I sometimes wonder what an alternative history would look like if Jobs was still around. Apple has done well, but they have largely played it safe. Even their riskiest product, the Apple Vision Pro, seemed like less of an innovation and more a response to market expectations.
Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses. He did it with desktop and mobile computers, he did it with the mp3 player, and did it with the smartphone and tablet. What has post-Jobs Apple done? Maybe the smartwatch… but one could argue that in itself is an iteration on the iPod (remember the Nano and Shuffles?).
Credit where credit is due, they are killing it in silicon - but that is a bit opaque culturally.
Jobs brought product to the table, but I don’t he did so because it was niche. I think he chose the products because it was solved a personal problem.
I remember a pre-iPod MP3 player where, to get to the 200nd song (a somewhat common thing if you listen to music a lot), it was absolute struggle.
Well then the iPod came out was its analog wheel. Suddenly selecting and listening to music was enjoyable.
I continually think about this: I feel like a lot of products, from kitchen tools to vehicles, have never been used by the people who make them.
His personality aside, what I think Jobs brought to the table was that he was a head guy with taste that was actually making things for himself and that he actually used what his company made day to day. It created a feedback loop that I think many companies lack (that or the head people have no taste).
> Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses.
It was more than this. He understood how to communicate to both customers/employees why what they bought/worked on mattered. For all the stories of his assholery, very few people bring up that the same people who complained about his assholery also acknowledge that he brought the best work out of them.
I'm gonna say that we need MORE "assholes" in the industry, the way things are now. Or rather, that being a perfectionist kinda makes one an asshole, because by definition you don't tolerate anyshit less than perfect.
Recall all the things in tech that have peeved you since a long:
If you were to be given charge of those companies, would you waste time asking people nicely?
I mean, sure, maintain basic humanity, don't devolve into Linus Torvalds, but to make major changes you HAVE to not put up with bullshit.
iTunes in Jobs' era had no overly intrusive DRM; you could literally copy purchased songs to another computer and play them there.
Now, Apple TV+ is so anal about DRM that skipping a few times causes it to get stuck, while it tries to reestablish that you are free of sin. Trying to watch on iPad on a slower-than-lightspeed connection while on travel requires a restart of the app every few minutes. I had to cancel my subscription and just pirated a copy of Severance just to be able to finish the show.
You can't even take screeshots. You can't even copy text from Books.app (in some/most books). There's so much user-hostile bullshit in iOS/macOS now that would get employees lashed if Jobs was there. And I, a user, would be all for it.
I could keep going but I don't want to ruin my own day.
I think you're reading "reinvent" here too literally. I doubt the OP literally thinks that Jobs personally designed every part of the iPhone and simply directed mindless drones to just do the dirty work of manufacturing it. But I think it's fair to say that Jobs' vision and direction of what the iPhone can and should be absolutely "reinvented" the category of "smart phone" for the masses.
And I think it’s fair to call that revisionist history of the worst kind. It wasn’t his vision at all. Someone else had the vision and had to sell Jobs on it who was initially skeptical.
So are you saying that had Hullot taken his ideas to any other company, the result would have been the same phone? Again, no one is saying that Jobs was solely responsible for the things Apple has done, or that other people weren't major parts of that. Even Hullot's own words tell us that the phone design he had in mind was not the touch based keyboard-less design that the iPhone became[1]:
In 2006, Steve decided to make this telephone: the iPod was on the decline and
he had the brainwave of producing a laptop without a keyboard - something that
was unthinkable at the time, and which caused quite a stir at Apple. We were
a secret project, barely known to Apple France.
He says he pushed the idea that Apple needed to create a phone with "the equivalent of Mac OS 10", but that's a very nebulous statement, that could range from iOS style to WindowsCE style. But again, no one who talks about the vision Jobs had for products (or at least no one who actually knows Apple history) believes that Jobs himself was responsible for everything and handing down fully formed ideas and designs from on high.
I walk by an apple store regularly, its full of people standing around, even at like 2pm on a weekday.
I'm always confused. What are those people doing?
I get buying apple products, I generally don't, but they're good at somethings and bad at others, so you know, choices.
But why go to an apple store, much less stand around? Apple products are just generic at this point. There's a new phone, which is exactly the same as the last 10 phones. Or a laptop or a tablet, etc.
> Apple products are just generic at this point. There's a new phone, which is exactly the same as the last 10 phones.
This is way too much of an exaggeration to be taken with any amount of seriousness! If you can’t see the huge upgrades in capabilities over the last 10 phones, you’re not the target customer for any smartphone and haven’t been paying attention to the announcements every year.
10 might be a slight exageration but this is probably more just a reflection of being old and jaded and stuff.
