Iphone 5 Release

Those hunkered down for the upcoming iPhone 5 release date and trying to figure out what Apple’s future product landscape will look like with newly appointed chairman Steve Jobs now riding in the back seat can look to another company for guidance: Disney. Here’s another: Pixar. These are two companies, one current and one former, in which Jobs has been cast as the big boss in the back seat who calls the shots when he wants to, but mostly allows his hands-on guy to do their thing. That stands on stark contract to the way in which Jobs has long reportedly managed Apple, where his hands-on style ensured that every product the company released and every decision the company made had his direct fingerprints on it.

But Jobs never ran Pixar that way. Despite owning the majority of the company and having as much power as he wanted, Jobs took a back seat to John Lasseter, who was the driving force behind the company’s pioneering movies like Toy Story. The fact that movies weren’t Jobs area may have had something to do with the fact that Jobs wasn’t particularly hands-on; the fact that he was also running Apple for much of the later Pixar days may have also been a factor. But it’s the same story now at Disney. Since the Pixar acquisition, Jobs owns a much higher percentage of Disney than he does of Apple. Yet even as he sits on Disney’s board and presumably nothing happens at that company that he can’t live with, he allows his people over there to handle the day to day stuff how they see fit. So what does this have to do with the upcoming iPhone 5, whose unrevealed release date is quietly becoming one of the most vital consumer tech stories of the fall?

The iPhone 5 will be wrapped in Steve Jobs DNA, but not smothered in it. After all, Jobs has been on “medical leave” for much of 2011. That’s placed in quote marks here because he’s spent much of that time at Apple’s headquarters, working on new product development even while he was technically on leave. Various reports, combined with his own words about the iPad being the future of technology, suggest that the bulk of his time has been spent on the iPad and not the iPhone. The means that the iPhone 5 very well could be just as much inspired by Jobs’ successors as it was by Jobs himself. But that doesn’

Enter the iPhone 4, which may have unofficially been the first post-Jobs product Apple released. It was a bumpy road, with a prototype surfacing early an ruining the launch. And worse, that prototype was decried as a fake by many because it was “too ugly” and “too geeky” to be an Apple product. Oops, then. By the time dust settled, iPhone boss Mark Papermaster was no longer at the company. Even as the iPhone 4 was sold very well, vastly outselling any previous iPhone model, it was an early cautionary tale for what could go wrong when the hands-on Jobs was too hands-off. Or more accurately, when the hands which replaced his weren’t the right ones. But the iPhone 5 has been in the hands of others within the company, presumably whom he trusts more after the Papermaster fiasco (Papermaster being an outside hire who was quickly placed in a position of autonomy). That means the results of the iPhone 5, once it finally gains a release date and arrives on Verizon and AT&T and whatever other carriers are in the works, will show the world what a post-Jobs Apple product, but one which was properly supervised by Jobs and/or others whom Jobs trusts, looks like. Even as much as the iPhone 5 will be the last product to come to market whose development was fully carried out under Jobs as CEO, it simultaneously represents the first Apple product which has a chance to show off what post-Jobs Apple, when functioning properly, can manage to pull off. Here’s more on the iPhone 5.