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.
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.
It's well known that Jobs was basically bored with the Mac and spent all of his time focusing on the iPhone.
This is where having a single visionary in charge of everything (including small decisions) breaks down. There are so many days in the week and you can't be everywhere at once.
Cook is the better CEO, and Jobs was the better founder / early CEO in my view. I'm thrilled with the M1, and I'm not sure that would ever be something Jobs would have developed.
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).
The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.
What does this mean? Is this a metonymy for skeumorphic design?
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Innovation is what made SV great. Now it is just evolutionary updates at a very slow pace.
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.
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.
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.
There’s two events in my life where I can clearly recall what I was doing at the time. The first is 9/11. I was eight years old and I came down from my bedroom, my parents were staring at the TV in disbelief. I knew I was witnessing something important.
The second is Steve Jobs’ death. I was sitting at my college’s math center. My friend who was sitting next to me suddenly declared: “Steve Jobs is dead.” Not sure why but I cried a little bit. It felt sad, and I didn’t even know the guy.
Steve Jobs whether you hate him or love him, you can’t deny the impact he had on our world and industry. He made technology relatable. He made it Human. He redefined how humans relate to each other via the introduction of the iPhone. Smart Phones rewired how we perceive the world and ultimately our consciousness.
I remember the naysayers. It’s too expensive, he should’ve stuck to iPods. He had a knack of being unconventional. In Japan, my home country, I remember a TV show where some rich businessmen bought the iPhone but primarily used their flip phone for work. It’s a toy they said. A decade later and now almost every citizen has some kind of smart phone.
Google and Facebook built an empire on Steve’s Jobs platform and ideas. Search and social media wouldn’t have been able to scale their power so widely without the introduction of the iPhone. He left a seed and technologists grew an Amazon.
Personally I listen to his Stanford graduation speech occasionally. Whenever I feel lost in life I remember, “stay hungry, stay foolish.” Those four words takes loads off my shoulders. I could only connect the dots looking back. I don’t have all the answers and that’s okay.
Day to day at work, I’m reminded that the systems and product we build have real life users. My job is to develop a relationship of trust directly with the user. There’s a lot of temptations to take shortcuts during development from management pressure or career ambitions, but it’s easy to push back if you imagine the user next to you frustrated that their app broke because you couldn’t write a simple test. My earliest memory of this ethos stems from Steve Jobs. No matter how fast you finish coding or how impressive the technology, experience is the only thing that matters.
Apparently he was a terrible person. :shrug: Why do I care? I learnt a lot from him and never had to deal with his shit. Do my heroes have to be saints? It would be nice sure, but the best stories I’ve seen are about complex anti-heroes and he played the part perfectly.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a big focus of his was user friendly affordable tech. Not luxury items like apple is now.
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.
"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) 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.
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.
https://www.apple.com/105/media/us/home/2021/ff297fe3-f6a6-4...
Jobs and Apple are both polarizing, but I have to say they've had a pretty positive impact in my life in terms of computing joy and inspiration. That sort of joy and inspiration is an important reason why I am (still) in the computing field.
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 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.
> "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.
It is just mind boggling. Do you read your own comments?
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.
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.
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.
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...
I was genuinely gutted when he died, and suffered from a form of grief!
Jony Ive gave an interview recently to the WSJ!
“I loved how [Steve] saw the world. The way he thought was profoundly beautiful.”[1]
"Perhaps it is a comment on the daily roar of opinion and the ugly rush to judge, but now, above all else, I miss his singular and beautiful clarity. Beyond his ideas and vision, I miss his insight that brought order to chaos."
"Since giving Steve’s eulogy I have not spoken publicly about our friendship, our adventures or our collaboration. I never read the flurry of cover stories, obituaries or the bizarre mischaracterizations that have slipped into folklore."
I think this idea he was a 'terrible person' is just one that gets headlines!
Jony Ive's comment about the "bizarre mischaracterizations" is important I think in understanding Steve Jobs.
Many of the comments and anecdotes that go into creating the publicly understood persona of Steve Jobs come from a few well trodden stories IMHO. I've read a lot of books and articles on Apple and SJ over the years. I worked there in the 90's.
If you don't have a story about what an asshole he was, it doesn't get airtime!
Want traffic to your blog? Write about that one time you met Steve Jobs for 2 minutes and he told you your idea was garbage....
[1] WSJ Article on Apple News. https://apple.news/AeAZZga9oTPK4eCMTuAKChQ
He brought Objective C to the forefront of attention, by creating a platform for the web, as exploited by Tim Berners Lee.
I must confess, I never learned Objective C.
The Jobsian "reality distortion field" must have been so very hard to bear for the man who wore it, but the ends have justified the means.
Steve Jobs made our reality, early, middle, and late.
