Apple

The FBI File on Steve Jobs

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Late last year, Michael Morisy contacted the the FBI, with a request under the Freedom of Information Act to attain the FBI files on Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple. His full correspondence appears here.

“Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals,” according to the report released today by the FBI.

The FBI interviewed Jobs and people who knew him as part of a background check for a possible appointment by former President George H. W. Bush. Interviews were conducted with unnamed associates of Jobs to judge his character, drug use and potential prejudices, according to the file. Near the end, there is a mention of a bomb threat.

The FBI report on Steve Jobs is decades old, and a large portion of the material is redacted, but it still makes for an interesting look-through. The full file is here.

Apple Results Distorting S&P 500 Earnings

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Quote of the day concerning Apple earnings from last quarter:

The world’s largest company by market capitalization said on Jan. 24 that profit in the quarter ended Dec. 31 was $13.1 billion, 36 percent more than the average analyst projection, while revenue beat forecasts by $7.3 billion, the most ever. The Cupertino, California-based company single-handedly erased a drop in S&P 500 earnings for the October-to-December period, turning a 4.2 percent decline into a 4.4 percent gain.

(source: Bloomberg)

Why the iPhone isn’t Made in America

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Why isn’t the iPhone made in the United States? Sure, Apple brands its product as “designed in California,” but the actual production happens in China. In this excellent New York Times piece, where more than thirty individuals were interviewed, we learn why the largest company in America has made the dramatic shift of producing its product in America to China. Apple executives believe there simply aren’t enough American workers with the skills the company needs or factories with sufficient speed and flexibility.

First, mind-boggling statistics about the scale of production at Foxconn, the factory in which iPhones and iPads are made:

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day.

This anecdote sounded familiar. I first read it in Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

On the Chinese preparation for a contract. So methodical:

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

So why is the iPhone made in China? It’s not just the low wages paid to Chinese workers. The flexibility, scale, and the formidable supply chain of Chinese factories, combined with the ability to raise an army of workers (sometimes literally overnight), cannot be matched in the United States.

And so, as quoted in the article, the consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. On a final note: while other companies have sent call centers abroad, Apple has kept its centers in the United States. It’s only a matter of time when Apple decides to outsource the call centers abroad…

The Secrecy at Apple

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This is a good piece by Adam Lashinsky outlining the culture of secrecy at Apple.

Apple created an elaborate and unnerving system to enforce internal secrecy. It revolves around the concept of disclosure. To discuss a topic at a meeting, one must be sure everyone in the room is “disclosed” on the topic, meaning they have been made privy to certain secrets. “You can’t talk about any secret until you’re sure everyone is disclosed on it,” said an ex‑employee. As a result, Apple employees and their projects are pieces of a puzzle. The snapshot of the completed puzzle is known only at the highest reaches of the organization. It calls to mind the cells a resistance organization plants behind enemy lines, whose members aren’t given information that could incriminate a comrade. Jon Rubinstein, formerly Apple’s senior hardware executive, once deployed the comparison in a less flattering but equally effective manner. “We have cells, like a terrorist organization,” he told Business Week in 2000. “Everything is on a need‑to‑know basis.”

Perhaps a strong generalization of how Apple differs from other Silicon Valley companies:

Apple’s culture is the polar opposite of Google’s, where fliers announcing extracurricular activities — from ski outings to a high-profile author series — hang everywhere. At Apple, the iTunes team sponsors the occasional band, and there is a company gym (which isn’t free), but by and large Apple people come to work to work. “At meetings, there is no discussion about the lake house where you just spent the weekend,” recalled a senior engineer. “You get right down to business.” The contrast with the non-Apple world is stark. “When you interact with people at other companies, there’s just a relative lack of intensity,” said this engineer. “At Apple, people are so committed that they go home at night and don’t leave Apple behind them. What they do at Apple is their true religion.”

Perhaps one day when I visit the Apple campus I will indulge in getting the shirt that has the following printed on the front: “I VISITED THE APPLE CAMPUS. BUT THAT’S ALL I’M ALLOWED TO SAY.”

Steve Jobs’s Vision for the World

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Today marks two months since the death of Steve Jobs. You’ve read incredible eulogies, countless personal remembrances, and perhaps have finished reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of the man. I wanted to share the video below, a brief 46-second clip featured in a recent PBS documentary. It vividly captures Steve Jobs’s spirit and his vision for the world:

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is…and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact: and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

The above edited footage comes from a 1995 interview conducted by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, while Jobs was still at NeXT, without the dramatic music. See the full video here.

