“That’s probably … certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.”
It’s a clip-on iPad keyboard with a milled aluminum chassis and integrated speaker that ostensibly converts the iPad into a MacBook. Other products like this exist, but Brydge is a bit more minimal than the others, and doesn’t fall into the trap of trying to make the iPad look exactly like a Macbook Air.
Kickstarter Project Turns The iPad Into Apple’s First Touchscreen Laptop
Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.” Eat it, rich guy.
True Design Genius: The Froaster Combines The Refrigerator And The Toaster
The more polarized we become, the stronger we feel a sense of belonging, and the more assured we are of our place in space. Imagine going to a football game and vacillating about which team you support. Chances are the real fans of both teams would shun you. “You’re either with us or against us”—a very useful phrase for momentum building and crowd growing.
How Enemies Power Innovation
“
My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies.
They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.
That’s the chemistry [at Pixar] between Ed [Catmull] and John [Lasseter] and myself. It’s worked pretty doggone well. We talk about things a lot, and sometimes one of us will want to do something that’s really stupid, or maybe not stupid but … oh, I don’t know … maybe not the wisest thing in the long run for the studio. And, you know, at least one of the other two will say, ‘Hey, you know, I think there’s a better way to do that.’ So we’ll all slow down and think it through, and we usually come up with a much better way.
”“I had covered Jobs for Fortune and The Wall Street Journal since 1985, but I didn’t come to fully appreciate the importance of these “lost” years until after his death last fall. Rummaging through the storage shed, I discovered some three dozen tapes holding recordings of extended interviews—some lasting as long as three hours—that I’d conducted with him periodically over the past 25 years. (Snippets are scattered throughout this story.) Many I had never replayed—a couple hadn’t even been transcribed before now. Some were interrupted by his kids bolting into the kitchen as we talked. During others, he would hit the pause button himself before saying something he feared might come back to bite him. Listening to them again with the benefit of hindsight, the ones that took place during that interregnum jump out as especially enlightening.”
“At that time, we already started our interaction with Apple and it was just after I had my meeting with them in Cupertino. I do feel that they have changed mindset on this issue, because at the end of our long meeting they said, “We need some kind of transparency over our supply chain management.” That was something I never heard before. Since then, we’ve had further communications and discussion. They reported back about some of the progress made in checking up on their suppliers that we cited in our report. They also created timelines to fix all their problems.”
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are transformational firms, but if you had to pick, which one would you say is the most innovative? Take the quiz to find your answer, plus our picks for all 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2012.
“
“Apple nears incredible milestone, coming just shy of $100 billion in cash on hand. Hoard is worth more than all but 52 companies on Earth.” So everyone else owning a company, in hundreds of nations, should just give up, eh? And are many of those 52 tech firms, or is it all old-school manufacturing or oil industry? That would be more illuminating.
Apple sold more iPhones per day than babies were born. That’s pretty impressive, and means Junior should line up for his iPhone right now! Until you remember that maybe Lego sold more than that, or that the number of toilet rolls sold each day could reach the moon and back (or other equally odd comparisons).
“Apple now worth more than projected Singapore economy (318 billion) in 2016.” Okay, which means it beats Singapore’s economy already…Unless the small nation’s economy is in some kind of decline? Which is clearly not the case.
“$AAPL’s cash is worth 2,000 tons of gold. (please forgive me @Morgan_03)” Call in Scrooge McDuck—we’re ready for some cash pile diving! But since a ton of gold is a cube just over 14 inches on a side, it wouldn’t really be that big a pile.
Apple’s profits are also about 30% bigger for the last quarter than Google’s entire revenue.
”
Apple revealed in its “Supplier Responsibility Report” for 2012 (available for perusal here) that it had carried out 229 individual audits among its diverse and largely secrecy-shrouded supplier chain. Looking for responsibke behavior across all aspects of their business, Apple paid attention to labor and human rights, health and safety, environmental impact and more ephemeral aspects like ethics and business practices. The targeted firms covered the full range from individual component suppliers to assembly firms like Foxconn.
This year the tablet industry is going to get interesting, gnarly even, because as the market matures a bunch of very smart power plays will happen. It starts with Google.
How explicitly can companies rip off Apple’s designs?
That was at the heart of a test posed to Samsung attorney Kathleen Sullivan during an October courtroom hearing with Apple, when a U.S. judge held up two devices, an iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab, and asked Sullivan, Perry Mason-style, if she could tell them apart.
“Not at this distance your honor,” said Sullivan, who stood just 10 feet away, according toReuters.
More and more, Apple’s competitors are mimicking the company’s designs on everything from tablets to laptops to software. There’s short-term benefit here for consumers looking for inexpensive Apple alternatives this holiday season. But more significantly, it demonstrates how much Steve Jobs’s legacy has impacted device makers—and how lost they’d likely be without Jobs’s vision. As competing devices start to look more like clear Apple knockoffs, the question becomes: How far can these companies push pirating their product designs before Apple pushes back?
“Men are more like Microsoft: They’ll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then try to intimidate everybody into using their product.”
