Steve Jobs, Apple, insanely great friends and how to live your life
April 23rd, 2010 by Tim Greenhalgh
I caught up with two old journalist colleagues, good friends, last night - Merlin John and Sean Coughlan. We put the world to rights, celebrated Sean’s promotion to education Correspondent at the BBC, and argued geek-pop-politics until forever.
We most definitely raised our voices around the subject of Steve Jobs and Apple; I found myself trying to defend the insanely great man against accusations that Apple had moved away from education, was trying to take over and control the Web, and that the iPad sucked.
One point we did agree on was the potential for the iPad and other slates to give publishers a lifeline through connections to new and old readerships. Sean’s been busy writing books, available online only so he has a keen interest in how this market will develop. Whether Jobs wants to and can effectively wall the internet garden is still up for debate but for now, for me, he remains a hero.
This morning I replayed the Stanford University video to remind myself why I respect Steve Jobs so much - if you have time, it just might be the best 14mins 30 secs you’ve spent. This is the way I’d like to live my life, most certainly.
Tags: apple, bbc, iPad, Merlin John, Sean Coughlan, Stanford University, steve jobs
May 2nd, 2010 at 10:47 am
Thanks for that, Phil. Better than a cup of coffee to get the day jump-started. Longer lasting, too. ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’ Brilliant. I remember the Whole Earth Catalog well and I still am the proud (if somewhat embarrassed) owner of a Mac SE which, now, thanks to this video, I vow never to get rid of…
May 2nd, 2010 at 11:54 am
Thanks Winston - definitely keep that Mac SE. Mine’s a first gen Mac - no hard drive, boot from floppy, awesome games, Macwrite (best WP ever). Whole Earth Catalogue laid conceptual groundwork for the Web. Actually, have you seen colleague Wendy’s post on Robert Cailleau, ‘co-inventor of the Web’ http://bit.ly/aycQV6 . He has good things to say about privacy, how Javascript sucks, the importance of open standards and a great pointer to some very cool updates from RunRev - who have carried the Hypercard torch, with changes, since ‘97. Keep in touch.