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I don't think parent is saying that Jobs should be "scrubbed from the history books", quite the opposite really. They're saying that we shouldn't just talk abo

I don't think parent is saying that Jobs should be "scrubbed from the history books", quite the opposite really. They're saying that we shouldn't just talk about all the positive things that Jobs did as if he was some kind of paragon - the history books should also talk about the bad.

gibolt 5y ago
He completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times. So he was an ass to work with... That doesn't void anything else that was done, nor should it be a highlight. Worth mentioning, sure. Visionaries are usually hard to deal with (perhaps because they are fighting against the grain). Most visionaries are wrong, but that diversity is what pushes us forward.
- Groxx 5y ago
  To some degree yes... but to some degree you sound like you're claiming they did what they did in a vacuum. iPhone launched 2007. Android was announced in 2007 and released in 2008. Palm had large-screen phones with apps and a browser in 2002[1]. A lot of things happen around people that isn't completely due to them being them. We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself. [1]: if not earlier. randomly skimming wikipedia finds e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices
  - carlosdp 5y ago
    > We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself. I believe there's a logical fallacy that described this thinking. I definitely don't think the smartphone revolution was inevitable, at least not on the timetable it happened on because Jobs pushed it forward. Yea, Palm had large-screen phones, and yet most people didn't care and still didn't have smartphones. That could have kept repeating for a long time more, with just Blackberry holding the market and just for "business phones," if Apple hadn't come in with its consumer gravitas. It's easy to look in hindsight and think the future was inevitable, but it often wasn't.
    - strken 5y ago
      There was a tipping point just before smartphones where J2ME apps were surging in popularity and feature phones were getting cheaper and better, where it was obvious that something was going to happen. My phone had google maps, ebooks, the web browser opera mini, and a very slow gameboy emulator running on it as J2ME apps in 2006.
      - netr0ute 5y ago
        The difference is that the iPhone ran a "full" OS without the "baby software" on every other device at the time.
        HWR_14 5y ago
        The iPhone was most certainly not the most full OS at the time.
        lmm 5y ago
        The opposite was true actually - the original iPhone couldn't run third-party applications at all. What it did have was a much bigger and better touchscreen that didn't need a stylus. (Even that wasn't really a technical innovation per se - rather it was the willingness to charge over twice as much as previous phones that made it possible).
        tobr 5y ago
        To be precise, the original iPhone can run third-party apps, but couldn’t from the beginning. The AppStore was introduced with iPhone OS 2 a year after the launch.
        Groxx 5y ago
        Yeah - capacitive touch tech was far from new, but it was still super expensive compared to resistive. Price made it largely not an option until around the time that Apple adopted it (which they were definitely ahead of the curve on, and they made fantastic use of it). It was pretty clear at the time that nobody was all that fond of styluses, but they were the sole pragmatic option available then. That, and many people were glad to have plastic screens - iPhones shattering because you looked at them too enthusiastically was a source of many lols and many expensive repairs / re-purchases. The early iPhones still scratched nearly as easily (keys or sand were more than sufficient), but they were nowhere near as durable overall. Decent screen durability, screen protectors, and protective cases took years to arrive - the gorilla glass of the time was far, far more fragile than it is now.
  - Aunche 5y ago
    Sure, a lot of similarly functional smartphones had existed, but that didn't matter because nobody used them. Steve Job's intuition about user experience was at least several years ahead of everyone else's. Improvements are generally incremental, but the iPhone nailed so much the first time: the app icons, pinch to zoom, using the accelerometer for portrait and landscape mode, adaptive screen brightness, and the use of the proximity sensor.
  - CaptainZapp 5y ago
    The first Nokia Communicator[1], arguably the first smartphone, was released in 1996 and just had its 25 year anniversary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      Arguably, Nokia is a good example of "money and connections won't save you if you persistently go astray". I liked Nokias, I even programmed for Symbian OS, but boy, that was one convoluted system. The UI was pure hell, badly documented, error-prone and had to be tailored to every device out there (of which Nokia churned out a lot), unless you wanted to risk bad artifacts. They also LOVED to introduce major compatibility breaks.
  - alasdair_ 5y ago
    I had a 3G windows phone the year before the 2G iphone came out that did everything the iphone did other than visual voicemail. Still, the iphone did everything so luch better that I switched.
- Jedd 5y ago
  > He completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times. Steve Jobs? This is going to need a fair amount of substantiation, because those are some wild claims.
  - mattl 5y ago
    I assume the parent is referring to MobileMe, iPod socks and NeXTSTEP for PA RISC.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs may not have invented the personal computer, smartphone, or computer-generated animated movies, but he definitely popularized all of them
    - theonlybutlet 5y ago
      In the US yes, the rest of the world not so much. They were already popular or had other influences initially.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        You're relying a lot on "or had other influences". None of those things were invented by him, or by the companies he worked with. They were mass-marketed by him.
        theonlybutlet 5y ago
