- An early Apple engineer said Steve Jobs would use his vacation to brainstorm a lot.
- Sometimes that meant that Jobs called employees five or six times a day.
- These chats will cover new technologies and what’s next for Apple.
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Apple co-founder Steve Jobs also appears to be struggling to shut down his brain while on vacation.
Tony Fadell, an early Apple engineer who invented the iPod, helped invent the iPhone, and co-founded the connected home company Nest, joins podcaster Tim Fee in an episode released Monday. Reese (Tim Ferriss) talked.
According to Fadell, he does not expect to hear from Jobs about his trip. While that’s true for the first 24 to 48 hours, the holidays have proven to spark the creativity of Apple’s CEO more than anything else.
“Steve will be on vacation and he’ll be thinking about where the next product is, where Apple’s next, new technologies, what he’s reading,” Fadell said. “He used that vacation to expand his mind and be outside of Apple every day.”
Fadell said his team back in the office was “like Google to him,” with Jobs calling or “searching” for employees and checking for updates on any given project.
During his time off, the Apple team can work “five or six times, depending on what he’s thinking about every day at the time,” during reasonable rather than crazy hours,” Fadell said, adding that he sometimes doesn’t call.
“You like it because you have to talk to him about all kinds of non-daily things, but at other times you’re like, ‘Okay, Steve, you need a vacation,'” Fadell said.
Fadell also said that Jobs usually vacations in the same one or two places because “that’s where he likes.”
Jobs, who died in late 2011, is remembered as one of the world’s greatest tech visionaries, running the company that gave rise to the iPod, iPhone and Mac computer. He was infamously fired from Apple in 1985, and he started his own company, NeXT, which was acquired by Apple in 1996. A few months later, Jobs became Apple’s CEO.
Fadell joined Apple in 2001 as a consultant after three years at General Magic, Apple’s spin-off handheld products company. Senior Vice President of Apple.
He then helped design the company’s now ubiquitous iPhone, which launched in 2007.
Fadell co-founded Nest in 2010 with Apple alum Matt Rogers. Google acquired it in 2014.