Remembering Steve Jobs, 10 Years Later (wired.com) 187
Jony Ive: Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect -- not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely.
I had thought that by now there would be reassuring comfort in the memory of my best friend and creative partner, and of his extraordinary vision.
But of course not. Ten years on, he manages to evade a simple place in my memory. My understanding of him refuses to remain cozy or still. It grows and evolves.
Perhaps it is a comment on the daily roar of opinion and the ugly rush to judge, but now, above all else, I miss his singular and beautiful clarity. Beyond his ideas and vision, I miss his insight that brought order to chaos.
It has nothing to do with his legendary ability to communicate but everything to do with his obsession with simplicity, truth and purity. Steven Levy, writing at Wired: The prudent thing to do would have been to write Steve Jobs'obituary well ahead of his death. We all knew that he did not have much time. For almost a year, even while Apple stuck to the story -- hoping against hope -- that its cofounder and CEO would make it, the body of the world's most iconic executive was telling a different story. It was saying goodbye, and so was he. My own farewell session had come earlier in the year, in the office he occupied on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters at the time. Fellow journalist John Markoff and I had set up the meeting specifying no agenda, but all three of us knew it was about closure. It was the middle of the work day, and thousands of people were on campus, but not a single call or visitor interrupted our 90-minute conversation. As if he were already a ghost.
Despite that evidence, I could not bring myself to pre-write that obituary. Call it denial. So when I got the call late in the afternoon of October 5, 2011, that Jobs was gone, I was stunned. And I had nothing. For the next four hours, I banged away on the computer that Steve Jobs ushered into the world and told the story of his life and legacy as best I could, in all its glory and gimcrackery. In the last paragraph of the obituary I never wanted to write, I said, "The full legacy of Steve Jobs will not be sorted out for a very long time." I think we're still sorting it out. There will never be a leader, innovator or personality quite like him. And we're still living in his world.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect -- not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely.
I had thought that by now there would be reassuring comfort in the memory of my best friend and creative partner, and of his extraordinary vision.
But of course not. Ten years on, he manages to evade a simple place in my memory. My understanding of him refuses to remain cozy or still. It grows and evolves.
Perhaps it is a comment on the daily roar of opinion and the ugly rush to judge, but now, above all else, I miss his singular and beautiful clarity. Beyond his ideas and vision, I miss his insight that brought order to chaos.
It has nothing to do with his legendary ability to communicate but everything to do with his obsession with simplicity, truth and purity. Steven Levy, writing at Wired: The prudent thing to do would have been to write Steve Jobs'obituary well ahead of his death. We all knew that he did not have much time. For almost a year, even while Apple stuck to the story -- hoping against hope -- that its cofounder and CEO would make it, the body of the world's most iconic executive was telling a different story. It was saying goodbye, and so was he. My own farewell session had come earlier in the year, in the office he occupied on the fourth floor of One Infinite Loop, Apple's headquarters at the time. Fellow journalist John Markoff and I had set up the meeting specifying no agenda, but all three of us knew it was about closure. It was the middle of the work day, and thousands of people were on campus, but not a single call or visitor interrupted our 90-minute conversation. As if he were already a ghost.
Despite that evidence, I could not bring myself to pre-write that obituary. Call it denial. So when I got the call late in the afternoon of October 5, 2011, that Jobs was gone, I was stunned. And I had nothing. For the next four hours, I banged away on the computer that Steve Jobs ushered into the world and told the story of his life and legacy as best I could, in all its glory and gimcrackery. In the last paragraph of the obituary I never wanted to write, I said, "The full legacy of Steve Jobs will not be sorted out for a very long time." I think we're still sorting it out. There will never be a leader, innovator or personality quite like him. And we're still living in his world.
It is fine to respect him, but try to be honest (Score:5, Interesting)
The book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson does a much better job of capturing him than this adoring summary.
auto complete strikes again (Score:2)
Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, whenever I think of Steve, this is the story I remember [cultofmac.com]. Yes, it's the one where he'd lease a new Mercedes every few months to avoid having to ever get license plates and then would park in handicapped spots because the fine, even if charged, was meaningless to him.
