I think people love to hate Steve. The one thing people love more than a great figurehead, is hating one. I think that Steve had a great internal model of how to combine form/function.
iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, but it may as well have been. It brought the smartphone to the mass market.
Part of it was a great advertising campaign, which unlike the smartphones at the time, pitched it as a luxury good as opposed to an executive enterprise one. You owned a blackberry to answer emails wherever and whenever you were, you owned an iphone so you can check Google Maps. A large part of it was redefining both the form factor, and use case of a smartphone.
I’m pretty sure the main reason people hate Jobs is because by all accounts he was an absolute ass and was objectively a wackadoodle when it came to that homeopathic healing shit and not showering.
Oh, he was an absolute asshole. Seems I deleted that sentence. RIP me.
“I have enabled and ushered in a new age of knowledge access like no other, here’s a cool way to eat that goes against all reasonable nutritionists’ advice. Sounds good to me!” - Really seems like a fitting way to kick off this century IMO.
Yep. He was the Elon Musk of those years. Great at marketing but an asshole to work for and likely would have started spreading his insane crap at some point to the masses.
At the time iPhone 1 didn’t seem like anything smarter than an iPod that could take calls. I was hyped over the Nokia 770 and eager to see what else would come out with Meamo OS. It took till mid 2008 until iPhone 3G and iOS 2 (and app store) were released.
An ipod with a much larger screen (320×240 vs 480x320), a camera, and could take phone calls, browse the internet, and do email.
His notebook finally empty?
Just nothing but pages of “exploit and abuse engineers”
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!
Wozniak, with Steve at Atari - tamarian for getting taken advantage of in business
Now there is a reference I haven’t seen in a looong time. Thank you!
Yeah bruh Tim Apple seems to be holding his own.
12 years… F…
Not like it matters because they’re a silicon valley giant so even the next zero change iphone will sell morbillion units.
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.
TL;DR: Wahhh apple isn’t jamming enough AI crap in their products.
Jobs was once asked about what helped to set Apple apart from other companies. In response, he spoke of his fondness of a quote from ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky who once said what set him apart as an ice hockey player is that “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Yet this is exactly where Apple finds itself right now, especially in relation to generative AI. While it is true Apple has long integrated AI technologies into the iPhone and its other devices in the form of features like computational photography and Siri, it has also trailed in these areas as well.
Google, conversely, AI from the start, making it a centerpiece of its Pixel smartphone strategy from the moment the original Pixel device shipped over 8 years ago with Google Assistant its heart coupled with computational photography chops. It has been focused on bringing useful and advanced (non-generative) AI-based features to users on a much broader scale than Apple, such as Call Screening, Google Lens, Top Shot, Smart Compose, among many others.
Pffft. Fuuuuuuuuck that.
Thanks for saving me a click (and multiple eyerolls)
“starting to”
Lol
This article is garbage. The only thing that Steve Jobs did was have ideas and enough narcissism to force them on other people. Engineers and designers far smarter than he did the actual work.
To be fair, he also had an eye for good product design. Not the skills to implement it but the ability to see whether a design is good.
Of course he expressed this skill by yelling at his engineers and designers. A lot. Because he was an asshole.
Steve Jobs was an awful person, the brand was already cracked
The amount of credit people give Steve Jobs is such a kick to the nuts to all the engineers that designed those products
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.
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?
Quick plug for the Behind the Bastards series on Jobs
I fucking love that podcast. So well researched and perfectly presented
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Progression Jobs didn’t do though, just Apple’s engineers.
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!
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.
The amount of credit people give Steve Jobs is such a kick to the nuts to all the engineers that designed those products
Try to lead an engineering team and make them all pull the same way and create a high quality, cohesive offering. It’s not as simple as you think. Good engineers should be recognized, but so should actual good leadership and technical vision. Steve’s visions may not always have been hits (and he often struggled with pricing) but it’s undeniable he had vision.
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.
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 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.
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.