Personally every couple of years I buy the latest samsung phone, its a bit nicer, but not the kind of thing I need to go look at before buying. It's more like milk lol
One of the things that I admire Steve Jobs the most is his good taste. He had a great ability of recognizing talented individuals and adopting some of the best ideas computer science had to offer at the time. For example, the Lisa and the Macintosh were heavily influenced by the work Xerox PARC did on the graphical user interface. The original Macintosh team had many excellent people; off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Jef Raskin (RIP), Bill Atkinson (RIP), Joanna Hoffman, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare. Larry Tesler (RIP) and even Alan Kay were both brought in from Xerox PARC to join Apple. When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and started NeXT, he not only brought some original Macintosh team members with him, but he hired other brilliant people such as Avie Tevanian. NeXT also looked to Xerox PARC for inspiration, this time adopting PARC's work in dynamically-typed object-oriented programming (Smalltalk, but in the form of Objective-C) and networking. When Apple purchased NeXT in late 1996, NeXT's operating system became the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS, Mac OS X, which fused a visually updated Macintosh interface with NeXT underpinnings.
Mac OS X under Steve Jobs was a truly excellent desktop operating system, with excellent technical underpinnings and a well-considered user interface with strong usability guidelines.
I miss Steve Jobs, and I wish the computer industry still had champions of personal computing.
One of the best movies about history of Apple and people involved is "Pirates Of Silicon Valley". Pretty accurate portrayal of Steve Jobs, Woz and the rest.
One part of his legacy that will forever be misunderstood is that being brutally honest, being demanding, being abrasive is a trait that only translates to success when you are at the top [0]. Countless mid level managers believe it is the only way to lead.
> For Steve Jobs, it's not that being an asshole was his secret sauce. It's that his unique position allowed him to survive the downsides of his personality.
By all accounts he was an asshole from the earliest days, long before he was a known quantity.
I'd argue that brutal honesty is a good thing. So many people try to be agreeable, but don't people stop to think what they themselves think of agreeable people? Generally they seem fake or insincere. When an asshole tells you 'That's an interesting idea.' they mean it. What an agreeable person says it they might mean it or they might mean 'Wow, that's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.' So it makes their opinions, or even discussion with them, rather pointless. And broad agreeability can also make a person seem quite daft.
I just now posted a top-level comment expecting this lol, about how Job gets hated for being an asshole in private, while Linus Torvalds gets forgiven and even admired for being much worse in public.
yeah but try explaining that to the narcissistic sociopaths that embody those traits and they'll think you're absolutely right, those other guys should listen to you.
Somewhat related: I recently googled Steve's son, Reed, out of curiosity. I haven't thought to look his kids up since when he died.
Reed is a spitting image of Steve[0] - voice and all. Steve was a hero of mine since I was a kid (I don't care what your opinion is about having a hero, let alone having steve as one). Seeing reed talk made me wistful. I miss steve dearly.
It also reminded of the many things I miss about the Apple I grew up loving. Leadership with an opinion is one of them. And by opinion, I mean a leader who isn't a slave to the A|B test or to shareholders. Someone who cared deeply about his product and could communicate it in words that made me care.
I'm using A|B as a blanket term for things that make a company think it's improving by using the opinions of others in lieu of having an opinion themselves. Focus groups also fall into this category.
I don’t dislike them inherently, but as people tend to believe they’re a one-stop solution it’s worth pointing out what they can’t do:
- On their own they don’t provide a hypothesis. You need to do user research to discover those.
- On their own they don’t tell you the value in what you’re testing. You need further analysis to understand that.
- They’re typically a short-term solution to longer-term problems. It’s easy to use them to achieve local maxima without understanding the wider picture.
- They’ll only tell you what the majority of your users find effective, without highlighting what hurts the journey for a minority of users. For example you could A/B test something that improves the journey for every group apart from visually impaired users, but block them completely, and still implement it because it’s the winning bucket.
Yes, there are guardrails you can put in place for all of these, and good teams do, but that requires a degree of maturity that is hard for a lot of organisations.
It's a good tool for optimizing around local maxima and is (generally) incapable of propelling you through a major product gap to the next (and hopefully greater) maxima.
But IMO the industry dogma is to use it for everything, particularly around greenfield development and new product areas that are pre-PMF.
Importantly also is that in many organizations A/B testing has become a crutch to avoid understanding the underlying system being measured.
Conversion rate rises by 5% if the button is green. Why? But rather than using experimentation as a tool for structured understanding many organizations devolve to "just test every change".
The practical outcome is that product teams commit elementary errors because they fail to understand why their products are successful, and product velocity slows as teams prove unable/unwilling to make any decisions without pushing something to prod.
> People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.
The reality is, people hate change period. The flat UI that everyone is now pining for was pretty roundly hated when it debuted too. And the reaction to the original OS X interfaces with its "lickable" buttons was also pretty full of hate and anger. And in every one of those cases, some of the complaints were valid, and Apple in some of those cases walked the changes back or adjusted them. But a large UI change also just comes with a lot of hate in general because everything is different.
There are plenty of parts about the new liquid glass UIs that are fine. They may not be your preferred aesthetic choice, but the flat UI or the heavy skeumorphic UI of days of old wasn't everyone's preferred aesthetic choice either. Personally I've found myself recently looking for KDE themes that bring back late 90's platinum/beOS/Next style "drawn 3D" UIs (which is a terrible term for it, but I don't have a better word at hand for what I'm thinking of). Liquid Glass will be refined, improved and sanded down into something people are fine with and in 10 more years when Apple releases a new UI we'll have this same discussion again.
I think everything I know about Apple's culture under jobs was that steve let his lieutenants have at each other. That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.
> That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.
This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple.
Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.
