9 ms·

Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This (2019)

101 points by nojito 5y ago

cudgy 5y ago
Maybe Jobs thought that developers would create applications that were useful and not primarily driven by advertising metrics and entertainment?
slver 5y ago
I'm a bit of a Steve Jobs ultrafan, and I've seen the presentation on iPhone maybe a 100 times. Predictably the article takes quotes out of contexts, makes unwarranted assumptions and is overall, worthless. I don't call NYTimes work worthless easily, I kind of have some reverence for them. But that truly was "random blog post" level of writing, pushing the writer's own words in Steve Jobs' mouth. Shame. Steve Jobs DID call it a "revolutionary internet communicator" like at least half a dozen times in that presentation. And he didn't deemphasize apps. He pushed for a native Google Maps app. He did push for a native YouTube app. He thought most of third party extensibility will be web apps, but he and his team were quickly convinced they need a native store when people jailbroke the phone and made one. Steve Jobs wasn't the kind of person who has opinions set in stone. In fact he liked to say "I don't need to be right [in an argument], I just want us to do the right thing. The best ideas should win." Did he imagine we'd stay 24/7 glued to our phones? Probably no, but that's also up to us, not up to our phones.
- jeremywho 5y ago
  I agree. He was still around when the sdk and App Store were released. He could have squashed that if he chose to.
  - tom_mellior 5y ago
    But of course he didn't squash it, because he loved vendor lock-in and walled gardens.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Scott Forstall ( he said it himself ) was pushing for Native Apps even before the launch of iPhone, Steve Jobs disagree and thought ( as Mark Zukerberg did ) that HTML 5 apps would take over, it would be easier to make, and just as good. Scott argued HTML5 will never be as good as native. And he was right. Then jailbreak happens, and Steve Jobs agreed to change. Copied the App Store model. And the rest is history. ( The App Store model exist long before Jailbreak in other 3G phones and market. So it isn't really new )
- sreque 5y ago
  How do you have reverence for a corrupt news organization that: covered up the Holocaust, covered up Stalin's mass starvations in Ukraine, singularly made Fidel Castro successful, spread lies about the Vietnam war that lead to american presence being extended for years, and, most recently, rewrote history with divisive lies via the 1619 project? https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Ashley-Rindsberg/dp/1736703307 https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Ashley-Rindsberg/dp/...
- arthur_sav 5y ago
  I've made a pledge to never read another NYT article. They've been writing absolute dogpoop for the last decade and have lost any credibility they once had.
  - astrange 5y ago
    News is completely different from how it was a decade ago, and NYT has hired most of the best writers from every other company. They even have the Buzzfeed guy doing his strange media reporting beat where he reports on things inside the NYT as if he didn't work there. It's really not worth ignoring them even if their politics reporting is still so terrible to the point they let Peter Baker work for them.
    - mcot2 5y ago
      Whats wrong with Peter Baker?
      - astrange 5y ago
        He's a hack who was going to leave and cover Israel, but was called back to cover Trump because he has a lot of Republican sources… aka he just publishes whatever they tell him and claims it's true because they said it was true. This is one of the reasons so many people think Trump-Russia was a hoax even though he obviously actually did it and both the Mueller report and the Republican Senate investigation said he did it. He's also part of the NYT's gang of terminal both-sides/horse race political reporters, I believe to the point of not voting because he doesn't want to take a side.
        passivate 5y ago
        In your judgement, which comparable organization has done better overall than NYT? They do cover a broad range of topics.
        notsureaboutpg 5y ago
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Jobs came for a different era too. An era where things where more scarce due to pre-internet structures. It might have been difficult for him to think '1000 songs in your pocket' would end up as an generalized addictive stream of pages and sucking peoples attention instead of helping good human contact. It's always the same butterfly effect, when you put something in the world, it might really succeed at that but you never know how the system will grow around it. Kinda like this static1.squarespace.com/static/527deb7fe4b009d7ee74d609/t/54f93e21e4b025c50f0e090c/1425620525003/avoiding_pain_desire_path.jpg (well far fetched analogy tbh)
  - mcot2 5y ago
    Your link doesn’t seem to point to anything.
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/527deb7fe4b009d7ee74d609/1425620522870-OKA5540SR5NE99L32HXW/avoiding_pain_desire_path.jpg?format=1000w&content-type=image%2Fpng https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/527deb7fe4b009d7e...
  - leeoniya 5y ago
    pretty sure that extra path was carved for/by bicycles
    - withinboredom 5y ago
      That’s the Netherlands if I’m not mistaken. The stairs have a well for bike wheels on either side, so people went out of their way to make a new path that wasn’t as steep.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - leeoniya 5y ago
        i don't see anything there that accommodates bikes. and in either case it would not be an example of GP's point. if someone gave me a fork to eat soup with, then i would invent the spoon because the fork is inadequate for that purpose; not because forks had some unforeseen spoon ecosystems grow around them. if doctors started using forks as medical instruments, then sure.
- chevill 5y ago
  Yea I find it hard to believe that science fiction has been predicting little rectangular computers used for nearly any purpose imaginable for several decades but it was completely lost on Steve Jobs that putting a computer in a person's pocket might result in them using it as much as much as people use other computers.
- duxup 5y ago
  Yeah if anything from watching Jobs talk over the years it's clear he is repeatedly reevaluating AND taking the input of those around him. "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." Steve would have changed his mind, so would people around him, as anyone would.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    We seem to think politicians should spring fully formed into existence, like Athena.
- xenocyon 5y ago