Re:Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Interesting)
When I think of Steve, I think of four things:
1: The new Mercedes every few months, so he doesn't have to worry about handicapped rules.
2: The ship he stiffed the shipwright on.
3: Screwing over family.
4: Leaving $0 to charity. Even the brutal robber barons in the later 1800s left hospitals, amphitheaters, and college grants behind. Jobs left absolutely nothing for anyone else.
To a number of people, he is just another egotistical billionaire, took much from society, and gave nothing back.
Re:Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Interesting)
The #1 thing that comes to mind for me is that this is the guy who took a chunk out of general-purpose computing, bringing walled gardens with an impenetrability and licensing cost that '80s computer manufacturers could only dream of and a sea of '90s-ish crappy shareware/trialware/adware to the modern computing experience, after we thought they were safely buried in the dustbin of history. Really great contributions there...
Re:Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that why so many still lust after the era of Mac clones, and show just how much they dislike Jobs by creating mackintoshes. And let's not get into the demand for NeXT hardware and software that would do an Amiga fan proud.
Re:Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's agree that he was a very troubled boy.
Clearly a lot in his childhood went very wrong.
I don't like him either, but I still have to point out, that he *was* just a human, after all.
And we certainly haven't been his therapists.
Re:Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are being too kind. He was a litigious deadbeat dad who denied paternity until his child was an adult. The outright contempt he showed to fellow humans, as evidenced by his manipulation of handicap rules you mention, is the same contempt he showed to his own family. He was truly a cretin. Don't forget that after he destroyed his own pancreas out of hubris, he bought his way in front of an (almost certainly) more deserving organ recipient, then wasted that life saving transplant as well. Nothing good should be said about this asshole.
On praising his "creativity", he was the one kneecapped product after product with innovations such as no power buttons and inadequate cooling, he was the one who didn't think a phone was interesting but a tablet was, that believed that smartphones should not have 3rd party apps, that text messaging was useless because of email, that a phone should not support MMS, that tablets and phones need large bezels for your fingers to rest. Jobs was wildly overrated if not not incompetent as an "idea" man, Apple succeeded in spite of it.
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After the respect I have for his obsessiveness and hyperfocus, I have nothing but contempt. The long tail of entropy that is Apple is a great money machine, but its values are gone awry-- if they ever had them.
This secretive, don't-you-dare-touch-my-supply-chain monstrosity whose products are designed NOT to be repaired, creates only profits for its shareholders, and the rest must bow fealty. Fie.
Jobs marched differently, and helped create geek wardrobe. And ultimately that's what Apple is, a designer manuf
Re: Speaking of autos... (Score:2)
Re:Speaking of autos... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wait, how did autocomplete befall you? As a geek on a geek site?
Why didn't you turn it off, first thing after disabling the "telemetry" on whatever you're using there? I thought that was normal.
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Sometimes people mistype things on their own. Even geeks. Yes, even you sometimes, probably.
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Creativity thankfully doesn't imply that it was a good thing. Because surely, as a geek, you will agree that is was mostly going off in the wrongest possible direction, especially in the iYears: Taking as much power and choice away from users in the name of "simplicity" (but actually feeding his obsession with control). ... As if you couldn't have *both*...
(At least during his time, the hardware was still nice, justifying the bling status. Sadly, that's gone now.)
Also, let's be honest, macOS was an Alto kno
Re:It is fine to respect him, but try to be honest (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, let's be honest, macOS was an Alto knock-off, and always will be.
Not this again (still).
Sorry, wrong.
While the Lisa Desktop owes some measure of Look and Feel with the Xerox OS, it also includes some very important usability improvements, too.
Note the post in this thread (and links therein) from Bruce Horn, one of the names listed as the Developer of the Macintosh Finder (IIRC) :
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple... [reddit.com]
The underlying LisaOS (and later the Macintosh System and Finder) are a from-scratch OS, based much more on SmallTalk OOP concepts (with some Tektronix ViewPort thrown-in) than Xerox's OS implementation.
