Hey, guess who’s back! It’s Dan formerly “Fake Steve Jobs” formerly “fake tech analyst” Lyons!
Ugh, right?
“Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ Biographer, Predicts Jimmy Iovine Will Run Apple’s Content Business” (tip o’ the antlers to @papanic).
That’s right, Dan Lyons interviewing Walter Isaacson. Why, what’s the problem?
Apple is reportedly acquiring Beats Electronics for $3.2 billion, with Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre said to be taking senior roles at the company.
Neither of these things has actually happened yet but, yeah, let’s let two people who have been wildly wrong about Apple out of their sensory deprivation tanks and give them some time to talk about it. Why not? You weren’t using those brain cells anyway.
Predictably, the Apple faithful are freaking out.
Lyons does not provide a link here, probably because no one is really “freaking out.” The pejorative must be played, reality be damned.
I spent a lot of time among these folks, back when I was writing the “Fake Steve Jobs” blog. They have a cultlike devotion to the Apple brand and are notoriously averse to change.
Oh, Dan. We have not missed you at all.
Seriously, not even a little.
Since Jobs’ death, nearly three years ago, Apple has grown risk averse.
If you don’t see things with your own eyes, they don’t exist!
Tim Cook, the handpicked successor, is a smart number cruncher, but he’s no Steve Jobs.
Iovine may not be either, but he’s closer than you might think. The two have a lot in common. Both were scrappy working-class kids whose success came not from family pedigree or an Ivy League school but from talent and chutzpah.
Unlike Tim Cook, whose father was a shipyard worker, whose mother worked in a pharmacy, and who earned a BS in industrial engineering from Auburn University.
I talked to Isaacson this week.
We made a fort under the couch cushions, got high on Pixy Stix, and talked Apple! And then mom came home and made us put everything back. So bogus.
The Apple faithful may not like it …
What is he even talking about? Is there some rioting in the streets that the Macalope is unaware of? No, it’s just Dan Lyons making up stuff to rail against.
… but they should remember that the Apple they know and love today is itself the product of an equally traumatic transfusion carried out in 1996. That was when Jobs returned to Apple, bringing along the team from NeXT, the computer company he had formed after Apple tossed him out in 1985.
Thanks for the newsflash from 1997, Dan. Important context people were not aware of. Thanks for that.
Though Jobs died in 2011, in a sense he still has been running the company.
In another sense—the quantum-mechanical sense that we know as “reality”—he has not.
Now, with this deal, Apple fans are facing up to the fact that Jobs is truly gone and that their beloved Apple is about to become a very different company.
When Lyons used to make stuff up as Fake Steve Jobs, it was funny. Now when he makes stuff up, it’s just dumb.