Steve Jobs, the driving force behind Apple at its start and also for the last decade, resigned as CEO yesterday. In a letter to Apple employees he said he could no longer meet his duties and expectations as CEO, but would like to remain as Chairman of the Board. He recommended COO Tim Cook as his successor, and the Apple board agreed.
Jobs has left the post of CEO several times before on temporary medical leave, each time putting Cook in charge. He has been running the day-to-day at Apple since January. Apple’s site already features Cook’s bio at http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/tim-cook.html.
1984: You can now run programs in windows instead of taking up the whole screen.
2011: New feature! You can now run programs that fill the whole screen!
Lion was updated to version 10.7.1 through Software Update this week. Most of the changes involved fixing bugs and improving reliability. The update was specific to several versions of Mac hardware and whether you had Lion Server installed as well.
You can get 10.7.1 by simply running Software Update from the Apple menu on any Mac with Lion. Details about the update are at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4764.
In line during the tough economic times of the past.
In line during the tough economic times of today.
Apple had two interesting announcements this week. The first was the addition of a low-end iMac strictly for the education market. In the past Apple has kept around older iMac models and continued to sell them to students and educators. But this time around they have produced a new version of the 21.5-inch iMac for that purpose. The model comes with an i3 processor, 2GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive for $999. You can buy this low-end iMac from Apple, but only if you qualify for educational pricing. Note that for only $200 more you get the standard low-end iMac which comes with an i5 processor, twice the memory and twice the disk space.
The discontinued white MacBook is also available for educational purposed, but cannot be purchased by individuals from Apple. Reportedly it can only be ordered by educational institutions.
Apple released an add-on to Lion this week in the free Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. It allows a Lion user to use an external hard drive, such as a USB flash drive, as a recovery disk. A hard drive with Lion installed will include such a disk as a separate hidden partition on that same drive. But this method will work even if that internal drive is damaged. It will allow you to boot from the external drive and use tools to repair your disk, restore from Time Machine or even log on to the Mac App Store and re-download and install Lion.
The financial turmoil this week has produced an interesting bit of data. While Apple’s stock price went down with the rest of the market, it didn’t suffer as much as others. Several times on Tuesday, and by the end of the day on Wednesday, by the numbers it was the world’s most valuable company. At the end of Wednesday it was valued at $337.2 billion, ahead of Exxon Mobil which was in the lead previously.
“I gave up chewing on his shoes. He seems to get much more excited when I chew on those new Apple Thunderbolt cables.”
Apple made steps this week toward the eventual release of iCloud. They launched iCloud.com, a test site for some of iCloud’s new features. The site is meant for developers who need to test iOS app compatibility with iCloud. Web-based versions of services such as Mail, Contacts, Calendars and iWork document storage are reportedly all part of the test. This shows that Apple is close to releasing iCloud as other portions of the free service, such as iTunes in the Cloud are already available.
In addition, Apple announced pricing for iCloud storage upgrades. You get 5GB of storage for free. Since music, apps, books and photo storage are not counted against your total, then it is hard to imagine needing more. But if you store a lot of iWork documents, then you can get an additional 10GB for $20/year, 20GB for $40/year and 50GB for $100/year.
iCloud is expected to launch at the same time as iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The Apple web site says “Coming this fall.” MobileMe users will be allowed to stick with MobileMe until June 30, 2012, if they wish. Many may choose to wait so they can keep using features like iDisk and MobileMe Web hosting and Photo Galleries.
My brother became a patent troll and he now lives under one of those billion-dollar fancy suspension bridges.