Steve Jobs' Yacht Revealed 438
schwit1 writes "Venus, the incredible luxury yacht Steve Jobs had been designing up until his death a little over a year ago, seems to have made its first appearance as a finished product in the city of Aalsmeer in the Netherlands. Unsurprisingly, its design is breathtaking. Reportedly designed in a joint effort between Jobs himself and Philippe Starck, the stunning ship first showed up on the blog One More Thing, which posted some stills as well as a few other details. The ship is about 230 to 260 feet long, for instance, and made entirely of aluminum, which makes it particularly light. And if you had any doubt this is Steve Jobs' yacht, there are seven 27-inch iMacs in the wheelhouse. According to One More Thing's sources, the Jobs family will be present for the yacht's christening ceremony proper, thought it's unknown whether or not they intend to use it, or what its ultimate fate may be. Regardless of what may happen to her, she sure is a beauty. It's certainly a shame Steve Jobs never got the chance to see her finished."
Re:iSore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gross (Score:0, Insightful)
Jobs was such a parasitic being...
Anything that blocky can't be called sleek (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like the Jobs reality distortion effect persists after death!
That's not a yacht! (Score:4, Insightful)
http://diamondsyacht.com/ [diamondsyacht.com]
iBox (Score:5, Insightful)
I barely want it to float. I've seen many beautiful ships. There is nothing on that that has any grace to it.
Re:Grow up (Score:1, Insightful)
I tend to agree with you.
It in fact has graceful and classic lines reminiscent of the Art Deco movement of the 1920's.
But seriously, did you expect anything else but childish nonsense on Slashdot about Apple?
Buddhist (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have thought a Buddhist would strive to be unencumbered by such monuments to worldly wealth.
But then, I might not be well enough informed.
It's a shame? (Score:2, Insightful)
How is it a shame that a cruel, lying, megalomaniac who disavowed his daughter's existence for nearly 20 years didn't get to out on his yacht?
Re:iSore? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, it looks more like an iSore to me.
A two word description, sterile and boring. If you turned that in as a final design for design school I'd expect to flunk. Even the placement of the iMacs lacks imagination. I thought they'd be built in not sitting in a row blocking the window. A design fail on every level.
Re:How Cheap of them (Score:5, Insightful)
I think they gave them one of those one things. You know. Those things. What're they called? It's right here on the tip of my tongue. I hate it when this happens. One of those one things. Ah-ha! I got it: a paycheck.
The card the the iPod are just thank you's. Going above and beyond. Ya putz.
Re:iSore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Those wars are over, asshole.
You just stated and disproved your point in one sentence. Interesting.
Re:iBox (Score:5, Insightful)
Minimalist? I barely want it to float. I've seen many beautiful ships. There is nothing on that that has any grace to it.
I know what you mean. And i wonder if the Worm-Food Formerly Known As Jobs was yelling and screaming at the shipyard workers, telling them how worthless they are etc.
He was pretty damned abusive to the ppl who helped make him his fortune. i bet he was even worse when he is the customer.
Sorry fanbois but i won't gloss over his emotional abuse just because his company makes good products. Abuse is still wrong. Good products don't just cancel it out. If we are gonna make some monument of the man and his life and every detail of it then let's be honest and tell the whole truth and not just be hypocritical bastards who pick and choose only the parts that support our fanbois.
Phillipe Starck (Score:5, Insightful)
He's no genius, just an egomaniac with the ability to fool a surprising number of people at least some of the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is sunk in the first rough seas it encounters, if its design is anything like as poor as his laughable lemon squeezer.
Not even close. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Regardless of what may happen to her, she sure is a beauty."
No she isn't, she's hideous - a barge with a couple of boxes and some cardboard on top. Worse yet, with that straight bow and huge expanses of glass in the forepeak... she's not designed to keep the sea either. (And what kind of moron puts passenger spaces in the fo'c'sle anyhow? Other than a bunk slung between the mains, that's the worst part of the ship.)
She's obviously designed for nothing more than staying in calm waters or moored to impress the impressionable - an as a sailor, I say that's a abomination.
Re:Grow up (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a huge fan of art deco.
That boat is not art deco.
It's kind of blocky like the Victory Monument in Bolzano, northern Italy which an example of fascist art style.
And it kind of reminds me of the wells fargo plaza which is an example of the brutalist style except it's made from aluminum instead of concrete. The wiki says that brutalist examples are typically very linear, fortresslike and blockish.
Art deco was full of life, color, cool little design bits while also been clean and elegant.
That monochromatic floating white iron has none of those qualities.
Re:Imagine if this were Mitt Romney (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs cofounded a company that built useful things, occupied a position of influence in its industry, made many employees and stockholders wealthy, and satisfied many customers.
