8 ms·

I occasionally loose sleep, wondering what products were lost due to Jobs' early death. Edit: Ok, fine. I loose sleep wondering what ideas were out there that

by fhood 8y ago

I occasionally loose sleep, wondering what products were lost due to Jobs' early death. Edit: Ok, fine. I loose sleep wondering what ideas were out there that languished because Jobs wasn't around to see their potential and capitalize on them. The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point.

codehandle 8y ago
> The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point. If I have a position to contribute it's that those ideas are still out there. Job's greatest gift was his sense of taste. He had refined a sense of good art. If more management had such sense they would be better patrons feeding good art and killing tasteless hacks projects.
emodendroket 8y ago
Steve Jobs did not single-handedly invent the iPhone.
- primitivesuave 8y ago
  Even a 1% shift in the direction of something as massive as Apple, compounded over an additional decade of Steve Job's tenure (assuming retirement at 65), could make a massive difference - whether this would be good or bad for humanity is another question and still debatable.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer. If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has an SDK, a TCP/IP stack and a POP email client. But no wireless connection. Now add a wireless connection. Could you tweet or Facebook? Sure, if those things existed then.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch controls. How long would we have been stuck with tiny screens (relative to the original iPhone) or giant devices (like the sidekick) to get a decent sized screen? How long would it have taken to get the App Store? Would we get one? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) has been transformative for our industry. The iPhone pushed us ahead years. Maybe a decade. We skipped a ton of teething time and got straight to it. Remember, RIM thought the iPhone demo was faked and impossible. That’s how far ahead Apple was.
    - mattmcknight 8y ago
      The original iPhone didn't have the AppStore. It was an incremental development on the original iPhone. Palm and Blackberry devices at the time did have AppStores. I was a happy Treo user...and the iPhone didn't have the ability for me to build apps for it. I also used my finger to touch the screen. What the iPhone didn't have was a physical keyboard. That was the primary design innovation.
    - wilsonnb 8y ago
      It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed. It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember correctly. At that time, Android and Blackberry both had app stores in the works. They might have released before the iOS App Store - I don't remember. Anyways, Apple did create a great product that deserves all of the popularity it has but they absolutely did not push us 10 years into the future of computing.
      - 8y ago
- btilly 8y ago
  He did not. But he DID repeatedly question the value propositions that Apple is based on, and produce a new value proposition that cannibalized the existing business. Apple is now fundamentally following the course of milking the last value proposition that they were left with. There is a lot of profit to milk, but long term the industry will leave that value proposition behind and Apple will wind up one of the losers.
  - greedo 8y ago
    In the long term, we're all dead. Apple has been "doomed" for years, but seems to have hung on for 42 years. I think it's highly likely to survive another decade. I'd say that 50+ years in technology is pretty good for a business.
- crispyporkbites 8y ago
  Indeed, the iphone was coming with or without steve jobs. At the time almost everyone had a mobile phone, the only thing they didn't all have was internet / wifi / gps on their phone, and a capacitive/useful touch screen. When the iphone dropped it combined it all of this into a great product but nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there.
  - AskewEgret 8y ago
    > nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there We used smartphones in the labs at Motorola when I started working there in 2001. They ran Linux and had all the capabilities you would consider essential to a smartphone, not just the form factor. They were targeted for public sale in 2002 or 2003, if I remember correctly, but got shelved because the dotcom crash caused the networks to delay upgrading their infrastructure (yes, high-speed data networks had been in the works since the 1990s). A smartphone for sale in 2003 would have been absolutely useless. You'll remember that the phone networks could barely handle (or couldn't depending on your viewpoint) the iPhone for the first few years. I didn't work in the cell phone division so I can't say for sure, but I think that most of the manufacturers let their smartphone development stagnate or stall from the early 2000s until 2006 or 2007, while Apple kept plugging away at it. When they proved that people would buy a smartphone even when their mobile network couldn't handle the traffic, all the manufacturers put effort back into development but by then they were far behind Apple.
- shams93 8y ago
  Yeah they had a lot of deep institutional knowledge built up working with arm on the apple newton when Jobs was over at Next. Its arguable that if Apple had not already gone deep into Newton before Jobs arrived there would not have been the skills necessary on board to birth the iphone. While Jobs killed the newton he didn't lay that team off by any means they essentially flipped from Newton into ios, using the same arm skills they intially developed working on Newton.
noxToken 8y ago
