11 ms·

I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. The overall software quality has dropped ma

I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left. There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he was still there but it has stagnated.

tomjen3 5y ago
If Jobs had been there, I can't help but believe there wouldn't have been a notch on the iPhone and the watch would have a longer lasting battery. My Samsung watch can go 2 days in between charges, so it should be possible.
- _moof 5y ago
  Hard to say. Jobs oversaw all sorts of whiffs. The circular mouse comes to mind. And his ability to turn these kinds of errors into "it's good, actually" was so legendary that it had its own name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
FormerBandmate 5y ago
Apple has moved from being an incredibly innovative company under Steve Jobs to a much more corporate, mature company that relies more on incremental growth. They don’t really have any incentive to change because of their success, and this fundamental pattern happens to every company (see GE’s history after Edison). Apple simply isn’t the company it was before, and that’s a natural part of capitalism. Other Apples are emerging all the time, and will continue to emerge
- paxys 5y ago
  "Mature company that relies more on incremental growth" is exactly the stage where they get overtaken and fade into obscurity. It won't happen tomorrow, but slowly there will be new kids on the block who will make their tech look dated and uncool. It seems impossible to even think about but you'd say the same about IBM a few decades ago.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I'm sure Jobs knew about this. I'm sure he told Cook to milk the market cow wide and deep to ensure survival of Apple while maintaining a steady brand, in the event that somehow something real genuine emerges again from Apple and they're ready to fire with 200B of cash.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > Other Apples are emerging all the time How so? Are other people creating closed software platforms where they charge 30% off the top for their developers? I agree that they've gone more corporate over the years, but it was only after the realization that they could exploit the market with their install-base. It's quite literally, step-for-step identical to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer parable that got them in so much trouble. They're taking advantage of a market without any other options, which is not something that an emerging company can do, much less at the scale Apple does it.
- gumby 5y ago
  Yeah, too bad they don't develop new ideas like the watch or AirPods or design their own CPUs from scratch.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Yeah, real show-stoppers for a company that's quite literally the largest, most powerful corporation in modern history.
duxup 5y ago
I think that's true, but there's also a danger of asking someone to 'be that guy' who isn't Steve. That seems like a bigger risk. And in the meantime Apple still has its own fairly cohesive idea of how you use their devices and software ... while places like Google cancel and re-releases apps with half the features as the one they canceled, and I don't think they have a real idea of how people use their stuff.
- killion 5y ago
  Definitely, I don’t see a way you could elevate someone to the level Steve was at. I think the plan was to have Jony Ive be the final word on design person. But with iOS 7 Ives showed he didn’t get software and the “design is how it works” concept.
  - Bud 5y ago
    Not really. iOS 7 is an insignificant blip. Hundreds of other times, Ive showed that he was the best in the entire world at the "design is how it works" concept. Ive was the embodiment of that for his entire time at Apple. Jony Ive is the person who made it possible for Steve Jobs to say that without being laughed at. Don't diss Jony Ive. He is the man.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      iOS 7 was absolutely huge at the time, it was Apple shifting away from skeuomorphism and the industry soon followed. Granted, Google Material Design seemed to have been independently invented in the same timeframe, but iOS 7 led the charge. For good or for ill, iOS 7 is not to be discounted for its significance.
    - na85 5y ago
      Jony Ive is the reason Apple has a fetish for thinness at the expense of functionality, is he not? He's a chump.
systemvoltage 5y ago
This is apparently not cool these days. I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great. Now it’s just identity politics, pessimism and general stagnancy as Peter Thiel puts it. I honestly kind of want to go back to 2005 - what a time to be alive.
- amelius 5y ago
  > I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great. Innovation is what made SV great. Now it is just evolutionary updates at a very slow pace.
  - naravara 5y ago
    Don't forget "tech companies" that are basically just thinly veiled excuses to engage in regulatory arbitrage and skirt employment laws.
dkarp 5y ago
I didn't know about the Cube[1], so thanks for sharing. Only sold for 1 year and then discontinued. Laptops are now dominant and have outsold desktops for a long time, but in year 2000 that wasn't the case. So the Cube seems like a false start down that path. Kind of like Jobs knew the future, but was a little too ahead of his time on that one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube
- gumby 5y ago
  Oh, then you missed the time they staged an entire press event to announce...an iPod dock! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi Hell, I own an Apple battery charger for AA batteries. Actually at the time it came out it was reasonably priced, plus it uses the same AC power connectors as apple computer chargers so was actually handy when traveling. But nevertheless, absurd.
- Lammy 5y ago