Burning resources to memorialize the past we only see through rose colored glasses of naive youth is vanity.
Biology is self selecting and that's all that's happening here. There's no intention or future value. It's plain old signal attenuation and entropy going on; memory is fading as those who experienced it churn out of existence.
A species still escaping banal worship of history ends up avoiding progress.
We're standing on the shoulders of many creative heroes; some technically brilliant, some better described as visionaries and designers. They all played a role in getting us this far.
I know this wont go over well but I think it's important to remember: Steve Jobs did not treat his pancreatic cancer when he was first diagnosed and it was treatable, he instead sought holistic/alternative medicine treatments[1]. He leveraged his vast wealth to get a replacement liver [2] that at the time was known to only extend his life. That liver could have gone to someone that did not have such a negative prognosis and possibly saved their life for a lot longer than it did Steve. He used a chunk of his remaining time to work on his last yacht.
He was a great product person but I don't think that excuses all of the horrible things he did as a human.
> Steve Jobs did not treat his pancreatic cancer when he was first diagnosed and it was treatable
That's his choice, it's _his_ cancer after all
> I don't think that excuses all of the horrible things he did as a human
I think this is a bit of a leap. He's done some bad things sure, but the only ones you mentioned were...working on a yacht, using alternative medicine and getting a liver transplant
While you're right, freedom of choice implies acceptance of risk and consequence. Leveraging wealth to jump the line, and presumably taking a liver from someone who could have used it, seems like the opposite of that.
A similar example from recent years is those who rejected all medical advise regarding COVID, and were still entitled to a hospital bed and respirator when it didn't work out for them.
I somewhat agree, but I'll say that cancer can move fast and it's important to keep that context in mind.
Jobs delayed for 9 months before doing traditional treatments. I don't believe he ever did full chemo.
Jobs getting the liver was more an exposure of a weakness of the transplant system in general. [1] Transplants are region locked. We can't easily move a liver across the country which means that it can be use it or lose it. Jobs had the resources to get put on lists across the country and had the resources to get to any part of the country from where ever he was in under 3 hours thanks to his private jet.
I don't think there's really a practical way to solve this problem. The want is national list for people that need new livers and some sort of life flight system to get the liver to the person in need.
I guess the one way to make it more fair would be coordinating the lists and tracking/penalizing someone for being registered across the nation. But if the list has Jobs on it the next person in line is also someone with cancer I don't really see a reason why Jobs couldn't get the liver.
I don’t know what Steve was thinking, but the desire to try alternatives is not necessarily just woo based thinking. Chemo and surgery are not just a walk in the park. I’ve seen people do chemo and surgery and then just die anyways, having basically tortured themselves with chemo and surgery before death. Cancer sucks and there are sometimes no great answers. I have a really low opinion of grifters that falsely advertise that they can definitively cure cancer with alternative medicine, but I respect any individual’s choice to take the path they are most comfortable with with their own body.
The pancreas is also one of the "it bleeds like crazy" organs which makes it hard to operate on. It's a much higher risk vs cutting off a mole for skin cancer.
I agree, even though he was way off on his thinking at least he tried something. The doctors told my father to go ion chemo because it would give him 2 yeras vs the 1 year he was facing with his pancreatic cancer. My sister, a oncology nurse told him not to do it, but he id. The chemo ended up causing a bile duct blockage which killing him after six months.
It is because of what Jobs did we know what not to do.
Here is a good podcast on his terribleness: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEv08Zzunfc Some high points: Incredibly abusive to his employees, stole from Woz, screwed over his employees when Apple went public and Woz covered, refused to admit his daughter Lisa was his for many years. The man had great taste but the way he is worshipped in Silicon Valley is off-putting. Woz is a much better person to wish to emulate in my opinion.
By all accounts, he fought tooth-and-nail to avoid recognizing his own daughter even after a state ordered paternity test [1]. There's quite a bit of evidence that whatever his positives as a product manager, he was a singularly unpleasant individual.
The whole buying a liver thing?! Do you have any idea what the process is to get a liver, even if you are dying of liver failure? I liked Steve until that point.
Since this is inevitably going to come up during any mention of Jobs:
Why does Linus Torvalds get a pass, even admired (like in this thread right here), for OPENLY being an extremely vitriolic f*ker, and continuing to be so even after being called out for it to his face in interviews/questions from the audience, but Steve Jobs still gets shade for allegedly being an asshole based on mostly hearsay long after his death?
Telling people to be aborted, outright insulting them in various ways, I have to keep making sure I'm not reading 4chan instead of the Linux mailing list. I doubt Jobs ever even came close to that.
People give Linus a pass for literally the same reasons that Jobs had to be an "asshole" for: "Linux is his baby" "No one else is suited to lead" etc
Are you talking about the guy that had a deal with a Mercedes dealership to provide him a new car every 6 months so he could drive around without license plates so he could park in handicapped spaces?
I actually somewhat agree with you; Linus has been an asshole in the kernel world for a long time, and it’s really not charming anymore.
I will admit that I used to find it funny but after having worked with a lot of people like Linus in the corporate world, a part of me wants to say something like “I promise you that you are not as smart as you think you are, and we are not as dumb as you think we are”.
