I don't recall affordability necessarily being a priority to Jobs.
I'm not going to say Apple is about inexpensive products. The notion of luxury (outside some of their watch products, I guess) is a marketing angle though. They're accessible to enough peoples' budgets such that they dominate many market verticals. They've succeeded in this to such a degree that it's almost black magic to me.
I don’t think I’d go as far as saying that. Apple has always had a premium price tag even under Jobs control. But I do agree that Cook has doubled down on the premium part of Apples product line (sometimes to the detriment of overall product quality, like those stupid MacBook “Pro”s with only 2x USB3 ports and a keyboard which breaks after 10 minutes).
Steve Jobs wanted the computer to disappear, for better and worse. It was that kind of vision that at least made Apple kinda interesting to me, but their recent shift back to just "consumer technology" has really sucked all the air out of the room.
I do wonder, same as you, what things would be like if he was still around. Maybe technology would be friendlier, and have a better place in this world. But at the same time, I remember how the man lived: eating fruit to supposedly stave off his cancer, violently berating his employees to get things finished faster, and even telling his daughter that she smelled like a toilet on his deathbed. Steve Jobs was a man, imperfect yet aligned just so that his manic side was completely hidden from the public (as opposed to, say, Ballmer). In any case, I'm tired of tech CEOs being self-important and elitist. Steve Jobs was the genesis for that, and his inability to admit when he was wrong ultimately lead to his demise.
I'm saying this from a truly impartial, empathetic and caring place: Steve Jobs' behavior should serve as a warning sign for what happens when you let infinite ego expand unchecked.
I think he was a great integrator. He got people working together that needed to. Internally with groups at apple, and externally like the record labels and apple.
I think he also listened to a variety of people and made course corrections.
As to affordability: they always had high margins.
wikipedia says of the original macintosh 128k:
Introductory price: US$2,495 (equivalent to US$6,220 in 2020)
The initial price target for the Macintosh was $1495, but with the addition of new technology like the Sony 400K floppy disk drive, the team realized it would have to sell for a higher price like $1995.
Three months before the release, John Sculley decided to raise the price to $2495 and use the extra profits for marketing. Steve Jobs was upset at this but eventually gave in. I've often wondered how different things would have been if Steve had won that argument... probably not very, to be honest.
Well, I agree that Apple would have been even better with Steve at the helm. As for affordability apple has never been cheap, when the first iphone came out it was very expensive, $600 in 2007 which would be $791 in today's dollars. This is for a phone with no apps or app store and 8GB of storage which is really tiny.
If we go back further apple products get even more expensive. The apple ii(released in 1978) was $1298 or $5543 in today's dollars, not exactly cheap!
I don’t think Apple was « affordable ». Even under jobs it was expensive.
But I agree it wasn’t expensive for the sake of being expensive (the definition of luxury) like today where the high price is almost a feature. It was expensive because they always tried to be different and it allowed them to set higher prices.
I think it means ‘user-friendly’ cheap which is different than cheap. I don’t see gnome to be user friendly much and don’t even get me started on windows on mobile. iPadOS on the other hand is something 2 year olds or someone who has never used a computer can get used to in hours.
From my experience... Cancer medication and treatment does awful things to people.
I wouldn't judge Jobs for the things he said while dying. However I'd judge him for his actions while he was living. Or rather, listen to the judgements of people who were close to him. So I have a hard time admiring him, though he was at the centre of a lot of admirable stuff.
Having read multiple Jobs biographies, it also seemed to me that he may have been bipolar, but unmedicated because of his stance on medication. Sometimes very hard to work with or be around. People ascribe incredible genius to this guy, but forget that he could be a very impulsive, arrogant and sometimes cruel human being.
Regarding Steve Wozniak, that's another big issue. Not only the betrayal, but it betrays a divide between Jobs and Wozniak. The original Apple II was a computer designed by Wozniak, and very open to tinkerers. Jobs didn't want the computer to be open or to have many extension slots, he wanted total control over the system. He designed his vision of a computer (the Macintosh), and it was a flop. Jobs killed the Apple II and sent the company on a downwards spiral that lasted several years.
It kind of pains me to see that so many people in tech love Apple products, but forget that Apple is not a platform made for creative engineers, it's designed to be a closed system they have control over. They don't really value or encourage your curiosity. They don't want you to peek at what's inside. Even though Apple, like most tech companies, was started by creative engineers.
It's not really a fair characterization to call the first Mac a flop; it sold reasonably well, though obviously not as well as the Apple II given the higher price point:
Jobs was chronically focused on producing products that were ahead of the market. As a consequence, the Macintosh and the NeXT were incredible, forward-looking, and overpriced for the market.
I’m by no means happy or in agreement with his “closed system” thinking, but it’s worth noting that the iPhone was exactly that.
He screwed over a ton of Apple employees. In Jobs' mind he truly deserved all of the credit and profits for their success because he was the vision guy. Woz and the rest of the team were just doing the boring implementation stuff.
This is a big oversimplification. Some people got screwed therefore he was always screwing everyone over. His career spans many years and quite a few people managed great contributions working with him in that time and got very well compensated and congratulated for that.
Steve Jobs did give a lot of credit to the people who worked under him, just to pick out a couple of notable examples he frequently heaped praise on Avie Tevanian and also the guy who actually made the initial speculative potential merger call to Apple. And in doing so he specifically called out their accomplishments as being savvy and decisive and not just boring implementation stuff.
Or how he taunted Alvy Ray Smith because of his Southern accent. Or how his example continues to be used to excuse bad behavior today ("but Steve Jobs did it that way").
especially when contrasted withg how Woz acted and continues to act. He just seems like a much more happy human being, and it's warming to see good things happen to good people.
I wonder how many of us would fare if subject to the same kind of scrutiny Jobs is.
As for the Wozniak thing, Wozniak forgave him. As he was the one wronged, we should let it go, too. Heck, if I didn't forgive my friends now and then, I wouldn't have any.
I think Apple would be an even more interesting company if he were still around. Maybe not as big or as profitable, but certainly more interesting.
I wish he hadn't been so strongheaded about herbal remedies and whatnot. He had the more curable kind of cancer, had he taken it seriously earlier. As someone who has lost family to pancreatic cancer, it really upset me to learn that he didn't use his vast resources to do everything he could to live.
I think he did quite a bit out of the ordinary, according to reports like this (1):
> "Through a legal, little-known practice called multiple listing, Jobs doubled his odds by getting on waiting lists in California and Tennessee. Competition was too stiff back home in California, and Jobs, his wealth and fame notwithstanding, may have died waiting. But in mere weeks he jumped to the top of the list in Memphis, ahead of dozens of others."
I would have a much higher opinion of Steve Jobs if he'd have kept Apple manufacturing in the USA instead of helping gut the Bay Area's electronics manufacturing industry by outsourcing to Foxconn and others. He was basically another clever CEO with a rather ruthless streak, hardly the Heroic Idea Man he's portrayed as.
> I would have a much higher opinion of Steve Jobs if he'd have kept Apple manufacturing in the USA instead of helping gut the Bay Area's electronics manufacturing industry by outsourcing to Foxconn and others.
None of these efforts worked out, which is probably one reason he didn't reverse Apple's trend of outsourcing after he returned in 1997. Tim Cook took charge of Apple's operations in 1998.
Shouldn't people be free to do whatever they want with their own life? I think that if he valued his principles more than his life, he should be free to do so.
Right, OP wasn't suggesting he shouldn't have been free to do what he did. The fact that he changed his mind when it was too late suggested even he knew he'd made a mistake.
> I think Apple would be an even more interesting company if he were still around
There is no way Jobs would have been at the helm of Apple, even if he was still alive.
He'd have been canceled, matter of fact he'd have been one of the first people to get canceled given that he'd be occupying a spot wanted by basically everybody, plus he had made so many enemies....and finally let's not dabble around it: guy had so many personal flaws and his personal relationships are a mine field.
He'd have been #metoo'd or singled out for abusive behavior towards subordinates or some other thing.
He was the one guy who could be taken down by basically every strain of SJW. They'd have had the time of their lives dragging him in so many battlefields of the culture wars, and he'd have lost on all of them.
From a legacy standpoint death was the best thing for Steve Jobs, much like his idol John Lennon. Death freezes the public perception and stops people from digging dirt.
You are correct that Steve, like most high profile CEOs, would have been vulnerable to the cancel police. I think this is one reason that many high net worth Bitcoiners choose to stay under-the-radar: not being vulnerable to the whims of the social media masses seems like the ultimate luxury. Bill Murray, the actor, had a prescient quote about this in an interview that occurred before metoo and the rest of the culture wars heated up:
”I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'Try being rich first.' See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job."
I think people today want more money and less fame, having watched many of the people they looked up to be publicly destroyed by the masses. Everyone makes mistakes, but famous people pay outsized prices for them.
You're talking about the idea of some one who hurts and abuses other people no longer being allowed to be a part of polite society, and the people that want that to be the case, like its a bad thing.
It is just mind boggling. Do you read your own comments?
> You're talking about the idea of some one who hurts and abuses other people no longer being allowed to be a part of polite society, and the people that want that to be the case, like its a bad thing.
No , the bad thing is that when somebody is dragged out in the court of public opinion all the positive contributions of that particular individual are not taken into consideration.
I am now a wide eyed utopian, I am a very practical person. As a practical person I tell you that if society doesn't let the good things that one does offset the negative flaws that one might have....then people will ask themselves if it's worth to do good things at all.
The SJWs I mentioned (and suspect also you) would retroactively cancel Richard Feynman because he grabbed by the waist some Brazilian dancer while he was teaching in Rio. Even if that meant succumbing to Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Dick Feynman earned the right to dance with as many Brazilian girls as he wanted.
You're going to have to explain what the Manhattan Project had to do with victory in Europe. And after that, please explain why Feynman's contributions to it were so critical.
Finally, I'd like to ask for an explanation as to how Feynman's actions starting in 1949 could have had a causal effect on a war that ended in 1945.
> Finally, I'd like to ask for an explanation as to how Feynman's actions starting in 1949 could have had a causal effect on a war that ended in 1945.
That's exactly what I mean, thank you! You have stressed the whole point!
Society feels comfortable in canceling people because these people already gave their contribution and for sure the person being canceled can't retroactively destroy all their contributions. If they could that'd be a powerful weapon of self defense, some sort of dead man switch against the mob.
But they don't, hence society is emboldened to destroy that person because it's the path of least resistence towards getting what it really wants: Separating the contributions from the person who made them, thus making sure that they cannot benefit from them, socially or financially.