By the way, SmallTalk-80 was given to Apple (as well as HP, Tektronix, and DEC, and also UC Berkely) by Xerox for the express purpose of "peer-review and implementing on their platforms."
So, if LisaOS/MacintoshOS were a "knock off" of Alto, it appears to have been not only approved; but actually expected.
(Quickest link I could find on this point, Sorry) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The Steve Jobs I remember? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny... The Steve Jobs that I remember was an asshole who verbally abused and overworked his employees, stiffed his wife on child support, and always parked his car in handicapped parking spots so he didn't have to walk an extra 100 feet to his office.
I never understood why the tech press always had rose colored glasses when they talked about this guy. He was NOT a good person. He was a marketing genius, though.
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Re:The Steve Jobs I remember? (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, if someone did a lot of stupid, selfish, or counterproductive things in life -- such as attempting to cure pancreatic cancer with wheatgrass shakes, treating Turing equivalence as a bug to be fixed, or buying a new Mercedes every six months to dodge traffic tickets -- people tend to forget their good qualities, which may have been equally profound.
It's almost as if portraying human beings as demons or saints is doomed to be an exercise in rhetorical masturbation.
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But were not. There were no good qualities.
You'll have to accept the judgement of history on that, and history disagrees strongly with you. Sorry.
Fact is, you can't throw a rock in the Valley without hitting a Woz who never found his Jobs. Light and dark, yin and yang, yoni and lingam. Nothing meaningful ever happens without both.
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America has a long tradition of worshipping and voting for successful assholes.
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Now, now, is that any way to talk about Washington.
Re:The Steve Jobs I remember? (Score:4, Insightful)
I owe my career, my hobbies, and my direction in life to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. One invented the Apple II and the other got it into my parents living room when I was in 2nd grade. Was he an asshole? It doesn't matter.
Puh-lease! (Score:2, Insightful)
I owe my career, my hobbies, and my direction in life to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.
Puh-fucking-lease!
If it hadn't been them, someone else would've taking their place - gushing over them like a teenage girl just makes you look like a total fanboy (read: idiot that thinks their idol can do no wrong, ever).
Re: Puh-lease! (Score:2)
Except it wasn't someone else, was it? What a stupid comment to make. And if the Wright Brothers hadn't flown at Kitty Hawk, someone else would have, eventually, as well. But they didn't. History is what it is, regardless of your opinions of the people that accomplished it. Dismissing accomplishments out of grudgery or whatever you have going on is just idiotic.
Flame Jobs for being a complete prick (he was), or tear him up for the absolute shitty way he handled his family (he did), or lambast him for t
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The Newton. [youtu.be] :-D
Re: Puh-lease! (Score:2)
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And he would have been exposed to piss-poor engineering practices, such as how to build a 1200-baud disk drive using almost as many chips as Woz needed for a whole motherboard.
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And he would have been exposed to piss-poor engineering practices, such as how to build a 1200-baud disk drive using almost as many chips as Woz needed for a whole motherboard.
Hell, even when Apple decided to put an entire 6502 computer in the 3.5" "Liron" drive (and turn the IWM on the Apple //c and IIgs into a glorified Serial interface), they still couldn't put as many chips on the drive-board as Commode-Door did on the 1541 world's slowest disk drive!
(Sorry, I can't find a good shot of the chip-side (bottom) of the Liron board; but IIRC, it had about 4 or 5 chips on it, including the IWM and the 65C02) :
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardow... [ifixit.com]
vs. the 1541:
https://www.youtube.com/wat [youtube.com]
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In the psychology books that I've read it is noted that people with psychopath/sociopath, machiavellian, and narcissist personalities are often able to charm and thus manipulate people that aren't too close to them due to their confident superficial exterior.
But those that are close to them and around them for a longer period of time realize pretty quickly what type of asshole personalities those people have.