  Bizarre that this is (at this time) the top comment with numerous replies and nobody has yet pointed out that this is not a NYTimes journalism piece; it is an opinion piece by Cal Newport.
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    This is a regular source of confusion on HN, usually accompanied by dozens to hundreds of comments about how you just can't trust the media, also if anyone points out the nature of opinion pieces you usually get a doubling down about how its printed by the NYT so its the same thing as reporting.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Then NYT is diluting their brand and they deserve some of the blowback anyway.
    - majewsky 5y ago
      It's absolutely commonplace for newspapers to publish op-eds. In fact, I'd be more surprised if any particular newspaper didn't do it. In print, it's usually not a source of confusion because the op-eds are on their own page or in their own column that has "Opinion" or something in the heading. This is something that the NYT's website should try harder to emulate (or it should provide some other sort of visual differentiation between reporting and opinion contents), but "diluting their brand" is a quite extraordinary claim.
- baryphonic 5y ago
  > Steve Jobs DID call it a "revolutionary internet communicator" like at least half a dozen times in that presentation. And he didn't deemphasize apps. He pushed for a native Google Maps app. He did push for a native YouTube app. He thought most of third party extensibility will be web apps, but he and his team were quickly convinced they need a native store when people jailbroke the phone and made one. Not only that, but his hook was that Apple was releasing three products: a touch screen iPod (that he led with this makes me laugh, but really, it was a big deal at the time), a mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator. I remember at the time, one of the most amazing things was seeing mobile Safari actually rendering real desktop web pages. Ironically, Steve even loaded the NYT website as an example. At the time, the existing "smartphones" (which Steve made fun of :D) completely choked at rendering HTML, and some of the vendors were even trying to introduce simpler markup languages like WAP just for mobile devices. Regular web pages rendered normally on the iPhone, and the multitouch made them work almost as well as on a desktop. And then I also remember a particularly funny moment when Steve made a crank phone call to an arbitrary San Francisco Starbucks, asking a barista to order thousands of coffees. It was a wonderful demonstration of the integration you could get on a phone. Obviously Steve was imagining that iPhones would enable many more of these kinds of integrated experiences (mainly provided via the web, in his mind). It's just at that time, so few of these integrations existed because the phone was brand new! So, yeah, totally agree with you. This article is just not accurate. The journalist could have watched the launch demo a couple times end-to-end on YouTube, and have realized that the iPhone really was meant to be a revolutionary device.
  - jalk 5y ago
    WAP and WML predates html rendering browser on phones by a number of years. Not even sure WML supports images See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built. >When the Apple founder called [NY Times reporter] Bilton to complain about a story shortly after the iPad's launch, Bilton asked how his kids were enjoying the wildly popular new product. "They haven't used it," Jobs responded. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home." https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gates-both-severely-limited-their-kids-tech-use.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gat... The same was true with Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai, among others.
  - enraged_camel 5y ago
    Yeah but that’s because Jobs was famously a minimalist and limited his own attachment to worldly possessions. (His biography goes into it in detail.)
    - nojito 5y ago
      Not really due to minimalism. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/how-bill-gates-mark-cuban-and-others-limit-their-kids-tech-use.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/how-bill-gates-mark-cuban-an...
  - pvorb 5y ago
    Basically every parent quickly realizes that not setting limits is bad for their children. At least the more educated ones do.
    - aspaceman 5y ago
      The act of setting limits is incredibly important to a child's development, even more so than what the limits ultimately are.
  - gumby 5y ago
    > It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built. You don’t have to be a tech “titan”. When I was on a school board (in Silicon Valley), there was a big push to have kids be trained in “technology”. Inevitably (in that era) that meant things like PowerPoint and Word. The only people who pushed back? A programmer, a tech startup CEO, and an engineering VP from what is now called FAANG. But we were overridden by the other board members. I still believe the kids (including my own) learned more by playing outside and writing with pens.
- js2 5y ago
  > I don't call NYTimes work worthless easily. Nor should you in this case, because this isn't NYT work. It's a guest essay by Cal Newport, who isn't an NYT employee. At best, you could argue that it doesn't meet their standards for guest essays or that they should have higher standards: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014809107-How-to-submit-a-Guest-Essay-for-Opinion https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014809107-How-... The NYT needs to do a better job perhaps distinguishing opinion from news and guests from columnists from editorial board work. In the print edition, it's clearer from the layout, but on the web, it all runs together. That said, this is clearly marked in red at the top as "opinion" with the author's name. It's also from the "Sunday Review" section which is all opinion pieces: https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/sunday https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/sunday
  - a4isms 5y ago
    I have a house. It has a front lawn. If I set up guest chairs on my front lawn and invite the world to sit on those chairs and give their opinion, it’s still opinion being broadcast from my lawn with my endorsement implied by the fact that I set the whole thing up and charge for advertising banners laid out at the speakers’ feet. The fact that I nudge-nudge wink-wink don’t endorse these opinions, and that I don’t formally employ the speakers is wildly irrelevant. If I don’t want to be accountable for the quality or correctness of their opinions, I shouldn’t put out the chairs and invite people to sit down and hold forth. I think we need to get rid of this pretend distinction between “opinion” and “editorial.” It’s all stuff a newspaper promotes, just as every talking head on Fox News is something Fox chooses to broadcast for money.
