Huckabee digs Mac:

From Wired Magazine: 25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

From Edible Apple, What it’s like to work at Apple:

I never had Steve’s flamethrower aimed at me, although I came close a couple of times; all in all, I was close to getting my butt fired three times – and all three times, I probably would have deserved it. I do know friends who did. It wasn’t always pleasant – but one thing I give Steve credit for is he held himself to the same high standards he held those around him. He is a perfectionist, and that’s what makes him successful and what made Apple succeed. But that kind of perfectionism isn’t easy, and isn’t done with gentle criticism.

“Apple doesn’t make four billion semiconductors. Apple is only its ideas — which is only its people.” – Steve Jobs

From a new convert:

I’ve been avoiding Apple devices since around 1996 when I decided that having both a Mac and a PC on my desk was getting ridiculous. While Macs were in many ways better than Windows-based machines they were clearly losing the adoption war. The arrival of the iPod failed to win me back, perhaps because they were so trendy. Instead I bought a Sony Walkman. The more recent appearance of MacBooks in meetings in front of their smug owners increasingly put me off the brand. But last week I had my road to Cupertino experience. I bought an iPhone. I’m now a convert, a neophyte of Steve Jobs. Here’s why.

Macworld Expo San Francisco, 2007

Steve unveils the iPhone and has a great time doing it. He tells the crowd that “this is a day I’ve been looking forward to for 2.5 years …” During this Stevenote he called Starbucks, asked for an order of 4,000 lattes, quickly explains he was just kidding and apologizes. His clicker doesn’t work, and he wonders aloud if Steve Wozniak hacked it. He has a happy conference call with Apple executives Jonathan Ive and Phil Schiller, checks Apple’s stock price (up $2.43 after the iPhone announcement), watches a TV show, plays back a voicemail from Al Gore and says with great glee that the iPhone puts “the internet in your pocket for the first time ever.”

Apple is a place where you work hard, but you get rewarded, and you help create things that are special. I found being part of something that was able and willing to fight to change society a real adrenalin rush. Seeing people react to what we did was even more of one.

And yes old news, sosumi:

Apparently distraught over their utter lack of market-share, all of the approximately eighteen 30-gig Zunes in the wild have apparently committed mass suicide (is their number large enough to be considered a “mass suicide” or is it simply “suicide together”? –ed).

No word on the fate of fat-harry-zune tattoo guy.