Steve Jobs drops by Apple earnings call to take jabs at competition
Monday afternoon Apple announced another quarter of record sales and earnings. Though iPod sales were down—a trend expected in a saturated market—Mac sales, iPad sales, and iPhone sales especially were up. Revenue and profits were also up, and the company is sitting on something approaching a $41 billion dollar cash hoard. So why, then, did CEO Steve Jobs—who doesn't normally participate in earnings calls—spend a good amount of time pointing out how its smartphone and tablet competitors just "don't get it?"
The answer is two-fold. Jobs was addressing concerns that analysts and shareholders have about the effect that competing mobile platforms—particularly Android—will have on Apple's iOS ecosystem. (Jobs' belief: not much.) But Jobs was also addressing the media and, by extension, the consumer base at large, attempting to reframe the debate about Apple's "closed" approach versus Android's "open" approach. He also touted Apple's attention to detail that goes into every part of the product, from the hardware to the software.
So far, the numbers Apple reported for the fiscal fourth quarter—which included over $20 billion in revenue—suggest Apple's approach is working, and may in fact be winning.
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The 21st century guide to platform trolling: Apple edition
Though the glory days of platform contention may be behind us, there is plenty about today's computing landscape that's... sub-optimal, shall we say. Yesterday we looked at some of the
many problems with the world of Windows: things that make the computing experience worse than it should be.
Windows' number one competitor is, of course, Mac OS X (sorry penguins, maybe 20
11 will be the year of Linux on the desktop), and Mac OS X is free of many of the problems that plague Windows. Unfortunately, the platform has plenty of problems of its own. Today, we're going to take a look at them.
You can have your turtleneck in any color you want, as long as it's black
One of the things that sets Mac OS X apart from Windows is the hardware it runs on. Sure, Macs are PCs these days, but if that PC isn't Apple-branded, you're not allowed to run Mac OS X on it, per the terms of the EULA. And while there are a few brave souls out there sticking it to The Man with their Hackintoshes, for normal people the EULA rules: they run Mac OS X on Apple hardware.
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Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley Dishes On Steve Jobs
"Here's a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs. It's long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things. It's also one of the frankest CEO interviews you'll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It's rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public." 
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