        Indeed but things like smartphones already had mass appeal in Europe and Asia, from the likes of Nokia in Europe and NTTDocomo in Japan.
  - hncurious 5y ago
    Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
- drunkenmagician 5y ago
  I'm not sure I would say 'changed the human trajectory for everyone', but I certainly think its fair to say that he was instrumental in substantially disrupting/transforming or created new markets in the technology (personal and business) space. The Apple 2 and Mac certainly disrupted personal computing in numerous ways (although perhaps the PC clone is a better example here). The Next box was a commercial failure, but a technological step forward for software. Mobile phones / tablets were clunky and did not have a great touch or internet experience before the iPhone. Apps / app stores have enabled a whole new paradigm for how users access global distributed services (and before someone says - mobile web, that experiences still is generally, subjectively a worse user experience than most apps). While there are plenty of stories about his abusive behavior (usually to his staff) especially in his younger days, there are equally plenty of positive anecdotes about him as a human. Personally I don't think I would have enjoyed working for him, but I feel it would have been an experience I would have not regretted. Like all of us, he was flawed in some areas, good in others.
- theonlybutlet 5y ago
  "transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet" That's some real hyperbole. We had phones and pc's already, it wouldn't of transformed our lives or changed our trajectory but yes he has been influential in shaping what that looks llike A cosmetic impact sure.
- ksec 5y ago
  >So he was an ass to work with I am starting to wonder if this is a tech thing. Because if you talk to people in many other industry, you will have a high chances of seeing / meeting one. And there are plenty of people who worked with him have no problem what so ever. And all of them are ones that are willing to stand up for themselves and talk back to Steve. I mean, by the age of late 30 one should realise most of the work we have today are really really shit. This may not be apparent in tech. But it is commonly the case everywhere else. Trying to push for higher quality and inertia will absolutely drive a person insane.
ryandrake 5y ago
But also don't let that one attribute of the person taint and overshadow a lifetime of accomplishments. I've seen a lot of this in the last few years on these sites. You start a thread about someone with a lifetime of achievements, and someone will inevitably come out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or (going farther back) "Buuuuut he was a slave-owner", implying that one attribute nullifies everything else the person did. Yes, everyone has flaws. Nobody is perfect. Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions! You're never going to find Mother Teresa (who, by the way, is also a target of these kinds of "but she also" nit-picks). History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.
- robbiep 5y ago
  I think the best current example of this is the ‘cancel billionaires’ writ large in the billionaire race to space. Yes wealth inequality is probably one of the biggest issues of our generation. Yes it is probably unethical that people are able to amass such huge fortunes particularly in some examples less reflective of the current crop of tech billionaires through tax loopholes and the fact that if you have money its easier to get more money. Yes musk is a billionaire but almost all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that? Also, why is the meme that if we still have world hunger we shouldn’t have a space program back again? As though the world isn’t large enough for us collectively to pursue more than one avenue of progress at once.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    The issue is not about a space program, the issue is that it's a space program that is largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires, i.e. a significant portion of funding is coming from government, through contracts and/or subsidies. On top of that is that the billionaires are using their money to fly to space, instead of really changing the world for better, which they clearly good do. At the same time there is a significant portion of our community that idiolises these people and acts as if they are in fact changing the world for better.
WalterBright 5y ago
> the history books should also talk about the bad I'm not so sure. For example, I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life.
- dagw 5y ago
  I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life. Then you probably should be reading about his work in a science text book rather than a history book. For history books, the background and context of the people and events is as important as the events themselves.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    You have a point, but my meaning is I will not adversely judge his accomplishments by listing his failures in other aspects of his life. How Steve Jobs treated his daughter, for example, is between him and his family. Diminishing his business accomplishments because of that is simply small-minded.
    - saiya-jin 5y ago
      That's your perspective, which is fine and dandy but that's not everyone's view. I for a change am interested in whole picture, not just nit-picking parts of humans to idolize and glorify them. If I should respect someone's opinion or success in life, well that respect needs to come from someplace. And in my eyes its just harder to earn it compared to your viewpoint - excellence in 1 singular aspect isn't cutting it. There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. The others, not so much.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        > There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. Or they've just managed to successfully hide their feet of clay, or you've just decided that you like their awesomeness so much you're going to overlook their peccadilloes. Name any accomplished person, and you'll find haters.
psyc 5y ago
We have biographies for that.
- dagw 5y ago
  Which is essentially a subset of history books.
inglor_cz 5y ago
I think there is plenty of volunteers heaping scorn on Jobs and Musk on every significant forum. Surely not everyone has to join them, or?

