Steve Jobs' Macworld Keynotes, 1998-2008 108
Ian Lamont writes "The Industry Standard has put together a collection of video highlights from Steve Jobs' Macworld keynotes since his return to Apple in the late 1990s. It's interesting to watch. Jobs was basically able to turn tech product demonstrations into convincing consumer spectacles that made even the simplest product feature — such as the handle on the clamshell iBook — seem innovative and utterly desirable. And while his appearance changed greatly over the years (compare his 1998 iMac demonstration with his "iPod Mini" keynote in 2004, when he was reportedly trying to treat cancer with a special diet), his enthusiasm never waned. Of course, he may make appearances at Apple's WWDC or other events, but a Macworld expo with Phil Schiller headlining just won't be the same."
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Scared? Upset maybe, distressed, distraught. But scared? At what, what might happen to Apple? It's an odd day when one is scared for the sake of a multi-billion dollar corporation...
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We've all seen what Apple is like without Steve. We don't want to see it again. He keeps bring out desirable products and that makes us happy. It also gives his opposition fits.
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Spoken like one who's livelyhood/retirement is not tied up in their stock. But I don't own any Apple stock... the only Apple product I have is an iPod shuffle -- hardly a high-dollar item.
1997? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:1997? (Score:5, Informative)
More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_jobs#Return_to_Apple [wikipedia.org] (doesn't mention the keynote, but although the collection starts from 1998 he actually came back in 1996, announcing it in 1997 at Macworld Boston.)
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Macworld Boston - that's the one. If the collection starts from 1998 then it must not include this one [youtube.com].
Lol, the spontaneous applause whenever anyone mentions directors resigning tells a story in itself.
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I'm surprised he didn't announce it two years in advance. After all, isn't that what they do with their products?
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Eh, no, not really.
In fact, they seem to strongly prefer to only announce products once they're ready to ship (or very nearly so), the sole exception I can think of being the OS.
Job's easy job... (Score:3, Funny)
[...] spectacles that made even the simplest product feature -- such as the handle on the clamshell iBook -- seem innovative and utterly desirable.
Spectacle?! You're kidding me. this is the easiest job in Silicon Valley? to arouse Mac fans and convince them to buy more Apple stuff. c'mom, that's as labourous as convincing an alcoholic to have another drink!
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Or getting a Leenux user to think recompiling the kernel is a fun way to spend a weekend
An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:5, Insightful)
If 10 years ago you would have told me that a 40 something balding man in a black turtleneck could make consumer computer technology look svelte, I wouldn't have believed you. I still find it hard to believe today. For all the weirdness, secrecy and--reportedly--heavy handedness, Jobs does some amazing work highlighting the positive aspects of Apple's products.
I think it's his confidence and an earnest belief that the product has been engineered to the highest standards that helps him be such an effective salesman. Bill Gates tried to capture some of that same humanity and enthusiasm in his Seinfeld commercials and somehow failed miserably. Perhaps it's Gate's lack of a publicaly accessible side. Or it could be that he's just a robot sent from the future.
Whatever you think about Apple (expensive, overly trendy, defectivebydesign, overly lawyered, Lord Job's GIFT to his children), Jobs does a pretty amazing job of selling it. My girlfriend pointed out that during his introduction of the iPhone, he not only enumerated the features of the device, he also taught everybody how it works. That's a pretty deft presentation.
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:4, Insightful)
What do we know, perhaps he's doing his absolutely best to highlight the bad sides of apple products as well, just that there isn't really any in the field(s) they are operating?
You don't buy a mac to run a server, you buy it to be creative, and I fail to see the drawbacks of such a purchase.
I have still to own my own mac, but I probably will in the future, because everyone I know who bought one tells me how sweet they are to use, and why wouldn't I trust my friends? After all, what I've seen from it it delivers.
Just having a hard time leaving linux, I guess I will have to multiboot :-)
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't buy a mac to run a server, you buy it to be creative, and I fail to see the drawbacks of such a purchase.
That's exactly why I bought into macs. That and I couldn't bear to upgrade from XP to Vista with a new laptop purchase. I use my macbook for school (as a teacher) and I was doing all my photographic developing on it. I couldn't handle the terrible color consistency on the itty-bitty screen so I upgraded to an iMac. I do most of my school related work on the lappy and use the desktop for all my photography.
