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Jony Ive
It's called "Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs."
The first 100 pages of the book are an entertaining, fast paced read about life at Apple when Steve Jobs was alive. After that, the book strays a bit and loses itself. It's more focused on things happening outside Apple like patent suits and working conditions in factories.
We've read the book and there are a bunch of fun tiny details about Apple, Jobs, Tim Cook, and even Jony Ive that we hadn't heard before.
Probably the most interesting is that after Steve Jobs died, lead designer Jony Ive asked Apple to give him a private jet.
Ive had assumed more control and more power within the company. Jobs used to fly in a Gulfstream paid for by Apple, and Ive wanted the same thing. He makes a lot of trips around the world.
Kane says CEO Tim Cook and the board drew a line. It rejected Ive's request.
That's just one of many little nuggets. Here are some more. These aren't Earth-shattering revelations, but they're fun little tid-bits we thought we'd pass along:
- Jobs' favorite water was Glaceau SmartWater.
- Apple has goofy names for conference rooms. The developer relations team names their rooms after evangelists like Tammy Faye and Pat Robertson. The iPhone software team has a room named "Between" which is between the "Rock" and "Hard Place" meeting rooms.
- Former Apple CEO Gil Amelio always ate his meals off china. His assistants had to take food out of take out containers and put it on china.
- Steve Jobs hated Amelio, and created the Gil-o-meter to gauge how stupid someone is. Two Gils meant you were twice as dumb as Amelio.
- Steve Jobs made the final call on naming the iPhone 3GS. But, initially he wanted it to be the iPhone 3G S. He later killed the space.
- When Jobs announced he needed surgery in 2004, Apple stock dropped 2%. His response: "That's it?"
- Apple initially planned to charge $399 for the iPad, but it was so confident in the product that it raised the price to $499.
- At a meeting with Apple's top 100 employees Jobs asked for suggestions of a better name than "iPod" before the product was released. Employees suggested "iPlay" and "iMusic." Jobs' response: "Those are all sh*t. I'm sticking with what I've got."
- Jobs wanted to call NeXT, the company he did after Apple, "Two." He was talked out of that.
- Jobs said the two coolest things he'd done in life were the first Macintosh and the first iPhone.
- When Jobs went on leave in 2008, Tim Cook's parents were so proud of their son, the went into the local newspaper's offices to give an interview about Cook. The newspaper didn't even ask them to come in, they just did it. When Apple found out, it tried to get the paper to kill the story. The paper didn't kill the story, but it downplayed it.
- Cook wasn't obsessed with computers growing up. Kane quotes him saying, "The truth is, I'd never thought much about computers. It just sort of happened. Would things have turned out different if that hadn't happened? I don't know. But I do know that there are only a very few things in life that define you and that was one of them for me."
- One time Cook was in an airport lounge at Heathrow in London. He grabbed some cookies and wanted to know why they were called "digestives." He asked, "Are these something I need be careful of?" He was told they're just cookies. His response, "With a name like digestives, I didn't know what I was going to be eating."
- Eddy Cue, who is one of the most important people at Apple now, tells his story of how he got Jobs' attention. He was in a meeting, and told Jobs his opinion. Jobs told him to shut up. Cue didn't shut up. So Jobs threw a pen at his forehead. Cue persisted. By the third time Jobs was listening.
- After Jobs died, Jony Ive, Apple's leading designer was distraught. He supposedly told a confidant, "What am I going to do? I don't have my intellectual partner."