gibolt 5y ago

He completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times. So he was an ass to work with... That doesn't void anything else that was done, nor should it be a highlight. Worth mentioning, sure. Visionaries are usually hard to deal with (perhaps because they are fighting against the grain). Most visionaries are wrong, but that diversity is what pushes us forward.

Groxx 5y ago
To some degree yes... but to some degree you sound like you're claiming they did what they did in a vacuum. iPhone launched 2007. Android was announced in 2007 and released in 2008. Palm had large-screen phones with apps and a browser in 2002[1]. A lot of things happen around people that isn't completely due to them being them. We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself. [1]: if not earlier. randomly skimming wikipedia finds e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treo_180 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palm_OS_devices
- carlosdp 5y ago
  > We can't know what would have happened without Jobs, but it seems fair to say that much of the global-scale stuff would have, though perhaps not Apple itself. I believe there's a logical fallacy that described this thinking. I definitely don't think the smartphone revolution was inevitable, at least not on the timetable it happened on because Jobs pushed it forward. Yea, Palm had large-screen phones, and yet most people didn't care and still didn't have smartphones. That could have kept repeating for a long time more, with just Blackberry holding the market and just for "business phones," if Apple hadn't come in with its consumer gravitas. It's easy to look in hindsight and think the future was inevitable, but it often wasn't.
  - strken 5y ago
    There was a tipping point just before smartphones where J2ME apps were surging in popularity and feature phones were getting cheaper and better, where it was obvious that something was going to happen. My phone had google maps, ebooks, the web browser opera mini, and a very slow gameboy emulator running on it as J2ME apps in 2006.
    - netr0ute 5y ago
      The difference is that the iPhone ran a "full" OS without the "baby software" on every other device at the time.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        The iPhone was most certainly not the most full OS at the time.
      - lmm 5y ago
        The opposite was true actually - the original iPhone couldn't run third-party applications at all. What it did have was a much bigger and better touchscreen that didn't need a stylus. (Even that wasn't really a technical innovation per se - rather it was the willingness to charge over twice as much as previous phones that made it possible).
        tobr 5y ago
        To be precise, the original iPhone can run third-party apps, but couldn’t from the beginning. The AppStore was introduced with iPhone OS 2 a year after the launch.
        Groxx 5y ago
        Yeah - capacitive touch tech was far from new, but it was still super expensive compared to resistive. Price made it largely not an option until around the time that Apple adopted it (which they were definitely ahead of the curve on, and they made fantastic use of it). It was pretty clear at the time that nobody was all that fond of styluses, but they were the sole pragmatic option available then. That, and many people were glad to have plastic screens - iPhones shattering because you looked at them too enthusiastically was a source of many lols and many expensive repairs / re-purchases. The early iPhones still scratched nearly as easily (keys or sand were more than sufficient), but they were nowhere near as durable overall. Decent screen durability, screen protectors, and protective cases took years to arrive - the gorilla glass of the time was far, far more fragile than it is now.
- Aunche 5y ago
  Sure, a lot of similarly functional smartphones had existed, but that didn't matter because nobody used them. Steve Job's intuition about user experience was at least several years ahead of everyone else's. Improvements are generally incremental, but the iPhone nailed so much the first time: the app icons, pinch to zoom, using the accelerometer for portrait and landscape mode, adaptive screen brightness, and the use of the proximity sensor.
