Apple gets Siri-ous about TV

Walter Isaacson, in his new biography of Steve Jobs, reveals that Apple is planning to introduce its own televisions, attempting to revolutionize that space in the same way it did mobile phones with the iPhone. He quotes Jobs as having said that he had finally cracked the technical issues of controlling such a TV, though giving no details. This has led to a lot of speculation, but it seems obvious to me that Jobs was referring to IOS 5’s new Siri personal assistance capability. We’ll control our Apple TVs by telling them what to do.

Apple has tried to do TVs before. A few years ago, inspired by the TV success of Gateway and then Dell, […]

Unanswered Steve Jobs questions

A lot has been said about Steve Jobs in the 24 hours since his death and some of that has come from me. It has been 24 hours of round-the-world media interviews, most of them live but you can see an edited version of me this Friday on ABC’s 20/20, which is doing a Jobs tribute of some sort. Remember ABC’s parent is Disney and Jobs was Disney’s largest shareholder.  With all that has been said and written, however, I’m hard put to know what there is I can add here. I can tell you though the two Jobs questions I still want answers for, and where I hope to find those answers.

Question #1 — […]

Steve Jobs

And now the frenzy begins. Running this story in reverse it’s suddenly clear why Apple didn’t introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs’s death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. I’m sure the phone will appear in a week or two with that appearance in part to encourage the recovery of Apple shares from what is sure to be a short-term decline.

I first met Steve Jobs in the spring of 1977 when I helped the two Steves take a prototype computer out of Woz’s Fiat at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. In the 34 years that followed I was hired and fired by Steve more than once, our relationship conducted in large part […]

Cupertino Two-Step

I was about to board an airplane Wednesday when Apple announced the resignation of Steve Jobs as CEO and his replacement by Tim Cook. With a couple hours to think on my flight to Charleston it became clear to me that this story is far from over and the long-term leadership of Apple has not yet been determined.

There were rumblings a month ago about Apple board members interviewing possible successors to Steve Jobs. There’s nothing surprising in that, given Jobs’ poor health and the fact that the primary function of any board is hiring and firing CEOs. But it evidently didn’t go down well with Steve, perhaps because he had his own succession plan or […]

Is the Mac Pro dead?

A rumor surfaced yesterday in Japan that Apple would by the end of the year introduce a radical new kind of Macintosh computer. That was it — new Mac, radical — yet dozens of sites ran with this non-information simply because Apple is a hot company and, who knows, it might be correct. In that same spirit, then, here’s my guess about what might be correct: I think Apple’s Macintosh Pro line of computers is dead.

Mac Pro’s are Apple’s big box PCs. They haven’t been refreshed since last summer and new models were expected this month with the new Minis, but for some reason the new Mac Pro’s failed to appear. Apple said nothing because, well, because Apple never says anything, instead […]