Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch posted an interesting look at Apple’s focus while pushing the post-PC era. From the article:

As we ponder what will happen to Apple without Steve Jobs, I keep coming back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a veteran Silicon Valley CEO who knew Jobs. This was just after Jobs had resigned as CEO of Apple. We got to talking about why Apple is so well-positioned in the post-PC era, and this executive zeroed in on something you don’t hear too often. “Steve Jobs told me he has 1,000 engineers working on chips,” he said. “Getting low power and smaller is the key to everything.”

Steve Jobs made it very clear at WWDC 2005 why Apple was switching from PowerPC to Intel processors, because Intel had “much better performance per watt.” This was two-years before the iPhone was released, and nearly five-years before Apple announced their A4 processor. Apple’s emphasis on performance per watt has been known for over six-years, and we are just now starting to understand why: they have been building the post-PC era.

Christopher Bonanos contributed an interesting Op-Ed to The New York Times on Steve Jobs’ true inspiration, Edwin H. Land. Land was a scientist, inventor, the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation, and the creator of the Polaroid instant camera. From the article:

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of both Time and Life magazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

How did Jobs speak of Land? From his 1985 interview in Playboy:

You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company—which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of. So Land, at 75, went off to spend the remainder of his life doing pure science, trying to crack the code of color vision. The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be—not an astronaut, not a football player—but this.

Does this sound familiar? The parallels between Land and Jobs are remarkable. Both were pushed out of the companies they co-founded, and both understood the combined strength of art and science.

“It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” — Steve Jobs, March 2nd, 2011

Best selling author and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki has posted an enlightening Google+ post on what he learned from Steve Jobs. Guy was once Apple’s Chief Evangelist and one of only a few individuals who have been awarded the Apple Fellowship.

Guy’s most recent literary contribution is “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.” If you haven’t had a chance to read it, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy.

Update: Guy Kawasaki gave the following speech below at Silicon Valley Bank’s CEO Summit on October 6, 2011.

It appears consumers did not get the memo that Apple’s new iPhone 4S was underwhelming. Both AT&T and Sprint have reported on their initial iPhone 4S orders and the results are very good. A couple notable quotes from AllThingsD:

AT&T: “AT&T has seen extraordinary demand for iPhone 4S, with more than 200,000 preorders in the first 12 hours alone, the most successful iPhone launch we’ve ever had,” an AT&T representative told AllThingsD

Sprint: “We are very, very pleased with the initial first day of iPhone 4S preorders,” Sprint Vice President of Product Development Fared Adib said in a statement. “Today’s sales and the overall customer experience greatly exceeded our expectations.”

Apple sold out of iPhone 4S pre-orders, pushing back the ship date by up-to two-weeks.

Verizon has yet to release a statement on their iPhone 4S sales results.

On Monday, Microsoft announced that Zune hardware was no more, and that they would focus their efforts on Windows Phone moving forward. From the original Zune support page post:

We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy, and that we will no longer be producing Zune players.

According to a tweet from @ZuneSupport, that announcement was made in error:

We are still supporting the Zune HD hardware. No official info has been released stating hardware is being discontinued. ^SM

What exactly is going on here? The only certainty I have is that Microsoft’s teams need to talk before posting public messages.

More info can be found at WinRumors