Romney did what for his money, again?
Re:iSore? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and y'know... he's dead. Those wars are over, asshole.
Nooo.... no they're not. The wars he started are really just beginning.
Steve Jobs was truly an evil and despicable person in the world of computing. One of the first to even understand what cyberspace *was*, what it *could* become, and how to ultimately control it.
It was once explained this way, and still is my favorite analogy:
Steve Jobs saw computing as a wide open territory yet to be populated. He did not want to empower people with free movement, or any freedom in general, in this new "space". The way he saw computing was like trains instead of cars. He would build the trains, sell the trains, and by building and owning the tracks, "guide" people in this new "space". He would be the gatekeeper, the guide, the prophet, and all would experience his world, on his terms, and why not? He's a fucking genius right ?
To say that man is a toxic plague upon cyberspace is a vast understatement. Where are we now with the whole concept of the walled gardens? How many other companies are rushing in with greedy fervor to make money the same way? Microsoft... I'm looking at you with Windows 8 and the app store.....
Yes, he could see that people wanted easy to use, shiny, very shiny, devices that just worked. Why not do that and control their ability at the same time?
If somebody brings up his anti-DRM stance, just remember that he had the foresight to see there was no winning that war, and that by controlling the walled garden and giving very cheap payment options, he would make up the money in volume and hardware sales.
The wars, the wars against people and freedom, have only just begun. Thanks to Steve Jobs, the people have started out with a severe disadvantage and handicap.
Although, to be fair, he is not wholly responsible for the horrific state we are in. Zuckerburg has some responsibility too.
only one hull ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Try as I might with these poor images, I can find only one hull. So many elegant multihull designs in recent decades and he has chosen a barge. It's not just speed that he's sacrificed, it's comfort, safety, fuel efficiency, ability to approach shallow water and, as so many have noticed, class.
Re:Phillipe Starck (Score:5, Insightful)
This Starck character appears to be the nautical version of the famed "architect" Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind designs art museums without vertical walls upon which to hang art.
Charlatan is the right word, sir. But perhaps a little lacking. Charlatans designed the emperor's new clothes. I think this class of people -- Libeskind, Christo, and a few handfuls of others -- have elevated the art of charlatanry to new heights. I can't help but wonder if their "designs" are tongue-in-cheek commentary on the vulgar tastes of a bourgeoisie who seem only too happy to embrace having their faces spat upon. The working stiffs know it's ugly and awful. Only the upwardly-mobile pretend to like having poo flung at them.
Re:iSnored? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've sung "The Good Ship Venus" a few times, myself.
'Venus' is a head-turner/head-scratcher in the same way a person always looks at a Yorkshire Terrier [wikipedia.org] doing #2 and wonders how it doesn't have its backside matted with dung.
1. It just does not look like it will be a good "sea-keeper", even with a slight turn near the bow.
2. The upright windows seem as though they will be hit bluntly by big seas, so must be quite strong.
3. There does not appear to be a way to wipe/wash the bridge windows, but they must have thought of that, surely.....
Re:iSore? (Score:5, Insightful)
No rage. Just a vast sea of disappointment and concern for our future.
I was not the one to come up with that analogy, nor did it come from a vacuum either. Jobs did not do great things for computing. Creating admittedly great devices is merely a distraction for the toxic environment he created where consumers do not own their own devices, decide what software and media is acceptable for the devices, and have freedom in general.
It's not like I would have to try very hard to get disappointment, frustration, and yes, rage from app developers and vendors that work with Apple either.
The app store is not a great idea, and it is a terrible execution of it for that matter. Creating a walled garden approach to computing is never a good idea. I might feel different about it if:
1) Any developer could submit any app, without restrictions, and receive a fair price. I won't argue about Apple's cut for this, which is way too high, either.
2) The consumer owned their own device and did not need to the endorsement of the Supreme Court to "jail break" their device to load software, and basically, enjoy what should be the basic fundamental rights of anybody in the computing "world".
An app store as a distribution model, great idea. An app store as a tool for totalitarian suppression of a population (mostly sheep), terrible idea that is a pox on society.
You can try to attribute hate and malice to my "rant", but how about coming up with good defenses of for the walled garden and lack of freedom?
Re:Ocean Air - Corrosive? (Score:0, Insightful)
All this and you've never heard of using aluminum in salt water before? Really? REALLY??
Jobs' true design ability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iSnored? (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like a boat designed by two people who weren't actually interested in boats or why good ones look the way they do. Let's just hope for the crew's sake that a proper marine architect was engaged for all the bits below the waterline.
