Inside Apple

The book I read to research this post was Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky which is an excellent book that I bought from a local bookstore. This book is about how Apple does business primarily in the period of 1997 onwards when Steve Jobs returned as Apple CEO. Apple became the biggest firm in the world in 2011 and since Steve Jobs died Tim Cook has been CEO. Many of the Apple employees and ex-employees were reluctant to talk to the author and many of those who did, did so off the record as they didn’t want to burn that bridge. Most of them were very complimentary about their time at Apple. The first time Steve left Apple he formed NeXt & Pixar and the latter was sold to Disney for $7.5 billion. Apple often will have disputes with its suppliers although it will continue working with them. An example of this is with Samsung whom they say is using iPhone technology in their smartphones although they continue to buy components for their iPhones from them. There is a term in the technology industry called frenemies and this kind of thing is common in that kind of business. Apple nowadays concentrates on things like the iPhones, iPads & iPods and the computers take a back seat. They had a dispute with Cisco over the IOS which stood for Iinternet Operating System and was particularly used with many of there network devices. In the end it was agreed Apple could use iOS for things like the iPad & iPhone to try and distinguish it. Another interesting thing is Apple will often take people from one department with appropriate experience in something rather than train people even in another geographical region to do the job. I think that makes a lot of sense as then they know they will do a satisfactory job. An example given was trade shows being first in America then Europe. Also as in the case of Siri the virtual assistant on the iPhone they cover every eventuality even providing answers to things like profound questions like the meaning of life although often in a jokey kind of way. I really enjoyed this book and would undoubtedly recommend it. I was lucky I bought this brand new from a £1 shop where it must have been surplus stock they bought cheap and resold. This is definitely a book worth reading.

Steve Job’s Presentation Secrets

The book I read to research this post was The Presentation Secrets Of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Steve jobs was the CEO of Apple Computers until his untimely death and made it into a bigger company than Microsoft but he had been earlier forced out of the same position at the age of 30 despite at that time Apple being a company he had founded and had become a major player in the computer industry. Let’s focus on his presentation skills anyway. He never used bullet points in his presentations and normally substituted pictures. He would often have a kind of stage background and people would often say if you were at one of his presentations you didn’t forget it in a hurry. He would use headline that were short, simple and to the point, often like tweets on twitter. At one of his presentations he used an actor who had played him in a tv movie and from a distance looked just like him to introduce him. On another occasion he had the CEO of Intel come on stage in a protective suit like they use in the manufacture of processors. He was very much a showman and would typically pose a problem to the audience and them the gadget and explain how it solved it. When he introduced the Apple TV he told them it is a dvd player for the 21st century. His presentations would consist of 3 products and would be displayed in 3 acts and apparently the US Marine corp has done research in how we remember things and found 3 is more effective than 2 or 4 strange as it sounds and is a kind of magic number for anything like presentations. There are technology events where they typically invite a CEO from a technology to do something like a 6 minute talk on a new product launch and they often limit how long it can be because they say if you can’t explain its features in that time it’s isn’t worth explaining. At one technology launch they charge $3,000 per minute for somebody from a company to do a talk and you can imagine they are eager to make it quick. I did really enjoy this book which is hugely informative although only around 210 pages so only short. Finally Steve Jobs also used to take technical facts about his products and translate it into something we’d understand like the first iPod was 5 GB of storage so he explained that’s about 1,000 songs.

Digital Wars

The book I read to research this post was Digital Wars by Charles Arthur which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. This book is about the war for market share & control of the internet by Microsoft, Google & Apple. Bill Gates the owner of Microsoft was once asked what company he feared the most & said what he feared the most was someone building something in a garage in Silicon Valley & selling it much like how Apple started because a small firm like that could respond to market forces much more readily than Microsoft ever could. Apparently out of the established companies he fears Google the most because they are a software company as well as a search engine & are run along similiar lines to Microsoft. He fears if he doesn’t watch Google very carefully they could put Microsoft out of business. Nowadays Bill has handed over much of the running of his company & concentrates on his charity work, stopping preventable illnesses in developing countries. When Apple brought back Steve Jobs to run the company they were almost out of business. Apple had filed a lawsuit against Microsoft because the Windows interface of using the mouse was quite similiar to the Apple Lisa which I think used a touch screen. Bill bought $150 million of non voting shares in Apple & agreed that he would continue to support an AppleMac version of Microsoft Office. Without all that Apple would have gone out of business. Nowadays Apple makes more revenue from iPods than from computers aside from the iPad. In 2011 Apple overtook Exxon to become the highest valued company on the stock exchange. Apparently Toshiba came up with a very tiny hard drive which was incorporated into the 1st generation iPod. Also they originally only worked with iMac computers & were seen as a way to increase Apples share of the computer market. It was inspired of Jobs to see that if they made iTunes compatible with Windows they could sell a lot more iPods. A lot of Apple fans saw it as sacrilege. A lot of the iPods competitors were much bulkier than the iPod & Jobs was instrumental in insisting it be as tiny as possible. Microsoft brought out the Zune which was a capable machine but was inferior to the iPod. It shared features with the Xbox & Xbox Live. I think if you had the wireless adaptor you could stream music from the Xbox to your Zune which was quite nifty.

iTunes

The book I read to research this post was iPod & iTunes – Portable Genius – Second Edition by Jesse David Hollington and it’s quite a good book. I got it from the library and the reason I’m writing about it in my computing blog instead of my technology blog is because the book is mostly about iTunes.

Apparently the 6th generation nano stopped supporting video playback but it does slideshows.The 5th generation ipods can use an ordinary av cable plugged into the headphone socket and then you reverse the yellow and red cables. Apple with the 6th generation or classic ipods and also the touch  made you get a special cable.

If you are transferring iTunes and your connected data to a new computer. Do it directly from your old computer. If you do it from the iPod you will lose your settings.