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Cheapest shot and lowest hanging slam on here — you never worked with or knew the man
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What I like is he gets all this credit for saving apple when he was instrumental in pushing those crappy Macintosh computers over the extremely impressive Apple 2 GS. He pushed hard to raise the price of the Apple 2gs Way beyond what it made sense to so that he could tank the product line and move on to the Macintosh. So for years you had a crummy black and white Macintosh as their main computer and they completely abandoned large install base of Apple II users.
The WDC 65C816 platform was an architectural dead end. The 65C832 never actually got built, whereas the 68000 had been available as a 32-bit chip for 5 years by the time the first Mac shipped (two years before the IIgs). The mistake wasn't dropping the Apple II line. The mistake was releasing the IIgs and muddying the waters. They should have put that graphics and sound technology into the Macintosh line and released a color Mac a year earlier (or more), and released the IIe compatibility card at the sa
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What I like is he gets all this credit for saving apple when he was instrumental in pushing those crappy Macintosh computers over the extremely impressive Apple 2 GS. He pushed hard to raise the price of the Apple 2gs Way beyond what it made sense to so that he could tank the product line and move on to the Macintosh. So for years you had a crummy black and white Macintosh as their main computer and they completely abandoned large install base of Apple II users.
The WDC 65C816 platform was an architectural dead end. The 65C832 never actually got built, whereas the 68000 had been available as a 32-bit chip for 5 years by the time the first Mac shipped (two years before the IIgs). The mistake wasn't dropping the Apple II line. The mistake was releasing the IIgs and muddying the waters. They should have put that graphics and sound technology into the Macintosh line and released a color Mac a year earlier (or more), and released the IIe compatibility card at the same time to provide for a seamless transition.
You are completely correct!
See how easy it is to make corporate decisions for someone else, especially given the benefit of a few decades of reflection... (Just Teasing, honest!)
Wasn't part of the problem getting Color QuickDraw (QuickDraw 32) finished and qualified?
Shame about the 65C832, though. It would have been a screamer! My Apple ][+ actually sports a 65C802 (the 8-bit data bus, 6502 pin-compatible version of the 65816). It was fun to play with; but you couldn't write any software for sale that depen
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What I like is he gets all this credit for saving apple when he was instrumental in pushing those crappy Macintosh computers over the extremely impressive Apple 2 GS. He pushed hard to raise the price of the Apple 2gs Way beyond what it made sense to so that he could tank the product line and move on to the Macintosh. So for years you had a crummy black and white Macintosh as their main computer and they completely abandoned large install base of Apple II users.
The WDC 65C816 platform was an architectural dead end. The 65C832 never actually got built, whereas the 68000 had been available as a 32-bit chip for 5 years by the time the first Mac shipped (two years before the IIgs). The mistake wasn't dropping the Apple II line. The mistake was releasing the IIgs and muddying the waters. They should have put that graphics and sound technology into the Macintosh line and released a color Mac a year earlier (or more), and released the IIe compatibility card at the same time to provide for a seamless transition.
You are completely correct!
See how easy it is to make corporate decisions for someone else, especially given the benefit of a few decades of reflection... (Just Teasing, honest!)
If I had been an adult at the time and had known more about the technology, I'd have probably come to the same conclusions back then. The WDC chip line was more than half a decade behind in terms of delivering 32-bit capabilities, and the first Mac (1984) had a CPU that was more than twice as fast (even after adjusting for the per-clock superiority of the 65k line over the 68k line) as the Apple IIgs (1986).
Apple continued to build the Apple II line because they were cheaper to build, and the Mac was too e
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The WDC 65C816 platform was an architectural dead end.
Agreed. It was an okay microcontroller, and decent for a dedicated games console (SNES), but computing was moving toward multitasking, and the 65C816 wouldn't have used memory efficiently because of the granularity of its paging. They should have put all that effort toward something like the Mac LC with 6502 card. Even better would have been to have an emulator like they did for 68K on PPC, but just like old 8088 code on a PC AT, too much 6502 code counted cycles or depended on the particular speed of execu
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Even better would have been to have an emulator like they did for 68K on PPC, but just like old 8088 code on a PC AT, too much 6502 code counted cycles or depended on the particular speed of execution.
