As a working furnituremaker, it depends on the client's budget. I try to get a sense of budget early in the design process so that I can both provide the best bang for the buck for the client and also a uniform level of quality throughout the piece. If push comes to shove, though, I'm not going to turn a job down because there isn't budget for a frame and panel back. I'm not going to turn someone's work away because they can't afford a higher-end option that nobody will ever see. That's not how to treat people with dignity.

In a couple instances, I've turned down work because the budget and expectations were wildly incompatible, but that's as simple as saying "I can't do the work you're looking for at that price." I'll offer suggestions for a more cost-effective alternative if I can. In one instance, that's turned into work down the line when the client came back with a different project with a budget more in alignment with their goals.

Lastly, while everything Nancy Hiller (RIP) has ever written is worth reading, these two pieces are highly relevant to the question of standards, budgets, and delivering the whole project.

https://www.finewoodworking.com/2019/09/11/dont-knock-the-la...

https://www.popularwoodworking.com/editors-blog/lets-make-ev...

This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty.

To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".

I finished building a cabinet for my shop last week. It holds 58 small parts cases from floor to ceiling. I didn't put a crappy piece of plywood on the back, I put three separate crappy pieces of plywood on the back. I used the worst leftover pieces that I though had the structural integrity to keep the cabinet rigid.

And instead of losing sleep over it, I would have lost sleep if I had used a perfectly good large sheet of plywood, and lost the opportunity to make something nice with it. Real wood? Forget about it.

Steve Jobs' imaginary carpenter must be too rich to care about stretching her materials as far as they can go.

I spend a LOT of time woodworking and have made a few cabinets.

I would love to use solid wood for cabinet backings, but I don't. The reason? $ and time cost will be 5x, and it will not be as durable as layered ply. Plywood actually makes a better cabinet!

The difference between me and SJ? He could sell the shit out of that expensive, not-as-good cabinet. And that got artists and engineers excited to start making high-quality things to go in that expensive cabinet.

This quote could only come from somebody that knows nothing about trades. Examine any "high style" cabinet from the federal period, or any other period really. The backs of highboys are the worst, rough-sawn, uneven, knot-riddled pieces the cabinetmaker had.

A craftsman knows where to apply his effort.

I think I follow this philosophy. You spend a lot of time looking at the insides of the things you build, even if no one else does - why shouldn't I get to see beauty too.

Related but distinct from aesthetic beauty, there's a sort of mechanical beauty. Simplicity and elegance and all that. All the parts that came out of the Macbook were held in with one screw - good - but all those screws look to be different shapes and sizes - less good. Maybe it isn't possible to have both. For my money I spend a lot of time going back and forth between the two.

I first heard this SJ quote maybe 15 years ago and I've carried it with me since.

I've always prided myself on taking a craftsman-like approach to software engineering... thinking deeply about interfaces, ownership, lifetimes, how the public API looks, how using the public API feels...

Lately, though, with the advent of LLM-assisted coding this mindset is starting to feel hollow. Why spend 1.5x as long crafting something robust when, in all likelihood, it will be replaced or refactored by LLM tooling within the next 5 or 10 years?

Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board

https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html

Apple device innards are made to appeal to people who have no idea about hardware engineering / repair. For the rest of us the design just screams wankery.

No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits.

A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy epoxy river pour with embedded 24 carat gold flakes that has no business being there.

> I was reminded of what Steve Jobs, relating a lesson from his father on cabinet-making…

I confess, I found that quote from Walter Isaac's biography on Jobs to be kind of gross. It felt to me like a bullshit line that Jobs asked him to put in. By all accounts, Jobs was completely dismissive of his adoptive parents — this felt like an attempt to rewrite history by Jobs.

As I fiddle with the aesthetics of my source code, how it’s organized right down to highly OCD symmetries of comments across similar parts of my code base, I spy things, and discover connections, that improve both the code and the abstract geometry of its source topology.

Should I spend that time futzing around so much? Objectively it sounds like a terrible use of (a lot) of time.

But the results speak for themselves. I can’t think of a better way to both study my own code (with all the advantage of intrinsic motivation), see it from so many directions, and yet have so much free unconstrained brain capacity at the same time, lost in deep long-hot-shower let-the-universe speak to me receptor mode.

Major design wins. Surprising bugs pressed out, before they even got to show themselves to the world. Poor things.

And I really like how my code looks when I have to look at it again!!!

Plywood is good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVxldyIa0Bg

Pride in craftsmanship and excellence are aspirational virtues missing in most of contemporary American society. It's an absolute shame because I saw and remember that version of America.

My last two MacBooks have had keyboards which have just been junk. And a keyboard isn't something which is just hidden away--it's out, front and center.