I find it curious that you seem to think that treating people with decency and respect is the realm of saints. That's a horrifically low bar.
What you've expressed is in my opinion one of the most detrimental sentiments in Silicon Valley (and sadly much of society) today. If you're brilliant, rich, talented, etc., the expectations for how you treat others drop immensely. Behaviors that would be considered severe character flaws in the less successful and admired are tolerated and brushed aside as the quirks of "complex" geniuses.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
That was an expression. I didn’t mean it literally.
In a modern workplace treating people with decency and respect is a must. If you’re experiencing toxicity from “brilliant jerks” consider escalating to HR. Definitely the most under used resource at work. I think the dialogue around workplace and mental health has evolved significantly over the last 10 years.
I don’t condone Steve Jobs’ style in the 2020s moving forward. The world moved past it already and the “next Steve Jobs” I hope will recognize people’s need for psychological safety to work effectively.
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 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.
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 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...>
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ended when Facebook wouldn't play along.
One reason developer salaries have popped so strongly in the last five years or so.
Without hackers, Jobs would have been designing plastic utensils with rounded corners for Tupperware, or something like that.
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. ;-)
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.
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.
----
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.
----
Another great example of social forces like this was phone app stores.
We've had the tech to do (considerably simpler, but functionally similar) ones as early as 1995. Early Nokia phones easily could have done gameboy-level (or palmpilot-tier) apps on a mobile store, but somehow, nothing like that happened. For decades.
It simply was not a technological problem - it was a social and political problem. The phone vendors expressly forbade any app distribution, period. Apps were pre-bundled (and hard-locked) on phones as selling perks to move the hardware, not as a fungible quantity of their own.
Only a political deal, an "offer they couldn't refuse", was capable of breaking that logjam. Apple had to play the phone companies against each other, using a new piece of hardware that wouldn't remain novel for more than a few years, and using that as a bargaining chip to demand control-transfer over the software part of the phone. Famously, several of the most successful carriers like Verizon told them to (and I quote) "go f** themselves". Only a back-bench carrier, Cingular (later bought by AT&T) was willing to humor them, but once that Pandora's box was opened, the reluctance of all the other phone vendors quickly caved. After that, because they wanted to ensure Apple wouldn't achieve hegemony over the OS supply, they quickly became favorable towards allowing other phone OSes "with app distributions" to exist.
But it's exactly that - goading the phone companies into a position where they were "politically inclined to allow app markets to exist" that was Job's genius.
We wouldn't have "not had Android because there wouldn't have been an iPhone to copy". We would have not had Android because the phone carriers would never have allowed it to exist. Nobody would be allowed to sell it - we'd all be stuck on embedded symbian-or-whatever stuff with apps pre-flashed into the firmware.
----
Politics is the greatest barrier to tech innovation. Not "actually creating the tech". Jobs was "the politician we needed".
There's an EXTREMELY similar schtick with Elon Musk and SpaceX. Politics are the number one reason NASA and Boeing et al couldn't develop reusable rockets. It's particularly ironic in that case, because those companies had, in many cases, literally the very people who later made the breakthroughs, but those people simply were not allowed to spend their time working on it, at those companies. For almost half a century, in that case. That's how technological stagnation happens.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
How do you do that when the brilliant jerk is the person who owns and runs the company, or is otherwise widely considered critical to the organization's success?
"Yeah, Barry can come off as a jerk but don't misread it. He's eccentric and between you and me, I think he's on the spectrum, but he's harmless. The investors love him and the launch of Magic X last year was a game changer for the company. At this rate we'll be going public in 2 years and it's all going to pay off. You can retire in Fiji."
> I don’t condone Steve Jobs’ style in the 2020s moving forward.
This is a different sentiment than "Why do I care?"
I wasn't even speaking specifically about Steve Jobs. The behavior we're talking about didn't just become unethical recently. Just because people have a somewhat better ability to call it out and not be buried these days doesn't mean it wasn't as despicable and unethical then as it is now, and that it wasn't known to be such a decade or three ago.
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.
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.
Don't diss Jony Ive. He is the man.
For good or for ill, iOS 7 is not to be discounted for its significance.
He's a chump.
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.
Without that centralized leadership Apple will still have components that excel, like processors, but the fundamental user experience will keep degrading.
I don’t agree with this. The Mac was his baby and yet it didn’t blind him to the future being in handheld and wearable computing. And it’s led to phenomenal success. He could have doubled down on Mac at the expense of the smartphone market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I can build the compiler I work on, on an iPad then I will consider it a coding platform.
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:
Signing up (free tier) is worth it imo:
My personal favorite[0]:
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...
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
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?
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!
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)
Unfortunately, all I have to give in return in this video of a sloppy Safari animation. :-)
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.
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.
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.
---
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?
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.
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...
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.
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