> Why does Linus Torvalds get a pass, even admired, for OPENLY being an extremely vitriolic f*ker, and continuing to be so even after being called out for it to his face in interviews/questions from the audience,
Linux is a major part of the human species' infrastructure. So Linus asking people to put effort into things, and prioritize Linux over themselves to a significant degree, even when the going is hard, is typically reasonable. And he probably gets upset when people are lackadaisical about the process and the effort. If there are fuckups, billions can be affected. That doesn't make any action fine, indeed being gentle can in some cases be the best and most effective and responsible action. But that isn't always the case. Is Linus perfect or optimal? Might a better system exist? Maybe, but there is risk in experimenting. There are other kernels than Linux that can have different processes, and having a diversity of kernels and processes may be good.
What other kernels are there, what processes have they followed, and how have they fared? Windows kernels have done well in terms of usage, but there are a wealth of different reasons for that.
I don't use or follow Linux but I do stumble upon news about it here and there, and I saw a video just a month or so ago, about Linus going off on RISC-V etc.
The simple answer is he invented it, it’s his baby, and despite his faults he is still best equipped to lead the project. Post-Linus Linux has great potential to go horribly wrong.
You're conflating their jobs quite a bit, here. Torvalds is the project lead of Linux, whereas Jobs was the chief executive officer of Apple. There were almost certainly even meaner people than Linus internally pushing for highly opinionated macOS changes; we just never saw them. Jobs' legacy is more lambasted for his lack of technical acumen and interpersonal frustration.
Guys like Woz would make a particularly bad replacement for Torvalds, because while he was super talented, Woz was also a pushover who had to leave Apple after being insulted hundreds of times by Jobs, who had almost no valuable technical know-how. Torvalds will never make his mistake, and Linux has long been better off ignoring the Tannenbaum types.
I'm a piece of shit. I have changed very few lives and accomplished very little. There are a lot of us. The only reason we are talking about Steve Jobs here is that, piece of shit or not, Steve changed very many lives and accomplished much.
Ah perception vs perspective. We perceive the same things but have different perspectives. And yes I have done terrible things. I even worked for Steve Jobs.
I wish he did not smoke [4], or convert to a largely fruit diet [1,2,3,5], they both most likely caused his pancreatic cancer.
My father died of pancreatic cancer, he smoked for most of his life and ate a ton of honey. I see it in my genetics (ABO, SOD2) and luckily I quit smoking when I was very young and could never tolerate sweet foods. I also eat a high manganese diet (the cofactor for ABO), lots of mussles, and take it as a supplement on occation.
I wish Jobs were still alive, I would probably not want to sell my iphone right now because of liquid ass.
I sometimes wonder what an alternative history would look like if Jobs was still around. Apple has done well, but they have largely played it safe. Even their riskiest product, the Apple Vision Pro, seemed like less of an innovation and more a response to market expectations.
Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses. He did it with desktop and mobile computers, he did it with the mp3 player, and did it with the smartphone and tablet. What has post-Jobs Apple done? Maybe the smartwatch… but one could argue that in itself is an iteration on the iPod (remember the Nano and Shuffles?).
Credit where credit is due, they are killing it in silicon - but that is a bit opaque culturally.
Jobs brought product to the table, but I don’t he did so because it was niche. I think he chose the products because it was solved a personal problem.
I remember a pre-iPod MP3 player where, to get to the 200nd song (a somewhat common thing if you listen to music a lot), it was absolute struggle.
Well then the iPod came out was its analog wheel. Suddenly selecting and listening to music was enjoyable.
I continually think about this: I feel like a lot of products, from kitchen tools to vehicles, have never been used by the people who make them.
His personality aside, what I think Jobs brought to the table was that he was a head guy with taste that was actually making things for himself and that he actually used what his company made day to day. It created a feedback loop that I think many companies lack (that or the head people have no taste).
> Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses.
It was more than this. He understood how to communicate to both customers/employees why what they bought/worked on mattered. For all the stories of his assholery, very few people bring up that the same people who complained about his assholery also acknowledge that he brought the best work out of them.
I'm gonna say that we need MORE "assholes" in the industry, the way things are now. Or rather, that being a perfectionist kinda makes one an asshole, because by definition you don't tolerate anyshit less than perfect.
Recall all the things in tech that have peeved you since a long:
If you were to be given charge of those companies, would you waste time asking people nicely?
I mean, sure, maintain basic humanity, don't devolve into Linus Torvalds, but to make major changes you HAVE to not put up with bullshit.
iTunes in Jobs' era had no overly intrusive DRM; you could literally copy purchased songs to another computer and play them there.
Now, Apple TV+ is so anal about DRM that skipping a few times causes it to get stuck, while it tries to reestablish that you are free of sin. Trying to watch on iPad on a slower-than-lightspeed connection while on travel requires a restart of the app every few minutes. I had to cancel my subscription and just pirated a copy of Severance just to be able to finish the show.
You can't even take screeshots. You can't even copy text from Books.app (in some/most books). There's so much user-hostile bullshit in iOS/macOS now that would get employees lashed if Jobs was there. And I, a user, would be all for it.
I could keep going but I don't want to ruin my own day.
> Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses.