    - passivate 5y ago
      > If I don’t want to be accountable for the quality or correctness of their opinions, I shouldn’t put out the chairs and invite people to sit down and hold forth. What metric are you using to objectively decide the "correctness" of an opinion? Can you propose a system that would work? I'm sure many publications are looking for one..
- grishka 5y ago
  > Did he imagine we'd stay 24/7 glued to our phones? Probably no, but that's also up to us, not up to our phones. Whatever device you use to access the internet is simply the medium. The problem lies with the services you access from it, of which many have the business model relying selling your attention and thus manipulating the shit out of you into spending more time with them. I'm able to enjoy the rare episodes of having a real life without being in my phone all the time, and I'm very picky about my notification settings. Every time I receive an unwanted or non-informative notification, I make sure to prevent that from ever happening again. Seeing /r/assholedesign on reddit, most people aren't like that though.
- elcomet 5y ago
  I agreed with you until the last line. Company that design phones and especially apps are designing them with addiction in mind.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Isn’t addiction a personal responsibility? It’s so easy for us to externalize what we should be more vigilant about. There is an endless sea of addicting things in the world. Passing responsibility to someone else isn’t solving the problem, it’s playing the victim card.
    - elcomet 5y ago
      I don't believe it's only a matter of personal responsibility. We have laws to help prevent addiction from gambling, alcohol, tobacco... When a company hires neuroscientists to design an addictive product, how can you say the responsibility of addiction falls on the users ? Would you say the company's behaviour is ethical, or desired if it leads to profits ?
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        That’s true, I think these laws highlight the dangers of substance use. They inform people. We need to do the same for iPhone usage, however, majority of the responsibilities lies on the people - They need to be adept at recognizing the dangers of any addiction and act accordingly.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        Substances are addictive by causing changes of actual physical biochemistry by chemical means. I have never seen any proof that phone apps are causing similar biochemical changes, people just like doing it a lot, but could stop at any time without any biologically determined issue.
minikites 5y ago
Steve Jobs was a capitalist like every other CEO, so Apple's ever increasing services profits based on using your phone (and their other devices) as much as possible would have delighted him.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
yaya69 5y ago
He didn't approve of a two button mouse.
- coldtea 5y ago
  So? He was right. From usability statistics I've seen, most regular users, even today, don't right click. Besides, Macs had optionally multi-button mice for ages, including under Jobs.
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Can you provide source for this usability statistics?
- slver 5y ago
  From my experience, most people never fully figure out when you left-click and when you right-click. So he was right. I could personally take a 20 button mouse, but we should be careful not to design mass market devices after our own nerd desires.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    IME most people I've known use the right button and wheel often. Gamers were and are a large cohort.
    - slver 5y ago
      Everyone understands the wheel. But right-click, less so. Gamers are a special case. They play a game a lot, and are used to controllers with a dozen buttons, each having a specific function in the game. General office workers are another story entirely.
mikl 5y ago
What a load of extremely distasteful manure. The Cal Newport has a negative opinion about smartphones, but instead of just presenting his own opinion, he tries to put words in the mouth of a famous dead person by stretching a few carefully mined quotes. The iOS App Store opened with Jobs as CEO. Even if you imagine he didn’t have the foresight to see how putting a computer that can run any kind of software in everyone’s pocket would change things, he had years to see the growth of the App Store and how having Gmail, Facebook, etc. in your pocket changed people, and yet there’s no quotes of him saying anything indicating that he had opinions like those Newport is trying to imbue him with.
- lupire 5y ago
  What people forget about Jobs is that he always believws that Apple products were the best possible thing, and that every alternative was bad until Apple figured out out to make it the way they wanted it to. In Jobs' worldview, " not ready yet" was the same as "wrong, terrible product". This led to him changint his view the instant Apple was figured out how to make something work, like the App Store, or Intel chips, or ARM chips. This is very different from the PC/Windows/Linux view of "eh, if someone might find it useful, we'll make it, and they can deal with the compromises". Of course there was a lot of Reality Distortion too, where if Apple couldn't so something a competitor could do, Jobs said it was stupid until the day Apple became able to do it too.
  - kristianc 5y ago
    > In Jobs' worldview, " not ready yet" was the same as "wrong, terrible product". This doesn’t seem to hold up with the v1 of Apple’s products (iPhone, PowerBook, Apple Watch) being ropey to borderline average. Apple has almost always released an underpowered v1 and figured it out later.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      Seems a bit revisionist to claim that the original IPhone was ropey or average. It was unlike anything we'd seen and far better than anything else on the market. In fact it would be years before anyone else managed to produce something that could compete with the v1 IPhone on quality. To head off accusations of fanboyism, I say this as a long-time Android user who did own a G1 phone when it first came out, along with many of the other early android devices. Likewise, the original apple watch was certainly not worse than any other smart watch on the market when it came out. I think you could make an argument that it wasn't best in class depending on use case (e.g. it was tethered) but it was far from being average.
helsinkiandrew 5y ago