A translator could presumably add busy waits to slow things down. After all, if they had never built the IIgs, you'd be talking about emulating a 1 MHz 8-bit CPU on an 8 MHz 32-bit CPU. It's not like the 6502 is a complicated architecture. :-)
That said, the cooperative multitasking nature of Macs in that day would probably have made software emulation somewhat glitchy, so a hardware solution would probably have made more sense.
The graphics modes would also have been troublesome to implement without special video card support.
I doubt that would have been a problem. After all, AFAIK, all early Macs used
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He pushed hard to raise the price of the Apple 2gs Way beyond what it made sense to so that he could tank the product line and move on to the Macintosh.
You're right that Jobs desperately wanted to stop selling the Apple //e and IIgs; however, IIRC, Apple didn't stop doing so until at least 1993 (Wikipedia says November 1993 for the //e (which was still wildly popular in K-12 schools), and November 1992 for the IIgs), some eight years after the introduction of the Macintosh, and nearly a decade after the introduction of the Lisa.
So, it wasn't exactly overnight. The rest of the Board wouldn't let him kill their cash cow!
But yes, Woz's last great Apple ][,//,
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Vision (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve Jobs had one idea that changed the world, that computers should be readily accessible to anyone. His (and Jeff Raskin's) idea was that a computer should be like a toaster. You bring it home, plug it into the wall, turn it on and start using it.
Power users and geeks hate this concept, but you don't change the world building exotic performance cars for people to race around the track with. You change the world building a car anyone can use and haul their family across the country with. /Grew up using a Mac AND a Commodore 64. //The Mac was totally hackable - you hit the interrupt button on the side of the case, drop into MacsBug, and edit the machine code of an in-memory app in real time
Re:Vision (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideas are cheap. Execution is the hard part. And the Woz deserves more credit than Jobs.
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Re:Vision (Score:5, Insightful)
For all his critique and grousing, Jobs was the best thing that ever happened to Woz, not the Apple I.
Woz would have sold maybe 20 boards at most and that would have been the end of it.
Would have written some clever assembly on some clever hardware that a dozen people ran for a few months and then forgot.
.
Re:Vision (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you've mixed up Steve Jobs (Score:2)
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True his initial insight is powering a century of disruption(“paradigm shift” in SJ lingo).
The truth is that SJ had one more deeper philosophical question. Microsoft bark screens incessantly faulted user behavior for its faults. People hated Windows and hated their job in Windows. SteveJobs asked:
“What if it were possible, could people love a thing, a computer, as much as they love other people?”
1990 in NYC at Swiss Bank SteveJobs dropped that mind bomb in private. Inthought it was
if you can't say something nice... (Score:3)
Anti-Vaxxer preview (Score:2, Insightful)
"The doctors suck and I'll cure myself with guru shit"
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It might be interesting to do an analysis of anti-vaxxers based on what kind of phone they own.
To Respect doesn't mean to like. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have a problem with putting people on a high pedestal, giving them attributes that they don't have, and you project your needs and wants onto that person to be able to achieve your particular perfect world.
We did this with Steve Jobs, We are doing this with Elon Musk, There is a lot of this with Obama and Trump (depending on your politics). We are hoping to find a person who will be our personal hero.
These people are not your personal hero. You can respect them for what they have accomplished and achieved, however they are just as flawed people like the rest of us. Jobs was a tyrant with people who didn't agree with his vision. Musk gets separated from reality, and tries too hard to be optimal at the cost of effective. Obama had a lot of big talk, with little action, Trump was only concerned about his branding. These people who are considered accomplished by many, can be respected, however they are not hero's nor will they ever meet your expectation of the perfect solution.
Human flaws (Score:5, Insightful)
That is perhaps the key: some feel saints are unrealistic fairytales, but admire people who are successful despite having human flaws just like they themselves do.
Steve had a nose for the consumer market that nobody could match. Microsoft and other co's poured billions into similar products and failed repeatedly. He thumbed his nose at their bumbling bureaucracy, kicking them in the head with K.I.S.S. and a willingness to toss tradition and industry habits.
