Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster(folklore.org) |
Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster(folklore.org) |
A lot of the reason people are hating on windows now-a-days is because "fast enough" has become the name of the game for UX. Unacceptable lags in working with a computer have just become accepted.
It’s a stark contrast to current industry norms, where anything that won’t keep the engagement and MRR bar charts on a steep incline gets vetoed. It’s more likely that memory consumption will be tripled and UI will be modified to harass users into compliance with whatever hare-brained thing product managers are pushing than it is for the software to become more efficient, pleasant, and useful.
Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions.
He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)
One of his biographers gave an example of how some cabinet makers only use good wood on the front and side, but Jobs would want good quality wood on the back as well.
Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.
As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.
If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.
SQL Server is of equally high quality.
We just have postgres in the open source world (which is truly exceptional) so our expectations are higher.
I am the first to hate on Microsoft, their OS is a dumpster fire that I feel is forced on me. But sometimes they knock it out of the park.
Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)
How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.
In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.
And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o
Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.
For example, my last Mac was a Cook-era machine with two third-party displays. Its normal boot process is a visual atrocity: the screens repeatedly blank off and on, the progress bar jumps arbitrarily to new positions and dimensions on the screen, the log-in window animation has drawing quirks...
...when I watch this orgy of complacent design, I often dream of what would happen had the Apple DRI presented it to Steve Jobs.
I think their HMDI implementation completly suck as well, I have had to get an USB-C adaptor to make it work properly.
Macs with external displays don't make a lot of sense, it basically against their initial idea about computer (standalone, with everything needed built-in). They don't even have chips that get very hot, it makes zero sense.
When you have hundreds of teams and they're all doing suboptimal things for shits and giggles, that extra 500 milliseconds is now a minute.
And, the real kicker is that usually the slow stuff isn't even simpler or better. It's just naive and poorly thought out. Usually it's super simple stuff like use a hash map instead of iterating through an array a bajillion times over. Or, do this network request asynchronously instead of just blocking for no reason. Or, in the case of some suspicious Microsoft GitHub code, just use sleep() instead of spin locking.
These things aren't harder, they're just different. So it's not even laziness really, it's something else. Apathy, maybe?
My hypothesis is that it comes from a bygone of tech.
Consider the lyrics from Weird Al's "It's all about the pentiums" (1999)
My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!
Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
Tech CEOs weren't blind to this fact. I have a lot of old software dev coworkers that lamented that era because they never had to think about performance problems. It was always "this won't be an issue if we wait a year".
I think that era has mostly built in an industry wide sloppiness and attitude.
Writing iOS apps, I've been in meetings where the discussion has basically made Apple's equivalent a benchmark. You can't make your feature slower/worse/buggier than theirs, but making it faster/better is optional.
No. Absolutely, unequivocally, no. You're talking about the difference between then and now in the way software was/is built, not the difference between Jobs and everyone else! The deification of Jobs is bad enough without the constant historical revisionism.
Back then, generally tuning/maximising performance and quality was a top priority for the majority of people in the industry, software engineers and senior staff alike. "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then. Many who were there in those days now bemoan the way their modern equivalents no longer prioritise efficiency, which leads to the awful slow UX you're referring to that really shouldn't be seen as acceptable, but somehow is.
Even if we see Jobs as being at the extreme - more focused on these things than most top-level execs of his day - then to treat the entire rest of the industry together as though they were at the opposite extreme (i.e. at today's level of not caring) and call him "revolutionary" in his day as a response to this, would very much be fallacious.
Not what I said. And I think you are the one that's doing historical revisionism now.
Even in this email from 1983, it starts off with
> since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II
From the 80s through the 00s (which I was alive through and very aware of), computer hardware was frequently doubling in performance. The common wisdom then was to make things fast enough. Anything more was a waste of time because in a year or two hardware would be twice as fast.
The wastefulness of today came directly from that past wisdom. I can guarantee you that ever since I've been conscious around discussions about software there's been people that have bemoaned how sloppy and wasteful software has become. People complained about how bloated Windows XP was vs 98.
Ruby, python, perl, java. All these bloated and slow programming languages got their starts in the 80s and 90s. Exactly because of the wisdom that "it's slow today but hardware tomorrow will make it fast". Heck, even C and lisp are manifestations of this. Consider that people weren't writing all software in assembly during the time period in question. There were clear performance benefits of doing so as compiler at the time were particularly bad.
I've worked with a lot of older devs and they all hold the attitude that performance optimization is a complete waste of time. They've been the hardest ones to break of that notion. Younger devs tend to more intuitively know that performance optimization are important. That's because over the last decade, hardware performance improvements have stagnated.
So yes, absolutely yes. In the past if you could make writing software more ergonomic by sacrificing some memory or performance, that's a tradeoff most of the industry would gladly take. They wrote for today's hardware and sometimes tomorrow's.
--
After the original iPad was released, Steve Jobs held a meeting with the MacBook engineering team and demonstrated the difference in wake speed.
He woke up a current MacBook (with an Intel chip), which took a few seconds.
He then instantly woke up the iPad (with an Apple A-series chip) by pressing the home/power button on and off rapidly.
Jobs told the team, "I want you to make this" (pointing to the MacBook) "like this" (pointing to the iPad), and then walked out of the room.
---
This no longer exists at Apple.
You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc.
IIRC, if you hit a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.0 or higher, the project is considered 'high value' and has a good shot at getting executed.
A bus can easily carry 50 passengers. 30 seconds times that many is 25 minutes. That's a lot of aggregate time wasted indeed.
Also assuming this 30 seconds delay is not compensated later, it can influence significantly more people than the bus capacity. And if someone misses a connection because of it that's even more time wasted.
IIRC it's over 10m USD in the us currently, but only about 6m USD in most of the EU.