Society would think long and hard before canceling people if it also meant automatically removing all their contributions.
I bet you society would have not canceled Harvey Weinstein if it also meant the complete disappearence of:
Society "cancelled" Harvey Weinstein because he raped multiple women, to the point where it was an in-joke in Hollywood. I don't think he's much of a good example except to identify how long it takes for justice to reach someone.
Maybe someone like Aziz Ansari is a better example... except he wasn't really cancelled - just hit a bump in his career that he had to acknowledge. (Similarly, Louis CK).
I absolutely would be OK with deleting every record of those movies, some of which are my favorites, if there were any point in doing so. The important thing is that a rapist is held accountable!
> Society "cancelled" Harvey Weinstein because he raped multiple women, to the point where it was an in-joke in Hollywood. I don't think he's much of a good example except to identify how long it takes for justice to reach someone.
He caused lifechanging trauma to 10-20 people. That is not excusable.
What is not brought up in the assesment of his persona is the amount of entertainment he provided to the world.
The aggregate of 40 hours of AAA movies being enjoyed by 3 billion people between theatre, DVD, streaming, TV and piracy.
But of course you can't call 3 billion people up to provide their account of what positive impact Wienstin had on their lives. Plus while the trauma caused is substantial, the entertainment provided to the aforementioned 3 billion people is marginal.
When you judge somebody you should see the whole picture.
I don't think he had anything to do with the script abd photography of these movies. Maybe too much with casting teenage actresses, but the movies would have been "managed" (rent-seek) by some other production companies, don't worry.
Feynman is a weird example - he talks about pickup culture and getting women to sleep with him. He also was a bad husband, spent a lot of time in a strip club drawing "art", and chased after Las Vegas Showgirls.
I'm not certain he would have been cancelled - I think that's mostly projection - but it's useful to acknowledge he wasn't exactly a "good guy", despite his contributions to science.
(The screed about the Nazis has already been debunked in another comment.)
> but it's useful to acknowledge he wasn't exactly a "good guy"
What exactly constitutes a "good guy" for you?
The only possible definition is somebody who wastes away his life, doesn't have fun, works all the times and gifts the discoveries of his endless hours of work to his subordinates so that they can claim as their own.
Obviously rejects any compensation above minimum wage for the whole ordeal, so that he could not even have the temptation to spend, because he needs that minimum amount to eat.
Not even Jesus Christ would manage to make it into your tier of "good guys".
What has the world come to...Feynman being thrown under the bus on HN.
To me, it's someone of character who doesn't treat the other sex like objects or puzzles to be solved. Or, if they do and learn from it, doesn't brag about the exploits in their memoirs.
There is also the dad test - would you want them dating your daughter?
I think Apple would be an even more interesting company if he were still around. Maybe not as big or as profitable, but certainly more interesting.
I agree. As a user of Apple products, I think Apple makes great products. And I don't believe Apple can't innovate because Jobs is gone (they basically set category standards in smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and ARM desktop computers since then).
But Apple was certainly more fun with Jobs. Many keynotes since Jobs have been cringeworthy, with the studied jokes, to slick presentations, etc. Jobs had natural showmanship and was confident enough in that to do present more spontaneously. Made the keynotes more fun.
Also I feel like product had larger design deltas. In the ten years since Jobs, Macs have mostly been aluminium/space grey (though they are definitely improving with the new iMacs), there was much more variety and evolution in the design the ten years before.
Plus, the NeXTcube was the probably most beautiful computer ever.
The problem is that few people are as captivating to listen to as Steve was. I think Steve could sell anything so long as he could genuinely believe in it.
I agree that recent keynotes have been awful, but this recent decline is largely due to the format being changed from a live audience presentation into a high production value movie. It's so incongruent because it's the wrong genre. The sooner Apple can return to a truly live keynote, the better.
For better and for worse, Jobs being so strongheaded about his own health and care was just another expression of precisely the same attributes that made him such an effective innovator: convinced his taste was right, he willed reality to bend to his perception of it. That works well on humans; it's (mostly) ineffective on disease.
Some of Jobs' later success probably came from his knowledge of his own mortality. This enabled him to shoot for the moon and drive as hard as he could.
Another interesting what-if: what if Wozniak remained at Apple after 1985? How would the company have proceeded, especially after Jobs was removed- if he was?
I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”.
The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left.
There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he was still there but it has stagnated.
Apple has moved from being an incredibly innovative company under Steve Jobs to a much more corporate, mature company that relies more on incremental growth. They don’t really have any incentive to change because of their success, and this fundamental pattern happens to every company (see GE’s history after Edison). Apple simply isn’t the company it was before, and that’s a natural part of capitalism.
Other Apples are emerging all the time, and will continue to emerge
"Mature company that relies more on incremental growth" is exactly the stage where they get overtaken and fade into obscurity. It won't happen tomorrow, but slowly there will be new kids on the block who will make their tech look dated and uncool. It seems impossible to even think about but you'd say the same about IBM a few decades ago.
I'm sure Jobs knew about this. I'm sure he told Cook to milk the market cow wide and deep to ensure survival of Apple while maintaining a steady brand, in the event that somehow something real genuine emerges again from Apple and they're ready to fire with 200B of cash.
How so? Are other people creating closed software platforms where they charge 30% off the top for their developers? I agree that they've gone more corporate over the years, but it was only after the realization that they could exploit the market with their install-base. It's quite literally, step-for-step identical to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer parable that got them in so much trouble. They're taking advantage of a market without any other options, which is not something that an emerging company can do, much less at the scale Apple does it.
I think that's true, but there's also a danger of asking someone to 'be that guy' who isn't Steve. That seems like a bigger risk.
And in the meantime Apple still has its own fairly cohesive idea of how you use their devices and software ... while places like Google cancel and re-releases apps with half the features as the one they canceled, and I don't think they have a real idea of how people use their stuff.
Definitely, I don’t see a way you could elevate someone to the level Steve was at. I think the plan was to have Jony Ive be the final word on design person.
But with iOS 7 Ives showed he didn’t get software and the “design is how it works” concept.
This is apparently not cool these days. I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great. Now it’s just identity politics, pessimism and general stagnancy as Peter Thiel puts it. I honestly kind of want to go back to 2005 - what a time to be alive.
I didn't know about the Cube[1], so thanks for sharing. Only sold for 1 year and then discontinued.
Laptops are now dominant and have outsold desktops for a long time, but in year 2000 that wasn't the case. So the Cube seems like a false start down that path. Kind of like Jobs knew the future, but was a little too ahead of his time on that one.
Hell, I own an Apple battery charger for AA batteries. Actually at the time it came out it was reasonably priced, plus it uses the same AC power connectors as apple computer chargers so was actually handy when traveling. But nevertheless, absurd.
Stebe seemed to have a thing for cubes. The G4 Cube is a throwback to the much more famous NeXT case design, though the original black cube running "Next Step" was perhaps a little too on the nose:
The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left.
Mostly on the Mac. The butterfly keyboard and how Apple handled it, were terrible. And macOS quality had gone down release after release. But I have never had any serious software or hardware quality issues with the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods or any other products. It seems that they had just lost focus on the Mac.
However, the Mac seems to be rebounding. I have a M1 MacBook Air and it is stellar - probably their best new Mac in decades. Also, I haven't had many issues with macOS 11 so far.
> Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired.
In which case, it sounds like a good thing they have a more sustainable culture. But I'm not sure your comment is true anyway.
Of course, Apple made all sorts of mistakes under Steve Jobs. In such a creative company, only a culture of freedom to make mistakes could produce extreme success. But now, because of a nostaglic cult of personality, any mistake meets with howls of "this would never happened under Steve!". That hero worship is a bigger problem for Apple.
You can code in Swift Playgrounds, including developing GUI apps using SwiftUI, and the next version will be able to release apps to the store directly from the iPad.
That's aside from the third party apps like Codea and Pythonista that have supported coding and app development on the iPad for about a decade. If you've not been coding on your iPad, you've been seriously missing out.
I generally agree, although there are all kinds of issues on iPhone as well. The one that bothers me most often is autocorrect sporadically changing correct English words to nonsense, or the complete inability to select certain bits of text properly (even in Apple apps).
I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.
There's some typos I get consistently and the correction is from a very normal word (probably, for instance) to a really seldom used word (poetically, in this example) and I'd prefer to remove poetically from my dictionary than to keep having it pop up.
Repeat this for a couple dozen very common words that consistently give me problems.
GBoard allows you to remove words, and the gesture is very simple. For example, "pepsi" is corrected to "Pepsi" but who wants that. So, just type "pepsi", and "Pepsi"'ll appear in the bar above the keyboard. Drag it up, and it won't be corrected again. Easy. As usual with gestures, zero affordance...
> I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.
Now imagine how frustrating it is having to deal with an additional layer of invisible predictions, silently changing a word after you've typed it and moved on, consistenly only allowing you to say "1/4" instead of "one-fourth" with nowhere to change it ...
I have to deal with this every day because I use dictation do most of my typing. Due to a hand injury (RSI).
I am someone who cares very very deeply about precise and novel expression. It is very very difficult to do that when I have to fight multiple layers of tools that think they know better, with no way for me to provide feedback to the system, as you say"Priority for predictive."
For instance, just looked at how Mack OS voice dictation chose to punctuate and space the string
> say"Prio
Above. Or look at how it misspelled its own name, in the previous sentence!
I turned off autocorrect a year ago. It’s easier to correct typos by tapping them than have to proof read for whatever properly typed word Apple changed for no reason.
The original iPhone had a much nicer cursor behavior and placement was easier with a tap or a hold-and-drag than it is to this day. I forget when this changed, I think it was about a decade ago.
I wish I could up vote this twice. Text handling on the iPhone is incredibly frustrating.
I'd add to the list of issues how hard it is to trigger the spell checker for underlined words and how poor its suggestions are when you finally do trigger it.
There are whole websites devoted to embarrassing errors caused iPhone text handling. I can't see why Apple don't bother to fix it. Even small iterative improvements would be OK.
Apple Maps directions now mispronounces the word "South" (who knew it had three syllables?). This word is so common in street names I'm shocked it made it out of testing.
Apple Maps is horrible for driving navigation. Relevant information like route number of the next turn is much smaller than it needs to be.
The directions are floating in space over the map which looks nice but wastes space on the margins. The directions themselves are in a box that also wastes tons of space.
If you reach a destination navigation is cancelled but you cant re-start navigation from there. So if you arrive but Apple Maps wants you to make a left turn across a median it cancels nav and you are in the dark for finding a route around.
