William Gallagher
An ex-Apple software designer claims that Steve Jobs personally shot several of the images presented as desktop pictures for 2007's Mac OS X Leopard.
A new blog post claims that OS X Leopard wallpaper, or desktop pictures, including "Grass Blades," "Rock Garden," and "Golden Palace" were photographed by Steve Jobs. The blogger, going only by the name "Cricket," says he spent nearly 20 years at Apple.
"It shouldn't surprise anyone that Steve Jobs liked to take pictures," says "Cricket" in a blog post. "He was even taking a picture the last time I saw him. However, many people might not know that some of his photos shipped as Desktop Pictures in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard."
"Cricket" shows five OS X Leopard images shot by Jobs. He also shows a further three Jobs images "that I was unable to confirm (or remember) ever made it into a Mac OS X release."
AppleInsider has independently confirmed that "Cricket" worked at Apple, and has reached out for more information.
Steve Jobs did not receive credit for the use of his photography in OS X Leopard.
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Amber Neely
Andrew Orr
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
19 Comments
This man continues to amaze years after his death.
This is awesome. I'm surprised they are his, but then it makes sense as Jobs was - as we all know, one for design and artistry. His enjoyment of photography was probably why iPhone was so much better at photos than the competition after the 4.
Steve Jobs brought art and beauty into not only its hardware, but in the software as well. If it weren't for him, we'd probably still be in the beige-box PC era.
This is the kind of detail and obsessive involvement from the top that’s been missing from Apple. Perhaps the scourge of the butterfly keyboard (and a few other oversights) would not have been loosed upon the world of Jobs were still around. RIP Steve.
I have a copy of the Ryōan-ji (“Rock Garden”) image from a Leopard beta that is cropped differently from the one used for the final release. It has a row of the ends of floorboards sticking up along the bottom edge, providing what is to my mind crucial context/scale/perspective for the photograph. When I saw they had cropped the floorboards out in the final release, I went back and did a clean install of that beta (this was back when they sent you install discs for the betas) just to get the original image, and I’ve used it ever since. [I’m an art historian who studies East Asia.] Nice to know it’s a Jobs photograph — a new layer of meaning!
I’d be happy to post it somewhere for download ...
EDIT: Okay, so I started to do this for posterity and now I see that the original photo was not simply cropped a bit differently in the final release, as I had always assumed — in fact the final image is not cropped, it is “Photoshopped” — the foreground floorboards are covered over with gravel. Honestly, it’s a pretty dumb thing to do to an image of an iconic historical and religious site and important work of art, and I’m not so sure that the Ryōan-ji itself would be altogether happy about it.
The Kinkaku-ji (“Golden Temple”) image must have been taken on the same trip to Kyoto.