"Never Wanted" is a bit of a stretch - the article seems to be talking about Steve Jobs view of the iPhone when it was introduced in 2007 - with no App Store and just a few built in apps. It would be interesting to see how his opinion changed after the App 'explosion'.
pmlnr 5y ago
> In addition, by eliminating your ability to publish carefully curated images to social media directly from your phone, you can simply be present in a nice moment, free from the obsessive urge to document it. Live it, be present, yes, but that is not the opposite of documenting it. Take that photo if you want to, just postpone putting it on social media until you're at home, bored. Then sit down, take your time, write the story as well, not just the photo, find the correct wording, and then post it.
nicklecompte 5y ago
The idea that Steve Jobs was laying out some sort of foundational moral ideology of smartphone usage in 2007, rather than trying to sell the iPhone to wary investors by describing it as an iPod that makes calls, is just ridiculous. I don’t think Jobs in 2007 had a clear idea about how iPhones would be used - and if he did, that idea had changed dramatically by the time of his death. If he were still alive his views on iPhones would be unrecognizable compared to 2007. Likewise I doubt Jobs would have been able (or even willing!) to stop negative trends around the internet and society which in fact predate the iPod (online radicalization, social ostracism, propaganda and misinformation, etc). The logical premise of this article is tenuous at best, and generally preposterous. That said, it is not nearly as preposterous as the moral premise, that we should live our digital lives in a way that (the author asserts) Steve Jobs would approve of. The man is not a saint! He is a dead technologist who was well-known for being a huge jerk to his friends and family, and whose company was only ethical compared to Facebook/MSFT/ etc. I understand Cal has a book to sell, but even by the standards of shameless billionaire-worship this is hard to stomach.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aranchelk 5y ago
> The presentation confirms that Mr. Jobs envisioned a simpler and more constrained iPhone experience than the one we actually have over a decade later. Does it? Is it possible his presentation was tailored for an audience to sell them on a new product and not necessarily a brain dump of his deepest darkest secret hopes for technology?
- indymike 5y ago
  > Is it possible his presentation was tailored for an audience to sell them on a new product and not necessarily a brain dump of his deepest darkest secret hopes for technology? In war, you go to battle with the army you have (at the moment the war starts). In business, you go to market with the product you have. The original iPhone was very limited by it's hardware and even more so by software. A lot of Jobs presentations early on were designed to focus on where the product had huge advantages, and draw discussion away from the places where it did not. For example, Jobs did not spend tons of time on enterprise email (which at the time Blackberry had a huge advantage in) or on the huge catalog of apps (which MS Windows CE had, comparatively, at the time).
k__ 5y ago
Who cares what he wanted? Smartphones are a hit and took many people to the internet that wouldn't have used it before. Every now and then I'm thinking how it could be integrated into our lifes even better. Smartwatches didn't work too well and the technology for smart glasses isn't in the mass market yet.
cortesoft 5y ago
This sounds like the people who say “the founding fathers never imagined...”, like somehow they could see the future. Steve Jobs didn’t know what the future would bring, so who cares what he wanted in 2008?
zedshawmotherfu 5y ago
Seriously, fuck Steve.
nixpulvis 5y ago
I'll tell you what... Steve would have never stood for the complete degradation of UX across the iOS ecosystem. Nothing seems to "just work" in the ways that I had come to expect of the old-new Apple. It's still much better than my Linux phone and I imagine it competes with Android but that's a shitty excuse frankly. Just because you're the best doesn't make you good.
david-cako 5y ago
I suspect for many of us, our phones and computers keep us better connected than we would be without them. Apple has always been more of a tools company than any of the other guys; they aren't telling you how to live your life. Even social media companies aren't telling you how to live your life, they're just providing a (addictive and at-times destructive) service to do it. Steve saw the iPhone as the best and most innovative computing device in the world, and that's exactly what it was, and perhaps still is.
bigbillheck 5y ago
Why should I care what Steve Jobs thought?
prionassembly 5y ago
I have to manage a few different inboxes — gmail, work email, startup email, Whatsapp, Discord, Upwork, Slack... there’s no UI as consistent as the iPhone for doing so on the desktop, at least not for Windows as of 2015 and recent Linux. Then: since all these things are mainly on my phone, my desktop computer is for Work. I don’t even have tabbed browsing, use a tiling WM with a tiny status bar and often hide even that inside code editor.
anshumankmr 5y ago
Steve Jobs didn't want people to watch porn on iPhones either. So that makes be believe he would have been conflicted to see how people are addicted to phones nowadays. I also believe he would have wanted to make privacy a priority for the company, which they have.
rdiddly 5y ago
Kind of silly. Whatever he didn't predict, he would've watched happen, adapted to, profited from, and probably taken credit for retroactively.
jmull 5y ago
This article is so foolish. Steve Jobs was going to sell you hard on why the device he could put in front of you was the very best device you could possibly buy. If the competition had more, they had too much, if they had less, what they were missing was absolutely critical. You didn't need apps in 2007 because the iPhone didn't have them. Yet. The App Store opened in 2008, which means it was seen as a priority at Apple (including Steve Jobs at the time) and under development in 2007 when the iPhone was released. I like the overall thesis here: use your phone, don't let it use you. But this Steve-Jobs-wouldntof-approved angle is just obnoxious.
capital_guy 5y ago
I have never known a man with such big a soap box as cal newport
Ensorceled 5y ago
Another, more likely explanation, is that Steve Jobs was well aware of the Osborne Effect and talked about that early iPhone's strengths and features instead of waxing poetic about what future iPhones might have if customers only wait a few more versions ....
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time (of the article): Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000166 - Jan 2019 (57 comments)