I wish usability was a priority but modern UX doesn’t seem to consider it at all.
In New Orleans today Apple Maps a) directed me across a bridge closed to vehicular traffic since Katrina b) directed me down a flooded street -- all in the same trip!
What? There's a toggle to hide episodes you've already listened to. If you have that turned on, it only shows you episodes you haven't listened to yet.
Only on the Latest Episodes page, which doesn’t allow you to group by show. The Downloaded page lets you hide played episodes, but doesn’t hide them for 24 hours (why??). The Shows page … that’s all messed up. You can hide played episodes, but it randomly displays episodes from years past with no possible way to mark them played without first downloading it and then marking it played.
I don't understand. The Shows page lets me hide played episodes and mark individual episodes as played without downloading them. You can click the "..." or long press on any episode in the Shows page to mark it as played.
I thought Podcasts was derided even when it was first released within a year after Jobs' passing, so it being a bad app is continuity from that era if anything
Podcasts feels like one of those apps Steve wouldn't have used, so it wouldn't have seen as much polish. I suspect this is why Keynote is fantastic but Pages and Numbers were unusable (at least, the last time I attempted to use them regularly, about 10 years ago)
Podcasts app seriously has some big issues. I had an iPhone XR and it would heat the shit out of the phone, I thought maybe it's because I have an old phone but it's doing the same with my 13. I have subscribed to 50+ podcasts.
iOS 11 and 13 were both pretty crappy, not to mention weird misses like the Podcasts app. I can't see those releasing when Steve Jobs was at the helm, unless the situation was desperate. (An example of a desperate situation would be when you’re current products run Mac OS 9).
iBooks wasn’t replacing a previous offering, and I don’t think it was abjectly terrible, just limited.
iMovie is a better example but I still think it was a decent update for the software’s target audience. And they offered everyone the older version for free! An even better example might be Final Cut X, which I actually think was a great product but for a very different audience for FCX.
The through-line is that these products were good products-they did something well and without bugs—but they weren’t targeted correctly, ignoring the needs of an existing customer base with (completely reasonable) expectations. That’s different in kind from something like iOS 13.
The guys at Pontiac who had this power with the Aztek probably thought they had taste; who defines this?
Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.
In full fairness, the Aztek was actually a great car with really decisive styling that wasnt a hit. The same designer actually penned the Corvette C7 and Camaro as well, obvious hits. Taste is defined by society and by those who push to create a wave with their splashes in the pond. It's really a 'You know it when you see it" kind of thing. I think that many in the software world also get lost on how to make good things by getting lost in the tools and insider baseball. For every one of his "silly" omitted functional design elements...there were actually brilliant chopped concepts that made way for the future. The iMac's lack of a floppy drive and Apple I/O, the iPhone's lack of a keyboard, the Macbook Air's lack of a Disk drive. All of these are the type of thing a more feature and function-focused product would not remove but in removing them the product was freed to be a better product. Not that all of his choices were good, but generally he really hit the nail on the head. Functionally the MacBook Air in 2008 with the optional SSD is the template for the modern thin laptop today and differs very little internally from say, a Surface laptop 4.
Are there really any such examples? Steve Jobs wanted excellent products and they didn't always work out. That was often because the tech wasn't quite there so either the functionality didn't quite work or the effort required to make it work resulted in a product which was just a bit too expensive. Reliability is really tricky to get right and most Apple products even now get rushed to market and then not iterated on in a big way, or at least nothing like the honing that goes into a Toyota product by contrast. There isn't really a balance of features that puts aesthetics in competition with other aspects.
Most modern CUVs have a similar side profile to the Aztek. One of the reasons they look less awkward is that bigger wheels are more popular. There's a few other awkward design quibbles with the Aztek, but for the most part similar cars sell like hot cakes now.
I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without the rich Corinthian leather, the PowerPC, and the colored plastic. The new keyboards aren't great, but I've dropped this MBP at least 30 times and it still keeps chugging; I'm pretty sure an errant dust particle could have take out my first Intel Macbook.
But this isn't the point, and comparing the two eras is useless IMO. It isn't where we were that matters, it where we could have been if Steve were still driving the ship.
With the glaring exception of the butterfly keyboard debacle (typing on, what, my fourth right now? and already showing some signs of wonkiness), I agree hardware quality is amazing & best its ever been.
The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.
I've been a OS X user since the Titanium Powerbook and wouldn't trade Mojave for any cat version --- and, in particular, wouldn't swap the aesthetics of Mojave for any of them either.
This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.
Haha, yeah I'm not going to argue for rich Corinthian leather, or the aesthetics of the old iTunes UI or brushed metal or whatever. The visual style now is great. But the usability and quality of the animations and general fit-and-finish is much lower now, I think.
Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now:
Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected.
The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost.
On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy.
Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??)
And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)
I've noticed the same animation issues in safari, and tbh, its very unlike apple.
There are other apps in macOS which have collapsible sidebars (preview and finder come to mind), but they don't suffer with the same icon lag issue.
And as far as I know, catalyst (which I assume is what's being used now for almost all of the new mac apps with the blurry sidebar) should handle these things inherently, it's strange that this seems to be a safari exclusive problem.
Historically unlike Apple, but becoming increasingly common sadly.
Beyond any tech details, I think the real problem is they've somehow just lost interest (or maybe even ability?) in crafting software to a high, delightful quality bar.
It seems likely that he would have, because the port being on the bottom (making it so you can't use it while charging) allows the form factor to be that much sleeker. Jobs would generally opt for the form factor over convenience - ever making phones/laptops slimmer and lighter at the cost of battery life, for example.
Yes, and specifically the phase Apple went through with excessively over-the-top skeuomorphism. As I recall, after the brushed metal fad had finally ended Mac OS X settled on a decent and fairly consistent look by 10.6, then in 10.7 there was a fresh excess including actual stitched leather textures: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/5/
That OS X release would have been frustrating for its usability and feature regressions even without the skeuomorphic textures, so also getting such heavy-handed, in-your-face design excesses made it a really disappointing release.
Steve quotes in the video "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" which is of course a Wayne Gretsky quote, and I think it captures this sentiment very well. Moving from leader to follower is such a classic move for an incumbent like Apple, and with Steve they never seemed to lose that insurgent mindset, even when they were absolutely enormous. They've steadily stagnated and truly lost that founder's mentality, and it sucks. I miss Steve Jobs a lot, and think about him often.
Honestly I don't see this. I realize it's a simple narrative, and it's one that plays well with the heroic arc, but businesses are not Aesop's Fables, sat on this earth to give us a morality tale to use to guide our children. The facts on the ground are far more complicated than "Apple was creative under Steve and isn't under Cook." Apple had MORE products when in the market when Steve came back as CEO, and he ruthlessly pared them down to the core. If Tim Cook killed half of Apple's lineup, would you say "wow, what a Steve-like move?" or would you say the company is simply resting on its laurels?
Apple has been managed by Tim Cook for more years now than it was by Steve Jobs. By business measures it is significantly more successful. They haven't released the next iPhone-class product, but one does not simply walk into Mordor, nor does one make an iPhone of products every year, or even every decade.
I think Apple is doing fine, warts and all. N of 1, but I've spent more money on their stuff in the last 4 years than I did in the 12 before that.
I think Steve was a product guy and Cook is more likely a business guy. I'm not making a value judgement either way, but I do see a lack of product vision/innovation under Cook, and I believe product vision/innovation is what excites me most about consumer electronics. I think the fact that Steve released several "once in a lifetime" level of success products in such a short time span is evidence enough for this.
Something that Steve jobs did well was understanding that building great products and successful business metrics aren't necessarily always aligned, especially in a product's nascent period.
I agree, and I don't think the time is right for the next major product category. Force something through and you get the cube again. They'll presumably wait for head-mounted displays of some sort, and a play at cars.
I'm stupefied as to how someone who didn't know him socially can miss a CEO of a giant faceless corporation, especially one known to be such a monumental asshole.
I mean his company made consumer products. It's like saying you miss the former CEO of Braun.
The answer of this question is complicated and requires mastery in psychology. In layman terms is something about religious experience mixed with father figure and deep symbolism. People need something to believe and worship, this is part of multinational traditions in different forms.
I personally have used Apple computers from purely UX an UI motivation, never trusted a slogan or marketing "reality distortion field", never been an early adopter or Apple fetishist. Simply put, in one distant point in time Macs were the ultimate professional tools. UNIX based, clean, logical software with reliable and beautifully designed hardware.
Now they are just a services and fashion company with hardware appliances as vehicles for vertical integration.
I respected Jobs intuition towards product design and execution but never "idolized" him for a second.
Even today, people don't get it, thousands of talented and faceless people are involved in Apples success but everything that the world can see is the face of the CEO and marketing presentation (This on second thought is one of biggest Jobs innovations).
The bigger problem is that we are "stuck" in Jobs vision of "user oriented" product (which figures as Tim Cook effectively abused and shifted towards monopoly, politics and shareholders driven existence) and cannot move forward.
The success stories of Jobs and Apple are considered "The Holly Grail" of tech companies and we have even some impostors using perception tricks (Elizabeth Holmes).
It is sad and frightening at the same time. If User Centered Design was really applied (not only advertised) the current state of personal computing would include real focus on encryption, privacy, data protection and accessibility, not some fetishistic obsession with tech specs and decoration in the name of "perception of progress" or corporate profits.
I’m stupefied as to how someone who didn’t know him socially can miss the CEO of a giant faceless corporation
Would you have called Apple “faceless” if Steve Jobs were still CEO?
I miss Steve Jobs because he did great things and he inspired others to do great things. The world was a more vibrant and creative place with him in it. As a software engineer I have used Apple products to do almost all of my day-to-day work since 2004 and I am thankful I have not had to use Linux, Windows or Android instead. It makes me sad to think of what we might have today if he was still alive.
And in comparison, here on HN, you mention the CEO of company that makes - electric razors? Whose name you cannot even remember?
The fact that Steve Jobs was an asshole to people at times is irrelevant. You value people for their strengths, not their weaknesses.
Dieter Rams was the legendary head of industrial design at Braun but I don't think you could say that he led the company.
His role was more akin to Jony Ive's at Apple.
Jobs was a different kind of animal. It's hard to say exactly what the source of his magic was but the fact that he remained interesting throughout his career showed he had something special that's still worth talking about.
What I miss is his insight into the state of the industry, the direction technology is going, and his discourse on design and why Apple products he worked on are engineered the way they are.
