Here’s the letter he sent:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

My name is John Devor and I’m the co-owner of a small Mac shareware company named The Little App Factory and a long-term Apple customer and shareholder. I doubt you’re aware but we recently received a letter from a law firm working on Apple’s behalf instructing us that we had violated several of Apple’s trademarks in our application iPodRip and asking us to cease using the name and Apple trademarks in our icons.

We have been distributing iPodRip since 2003 with the aim of providing a method to recover music, movies and photos from iPods and iPhones in the event of a serious hardware failure on their Mac which leads to data loss. Our goal has been to provide the highest quality product coupled with the highest quality service in a bid to resolve some of the angst that is generated by such an ordeal; service befitting of an Apple product. In this department we think we have succeeded as we have approximately 6 million customers, many Apple employees, music artists and other notable people in society. In fact I’d argue that our customer service is the best of all competing applications in our niche as many of them are scams and frauds that leave Apple customers with a terrible taste in their collective mouths. We fear very much that tens of thousands of Apple customers looking to recover their own music and having heard of our product via word-of-mouth or otherwise, will instead find a product produced by one of our competitors, and will wind up the victim of a scam (one closely-named competitor charges a hidden monthly fee, for instance).

It is quite obvious that we mean Apple no harm with the use of the name iPodRip, or of the inclusion of trademarked items in our icons, and in fact I believe that we have been providing an excellent secondary service to Apple customers that has potentially caused you many repeat clients. In fact, we are quite aware that Apple support and store staff have recommended our software on numerous occasions as far back as 2004 so we have felt that we were doing something right!

With this in mind, we are in desperate need of some assistance and we beseech you to help us to protect our product and our shareware company, both of which we have put thousands upon thousands of hours of work into. Our company goal is to create Mac software of the highest quality with the best user experience possible. I myself dropped out of school recently to pursue a path in the Mac software industry, and you yourself have been a consistent inspiration for me.

If there is anything at all you can do with regards to this matter, we would be most grateful.

Best,

John Devor

And Steve replied:

Change your apps [sic] name. Not that big of a deal.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

So they changed the name of their app to iRip. Fair enough! [CrunchGear]

We believe there are only two significant brands in the film industry—”Disney” and “Steven Spielberg”. We would like to establish “Pixar” as the third. Successful brands are a reflection of consumer trust, which is earned over time by consumers’ positive experiences with the brand’s products. For example, parents trust Disney-branded animated films to provide satisfying and appropriate family entertainment, based on Disney’s undisputed track record of making wonderful animated films. This trust benefits both parents and Disney: it makes the selection of family entertainment that much easier for parents, and it allows Disney to more easily and assuredly draw audiences to see their new films. Over time we want Pixar to grow into a brand that embodies the same level of trust as the Disney brand.

This letter was available on the Pixar website until 2006, when Disney, utterly trounced by Pixar in the world of animated features, bought the company. [The Pixar Touch via David Cho]

That’s the starting eBay bid for this motherboard. According to the original invoice included in the auction package — dated December 7, 1976 — he also was the one filling the sales forms. At least this one, which says Steven. Since it was only him and Woz at the time — and the latter was always busy creating beautiful electronics and calling the Pope — it’s pretty safe to say that this was indeed Apple’s current CEO and then CEO, CFO, CMO, COO and CLSDI. The original package has Steve Jobs’ parents as the return address:

It includes:

• The computer itself
• The original shipping box, with Steve Jobs’ parents’ house as a return address
• The original manual, with schematics to build your own Apple 1
• The tape interface card
• The manual for the tape interface
• A plain Scotch-brand cassette tape with a simply-typed label “BASIC” that came with the unit
• A letter, signed by Steven Jobs in 1976, explaining connecting a keyboard and monitor, as well as detailing when dealer applications would be available
• An original full-page glossy advertisement for Apple, included when the Apple 1 computer was shipped. (The ad is almost unrecognisable as an Apple ad due to its elaborate Isaac Newton logo. The artist who drew that logo was the third original partner in Apple Corp. His stake in Apple was bought out for a couple thousand dollars when the company started getting serious).
• Photographs of all prior owners of this unit.