I can't get away from linux though. I have a linux box running in the next room as a print/web/music server. It also manages all the local and remote backups. The darwin side of OS X is also pretty awesome. I get to pretend that I know what the hell I'm doing and hack around in the command line and feel like a sys-admin.
As for the "bad sides" of Apple products, there's plenty that Jobs doesn't bother to mention. Like the iron grip Apple has on the iphone appstore, poor material quality on the macbook line (the keyboard deck and backsides are all cracking and crazing-mine has a razor sharp edge right where my right wrist rests). His strength is to make all the good qualities sound so sexy, you're willing to ignore those nasty ones. I sure did when I bought the 3G iphone. I love what the iphone does, but to be perfectly honest, my old Nokia 6000 series had a vastly better call quality and at a fraction of the price ($50).
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Well, about the apple store. It's okay that they do what they want with it to withold a certain quality BUT on the other side of that coin they should allow users to install whatever they want on their phones (even if this introduces virus threats).
It's not like microsoft allows open source programs from their windows update do they?
And yes, they have drawbacks such as the locked in iphone 3g, but you know what: you don't HAVE to buy it you know...
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Other than a contract, the iPhone 3G is fairly "free" - you don't have to just get apps from the iTunes App Store - jailbreaking has worked on them almost from day 1. With Cydia and Installer, making your app public is also fairly simple.
Oh, and today, if your SIM is fairly simple, there is a soft-unlock for it, so almost any SIM card can work (exceptions are those that are PIN locked, and SI
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:4, Funny)
Dear Friend,
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Alright, just give me your credit card details and I'll be on my way...
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:4, Funny)
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I have still to own my own mac, but I probably will in the future, because everyone I know who bought one tells me how sweet they are to use, and why wouldn't I trust my friends? After all, what I've seen from it it delivers.
My next laptop will probably be a Macbook. Not because Macs are so "sweet" to use, but because they are less bad than modern Windows-based PC's.
I use a Mac at work almost exclusively. To say it works "intuitively", as Apple fans often do, is overstating things at best. It works intui
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:5, Informative)
Select the file to be renamed. PRESS THE "ENTER" KEY. Type the new name. Press the enter key again, or click anywhere else.
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Select the file to be renamed. PRESS THE "ENTER" KEY. Type the new name. Press the enter key again, or click anywhere else.
Alternatively, just click the icon, then click the file name, and type the new name. That gets rid of the risk of double-clicking.
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Which button? Oh sorry, it's a Mac. My bad.
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You don't buy a mac to run a server, you buy it to be creative
Are you kidding me? You BUY a Mac to BE creative? Anybody who actually believes that must not have a creative bone in their body if they don't understand that mindless mass market consumption doesn't fuel creativity. A painter buys a brush to express creativity, not to "be creative." And a truly creative painter doesn't need that brush, certainly not one with a shiny white logo on it. Picaso would not be more or less creative if you gave him a Mac instead of a brush, and giving him a PC instead of a Mac wou
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to express, then.
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But Macs make certain atheist girls look good while babbling about generic arguments against organized religion. its all about the iSight camera :P
Nice to find you on slashdot, casey. TS from YT here. :O
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Hey, don't judge me. I wouldn't do it my dad payed more attention to me.
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hm im doing pretty good, except my legs and lungs--thanks to new years, heh. school is starting again and it looks like new vids will have to wait till the summer. hows life post-tubes?
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:5, Funny)
a 40 something balding man in a black turtleneck
that's a terrible mischaracterization. He's a 50-something balding man in a black turtleneck
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He's starting to sound like the elusive fifth Wiggle.
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That's a terrible mischaracterization. He's a 50-something balding man in a black mock turtleneck.
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:5, Funny)
Of course the fact that his demos don't regularly crash midway through helps a lot.
At similar Microsoft events the "tension in the air" is everyone anticipating the blue screen of death with every mouse click.
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Of course the fact that his demos don't regularly crash midway through helps a lot.
Its almost as if he spends a couple of days on testing before the event. Imagine doing that amount of effort to avoid appearing an idiot in front of millions of people.
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Apple has a lot of education customers, video editing and sound editing folk, the movie industry, journalists, copy rooms, the list goes on. How are those not enterprise ? Unless enterprise as some very strict meaning where it's only IT companies and Finance firms that count...
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Apple has yet to create any form of enterprise level reliable software. Not a single one.
Well there's web-objects which back in the day served dynamic content from Disney, Dell etc.
