Steve Jobs, Gadgets | featured news

Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs when it comes to leading Apple Inc. As the debut of the new iPhone 5 just proved, that may not be a bad thing. The taller, thinner and lighter phone prompted a rush on Wall Street to raise price targets for Apple stock, but the optimism was not because of a big technological advance or design breakthrough; the "wow" factor that was the trademark of the late Apple co-founder Jobs was decidedly absent.

Families waiting for San Francisco's cable cars on a recent morning couldn't help but notice Kenny the Clown, who wore a curly rainbow wig as he twisted brightly colored balloons into animal shapes for visitors, blasting Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal" from an iPad at his feet....

Steve Jobs was receptive to Apple Inc making a smaller tablet, a senior executive said in a 2011 email revealed on Friday, fanning speculation that Apple plans to make a mini-iPad and take on Google and Amazon products.

This is Apple’s second earnings miss under Tim Cook. After the second miss, the scrutiny of Tim Cook’s leadership inevitably comes into play. The big question is, “Are Steve Jobs’ shoes too big to fill?” Steve Jobs was a master at managing expectations. He mastered the art of under promising and over delivering. Steve Jobs perfected the art of managing expectations by not giving good guidance regarding earnings.

In Steve Jobs fashion, Apple CEO Tim Cook kicked off the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco with a handful of key stats about its app ecosystem, which Cook called “an economy in itself.”

Apple generates more gossip than the Kardashians. There's a constantly spinning mill of rumors about Apple products, most of which turn out to be untrue. What's unusual this week is that talk has revived of a smaller iPad model, an idea company founder Steve Jobs derided publicly a year before he died.

Apple, one of the world’s richest companies, will reward investors with a dividend- and share-purchase program totaling $45 billion over three years, the company said Monday. In a departure from the direction of late chief executive Steve Jobs, Apple will significantly draw from its massive $98 billion cash war chest to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fiscal quarter beginning July 1.

Maybe it just seemed that way, but in the moments before Apple opened the doors to its Palo Alto, California store — hometown to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and current CEO Tim Cook — there seemed to be as many blue-shirted salespeople inside getting pumped up for the day as there were blanket-wrapped fans in the line outside.

A new book examines Apple from the inside out, revealing details about the company’s level of detail that continue to give it an edge in the market. “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired-and Secretive-Company Really Works,” by Adam Lashinsky, senior editor-at-large at Forbes, shares highly guarded secrets about the company’s development and design processes, as well as insight into former founder and CEO Steve Jobs, who passed away in October of last year.

You may have just unwrapped your new iPad 2, but rumors are already swirling about the iPad 3... That a new model will be rolled out February 24, which would have been Steve Jobs' birthday, or in March, the same month the iPad 2 was introduced.