Apple's Life After Steve Jobs

animusCollards writes "Slate ponders a post-Steve Jobs Apple, including possible successors, and the future is... boring. '..it's certainly true that Jobs' style is central to the company's brand and the fierce connection it forges with its customers. His product announcements prompt hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free press coverage and whip up greater and more loyal fans, generating ever-greater interest in the company. ... At some point, all that will end. Jobs will eventually leave the company. There are no obvious plans for succession; in addition to Schiller, observers finger Tim Cook, Apple's COO, and Scott Forstall, who helped develop Mac OS X and the iPhone's software, as contenders for the job. But Tuesday's keynote illustrated how difficult it will be for any of those guys to replace Jobs.'"

Comments

Re:He's done it before - anyone remember NeXT?

[jbolden]

At least according to Apple their problems aren't technical, they can't figure out how to license this in a cost effective manner. I.E. the problem is really with Sony.

Don't know if it is true or not, but they have fairly specific in what the issues are. AFAIK the recommended solution is QuickTime to author the movie and then build the menus using a professional Hollywood system.

Re:Creating Fans By Attrition

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

I think you got some details slightly wrong. If by Apple II decisions where Jobs lost to Woz you mean the expansion slots, then though Jobs was a vocal proponent of not having them on the Mac this feature was a fundamental aspect of Jef Raskin's proposal from the very beginning.

Woz was part of the Mac project when he had his accident, but it was indeed the treatment of the Apple II group that was one of his main reasons for leaving. He did come back a few years later and worked on the 16 bit IIgs. I am not aware of any serious plans for a 32 bit Apple II but would love to hear more about it.

Re:I for one was pretty let down with this keynote

[WiiVault]

Apple is unique in that they are pretty conservative with their battery life stats. Often, but not always, products actually exceed the rated amount.

Re:I for one was pretty let down with this keynote

[RedK]

The battery is guaranteed for 3 years, and my MB battery can do the advertised 5 hours if I'm web browsing on 802.11n wireless.

Re:I for one was pretty let down with this keynote

[Shag]

The way to advertise a good battery life is to turn the screen brightness right down to almost-unreadable, no WiFi (usually), hard disk spun down, sometimes even boot off a RAM disk, then open TextEdit and type some characters to simulate 'use'. If you're lucky the vendor's test might be to open Safari and load a webpage every 5 minutes from a local web server.

Apple's web site says it was based on 50% screen brightness, websurfing over wifi and using a word processor. If they really wanted to tweak the numbers, they could've turned off wifi and websurfed over ethernet, one would think.