Yes he was a flawed person especially when he was younger, but he was also incredibly insightful, a master communicator and was always interesting to listen to. I think it's reasonable to miss that, and hence the person.
It takes years to develop stuff, and a final gatekeeping step will certainly prevent them from shipping junk, but doesn't teach people how to create something that isn't junk.
Every time I see some usability flub in Mac software—like the new Safari tabs—I think that Steve is just a little more gone. Despite his flaws, he really understood how people interact with computers in a way not many others do.
If Jobs had been there, I can't help but believe there wouldn't have been a notch on the iPhone and the watch would have a longer lasting battery. My Samsung watch can go 2 days in between charges, so it should be possible.
Hard to say. Jobs oversaw all sorts of whiffs. The circular mouse comes to mind. And his ability to turn these kinds of errors into "it's good, actually" was so legendary that it had its own name.
> I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”.
It's probably just a coincidence but I can't help but notice how Apple didn't become a PRISM "Provider" until a year after he was dead, many years after the Googles/Facebooks of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
If you read the Wiki page you linked, you’ll see that PRISM was just the NSA internal source name for data sourced via FISA warrants—which are not optional.
Apple had no choice to “join” PRISM; the timing you see on that slide was determined by the FBI.
>I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”.
I have this recurring fantasy, where an engineer walks into Jobs's office with the new iPhone 7 prototype for the first time. The engineer holds it up, and says "Look! We've added the most advanced camera ever to be put into a phone! People will love this!"
Steve then graciously takes it from his hands, flips it over, runs his fingers across the lens bump, looks up at the engineer, and calmly says "Youre fired. Get rid of the damn bump."
What I think it really suffers from is that the buyer isn't Apple's target audience, it's the person watching the person using an Apple product. Second is Apple (well actually the first is to serve Apple too). This skews priorities.
When Ive bungled the laptop line with the butterfly keyboards, I feel like somebody must have said "this is shit" and hence his departure and release of better hardware since.
I've thought a lot about his legacy lately with the permanently on-going horror story that is Facebook and Mark Zuckerburg.
For all of Steve's flaws, from an outside observer like myself, it seems that his intentions/desires/goals for Apple, Pixar, NeXT were mostly, or at least equally, fueled by genuinely wanting to improve the lives of humans.
Among the rarified air of modern radical world-changing billionaire CEO's, anyone else think this is why there is a fandom for Elon Musk and not like the likes of Bezos? Because, again, despite his flaws, he seems to be at least oriented towards some idea of greater good?
Musk (and his PR machine) leans into his mostly manufactured image as an eccentric genius, which charms an audience who is susceptible to that type of thing.
Bezos has had no significant public profile to speak of except as a brutal, unrelenting capitalist. He's clearly trying to change that with his post-Amazon charm tour in space.
It was my dream to meet Steve. Would not have gone down this road of trying to build things I love if not for finding inspiration from watching him present all those products.
Thank You Steve.
This thread reminds me of the last Steve Jobs related thread. So many people bashing Jobs based on stories they’ve read having never met him and knowing little about him. People seem to think they even know his private medical history based on only public reports. So much judgement and criticism and it feels completely unnecessary. It’s the kind of pointless outrage type comments we tend not to find very often on HN, but Steve Jobs seems to bring it out in people. I don’t doubt there are many valid criticisms of Jobs but it’s depressing that a thread linking to a post about his 10th anniversary has almost no talk of the incredible contributions he made in life.
Sometimes people (me included) can't separate the person from their creations/actions.
I'm not saying they always should, but is just an observation.
I think is fair to say that Jobs changed several industries and that has a lot of value to me, but there are plenty of documented situations when I was left thinking he was not a good person.
I don't need to know him to learn from all those documented facts.
Well in the context of this post they're lionizing the individual as a stellar human, so I think it's fair to question you agree with this, or if it's even accurate.
I'm incredibly thankful for Jobs introducing the personal computer. Computers are devices that we can own and use, not intangible and unreachable academic things. We owe our careers in part to him and his work.
At the same time, I'm profoundly upset at his introduction of the App Store and sidelining of the right to repair. Our devices belong to us. We should be able to do with them what we please.
It's also incredibly anti-competitive to tell every startup in the world that what was once free to distribute, market, and form a relationship with their customer: "now you must sit atop Apple rails for (entirely artificial) reasons". It's extractive. There's so much more to solve in the world. Why take energy from those smaller than you? It lowered the fitness and innovation capacity of everyone else. Those dollars could be runway and additional labor for someone with bright ideas.
Jobs was a human just like the rest of us. There was both good and bad in him, and he made a profound mark upon society. The world was shaped by his short time here. No question.
There's no doubt that Jobs was a very polarizing figure, had many negative character traits and made a lot of mistakes throughout his life. For what it's worth, I read his biography and he came across as repentant and apologetic when confronted, especially near the end when he knew he was going to die. He was a brilliant but flawed person, and he was aware of it.
What really rubs me the wrong way is people who refuse to give him credit for his tremendous achievements, and belittle and ridicule him instead.
Some Apple defenders seem to be stuck sometime between the mid-90s when Apple was on the verge of collapse, and before the introduction of the iPod. Apple is the most profitable company on Earth. Jobs' place in the history books is assured. This isn't some plucky underdog that's in need of defense anymore. Even the fiercest critic of Jobs will need to recognize his accomplishments, and Apple's success. And even if they don't, so what? Apple is a giant. It has outshone M$ and made their mobile attempts look like a joke. Steve Jobs is a secular saint, an icon. Who cares what a few trolls think?
The most irritating thing about modern Apple fanboyism is that it lets the most profitable company on Earth and its leadership off scot-free. Anyone who criticizes Apple is put in the same company as bullies from decades ago who were on the side of Wintel and mocking a tortured genius. That's very outdated. And it blinds people from valid critiques.
For what it's worth, I read his biography and he came across as repentant and apologetic when confronted, especially near the end when he knew he was going to die.
Well, the thing with this is that while he might have been privately apologetic, the public image that relentlessly and abusively driving employees leads to success has stayed with us after his death and he certainly made no effort publicly debunk it. That certainly influences how I see him.
I like to think all reasonable computer nerds recognize the duality that created Apple: incredible engineering (Woz) combined with incredible passion, marketing and drive (Jobs). The problem is people point to Jobs as an example of unacceptable behaviours that are excused by his results. Yet somehow Woz showed us you could do really ingenious engineering AND be a decent human being, but they don't teach this in business school.
The “Steve Jobs” movie written by Soorkin does such a good job examining this question by having the two of them fight over the relative importance of their contributions. Since one of character-Woz’s strongest lines is “you can be decent and brilliant at the same time,” I assume you’ve seen it. If not, you should! Everybody here should, it’s a brilliant film.
One of the things that character-Jobs says is (something along the lines of) “you’d be the easiest A at Palo Alto highschool right now if it wasn’t for me.” What he’s getting at is that Woz didn’t know how to channel his engineering talent into successful ambition. This makes the question a lot more complex: it’s not “can you be talented & kind,” it’s “can you be talented & kind & successfully ambitious.” Character-Jobs is asserting that his ruthlessness, his faults, were a necessity for these things to happen with Apple.
The film probes at these questions from just about every angle. Perhaps not coincidentally, it portrays his greatest success at the time when character-Jobs is most able to be at peace with himself and work other people.
This "contributions" you're talking about someone elsewhere would have done it, and we can just imagine how better the world would be if those contributions would be for the benefit of the world and not for a company.
And even if someone else had made these "contributions," the nature of the them is dubious at best. The world is not a better place because of a phone, or a laptop, or a desktop.
His one and only innovation was the ability to say "no." "No" to superfluous features, and "no" to tracking. That is a rare quality, but hardly unique. Apple (under his leadership) even attempted to trademark ideas that were not their own.[1]
It is very worrying that society continues to fawn over this greedy man, while quickly forgetting those who made genuine contributions.[2]
I don't think this is really unique to Jobs. In fact I think he gets a pretty big break because people like Apple and, well, he's dead. Musk or Bezos, for example, seem to catch a lot more crap.
I cant help but think Apple is using Steve to tell us what Apple really is. Since Tim Cook has failed to communicate that message across to its audience. ( May be apart from certain ideology group ).
It may also help to temper the new born hatred against Apple from their long time supporters.
I really wish he was still alive, and continue to be the yard stick of quality so we dont have Apple Music, spending two years on the next song and then another two years reversing that. [1], Apple TV+, as Steve would have partnered with Disney. A whole generation of MacBook with Butterfly Keyboard. Apple without an Editor is like a Giant Design Studio, everything looks great, from UI to Industrial Design. But they are more forms over function.
Can we please update the title to clarify it's Steve Jobs. I know that's the original title on the site but it's a bit confusing when it comes to Steves and Apple. My heart dropped when I read it and thought it was Steve Wozniak.
Ten years ago I was at Infinite Loop, when Apple held a special event in memory of Steve. Everybody was wearing sunglasses to hide their tears, even Tim and Jony. I remember Jonys speech quite vividly as it showed how truly close they were. He joked about how he would never unpack his bags upon arriving at a hotel because Steve would call him and say the hotel is shit so they had to move immediately after checking in.
I think it’s those human connections he made that made him so great. Lots of people have their Steve Jobs story. I don’t know of many other people that make that kind of connection with people on such a deep level.
Thanks Apple for posting this and thanks for remembering and celebrating him. I’m no longer an employee, but always a fan. May your best inventions be in your future.
> He joked about how he would never unpack his bags upon arriving at a hotel because Steve would call him and say the hotel is shit so they had to move immediately after checking in. I think it’s those human connections he made that made him so great.
This is awful, no? There are people like that who can never be pleased. Usually narcissists. I fail to see where the human connection is in being a crybaby Karen.
Not to diminish Jobs' accomplishments, but it's one thing to say "he was a complicated man, achieved a lot but was difficult to deal with" and quite another to being up that story as a positive. That just seems like Stockholm syndrome.
That shouldn't have happened enough times that Ive developed a Pavlovian reflex to avoid unpacking his bag. Or if all hotels they stayed at were that shitty, perhaps some stern words should have been said to the people responsible for booking travel.
But this sounds like a case of someone being a diva. Hardly the mark of a great leader and role model. I've known people like this by the way. They act like any accommodation is beneath their princely person and berate the servant class members unfortunate enough to be assigned to caring for their majesty. It actually stems from a deep sense of insecurity and the need to overcompensate by appearing larger than life.