Deloitte, KPMG, etc are usually more involved in writing the financial case (how to fund the project).
An example: a few years ago, there was a recurring unnecessary traffic congestion on my commute because of a malfunctioning traffic light. On the third day, I did some numbers while waiting and came to the conclusion that over hundreds of people, this was quickly adding up to months of lifetime wasted in total.
I then called the responsible municipality right on the spot to notify them there's a problem. They thanked me and had it fixed the next day.
Could someone build a tea timer app in React and save some time? How much impact to humanity does the GBs of RAM and untold CPU cycles the app now require that could be put to use elsewhere, or causes systems to be landfilled due to inefficiency?
I had a phone with GBs if RAM and a multicore processor that could barely run a single current app. I can buy a new phone, but what about the billions of people that don’t have that option?
These days Slack is occupying 4-8GB of RAM and is less snappy than a native app.
Yeah, in-lining giphy images is kinda fun. But 1000X memory consumption seems like a horrible trade off.
A modern desktop PC would have been a damn supercomputer not long ago. Today it’s kinda adequate.
- Big boss doesn't just yell at the product manager who then yells at the team leads who then calls "all hands" and unloads her stress on the team
- Instead big boss explains his line of thinking and adding some nape of the napkin projections why this improvement actually matters.
You might get a chuckle out of the "life saved" point, but it's easy to understand that this is meaningful productivity over a big number of users.
Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wall in a fit of anger.
But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women.
I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best.
Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their life makes them impossible pricks in others.
Extreme excellence in one facet of life is what I admire people like that for.
https://www.apple.com/environment/
LOL
These engineers aren't ignorant—I'm sure they saw the disconnect between the number of accumulated seconds saved and actual human lives somehow being saved. Somehow Jobs thought he could pull one over on them though with this "logic", ha ha.
How many decades have been wasted in Windows waiting for updates?
You're talking about specific user experiences based on Jobs's dogmas. There's also absolutely nothing revolutionary about quality and user experience for that existed long before Steve Jobs "invented" it. ;)
> "A lot of the reason people are hating on windows now-a-days is because "fast enough" has become the name of the game for UX."
Apple is good enough married to a closed-off eco system. Almost like 16-bit home computers back in the day, but worse. The off-the-rack experience, just with modern enshittification.
PCs can be good enough, too. But here I have the option for something made-to-wear or even bespoke. That includes the many-flavored Windows; fast enough UX is an almost negligible part of the equation.
In bringing up modern Apple, you are arguing against things no one here has said.
And are you actually claiming that Windows is an open ecosystem...? And in fact so great is its openness that slow UX isn't even a problem?
And that's utterly inaccurate; nothing about that kind of behavior was revolutionary in any way; lots of CEOs were, are and will be obsessed with quality. If they can translate that into product lines, and to what extend, is written on another piece of paper.
I, for my part, was never impressed with Apple; their only product I really liked was one that Jobs allegedly hated: the Newton.
> "In bringing up modern Apple, you are arguing against things no one here has said."
It contrasts the criticism of modern Windows the guy I replied to brought up. :)
> "And are you actually claiming that Windows is an open ecosystem...?"
Uhm... no. But the IBM-compatible family obviously was and still is (x86/x64). It's not exactly Sharp's OS-agnostic "clean computer" concept, but it's the next best thing.
> "And in fact so great is its openness that slow UX isn't even a problem?"
Again, no. I said the Windows UX is, or can be, fast enough and is therefore virtually a non-problem (Windows's problems have much more to do with Microsoft's abominable corporate culture).
Unless you're computer illiterate and bloat-up your system with badly-coded applications, and/or don't do due dilligence by way of choosing, streamlining and maintaining the best Windows version for you in the first place. And yes, I'm aware that both can sometimes not be avoided as one is forced into specific toolchains.
Perhaps implementing some other feature, or fixing a bug may save 100 lives. It may not be worth trying to save only 12.
...and people would be using hardware spanning several generations that actually considerably differed in performance, as nobody but the nerds was buying a new PC every year.
What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines. 2. I agree - though he made as many bad big bets as good ones: no expandability of the original Mac, the iMac, PowerPC, are a few examples 3. was deeply technical? compared to his peer tech leaders this was just not true. He was a great product manager, but not particularly technical. I'd suggest you look at his entire corpus before you lionize a spectacular PM & designer, and incredibly flawed human being.
>> I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)
So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?
Isn't that what they get the big pay package for?
but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.
People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.
I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.
Not entitled; just very tired of fighting it.
They have some good things on the hardware side but you have pay a lot for it, and it's not just about the money.
Sleep on windows is a hot mess, I've never had an experience I had any amount of confidence in.
But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.
Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).
My Dell laptop running Ubuntu wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.
This is also why men like dating crazy girls. It's not actually a good relationship or management style.
(To balance this out, one thing I noticed reading those bios of Jobs where he shouts at everybody, is that the people being shouted at were all director/distinguished engineer level or higher, so they were all earning millions per year. It's not like he did that with everyone.)
And while Jobs implementation of "caring" was not as good as it could've been, and he could've solved the same problems a bit nicer, he still "cared" and still solved the right problems.
The people at Apple today don't have the same level of care, especially the senior leadership. If they would, I wouldn't have all these bugs that show it.
But to do this, Intel CPUs have updatable microcode, which is a feature that comes at a cost and which not all CPUs have.
It remins me of some gnome themes from 2005-2009.
I'd choose that a thousand times over an ad filled start menu
My main problem with liquid glass is it's slow, and the trade off is... a worse user experience in literally every conceivable way? Wow, okay, not a very good deal.
Granted, most downgrades in things like legibility or density are very slight. But they're still downgrades. Downgrading is only worth it if you get something out of it.
> If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.