101 points by nojito 5y ago

Maybe Jobs thought that developers would create applications that were useful and not primarily driven by advertising metrics and entertainment?

slver 5y ago

I'm a bit of a Steve Jobs ultrafan, and I've seen the presentation on iPhone maybe a 100 times. Predictably the article takes quotes out of contexts, makes unwarranted assumptions and is overall, worthless. I don't call NYTimes work worthless easily, I kind of have some reverence for them. But that truly was "random blog post" level of writing, pushing the writer's own words in Steve Jobs' mouth. Shame. Steve Jobs DID call it a "revolutionary internet communicator" like at least half a dozen times in that presentation. And he didn't deemphasize apps. He pushed for a native Google Maps app. He did push for a native YouTube app. He thought most of third party extensibility will be web apps, but he and his team were quickly convinced they need a native store when people jailbroke the phone and made one. Steve Jobs wasn't the kind of person who has opinions set in stone. In fact he liked to say "I don't need to be right [in an argument], I just want us to do the right thing. The best ideas should win." Did he imagine we'd stay 24/7 glued to our phones? Probably no, but that's also up to us, not up to our phones.

jeremywho 5y ago
I agree. He was still around when the sdk and App Store were released. He could have squashed that if he chose to.
- tom_mellior 5y ago
  But of course he didn't squash it, because he loved vendor lock-in and walled gardens.
- ksec 5y ago
  Scott Forstall ( he said it himself ) was pushing for Native Apps even before the launch of iPhone, Steve Jobs disagree and thought ( as Mark Zukerberg did ) that HTML 5 apps would take over, it would be easier to make, and just as good. Scott argued HTML5 will never be as good as native. And he was right. Then jailbreak happens, and Steve Jobs agreed to change. Copied the App Store model. And the rest is history. ( The App Store model exist long before Jailbreak in other 3G phones and market. So it isn't really new )
sreque 5y ago
How do you have reverence for a corrupt news organization that: covered up the Holocaust, covered up Stalin's mass starvations in Ukraine, singularly made Fidel Castro successful, spread lies about the Vietnam war that lead to american presence being extended for years, and, most recently, rewrote history with divisive lies via the 1619 project? https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Ashley-Rindsberg/dp/1736703307 https://www.amazon.com/Gray-Lady-Winked-Ashley-Rindsberg/dp/...
arthur_sav 5y ago
I've made a pledge to never read another NYT article. They've been writing absolute dogpoop for the last decade and have lost any credibility they once had.
- astrange 5y ago
  News is completely different from how it was a decade ago, and NYT has hired most of the best writers from every other company. They even have the Buzzfeed guy doing his strange media reporting beat where he reports on things inside the NYT as if he didn't work there. It's really not worth ignoring them even if their politics reporting is still so terrible to the point they let Peter Baker work for them.
  - mcot2 5y ago
    Whats wrong with Peter Baker?
    - astrange 5y ago
      He's a hack who was going to leave and cover Israel, but was called back to cover Trump because he has a lot of Republican sources… aka he just publishes whatever they tell him and claims it's true because they said it was true. This is one of the reasons so many people think Trump-Russia was a hoax even though he obviously actually did it and both the Mueller report and the Republican Senate investigation said he did it. He's also part of the NYT's gang of terminal both-sides/horse race political reporters, I believe to the point of not voting because he doesn't want to take a side.
      - passivate 5y ago
        In your judgement, which comparable organization has done better overall than NYT? They do cover a broad range of topics.
        notsureaboutpg 5y ago
agumonkey 5y ago
Jobs came for a different era too. An era where things where more scarce due to pre-internet structures. It might have been difficult for him to think '1000 songs in your pocket' would end up as an generalized addictive stream of pages and sucking peoples attention instead of helping good human contact. It's always the same butterfly effect, when you put something in the world, it might really succeed at that but you never know how the system will grow around it. Kinda like this static1.squarespace.com/static/527deb7fe4b009d7ee74d609/t/54f93e21e4b025c50f0e090c/1425620525003/avoiding_pain_desire_path.jpg (well far fetched analogy tbh)
- mcot2 5y ago
  Your link doesn’t seem to point to anything.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/527deb7fe4b009d7ee74d609/1425620522870-OKA5540SR5NE99L32HXW/avoiding_pain_desire_path.jpg?format=1000w&content-type=image%2Fpng https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/527deb7fe4b009d7e...
- leeoniya 5y ago
  pretty sure that extra path was carved for/by bicycles
  - withinboredom 5y ago
    That’s the Netherlands if I’m not mistaken. The stairs have a well for bike wheels on either side, so people went out of their way to make a new path that wasn’t as steep.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - leeoniya 5y ago
      i don't see anything there that accommodates bikes. and in either case it would not be an example of GP's point. if someone gave me a fork to eat soup with, then i would invent the spoon because the fork is inadequate for that purpose; not because forks had some unforeseen spoon ecosystems grow around them. if doctors started using forks as medical instruments, then sure.
chevill 5y ago
Yea I find it hard to believe that science fiction has been predicting little rectangular computers used for nearly any purpose imaginable for several decades but it was completely lost on Steve Jobs that putting a computer in a person's pocket might result in them using it as much as much as people use other computers.
duxup 5y ago
Yeah if anything from watching Jobs talk over the years it's clear he is repeatedly reevaluating AND taking the input of those around him. "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do." Steve would have changed his mind, so would people around him, as anyone would.
- hinkley 5y ago
  We seem to think politicians should spring fully formed into existence, like Athena.
xenocyon 5y ago
Bizarre that this is (at this time) the top comment with numerous replies and nobody has yet pointed out that this is not a NYTimes journalism piece; it is an opinion piece by Cal Newport.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  This is a regular source of confusion on HN, usually accompanied by dozens to hundreds of comments about how you just can't trust the media, also if anyone points out the nature of opinion pieces you usually get a doubling down about how its printed by the NYT so its the same thing as reporting.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 5y ago
  Then NYT is diluting their brand and they deserve some of the blowback anyway.
  - majewsky 5y ago
    It's absolutely commonplace for newspapers to publish op-eds. In fact, I'd be more surprised if any particular newspaper didn't do it. In print, it's usually not a source of confusion because the op-eds are on their own page or in their own column that has "Opinion" or something in the heading. This is something that the NYT's website should try harder to emulate (or it should provide some other sort of visual differentiation between reporting and opinion contents), but "diluting their brand" is a quite extraordinary claim.
baryphonic 5y ago