Sure, he made mistakes, but wasn't afraid to move on. In MS and corporate-land, those who make expensive mistakes are probably demoted or shunned. Maybe a big ego is necessarily to keep self-doubt from making one tepid.
Some who worked for him spent grueling intense hours on projects, but then saw them change the world, and wouldn't undo that experience.
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We are hoping to find a person who will be our personal hero.
Ah Gandhi, at least we put you in a video game.
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Musk gets separated from reality, and tries too hard to be optimal at the cost of effective
You're confusing Musk with Bezos. Say what you want about Musk, but if he were any more "effective" he'd be a villain in a 007 movie.
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That's the most ridiculous thing I've read all day, and that's saying something.
Musk is a driven head case who is basically our generation's version of Howard Hughes. Trump is a two-bit con man who rubbed a bottle the wrong way and summoned Steve Bannon. They couldn't be more different.
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You need to give him credit for creating the PC revolution. Woz, was happy to stay with the Computer Hobbiest group. Making Computer Kits. Other computer makers were mostly just focused on big business, or video game consoles. It did take vision and conviction to create a new market out of nowhere.
But yes he was a jerk and was rather harsh and cruel to others, but that is why you should respect his accomplishments but not think he is the perfect human roll model.
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You need to give him credit for creating the PC revolution.
He also nailed his 95 theses to the church door, invented the integrated circuit, brought Viagra to market, and delivered cocaine and hookers to all the poor children of the world every Christmas.
I'd also say "he cured cancer" but we all know how that went and no amount of rewriting history is gonna fix that one.
Interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
What's one way to memorialize a perfectionist.
Anybody can bitch and moan that things aren't perfect, making people's lives hell, so that one singular vision can be achieved. Anyone *can* do that. But we *don't*, because inflicting pain in other people, and living our own lives in the misery of imperfection, is a shitty way to go through life.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry but I suffered from perfectionism, and it is actually a really bad thing. I mean literally the result of a traumatic childhood bad.
Because there's a healthy balance between how good you want it be, and how much resources are actually *worth* it.
As AvE said [Paraphrasing here]: Anyone can make a great tool. But it's gonna be expensive, and take forever. The hard job is to make it to a price point!
That's true for time, space and energy too.
I used to sit there for three months, making the perfect plan of everything in my life... instead of actually doing anything! Even when I knew I'm gonna be without food and lose my apartment. ... It HAD to be perfect. ... Everyone always told me how perfect the things were that I made. ... And then about 5 minutes after I was done, the doorbell rang, and brought news that completely changed everything. I had to drop the entire thing. ... That literally happened. Exactly like this. After that I sat there for hours, just staring at the wall.
I just couldn't stop and call it "good enough", even if was long past the date where it would have still been useful. . Even if it was physically painful and an entire waste of time by now... because it It was MORE physically painful to just abort it right there.
I realized it was a mental problem. Caused by total chaos and constant peril in childhood.
Took me quite a while to grow the experiences that it's not that time anymore, and to change my intuition about what's best.
It seems Steve Jobs had to much opportunities and money to ever get to a crisis that would have provided the emotional intensity to drive him to fix that. Until it killed him.
I am pretty certain that it wasn't actually a happy life. More like a constant panic of losing control.
So fuck you, mom and dad Jobs. Real good job you did there.
And you, dear peterww, I know you didn't know... but please don't glorify perfectionism. Is is just as harmful as extreme laziness.
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I was pointing out that perfectionism isn't something to glorify. I did a bad job at expressing myself. Thank you for sharing your experience
All that 'quality' thinking... (Score:2)
...and yet he copped out on the surgery that could have saved him. I'm old enough to have collected a list of people I've known personally that put off cancer surgery because getting cut up is no fun. They're all dead now too.
Well, OK (Score:2)
Pioneer... (Score:2)
Simplicity, truth and purity. (Score:2)
To be fair, their stuff usually works very well, for a certain carefully constrained notion of "works."
How about remembering Steve Wozniak (Score:2)
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Wozniak's not dead.
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He just smells funny.