Huh? Jobs didn’t invent much of anything. Woz reinvented personal computing, Jobs built a money printing machine around it.
Hullot convinced Jobs to have an engineering group work on turning the iPod into the iPhone.
Apple wouldn’t be what it is without Jobs but the people who give him all the credit for inventions he had almost nothing to do with gets exhausting.
About the only thing I think was HIS idea was the Lisa, and that was an absolute disaster.
I think you're reading "reinvent" here too literally. I doubt the OP literally thinks that Jobs personally designed every part of the iPhone and simply directed mindless drones to just do the dirty work of manufacturing it. But I think it's fair to say that Jobs' vision and direction of what the iPhone can and should be absolutely "reinvented" the category of "smart phone" for the masses.
> But I think it's fair to say that Jobs' vision
And I think it’s fair to call that revisionist history of the worst kind. It wasn’t his vision at all. Someone else had the vision and had to sell Jobs on it who was initially skeptical.
So are you saying that had Hullot taken his ideas to any other company, the result would have been the same phone? Again, no one is saying that Jobs was solely responsible for the things Apple has done, or that other people weren't major parts of that. Even Hullot's own words tell us that the phone design he had in mind was not the touch based keyboard-less design that the iPhone became[1]:
He says he pushed the idea that Apple needed to create a phone with "the equivalent of Mac OS 10", but that's a very nebulous statement, that could range from iOS style to WindowsCE style. But again, no one who talks about the vision Jobs had for products (or at least no one who actually knows Apple history) believes that Jobs himself was responsible for everything and handing down fully formed ideas and designs from on high.[1]: https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...
What do you think would happen to Woz if he never met Jobs?
I’m sure he would’ve been a very successful engineer regardless but I doubt we would even know his name.
I’m not saying this to dispute his achievements etc. But it’s very one sided to attribute all the achievements to either one of them.
> What has post-Jobs Apple done?
The Airpods are one of the most successful products ever
That blows my mind.
I walk by an apple store regularly, its full of people standing around, even at like 2pm on a weekday.
I'm always confused. What are those people doing?
I get buying apple products, I generally don't, but they're good at somethings and bad at others, so you know, choices.
But why go to an apple store, much less stand around? Apple products are just generic at this point. There's a new phone, which is exactly the same as the last 10 phones. Or a laptop or a tablet, etc.
> Apple products are just generic at this point. There's a new phone, which is exactly the same as the last 10 phones.
This is way too much of an exaggeration to be taken with any amount of seriousness! If you can’t see the huge upgrades in capabilities over the last 10 phones, you’re not the target customer for any smartphone and haven’t been paying attention to the announcements every year.
10 might be a slight exageration but this is probably more just a reflection of being old and jaded and stuff.
Personally every couple of years I buy the latest samsung phone, its a bit nicer, but not the kind of thing I need to go look at before buying. It's more like milk lol
They’re probably waiting for someone to bring back their iPhone with a replaced screen after they dropped it.
One of the things that I admire Steve Jobs the most is his good taste. He had a great ability of recognizing talented individuals and adopting some of the best ideas computer science had to offer at the time. For example, the Lisa and the Macintosh were heavily influenced by the work Xerox PARC did on the graphical user interface. The original Macintosh team had many excellent people; off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Jef Raskin (RIP), Bill Atkinson (RIP), Joanna Hoffman, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare. Larry Tesler (RIP) and even Alan Kay were both brought in from Xerox PARC to join Apple. When Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and started NeXT, he not only brought some original Macintosh team members with him, but he hired other brilliant people such as Avie Tevanian. NeXT also looked to Xerox PARC for inspiration, this time adopting PARC's work in dynamically-typed object-oriented programming (Smalltalk, but in the form of Objective-C) and networking. When Apple purchased NeXT in late 1996, NeXT's operating system became the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS, Mac OS X, which fused a visually updated Macintosh interface with NeXT underpinnings.
Mac OS X under Steve Jobs was a truly excellent desktop operating system, with excellent technical underpinnings and a well-considered user interface with strong usability guidelines.
I miss Steve Jobs, and I wish the computer industry still had champions of personal computing.
One of the best movies about history of Apple and people involved is "Pirates Of Silicon Valley". Pretty accurate portrayal of Steve Jobs, Woz and the rest.
One part of his legacy that will forever be misunderstood is that being brutally honest, being demanding, being abrasive is a trait that only translates to success when you are at the top [0]. Countless mid level managers believe it is the only way to lead.
> For Steve Jobs, it's not that being an asshole was his secret sauce. It's that his unique position allowed him to survive the downsides of his personality.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/you-cant-be-an-asshole-as-a-manager
By all accounts he was an asshole from the earliest days, long before he was a known quantity.
I'd argue that brutal honesty is a good thing. So many people try to be agreeable, but don't people stop to think what they themselves think of agreeable people? Generally they seem fake or insincere. When an asshole tells you 'That's an interesting idea.' they mean it. What an agreeable person says it they might mean it or they might mean 'Wow, that's one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.' So it makes their opinions, or even discussion with them, rather pointless. And broad agreeability can also make a person seem quite daft.
>agreeable
Being agreeable is what leads to design by committee. And being agreeable gets you out of being called an asshole.
