How Close Steve Jobs Was to Sony
It’s well-known that Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony — even his famous black mock-turtleneck and Levi’s 501 ensemble was inspired by Sony uniforms — but Tokyo-based IT journalist Nobuyuki Hayashi has revealed some new information on how close the Apple co-founder was to the Japanese company. Jobs regularly visited Sony co-founder Akio Morita, and the two men had a mutual admiration of each other. Jobs was so impressed with the Sony VAIO laptops that he tried to convince Sony to adopt Mac OS X for them in 2001. Jobs even gave Sony the idea to build a GPS into its Cyber-shot cameras.
"he even patterned his famous black mock-turtleneck and Levi’s 501 ensemble after Sony uniforms"--FALSE. The *concept* of wearing the same thing to work every day, even in a professional setting, came from Sony. Clearly, uniforms are commonplace for industrial workers. Sony extended that concept to engineers and executives, and Jobs tried to implement the idea at Apple (and was soundly rejected--see http://gawker.com/5848754/steve-jobs-on-why-he-wore-turtlenecks ). The Sony uniform was "a jacket made of rip-stop nylon with sleeves that could unzip to make it a vest." But the famous black mock-turtleneck, blue jeans and sneakers ensemble comes from the "Jonny Quest" cartoon--created in 1964.
One thing I found amusing is that in the video Michael Cohen links to of Jobs answering questions at the 1997 WWDC, his jeans are ripped and patched. :-)
Ha! OK, so I changed to say that his outfit was inspired by Sony, which is indeed more accurate.