It was one of the darlings of NeXT (a company ahead of it's time), and after NeXT was re-absorbed by Apple has languished and maybe superseded.
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Enterprise level reliable? If an enterprise truly values reliability they go with Big Iron. Five or six 9s of reliability is expensive but also come with financial incentives. For the money, these companies pay for reliability, but they get financial compensation if not met. Microsoft famously touted their reliability when running a major stock exchange. The London Stock Exchange was down for a day and that blew their reliability for an entire century. NASDAQ is the same size as the LSE and they run
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If we're going to judge Windows on a completely different operating system (Windows 98 - as noted here [windowsitpro.com], "NT didn't crash, however, despite its much earlier beta state."; since you don't know, NT 5 became Windows 2000, from which Vista is descended from), then it's fair game to judge OS X by the shambles that was classic MacOS. So, wake me up when MacOS has finally managed simple features such as multitasking...
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Good point. Win9X was a steaming turd which we all suffered through. And ironically MacOS (in all it's later forms) was also a steaming turd. Multitasking?! Multitasking?! That's advanced stuff, how about a disk driver that was interrupt safe so that you could, you know, do stuff while writing to disk. Man you've got to walk before you can run.
I used to write fortran code in absoft fortran 77 on a Mac during grad school. It was such a great machine for avoiding RSI. I'd do some sort of bone-headed ar
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Oh dear, it looks like I've upset one of the three remaining classic MacOS fans.
Posting the link again, for those who still seem to think that Windows 98 has anything to do with Windows Vista: http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/17767/windows-98-crashes-during-gates-demo.html [windowsitpro.com] .
Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's obvious that Jobs uses his company's product unlike those pesky auto execs who probably drive golf carts more often than they drive their classic European sports cars. Sorry, was that too bitter?
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My God techies don't get out much do they...
Ever heard of a company called NOKIA????
Do you know what Nokia made before they became the Juggernaut that they are today? Rubber Boots, TV's!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia [wikipedia.org]
The original CEO who transformed Nokia is long gone, but Nokia is still creating the products that they are.
The key with Nokia and the CEO is that he instilled a new way of thinking. Think HP, and how they used to think and do things. This is exactly what is going on with Apple.
Steve Jobs wa
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Jobs isn't the only thinker. He's the only one, however, who has been able to make the world passionate about Apple products. I think it's fair to say that Apple's next CEO will not make the boneheaded mistake of making Apple products that look just like every other computer out there except maybe a bit more rounded, though.
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I would. People were gullible before that, they were gullible then and they're gullible now.
And it's a scientific fact that people are getting more gullible at an average rate of around 1.5% per year.
Yes, he IS kind of a priest (Score:5, Insightful)
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Without a doubt. It's completely in his personality, and he's always been this way. It's been said that everything with Steve has been about revolution and overthrowing stale paradigms. And likewise for Bill Gates, it's about the thrill of the victory. He's a nut when it comes to games like poker or puzzles. Neither of these guys care about money for the sake of money.
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No. Obviously they have to be good businessmen, and that entails being motivated by profit. They would be irresponsible not too, but I'm talking about the motivations that drive their personalities. Everyone who's known Bill Gates since his teen years knows about how intensely competitive Bill is. He loves to win. If the objective of the game is money, then his goal is to obtain the most. If the objective is just being dominant in a particular segment, even at a loss, then Bill will pursue that. As for Stev
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Re:An old dude in a turtleneck... (Score:5, Funny)
He can't be God, everyone knows Woz is God.
The iRack (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE
Zombie Steve Jobs releases iBrains (Score:5, Funny)
Steve Jobs, visionary leader of Apple Computer, has died - and come back, better and stronger [today.com].
The news was carried in an obituary run by Bloomberg late last night, which was pulled when news of his resurrection came through.
"They don't call it the Jesus Phone for nothing," Jobs laughed with reporters, before eating their tasty, tasty brains.
Jobs' new cyborg arsenal includes wifi, 3G, laser cannons, a flame thrower and a can opener, all running on Mac OS X Robosteve. Bundled applications include an enhanced hypnotic force field based on the one he uses at MacWorld keynotes. "I can't wait to try it on Bill," he said.
Disney, in which Jobs is the single largest shareholder, remained unaffected. "Steve's just working with the way we do things here," said the disembodied computer-hosted soul of Walt Disney, who was decanted to a computer in 1966 to avoid being declared legally dead, so that copyright in his works would never, ever run out.