> Steve Jobs DID call it a "revolutionary internet communicator" like at least half a dozen times in that presentation. And he didn't deemphasize apps. He pushed for a native Google Maps app. He did push for a native YouTube app. He thought most of third party extensibility will be web apps, but he and his team were quickly convinced they need a native store when people jailbroke the phone and made one. Not only that, but his hook was that Apple was releasing three products: a touch screen iPod (that he led with this makes me laugh, but really, it was a big deal at the time), a mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator. I remember at the time, one of the most amazing things was seeing mobile Safari actually rendering real desktop web pages. Ironically, Steve even loaded the NYT website as an example. At the time, the existing "smartphones" (which Steve made fun of :D) completely choked at rendering HTML, and some of the vendors were even trying to introduce simpler markup languages like WAP just for mobile devices. Regular web pages rendered normally on the iPhone, and the multitouch made them work almost as well as on a desktop. And then I also remember a particularly funny moment when Steve made a crank phone call to an arbitrary San Francisco Starbucks, asking a barista to order thousands of coffees. It was a wonderful demonstration of the integration you could get on a phone. Obviously Steve was imagining that iPhones would enable many more of these kinds of integrated experiences (mainly provided via the web, in his mind). It's just at that time, so few of these integrations existed because the phone was brand new! So, yeah, totally agree with you. This article is just not accurate. The journalist could have watched the launch demo a couple times end-to-end on YouTube, and have realized that the iPhone really was meant to be a revolutionary device.
- jalk 5y ago
  WAP and WML predates html rendering browser on phones by a number of years. Not even sure WML supports images See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
GeekyBear 5y ago
It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built. >When the Apple founder called [NY Times reporter] Bilton to complain about a story shortly after the iPad's launch, Bilton asked how his kids were enjoying the wildly popular new product. "They haven't used it," Jobs responded. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home." https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gates-both-severely-limited-their-kids-tech-use.html https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gat... The same was true with Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai, among others.
- enraged_camel 5y ago
  Yeah but that’s because Jobs was famously a minimalist and limited his own attachment to worldly possessions. (His biography goes into it in detail.)
  - nojito 5y ago
    Not really due to minimalism. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/how-bill-gates-mark-cuban-and-others-limit-their-kids-tech-use.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/how-bill-gates-mark-cuban-an...
- pvorb 5y ago
  Basically every parent quickly realizes that not setting limits is bad for their children. At least the more educated ones do.
  - aspaceman 5y ago
    The act of setting limits is incredibly important to a child's development, even more so than what the limits ultimately are.
- gumby 5y ago
  > It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built. You don’t have to be a tech “titan”. When I was on a school board (in Silicon Valley), there was a big push to have kids be trained in “technology”. Inevitably (in that era) that meant things like PowerPoint and Word. The only people who pushed back? A programmer, a tech startup CEO, and an engineering VP from what is now called FAANG. But we were overridden by the other board members. I still believe the kids (including my own) learned more by playing outside and writing with pens.
js2 5y ago
> I don't call NYTimes work worthless easily. Nor should you in this case, because this isn't NYT work. It's a guest essay by Cal Newport, who isn't an NYT employee. At best, you could argue that it doesn't meet their standards for guest essays or that they should have higher standards: https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014809107-How-to-submit-a-Guest-Essay-for-Opinion https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014809107-How-... The NYT needs to do a better job perhaps distinguishing opinion from news and guests from columnists from editorial board work. In the print edition, it's clearer from the layout, but on the web, it all runs together. That said, this is clearly marked in red at the top as "opinion" with the author's name. It's also from the "Sunday Review" section which is all opinion pieces: https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/sunday https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/sunday
- a4isms 5y ago
  I have a house. It has a front lawn. If I set up guest chairs on my front lawn and invite the world to sit on those chairs and give their opinion, it’s still opinion being broadcast from my lawn with my endorsement implied by the fact that I set the whole thing up and charge for advertising banners laid out at the speakers’ feet. The fact that I nudge-nudge wink-wink don’t endorse these opinions, and that I don’t formally employ the speakers is wildly irrelevant. If I don’t want to be accountable for the quality or correctness of their opinions, I shouldn’t put out the chairs and invite people to sit down and hold forth. I think we need to get rid of this pretend distinction between “opinion” and “editorial.” It’s all stuff a newspaper promotes, just as every talking head on Fox News is something Fox chooses to broadcast for money.
  - passivate 5y ago
    > If I don’t want to be accountable for the quality or correctness of their opinions, I shouldn’t put out the chairs and invite people to sit down and hold forth. What metric are you using to objectively decide the "correctness" of an opinion? Can you propose a system that would work? I'm sure many publications are looking for one..
grishka 5y ago
> Did he imagine we'd stay 24/7 glued to our phones? Probably no, but that's also up to us, not up to our phones. Whatever device you use to access the internet is simply the medium. The problem lies with the services you access from it, of which many have the business model relying selling your attention and thus manipulating the shit out of you into spending more time with them. I'm able to enjoy the rare episodes of having a real life without being in my phone all the time, and I'm very picky about my notification settings. Every time I receive an unwanted or non-informative notification, I make sure to prevent that from ever happening again. Seeing /r/assholedesign on reddit, most people aren't like that though.
elcomet 5y ago
I agreed with you until the last line. Company that design phones and especially apps are designing them with addiction in mind.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Isn’t addiction a personal responsibility? It’s so easy for us to externalize what we should be more vigilant about. There is an endless sea of addicting things in the world. Passing responsibility to someone else isn’t solving the problem, it’s playing the victim card.
  - elcomet 5y ago
    I don't believe it's only a matter of personal responsibility. We have laws to help prevent addiction from gambling, alcohol, tobacco... When a company hires neuroscientists to design an addictive product, how can you say the responsibility of addiction falls on the users ? Would you say the company's behaviour is ethical, or desired if it leads to profits ?
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      That’s true, I think these laws highlight the dangers of substance use. They inform people. We need to do the same for iPhone usage, however, majority of the responsibilities lies on the people - They need to be adept at recognizing the dangers of any addiction and act accordingly.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      Substances are addictive by causing changes of actual physical biochemistry by chemical means. I have never seen any proof that phone apps are causing similar biochemical changes, people just like doing it a lot, but could stop at any time without any biologically determined issue.

