The man behind the apple

The Man Behind Apple’s Renewed Focus on Engineering

Recent events at and products from Apple suggest that there’s a re-emphasized focus on engineering.

Background: There’s been a lot of analysis lately about the impact of Sir Jony Ive’s departure from Apple. Much of it points to Ive’s tremendous and genuine contributions and then speculates that things might not be so bad after all in the future.

But there’s more going on.

Notable Events

What stood out for me in this discussion was the confluence of several events. 2019 Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR.

First, we got the 2019 Mac Pro. So powerful and brutish in its engineering design that it quickly earned the title “cheese grater 2.0.” Who would have thought that Apple would have the courage to return to this design given Apple’s recent emphasis on form over function? And yet, there it is in all its hardware and computational glory, function over form.

And then we got the cancellation of the MacBook. Engineering analysis suggests that the ultra slim case design couldn’t make the move into more powerful CPUs/GPUs/memory and storage. It had reached a technical dead end. Beloved, it had to go.

And just recently, there are hints that the ill-fated Butterfly keyboard may be on the way out. Digital Trends writes: “Evidence mounts that Apple will kill the MacBook’s butterfly switch keyboard.”

That Apple is reconsidering the scissor switch is an interesting thing to note, given its previous assertions that the butterfly switch provides “four times more key stability than a traditional scissor mechanism.” But it’s also not surprising, given the many, many times Apple has tried and failed to correct the problems plaguing the [butterfly] design.

Real, Pleasing Change

These real and surmised changes are something we have been unaccustomed to. Namely, Apple has recently lingered on with some uncomfortable design decisions and products that have mystified us. My feeing is that it was the result of design adamance by Ive versus more pragmatic thinking by COO Jeff Williams resulting in a standoff. See a MacRumors’s report. Apple COO Jeff Williams

One thing that may have helped the cause of COO Williams was his guiding of the Apple Watch into a health and fitness focus, which has been wildly successful, and away from the original Ive focus on fashion. That could explain why the US$10K solid gold model quickly disappeared.

These engineering decisions by Apple that I cited above are most welcome and suggest that the company we’ve loved for its legendary industrial design is back on track with a special focus on performance and product-line coherence. For more color on this, see Tim Bajarin’s excellent analysis. “Industrial Design And Operational Excellence Drives Apple’s Success.”

There’s a seemingly new atmosphere of engineering pragmatism, without sacrificing great design, and I suspect it’s being spearheaded by COO Jeff Williams.

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Review: Different Thinking About Steve Jobs, the Man Behind Apple

By Nicolas Rapold

The transformative impact Steve Jobs has had on culture and society has become an article of faith since his much-mourned death in 2011. The secular canonization of Mr. Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple, is the starting point for “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” Alex Gibney’s trenchant new documentary, which asks with sincere curiosity: What’s the fuss about? And more to the point: What’s wrong with this picture?

Mr. Gibney, a prolific documentarian, not only charts Mr. Jobs’s extraordinary record of marketing and innovation, but also presents a merciless anatomy of a complicated public character. Mr. Jobs has already been the subject of dueling books, and will be incarnated by Michael Fassbender in a film this fall. But Mr. Gibney has produced his own penetrating cultural commentary amid the smorgasbord of interviews and archival Jobsiana, braiding together tough questions about the particular modern world Mr. Jobs helped create.

Movie Review: ‘Steve Jobs’

The Times critic Nicolas Rapold reviews “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”

That world begins, in time-honored tech-world fashion, with the origin myth of Apple in the hacker days of Steve Wozniak and Mr. Jobs in the 1970s. Even here Mr. Gibney takes a moment to note how Mr. Jobs shortchanged Mr. Wozniak out of some money in a programming gig before hitching the story to Mr. Jobs’s boundless ambition and ability to make computing cool (and, later, normative). The hit parade follows: the first Mac revolution; Mr. Jobs’s departure from Apple in 1985; and the return of the king, with all the triumphant toys and i-candy that followed — Macs, iPods, iPhones, iPads.

Ruthless, canny and tenacious, Mr. Jobs emerges as a formidable captain of industry in the vein of past fierce innovator-businessmen like Thomas Edison, with a Svengali’s coal-eyed stare to boot. Former associates and an ex-wife are on hand to marvel, gripe and even weep. Yet as frequent shots of peaceful Japanese gardens remind us, Mr. Jobs was also way into Zen — or at least a certain interpretation of Zen that, as Mr. Gibney underlines, yielded the focus of a monk but not the empathy.

The Best Movies of 2021

The Times’s chief film critics, A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, selected their favorite movies of the year. Here are some of their picks:

• • ‘Summer of Soul’: Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in Questlove’s documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival.
  • ‘Spencer’:Kristen Stewart stars as an anguished, rebellious Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s answer to “The Crown.”
  • ‘Passing’: Set in the 1920s, the movie centers on two African American women, friends from childhood, who can and do present as white.
  • ‘Drive My Car’: In this quiet Japanese masterpiece, a widower travels to Hiroshima to direct an experimental version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

That disconnect, Mr. Gibney suggests, is echoed elsewhere in the Apple endeavor. His questioning voice-over repeatedly steps in to give a reality check to the high-flying story of best-selling products and core company values. Soon after recognizing the iPhone as a milestone, Mr. Gibney surveys Apple and Mr. Jobs’s less savory activity: backdated stock options, huge overseas tax shelters, scandalous Chinese factories and retaliatory police investigations.

