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The History of the iPhone on its 10th Anniversary [audio]
- rcarmo 10y agoIt should be noted that the transcript makes for _great_ reading on its own, and seems to be word-for-word.
- crispyambulance 10y agoYes, good reading... but mind-numbingly horrible as a podcast. The guy is just reading an essay out-loud! Very few people can successfully podcast in a monologue format. The only person that comes to mind is Malcom Gladwell.
- ihuman 10y agoI agree. Monologue podcasts either work really well, or poorly. I'm a fan of Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" podcast.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kogus 10y agoDefinitely a skill that not everyone has. Aaron Mahnke in Lore is great at it. http://www.lorepodcast.com/ http://www.lorepodcast.com/
- Darthy 10y ago"And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’" Does anybody know who this guy was?
- lumisota 10y agoBas Ording - http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,469,381.PN.&OS=PN/7,469,381&RS=PN/7,469,381 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...
- overcast 10y agoNow doing UI design at Tesla, as of a year ago.
- thefalcon 10y agoOn page 363 of his Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson tells the story of Jobs meeting a graphical designer in the lobby at Apple after a particularly poor interview: "The process could be intimidating, but Jobs had an eye for talent. When they were looking for people to design the graphical interface for Apple’s new operating system, Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. "Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. "When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. “I said, ‘My God,’ and hired him on the spot,” Jobs recalled. The feature became a lovable part of Mac OS X, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a moment after you’ve finished swiping)."
- swampthinker 10y ago“Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued. It happened. But mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are fucking up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.'” If I had read this quote 2-3 years ago, before trying to found a startup, I would've thought that Jobs was a crazy asshole. While the latter point is still up for debate, I can now completely sympathize with how he felt in this moment.
- sverige 10y agoI don't really think it's debatable. Jobs was a crazy asshole. No need to hedge the assertion with all the evidence.
- overcast 10y agoActing like that to your employees is a quick way to make them disappear. Apple was Apple, nothing was going to make them leave, no matter how much of an asshole Jobs was. I would listen to a CEO/Managers tirade once, before I started looking elsewhere. It's only a job.
- Cthulhu_ 10y agoGood. If someone (like Jobs) want to create the best product(s) out there, either you Be Better, or find somewhere where anything less than the best is good enough. Shape up or ship out.
- overcast 10y agoThat's not how the world works. Number one reason for employees leaving, is management. Just because it worked for Apple, absolutely does not mean it works for all companies. Else that would just be the norm, and we wouldn't be talking about it. Being a tyrant, and ruling with an iron fist, does NOT work historically.
- freehunter 10y agoWhat everyone forgets when they're trying to talk about how to be as effective as Jobs is that yes, he was a tryant ruling with an iron fist, he was a crazy asshole, etc, but he was also right, almost all the time. He knew what he wanted and he knew what would work and he knew what what in his power to create, and he made sure it got created. People try to replicate his management style without having that last quality. If you're a madman tyrant asshole and your product is OnLive[1], you're just a madman tyrant asshole with a failed product because you didn't realize that your company's problems are far outside your scope of control. If you're a madman tyrant asshole and your product instantly destroys two of the only three major smartphone OSes on the market at the time, you're Steve Jobs. [1](I'm just picking on them as a failed startup, I have no idea what their CEO's management style was.)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Darthy 10y ago"So they asked, ‘Why can’t we just make a little seam for the radio waves to escape through?’ And you have to explain to them why you just can’t." Well, the iPhone 6 and especially the iPhone 7 do exactly this, so apparently you can indeed do exactly that. I wonder what has changed to make it possible.
- rhino369 10y agoThey use the aluminum housing as part of the antenna now.
- Zanta 10y agoCool read. “We put a sign on over the front door of the iPhone building that said FIGHT CLUB,” Forstall testified. “Because the first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about fight club.” I found this bit wonderfully ironic given the anti-consumerist nature of the movie. Shades of Reagan playing 'Born in the USA' on the campaign trail.
- throwanem 10y agoOn the other hand, the "Project Mayhem" members were shown to be consuming, avidly, an ultimately pointless product which they mistook for having a capability to fill the empty spaces in their lives where meaning could've gone. That the product in question happened to be a somewhat unusually violent repackaging of anti-consumerist ideology doesn't change the nature of its relationship with "Tyler Durden"'s followers.