minikites 5y ago

Steve Jobs was a capitalist like every other CEO, so Apple's ever increasing services profits based on using your phone (and their other devices) as much as possible would have delighted him.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

yaya69 5y ago

He didn't approve of a two button mouse.

coldtea 5y ago
So? He was right. From usability statistics I've seen, most regular users, even today, don't right click. Besides, Macs had optionally multi-button mice for ages, including under Jobs.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Can you provide source for this usability statistics?
slver 5y ago
From my experience, most people never fully figure out when you left-click and when you right-click. So he was right. I could personally take a 20 button mouse, but we should be careful not to design mass market devices after our own nerd desires.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  IME most people I've known use the right button and wheel often. Gamers were and are a large cohort.
  - slver 5y ago
    Everyone understands the wheel. But right-click, less so. Gamers are a special case. They play a game a lot, and are used to controllers with a dozen buttons, each having a specific function in the game. General office workers are another story entirely.

mikl 5y ago

What a load of extremely distasteful manure. The Cal Newport has a negative opinion about smartphones, but instead of just presenting his own opinion, he tries to put words in the mouth of a famous dead person by stretching a few carefully mined quotes. The iOS App Store opened with Jobs as CEO. Even if you imagine he didn’t have the foresight to see how putting a computer that can run any kind of software in everyone’s pocket would change things, he had years to see the growth of the App Store and how having Gmail, Facebook, etc. in your pocket changed people, and yet there’s no quotes of him saying anything indicating that he had opinions like those Newport is trying to imbue him with.

lupire 5y ago
What people forget about Jobs is that he always believws that Apple products were the best possible thing, and that every alternative was bad until Apple figured out out to make it the way they wanted it to. In Jobs' worldview, " not ready yet" was the same as "wrong, terrible product". This led to him changint his view the instant Apple was figured out how to make something work, like the App Store, or Intel chips, or ARM chips. This is very different from the PC/Windows/Linux view of "eh, if someone might find it useful, we'll make it, and they can deal with the compromises". Of course there was a lot of Reality Distortion too, where if Apple couldn't so something a competitor could do, Jobs said it was stupid until the day Apple became able to do it too.
- kristianc 5y ago
  > In Jobs' worldview, " not ready yet" was the same as "wrong, terrible product". This doesn’t seem to hold up with the v1 of Apple’s products (iPhone, PowerBook, Apple Watch) being ropey to borderline average. Apple has almost always released an underpowered v1 and figured it out later.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    Seems a bit revisionist to claim that the original IPhone was ropey or average. It was unlike anything we'd seen and far better than anything else on the market. In fact it would be years before anyone else managed to produce something that could compete with the v1 IPhone on quality. To head off accusations of fanboyism, I say this as a long-time Android user who did own a G1 phone when it first came out, along with many of the other early android devices. Likewise, the original apple watch was certainly not worse than any other smart watch on the market when it came out. I think you could make an argument that it wasn't best in class depending on use case (e.g. it was tethered) but it was far from being average.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago

"Never Wanted" is a bit of a stretch - the article seems to be talking about Steve Jobs view of the iPhone when it was introduced in 2007 - with no App Store and just a few built in apps. It would be interesting to see how his opinion changed after the App 'explosion'.