Obligatory disclaimer: Jobs still achieved great things and I like my iPhone just fine most days. We can celebrate his accomplishments while acknowledging that he was not a perfect person. None of us are.
A lot of hotels are shit, and often in way that aren't justified by cost. A most obvious example relevant to Steve's lifetime is wifi. 10-20 years ago, many hotels had unnecessarily restrictive wifi with tedious fees and tedious limitations. It's not a problem these days because hotels have finally given up being customer hostile—and because most people can rely on 4G anyway. But that kind of attitude pervades many aspects of the industry.
Steve reserved a hotel with requirements X, Y and Z. Hotels might skimp on the requirements a bit because most clients don't care and won't bother to leave if something is wrong.
I heard a Jobs story from someone who shall remain nameless:
They all went out to dinner with Jobs (this was before his return to Apple), eight or more people. Jobs announced that he'd order for everyone, ordered all vegetarian dishes, and then ate nothing himself.
iOS 7 was absolutely huge at the time, it was Apple shifting away from skeuomorphism and the industry soon followed. Granted, Google Material Design seemed to have been independently invented in the same timeframe, but iOS 7 led the charge.
For good or for ill, iOS 7 is not to be discounted for its significance.
I disagree about Cook being the better CEO. He's the better chief operating officer, which is the ideal combination with Jobs as CEO. A product person should always lead a company like Apple, if you can find one good enough to do the job. If you don't have that eventually you'll miss a critical inflection and the company will tip over. Cook will extract maximum profit from the product and ecosystem foundation that Jobs left him, which is exactly what he has been doing for a decade now. Jobs installed Cook in that role because he knew that operationally Cook wouldn't screw up the product map that was already primed. However Apple will need a product person after Cook.
I think that is exactly right. Tim Cook is the most amazing supply chain and operational leader – but he is not a product person. He doesn't have the knack for diving in and really refining how things work.
Without that centralized leadership Apple will still have components that excel, like processors, but the fundamental user experience will keep degrading.
What I remember the most about Jobs' death are 2 things:
1) Most of the media did an heavy coverage of his death and legacy.
2) Exactly 1 week after his death one of my personal heroes died too: Dennis MacLister Ritchie. Almost no one paid attention.
From computers to micro-controllers, from satellites to abs breaks, Ritchie's legacy goes far deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost every programmer today touches some of his legacy every day at work. However very few magazines and newspapers mentioned him. I suspect that, even here at HN, many programmers don't even know who he was.
I think that's sad...
* Edit: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the most influential, revolutionary and innovative software system in history, the Unix operating system. He also created the most influential of all programming languages, C.
That seems really weird to me. We even did a machine language course even though we will never do any machine language programming. It's good to understand what the hell is going on. C is amazing in explaining how memory management works, since you have to do it all yourself.
For an undergrad course on compilers that I took, I had to build a parser, implement a state machine and a few other things. All in Haskell.
For my master's I took a course on static analysis, for which we had to perform usage analysis, type error diagnosis, implement a type checker etc. All in... Haskell.
We did something similar, not in Haskell unfortunately. We did have a programming languages class that introduced us to haskell. It seems so damn intuitive. As a web developer though there just isn't the support for that language unfortunately.
C teaches you how PDP11 memory management works. Modern PC/server hardware doesn't work like this, neither do modern applications that use accelerators, and while the system works hard to present this virtual address space to your runtime, you don't need to think about it in many languages, from LISP to Swift. Most devs write Javascript.
I say this as a person who loves C and taught it lovingly to undergrads for many years.
Embedded system programming is a lovely niche, but we don't need to design CS curricula around it.
I would hope you wouldn't be designing cs curricula around javascript, because even javascript frameworks are moving to typescript.
This seems like not teaching calculus because you can do it on a calculator. I didn't do a degree that focused on C development, but I still had to know how to do it. God forbid any of your graduates end up working on an operating system at some point.
Someone beat me to the punch, but yeah, at this point, C barely works the way actual computers work under the hood. It works the way a PDP-11 does, and most modern computers have been forced (even at the CPU level) to basically act as PDP-11 emulators.
Take, for example, the entire stack-and-heap thing. That's not a bedrock feature of computing; it's merely a thing that was particularly convenient to do on a PDP-11. But if you're working in C, you have to do it - so it stays a "seemingly bedrock" feature even if the hardware has drifted far from the PDP-11. A lot of these features boiled down to the ISA making it fairly convenient to do them that way - there were built-in instructions that made it pretty easy to "color-by-numbers" and get the job done.
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This is similar to how we (societally) did barely any woodworking with screws before we had the industrial processes (like lathes or whatnot) to make them. Nails weren't some magic ground-truth or axiom of woodcrafting - it was just obscenely difficult to craft a screw, so why would anyone in their right mind attempt to build something with them?
I went through the joint honours degree in mathematics and computer science at Oxford (that's basically a particularly rigid double major for people unfamiliar with the British system). I did not learn C, mostly because I spent a good deal of effort trying to stay as far from actual implementations as possible, but I'm sure it's quite possible for even straight CS students to not learn C. I don't believe that any required courses (which in particular does not include a course on operating systems) use C.
I looked over the degree requirements for an MIT 6-3 (Comp Sci part of EECS) degree and it looks to me like you can get one without taking a course in C. Maybe MIT EECS "doesn't matter", but I doubt that.
It was not for me; C wasn’t even taught outside of an elective on operating systems, the main CS course was mostly Java and python with one quarter focused on C++.
That's really sad.
I mean, we weren't actually taught any programming language, but we had courses that required C, so the Ritchie & Kernighan book was part of the deal.
It wasn't in my program. There was a lousy textbook that is only popular among engineering programs in my country, and only a few offhanded mentions of K&R.
Depends on the instructor. Some profs where I studied will assign K&R C for reading and others will use King's C Programming: A Modern Approach. King is a much more gentle introduction IMO.
Really? I mourned Ritchie's passing much more than Jobs.
I think perhaps the reason it feeling like that is that Jobs was a figure that consumers knew, but I definitely think folks in engineering mourn Ritchie's passing more.
Ritchie’s contribution was so fundamental that it was almost impossible to actually recognize his achievements. It’s like honoring the guy that invented the pencil.
Jobs, on the other hand, ran a company that sold products which billions of people knowingly interacted with on a daily basis.
No need to compare the two. One built the foundation, the other built the pretty house on top of it.
Steve Jobs was a celebrity. Celebrities are, well, celebrated. People who do important work don't necessarily become celebrities. I used to find that deeply unfair, but I'm not sure being well-known among the common populace is necessarily something to be desired in the first place.
The thing that made Jobs consequential was the old Henry Ford-ism of "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse."
Dennis Ritchie did a damn fine job making what he did, but what he did was essentially just going with the flow; unix and C are like selling sugar to bees. They essentially "sell themselves"; they have qualities that programmers look at and inherently go "I want that!".
What Jobs did was going against the flow.
I'm going to go ahead and say something outrageous: we wouldn't have gui software without him. Or more accurately; it would be about as common as Lisp or Smalltalk. You'd have these isolated islands of gui development for a few specialist apps, but it would basically be workstation stuff, because only dedicated, specialist machines would be capable of running it.
What he understood was that most changes in technology aren't caused by historical inevitabilities or meritocratic ascendence of technology that's ready for prime-time, but are caused by social factors. GUIs had been technologically ready for years, but would only take off with the right social factors. One of these was to have a platform where all machines were guaranteed to have all the necessary ingredients to support GUIs; it was "safe" as a developer to do that, because you knew the entire addressable market could run your stuff. Furthermore, they took the "crazy" additional step of expressly forbidding non-gui ports from other platforms for a few years, and kept it quite difficult to do after that embargo ended. They adamantly wanted people to come up with brand-new, gui-based solutions to common app categories, rather than just porting over some famous app from a command-line paradigm.
This was critical - both MS Word, and Excel were born in that environment (yes, as mac programs, first), and it was particularly because Excel didn't get stabbed in the cradle by now-forgotten juggernauts like VisiCalc. If VisiCalc had been ported to the original mac, Excel wouldn't have stood a chance.
But that's emblematic of what it actually would have been like: if VisiCalc even could have been ported, that's what 90% of mac software would have been - command-line apps. Even native, non-ported apps are would have been mostly command-line apps, because they're just plain easier to write. At that point, it's not a Mac - it's not even a GUI machine then, and why would you even buy it if it didn't do anything unique? They had to artificially prevent that to "jump-start" us into a world where everything would actually all be gui stuff, across-the-board, no matter what, to allow us to experience what that's actually like.
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That was the trick; it was a "gateway drug". Once you'd bought a machine to run Excel or Word, suddenly you had the ground conditions that made it possible for something like Photoshop or PageMaker to exist. You couldn't make a business out of apps like these without a large market of people already "forced" to be 100% gui-and-mouse. Spreadsheets are possible on a commandline, if awkward. Drawing apps (not plotting apps, drawing apps) are impossible without a mouse. And without that captive market, the business case to dare making them couldn't be made, nor could the "hey, that's only $100, let's buy that on a lark because I've already got a machine that can run it" rationale be possible.
This wasn't an accident. This was planned.
Much like a competent city planner; this wasn't a historical accident, but was a deliberate consequence of choices intended to achieve it. Jobs saw exactly what socio-political-economic forces were preventing this from happening, and set up an "artificial greenhouse" where these proverbial plants could take root, and grow big enough to survive outside the greenhouse.
Thanks, that was an interesting read. I disagree on the details (e.g.: Jobs rejected the idea of an app store, it was forced on him by circumstances and even the iPhone was something that other directors on Apple fought hard to convince him).
But your general idea is sound and it does make sense: he swam against the flow. Pixar is probably a better example, he struggled for years to find a sustainable business model for it.
It is not true that Steve Jobs was bored with the Mac. Steve Jobs loved the Mac and would have preferred for it to be at the center. The thing is that Apple nearly died only just a few years before by not selling people what they wanted and by that time what people really expressed desire for using their money was personal devices.
Apple had many problems dealing with processor suppliers over the years and probably would have looked for solutions beyond Intel when they floundered no matter who was at the top.
10 years. Still I remember his speech at Stanford 2005 [1]
"Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life."
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadCorrect me if I'm wrong, but a big focus of his was user friendly affordable tech. Not luxury items like apple is now.
I'm not going to say Apple is about inexpensive products. The notion of luxury (outside some of their watch products, I guess) is a marketing angle though. They're accessible to enough peoples' budgets such that they dominate many market verticals. They've succeeded in this to such a degree that it's almost black magic to me.