The Apple I was the first Apple computer. The two Steves started to sell it on July 1976. The price then was $US666.66. At the time all computers needed to be assembled, but the Apple I was a motherboard — assembled by themselves at Jobs parents’ garage — was ready to connect to a keyboard, monitor and cassette player. [eBay via Tuaw]

Here is the full quote in context from the program Warren Buffett and Bill Gates: Keeping America Great.

“Well, he’s done a fantastic job,” Gates said. “Apple is in a bit of a different business where they make hardware and software together. But when Steve was coming back to Apple, which was actually through an acquisition of NeXT that he ran, Apple was in very tough shape. In fact, most likely it wasn’t going to survive.”

He continued: “And he brought in a team, he brought in inspiration about great products and design that’s made Apple back into being an incredible force in doing good things. And it’s great to have competitors like that. We write software for Apple, Microsoft does. They compete with Apple. But he, of all the leaders in the industry that I’ve worked with, he showed more inspiration and he saved the company.”

Awww…how touching. [AppleInsider]

The turtle neck and glasses are there, but I don’t know what’s up with that “where’s the bathroom?” pose. Cute, but strange. [Artist Dax Norman via Walyou]

On December 27, 1996, Apple had $US1.8 billion in cash and securities. Today it has $US34 billion.

(Thanks to reader Cory Padfield for this chart idea.)

Some of us from Silicon Valley were invited to a dinner in Palo Alto. It was 1983. At one point during the meal, Steve stands up and yells: “Nobody over 30 can possibly understand what computing is all about.”

I pulled him aside, waved my finger, and lectured him, telling him, “You’re incredibly arrogant. You don’t know what you don’t know.” His response was, “Teach me. Tell me what I should know.”

Yes, a total twunt, but you have to admire how he turned it around, nonchalantly. Mr. Grove says that they later had lunch together, talking mostly about personal stuff. He thinks that he didn’t teach him a single thing. Instead time has, as he points out the irony of Steve’s words during that dinner:

He was wrong when he singled a generation out. How old was Steve when the iPod came out — 46?

Indeed. Read the rest of the anecdotes from the rest of the eight business stars talking about el Señor Esteban in [Fortune]

The Oracle CEO had all the money lined up, ready to buy the triumphant return of Caesar. But Steve didn’t want that kind of comeback. He thought that if he proceeded with a takeover, people would think he was just greedy, wanting to make money out of the company. In Ellison’s own words:

He explained to me that with the moral high ground, he thought he could make decisions more easily and more gracefully.

My guess is that it wasn’t only that. Steve wanted to be wanted. He knew he was loved by the public and the press. After all, everyone likes the story of a legend coming back — to see him succeed or, better yet, for Hollywood drama, fail. More importantly, the company was his company. He didn’t have to buy it! That was absolutely preposterous, he probably thought at the time. He knew he was going to return as king once again, acclaimed by his troops and his people, so why spend any money?

He was right. As we know now, it all worked out. He returned, first as (interim) CEO bringing the iMac that wasn’t going to be named iMac, then as official CEO. He turned the company around from insignificance and certain oblivion to one of the most recognisable and successful brands in consumer electronics. Which apparently is the reason why Fortune has named him CEO of the Decade. [Fortune]

The Macternet! OK, that doesn’t really curdle my blood, but I’m sure you will do better in the comments.

That’s according to the man who named it, Ken Segall, who talked to Leander at Cult of Mac. He worked at Apple’s agency TBWA\Chiat\Day and not only christened the iMac, but was the man behind Apple’s pitch-perfect “Think Different” campaign.

It’s ironic that Segall, who knew iMac was the perfect name and pitched it to Jobs over and over after being rejected again and again, thought that the computer itself was stupid: “We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, ‘Jesus, do they know what they are doing?’ It was so radical.” It strikingly highlights the difference between people who create things and the people who sell them: Apple could see they had a brilliant product, but a terrible way to sell it. TBWA saw a terrible product, but had a brilliant way to brand it.

Unfortunately, Segall won’t actually reveal Jobs’ terrible name, fearing it would open the ninth gate of hell and bring forth the apocalypse choo-choo.

Steve never actually told Segall he’d accepted the name — he just started silk-screening it on prototypes to see how it looked. Check out the full interview over at Cult of Mac, it’s definitely worth the read. [Cult of Mac]