Apple, like any company, had to learn how to properly craft things in an efficient and elegant way. They certainly didn’t do it right out of the gate. They did ship products that were a disaster inside, including iPhones and MacBooks. Foxconn publicly said Apple needs to get their act together if they ever want to manufacture and assemble things in an efficient and cost effective way. The complexity and amount of screws for certain products were crazy.

Now, with all that said, Apple has tried to improve in all these areas and have since been innovative in how things are actually put together.

So, the takeaway is if if the quote from Jobs did inspire people then it was a good thing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-25184

It is a little funny that car manufacturers have figured this out in a silly way.

Basically, a lot of new cars are very simple and elegant when you open the hood, showing clearly fluid reservoirs, a sculpted engine, and some elegant plastic covers to tie it all together.

... but basically the plastic covers are a "second hood" with the ugliness pushed down one level.

I will say that powermac G* and mac pro systems have always been kind of cool - they were made to be opened and there were always really nice engineering details.

Things I remember are the carefully stored hard disk screws for slide in drives on the powermac G5. Or the pci express card locking systems. Or the case opening procedure on any of the systems.

We recently had two gaming machines built by different vendors. The second hada higher spec than the first.

The engineer from my company who interacted with the vendors and I were chatting about the machines and we kept coming back to the point about nicely the first guy had routed the cables and put them in the cabinet. It would be covered by a metal sheet and hence invisible but the work he put into it was obvious when we opened it up to install a RAM stick.

I don't know how to quantify the practical benefits of this but it does indicate a different mindset. I think that will spill over to other work which has more tangible benefits and that's a good thing.

The quote assumes that "good looking" wood is inherently "good" which is not always the case. You could have a very ugly piece of wood facing the wall but it could be the most structurally sound and durable wood ever. Value isn't always in appearance.

I can no longer find a link to this... But I do remember an article about the uniquely machined stainless steel screws that Apple used to assemble Macbooks. They were infact unique. Very "square threads". IMHO that was SteveJ (and perhaps Woz). They cared less about share price, and were focused on everything that could add unique value -- including the special screws. Now SHV trumps everything, and we have "...fiduciary responsibilty..." (FR) to cover all decisions no matter how anti-consumer. Sadly the FR decisions today are mostly due to the brand value built during the IDGAS era when high-quality screws were important.

I can do nothing but agree - but don’t tell the author about Louis Rossmann, who has been opening, repairing, and bemoaning the horrible electronics design of Apple products.

Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.

You can always make something more beautiful. So how do you know when to stop?

I recently saw an interview without someone on the mac team and what's interesting is that the original Mac team had a lot of friction because of this philosophy. Jobs constantly asked unreasonable design constraints of his engineering team, the team prepared two laptops one with the "esthetic" laptop and one with the pragmatic design. One vastly outperformed the other and Jobs conceded, this was a constant pattern for the engineering teams at Apple. What you see before you is not the esthetic version but the pragmatic version. Sometimes Jobs was right but most of the time he was delusional.

who else thought this was going to be about turtlenecks and 501s?

Wow, the interesting part there—at least for anyone who already knows the cabinet story—is how it ends:

"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".

"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."

So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.

That's interesting because (a) it's a story of how the cabinet principle didn't prevail, and (b) it's a brilliant example of how to communicate.

I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college.

I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.

I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.

Jobs knew a lot about hardware design, sure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III

> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly.

> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat.

Every time I casually chuck my iPhone onto a surface instead of gingerly placing it down with reverence and care, I think about those epoxy rims doing the job they're there to do.

Bingo. Those Macbook internals are designed as show ponies you shoot the second they're injured. Raise your hand if you've ever had "replace topcase/logic board" as the solution to a component-level issue before. Yep.

It's startling to imagine what Apple would be capable of, if survivable hardware was a remote business priority for them.

I've had an interesting experience taking apart my 72 Dodge and putting it back together again. It's clear that there was a great deal of thought put into its design. It's simple, easy to take apart, easy to fix, easy to put back together. The money is only put where it is needed. Frankly, it's first class engineering.

Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged by being bolted to inexpensive parts. It was difficult to assemble correctly. Money was spent in the wrong places. I had a long list of complaints about the erratic engineering in it.

For example, it had sodium-cooled valves, something one finds only on a race engine. They are used for cooling. The values slid into bronze valve guides. The bronze valve guides were pressed into aluminum heads. The trouble was, aluminum expands at twice the rate of bronze. So when the engine got a little hot, the valve guides would come loose, and you'd have to rebuild the cylinder head. The sodium-cooled feature was completely sabotaged by those valve guides. A proper design would have mechanical retention of the valve guides, and not rely on a press fit.

with the component density of their PCB right now, it would be impossible to put silkscreen for every component. Also nowaday we use boardview software to find component, so silkscreen is not that needed anymore.