- CaptainZapp 5y ago
  The first Nokia Communicator[1], arguably the first smartphone, was released in 1996 and just had its 25 year anniversary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    Arguably, Nokia is a good example of "money and connections won't save you if you persistently go astray". I liked Nokias, I even programmed for Symbian OS, but boy, that was one convoluted system. The UI was pure hell, badly documented, error-prone and had to be tailored to every device out there (of which Nokia churned out a lot), unless you wanted to risk bad artifacts. They also LOVED to introduce major compatibility breaks.
- alasdair_ 5y ago
  I had a 3G windows phone the year before the 2G iphone came out that did everything the iphone did other than visual voicemail. Still, the iphone did everything so luch better that I switched.
Jedd 5y ago
> He completely transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet, multiple times. Steve Jobs? This is going to need a fair amount of substantiation, because those are some wild claims.
- mattl 5y ago
  I assume the parent is referring to MobileMe, iPod socks and NeXTSTEP for PA RISC.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > Steve Jobs? Steve Jobs may not have invented the personal computer, smartphone, or computer-generated animated movies, but he definitely popularized all of them
  - theonlybutlet 5y ago
    In the US yes, the rest of the world not so much. They were already popular or had other influences initially.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      You're relying a lot on "or had other influences". None of those things were invented by him, or by the companies he worked with. They were mass-marketed by him.
      - theonlybutlet 5y ago
        Indeed but things like smartphones already had mass appeal in Europe and Asia, from the likes of Nokia in Europe and NTTDocomo in Japan.
- hncurious 5y ago
  Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
drunkenmagician 5y ago
I'm not sure I would say 'changed the human trajectory for everyone', but I certainly think its fair to say that he was instrumental in substantially disrupting/transforming or created new markets in the technology (personal and business) space. The Apple 2 and Mac certainly disrupted personal computing in numerous ways (although perhaps the PC clone is a better example here). The Next box was a commercial failure, but a technological step forward for software. Mobile phones / tablets were clunky and did not have a great touch or internet experience before the iPhone. Apps / app stores have enabled a whole new paradigm for how users access global distributed services (and before someone says - mobile web, that experiences still is generally, subjectively a worse user experience than most apps). While there are plenty of stories about his abusive behavior (usually to his staff) especially in his younger days, there are equally plenty of positive anecdotes about him as a human. Personally I don't think I would have enjoyed working for him, but I feel it would have been an experience I would have not regretted. Like all of us, he was flawed in some areas, good in others.
theonlybutlet 5y ago
"transformed modern life and changed the human trajectory for everyone on the planet" That's some real hyperbole. We had phones and pc's already, it wouldn't of transformed our lives or changed our trajectory but yes he has been influential in shaping what that looks llike A cosmetic impact sure.
ksec 5y ago
>So he was an ass to work with I am starting to wonder if this is a tech thing. Because if you talk to people in many other industry, you will have a high chances of seeing / meeting one. And there are plenty of people who worked with him have no problem what so ever. And all of them are ones that are willing to stand up for themselves and talk back to Steve. I mean, by the age of late 30 one should realise most of the work we have today are really really shit. This may not be apparent in tech. But it is commonly the case everywhere else. Trying to push for higher quality and inertia will absolutely drive a person insane.