I do wonder, same as you, what things would be like if he was still around. Maybe technology would be friendlier, and have a better place in this world. But at the same time, I remember how the man lived: eating fruit to supposedly stave off his cancer, violently berating his employees to get things finished faster, and even telling his daughter that she smelled like a toilet on his deathbed. Steve Jobs was a man, imperfect yet aligned just so that his manic side was completely hidden from the public (as opposed to, say, Ballmer). In any case, I'm tired of tech CEOs being self-important and elitist. Steve Jobs was the genesis for that, and his inability to admit when he was wrong ultimately lead to his demise.
I'm saying this from a truly impartial, empathetic and caring place: Steve Jobs' behavior should serve as a warning sign for what happens when you let infinite ego expand unchecked.
I think he also listened to a variety of people and made course corrections.
As to affordability: they always had high margins.
wikipedia says of the original macintosh 128k:
Introductory price: US$2,495 (equivalent to US$6,220 in 2020)
Three months before the release, John Sculley decided to raise the price to $2495 and use the extra profits for marketing. Steve Jobs was upset at this but eventually gave in. I've often wondered how different things would have been if Steve had won that argument... probably not very, to be honest.
Source: Andy Hertzfeld <https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...>
If we go back further apple products get even more expensive. The apple ii(released in 1978) was $1298 or $5543 in today's dollars, not exactly cheap!
But I agree it wasn’t expensive for the sake of being expensive (the definition of luxury) like today where the high price is almost a feature. It was expensive because they always tried to be different and it allowed them to set higher prices.
I wouldn't judge Jobs for the things he said while dying. However I'd judge him for his actions while he was living. Or rather, listen to the judgements of people who were close to him. So I have a hard time admiring him, though he was at the centre of a lot of admirable stuff.
Regarding Steve Wozniak, that's another big issue. Not only the betrayal, but it betrays a divide between Jobs and Wozniak. The original Apple II was a computer designed by Wozniak, and very open to tinkerers. Jobs didn't want the computer to be open or to have many extension slots, he wanted total control over the system. He designed his vision of a computer (the Macintosh), and it was a flop. Jobs killed the Apple II and sent the company on a downwards spiral that lasted several years.
It kind of pains me to see that so many people in tech love Apple products, but forget that Apple is not a platform made for creative engineers, it's designed to be a closed system they have control over. They don't really value or encourage your curiosity. They don't want you to peek at what's inside. Even though Apple, like most tech companies, was started by creative engineers.
https://www.cultofmac.com/479113/today-apple-history-first-1...
I’m by no means happy or in agreement with his “closed system” thinking, but it’s worth noting that the iPhone was exactly that.
Steve Jobs did give a lot of credit to the people who worked under him, just to pick out a couple of notable examples he frequently heaped praise on Avie Tevanian and also the guy who actually made the initial speculative potential merger call to Apple. And in doing so he specifically called out their accomplishments as being savvy and decisive and not just boring implementation stuff.
Without hackers, Jobs would have been designing plastic utensils with rounded corners for Tupperware, or something like that.
As for the Wozniak thing, Wozniak forgave him. As he was the one wronged, we should let it go, too. Heck, if I didn't forgive my friends now and then, I wouldn't have any.
Ended when Facebook wouldn't play along.
One reason developer salaries have popped so strongly in the last five years or so.
I wish he hadn't been so strongheaded about herbal remedies and whatnot. He had the more curable kind of cancer, had he taken it seriously earlier. As someone who has lost family to pancreatic cancer, it really upset me to learn that he didn't use his vast resources to do everything he could to live.
> "Through a legal, little-known practice called multiple listing, Jobs doubled his odds by getting on waiting lists in California and Tennessee. Competition was too stiff back home in California, and Jobs, his wealth and fame notwithstanding, may have died waiting. But in mere weeks he jumped to the top of the list in Memphis, ahead of dozens of others."
I would have a much higher opinion of Steve Jobs if he'd have kept Apple manufacturing in the USA instead of helping gut the Bay Area's electronics manufacturing industry by outsourcing to Foxconn and others. He was basically another clever CEO with a rather ruthless streak, hardly the Heroic Idea Man he's portrayed as.
1. https://archive.naplesnews.com/news/southern-transplants-how...
He did. Apple's manufacturing wasn't outsourced until well after Jobs left the company in 1985: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/business/apple-california...
Meanwhile at NeXT, Steve Jobs built a massive automated factory in Fremont: https://www.cultofmac.com/617676/a-brief-history-of-steve-jo...
None of these efforts worked out, which is probably one reason he didn't reverse Apple's trend of outsourcing after he returned in 1997. Tim Cook took charge of Apple's operations in 1998.
There is no way Jobs would have been at the helm of Apple, even if he was still alive.
He'd have been canceled, matter of fact he'd have been one of the first people to get canceled given that he'd be occupying a spot wanted by basically everybody, plus he had made so many enemies....and finally let's not dabble around it: guy had so many personal flaws and his personal relationships are a mine field.
He'd have been #metoo'd or singled out for abusive behavior towards subordinates or some other thing.
He was the one guy who could be taken down by basically every strain of SJW. They'd have had the time of their lives dragging him in so many battlefields of the culture wars, and he'd have lost on all of them.
From a legacy standpoint death was the best thing for Steve Jobs, much like his idol John Lennon. Death freezes the public perception and stops people from digging dirt.
”I always want to say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'Try being rich first.' See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job."
I think people today want more money and less fame, having watched many of the people they looked up to be publicly destroyed by the masses. Everyone makes mistakes, but famous people pay outsized prices for them.
Given how litigious the US is and how every surface of attack is exploited by the mob (offline or online) is simply not worth it.
My prediction is that people have a natural desire to be appreciated , so Americans might look to find some social relevance in other countries.
English speaking countries which are less litigious such as South Africa, Dubai, Singapore, New Zealand, the Caribbean etc.
It is just mind boggling. Do you read your own comments?
No , the bad thing is that when somebody is dragged out in the court of public opinion all the positive contributions of that particular individual are not taken into consideration.
I am now a wide eyed utopian, I am a very practical person. As a practical person I tell you that if society doesn't let the good things that one does offset the negative flaws that one might have....then people will ask themselves if it's worth to do good things at all.
The SJWs I mentioned (and suspect also you) would retroactively cancel Richard Feynman because he grabbed by the waist some Brazilian dancer while he was teaching in Rio. Even if that meant succumbing to Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Dick Feynman earned the right to dance with as many Brazilian girls as he wanted.
Finally, I'd like to ask for an explanation as to how Feynman's actions starting in 1949 could have had a causal effect on a war that ended in 1945.
That's exactly what I mean, thank you! You have stressed the whole point!
Society feels comfortable in canceling people because these people already gave their contribution and for sure the person being canceled can't retroactively destroy all their contributions. If they could that'd be a powerful weapon of self defense, some sort of dead man switch against the mob.
But they don't, hence society is emboldened to destroy that person because it's the path of least resistence towards getting what it really wants: Separating the contributions from the person who made them, thus making sure that they cannot benefit from them, socially or financially.
Society would think long and hard before canceling people if it also meant automatically removing all their contributions.
I bet you society would have not canceled Harvey Weinstein if it also meant the complete disappearence of:
- Reservoir dogs
- Pulp Fiction
- Kill Bill
- The Aviator
- Gangs of New York
- Wolf of Wall Street
.
.
.
Hypocrisy
Maybe someone like Aziz Ansari is a better example... except he wasn't really cancelled - just hit a bump in his career that he had to acknowledge. (Similarly, Louis CK).
I absolutely would be OK with deleting every record of those movies, some of which are my favorites, if there were any point in doing so. The important thing is that a rapist is held accountable!
He caused lifechanging trauma to 10-20 people. That is not excusable.
What is not brought up in the assesment of his persona is the amount of entertainment he provided to the world.
The aggregate of 40 hours of AAA movies being enjoyed by 3 billion people between theatre, DVD, streaming, TV and piracy.
But of course you can't call 3 billion people up to provide their account of what positive impact Wienstin had on their lives. Plus while the trauma caused is substantial, the entertainment provided to the aforementioned 3 billion people is marginal.
When you judge somebody you should see the whole picture.
I don't think he had anything to do with the script abd photography of these movies. Maybe too much with casting teenage actresses, but the movies would have been "managed" (rent-seek) by some other production companies, don't worry.
That aside, please answer my other two questions.
(And for the rest of your post, maybe the movies we'd have had in the absence of Weinstein would have been better)
I'm not certain he would have been cancelled - I think that's mostly projection - but it's useful to acknowledge he wasn't exactly a "good guy", despite his contributions to science.
(The screed about the Nazis has already been debunked in another comment.)
What exactly constitutes a "good guy" for you?
The only possible definition is somebody who wastes away his life, doesn't have fun, works all the times and gifts the discoveries of his endless hours of work to his subordinates so that they can claim as their own.
Obviously rejects any compensation above minimum wage for the whole ordeal, so that he could not even have the temptation to spend, because he needs that minimum amount to eat.
Not even Jesus Christ would manage to make it into your tier of "good guys".
What has the world come to...Feynman being thrown under the bus on HN.
There is also the dad test - would you want them dating your daughter?
I agree. As a user of Apple products, I think Apple makes great products. And I don't believe Apple can't innovate because Jobs is gone (they basically set category standards in smartwatches, wireless earbuds, and ARM desktop computers since then).
But Apple was certainly more fun with Jobs. Many keynotes since Jobs have been cringeworthy, with the studied jokes, to slick presentations, etc. Jobs had natural showmanship and was confident enough in that to do present more spontaneously. Made the keynotes more fun.
Also I feel like product had larger design deltas. In the ten years since Jobs, Macs have mostly been aluminium/space grey (though they are definitely improving with the new iMacs), there was much more variety and evolution in the design the ten years before.
Plus, the NeXTcube was the probably most beautiful computer ever.
I agree that recent keynotes have been awful, but this recent decline is largely due to the format being changed from a live audience presentation into a high production value movie. It's so incongruent because it's the wrong genre. The sooner Apple can return to a truly live keynote, the better.
The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left.
There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he was still there but it has stagnated.
Other Apples are emerging all the time, and will continue to emerge
How so? Are other people creating closed software platforms where they charge 30% off the top for their developers? I agree that they've gone more corporate over the years, but it was only after the realization that they could exploit the market with their install-base. It's quite literally, step-for-step identical to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer parable that got them in so much trouble. They're taking advantage of a market without any other options, which is not something that an emerging company can do, much less at the scale Apple does it.