Look at NeXT right before Apple ‘bought’ them. They were pretty much on their deathbed. Turns out, marketing $10,000 workstations to college students isn’t such a smart idea.
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.
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.
A diet in which he thought would magically avoid creating body odor.
Those of us who have this problem know that your diet really does affect that. Actually others can sometimes say what we’ve eaten a few hours before.
However, Jobs’ case is kinda extreme, usually eating less sugar and fat and more carbs is kinda sufficient.
Jobs actually believed he didn’t need to take baths though, it was more extreme than just reducing his smell, he legitimately believed he didn’t smell at all.
Nobody ever said smart people can’t be stupid too.
And that 90% is average number, it’s quite possible that with his money that number would be higher…
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.
I see you also listen to Behind The Bastards.
Actually no, I think it’s a well enough known thing though. But for sure he was a right cunt.
He also jumped the line to get a liver transplant once he, presumably, decided maybe there’s a chance the diet thing wouldn’t work out.
Died shortly thereafter, wasting a perfectly good liver.
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.
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.
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.
Idk, more and more people are switching to mac and ditching windows. If their m1 thing continues being successful they’re going to have a more severe monopoly than Microsoft ever did. It’s one thing to patch Microsoft’s half ass attempts to embrace extend destroy Linux but that isn’t going to work out as well anymore once all the mainstream stuff is quarantined to an entire different cpu architecture and computers that no longer use off the shelf parts.
Luckily the only software they really have right now that Linux doesn’t is that s tier video editor and then no one wants to use their stupid Metal graphic acceleration so games aren’t going to have a hard ass time taking off as well. Too bad most people think “command lines are too hard”.
The common person is going to lose access to computers as we know them today if Apple wins. If it gets to the point where the only modem mainstream systems left are M1 macs, everything computer related is going to get 10x as expensive. $1000 for a potato ass MacBook Air is already obnoxious but when that’s the only choice, that potato ass MacBook Air is going to cost $10k.
Idk if I agree with this. I feel like 1000 goes further for a Mac than 1000 on on an equivalent PC, least as far as user experience goes. Windows arm isn’t there yet as far as support from vendors goes. With apple everyone hopped on the train fast , it was a smooth transition for average workflows. It will be faster and/or more efficient. They certainly have their problems , mainly the base storage , and display limitations but at least they’re fixing the latter of the two.
Not everyone wants to navigate a computer with a terminal. Hell , apple silicon Mac’s have outperformed Mac’s that cost 3 times the amount. I think you overestimate the need of a more powerful laptop in that space. The real difference is that Mac has N AppStore and large enough dev base that unless it’s some obscure windows specific software or games , the app likely exists on Mac. Word , Spotify , adobe adobe apps , he’ll even epic has software coming to Macs for hospitals.
If the price just gets so absurd , the common person will just use cheaper and or older alternatives. But it’s not like apple hasn’t been competing in the mid to low range for iPhones. M1 Mac’s are still excellent deals to buy 3 years later and eventually they can offer Macs at a lower price point. They aren’t stupid enough to isolate the common man when other options will always exist
People aren’t ditching Windows. They’re ditching non-Apple laptops that happen to have Windows.
Cause honestly laptop offerings are sucky one way or another these days.
It’s shocking how bad the competition is in the laptop space. There are good options, but none of them have the great battery life, great screen, performance, and good trackpad all in one device. The margins being so low probably don’t help the situation. Developing for Windows native is meh edging on bad, so most apps these days are available on whatever other platform you use. The ship won’t sink because of Windows, it’ll sink because people aren’t buying the hardware that has Windows.
by making that device a phone with internet access.
Fuck you WAP phones existed. Blackberries existed.
And they sucked ass by only half-assing the usability
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.
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.
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.
It’s almost like… endless growth is unsustainable.
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.
Starting? lol
Wow is that really what the Apple campus looks like? That’s hilarious. Like if Nintendo HQ was a big warp pipe.
Except the warp pipe would be cool.
