies, there is likely to be a surge in shopping. Bear in mind that around 400 million users have iPhones older than 3 years. Trade-in values are as high as $1000. Which leads to…

A thriving secondary market. The used smartphone market is dominated by iPhones and this drops the floor for entry into the iPhone ecosystem to essentially $0.

But Steve Jobs’s legacy lives on when it comes to features

Dediu argues that Apple’s greatest enemy is the fact that all modern smartphones are good enough these days. It would be very easy for owners to hold onto their phones for years, without feeling like they are missing out on much when it comes to the latest models.

But how the iPhone maker fights back is doing exactly what Steve talked about back in the day: giving consumers things they didn’t know they wanted, but now must have. That, he says, is evident in the iPhone 13.

If you don’t shift the definition of performance eventually you run out of demand at the top of the performance curve. That opens you up to “good enough” competition from below. Instead you need to re-define the notion of performance: compete on a new basis, reset expectations. That the iPhone can find new dimensions of performance and hence demand is effectively a solution to the innovator’s dilemma […]

We did not ask for rack focus, post-production focus (!), night mode, macro photography and portrait bokeh. But once we have these features we begin, ever so slowly, to use them and then we start demanding them […]

What makes the iPhone and perhaps Apple special is that it seems to deliver things that nobody asks for but then everybody wants.

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Почему Стив Джобс запрещал своим детям iPhone и iPad?

Стив Джобс – основатель компании Apple и один из «отцов-основателей» современных технологий, действительно ограничивал использование своих же продуктов (iPhone, iPad и т.д.) детьми. Один из журналистов The New York Times, однажды спросил у Джобса:

«Скорее всего, Ваши дети без ума от iPad?».

Однако, ответ Стива его ошеломил. Глава Apple сказал:

«Мы ограничиваем использование устройств детьми дома».

Стив Джобс запрещал своим детям айфоны

Нику Билтону (тому самому журналисту) казалось, что дом Джобсов буквально нашпигован самой передовой техникой, у них всюду висят большие сенсорные панели и, вообще, их дом – это самый настоящий рай для любого гика. На деле выяснилась совсем противоположная картина.

Билтон не успел спросить Стива Джобса о том, чем занимаются его дети, если не пользуются гаджетами и компьютерами. Позже, об этом рассказал один из биографов Джобса, Уолтер Айзексон:

«Когда семья Джобсов собиралась за ужином, никто «не сидел с телефоном или планшетом». Сам Джобс был очень интересной личностью и беседы с ним на самые разнообразные темы были для детей гораздо интереснее цифровых технологий».

А что говорят другие CEO из мира IT?

Многие руководители IT-компаний тоже запрещают или ограничивают использование устройств, компьютеров и, тем более, Интернета для своих детей.

Так, например, Эван Уильямс – основатель Twitter, говорит, что его дети пользуются современными технологиями не более одного часа в день. В доме Уильямсов есть сотни бумажных книг, которые всегда доступны детям и читать их можно, сколько угодно.

Крис Андерсон – исполнительный директор 3D Robotics и бывший главный редактор Wired Magazine (IT-журнал) говорит, что пятеро детей считают их с женой «слишком озабоченными технологиями» .

Андерсоны ввели жесткие временные ограничения на использование гаджетов, компьютеров и Интернета. Более того, Крис настроил все девайсы так, чтобы они были активными не более 2 часов в сутки.

Сам глава семейства говорит об этом так: «Я видел, какие проблемы могут возникнуть в результате частого пользования современными технологиями. Я столкнулся с ними сам, и не хочу, чтобы они были у моих детей».

Алекс Констатинополе – руководитель OutCast Agency (технически ориентированная компания, занимающаяся рекламой и маркетингом) говорит, что для младшего сына она ограничила использование технологий на протяжении всей рабочей недели, а старшие дети могут пользоваться ими не более 30 минут в день.

Вероятнее всего главы крупных компаний видят опасность, как минимум в двух вещах:

1. Вредный и непотребный контент, который оказывает плохое влияние на психику и развитие ребенка. Психологи говорят о притуплении творческих способностей и абстрактного мышления из-за компьютерных игр, развитии агрессии, обесценивании некоторых норм и правил поведения в обществе.

2. Интернет-зависимость. Ребенок замыкается в себе, просиживая за экраном не только телефонов и планшетов, но и компьютеров, плохо идет на контакт с родителями и сверстниками.

Впрочем, есть и другое мнение. Многие полагают, что ограничения могут «породить настоящего IT-монстра» . Например, Дик Кастоло (представитель высшего звена ТОП-менеджмента Twitter) приводит такой пример:

«Когда я учился в колледже, со мной по соседству жил парень, у которого в комнате было очень много ящиков с Coca-Cola и другими газированными напитками. А чуть позже я узнал, что в детстве его родители запрещали пить эти напитки. И если мы ограничиваем своим детям современные технологии, то к каким последствиям это может привести?».

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