And in the meantime Apple still has its own fairly cohesive idea of how you use their devices and software ... while places like Google cancel and re-releases apps with half the features as the one they canceled, and I don't think they have a real idea of how people use their stuff.
But with iOS 7 Ives showed he didn’t get software and the “design is how it works” concept.
Innovation is what made SV great. Now it is just evolutionary updates at a very slow pace.
Laptops are now dominant and have outsold desktops for a long time, but in year 2000 that wasn't the case. So the Cube seems like a false start down that path. Kind of like Jobs knew the future, but was a little too ahead of his time on that one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi
Hell, I own an Apple battery charger for AA batteries. Actually at the time it came out it was reasonably priced, plus it uses the same AC power connectors as apple computer chargers so was actually handy when traveling. But nevertheless, absurd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube
http://www.magicgatebg.com/Books/Aleister%20Crowley/Heart_of...
There's also the 30ft glass cube Apple Store that opened in Manhattan in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Fifth_Avenue
Mostly on the Mac. The butterfly keyboard and how Apple handled it, were terrible. And macOS quality had gone down release after release. But I have never had any serious software or hardware quality issues with the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods or any other products. It seems that they had just lost focus on the Mac.
However, the Mac seems to be rebounding. I have a M1 MacBook Air and it is stellar - probably their best new Mac in decades. Also, I haven't had many issues with macOS 11 so far.
Multitasking in iPadOS is also a good example of non-Mac software being near unusable.
In which case, it sounds like a good thing they have a more sustainable culture. But I'm not sure your comment is true anyway.
Of course, Apple made all sorts of mistakes under Steve Jobs. In such a creative company, only a culture of freedom to make mistakes could produce extreme success. But now, because of a nostaglic cult of personality, any mistake meets with howls of "this would never happened under Steve!". That hero worship is a bigger problem for Apple.
I have an M1 iPad Pro. The thing is so fucking fast, just let me do a bit of coding on it.
... or let me rename file extensions.
That's aside from the third party apps like Codea and Pythonista that have supported coding and app development on the iPad for about a decade. If you've not been coding on your iPad, you've been seriously missing out.
When I can build the compiler I work on, on an iPad then I will consider it a coding platform.
There's some typos I get consistently and the correction is from a very normal word (probably, for instance) to a really seldom used word (poetically, in this example) and I'd prefer to remove poetically from my dictionary than to keep having it pop up.
Repeat this for a couple dozen very common words that consistently give me problems.
Now imagine how frustrating it is having to deal with an additional layer of invisible predictions, silently changing a word after you've typed it and moved on, consistenly only allowing you to say "1/4" instead of "one-fourth" with nowhere to change it ...
I have to deal with this every day because I use dictation do most of my typing. Due to a hand injury (RSI).
I am someone who cares very very deeply about precise and novel expression. It is very very difficult to do that when I have to fight multiple layers of tools that think they know better, with no way for me to provide feedback to the system, as you say"Priority for predictive."
For instance, just looked at how Mack OS voice dictation chose to punctuate and space the string
> say"Prio
Above. Or look at how it misspelled its own name, in the previous sentence!
The original iPhone had a much nicer cursor behavior and placement was easier with a tap or a hold-and-drag than it is to this day. I forget when this changed, I think it was about a decade ago.
I'd add to the list of issues how hard it is to trigger the spell checker for underlined words and how poor its suggestions are when you finally do trigger it.
There are whole websites devoted to embarrassing errors caused iPhone text handling. I can't see why Apple don't bother to fix it. Even small iterative improvements would be OK.
The directions are floating in space over the map which looks nice but wastes space on the margins. The directions themselves are in a box that also wastes tons of space.
If you reach a destination navigation is cancelled but you cant re-start navigation from there. So if you arrive but Apple Maps wants you to make a left turn across a median it cancels nav and you are in the dark for finding a route around.
I wish usability was a priority but modern UX doesn’t seem to consider it at all.
iOS 11 and 13 were both pretty crappy, not to mention weird misses like the Podcasts app. I can't see those releasing when Steve Jobs was at the helm, unless the situation was desperate. (An example of a desperate situation would be when you’re current products run Mac OS 9).
iMovie is a better example but I still think it was a decent update for the software’s target audience. And they offered everyone the older version for free! An even better example might be Final Cut X, which I actually think was a great product but for a very different audience for FCX.
The through-line is that these products were good products-they did something well and without bugs—but they weren’t targeted correctly, ignoring the needs of an existing customer base with (completely reasonable) expectations. That’s different in kind from something like iOS 13.
Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.
The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.
This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.
Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now:
Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected.
The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost.
On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy.
Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??)
And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)
I thought you could upload videos to imgur? Anyhow:
Quick and easy:
https://filebin.net
https://litterbox.catbox.moe
Signing up (free tier) is worth it imo:
https://blackhole.run
My personal favorite[0]:
https://0x0.st
0. try out this little script i use to make uploading files from a CLI dead easy: https://gitlab.com/co1ncidence/dotless/-/blob/master/usr/bin...
Unfortunately, all I have to give in return in this video of a sloppy Safari animation. :-)
https://filebin.net/59kjnt15u834j7xl/safari-anim.mov
I've noticed the same animation issues in safari, and tbh, its very unlike apple.
There are other apps in macOS which have collapsible sidebars (preview and finder come to mind), but they don't suffer with the same icon lag issue.
And as far as I know, catalyst (which I assume is what's being used now for almost all of the new mac apps with the blurry sidebar) should handle these things inherently, it's strange that this seems to be a safari exclusive problem.
Beyond any tech details, I think the real problem is they've somehow just lost interest (or maybe even ability?) in crafting software to a high, delightful quality bar.
What does this mean? Is this a metonymy for skeumorphic design?
That OS X release would have been frustrating for its usability and feature regressions even without the skeuomorphic textures, so also getting such heavy-handed, in-your-face design excesses made it a really disappointing release.
> the rich Corinthian leather
Taste, you either have it or you don't. Steve certainly did.
> the PowerPC,
The Mac switched to Intel in the Jobs era.
> and the colored plastic
Again, all Mac laptops and desktops switched to Aluminum in the Jobs era.
It seems to me you're going out of your way to not give credit whom (Steve Jobs) it's due, why is that?
Apple has been managed by Tim Cook for more years now than it was by Steve Jobs. By business measures it is significantly more successful. They haven't released the next iPhone-class product, but one does not simply walk into Mordor, nor does one make an iPhone of products every year, or even every decade.
I think Apple is doing fine, warts and all. N of 1, but I've spent more money on their stuff in the last 4 years than I did in the 12 before that.
Something that Steve jobs did well was understanding that building great products and successful business metrics aren't necessarily always aligned, especially in a product's nascent period.
I'm stupefied as to how someone who didn't know him socially can miss a CEO of a giant faceless corporation, especially one known to be such a monumental asshole.
I mean his company made consumer products. It's like saying you miss the former CEO of Braun.
I honestly don't get it.
Now they are just a services and fashion company with hardware appliances as vehicles for vertical integration.
I respected Jobs intuition towards product design and execution but never "idolized" him for a second.
Even today, people don't get it, thousands of talented and faceless people are involved in Apples success but everything that the world can see is the face of the CEO and marketing presentation (This on second thought is one of biggest Jobs innovations).
The bigger problem is that we are "stuck" in Jobs vision of "user oriented" product (which figures as Tim Cook effectively abused and shifted towards monopoly, politics and shareholders driven existence) and cannot move forward.
The success stories of Jobs and Apple are considered "The Holly Grail" of tech companies and we have even some impostors using perception tricks (Elizabeth Holmes).
It is sad and frightening at the same time. If User Centered Design was really applied (not only advertised) the current state of personal computing would include real focus on encryption, privacy, data protection and accessibility, not some fetishistic obsession with tech specs and decoration in the name of "perception of progress" or corporate profits.
Would you have called Apple “faceless” if Steve Jobs were still CEO?
I miss Steve Jobs because he did great things and he inspired others to do great things. The world was a more vibrant and creative place with him in it. As a software engineer I have used Apple products to do almost all of my day-to-day work since 2004 and I am thankful I have not had to use Linux, Windows or Android instead. It makes me sad to think of what we might have today if he was still alive.
And in comparison, here on HN, you mention the CEO of company that makes - electric razors? Whose name you cannot even remember?
The fact that Steve Jobs was an asshole to people at times is irrelevant. You value people for their strengths, not their weaknesses.
https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/andrewpacio/2016/02/19/how-a-designe...
His role was more akin to Jony Ive's at Apple.
Jobs was a different kind of animal. It's hard to say exactly what the source of his magic was but the fact that he remained interesting throughout his career showed he had something special that's still worth talking about.
Yes he was a flawed person especially when he was younger, but he was also incredibly insightful, a master communicator and was always interesting to listen to. I think it's reasonable to miss that, and hence the person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
It's probably just a coincidence but I can't help but notice how Apple didn't become a PRISM "Provider" until a year after he was dead, many years after the Googles/Facebooks of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
Apple had no choice to “join” PRISM; the timing you see on that slide was determined by the FBI.
I have this recurring fantasy, where an engineer walks into Jobs's office with the new iPhone 7 prototype for the first time. The engineer holds it up, and says "Look! We've added the most advanced camera ever to be put into a phone! People will love this!"
Steve then graciously takes it from his hands, flips it over, runs his fingers across the lens bump, looks up at the engineer, and calmly says "Youre fired. Get rid of the damn bump."
For all of Steve's flaws, from an outside observer like myself, it seems that his intentions/desires/goals for Apple, Pixar, NeXT were mostly, or at least equally, fueled by genuinely wanting to improve the lives of humans.
Among the rarified air of modern radical world-changing billionaire CEO's, anyone else think this is why there is a fandom for Elon Musk and not like the likes of Bezos? Because, again, despite his flaws, he seems to be at least oriented towards some idea of greater good?
Bezos has had no significant public profile to speak of except as a brutal, unrelenting capitalist. He's clearly trying to change that with his post-Amazon charm tour in space.
I'm not saying they always should, but is just an observation.
I think is fair to say that Jobs changed several industries and that has a lot of value to me, but there are plenty of documented situations when I was left thinking he was not a good person.
I don't need to know him to learn from all those documented facts.
At the same time, I'm profoundly upset at his introduction of the App Store and sidelining of the right to repair. Our devices belong to us. We should be able to do with them what we please.
