Apple Loop: Tributes to Steve Jobs, An iPad Mini For The Holidays ... - Forbes

Keeping you in the loop on some of the things happening around Apple this week.

Remembering Steve. Today marks the one-year anniversary of Steve Jobs’ passing, and Apple posted a lovely video tribute to their former leader, accompanied by a note from CEO Tim Cook. There have been plenty of tributes (including my collection of untold stories from a few friends and colleagues), as well as stories galore on how Apple has been doing in the past year under Cook. My take: they are the most valuable company in the world by a huge margin, customers still line up to buy their products, and they trounced Samsung in their patent suit. So even with the recent debacle over Maps, Apple still has one of the world’s most notable brands, and a reputation for elegant and simple-to-use products that rivals continue to envy. But Apple didn’t develop those design sensibilities overnight. It’s early ads were, in a word, ugly. Don’t believe me? This slideshow offers proof.

Feeling the love with the iPad mini. Cook said in today’s note that Apple’s greatest tribute to Jobs is to keep dreaming up great products that customers love. Well okay then. Here’s hoping that the rumors are true that an iPad mini, a smaller version of the iPad, will make its bow on or around Oct. 17. The timing makes sense, especially if we believe various news reports out of Asia that production on the device has already begun. That would make the mini, rumored to have an aluminum shell and a 7.85-inch- screen compared to the iPad’s current 9.7-inch display, available in time for Apple’s all-important holiday shopping season. And since Apple usually gives media one-week notice for its events and since no invites were sent this week, it stands to reason invites might go out next week (Oct. 9 is my guess since they usually send them on Tuesdays) for an event the following week. And if they don’t introduce an iPad mini for the holidays this year? Time to check out Google’s Nexus 7.

Failing to play nice with Samsung. In the month’s leading up to their patent trial in July, Apple proposed a reciprocal patent agreement to Samsung. Boris Teksler, Apple’s intellectual-property licensing director, proposed the deal in a three-page letter on April 30 that was disclosed in federal court after U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh said no to the companies’ pleas to keep the documents sealed. You can read the whole letter here. Basically Apple says it will agree to license some of its patents to Samsung under FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory Terms), but that Samsung has to do the same. The letter goes on about how Samsung had asked Apple for 2.4 percent of the average selling price of its products, but the Korean maker had failed to offer any evidence of any company paying a similar royalty rate. This, of course, all came up during the court case this summer (which Apple won) but interesting reading nonetheless.

The lost speech, found. Much ado was made a few months ago of a recording of a speech that Steve Jobs’ delivered at the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA). But turns out the 20-minute recording is only part of the talk Jobs’ gave at the conference, whose theme was “The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be.” Now an additional 40-minutes from the Q&A have been found, digitized and posted. In it, Jobs seems to predict a whole lot of things, including wireless networks and iPads, noting that Apple’s goal is “put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you can learn how to use in 20 minutes” Kudos to Marcel Brown of Life, Liberty, and Technology for providing all the background behind the conference, a synopsis of Jobs’ talk and the audio. Check it out.

Odds and ends. Apple CEO Tim Cook sent Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a free iPhone 5, Zuckerberg told NBC’s Matt Lauer in an interview this week. Geez, I didn’t know Facebook’s stock had fallen that far…Apple employees, who have enjoyed a paid week off at Thanksgiving week in recent years, will get the perk again, according to an email Cook sent the staff, praising them for “another incredibly successful year.”…Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs’ high school girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, has signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press to publish a memoir about those early years with Jobs. It’s going to be published next year. “At 17, Steve had more than a touch of the cool sophistication of a Beat poet,” Brennan wrote in an Oct. 2011 essay in Rolling Stone after his death. “It is as if Beat poetry laid the future for technology in Steve.”

Enjoy the weekend.