Remembering Steve Jobs
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The article remembers Steve Jobs on the anniversary of his passing, sparking a discussion about his legacy and impact on technology and design, with commenters sharing personal anecdotes and insights into his influence.
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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.
No one is forcing you to admire Steve Jobs.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But there are some real rough edges to be sanded down still. There are places where the transparency effects mean the underlying color/text bleeds into the menu / UI text that you actually want to read. It happens way less than you'd expect from critical screen shots, and a lot of the time it's less that it makes the UI text unreadable and more that it makes it look like a graphical glitch. But it does happen, that's not great and needs to get cleaned up.
There's also a weird level of "flatness" to some parts of the UI, that seem to rely on color contrasts to get the depth, but then that means that in certain situations the depth that should be there is missing. A good example if this is the safari button bar. On a site like HN where the background is white/off-white, the buttons and their bezels just sort of look like a flat white on a flat light grey. A site with a solid dark grey like daringfireball's website on the other hand allows the edges of the buttons to give a little bit of depth, but there's basically 0 contrast between the control backgrounds and the bar background. But then a site like slashdot has a medium grey background and now the buttons not only have color contrast but the slight shading around the bottom edges gives them depth that's not present in either of the other cases. When it works, the effect is nice, the problem is their theming system isn't (yet?) smart enough to make it work all the time.
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".
Based on what?
i thought you might be exaggerating but holy crap, you're right
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
Maybe it was this, not sure, not gonna go dig it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E8Gb7Ikm2o
That said I really didn’t that that contributor creating a helper function like that to do some bitwise stuff was such a big deal, I think Linus overreacted and I don’t even know that I agree with his take that on it, but I do think it is probably bad to have a big change like this late in the release window.
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.
Like Stone Cold Steve Austin vs Mr. McMahon. Both assholes, just one rich and the other not so rich.
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?
Interesting how the halo effect seems to revise the rest of Jobs' story. He was a conman, plain and simple.
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 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”.
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.
> 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
Nothing about social media is friendly to looking past social skill issues.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45482539
Obviously he has defenders and fans for various reasons, but I think its nice to see.
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.
Being agreeable is what leads to design by committee. And being agreeable gets you out of being called an asshole.
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.
The Airpods are one of the most successful products ever
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...
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.
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).
Recall all the things in tech that have peeved you since a long time:
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/managers 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.
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...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-denied-daughter-ye...
It is because of what Jobs did we know what not to do.
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.
Stripped away some other people's choice, though.
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...
"And they showed me, really, three things, but I was so blinded by the first one that I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming. They showed me that, but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was really a networked computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers all networked using email, etc., etc., but I didn't see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I've ever seen in my life."
https://youtu.be/J33pVRdxWbw?si=D6lfFFCXGcKNAQ4S&t=386
Jobs would revisit object-oriented programming and networked computing when he started NeXT in 1985. NeXT is closer to the Smalltalk environment than the original Macintosh was, with its support for networking thanks to its 4.2BSD underpinnings and with its object-oriented APIs and programming environment, coded in Objective-C, which is essentially the Smalltalk object model on top of C.
There's another Xerox PARC-inspired technology that was a core part of the NeXT experience: Display PostScript, which was NeXTSTEP's foundation for rendering graphics. While PostScript is an Adobe product, Adobe was founded by the creators of Interpress, an earlier page description language that was a Xerox PARC project.
Steve Jobs definitely knew a good thing when he saw it :)
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.
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...
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