  Stebe seemed to have a thing for cubes. The G4 Cube is a throwback to the much more famous NeXT case design, though the original black cube running "Next Step" was perhaps a little too on the nose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube http://www.magicgatebg.com/Books/Aleister%20Crowley/Heart_of_the_Master.pdf#page=18 http://www.magicgatebg.com/Books/Aleister%20Crowley/Heart_of... There's also the 30ft glass cube Apple Store that opened in Manhattan in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Fifth_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Fifth_Avenue
microtonal 5y ago
The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left. Mostly on the Mac. The butterfly keyboard and how Apple handled it, were terrible. And macOS quality had gone down release after release. But I have never had any serious software or hardware quality issues with the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods or any other products. It seems that they had just lost focus on the Mac. However, the Mac seems to be rebounding. I have a M1 MacBook Air and it is stellar - probably their best new Mac in decades. Also, I haven't had many issues with macOS 11 so far.
- LewisVerstappen 5y ago
  Have you used iOS 15?
  - killion 5y ago
    Agreed. Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired. Multitasking in iPadOS is also a good example of non-Mac software being near unusable.
    - blowski 5y ago
      > Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired. In which case, it sounds like a good thing they have a more sustainable culture. But I'm not sure your comment is true anyway. Of course, Apple made all sorts of mistakes under Steve Jobs. In such a creative company, only a culture of freedom to make mistakes could produce extreme success. But now, because of a nostaglic cult of personality, any mistake meets with howls of "this would never happened under Steve!". That hero worship is a bigger problem for Apple.
    - mhh__ 5y ago
      iPad in general screams of directionless product development. I have an M1 iPad Pro. The thing is so fucking fast, just let me do a bit of coding on it. ... or let me rename file extensions.
skeeter2020 5y ago
The guys at Pontiac who had this power with the Aztek probably thought they had taste; who defines this? Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.
- agloeregrets 5y ago
  In full fairness, the Aztek was actually a great car with really decisive styling that wasnt a hit. The same designer actually penned the Corvette C7 and Camaro as well, obvious hits. Taste is defined by society and by those who push to create a wave with their splashes in the pond. It's really a 'You know it when you see it" kind of thing. I think that many in the software world also get lost on how to make good things by getting lost in the tools and insider baseball. For every one of his "silly" omitted functional design elements...there were actually brilliant chopped concepts that made way for the future. The iMac's lack of a floppy drive and Apple I/O, the iPhone's lack of a keyboard, the Macbook Air's lack of a Disk drive. All of these are the type of thing a more feature and function-focused product would not remove but in removing them the product was freed to be a better product. Not that all of his choices were good, but generally he really hit the nail on the head. Functionally the MacBook Air in 2008 with the optional SSD is the template for the modern thin laptop today and differs very little internally from say, a Surface laptop 4.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  Are there really any such examples? Steve Jobs wanted excellent products and they didn't always work out. That was often because the tech wasn't quite there so either the functionality didn't quite work or the effort required to make it work resulted in a product which was just a bit too expensive. Reliability is really tricky to get right and most Apple products even now get rushed to market and then not iterated on in a big way, or at least nothing like the honing that goes into a Toyota product by contrast. There isn't really a balance of features that puts aesthetics in competition with other aspects.
- NathanielK 5y ago
  Most modern CUVs have a similar side profile to the Aztek. One of the reasons they look less awkward is that bigger wheels are more popular. There's a few other awkward design quibbles with the Aztek, but for the most part similar cars sell like hot cakes now.
echlebek 5y ago
How do you explain iTunes then?
tptacek 5y ago
I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without the rich Corinthian leather, the PowerPC, and the colored plastic. The new keyboards aren't great, but I've dropped this MBP at least 30 times and it still keeps chugging; I'm pretty sure an errant dust particle could have take out my first Intel Macbook.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  I wouldn't mind having Ping back. Yesterday's events demonstrate the world still has room for more social networks, even if only for a few hours.
- actusual 5y ago
  But this isn't the point, and comparing the two eras is useless IMO. It isn't where we were that matters, it where we could have been if Steve were still driving the ship.
- dilap 5y ago
  With the glaring exception of the butterfly keyboard debacle (typing on, what, my fourth right now? and already showing some signs of wonkiness), I agree hardware quality is amazing & best its ever been. The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    I've been a OS X user since the Titanium Powerbook and wouldn't trade Mojave for any cat version --- and, in particular, wouldn't swap the aesthetics of Mojave for any of them either. This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.
    - dilap 5y ago