Mr. Gibney’s film is a chunky mix, with a-little-too-proudly-rolled-out pop songs (even though they partly serve to echo Mr. Jobs’s self-regard). But even if this isn’t the iPhone of documentaries, it gets its point across, and unlike Mr. Gibney’s Scientology exposé “Going Clear,” this movie has a harder target (albeit with its own devoted following). He also brings out the uncanny details that help rediscover the strangeness of widespread cultural changes. When Mr. Jobs is reported to seethe at the news that he has fathered a child by his girlfriend, Mr. Gibney segues into the unveiling of Mr. Jobs’s apparently preferred offspring — a new Mac — suggesting some god-player figure out of science fiction.

By the end, Mr. Gibney has also skewered Apple’s marketing of its consumer devices as a form of creative expression (“Think Different”), and has drawn out the dissonance between that individuality and the danger of self-absorption. While his conclusion verges on a public awareness announcement, he re-evaluates Mr. Jobs and elucidates a cultural technological landscape that is too often taken for granted.

“Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Strong language.

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The Man Behind ‘The Big Apple’

02/05/2019 by Kenneth Roman

This past December, former Ogilvy & Mather Chairman Bill Phillips passed away. Kenneth Roman, who succeeded Phillips, wrote the following piece, originally published in The Wall Street Journal and on Medium.

Bill Phillips was walking to work from his Manhattan apartment, eating an apple, one spring morning in 1975. As the chairman of ad agency Ogilvy & Mather stepped over piles of refuse, he thought: “I must be crazy to live here.” A garbage strike was only one of many problems facing New York: Crime was up, bankruptcy was looming, and there was no prospect of a bailout.

Phillips, who died in December, had volunteered his agency to boost the city’s reputation, but hadn’t found the right angle. When he got to the agency that morning, he told creative director Jay Schulberg his insight from that walk: that New Yorkers have a love-hate relationship with their city. He suggested they devise a campaign that would represent that complex attitude.

A few days later Schulberg had the line, a variant on a quotation from the city’s outspoken Rep. Bella Abzug: “You have to be a little crazy to live in New York, but you’d be nuts to live anywhere else.”

They had the words. What about the image? Jazz musicians had long used “the Big Apple” to refer to the city — “You can play all over the country, but New York is the Big Apple” — and the nickname was already part of the visitor bureau’s promotional material. Recognizing the potential, Ogilvy’s creative group superimposed the New York skyline on a bright-red apple and added in the new tagline, turning out several variations for ads in subways and buses: “You have to be a little crazy to live in New York …” “Crazy about museums. We have 95.” “Crazy about restaurants. There are hundred.” “Crazy about beaches. There are over 10 miles of them.”

Then they had to sell the idea. A meeting was held at Gracie Mansion with Mayor Abe Beame, who was reluctant to spend scarce funds on morale-building advertising. Phillips similarly felt he couldn’t ask for money when the city was firing police and firefighters. So he offered to do the campaign pro bono and obtain free media — no public funds required.

Then he showed the mayor the ad. A Beame staffer whispered, “We can’t tell New Yorkers they’re crazy.” The mayor paused and, with a glint in his eye, replied, “Well, I think we are, at least part of the time.” The campaign was approved.

Newspapers contributed space for the ads. International Paper, an Ogilvy client, donated premium paper for the subways cards. Production costs were covered by selling posters, some signed by notables like Robert Redford, artist Peter Max and former Mayor John Lindsay. Phillips persuaded WNEW-TV to tape a commercial about New York: “A crazy town where you could learn and grow and be whatever you want to make of yourself.” That ad spurred other TV stations to compete with their own pro-New York commercials. The campaign was a hit in and outside the city. The Paris-based International Herald Tribune noted that New Yorkers had finally confirmed they were a little crazy.

Ogilvy didn’t create “the Big Apple,” but the agency established it as the universal symbol for New York — and helped boost morale at a tough time for the city.

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The Apple Man Behind the Google Phone

Googleis Android OS for mobile phones is poised to challenge Microsoftis assertion that open source can imitate but not innovate. In fact, the man behind Android is a former Apple and General Magic employee, Andy Rubin, according to John Markoff at the New York Times on Tuesday.

There is a lot at stake as the mobile phone morphs into the mobile personal computer and standards are set. The way Google plans to stay ahead in the game is to give its software away and then cash «in by providing a menu of services linked to those products, such as email, photos, and news,» Mr. Markoff wrote.

The man behind Googleis effort to muscle its way into this emerging business of mobile Internet anywhere is hardware and software genius Andy Rubin. Mr. Rubin has had a vision for portable Internet communications early on and has walked the halls of Carl Zeiss, Apple, Danger, Inc., General Magic, Artemis Research (which became WebTV), and Microsoft for a short period after they bought WebTV.

In 2002, Larry Page and Sergey Brin attended a presentation at Stanford where Rubin was demonstrating a small device, the Sidekick, an Internet savvy smartphone that had not obtained any traction in the market place. However, later, after years of work, Rubin once again encountered Google. This time, Google bought Android for an undisclosed sum.

Mr. Rubinis genius with hardware and gadgets is legendary. More important for Google, however, right now is the future of Google in the wireless market. Mr. Markoff suggests that Google is now in a position to do to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Netscape. «. Google, though not in a dominant position in this field, may be able to replay the strategy that Microsoft itself used to bulldoze Netscape in the mid-1990s. Just as Microsoft successfully cut off Netscapeis air supply by giving away its Explorer Web browser as part of the Windows operating system, Google may shove Windows Mobile aside if the Google Phone is given away to hand-set makers.

«And if the strategy works, it will be because a robotics fanatic named Andy Rubin and his team will have successfully developed the smart phone of the future,» Mr. Markoff concluded.

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