While I sympathize with Jobs’s vision, I must admit that I haven’t acted upon his message. Not yet. But I will.

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(via A Photo Editor and Brain Pickings)

Steve Jobs as a Modern-Day Jules Verne

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I’m a bit late to this, but Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings, has a wonderful personal post reflecting on the life and legacy of Steve Jobs:

I grew up in Bulgaria in the 1980s. Before the fall of the communist regime in 1989, scarcity underpinned the status quo — of commodities, of information, of opportunity. So limited were Western imports that once a year, around New Year’s, a handful of grocery stores would make available “exotic” produce like tropical fruit. The supply-demand ratio was so skewed that the store had to ration these exorbitantly priced annual luxuries — one banana and two oranges per person — and people would line up around the block to get them. (Meanwhile, the unworthy apple, Bulgaria’s most ample fruit crop, would sit neglected in the produce aisle at 50 stotinki a kilogram, roughly $0.15 per pound.) The most ambitious parents would camp out in front of the store overnight to make sure they got the bananas and oranges first thing in the morning as they went on sale.

In my lifetime, I’ve only seen such lines twice since — first in front of the Apple Store on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone was released, and then again in April of last year, when the iPad became semi-available. Under Steve Jobs, Apple became the bananas of the West.

In the 1990s, my mother joined Bulgarian Business Systems — Bulgaria’s first and, for over a decade, only official Apple dealer. I had grown up reading Jules Verne, so when we got our first Macintosh, I remember thinking that the man behind it — because, let’s face it, such was the cultural conditioning that I wouldn’t have expected a woman — must be some modern-day Jules Verne, having just handed me a portal for curiosity and exploration that helped me lean into knowledge in a way that has since become the fundamental driving force of my intellectual life.

Definitely worth reading. In the post, Maria touches upon networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity, the subject of her Creative Mornings talk earlier this year.

The Fragility of Ideas

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On October 19, Apple held an event to honor Steve Jobs. Featured appearances include the newly-appointed CEO Tim Cook and the legendary designer Jony Ive, who goes on to talk about the fragility of ideas (as proposed by Steve Jobs):

Steve used to say to me — and he used to say this a lot — “Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea.”

And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

So eloquently said. I’m reminded of this quote from Inception:

What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient… highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed—fully understood—that sticks; right in there somewhere. 

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(Hat Tip: Fortune)

Jony Ive and Freedom

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I’ve pre-ordered Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, and I can’t wait to read it. In the meantime, I’ve been following some news outlets reporting snippets from the book. This bit about the iconic designer at Apple, Jonathan (Jony) Ive, and his independence at the company, struck a chord with me:

In talking with author Walter Isaacson for the book, Jobs revealed that he viewed Ive as his “spiritual partner” at Apple. Showing his trust in Ive, the company co-founder left him more freedom than anyone else in the company — a perk that remains even after Jobs’s death.

“He [Steve Jobs] told Isaacson that Ive had ‘more operational power’ at Apple than anyone else besides Jobs himself — that there’s no one at the company who can tell Ive what to do,” the report said. “That, says Jobs, is ‘the way I set it up.'”

Ive and Jobs became close at Apple, working directly together on designing a number of the company’s core products, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Ive, a 44-year-old native of London, joined Apple in 1996 and has held his current job since 1997.

After I finish reading the book sometime next week, I will post a comprehensive review of my own. Stay tuned.

Technology’s Gang of Four

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From The London Review of Books, we have this gem:

This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless…

Very interesting analogy from the real Gang of Four to technology companies. Do you agree?

Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple’s CEO

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Wow. Steve Jobs just resigned as Apple’s CEO. Biggest news of the day, by far. That earthquake on the East Coast yesterday? This is an earthquake for the West Coast. Tim Cook becomes Apple’s new CEO while Jobs transitions his role as Chairman of Apple’s Board.

The WSJ has a nice list of the best Steve Jobs quotes over the years, such as this one:

These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.

But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

And oh, this is my favourite Steve Jobs video. A must-watch, if you’ve never seen it.

Apple at the core…Its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better. That’s what we believe. 

Think Different.