Stupid people rewriting history. (Score:2)
It's ridiculous that some kid in the future might read a history book and the idiots of today will have portrayed Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as "visionary leaders" and "innovators".
When really, the one built a business from ripping off other people's ideas, acting like his company invented them, and somehow managing to get the whole world to deeply despise everything he releases while at the same time giving him money for it and using it.
And the other sure had a vision. Or shall we say hallucination, because
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But they both had one thing in common: They got most famous for ripping off the Xerox Alto.
Steve Jobs didn't try to hide it. See this [quora.com]. In later years he would explicitly call Alan Kay on the phone and seek out his advice.
Take no heroes - only inspiration (Score:5, Interesting)
He was a total asshole, but he had the knack and the vision for products and interfaces that work.
I think that sometimes, to create good products you'd need someone (or a tight team) with a clear vision and tight control to pull it through.
Without that, it could easily lead to a watered-down mess.
That's the inspiration I've got from him anyway. (Not that I ever get to make use of it though)
Remembering.... (Score:2)
But he was obstinate and anal-retentive, a control freak. And that might have worked extremely well on a narrow slice of life (inventing and pushing cool stuff at Apple) but which is disastro
Says a lot about a man... (Score:2)
Ive appears to be a terrible person. He's either a completely blind moron, or he's a psychopath who wishes he had wha Jobs had -- a genius for hurting people in order to make more money.
high standards (Score:2)
Steve had high standards. Otherwise he seems like kind a of dick.
Jobs berated me at Lisa Announcement in Toronto (Score:5, Informative)
I was working for IBM at the time (spring 1983) as a student and got roped into doing a product announce presentation for the PC XT (basically a PC with a harddrive). Honestly, the IBM announcement was a big yawn with some new features but nothing revolutionary, but they wanted to make a big splash of it and Apple horned in on the event.
Jobs managed to get Apple up first and started out by saying that Apple was the future and you could see it in the casual clothes they wore - not the blue pin stripes of the old generation (I remember feeling relieved because I wore a camel hair sports jacket). He went on to trash the PC XT as nothing to see there. He did do a good introduction of the Lisa but things really fell flat for him when he announced the price ($9,995 USD) and you could see him get irritated at the rumblings from the audience.
After the presentations everybody got a chance to try out the computers. IBM had a really nice demo showing how the XT really changed the PC experience - I knew the XT wasn't that great but there was a regular PC with floppies and an XT both running Lotus 1-2-3 and XT really showed off well. I think IBM announced an IBM branded 80x25 character colour display (for the CGA adapter) at the time as well as coax terminal adapter cards which really gave the impression that the XT was ready to be at people's desks.
I remember trying out the Lisa and it was fun bringing up windows and moving them around. There were no applications other than a drawing program and a basic editor and any time the disk was accessed it was slow, deadly slow. I was talking about my thoughts to another IBMer which included stating that the Lisa cost as much as a new Porsche 924 and from what I saw I'd rather have the car. Jobs was behind me and called me an asshole who couldn't see that the future was the Lisa - he was pulled away by Apple salesman and nobody saw him again. I did get an apology from some Apple guys and was told "Steve gets like that".
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That actually is a pretty cool story.
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Source, New York Times April 3, 1985
While expensive, that is not $8,000
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And sure, $10,000 wasn't all that crazy, that's why Apple sold so many of them.
$10k was very crazy for a computer - the average wage in 1983 was $15,239.24 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Indexed_Monthly_Earnings).
I don't know where you got the idea "Apple sold so many of them" - the Lisa was widely regarded as a sales failure and one of the reasons why Jobs was fired from Apple (https://medium.com/macoclock/why-steve-jobs-was-fired-from-apple-81484f0d514a).
I hated him then and I hate him still. (Score:2)
Jobs kept Apple alive when it was properly destined for death. He turned a significant minority of people into an entitled, self-absorbed, dickish significant minority of people. He championed important ideas like the GUI and the MP3 player and the smartphone that he didn't invent.
There's a reason I refuse to own any Apple products, except for the work iPhone I am required to have and that I use solely for work. That reason is named Steve Jobs.
