Steve Sakoman

Steve Sakoman was hardware engineer and executive at Apple Computer who worked on the system design of several early Macintosh models and initiated development of the Newton platform.

Education
Sakoman received a bachelor of science in computer engineering from.

Career
Sakoman first worked at Hewlett-Packard from 1975 to 1984 as a development engineer and project manager.

Apple Computer
Sakoman joined Apple in 1984 and became director of hardware engineering, leading development of the Macintosh Plus, SE, II, and Apple II GS.

In 1987, Sakoman started the Newton project to create a mobile platform with the support of Apple executives Jean-Louis Gassée and John Sculley. However, the scope of the project soon ballooned out of control. Sakoman and Gassée left Apple in 1990 to co-found Be, Inc.

Be
Sakoman became chief operating officer of Be. After BeOS was passed over in favor of NeXTSTEP to become Mac OS X, Be was acquired in 2001 by, where he became part of the team that developed.

Return to Apple
Sakoman returned to Apple in February 2003 to become the vice president of OS and server technology. He was responsible for development of non-UI technology that went into Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" and Mac OS X Server. He also led the "skunk works" team that was involved in porting Mac OS X to Intel architecture. In 2004, Sakoman was concerned about development for Motorola's forthcoming iTunes phone and advocated to Steve Jobs for Apple to create its own phone. Sakoman retired from Apple in November 2005.