I just now posted a top-level comment expecting this lol, about how Job gets hated for being an asshole in private, while Linus Torvalds gets forgiven and even admired for being much worse in public.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45482539
Torvalds has publically apologized and taken some kind of "being nicer" class and people, here at least, constantly criticize his rudeness.
Obviously he has defenders and fans for various reasons, but I think its nice to see.
yeah but try explaining that to the narcissistic sociopaths that embody those traits and they'll think you're absolutely right, those other guys should listen to you.
If Steve Jobs were on HN he would be ruthlessly downvoted.
I always remember this: https://spectrum.ieee.org/smalltalk He knew a good thing when he saw it. Too bad he only wanted the overlapping windows.
Somewhat related: I recently googled Steve's son, Reed, out of curiosity. I haven't thought to look his kids up since when he died.
Reed is a spitting image of Steve[0] - voice and all. Steve was a hero of mine since I was a kid (I don't care what your opinion is about having a hero, let alone having steve as one). Seeing reed talk made me wistful. I miss steve dearly.
It also reminded of the many things I miss about the Apple I grew up loving. Leadership with an opinion is one of them. And by opinion, I mean a leader who isn't a slave to the A|B test or to shareholders. Someone who cared deeply about his product and could communicate it in words that made me care.
0: edit here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBZhruuQ44
> Reed is a spitting image of Steve - voice and all
i thought you might be exaggerating but holy crap, you're right
what's wrong with a/b tests?
I'm using A|B as a blanket term for things that make a company think it's improving by using the opinions of others in lieu of having an opinion themselves. Focus groups also fall into this category.
It works for hardware, because that's the only way to do it. There's no 2 populations for hardware. All decisions are one way doors.
Software must use feedback, otherwise you'll end up with duds like Camera Control, 3D touch, and .. Apple Maps (1.0).
Apple doesnt have that culture, and it shows in their software.
I don’t dislike them inherently, but as people tend to believe they’re a one-stop solution it’s worth pointing out what they can’t do:
- On their own they don’t provide a hypothesis. You need to do user research to discover those.
- On their own they don’t tell you the value in what you’re testing. You need further analysis to understand that.
- They’re typically a short-term solution to longer-term problems. It’s easy to use them to achieve local maxima without understanding the wider picture.
- They’ll only tell you what the majority of your users find effective, without highlighting what hurts the journey for a minority of users. For example you could A/B test something that improves the journey for every group apart from visually impaired users, but block them completely, and still implement it because it’s the winning bucket.
Yes, there are guardrails you can put in place for all of these, and good teams do, but that requires a degree of maturity that is hard for a lot of organisations.
It's a good tool for optimizing around local maxima and is (generally) incapable of propelling you through a major product gap to the next (and hopefully greater) maxima.
But IMO the industry dogma is to use it for everything, particularly around greenfield development and new product areas that are pre-PMF.
Importantly also is that in many organizations A/B testing has become a crutch to avoid understanding the underlying system being measured.
Conversion rate rises by 5% if the button is green. Why? But rather than using experimentation as a tool for structured understanding many organizations devolve to "just test every change".
The practical outcome is that product teams commit elementary errors because they fail to understand why their products are successful, and product velocity slows as teams prove unable/unwilling to make any decisions without pushing something to prod.
Instagram is a product of a/b testing. Go figure
People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.
I'd say that what apple did with liquid glass, forcing it onto its customers is kind of what jobs would do. "We know better, shut up plebe"
In that way, the apple from today isn't very different from the apple of jobs.
> People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.
The reality is, people hate change period. The flat UI that everyone is now pining for was pretty roundly hated when it debuted too. And the reaction to the original OS X interfaces with its "lickable" buttons was also pretty full of hate and anger. And in every one of those cases, some of the complaints were valid, and Apple in some of those cases walked the changes back or adjusted them. But a large UI change also just comes with a lot of hate in general because everything is different.
There are plenty of parts about the new liquid glass UIs that are fine. They may not be your preferred aesthetic choice, but the flat UI or the heavy skeumorphic UI of days of old wasn't everyone's preferred aesthetic choice either. Personally I've found myself recently looking for KDE themes that bring back late 90's platinum/beOS/Next style "drawn 3D" UIs (which is a terrible term for it, but I don't have a better word at hand for what I'm thinking of). Liquid Glass will be refined, improved and sanded down into something people are fine with and in 10 more years when Apple releases a new UI we'll have this same discussion again.
I think everything I know about Apple's culture under jobs was that steve let his lieutenants have at each other. That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.
> That culture died when Forstall was booted from the company (one of apple's biggest mistakes, IMO). Tim Cook gives people their space. It's why Jony Ive and Alan Dye have been allowed to run amok, with almost zero checks and balances.
This is what I’ve been thinking too, ever since Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall over Apple Maps. To be frank, it’s about a decade later now and Apple Maps still sucks big time in many countries, and Google Maps is what iPhone users there use. Coming back to the change of people, the huge messes made by Jonny Ives (without Steve Jobs to balance him out) on hardware (the butterfly keyboard was his design and decision, AFAIK) and software just carried on for years. Now Alan Dye and his team seem to be tanking the user interface and user experience like there’s nobody with any taste left at Apple.