It's also incredibly anti-competitive to tell every startup in the world that what was once free to distribute, market, and form a relationship with their customer: "now you must sit atop Apple rails for (entirely artificial) reasons". It's extractive. There's so much more to solve in the world. Why take energy from those smaller than you? It lowered the fitness and innovation capacity of everyone else. Those dollars could be runway and additional labor for someone with bright ideas.
Jobs was a human just like the rest of us. There was both good and bad in him, and he made a profound mark upon society. The world was shaped by his short time here. No question.
Um, no. Read some history.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=90_Hours_A_Week_...
https://venturebeat.com/2011/08/25/michael-dhuey-apple-engin...
https://www.businessinsider.com/ex-apple-employee-on-steve-j...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/01/former-apple-employee-guy-ka...
What really rubs me the wrong way is people who refuse to give him credit for his tremendous achievements, and belittle and ridicule him instead.
Some Apple defenders seem to be stuck sometime between the mid-90s when Apple was on the verge of collapse, and before the introduction of the iPod. Apple is the most profitable company on Earth. Jobs' place in the history books is assured. This isn't some plucky underdog that's in need of defense anymore. Even the fiercest critic of Jobs will need to recognize his accomplishments, and Apple's success. And even if they don't, so what? Apple is a giant. It has outshone M$ and made their mobile attempts look like a joke. Steve Jobs is a secular saint, an icon. Who cares what a few trolls think?
The most irritating thing about modern Apple fanboyism is that it lets the most profitable company on Earth and its leadership off scot-free. Anyone who criticizes Apple is put in the same company as bullies from decades ago who were on the side of Wintel and mocking a tortured genius. That's very outdated. And it blinds people from valid critiques.
Well, the thing with this is that while he might have been privately apologetic, the public image that relentlessly and abusively driving employees leads to success has stayed with us after his death and he certainly made no effort publicly debunk it. That certainly influences how I see him.
One of the things that character-Jobs says is (something along the lines of) “you’d be the easiest A at Palo Alto highschool right now if it wasn’t for me.” What he’s getting at is that Woz didn’t know how to channel his engineering talent into successful ambition. This makes the question a lot more complex: it’s not “can you be talented & kind,” it’s “can you be talented & kind & successfully ambitious.” Character-Jobs is asserting that his ruthlessness, his faults, were a necessity for these things to happen with Apple.
The film probes at these questions from just about every angle. Perhaps not coincidentally, it portrays his greatest success at the time when character-Jobs is most able to be at peace with himself and work other people.
His one and only innovation was the ability to say "no." "No" to superfluous features, and "no" to tracking. That is a rare quality, but hardly unique. Apple (under his leadership) even attempted to trademark ideas that were not their own.[1]
It is very worrying that society continues to fawn over this greedy man, while quickly forgetting those who made genuine contributions.[2]
[1]: https://lizerbramlaw.com/2011/10/12/apples-multi-touch-and-t... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_English_(computer_enginee...
It may also help to temper the new born hatred against Apple from their long time supporters.
I really wish he was still alive, and continue to be the yard stick of quality so we dont have Apple Music, spending two years on the next song and then another two years reversing that. [1], Apple TV+, as Steve would have partnered with Disney. A whole generation of MacBook with Butterfly Keyboard. Apple without an Editor is like a Giant Design Studio, everything looks great, from UI to Industrial Design. But they are more forms over function.
[1] https://youtu.be/B9Ve-mEy1oY?t=260
This sounds highly revisionist based on how he approached and treated people who knew more about him in many areas.
and this:
>> We were blessed to have him as husband and father.
My own father may be a nobody to history but he's a superior husband and father to Jobs on any scale.
This is awful, no? There are people like that who can never be pleased. Usually narcissists. I fail to see where the human connection is in being a crybaby Karen.
Not to diminish Jobs' accomplishments, but it's one thing to say "he was a complicated man, achieved a lot but was difficult to deal with" and quite another to being up that story as a positive. That just seems like Stockholm syndrome.
But this sounds like a case of someone being a diva. Hardly the mark of a great leader and role model. I've known people like this by the way. They act like any accommodation is beneath their princely person and berate the servant class members unfortunate enough to be assigned to caring for their majesty. It actually stems from a deep sense of insecurity and the need to overcompensate by appearing larger than life.
Obligatory disclaimer: Jobs still achieved great things and I like my iPhone just fine most days. We can celebrate his accomplishments while acknowledging that he was not a perfect person. None of us are.
Steve reserved a hotel with requirements X, Y and Z. Hotels might skimp on the requirements a bit because most clients don't care and won't bother to leave if something is wrong.
Steve cared.
So he left and took his money somewhere else.
[0] https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9
They all went out to dinner with Jobs (this was before his return to Apple), eight or more people. Jobs announced that he'd order for everyone, ordered all vegetarian dishes, and then ate nothing himself.
For good or for ill, iOS 7 is not to be discounted for its significance.
Without that centralized leadership Apple will still have components that excel, like processors, but the fundamental user experience will keep degrading.
1) Most of the media did an heavy coverage of his death and legacy.
2) Exactly 1 week after his death one of my personal heroes died too: Dennis MacLister Ritchie. Almost no one paid attention.
From computers to micro-controllers, from satellites to abs breaks, Ritchie's legacy goes far deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost every programmer today touches some of his legacy every day at work. However very few magazines and newspapers mentioned him. I suspect that, even here at HN, many programmers don't even know who he was.
I think that's sad...
* Edit: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the most influential, revolutionary and innovative software system in history, the Unix operating system. He also created the most influential of all programming languages, C.
For my master's I took a course on static analysis, for which we had to perform usage analysis, type error diagnosis, implement a type checker etc. All in... Haskell.
I say this as a person who loves C and taught it lovingly to undergrads for many years.
Embedded system programming is a lovely niche, but we don't need to design CS curricula around it.
This seems like not teaching calculus because you can do it on a calculator. I didn't do a degree that focused on C development, but I still had to know how to do it. God forbid any of your graduates end up working on an operating system at some point.
I didn't propose that.
I'd expect a good curriculum to expose students to several languages, so that picking up another one is not an ordeal.
Take, for example, the entire stack-and-heap thing. That's not a bedrock feature of computing; it's merely a thing that was particularly convenient to do on a PDP-11. But if you're working in C, you have to do it - so it stays a "seemingly bedrock" feature even if the hardware has drifted far from the PDP-11. A lot of these features boiled down to the ISA making it fairly convenient to do them that way - there were built-in instructions that made it pretty easy to "color-by-numbers" and get the job done.
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This is similar to how we (societally) did barely any woodworking with screws before we had the industrial processes (like lathes or whatnot) to make them. Nails weren't some magic ground-truth or axiom of woodcrafting - it was just obscenely difficult to craft a screw, so why would anyone in their right mind attempt to build something with them?
If a CS/Engineering program doesn't have an OS class with non-trivial labs in C, it's simply not serious and a red flag on a resume.
Furthermore, 6.004[1] looks like it has to involve C at some point.
[0] http://catalog.mit.edu/degree-charts/computer-science-engine...
[1] http://catalog.mit.edu/search/?P=6.004
I think perhaps the reason it feeling like that is that Jobs was a figure that consumers knew, but I definitely think folks in engineering mourn Ritchie's passing more.
Jobs, on the other hand, ran a company that sold products which billions of people knowingly interacted with on a daily basis.
No need to compare the two. One built the foundation, the other built the pretty house on top of it.
Though the original Mac didn't use UNIX or C. ;-)
Dennis Ritchie did a damn fine job making what he did, but what he did was essentially just going with the flow; unix and C are like selling sugar to bees. They essentially "sell themselves"; they have qualities that programmers look at and inherently go "I want that!".
What Jobs did was going against the flow.
I'm going to go ahead and say something outrageous: we wouldn't have gui software without him. Or more accurately; it would be about as common as Lisp or Smalltalk. You'd have these isolated islands of gui development for a few specialist apps, but it would basically be workstation stuff, because only dedicated, specialist machines would be capable of running it.
What he understood was that most changes in technology aren't caused by historical inevitabilities or meritocratic ascendence of technology that's ready for prime-time, but are caused by social factors. GUIs had been technologically ready for years, but would only take off with the right social factors. One of these was to have a platform where all machines were guaranteed to have all the necessary ingredients to support GUIs; it was "safe" as a developer to do that, because you knew the entire addressable market could run your stuff. Furthermore, they took the "crazy" additional step of expressly forbidding non-gui ports from other platforms for a few years, and kept it quite difficult to do after that embargo ended. They adamantly wanted people to come up with brand-new, gui-based solutions to common app categories, rather than just porting over some famous app from a command-line paradigm.
This was critical - both MS Word, and Excel were born in that environment (yes, as mac programs, first), and it was particularly because Excel didn't get stabbed in the cradle by now-forgotten juggernauts like VisiCalc. If VisiCalc had been ported to the original mac, Excel wouldn't have stood a chance.
But that's emblematic of what it actually would have been like: if VisiCalc even could have been ported, that's what 90% of mac software would have been - command-line apps. Even native, non-ported apps are would have been mostly command-line apps, because they're just plain easier to write. At that point, it's not a Mac - it's not even a GUI machine then, and why would you even buy it if it didn't do anything unique? They had to artificially prevent that to "jump-start" us into a world where everything would actually all be gui stuff, across-the-board, no matter what, to allow us to experience what that's actually like.
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That was the trick; it was a "gateway drug". Once you'd bought a machine to run Excel or Word, suddenly you had the ground conditions that made it possible for something like Photoshop or PageMaker to exist. You couldn't make a business out of apps like these without a large market of people already "forced" to be 100% gui-and-mouse. Spreadsheets are possible on a commandline, if awkward. Drawing apps (not plotting apps, drawing apps) are impossible without a mouse. And without that captive market, the business case to dare making them couldn't be made, nor could the "hey, that's only $100, let's buy that on a lark because I've already got a machine that can run it" rationale be possible.
This wasn't an accident. This was planned.
Much like a competent city planner; this wasn't a historical accident, but was a deliberate consequence of choices intended to achieve it. Jobs saw exactly what socio-political-economic forces were preventing this from happening, and set up an "artificial greenhouse" where these proverbial plants could take root, and grow big enough to survive outside the greenhouse.
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A...
But your general idea is sound and it does make sense: he swam against the flow. Pixar is probably a better example, he struggled for years to find a sustainable business model for it.
Apple had many problems dealing with processor suppliers over the years and probably would have looked for solutions beyond Intel when they floundered no matter who was at the top.
https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2011-10-05
He's a chump.
"Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc