People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
By any metric other than “line must always go up” Apple is doing just fine.
“Oh no, they haven’t found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won’t continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come…better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins”, the horror.
He was very much the Elon Musk of his times, and it’s very possible he would have gone down the same route of extremist views and decisions that completely failed because of his egoism.
He died because he didn’t listen to his doctor’s advice. That is somewhat extreme.
He believed in the teachings of a 20th century cultist who said you excreted mucus based on dietary choices, and therefore didn’t have to worry about health or bathing unless you ate poorly. (Stinky dude who also made an 8 yr old cry for eating a cheeseburger).
Wish everyone health but guy was as extreme as it gets in regards to being an asshole. Denied his daughter, settled child support days before taking Apple into the public market, etc.
Had pancreatitis because of his diet. A diet in which he thought would magically avoid creating body odor.
It turned into cancer. He lucked out that it was a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer with a 90% survival rate 5 years out. Which is abnormal as most forms of pancreatic are essentially a death sentence. Survival rate past 3 years is under 10% for the more common variants.
Stuck to his diet anyway. Ignored his doctors. Died to an illness he had a 90% chance of beating because he knew better.
And to top it all off, it didn’t help his body odour at all. He stank.
Kinda crazy, because we figured out deodorant a while ago.
To be fair, we saw formerly what Apple without jobs did, it was a failure. So one might wonder when the new Apple might run out. The catch being that the iPhone, app store, and iTunes are all indefinite money machines, except maybe iPhone one day. So they had a steak of ever increasingly wildly successful products that culminated in the iPhone and then no mind blowing follow-up, but they don’t need one. Folks may like the narrative that Jobs death coincided with their last big product category though
We also saw Jobs without Apple, also pretty much a failure.
NeXT was successful at being an application for the position of CEO at apple.
NeXT was a mediocre BSD front end and a few interesting Objective-C libraries. Apple’s board of directors pretty much crawled back to Jobs hat in hand after the disasters of Sculley and Spindler.
The amount of credit people give Steve Jobs is such a kick to the nuts to all the engineers that designed those products
Jobs basically had one job - be the screaming obnoxious asshole in charge who harangued the engineers until they came up with something to his liking. And then took the credit when they did. Basically just the Elon Musk of his day.
Crying smelly barefoot goblin man. Jobs was such an asshole.
“I’m vegan! I don’t need to shower! I don’t produce mucus or smell because of my superior diet. Brb I’m gonna go wash my feet in the toilet!” -Steve Jobs
fly me to more liver transplants, stat! The last one didn’t get rid of my cancer!
Except I can look at Jobs’ history and see an actual progression in technology. With Musk there is literally nothing but nonsensical hyped up promises.
Why can’t you make the same argument for that dick hole musk? Neither one has any engineering capabilities, and were a non-technical figurehead overseeing people with the actual talents making the technology better.
Jobs may have had an actual design element of input that I doubt musk has, but neither one of them actually improved technology; they have smarter people working for them that can do it. That’s especially true of Jobs with Woz, one of the actual people who improved technology at apple.
Im not praising musk, and i really think he fucked up his lead on twitter and tesla, but he is very much similar to jobs. Neither musk nor jobs have done really any of the engineering work, but both have had their hands in some pretty remarkable tech. Musk with paypal, spacex, tesla. Again, im not saying hes a good engineer, he hasnt done anything, but to discredit those companies is unfair.
Progression Jobs didn’t do though, just Apple’s engineers.
I think we can give Musk credit for progressing technology - electric cars & space rocketry and some other things. But he is also an incredible asshole, has little regard for the people who work for him, has no inner filter and has some incredibly stupid hot takes.
Except he didn’t. Jobs progressed technology by essentially bullying engineers into making it a reality. Musk didn’t even put that effort in. He bought companies that were already doing these things
I think that is disingenuous. It’s clear Musk has been a driving force in Tesla and to a lesser extent in SpaceX and Starlink. And while I hate the guy with a passion and think he is a massive prick who is an awful boss and who takes credit for other’s work, I have no doubt that if not for him EVs wouldn’t be a mainstream technology they are today. Just like with Apple and smart phones, Tesla did not invent the electric car but they made the first cars people actually wanted to buy.
Gwynne Shotwell deserves quite a lot more credit for SpaceX than Musk. Someone has to keep the place running until the ketamine clears his system.
The same with Musk. People are seeing him as the sole engineer of Tesla and SpaceX while in reality anonymous engineers did all this possible.
And it doesn’t help Musk calls himself lead engineer or whatever at times.
I think in one of his autobiographies he was claiming that he self educated how to build rockets from some books and I wonder how much of this is true and how much is coming from his ego.
From Mr. “make rocket pointier because LOL”? I’ll put my money on the latter option.
True, but without him both Tesla and SpaceX would not be here. Same for Jobs, without him Apple probably would not be what it is.
Quick plug for the Behind the Bastards series on Jobs
I fucking love that podcast. So well researched and perfectly presented
But did they wear jeans and black turtlenecks?
I do have a black turtleneck and without thinking I came into work wearing it with jeans. That with my glasses, well I got teased a bit.
But did you gain reality distortion powers?
Im not gonna sit here and shill for people like job and musk. But i have to say there is somethkng to be said about steering a ship in the right direction.
Jobs knew how to market the products, and steer the engineers in the right direction.
One thing he always said was that there only needed to be one iphone and one ipad. I recall that the with the ipad he said it was the perfect size and didn’t need alternatives or it would become less functional.
Then he died and the ipad mini was released, as well as the iphone 5c.
In 2012, the year following the iphone 5c and the year of the ipad mini apple lost its global market lead to android.
They diluted the product and confused the market of loyalists and general consumers by releasing multiple versions of their main product and if you ask me, thats when the cracks started to show.
Apple havent had a majority of the global market share for years now.
Jobs knew marketing, but that is about it.
It was Wozniak with the great ideas.
I think what Jobs really understood was that in a world of Ford, people crave a Ferrari.
Making the best be beautiful and accessible is hard, but you do it through focus and intentionality. Jobs, despite his many, many faults did that well.
It’s one thing to make a tool accomplish a task.
It’s another thing to beat the engineers until grandma can operate the tool.
I didn’t like the guy either, and found it funny that his own bullshit killed him in the end, but he did add “value”.
and found it funny that his own bullshit killed him in the end
Which is also what all those people credit him for, the kind of thinking that gets you killed by choosing “alternative medicine” over science. Apple devices make that seem to be a valid approach to the world.
It beats me how they don’t see the irony.
I listened to an interview with Scott Forestall several years back and he discusses the meeting he was in where Steve Jobs basically gave them the idea for the iPhone. He had seen the multi-touch displays, initially just used for very large displays, and also was seeing mobile phones take off at the same time. He was the one who put those two together and told the team to work on it. Sure, the product managers and designers came up with the details of the product and engineers figured out the tech to support it, but without that initial idea and leadership’s support to expend resources on building it, it may not have happened.
There are a lot of companies with bad uninspiring leadership that just ship what everyone else is shipping. Apple under Steve Jobs was trying to innovate.
I mean, certainly he gets more credit than deserved. But I find it hard to deny the major impact he had. When he was hired back as CEO in the late 90s, Apple already had talented engineers, but there was no coherence or direction in what they were working on, and the next gen OS was never going to happen. Back then, CEO Michael Dell was asked what he’d do if he were in charge of Apple and he said he’d shut it down. Apple was a punching bag in the industry.
Jobs immediately made radical changes at the company, eliminating most of their product line which was superfluous and confusing, shutting down software projects that were “neat” but didn’t fit into a vision, putting them on the path to release OS X (which his company had envisioned and developed the basis for while he was away from Apple), changing their marketing strategy, making the most clear-cut product line I’d ever seen, and turning conference keynotes into must-see TV. And in addition to that he pushed Apple towards the iMac, the iPod and the music store, and the iPhone.
It took amazing engineers and a lot of work and pain to actually deliver these products. And Jobs does get more credit than deserved. But I think he does deserve a whole lot of credit.
Even if we think about commerce and popularization stuff - people like Bill Joy or James Clark or many other names are much cooler than this particular salesman.
Steve Jobs was a piece of shit human being who contributed nothing to technology.
That said, he was a hell of a skilled bullshitter/marketer. Most people fucking looooove to be bullshitted, and Americans more than most.
It’s why we elect virtually no wonks/technocrats, even though thats who we should elect almost exclusively. We’d rather some snake oil motherfucker sell us on magical lies while telling us we’re pretty.
I’ve never complimented, or defended Steve Jobs before, because he was a grade A piece of shit…but, Steve Jobs transformed technology precisely because he was a phenomenal salesman, with a great eye for technical talent.
Just because he wasn’t an engineer, doesn’t change the fact that he forged Apple into what it became, and that absolutely contributed to modern technology - for better, and worse.
Just because he wasn’t an engineer, doesn’t change the fact that he forged Apple into what it became,
I think the big complaint about Jobs is not the lack of engineering skills, but that he got where he did through deception, taking advantage of people, and often treating folks like garbage. Many of us view him as unworthy of celebrating, because the ends don’t justify the means.
(There’s also the fact that what Apple became was not all good, but perhaps that’s a separate discussion.)
Steve Jobs could sell his turds to the Apple fanboys, and they would eat it up.
Doesn’t mean what he sold is some culinary dish or he a master chef. Just that he could sell them whatever he wants, no matter what it was. Whether it was technology or not.
The irony here is that you’re a cliche anti-Apple fanboy, and I don’t even use Apple products.
So blinded by your dork rage, that you missed the entire point of this little comment thread.
What’s even funnier, is that you also unintentionally proved mine.
I think marketers should get to take credit for ad campaigns they create, and engineers should get to take credit for technology they create.
Capitalists just want to take the credit for what others do. Societal leeches. I don’t buy into their false narrative that providing the means of production they hoard out of greed means they deserve most to all of the credit for what they permit talented people to engineer and produce by the swear of their brow and the migraines of their solutions.
We should be rewarding the Teslas of the world for what they invent, and punishing the Edisons that would claim other’s inventions as their own. But we suck, so we won’t.
Moving goalpost?
You said he didn’t contribute to technology, so I pointed out that he’s responsible for Apple becoming what it became, which itself transformed technology.
Now, you’re saying he shouldn’t get technical credit for…making the iPhone?
Okay…I never said he should…but it you want to go down that path, he was very hands-on with in the design processes for two of their most pivotal products: the iMac and iPod.
Again, he was a grade-A douche bag, who died a fucking hilariously stupid death, but that doesn’t erase, or override his impact.
I think the argument is that the motivations society allowed him under capitalism are what drew him to do what he did, not just that he was some brilliant asshole but that he wanted to own the work those beneath him had done.
Lots of us who have spent our lives being told “yeahuh but that’s how it’s supposed to work!” probably have a hard time grappling the concept that just because it turns out good sometimes doesn’t mean we can’t do better.
So to the original point of the rebuttal - we’re lucky it only turned out like it did, and not way way worse (and some other high-on-capital folks have been busy proving that lately…)
If you want to congratulate his corpse for what he didn’t engineer or design, go ahead.
It has nothing to do with congratulating.
You made a false statement, and then moved the goalpost (motte and bailey) when I pointed it out.
Simple as that.
After listening to the recent Behind the Bastards episode on him, yeah absolutely. It’s amazing his legacy isn’t judged more harshly.
He’s one of those people who died at the right time to preserve their own legacies, before public reckonings for non illegal bad behavior became common.
Harvey Dent: You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself to become the villain.
Steve Jobs: Bet.
I guess he died more or less pre-Twitter, so that’s something. He’d have a different legacy otherwise.
I work in tech and specialize in Apple hardware. I get really sick of industry folks talking about Jobs as being inspiring and other nonsense. No, he was an asshole and we should not celebrate him.
It’s also partially because any decent engineer/technocrat both lacks sufficient charisma and cash flow, and more importantly looks at public service and says “there’s no reliable way I can keep my morals and make a difference there.” As an engineer myself, I can’t imagine dealing with the general public. Choosing the correct, logical path will never win over people who put opinions and faith/feelings over reasoning and science. We’ve seen it time and time again and I’m not going to bang my head against that wall.
Instead I help friends and family, contribute to open source and projects I believe in and be the change I want to see in the world. Trying to do that as an elected official would foster insanity and pushback from those who don’t care and only want their side to win, regardless of the overall outcome.
Also: yes SJ was a POS, but he was a POS with charisma, a plan, and smart enough to surround himself with people who could make his ideas happen… and then micromanage them.
wonks/technocrats
…Knowledge Fight-like typing detected?
I had the same thought!
who contributed nothing to technology.
If it wasn’t for jobs Wozniak would still be putting breadboards together in his garage. We have no idea what the personal computer ecosystem would have looked like without the apple 2. He gets a lot more credit than he deserves sometimes but the idea that he contributed nothing is absurd. If he had contributed nothing you wouldn’t know his name.
Jobs was the fucking cracks. The reason why zoomers have no fucking idea where their files are on their computer are because of the shitty attitude instilled into iphones/ipods.
He started the entire fucking enshittification trend and everyone ate his asshole like peaches.
I agree. I had to explain to a younger family member today that when I say “open notepad”, I meant the application that’s been on every Windows version since they were born, not to Google “notepad”
Gave me a crisis that people know so little of what would have been considered basic computer usage a while back.
If it makes you feel better I gave my 16 year old daughter a laptop with a fresh Debian install and she’s figuring out things on her own without asking for help. Customizing it and making it do what she wants.
I just thought she would watch YouTube videos on it and be content. Instead she’s talking about the nuance of installing programs on it, and how different it is from Windows.
Not all hope is lost.
There’s an xkcd for everything
Careful, or she’ll be running nixOS in a month or two
It really is like that, the average people will get so much dumber but the kids who are interested is going to get much much crazier than the older dudes simply because of the abundance of information when they started. I still remember using magazines for guides.
Such is the result of Fisher Price’ing their devices.
You can extend this argument to saying everyone should master the command line. They’re all interfaces. There’s no “right way” to use a computer.
Jobs turned the computer into a product used by everyday people who don’t give a shit about how it works, and that’s fine. That’s empowering because it lowers the barrier to entry.
That said, we’ve been in a much worse “eternal September” since the iPhone shipped.
They’re all interfaces
My files are in a magic place is not a fucking interface.
Can you expand a bit more on this? What makes it not an interface?
I am an android and windows person (would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if my CAD worked on there) and pretty tech savvy, even run my own servers. So I hate the fact that things are getting so dumbed down but I can’t understand why it’s just an interface would be not true.
I’ll take a swing at this one.
A good interface has well defined inputs and outputs. A lot of interactions with iOS/MacOS software/applications have decently defined inputs via their UIs, but finding the outputs of those UIs can be a Sysiphysian effort. Figuring out where those outputs are beyond the defaults like “downloads from a browser end up in the Downloads folder” or “documents saved in the Pages app end up in the Documents” folder is frequently non-trivial.
It ends up being that the easiest way to find a file is to just open the original app you created it in, and find it in it’s history or whatever. To a non-technical person, this creates the impression that the only way to interact with those files is with the original app it was created in, which ends up limiting what people think they can do with their devices, and creates a bit of a walled garden effect.
So I suppose that the blanket statement of “it’s not an interface” isn’t completely fair. What is fair though, is to say that “it’s a bad interface”, if the average user can’t readily find said interface’s output.
I think I understand what you mean now, if it was an interface then it should be possible to use a separate but similar interface to access the output but here there is only one non-PITA way. Eg. If there was a competing galleries app on iOS it should be able to see all the photos. Is that roughly the thinking? Makes sense to me and thanks for taking the time to type that out.
yep, zalgotext basically did it for me. One other thing is that when you try to access files on an ipod through a non apple computer, it still uses tree based file structures, but the individual files, names, and locations are all garbled (eg : your Rancid album track 3 is in the same folder as your rush 2112 overture, but the rest of those albums are fuck knows where).
I had a joke that the original iphone wasn’t turing complete because you couldn’t run programs on it not from the istore.
Yup! I’m not the original commenter, so that’s just my interpretation of the original comment you replied to. But it sounds like you get my drift
Your files are in a magic place, directories don’t actually exist they’re a hierarchy we developed to meet the traditional concepts of a 20th century office. Tags and searching are just as valid.
Yes but under the hood, IOS is using a filesystem. Hiding helpful details is not the same as simply being a different way to use a computer. One actively makes the computer harder to use.
Though I agree with you partially there, I still think there should be options for users to access their data easily. Last time I tried getting my chat backups out of an iPhone was a nightmare
I can remember where I put shit faster and more easily than I can remember arbitrary names, tags, or my own typos. But if you put all the documents in a fucking folder I can find that AND IT CAN STILL BE TAGGED AND SEACHED FOR. The problem comes from business environments using technology that isn’t a fucking iPhone and then I’m having to teach a 25 year old how to use a USB drive. And that’s not an exaggeration, I literally had to do that today.
Apple managed to capture lightning in a bottle, twice. First by making a better Walkman, and then again by making that device a phone with internet access. They were able to leverage that success to revitalize their computer hardware business and act as a platform for selling accessories, and all of that made them very successful.
But the stock market doesn’t care about past success, it cares about growth, and without a major new, or buzz worthy product, investors might start to turn against Apple. Problem is, they have ridden the iPod horse about as far as it can go. They tried putting wheels on it, but that failed, and the jury is still out on whether tying one to your face will work out or not.
Yep. Doesn’t matter how healthy or stable a company is… when infinite growth is no longer feasible, investors would rather pick the bones clean than let it be.
Why does a company that has already achieved it’s success need investment? When company potential is how we value society, this is an inevitable end result.
APPL is second only to MSFT by market cap. So far, the stock market doesn’t care.
Yeah, but investors really don’t care about the price of a stock, they care about how much the price moves once they own it.
It’s the inherent problem with publicly owned companies. Even if you perfected a mode of profit, unless you improve upon perfection next quarter you’re in hot shit.
You can only squeeze so much profit out of any one gimmick, after that the only way to mimic growth is by cutting labour costs, and eventually diverting investment funding into profit for shareholders.
Not necessarily. Investors also care about dividends. Those tend to be the people who hold on long term. Blue chips, as a class of stock, are all about companies that don’t make big moves in price and pay out in dividends. They’re older companies that have built their product line, and while they still do R&D on new ones, they only do that to make sure they don’t get left behind.
It’s almost like… endless growth is unsustainable.
Edit: Downvoted by a shareholder lol
IMPOSSIBLE!?
“What if we just doubled the price?” - some genius executive that never created a damn thing in their life
That only works for housing and healthcare.
You forgot groceries, mandatory insurance, and utilities…
big part of apple’s success is that it successfully establishes itself as a status symbol - it is for a lot of people what car was for generation of their parents and grandparents.
so there will definitely be a clientele for that two times expensive whatever. some people will buy it just to show others they can afford it, same reason why people were buying overpriced cars.
by making that device a phone with internet access.
Fuck you WAP phones existed. Blackberries existed.
Apple made it better. There is innovation in execution (whether they “invented” things or not) and that is what Apple does. It’s why Blackberries are things of the past.
And they sucked ass by only half-assing the usability
Not like it matters because they’re a silicon valley giant so even the next zero change iphone will sell morbillion units.
The Apple Car was the hint the wheels fell off, because it was out of scope for Apple’s focus. And the Vision Pro is the next biggest one, because Steve haaaaaaated wearable computing.
Meh, when you have a chip that powerful and that energy efficient, trying something in wearable computing is a no brainer imo.
I still don’t know who wants wearable tech. Just using my phone can be painful at times. Notifications after notifications. Enable cookies, mark as read that work email, deal with the emoji in the group chat, ignore that spam call voicemail, ignore that update, dismiss that missed alarm, read the notification from my kid’s school that the PTO meeting was moved…
Now imagine you can’t just put it down. It is right there screaming for your attention. Just emails alone probably eat 10% or more of my working day. The very last thing I want is the screaming notifications to be on face in my field of vision.
Plus that thing is going to smell like ass in a month.
Wearable computing does not have to be a VR device, and it can be anything with a sensor, a cpu, gpu and networking features. Apple has at least one succesful wearable computing device, the apple watch. I am not touching vr anyway, it look pointless in nature and gives simulation sickness.
Trying, not releasing
he also hated non-skeuomorphic design, and yet here we are for the better in a world where we’ve moved on from that dated concept
just because he didn’t like something doesn’t make it wrong for apple to pursue
It only seems dated because everyone had this shitty flat interface crazy in the early to mid 2010s. Nowadays new, somewhat flat, but also skeuomorphic design languages like Fluent and Material 3 are getting attention
personally, i can’t stand either fluent or material either - the modern components and design language i keep coming back to is ant.design
anything skeuomorphic is just a huge waste of space - they add so much detail to the screen that has no function other than signaling “real world” application
WASTE OF SPACE? skeuomorphic designs were absolutely packed with information, nowadays we have shitty interfaces with almost no information (because the silicon valley arts graduates think people are too dumb to comprehend data) and lots of shitty pure white/pure black no gradient blank space.
You can criticize skeuomorphic design for lots of things but lack of information density ain’t one
The cracks have been visible for a very long time, most fanboys don’t want to see them though.
The cracks in this case are really that governments will no longer support the model that Apple created.
Cracks? Cracks! These are not cracks, these are features of our product. Their features of our business! It’s what differentiates us from the fractured Windows and Android communities. You want these crac…err features, you need them because it makes our products better.
/s
The cracks have been visible on just about every teen girl’s iphone screen.
Take a look at Apple stock over the last 12 years the company is worth literally 10x what it was worth when Jobs died. What a dumb framing.
Boeing’s stock kept rising in the last 10 years, because they were sacrificing what they should be doing for shareholder value. Stock price alone is not a good metric for companies.
I hate how people point towards profit and claim that is an argument a company is successful.
It is easy to make a lot of money when exploiting workers, customers and all the people of the countries you evade taxes in.
It is like claiming drug barons, mafia bosses and human traffickers are successful. Successful in evading the law maybe.
His notebook finally empty?
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Behind the Bastards just did a great series on him.
I’d never really understood how he could have killed himself with his fruitarian nonsense until I listened, but once you get the pattern of behavior all laid out, well.
RIP, bozo.
I’m on the last part of. Some people do not know the depths of how much of a basic garbage human being he was.
I never understood the Steve Jobs worship. We knew he was a shithead bully long before he died
His notebook empty. Cook, when the infinite loop fell!
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Now there is a reference I haven’t seen in a looong time. Thank you!
Yeah, like that lie they told for decades about how “mac can’t get viruses!” they got sued in a class action lawsuit over that claim, which is why they don’t EXPLICITLY say it anymore.
Or how apple can yoink anything you install off your apple devices whenever they want?
Yeah but in a person meetings are at an all time high and anonymous sticks of deoderant being left on peoples’ desks is at an all time low.
Lol, the crack appeared as soon after his death. Steve Jobs : no ipad air, no dividend for the share holders.
Guess what been announced in the months following his death.
Yeah bruh Tim Apple seems to be holding his own.
To be honest my old 2 gen iPad started showing cracks several years ago…
Do you mean your second generation iPad or your iPad that is 2 generations old?
Well kinda both. Got it used from my brother and I think it was the second gen made. It’s dead since a few years tho. The battery died.