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Strange confusion... it isn't obvious? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like bad business practice (a liability?) for the fate of an entire company to be tied to one man, but there it is: people do not trust Apple to innovate sans Jobs. Rather than wait for the guy to drop dead or decide to quit. They have to start weening the public off of the idea that Steve Jobs sits in a big room, thinking up ideas that later become the products people crave.
The fact of the matter is Jobs has brought an atmosphere and mindset to Apple that they'd been lacking for a long time. And while people are -often legitimately- prone to question how truly innovative Apple's products are, it's hard to argue that the hype is often legitimate, and they at least have designs that contain and lack just the right number of features with the right amount of polish for a majority of users, to the point where they are willing to pay a premium for the product.
Separating the Steve Jobs from the idea that Apple is what has to be done, and it's going to be rough.
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It seems like bad business practice (a liability?) for the fate of an entire company to be tied to one man, but there it is: people do not trust Apple to innovate sans Jobs.
It's true, but I find that fact hilarious. It means that people really are stupid enough to think Jobs is the one doing the innovating at Apple. Any innovation that comes out of that place is the product of a bunch of really smart people working together, not one man.
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Apple had smart people working there in the wilderness years too, and a fat lot of good it did them without a coherent long-term strategy and a bit of vision at the top.
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If you really are on first name terms with steve, tell him osx runs well on a netbook, acer aspire one is mostly compatile, needed a usb wificard since the internal one wasn't supported.
There's two possibilities he could consider an osx release which fully supports this limited hardware or getting an apple badged version on the streets.
I understand Apple doesn't want to suffer the Linux issue, 99% compatibility but that 1% causes the quality of Linux into question time and time again. However as a subset of
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They have to start weening the public off of the idea that Steve Jobs sits in a big room, thinking up ideas that later become the products people crave.
Yeah, agree mostly, and I have no doubt that post-Jobs they will continue to do all that good stuff - refreshing the hardware, coming up with a new look to replace aluminium+glass, adding fribble-frabble to OS X and so on.
But it's hard to imagine an Apple led by (eg) Phil Schiller, creating new products on a par with OSX, iLife, the iPhone, the iPod and so on.
Why are they stopping doing these? (Score:4, Insightful)
Steve or no steve, the what-are-apple-bringing-out-next keynotes are a big tech highlight. They always get lots of news coverage- e.g. this piece!
It mystifies why Apple have decided that they can be dispensed with. Dell would kill to have this.
Re:Why are they stopping doing these? (Score:5, Insightful)
They're stopping because they're tired of having to have something to show off two weeks after Christmas when the alternative is getting hammered for not announcing anything exciting-- without the Expo, they are free to work on stuff until they feel it's ready to be announced; they don't have to rush to conform to the timing of the show.
Plus, the timing of the show (which IDG is has apparently never been willing to reschedule) puts a dent in Apple's holiday sales... people who want to buy will hold off to see what new stuff gets announced at the Expo.
Finally, Apple now has sufficient mindshare with the general public that they don't really need a big trade show presence anymore to garner publicity. I see headlines on CNN.com frequently when Apple introduces new/updated products, and not just during the Expo-- Dell and HP don't have that kind of coverage when they announce new stuff, and most of Microsoft's press is stuff they'd rather not see on the main page of CNN.com, like yesterday's Zune coma epidemic.
~Philly
Jobs = Marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
Just goes to show you what you can do if you truly believe in your products.
Personally i think he's a pompous jerk and is often shortsighted, but I cant deny he's the master of marketing.
Re:Jobs = Marketing (Score:5, Funny)
Personally i think he's a pompous jerk and is often shortsighted, but I cant deny he's the master of marketing.
You just repeated yourself. Master of Marketing would have been sufficient.
Looking at the videos, it occurs to me (Score:5, Insightful)
that Jobs may be unique in that he has the skills to manage a major company, at the same time he really, really cares about the product. That's what comes across in videos; it's not that his keynotes have a great deal of razzmatazz, it's that they have conviction. That is the source of the famous reality distortion field. At the same time, he also brought classic management common sense to Apple, simplifying their product line to fit a well chosen market position, streamlining the manufacturing end of the business.