>...like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience It seems like everyone in this thread is forgetting that the HomePod[0] is a thing. Apple's privacy practices are better than the other listed companies, but they do have a smart speaker just as capable as the others. [0]: https://www.apple.com/homepod/ https://www.apple.com/homepod/
- fhood 8y ago
  Right, but I am not worried (at the moment) that the HomePod will be used to collect my private information to be sold later on. I think this is false equivalence. How is the HomePod any different from connecting my iphone to a speaker?
- Avenger42 8y ago
  I think anyone who's used Siri would debate you about the "as capable as the others" part of your statement. Not to mention that when it was announced, several of its features were tied to the introduction of AirPlay 2, which still has yet to be released.
- scarface74 8y ago
  The HomePod has a very simple proposition. I give Apple money and they give me a speaker. They aren't trying to use the HomePod to gather data to see what else they can sell me.
  - simsla 8y ago
    Neither are the other two.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      Bezos specifically said that the entire purpose of their hardware is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. You really don't think both Amazon and Google are collecting data to improve their real money makers - targeted ad revenue and marketing?
erikpukinskis 8y ago
Those products were cancelled but his death accelerated the round of products made by young people inspired by his legacy. We’re in the lull of Jobslessness; the shock of his death.
perfmode 8y ago
I wonder the same about Alan Turing.
zer00eyz 8y ago
Not worth it. Jobs was, for all intents and purposes a phenomenal business person in spite of the fact that many people early in his career didn't see it. Name a product apple invented that was HUGE? Go ahead and think about that. GUI & Mac was Xerox, the iPhone was Xerox and palm and... Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things. Lets look at the design side. MacBooks for all their glory are just advanced machining (cnc + automation) put to work at scale (and thats "new" but not groundbreaking). OSX is just *nix with a nice GUI (something open source could learn from). Jony Ive leaves apple, then I might start to worry.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things. I'm not sure if you mean that as an insult, but honestly it's probably the most important thing he could have done; there's no shortage of good ideas out there, but most of them have terrible execution. Being able to see through that bad execution to the good idea, and imagine a great execution not encumbered by what it had, is a profoundly valuable skill.
- Retric 8y ago
  > iPhone was Xerox LoL what? Everything that's built with computers can be traced back to the guy who invented the transistor, but that does not mean innovation stopped then.
  - IncRnd 8y ago
    The first implementation of a smart phone was likely the LG Prada not the iPhone.
    - abritinthebay 8y ago
      I mean... if you're playing that kind of naive equivalency then the first "smartphones" were the early PDA/Phone hybrids like the HP OmniGo 700LX, the pdQ, or the Nokia 9000 Communicator. But that would be silly, because the modern "smartphone" era was absolutely started with the iPhone.
logfromblammo 8y ago
All I see is a bunch of proprietary connectors and dongles, and I sleep like a log. Jobs was just the salesman. Those products aren't lost, but they may have had a harder time getting to market without the "visionary" around to hype them up.
- gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  Salesman is an oversimplification. He was a productizer that could sell. :) Also, does anybody know what cable the longest (number of years) a specific Apple cable/connector has remained compatible with the ever-changing hardware? I am guessing it is this thing: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-extension-cable https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-e... Apple has always had BS connectors, like the Powerbook 5300 (1996)and G3, G4 laptops power connector - an male RCA plug, but the inside contact replace with a 3.5mm headphone plug.
  - dwaite 8y ago
    That brick power connector is a brilliant design. It is based on the IEC C7 connector with an extra (optional) spot for a grounding pin. You can take the power cord from a lot of small appliances and plug it into the slots as an extension cord.
et-al 8y ago
Has this talk with a friend, but it was actually centered around accessibility of technology for older people (or less technologically-inclined people, if you must). If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use? Would Siri be more functional? I know Jitterbug exists, but it seems almost insulting. (If anyone has used one and feels otherwise, please share.)
- scarface74 8y ago
  Apple already goes out of its way to make the iPhone accessible.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  In his biography, Jobs bemoaned the utilitarian brutalism of the medical devices he relied on in his final years of life. He absolutely would've oversaw the development of slicker accessibility.
- mikestew 8y ago
  If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use? There are accessibility settings on iOS that mitigate every one of those items (and more), and iOS has consistently been one of the most, if not the most, accessible phones out there . What specifically are you looking for?
  - fragmede 8y ago
    I want an iPad sized machine that displays as much as an iPhone, and I want an iPhone who's home screen has 2x3 grid of icons instead of ever-so-slightly bigger 4x5 icons when zooming is turned on. Thankfully Android allows for alternate launchers, even though some icons are horribly ugly. Would Apple ever admit to doing something functional-yet-ugly?
ksec 8y ago
People still don't understand what is invention and what is innovation. So no need to feel bad about it.