pmlnr 5y ago

> In addition, by eliminating your ability to publish carefully curated images to social media directly from your phone, you can simply be present in a nice moment, free from the obsessive urge to document it. Live it, be present, yes, but that is not the opposite of documenting it. Take that photo if you want to, just postpone putting it on social media until you're at home, bored. Then sit down, take your time, write the story as well, not just the photo, find the correct wording, and then post it.

nicklecompte 5y ago

The idea that Steve Jobs was laying out some sort of foundational moral ideology of smartphone usage in 2007, rather than trying to sell the iPhone to wary investors by describing it as an iPod that makes calls, is just ridiculous. I don’t think Jobs in 2007 had a clear idea about how iPhones would be used - and if he did, that idea had changed dramatically by the time of his death. If he were still alive his views on iPhones would be unrecognizable compared to 2007. Likewise I doubt Jobs would have been able (or even willing!) to stop negative trends around the internet and society which in fact predate the iPod (online radicalization, social ostracism, propaganda and misinformation, etc). The logical premise of this article is tenuous at best, and generally preposterous. That said, it is not nearly as preposterous as the moral premise, that we should live our digital lives in a way that (the author asserts) Steve Jobs would approve of. The man is not a saint! He is a dead technologist who was well-known for being a huge jerk to his friends and family, and whose company was only ethical compared to Facebook/MSFT/ etc. I understand Cal has a book to sell, but even by the standards of shameless billionaire-worship this is hard to stomach.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aranchelk 5y ago

> The presentation confirms that Mr. Jobs envisioned a simpler and more constrained iPhone experience than the one we actually have over a decade later. Does it? Is it possible his presentation was tailored for an audience to sell them on a new product and not necessarily a brain dump of his deepest darkest secret hopes for technology?

indymike 5y ago
> Is it possible his presentation was tailored for an audience to sell them on a new product and not necessarily a brain dump of his deepest darkest secret hopes for technology? In war, you go to battle with the army you have (at the moment the war starts). In business, you go to market with the product you have. The original iPhone was very limited by it's hardware and even more so by software. A lot of Jobs presentations early on were designed to focus on where the product had huge advantages, and draw discussion away from the places where it did not. For example, Jobs did not spend tons of time on enterprise email (which at the time Blackberry had a huge advantage in) or on the huge catalog of apps (which MS Windows CE had, comparatively, at the time).

k__ 5y ago

Who cares what he wanted? Smartphones are a hit and took many people to the internet that wouldn't have used it before. Every now and then I'm thinking how it could be integrated into our lifes even better. Smartwatches didn't work too well and the technology for smart glasses isn't in the mass market yet.

cortesoft 5y ago

This sounds like the people who say “the founding fathers never imagined...”, like somehow they could see the future. Steve Jobs didn’t know what the future would bring, so who cares what he wanted in 2008?

zedshawmotherfu 5y ago

Seriously, fuck Steve.

nixpulvis 5y ago

I'll tell you what... Steve would have never stood for the complete degradation of UX across the iOS ecosystem. Nothing seems to "just work" in the ways that I had come to expect of the old-new Apple. It's still much better than my Linux phone and I imagine it competes with Android but that's a shitty excuse frankly. Just because you're the best doesn't make you good.

david-cako 5y ago

I suspect for many of us, our phones and computers keep us better connected than we would be without them. Apple has always been more of a tools company than any of the other guys; they aren't telling you how to live your life. Even social media companies aren't telling you how to live your life, they're just providing a (addictive and at-times destructive) service to do it. Steve saw the iPhone as the best and most innovative computing device in the world, and that's exactly what it was, and perhaps still is.

bigbillheck 5y ago

Why should I care what Steve Jobs thought?

prionassembly 5y ago

I have to manage a few different inboxes — gmail, work email, startup email, Whatsapp, Discord, Upwork, Slack... there’s no UI as consistent as the iPhone for doing so on the desktop, at least not for Windows as of 2015 and recent Linux. Then: since all these things are mainly on my phone, my desktop computer is for Work. I don’t even have tabbed browsing, use a tiling WM with a tiny status bar and often hide even that inside code editor.

anshumankmr 5y ago

Steve Jobs didn't want people to watch porn on iPhones either. So that makes be believe he would have been conflicted to see how people are addicted to phones nowadays. I also believe he would have wanted to make privacy a priority for the company, which they have.

rdiddly 5y ago

Kind of silly. Whatever he didn't predict, he would've watched happen, adapted to, profited from, and probably taken credit for retroactively.

jmull 5y ago

This article is so foolish. Steve Jobs was going to sell you hard on why the device he could put in front of you was the very best device you could possibly buy. If the competition had more, they had too much, if they had less, what they were missing was absolutely critical. You didn't need apps in 2007 because the iPhone didn't have them. Yet. The App Store opened in 2008, which means it was seen as a priority at Apple (including Steve Jobs at the time) and under development in 2007 when the iPhone was released. I like the overall thesis here: use your phone, don't let it use you. But this Steve-Jobs-wouldntof-approved angle is just obnoxious.

capital_guy 5y ago

I have never known a man with such big a soap box as cal newport

Ensorceled 5y ago

Another, more likely explanation, is that Steve Jobs was well aware of the Osborne Effect and talked about that early iPhone's strengths and features instead of waxing poetic about what future iPhones might have if customers only wait a few more versions ....

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time (of the article): Steve Jobs Never Wanted Us to Use Our iPhones Like This - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19000166 - Jan 2019 (57 comments)