Add to this the turf war between John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi on the AI part, with Federighi winning the game, it doesn’t look like Tim Cook has a good grasp on people’s abilities and how to manage them. Cook has his strengths in supply chain and manufacturing, but design (along with better software quality) are not his strengths or focus areas.
> People hate liquid glass, at least the majority.
Based on what?
I'd say that the majority of users instead are between "I don't care about this" and "this looks cool, whatever".
The "majority" you talk about doesn't exist in my experience, it's like the 1% arguing between "this is life changing" and "I hate this".
Wish we could get his opinion on the notch...
We're talking about the "you're holding it wrong" guy. It's pretty easy to guess what he would say.
It is better to remember Dennis Ritchie instead: Humble man, great engineer, brilliant in his designs.
There's no 'instead', you can remember them both.
We can do a lot of things. Must we? Should we?
Burning resources to memorialize the past we only see through rose colored glasses of naive youth is vanity.
Biology is self selecting and that's all that's happening here. There's no intention or future value. It's plain old signal attenuation and entropy going on; memory is fading as those who experienced it churn out of existence.
A species still escaping banal worship of history ends up avoiding progress.
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We're standing on the shoulders of many creative heroes; some technically brilliant, some better described as visionaries and designers. They all played a role in getting us this far.
No one is forcing you to admire Steve Jobs.
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I know this wont go over well but I think it's important to remember: Steve Jobs did not treat his pancreatic cancer when he was first diagnosed and it was treatable, he instead sought holistic/alternative medicine treatments[1]. He leveraged his vast wealth to get a replacement liver [2] that at the time was known to only extend his life. That liver could have gone to someone that did not have such a negative prognosis and possibly saved their life for a lot longer than it did Steve. He used a chunk of his remaining time to work on his last yacht.
He was a great product person but I don't think that excuses all of the horrible things he did as a human.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/food-for-thought/201...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/24/liver.transplant.prior...
> Steve Jobs did not treat his pancreatic cancer when he was first diagnosed and it was treatable
That's his choice, it's _his_ cancer after all
> I don't think that excuses all of the horrible things he did as a human
I think this is a bit of a leap. He's done some bad things sure, but the only ones you mentioned were...working on a yacht, using alternative medicine and getting a liver transplant
> That's his choice, it's _his_ cancer after all
While you're right, freedom of choice implies acceptance of risk and consequence. Leveraging wealth to jump the line, and presumably taking a liver from someone who could have used it, seems like the opposite of that.
A similar example from recent years is those who rejected all medical advise regarding COVID, and were still entitled to a hospital bed and respirator when it didn't work out for them.
I somewhat agree, but I'll say that cancer can move fast and it's important to keep that context in mind.
Jobs delayed for 9 months before doing traditional treatments. I don't believe he ever did full chemo.
Jobs getting the liver was more an exposure of a weakness of the transplant system in general. [1] Transplants are region locked. We can't easily move a liver across the country which means that it can be use it or lose it. Jobs had the resources to get put on lists across the country and had the resources to get to any part of the country from where ever he was in under 3 hours thanks to his private jet.
I don't think there's really a practical way to solve this problem. The want is national list for people that need new livers and some sort of life flight system to get the liver to the person in need.
I guess the one way to make it more fair would be coordinating the lists and tracking/penalizing someone for being registered across the nation. But if the list has Jobs on it the next person in line is also someone with cancer I don't really see a reason why Jobs couldn't get the liver.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/24/liver.transplant.prior...
I don’t know what Steve was thinking, but the desire to try alternatives is not necessarily just woo based thinking. Chemo and surgery are not just a walk in the park. I’ve seen people do chemo and surgery and then just die anyways, having basically tortured themselves with chemo and surgery before death. Cancer sucks and there are sometimes no great answers. I have a really low opinion of grifters that falsely advertise that they can definitively cure cancer with alternative medicine, but I respect any individual’s choice to take the path they are most comfortable with with their own body.
The pancreas is also one of the "it bleeds like crazy" organs which makes it hard to operate on. It's a much higher risk vs cutting off a mole for skin cancer.
I agree, even though he was way off on his thinking at least he tried something. The doctors told my father to go ion chemo because it would give him 2 yeras vs the 1 year he was facing with his pancreatic cancer. My sister, a oncology nurse told him not to do it, but he id. The chemo ended up causing a bile duct blockage which killing him after six months.
It is because of what Jobs did we know what not to do.
Here is a good podcast on his terribleness: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEv08Zzunfc Some high points: Incredibly abusive to his employees, stole from Woz, screwed over his employees when Apple went public and Woz covered, refused to admit his daughter Lisa was his for many years. The man had great taste but the way he is worshipped in Silicon Valley is off-putting. Woz is a much better person to wish to emulate in my opinion.
Which of the things you listed do you believe are "horrible things he did as a human"?
By all accounts, he fought tooth-and-nail to avoid recognizing his own daughter even after a state ordered paternity test [1]. There's quite a bit of evidence that whatever his positives as a product manager, he was a singularly unpleasant individual.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-denied-daughter-ye...
Jobs' relationship with his family was famously strained.
The whole buying a liver thing?! Do you have any idea what the process is to get a liver, even if you are dying of liver failure? I liked Steve until that point.