by fhood 8y ago

codehandle 8y ago

> The argument "he wasn't that important because he didn't actually invent X" is played out, and it fundamentally misses the point. If I have a position to contribute it's that those ideas are still out there. Job's greatest gift was his sense of taste. He had refined a sense of good art. If more management had such sense they would be better patrons feeding good art and killing tasteless hacks projects.

emodendroket 8y ago

Steve Jobs did not single-handedly invent the iPhone.

primitivesuave 8y ago
Even a 1% shift in the direction of something as massive as Apple, compounded over an additional decade of Steve Job's tenure (assuming retirement at 65), could make a massive difference - whether this would be good or bad for humanity is another question and still debatable.
beamatronic 8y ago
For those of us who were PDA users in the late 90s and Treo users in the early 2000s, the iPhone is an incremental improvement on those ideas. The presence of ubiquitous wireless networking (I am lumping cellular wireless and WiFi in together) was the real game changer. If you are not convinced, try this thought experiment: Imagine yourself in 1998 standing on the street in a major city holding a Palm pilot. It has an SDK, a TCP/IP stack and a POP email client. But no wireless connection. Now add a wireless connection. Could you tweet or Facebook? Sure, if those things existed then.
- MBCook 8y ago
  It was not an incremental leap. It was MASSIVE. Yes, all the technology was there. We had smartphones and they would have continued without the iPhone. The value of the internet in your pocket is too big for the smart phone not to become a huge thing. Eventually. But Apple NAILED the UI. They made it so simple that 3 year olds can use the UI and are confused when other computers don’t work through such great touch controls. How long would we have been stuck with tiny screens (relative to the original iPhone) or giant devices (like the sidekick) to get a decent sized screen? How long would it have taken to get the App Store? Would we get one? That single innovation (making it trivial for people to find/buy software) has been transformative for our industry. The iPhone pushed us ahead years. Maybe a decade. We skipped a ton of teething time and got straight to it. Remember, RIM thought the iPhone demo was faked and impossible. That’s how far ahead Apple was.
  - mattmcknight 8y ago
    The original iPhone didn't have the AppStore. It was an incremental development on the original iPhone. Palm and Blackberry devices at the time did have AppStores. I was a happy Treo user...and the iPhone didn't have the ability for me to build apps for it. I also used my finger to touch the screen. What the iPhone didn't have was a physical keyboard. That was the primary design innovation.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    It really wasn't as massive a leap as you make it out to be. It's likely that we would have ended up with something very similar to today's smartphones even if the iPhone had never existed. It wasn't the first smartphone. It wasn't the first phone to use a capacitive touch screen. The first iPhone didn't even have the app store - it launched with the 3G a year after the the first iPhone was released, if I remember correctly. At that time, Android and Blackberry both had app stores in the works. They might have released before the iOS App Store - I don't remember. Anyways, Apple did create a great product that deserves all of the popularity it has but they absolutely did not push us 10 years into the future of computing.
    - 8y ago
btilly 8y ago
He did not. But he DID repeatedly question the value propositions that Apple is based on, and produce a new value proposition that cannibalized the existing business. Apple is now fundamentally following the course of milking the last value proposition that they were left with. There is a lot of profit to milk, but long term the industry will leave that value proposition behind and Apple will wind up one of the losers.
