Illustration by Default
(Photo: Harald Franzen/Zuma Press)
Posted on 06/18/2007 8:59:28 PM PDT by Swordmaker
It’s a stunning box, a wizard object with a passel of amazing features (It’s a phone! An iPod! A Web browser!). But for all its marvels, the iPhone inaugurates a dangerous new era for Jobs. Has he peaked?
Illustration by Default
(Photo: Harald Franzen/Zuma Press)
He saunters out onstage, and the first thing you think is, man, Steve Jobs looks old. The second thing you think is, no, not old: He finally looks his age. Well into his forties, Jobs appeared to have pulled off some kind of unholy Dorian Gray maneuver. But now, at 52, his hair is seriously thinning, his frame frail-seeming, his gait halting and labored. His striking facial features—the aquiline nose, the razor-gash dimples—are speckled with ash-gray stubble. A caricaturist would draw him as a hybrid of Andre Agassi and Salman Rushdie. The senescence on display is jarring, but it’s also fitting. After three decades as Silicon Valley’s regnant enfant terrible, Jobs has suddenly, improbably, morphed into its presiding éminence grise.
The stage in question is at the Four Seasons in Carlsbad, California, where Jobs has come this afternoon in May for The Wall Street Journal conference “D: All Things Digital.” Dressed in his customary uniform—black mock turtleneck, faded 501s, running shoes—Jobs sits across from Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg, who commences with a simple question: Having recently changed its named from Apple Computer to Apple Inc., exactly what business is the company in?
“We’ll very shortly be in three businesses and a hobby,” Jobs replies, projecting the mildest affect he can muster—yet still the crowd is goggle-eyed, as if Bono were in the house.
(Excerpt) Read more at nymag.com ...
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I thought Sonny Bono died.
Thanks for sharing that...
Who knew?>>>
Go Steve!
For such a talented man, he is none too smart in his politics.
This writer is still promoting the stupid “music by subscription” model.
No, I am not going to make monthly payments to someone to get to listen to my music. Not ever. They should get it out of their stupid heads, all these people who think that I want to do nothing but sign up to get dozens of monthly bills.
Agreed. That fool is just way outside reality thinking we will pay to rent what we can HAVE and OWN.
With what Jobs dubs a "hobby," Apple TV, the company has invaded the sanctum sanctorum of living-room entertainment.The window of opportunity on that will be the transition from all-analog to all-digital broadcasting, IMHO.
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