I really think this combination is rare. There are lots of entrepreneurs who start businesses, to whom management is something they have to do in order to create products. There are lots of high flying managers for whom, at the end of the day, a company is merely a machine for efficient profit generation. I think Carly Fiorina at HP was an example of the latter. It wasn't that her ideas were, in a generic sense, bad. It's that she didn't have a sense for what was right, and more importantly, unique at HP. People see her as the manager that destroyed HP; that's not quite right. She is the manager who turned HP from an unique institution into just another big company.
I suppose it may be that a more or less standard company is easier to run; you can get generic B school grads employing motherhood and apple pie practices and turn a normal profit, or with luck a tiny bit more. But while the process of converting an unique company into something easier to grasp, there is a spark of imagination and creativity that is lost.
Whatever Jobs faults may have been, you can't say he was an ineffective or inefficient manager, nor can you say he treated the products of the company as merely profit centers. Apple is a company with personality, with a sense of uniqueness and mission, things which business plans give lip service to but usually aren't reflected in reality.
Jobs is a manager for whom the details of a product matter. People snicker about the reality distortion field when the crowd goes wild when Jobs announces the iBook will have a handle, but I don't think they get it. Whether or not a handle is something a laptop ought to have, details matter. I wish other manufacturers had this attitude; they copy stylistic elements from Apple, but while the result may or may not look great, they still miss important details like managing the cord on the power brick, or the power connector itself.
Re:Looking at the videos, it occurs to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that he cares about the product so much is a rare characteristic in CEOs. Most CEOs get on stage and talk about profit momentum and other accounting noise. Steve gets on stage and talks about the beauty of the product and how this changes people's lives.
I remember reading a story about the development of the first Macintosh. Steve was haranguing a programmer to make the boot time faster. (Paraphrasing). "Imagine if you cut the boot time by 10 seconds. Multiply that by a million customers. You just saved 115 days of life every year." Most CEOs would have talked about how many more units would be sold.
Whatever else you say about him that passion for the product is an outstanding characteristic.
Re:Looking at the videos, it occurs to me (Score:4, Insightful)
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People see her as the manager that destroyed HP; that's not quite right. She is the manager who turned HP from an unique institution into just another big company.
This is very much the same thing.
I have a first-generation Compaq nw9440 laptop. It had a serious GPU overheat problem and a self-ejecting DVD-rom problem when I got it. Without going into detail (some of you have seen much of it already) they've sent me the wrong-brand optical drive twice (HP brand is a line item feature, I don't want tsstcorp even if it's only a bios difference!) and the wrong MODEL (4x instead of 8x, no lightscribe) three times, sent me the wrong power supply twice, on-site tech came out
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Whether or not a handle is something a laptop ought to have, details matter. I wish other manufacturers had this attitude; they copy stylistic elements from Apple, but while the result may or may not look great, they still miss important details like managing the cord on the power brick, or the power connector itself.
I was an early adopter of the HDD based mp3 player. I bought Archo's FIRST HDD mp3 player and it was a beast. It took 6(!) AA batteries, had the form factor of a cassette player and charged with an ugly wallwart. It had a reasonable capcity (10GB), but the UI was terrible. The screen was a tiny, muddy backlit mess and it was just about impossible to navigate through the tiny screen. A few years later, after giving up on HDD based mp3 players, I bought an iPod. It was my first experience with an Apple
keynote archive? (Score:2)
does anyone know of a video archive of all of jobs' keynotes since he has returned to apple? try as i might, i've only been able to gather a few that i've found from youtube and itunes.
Needs a match between MacWorld xx and NeXTWorld yy (Score:2)
'cause it's hilarious (and sad) how after Apple bought NeXT people at MacWorld were cheering for demos which were repeats of previous NeXTWorlds.
William
(who didn't wait, but switched to using a NeXT Cube in college)
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(who didn't wait, but switched to using a NeXT Cube in college)
And from the adoption of both NeXTStep and Objective-C, it's clear you made the right choice.
Martin
(who used afterstep to make his Linux system look like NeXTStep about the same time he dropped out of college)
And boom... (Score:1)
Boom... (Score:2)
Here's another good collection of keynotes from the same period:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8L39UwOS-Y [youtube.com]
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Unfortunately, it's just not funny. I got bored after reading the first section. It made me smile in a few places but not even an audible chuckle. It just comes off seeing angry, petty, and formulaic.
I mean, the encyclopediadramatica article on Steve Jobs is at least trying, and worthy of a laugh.