If I had a time machine, I would totally fuck up his life. The w
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If I had a time machine, I would totally fuck up his life. The world would be better for it.
OK, but from your post I don't see why you think it would make the world better.
Steve Jobs was an asshole (Score:2)
Don't revere this asshole, revile him. Don't give young 'entrepreneurs' further excuse to model their lives after his. He was not a good role model and you should not aspire to be like him.
Cool. Now how about DMR? (Score:5, Informative)
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He was well and truly mourned - take a look at the /. archives.
Here it comes... (Score:2)
Great. An opportunity for complete assholes to call someone else an asshole.
You assholes live for this sort of thing.
Assholes.
Forgetting Dennis Ritchie, 10 Years Later (Score:2)
The two died about a month apart, but Ritchie deserved all the accolades Jobs gets. Richie's work allowed Jobs to be an iconoclast.
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Dennis Ritchie deserves all of Jobs and Torvald's accolades.
His work influences the entirety of computing today.
SteveJobs never resorted to an outright lie (Score:2)
That’s what I remember most vividly.
Sure, truth hurts. No one likes told “No”. Not even SteveJobs. But he never flexed so much as a half-truth to get what he wanted.
Have yet to meet his equal on that basis IRL
Everybody Forget About Pixar? (Score:5, Interesting)
That Jobs was a remarkable business talent, with amazing foresight, should be non-controversial given his track record. Founding Apple. Founding NeXT*. Establishing Pixar (Lucas should be credited with founding its nucleus though) and building it into a huge success. Rescuing Apple, which was headed for banruptcy, and turning it into the world's most valuable company. He did all of that.
He was also, quite clearly, a sociopath, who worked hard at developing his abilities at manipulating people, none of whom he really cared about at all. This is in good measure why he was so successful in business.
Jobs was a brilliant business man. And a terrible person, without any real friends.
*But NeXT highlights the fact that he also had a habit of imposing crippling arbitrary requirements on his products because "vision". His vision thing cut both ways. You couldn't buy an NeXT unless you were enrolled in college. It had to have a black magnesium cube for a case even though is was a terrible case design and raided the price (in today's money) by $2000 for no value at all because "cool". Similarly the original Macintosh did not have to have so many tech compromises to turn it into Job's "toaster", A less toaster-ish computer would have been even more successful. The WYSIWYG GUI, mouse control, square pixel bit-mapped graphics did not require it to be in a sealed cube with a tiny screen, impossible to upgrade.
Steve Jobs was central to Apple (Score:2)
While Steve Jobs was in charge:
iMac 1988
iPod 2001
iPhone 2007
iPad 2010
After Steve Jobs death in 2011:
Some incremental improvements and a watch ...
Re: Steve Jobs was central to Apple (Score:2)
- Airpods are massively popular
- largely successful expansion to services
âoeA watchâ is also underselling it - still the most popular device of its type while not the cheapest, and it points the way to comprehensive health monitoring when gradually sensors are being added.
Focus, focus, focus (Score:2)
I have the impression that the company still operates with this DNA, look at products like the airtags and the airpods.
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* The guy that Bill Gates always wanted to be. ;)
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I have only one problem with your comment:
Postscript isn't actually a bad choice. It's just less XMLy or webby or whatever the current bloaty layout markup equivalent is.
Any form of semantic interface between applications and outputs is a good thing. It gives you a lot of power to automatically transform that output for various purposes. Like everything from theming to screen readers for the disabled to remote desktops to completely different interfaces.
Maybe having a Turing-complete language was a bit much
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Seems many have forgotten about NeWS [wikipedia.org]. That doesn't take away from the accomplishment Display Postscript [wikipedia.org] was. And some still try. [nongnu.org]
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* The guy who makes you have to buy a different goddam charging cable for every new phone model
Apple has changed phone charging ports exactly 1 time in 14 years,
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Don't abuse your cables and they last a very long time. I still have one that came with an iPhone 6 and it's not frayed in the least.
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He does!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Somebody finally gets it!