- greedo 8y ago
  In the long term, we're all dead. Apple has been "doomed" for years, but seems to have hung on for 42 years. I think it's highly likely to survive another decade. I'd say that 50+ years in technology is pretty good for a business.
crispyporkbites 8y ago
Indeed, the iphone was coming with or without steve jobs. At the time almost everyone had a mobile phone, the only thing they didn't all have was internet / wifi / gps on their phone, and a capacitive/useful touch screen. When the iphone dropped it combined it all of this into a great product but nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there.
- AskewEgret 8y ago
  > nokia, samsung and others were all on their way with competing products that would have filled the void had the iphone not been there We used smartphones in the labs at Motorola when I started working there in 2001. They ran Linux and had all the capabilities you would consider essential to a smartphone, not just the form factor. They were targeted for public sale in 2002 or 2003, if I remember correctly, but got shelved because the dotcom crash caused the networks to delay upgrading their infrastructure (yes, high-speed data networks had been in the works since the 1990s). A smartphone for sale in 2003 would have been absolutely useless. You'll remember that the phone networks could barely handle (or couldn't depending on your viewpoint) the iPhone for the first few years. I didn't work in the cell phone division so I can't say for sure, but I think that most of the manufacturers let their smartphone development stagnate or stall from the early 2000s until 2006 or 2007, while Apple kept plugging away at it. When they proved that people would buy a smartphone even when their mobile network couldn't handle the traffic, all the manufacturers put effort back into development but by then they were far behind Apple.
shams93 8y ago
Yeah they had a lot of deep institutional knowledge built up working with arm on the apple newton when Jobs was over at Next. Its arguable that if Apple had not already gone deep into Newton before Jobs arrived there would not have been the skills necessary on board to birth the iphone. While Jobs killed the newton he didn't lay that team off by any means they essentially flipped from Newton into ios, using the same arm skills they intially developed working on Newton.

noxToken 8y ago

>...like smart speakers, with their threat of big brother-style surveillance in exchange for a minimal increase in convenience It seems like everyone in this thread is forgetting that the HomePod[0] is a thing. Apple's privacy practices are better than the other listed companies, but they do have a smart speaker just as capable as the others. [0]: https://www.apple.com/homepod/ https://www.apple.com/homepod/

fhood 8y ago
Right, but I am not worried (at the moment) that the HomePod will be used to collect my private information to be sold later on. I think this is false equivalence. How is the HomePod any different from connecting my iphone to a speaker?
Avenger42 8y ago
I think anyone who's used Siri would debate you about the "as capable as the others" part of your statement. Not to mention that when it was announced, several of its features were tied to the introduction of AirPlay 2, which still has yet to be released.
scarface74 8y ago
The HomePod has a very simple proposition. I give Apple money and they give me a speaker. They aren't trying to use the HomePod to gather data to see what else they can sell me.
- simsla 8y ago
  Neither are the other two.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Bezos specifically said that the entire purpose of their hardware is to get people to buy more stuff from Amazon. You really don't think both Amazon and Google are collecting data to improve their real money makers - targeted ad revenue and marketing?

