According to today’s NYTimes,

SAN FRANCISCO — A handful of presumptive biographers have, over the years, tried to tell the remarkable story of Steven P. Jobs: the youthful visionary who, after being ousted from Apple, the company he helped to found, triumphantly returned to lead a new era of high-tech innovation.

But those efforts lacked one important ingredient: cooperation from Mr. Jobs himself.

Now Apple’s chief executive is set to collaborate on an authorized biography, to be written by Walter Isaacson, the former managing editor of Time magazine, according to two people briefed on the project.

The book, which is in the early planning stages, would cover the entire life of Mr. Jobs, from his youth in the area now known as Silicon Valley through his years at Apple, these people said.

Mr. Jobs, who will turn 55 on Feb. 24, has invited Mr. Isaacson to tour his childhood home, one person with knowledge of the discussion said.

Hmmm… Wonder if Mr Isaacson has checked his blood-pressure recently. He’ll need a stable reference point for the coming months.

Hmmm… This from Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Thought you were done hearing rumors about the tablet Apple is secretly developing? No such luck. Less than a week after the iPad was unveiled, there is already talk that a larger, more versatile sibling is in the works. Mind you, it’s just talk — a thinly sourced tidbit relayed by TechCrunch with the requisite grain of salt and appropriate hedging. But the gist of it is that Apple is well along on a second tablet with Intel inside, a screen possibly as large as 15.4 inches, and, instead of the iPhone OS, a version of Mac OS X, making for a more open device. MG Siegler suggests we keep an eye on Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June to see if Apple offers a peek at the upcoming OS X 10.7. Should the new version include some significant multitouch features, he says, that would bolster prospects for a more Mac-like tablet.

Actually, they could just rip the screen off my MacBook Air and use that.

Well, it will if this can be believed.

Mission Repair, a company that fixes broken Apple products, apparently got their hands on some iPad parts. Their pictures showed off the internal frame, which curiously enough has a small hole on the top of the frame.

When the Mission Repair team took a camera out of a MacBook and placed it inside the iPad’s top hole, it fight right in. You can see a comparison of the MacBook camera and the iPad slot in the image above.

No, this isn’t about standard paper sizes, but the processor chip in the iPad.

I was puzzled that Apple had gone to the trouble and expense of doing custom silicon, and I’m still puzzled. So — according to this NYT report — are other observers.

But designing its own processors burdens Apple with additional engineering costs and potential product delays. It also forces the company to hire — and retain — experienced chip designers. Several who joined the company in 2008 after an acquisition have already left for a secretive start-up.

Though chip industry experts have yet to put the iPad through their customary rigorous tests, Apple’s demonstrations left them underwhelmed.

“I don’t see anything that looks that compelling,” said Linley Gwennap, a chip analyst at the Linley Group. “It doesn’t seem like something all that new, and, if it is, they are not getting far with it.”

Very thoughtful essay by Alex Payne.

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home…

This is a lovely essay — and it attracted some interesting comments. What it illustrates is the gulf between the ‘consumer’ view of computing and the programmer’s perspective, where ‘freedom to tinker’ is of paramount importance.

One of the comments also makes an important point, namely that the dichotomy between ‘closed=safe’ and ‘open=vulnerable’ is a false one. The most insidious thing of all is a closed system that isn’t secure but which users believe is secure, because that leaves them open to hacking in a particularly unpleasant way. A bit like the false confidence that comes from using a bike-lock which you are told is unbreakable but which is, in fact, vulnerable to those who know how to break it.

FOOTNOTE: I found Alex’s essay via dive into mark, which has an equally thoughtful post about the iPad.

Interesting how low-budget it looks compared with the recent Jobs Keynotes.

I know, I know: it’s an old joke. But still funny.

After a big announcement, Steve Jobs often holds a ‘town hall’ meeting of Apple employees. Here’s an excerpt from Wired‘s report of the latest one.

Jobs, characteristically, did not mince words as he spoke to the assembled, according to a person who was there who could not be named because this person is not authorized by Apple to speak with the press.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

The world, of course, includes Google, which last week in a somewhat more modest development bypassed Apple’s iPhone app blockade by unveiling an html5 version of Google Voice, which takes full advantage of mobile Safari on the iPhone. Wired.com found it to be an impressive variation of the app Apple has neither approved nor officially rejected.

And it is, of course, in keeping with Google’s stated view (Android app marketplace notwithstanding) that the future is really in web-based applications and not in mobile apps at all. Web-based applications of the sort html5 makes much more viable.