Keeping you in the loop on a few of the things that happened around Apple this week.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Apple released an iPad app that lets users shop the Apple online store (it already has a shopping app for the iPhone). Reviewers say the shopping experience is better than what you find on the web, with high-resolutions images, responsive pinch-to-zoom screens and useful info automatically served up in context with the product you’re looking at….While many Apple retail stores will be shut on Thanksgiving, many will be opening early on Black Friday, as early as 6a.m. “on the only day of the year that Apple offers sale prices on its merchandise,” notes MacRumors. Just go to the Apple retail store list and click on the outlet to see the “extended holiday hours.”
Apple campus ready for lift off. The Cupertino, California City Council gave its final approval to the Apple Campus 2 project this week, With Cupertino Mayor Orrin Mahoney telling the company to “We’re eager to see it happen. Go for it.” The next step will be demolishing the old Hewlett-Packard campus that now sits on the 176-acre site. Phase 1 will see the construction of the 2.8-million-square foot spaceship (or donut)-shaped, four-story main building, with an underground garage with parking spaces for 2,000. The campus is designed to accmodate 13,000 employees. Wired, which earlier this month got new high-resolution images of what the campus will look like says visitors will enter a “a walkway, flanked by two Apple Store-white staircases, will lead into the mothership itself.” Apple’s architects at Foster and Partners said it will be one of the most environmentally sustainable buildings on this scale anywhere in the world, and the green efforts will be overseen by Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA for the Obama Administration who joined Apple earlier this year. Steve Jobs, who worked on the campus design before he died, said the goal was to promote collaboration — in th same way that the main Atrium at his other company, Pixar, allows employees to bump into each other. “At one point in the day you may be in offices on one side of the circle and find yourself on the other side later that day,” Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO, told the San Jose Mercury News last month. “We found that rectangles or squares or long buildings or buildings with more than four stories would inhibit collaboration…We wanted this to be a walkable building, and that’s why we eventually settled on a circle.” The City of Cupertino has all the details on a website devoted to the project. You can dig in here.
Samsung asked to pay up. Apple was awarded $290.5 million in damages by a jury this week as part of its 2012 patent victory over mobile device rival Samsung. The damages stem from a highly-publicized patent trial held last summer before U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh. A jury found Samsung had infringed on Apple’s patents for the iPhone and iPad and awarded the Cupertino, California-based company $1.05 billion in damages. But Koh said the jury had erred in calculating damages on 13 Samsung smartphones and tablets, called for a new jury trial and reduced Apple’s award to $600 million. Legal experts say the new award, which brings the total payout due from Samsung to $900 million, is far from the end of their legal wrangling. Samsung will likely appeal the ruling to see if it can get the amount reduced. And Apple and Samsung are also scheduled to meet in court in March in a new trial before Judge Koh to examine more recent smartphones and tablets, including Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s Galaxy S III.
On design. Longtime Apple journalist Leander Kahney of CultofMac.com has written a biography of Apple design chief Jony Ive. Called “Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products,” the book wasn’t written without cooperation from Apple or Ive — but that hasn’t stopped Kahney from sharing good insight into Apple’s design genius and how Ive and his design team “sweat the tiniest details.” Ive was actually on the Charlie Rose show this week with his industrial designer Marc Newsom, with the duo discussing the items they selected for a charity auction for Project Red ( the proceeds go to the Global Fund to fight AIDS in Africa). You can watch the whole interview here. CultofMac.com also has two excerpts, including Ive and Newsome talking about what they both care about when it comes to design.
Apple’s media blacklist. While perusing CultofMac.com, I also came across a post on how Apple’s blacklist of the press works. Now companies have always had the ability to decide who they get to invite to the party, so to speak, when they host an event. But decide for yourself what you think about how Apple “handles” the media. I found this the most telling line by author Mike Elgan: “If I wasn’t on Apple’s “blacklist” already, this post would surely get me on it.”
iWork update. Apple updated the iWork apps suite this week and restored some features after users complained. AppleInsider has a breakout of all the new things you can find in Keynote, the presentation software, Numbers spreadsheet software and Pages word processing and page layout app.
Steve Jobs and that one thing. Thirty-three years ago, Steve Job donated an Apple II to the Seva Foundation, a non-profit working to offer cataract surgery to the poor in developing countries. And this month, the foundation, co-founded by Larry Brilliant, returned the Apple II to Jobs’ wife, Laurene Powell Jobs and his children after it spent all those years in a hospital basement in Katmandu, Nepal, according to Nick Wingfield in the New York Times. The story aims to put a new light on Jobs, who was criticized for the lack of public philanthropy during his life. “I do want to counter the meme that he was disinterested in philanthropy and things for the greater good,” Dr. Brilliant, former head of Google’s philanthropy organization and now head of the Skoll Global Threats Fund, told the newspaper. “It wasn’t true.”
Brilliant said he met Jobs in India, where Jobs went to seek enlightment and where Brilliant was living and working on a program to eridicate small pox. After Jobs started Apple, he sent Brilliant a check for $5,000 to help start Seva. The Apple II was donated so Seva could compile data on eye surgeries in Nepal. “He gave the organization the computer around 1980, to help Seva enter and analyze survey data from its eye surgeries in Nepal. Mr. Jobs threw in a copy of an early spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, and an external hard drive that he boasted was the largest of its kind. “You’ll never be able to use all the memory,” Dr. Brilliant recalled Jobs telling him. “It’s five megabytes!’” The Apple II was also used to set up, via a primitive modem, a discussion group with groups around the world who were trying to figure out how to salvage a downed helicopter. The “computer conference call” was one of the inspirations behind the Well, an early online community co-founded by Dr. Brilliant. While Powell Jobs has been more visible and involved in charitable works since Jobs’ death in 2010, Dr. Brilliant said Jobs himself might have become a more public philanthropist except he spent all his time working on Apple. “I only know how to do one thing well,” Mr. Brilliant said Jobs told him, according to the NY times. “I think I can help the world by doing this one thing.”
That’s it. Enjoy the weekend. And have a Happy Thanksgiving . In keeping with the apple theme of this column, here’s a link to a very easy apple tart recipe.
If you missed last week’s issue of Apple Loop, here you go:
Apple Loop logo designed by Laura Leddy
