Ken Segall, who worked alongside the tech giant’s co-founder, says company’s incredible growth was rooted in his love of simplicity – but things have changed

Apple’s stellar growth was rooted in Steve’s love of simplicity.

This love – you might call it obsession – could be seen in Apple’s hardware, software, packaging, marketing, retail store design, even the company’s internal organization.

But that was four years ago.

A growing number of people are sensing that Tim Cook’s Apple isn’t as simple as Steve’s Apple. They see complexity in expanding product lines, confusing product names, and the products themselves.

Is this just perception, or is it reality?

Steve Jobs, master of simplicity

First, we need to get one critical fact out of the way: Steve Jobs cannot be replaced. He had the credibility of the founder, extraordinary instinct, vision and energy, and he could make things happen by sheer force of will. It’s just not possible for Apple to be the same without him – but it can still succeed.

Tim Cook has a different style. Remember, he was handpicked by Steve to be Apple’s next leader, and he certainly knows how to make Apple run efficiently. He also recognizes that he doesn’t have Steve’s many talents, so he relies on the expertise of others in those areas where he is less experienced – such as product design and marketing.

That’s where things get a little more complicated. Steve’s vision, strength and charisma made him the benevolent dictator

Markets mature. A bigger audience has more diverse needs. If Apple were to ignore those needs, they would only force customers to go elsewhere. (As they did for several years by not making a big-screen iPhone.)

So, yes, Apple’s product lines have become more complicated. But really, are they that complicated? The company’s entire selection of products can easily fit on an average-size table

Critics have had a field day complaining about the growing complexity of Apple software.
Apple’s ability to make software solid and simple has come under attack from a number of normally pro-Apple sites.

The fact is, even the best of companies make mistakes from time to time. What’s alarming the Apple crowd today is that the flaws and complexities now seem to be creeping into the products more frequently.

Once upon a time, Apple’s product naming was extremely simple. Computers were Macs and consumer products were i-devices.

Does simplicity still rule at Apple?

I have zero doubt that Apple believes deeply in the power of simplicity. Simplicity is at the heart of the company’s products and the foundation of its vision for the future.
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But simplicity is a matter of perception

Stubborn, brilliant, dead. These are words one might use to describe Steve Jobs, perhaps not always in that order.

Jobs, gone almost 4 years now, had a certain way about him. There were things he did and things he would never do

Here are a few things Jobs was sour on but have been or could be sweet for Apple:

Stylus: Like a No. 2 pencil, but a lot more expensive
Consumers like big phones, and sales do not lie
Smaller size, no sandpaper required
Philanthropic giving and profitability
Suits mix with engineers

The popular narrative that Steve Jobs was removed from Apple by board fiat after losing a war for control with then-CEO John Sculley is not entirely accurate, according to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

“Steve Jobs wasn’t pushed out of the company. He left,” Wozniak wrote on Facebook. “After the Macintosh failure it’s fair to assume that Jobs left out of his feeling of greatness, and embarrassment about not having achieved it.”

Wozniak’s comments came in the midst of a larger discussion centering on the new Aaron Sorkin-penned, Danny Boyle-led movie about Jobs’s life that is set to hit theatres next month. Wozniak has praised that film — for which he consulted — as the best screen adaptation of Jobs and Apple since 1999′s Pirates of Silicon Valley.

What those grumbling about the influx of Syrian migrants crossing into their borders fail to consider is their lives have been irreversibly changed by the son of a Syrian migrant, Steve Jobs. A tech pioneer has succeeded in bringing global attention to this fact with a short but sweet tweet, which as of Friday afternoon, had already earned more than 5,000 retweets.

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A Reminder That A Syrian Migrant’s Son Gave Us The iPhone
Europe’s xenophobes should think twice.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/syrian-migrants-son-steve-jobs_55e9d5cee4b002d5c075ec83

Didn’t like Jobs , the 2013 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Ashton Kutcher? Maybe you’ll prefer Steve Jobs, the 2015 biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender.

Steve Jobs Is a Tech Visionary, Total Dick in the Steve Jobs Trailer
Michael Fassbender inhabits the Apple mastermind
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/news/a36124/steve-jobs-trailer-michael-fassbender/

A group of programmers and engineers designed the first Apple computer in a garage. An even larger team executed the Apple II. Billions of dollars went into creating the iPhone. Steve Jobs got all the credit. In the first seconds of the new trailer for Steve Jobs, a biopic from director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and writer Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), Steve Wozniak wonders exactly what Jobs did to deserve it.

“Musicians play their instruments,” Jobs says. “I play the orchestra.”

Michael Fassbender plays the technological artist with diabolical precision. He’s terrifying. Alongisde Fassbender are: Seth Rogen, stepping up his dramatic game as Wozniak, Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, former marketing chief of Macintosh, and Jeff Daniels as Apple CEO John Sculley, and Inherent Vice actress Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan, Jobs’ ex-girlfriend and mother of his estranged child.

The Cult of Steve
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/03/becoming_steve_jobs_why_apple_insiders_are_pushing_this_book_over_walter.single.html

Why Apple insiders are so worked up over two admiring Steve Jobs biographies.

One thing has become exceedingly clear in the run-up to the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs: The people closest to Steve Jobs do not like that other biography of Steve Jobs. And with this one, they’re eager to set the record straight.

The criticism for Walter Isaacson’s official biography, which was rushed to press following Jobs’ death in 2011, has flowed steadily from Apple’s inner-sanctum in the weeks preceding the new book’s release.

“It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality,” Cook is quoted as saying. “You get the feeling that he’s a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person.”

The new book lets many of Jobs’ closest colleagues give their own take on his legacy. It’s a highly favorable account of his gifts, acknowledging some of Jobs’ well-documented flaws while often seeking to minimize them. More than anything, it sets out to show how Jobs grew over the years, becoming both a more effective CEO and, at least in some ways, a gentler person. That last bit is debatable, but you could say this: The book convincingly traces a trajectory from a young man whose ego and monomania repeatedly thwarted his ambition to an older one who was occasionally a jerk but mostly just because he was burning to get things done. As Jim Collins, bestselling business author, says of Jobs in the book: “He’s not a success story. He’s a growth story.”

Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-reaction-when-jon-rubinstein-quit-2015-3?r=US#ixzz3VDs6Iosc

The day that Steve Jobs died, people around the world flocked to Apple Stores in a sort of spontaneous mass pilgrimage. They left letters and signs, holding up iPhones and iPads in tribute. Director Alex Gibney shows the event early on in his new documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, and it stirred up a flurry of emotions in me, because I was one of those people.

Rather than going for a chronological history of Jobs’ life, Gibney has created a documentary that is about his own dawning awareness of the many facets of Jobs, starting from Gibney’s initial status as a card-carrying iPhone fetishist (he likens his phone to the One Ring early in the film).

It’s encapsulated best by early Macintosh director of engineering Bob Belleville. He describes being hired away from Xerox — Jobs told him that everything he’d worked on up until that point had been “shit” — and how working at Apple destroyed his marriage and pushed him away from his children.