erikpukinskis 8y ago

Those products were cancelled but his death accelerated the round of products made by young people inspired by his legacy. We’re in the lull of Jobslessness; the shock of his death.

perfmode 8y ago

I wonder the same about Alan Turing.

zer00eyz 8y ago

Not worth it. Jobs was, for all intents and purposes a phenomenal business person in spite of the fact that many people early in his career didn't see it. Name a product apple invented that was HUGE? Go ahead and think about that. GUI & Mac was Xerox, the iPhone was Xerox and palm and... Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things. Lets look at the design side. MacBooks for all their glory are just advanced machining (cnc + automation) put to work at scale (and thats "new" but not groundbreaking). OSX is just *nix with a nice GUI (something open source could learn from). Jony Ive leaves apple, then I might start to worry.

mcphage 8y ago
> Simply put he was a master at finding good things and refining them into great things. I'm not sure if you mean that as an insult, but honestly it's probably the most important thing he could have done; there's no shortage of good ideas out there, but most of them have terrible execution. Being able to see through that bad execution to the good idea, and imagine a great execution not encumbered by what it had, is a profoundly valuable skill.
Retric 8y ago
> iPhone was Xerox LoL what? Everything that's built with computers can be traced back to the guy who invented the transistor, but that does not mean innovation stopped then.
- IncRnd 8y ago
  The first implementation of a smart phone was likely the LG Prada not the iPhone.
  - abritinthebay 8y ago
    I mean... if you're playing that kind of naive equivalency then the first "smartphones" were the early PDA/Phone hybrids like the HP OmniGo 700LX, the pdQ, or the Nokia 9000 Communicator. But that would be silly, because the modern "smartphone" era was absolutely started with the iPhone.

logfromblammo 8y ago

All I see is a bunch of proprietary connectors and dongles, and I sleep like a log. Jobs was just the salesman. Those products aren't lost, but they may have had a harder time getting to market without the "visionary" around to hype them up.

gm-conspiracy 8y ago
Salesman is an oversimplification. He was a productizer that could sell. :) Also, does anybody know what cable the longest (number of years) a specific Apple cable/connector has remained compatible with the ever-changing hardware? I am guessing it is this thing: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-extension-cable https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-e... Apple has always had BS connectors, like the Powerbook 5300 (1996)and G3, G4 laptops power connector - an male RCA plug, but the inside contact replace with a 3.5mm headphone plug.
- dwaite 8y ago
  That brick power connector is a brilliant design. It is based on the IEC C7 connector with an extra (optional) spot for a grounding pin. You can take the power cord from a lot of small appliances and plug it into the slots as an extension cord.

et-al 8y ago

Has this talk with a friend, but it was actually centered around accessibility of technology for older people (or less technologically-inclined people, if you must). If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use? Would Siri be more functional? I know Jitterbug exists, but it seems almost insulting. (If anyone has used one and feels otherwise, please share.)

scarface74 8y ago
Apple already goes out of its way to make the iPhone accessible.
ashleyn 8y ago
In his biography, Jobs bemoaned the utilitarian brutalism of the medical devices he relied on in his final years of life. He absolutely would've oversaw the development of slicker accessibility.
mikestew 8y ago
If Jobs had aged, needed reading glasses, and maybe had Parkinson's, would there be more of a push towards making devices easier to use? There are accessibility settings on iOS that mitigate every one of those items (and more), and iOS has consistently been one of the most, if not the most, accessible phones out there . What specifically are you looking for?
- fragmede 8y ago
  I want an iPad sized machine that displays as much as an iPhone, and I want an iPhone who's home screen has 2x3 grid of icons instead of ever-so-slightly bigger 4x5 icons when zooming is turned on. Thankfully Android allows for alternate launchers, even though some icons are horribly ugly. Would Apple ever admit to doing something functional-yet-ugly?

ksec 8y ago

People still don't understand what is invention and what is innovation. So no need to feel bad about it.