ryandrake 5y ago

But also don't let that one attribute of the person taint and overshadow a lifetime of accomplishments. I've seen a lot of this in the last few years on these sites. You start a thread about someone with a lifetime of achievements, and someone will inevitably come out of the woodwork to remind everyone: "Buuuuuut he was sexist" or "Buuuuuut he sometimes beat his kids" or (going farther back) "Buuuuut he was a slave-owner", implying that one attribute nullifies everything else the person did. Yes, everyone has flaws. Nobody is perfect. Particularly when you use today's more sensitive moral yardstick to measure yesterday's actions! You're never going to find Mother Teresa (who, by the way, is also a target of these kinds of "but she also" nit-picks). History books should also talk about the bad, but it usually doesn't deserve even a single chapter, let alone be a major theme of the book.

robbiep 5y ago
I think the best current example of this is the ‘cancel billionaires’ writ large in the billionaire race to space. Yes wealth inequality is probably one of the biggest issues of our generation. Yes it is probably unethical that people are able to amass such huge fortunes particularly in some examples less reflective of the current crop of tech billionaires through tax loopholes and the fact that if you have money its easier to get more money. Yes musk is a billionaire but almost all of his assets are tied up in company stock, so like how do you go about redistributing that? Also, why is the meme that if we still have world hunger we shouldn’t have a space program back again? As though the world isn’t large enough for us collectively to pursue more than one avenue of progress at once.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  The issue is not about a space program, the issue is that it's a space program that is largely redistributing wealth from the commons to rich billionaires, i.e. a significant portion of funding is coming from government, through contracts and/or subsidies. On top of that is that the billionaires are using their money to fly to space, instead of really changing the world for better, which they clearly good do. At the same time there is a significant portion of our community that idiolises these people and acts as if they are in fact changing the world for better.

WalterBright 5y ago

> the history books should also talk about the bad I'm not so sure. For example, I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life.

dagw 5y ago
I'm quite interested in what made Einstein great, his work on physics. I have zero interest in his failures in his non-physics personal life. Then you probably should be reading about his work in a science text book rather than a history book. For history books, the background and context of the people and events is as important as the events themselves.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  You have a point, but my meaning is I will not adversely judge his accomplishments by listing his failures in other aspects of his life. How Steve Jobs treated his daughter, for example, is between him and his family. Diminishing his business accomplishments because of that is simply small-minded.
  - saiya-jin 5y ago
    That's your perspective, which is fine and dandy but that's not everyone's view. I for a change am interested in whole picture, not just nit-picking parts of humans to idolize and glorify them. If I should respect someone's opinion or success in life, well that respect needs to come from someplace. And in my eyes its just harder to earn it compared to your viewpoint - excellence in 1 singular aspect isn't cutting it. There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. The others, not so much.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      > There are properly awesome people out there through and through, in private and public alike, and those deserve my full respect. Or they've just managed to successfully hide their feet of clay, or you've just decided that you like their awesomeness so much you're going to overlook their peccadilloes. Name any accomplished person, and you'll find haters.

psyc 5y ago

We have biographies for that.

dagw 5y ago
Which is essentially a subset of history books.

inglor_cz 5y ago

I think there is plenty of volunteers heaping scorn on Jobs and Musk on every significant forum. Surely not everyone has to join them, or?