He didn’t buy a liver, he registered in Tennessee which has low waiting times.
Was it some sort of black market exchange?
Since this is inevitably going to come up during any mention of Jobs:
Why does Linus Torvalds get a pass, even admired (like in this thread right here), for OPENLY being an extremely vitriolic f*ker, and continuing to be so even after being called out for it to his face in interviews/questions from the audience, but Steve Jobs still gets shade for allegedly being an asshole based on mostly hearsay long after his death?
Telling people to be aborted, outright insulting them in various ways, I have to keep making sure I'm not reading 4chan instead of the Linux mailing list. I doubt Jobs ever even came close to that.
People give Linus a pass for literally the same reasons that Jobs had to be an "asshole" for: "Linux is his baby" "No one else is suited to lead" etc
>allegedly being an asshole
Are you talking about the guy that had a deal with a Mercedes dealership to provide him a new car every 6 months so he could drive around without license plates so he could park in handicapped spaces?
The very same guy who pawned off a $5,000 contract to Wozniak by lying and saying it was worth $750 (of which Woz pocketed $375).
Interesting how the halo effect seems to revise the rest of Jobs' story. He was a conman, plain and simple.
I actually somewhat agree with you; Linus has been an asshole in the kernel world for a long time, and it’s really not charming anymore.
I will admit that I used to find it funny but after having worked with a lot of people like Linus in the corporate world, a part of me wants to say something like “I promise you that you are not as smart as you think you are, and we are not as dumb as you think we are”.
> Why does Linus Torvalds get a pass, even admired, for OPENLY being an extremely vitriolic f*ker, and continuing to be so even after being called out for it to his face in interviews/questions from the audience,
Linux is a major part of the human species' infrastructure. So Linus asking people to put effort into things, and prioritize Linux over themselves to a significant degree, even when the going is hard, is typically reasonable. And he probably gets upset when people are lackadaisical about the process and the effort. If there are fuckups, billions can be affected. That doesn't make any action fine, indeed being gentle can in some cases be the best and most effective and responsible action. But that isn't always the case. Is Linus perfect or optimal? Might a better system exist? Maybe, but there is risk in experimenting. There are other kernels than Linux that can have different processes, and having a diversity of kernels and processes may be good.
What other kernels are there, what processes have they followed, and how have they fared? Windows kernels have done well in terms of usage, but there are a wealth of different reasons for that.
I haven't followed it much, but didn't Linus have some self reflection and talk about toning things down a bit?
I don't use or follow Linux but I do stumble upon news about it here and there, and I saw a video just a month or so ago, about Linus going off on RISC-V etc.
Maybe it was this, not sure, not gonna go dig it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E8Gb7Ikm2o
The simple answer is he invented it, it’s his baby, and despite his faults he is still best equipped to lead the project. Post-Linus Linux has great potential to go horribly wrong.
Can you point me to a picture of Linus Torvalds' car parked in a handicapped space?
He doesn't, at least not universally, same with Jobs?
You're conflating their jobs quite a bit, here. Torvalds is the project lead of Linux, whereas Jobs was the chief executive officer of Apple. There were almost certainly even meaner people than Linus internally pushing for highly opinionated macOS changes; we just never saw them. Jobs' legacy is more lambasted for his lack of technical acumen and interpersonal frustration.
Guys like Woz would make a particularly bad replacement for Torvalds, because while he was super talented, Woz was also a pushover who had to leave Apple after being insulted hundreds of times by Jobs, who had almost no valuable technical know-how. Torvalds will never make his mistake, and Linux has long been better off ignoring the Tannenbaum types.
> Why does Linus Torvalds get a pass
Because he does not make a ton of money. Only a measly $150 net wroth compared to the $10 billion of Jobs.
People put up with asshles in a hope they they will get some of that stinky money.
That doesn't make sense, unless you mean people get more jealous of rich assholes than poor assholes. They see a poor asshole as One of Us.
Like Stone Cold Steve Austin vs Mr. McMahon. Both assholes, just one rich and the other not so rich.
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Please don't post like this to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You may not owe people who you feel are pieces of shit better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm a piece of shit. I have changed very few lives and accomplished very little. There are a lot of us. The only reason we are talking about Steve Jobs here is that, piece of shit or not, Steve changed very many lives and accomplished much.
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Ah perception vs perspective. We perceive the same things but have different perspectives. And yes I have done terrible things. I even worked for Steve Jobs.
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I wish he did not smoke [4], or convert to a largely fruit diet [1,2,3,5], they both most likely caused his pancreatic cancer.
My father died of pancreatic cancer, he smoked for most of his life and ate a ton of honey. I see it in my genetics (ABO, SOD2) and luckily I quit smoking when I was very young and could never tolerate sweet foods. I also eat a high manganese diet (the cofactor for ABO), lots of mussles, and take it as a supplement on occation.
I wish Jobs were still alive, I would probably not want to sell my iphone right now because of liquid ass.
[1] https://www.uclahealth.org/news/release/pancreatic-cancers-u...
[2] https://www.aicr.org/resources/blog/glucose-fructose-and-the...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10722142/
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5455596/
[5] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-followed-extreme-d...