Indeed, WinTel was a blessing not a curse (Score:5, Insightful)
It ain't just Steve Jobs/Apple, had the PC become owned by IBM, Atari, Commodore and god knows who else (japan had its own eco-structure and it becomes more and more obvious as the world gets smaller that back then every country had their own home computer brand), IT would have looked very different. ALL those companies were about owning the entire market, from the computers themselves (go buy a Commodore from Compaq) to the storage media, the joysticks EVERYTHING.
It is thanks to Compaq, MS and Intel (and the "failures" of the rest) that we got this accidentally remarkably open platform. Apple sold expensive PC's, thanks to Compaq creation of the IBM-compatible, we got cheap PC's and thanks to those who cloned Compaq's we got EVEN cheaper PC's. Some might point out the Apple Mini but Apple would NEVER have produced that IF they didn't have to because of cheap PC's. Proof? Apple didn't produce them when there weren't any cheap PC's. That is why Apple almost went bust the first time around.
Thanks to MS we got an OS that would work ACROSS cpu's... yes i know AMD and Intel both made X86 but if you think that makes them automatically fully compatible in all but their most base modes, you are a silly person. And this gave buyers, a CHOICE. Apple/Atari/IBM never gave you a choice. You buy what they choose to sell you. Intel thought 33mhz was enough for the 386(if I remember correctly) and AMD made a 40mhz version and people could choose. Could choose NOT to buy IBM or Dell or Compaq and roll their own.
It all happened by accident and thank god for it, wintel was/isn;t perfect but we narrowly avoided situations that would have been far far worse.
But that doesn't mean we are saved. The openess and freedom of the PC and internet might have come around by accident but that doesn't mean it can change.
Bootcamp, was that introduced because Apple wanted you to be able to use the OS of your choice or because they knew that if people couldn't run Windows on a Mac, they would sell fewer Mac's? I seen an amazing amount of Macbooks with the Aero design on the desktop.
Closed architectures are not just limited to niche attempts like Linux. If a mono-culture exists, control becomes easy. The US is rather famous for NOT having state censorship for TV such as England has. Instead, the TV broadcasters "choose" to censor themselves and no politician has to stand up and say"I want to limit free speech" but can "think of the children" thanks to self-censorship.
There have been countless stories of mega-stores in the US censoring products. Walmart censoring music CD's, App store refusing to carry apps. This doesn't matter, as long as a free alternative exist, the internet in general. But as AOL has shown and MS network and countless other attempts, there is a constant push to create walled gardens. And a walled garden isn't that bad, as long as you can get out with relative ease but nobody builds a walled garden with the idea that people should be able to get out easily.
When mega-stores are the only places to shop, their control becomes extremely risky to a free society. And with the app-store, Apple and Steve Jobs have given everyone who values real freedom a frightening look at how IT could have turned out if Jobs had sold cheaper PC's.
Jobs has the most depressing eulogy you could think off: "Thank god the man was a failure at the most critical time". And we can only pray that it remains true because if the app-store walled garden approach succeeds in W8 new app-store, the PC environment as we know it, is doomed.
Re:Talk about a useless troll (Score:0, Insightful)
Did the daughter he denied for so many years get to see the yacht also? Talk about worthless, you idolize scumbags.
Re:iSore? (Score:4, Insightful)
This.... a thousand million times... this. I am so sick of the hero worship. Albert Einstein was a genius. Nikolai Tesla was a Genius. Thomas Edison was a great inventor and, arguably, a genius. Steve Jobs was none of these. He was a great salesman and perhaps even an extraordinary salesman, but not a genius. I heard some kid talking the other day about how Steve Jobs was a genius because he invented the smartphone and the MP3 player. It was all I could do to not slap the kid.
Let's be clear. Steve Jobs did NOT invent the smartphone. He did not invent MP3 players. He did not invent the personal computer. He merely repackaged those ideas into something else. Steve jobs was a great salesman, nothing more.
Re:iSore? (Score:2, Insightful)
But y'know what? Jobs was a fucking genius, and that boat is a clear expression of how his vision matured over the years.
No.
That "boat" is a monument to the stupidity of ignoring weather and physics for the sake of the designer's ego. There are reasons small, lightweight boats of this type all look pretty much the same, and these can be summed up with a single word: seaworthiness.
This thing looks like the design was taken from an oil tanker or a bulk freighter, where there is so much inertian that the shape of the superstructure does not matter.
Re:iSore? (Score:2, Insightful)
If Jobs "Great Genius" was the fact that he " recognized the great work at PARC" then you are a genius as well for recognizing Jobs genius.
Jobs was by no means a stupid man.
He was harsh, demanding a decent business man and a very good marketer.
Woz was a fucking genius. Steve Jobs was a smart asshole who bought or stole every good idea he had and sued anyone who had a similar idea.