- yathern 10y agoThank you!! So many of my friends have watched that movie and their interpretation is "yeah wouldn't it be awesome to start a fight club". When really it's showing how a charismatic cult leader can gain massive influence.
- Zanta 10y agoThat's an interesting argument! What do you think Tyler's goal was in that movie? His fight club -> project mayhem plan seemed to go off the way he wanted it to. If you think he wanted to promote that free-your-mind, reset-the-score, you-are-not-your-possessions ideology, that desire seems to fit with the fact that he's the alter-ego of Norton's unfulfilled white collar weakling character. But you lay out pretty convincingly that Project Mayhem is more of a trick, trading one kind of prison for another. What would compel Norton's alter-ego to play such a trick?
- throwanem 10y agoIn a word: nihilism. In another: narcissism. Project Mayhem is indeed a trick, but it's one "Jack" plays on himself. Consider that blowing up the headquarters buildings of credit card companies does not suffice to achieve, or even approach, the goal of wiping out debt. Offsite backups are a thing. It doesn't even impair the operation of the business all that much, because disaster-recovery plans and hot failover sites are also a thing. All told, Project Mayhem might have produced a period of as long as a whole weekend during which bank cards wouldn't work, and maybe not even that. But even if we're exceedingly charitable and assume they brought all the settlement systems down for a whole week, that doesn't materially affect debt held by credit customers, especially in light of the brief spending boom that'd almost certainly occur once people's cards started working again. So blowing up the HQ buildings is big, flashy, maybe a bit expensive for a variety of real estate insurance companies, and ultimately pointless. And the way I read the character, Tyler Durden knows this is the case all along. The only person he really cares about selling on his line of bullshit is his own alter ego "Jack". Durden exists because "Jack" created him, and "Jack" created him because "Jack" wants convincing that he's not as meaningless, not as worthless, not as pointless, as he feels himself to be. Because he feels himself that way, he can't muster the emotional resources to do this work for himself, so he creates Tyler Durden to do it for him, and Durden does it very well. Creating a fringe political movement that blows things up is incidental, and occurs not because Durden thinks that's a thing worth doing in its own right - it's an open question whether Durden can even be considered to have agency or consciousness independent of "Jack" - but because it serves the purpose of convincing "Jack" that he has a purpose. This is a problem someone else might solve by volunteering at a retirement home or joining a church or starting a family - or all of the above, perhaps - but "Jack"'s too much of a nihilist to really believe in anything outside himself, and too much of a narcissist to really buy into anything that doesn't center on himself. We see the former in his internal monologue, which the film helpfully externalizes for us, and the latter in his behavior at the various support groups he parasitizes in the first act. So "Jack" eventually invents Tyler Durden, and Tyler Durden invents Project Mayhem, and this pays off for "Jack" twice over: first when he finds himself to have become the barycenter of a movement that has people ready to kill and die to advance its goals, and then second when he decides it can't be borne and sets about to destroy it, thus becoming able to conceive of himself as a virtuous man struggling against all the odds - and, in "killing" Durden at the climax, eventually succeeding in that struggle. The property damage, like the existence of Project Mayhem in the first place, is incidental; the only meaning it has in the context of "Jack"'s evolving self-experience, and thus in the context of the film, is an indication of the extent to which it's necessary for "Jack" to go in order to bridge the gap between how he perceives himself and how he needs to perceive himself in order to tolerate his own existence. Of course, one's experience of oneself is rarely static, and Palahniuk and Fincher are too skilled in their respective crafts for it to be mere coincidence that Fight Club ends when it does. It would perhaps be interesting to watch "Jack"'s tenuous grasp on life disintegrate completely, along with his circumstances, over the next several days following the climax of the film. But I doubt it would add all that much of appeal to the experience, or have a fingernail's chance of getting past the first test audience on which it was tried.
- jlundberg 10y agoA good hour of audio for my trainride back from Stockholm. It's amazing how emotional the iPhone unveil feels even without the video. Thanks for sharing.