Over the years, Wired magazine has published some insanely great stuff about Apple Computer.
The coverage includes exclusive interviews, insightful profiles and one-of-a-kind features not seen anywhere else. Here are some of the highlights:
Pray
The cover of Wired's June 1997 issue featured Apple's famous rainbow logo wearing a crown of thorns and the stark admonishment: "Pray."
Apple was in deep doo-doo at the time, so the magazine polled a variety of experts for advice about saving the company.
Apple at 30 Coverage March 28
Apple OS Gallery: A screenshot tour of three decades of Apple operating systems. By Owen W. Linzmayer.
March 29
Heroes and Villains: The people who made Apple great – and who almost brought it down. By Pete Mortensen.
Steve Jobs in His Own Words: Some of the most memorable quotes from tech's most quotable leader. By Owen W. Linzmayer.
March 30
Every Apple Ever Made: A gallery of some 240 product shots spanning 30 years. By Wired News staff.
[You are here]
PLUS: Highlights from the Wired News archive.
March 31
Best Moments in Apple Advertising: An image gallery of the best and most memorable campaigns. Courtesy of Macmothership.com.
April 1
Apple Fans Gone Wild: More images showing the depth and breadth of Mac culture. By Leander Kahney.
The 101 responses generated a few chestnuts, like "license the operating system to clone makers," and impractical schemes like "organize a telethon."
The piece was derided by many Mac fans, who refused to believe the company was in need of prayer, but actually contained some prescient advice (and the cover was named one of the top 40 magazine covers of the past 40 years). For example:
7. Don't disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple salespeople, and display everything like you're a living, breathing company and not a remote, dusty concept.
23. Create a new logo. The corporate graphic of the multicolored apple was tired in the 1980s, now it's positively obsolete. Plaster the new logo on hats and T-shirts to be worn conspicuously by Andre Agassi, Nicolas Cage and Ashley Judd.
34. Port the OS to the Intel platform, with its huge amount of investment in hardware, software, training and experience. Don't ignore it; co-opt it. Operating systems are dependent on installed base; that is your biggest hurdle now. It is not the head-to-head, feature-set comparison between Windows and Mac OS.
50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development. Let Gil Amelio stick to operations. There's no excitement at the top, and Apple's customers want to feel like they've joined a computer revolution. Even if Jobs fails, he'll do it with guns a-blazin', and we'll be spared this slow water torture that Amelio has subjected us to.
98. Testimonials. Create commercials featuring real-life people in situations where buying a Mac (or switching to a Mac) saved the day.
Jobs Shops for a Major Appliance
In February 1996, the magazine ran a rare major interview with Steve Jobs while he was at NeXT Computers, the company he founded after being forced out of Apple.
Interviewed by Gary Wolf, Jobs talked up object-oriented programming, the impact of the web (he downplayed it), and his ideas for how to fix the American education system (with vouchers). He also recounted the amazing tale of how he bought a new washing machine – a complex, drawn-out process that involved his whole family.
"We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We'd get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.
Woz's Greatest Philonumerical Triumph
The following year, the magazine published an insightful profile of Steve Wozniak, also by Gary Wolf.
The profile concludes with a delightful story about Wozniak that is perhaps the most appropriate thing ever written about the man:
"Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits.... After more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.
The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.
Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver was snatched up and slammed down.
Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep."
The children of America were making their first prank call.
And the person who answered the phone was Woz."
Gassée on Sex and U.S. Culture
In May 1996, Wired writer David Diamond published an account of a memorable, one-day trip to Nevada's Black Rock Desert in the company of Jean-Louis Gassée, the former head of Macintosh development in the late '80s.
A colorful, outspoken character, Gassée proffered lots of opinions about this and that, including this pithy summary of American pop culture:
"(Gassée) was the kind of adolescent you could imagine getting caught reading Électronique Populaire hidden inside Playboy, although he makes it clear that he wasn't your typical undersexed nerd. 'I don't understand the demonization of sex in this country!' he exclaims. 'I don't understand how we can show on TV people blowing each other's brains out but we can't show them blowing each other's....'"
Apple's Biggest Blunder?
In November 1997, Jim Carlton, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, published a lengthy – and debatable – account of Apple's "biggest, most strategic blunder":
"The biggest of those mistakes was Apple's refusal to license its Macintosh software to the rest of the industry, as the following excerpt from my book reveals. Had Apple opened the Mac to all comers back in the '80s, when the software was still light-years ahead of Microsoft in terms of ease of use and visual appeal, the hip pioneer undoubtedly would have gone on to dominate the industry instead of Microsoft."
__Think Belligerent
A May 2005 story about Apple's lawsuit against rumor site ThinkSecret raised the notion that the company is institutionally "paranoid."
"The urge to clamp down on information sometimes borders on paranoia. Employees must sign nondisclosure agreements; job interviewees aren't allowed to visit the restroom unaccompanied lest they get a glimpse of something unauthorized. In January, when bloggers from an enthusiast site stood outside San Francisco's Moscone Center and photographed Life Is Random posters 48 hours before the phrase was to become the iPod shuffle's ubiquitous tag line, an Apple crew rushed outside and forced them to delete their photos."__
