“It had been only four hours since Jimmy Iovine had agreed to sell Beats Electronics to Apple for $3 billion, but it was clear that he had already gotten the corporate memo,” Vindu Goel reports for The New York Times. “‘I’m at Apple now. I can’t say anything,’ he told a crowd of technology executives Wednesday night at the Code conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., referring to Apple’s famously tight-lipped culture. But it was also clear that for Mr. Iovine — as for the late Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs — rules are made to be broken.”
“During an hour-plus conversation with the journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, with the Apple executive Eddy Cue at his side, Mr. Iovine proceeded to speak his mind about a lot of things,” Goel reports. “The free earbuds that come with every Apple iPhone? Awful. ‘You listen to ‘Apocalypse Now’ and a helicopter sounds like a mosquito,’ he said.”
MacDailyNews Take: One thing’s for sure: Jimmy is an absolute expert in awful-sounding headphones.
By the way, the most important and powerful person at Apple, Jony Ive, will just love that comment. That’s right, Jony, the results of all of your work: Awful.
Here’s Jony waxing lyrical about Apple’s EarPods:
“Sound is so important to the way that you experience an Apple product, so we wanted to make a headphone that was absolutely the very best it could be,” so that the Hollywood huckster responsible for the worst-sounding, most-overpriced headphones ever made could call them “awful” four hours after we paid him $3 billion.
“The Beats partnership with Hewlett-Packard? A marriage of convenience that will be terminated when the contract is up. ‘Computers are made for talk,’ he said. Aside from Apple, ‘every other computer sounds like a portable television.’ Beats struck the HP deal, he said, to make Dell jealous enough to improve the sound of its computer speakers,” Goel reports. “Hollywood? ‘Desperately insecure.’ Silicon Valley? ‘Overconfident.’ Uh, did anyone tell Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, that Mr. Iovine, a music mogul with an impressive track record, was going to be a little hard to control?”
“Mr. Iovine’s irrepressible spirit — and his willingness to simply declare something to be reality regardless of the complexity of the facts — bears a marked resemblance to the ‘reality distortion field’ that Mr. Jobs so famously emanated,” Goel reports. “Indeed, Mr. Iovine appears to recognize that bluster is part of his business magic. He said that Beats spent ‘zero dollars’ on marketing during its first three years, relying solely on media attention and product placements to build its sales to $500 million. ‘We knew how to harness the media,’ he said. Mr. Jobs would have been proud.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Not all RDFs are created equal. Be careful, Jimmy. There’s a fine line between operating a functional RDF and a dump truck full of bullshit.