      Haha, yeah I'm not going to argue for rich Corinthian leather, or the aesthetics of the old iTunes UI or brushed metal or whatever. The visual style now is great. But the usability and quality of the animations and general fit-and-finish is much lower now, I think. Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now: Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected. The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost. On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy. Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??) And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)
actusual 5y ago
Steve quotes in the video "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" which is of course a Wayne Gretsky quote, and I think it captures this sentiment very well. Moving from leader to follower is such a classic move for an incumbent like Apple, and with Steve they never seemed to lose that insurgent mindset, even when they were absolutely enormous. They've steadily stagnated and truly lost that founder's mentality, and it sucks. I miss Steve Jobs a lot, and think about him often.
- sulam 5y ago
  Honestly I don't see this. I realize it's a simple narrative, and it's one that plays well with the heroic arc, but businesses are not Aesop's Fables, sat on this earth to give us a morality tale to use to guide our children. The facts on the ground are far more complicated than "Apple was creative under Steve and isn't under Cook." Apple had MORE products when in the market when Steve came back as CEO, and he ruthlessly pared them down to the core. If Tim Cook killed half of Apple's lineup, would you say "wow, what a Steve-like move?" or would you say the company is simply resting on its laurels? Apple has been managed by Tim Cook for more years now than it was by Steve Jobs. By business measures it is significantly more successful. They haven't released the next iPhone-class product, but one does not simply walk into Mordor, nor does one make an iPhone of products every year, or even every decade. I think Apple is doing fine, warts and all. N of 1, but I've spent more money on their stuff in the last 4 years than I did in the 12 before that.
  - actusual 5y ago
    I think Steve was a product guy and Cook is more likely a business guy. I'm not making a value judgement either way, but I do see a lack of product vision/innovation under Cook, and I believe product vision/innovation is what excites me most about consumer electronics. I think the fact that Steve released several "once in a lifetime" level of success products in such a short time span is evidence enough for this. Something that Steve jobs did well was understanding that building great products and successful business metrics aren't necessarily always aligned, especially in a product's nascent period.
  - 5y ago
passivate 5y ago
It takes years to develop stuff, and a final gatekeeping step will certainly prevent them from shipping junk, but doesn't teach people how to create something that isn't junk.
pico303 5y ago
Every time I see some usability flub in Mac software—like the new Safari tabs—I think that Steve is just a little more gone. Despite his flaws, he really understood how people interact with computers in a way not many others do.
- deleted 5y ago
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Lammy 5y ago
> I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. It's probably just a coincidence but I can't help but notice how Apple didn't become a PRISM "Provider" until a year after he was dead, many years after the Googles/Facebooks of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  If you read the Wiki page you linked, you’ll see that PRISM was just the NSA internal source name for data sourced via FISA warrants—which are not optional. Apple had no choice to “join” PRISM; the timing you see on that slide was determined by the FBI.
ramesh31 5y ago
>I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. I have this recurring fantasy, where an engineer walks into Jobs's office with the new iPhone 7 prototype for the first time. The engineer holds it up, and says "Look! We've added the most advanced camera ever to be put into a phone! People will love this!" Steve then graciously takes it from his hands, flips it over, runs his fingers across the lens bump, looks up at the engineer, and calmly says "Youre fired. Get rid of the damn bump."
karmakaze 5y ago
What I think it really suffers from is that the buyer isn't Apple's target audience, it's the person watching the person using an Apple product. Second is Apple (well actually the first is to serve Apple too). This skews priorities.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
shrimpx 5y ago
When Ive bungled the laptop line with the butterfly keyboards, I feel like somebody must have said "this is shit" and hence his departure and release of better hardware since.

tomjen3 5y ago

If Jobs had been there, I can't help but believe there wouldn't have been a notch on the iPhone and the watch would have a longer lasting battery. My Samsung watch can go 2 days in between charges, so it should be possible.

_moof 5y ago
Hard to say. Jobs oversaw all sorts of whiffs. The circular mouse comes to mind. And his ability to turn these kinds of errors into "it's good, actually" was so legendary that it had its own name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

FormerBandmate 5y ago

Apple has moved from being an incredibly innovative company under Steve Jobs to a much more corporate, mature company that relies more on incremental growth. They don’t really have any incentive to change because of their success, and this fundamental pattern happens to every company (see GE’s history after Edison). Apple simply isn’t the company it was before, and that’s a natural part of capitalism. Other Apples are emerging all the time, and will continue to emerge

paxys 5y ago
"Mature company that relies more on incremental growth" is exactly the stage where they get overtaken and fade into obscurity. It won't happen tomorrow, but slowly there will be new kids on the block who will make their tech look dated and uncool. It seems impossible to even think about but you'd say the same about IBM a few decades ago.
agumonkey 5y ago
I'm sure Jobs knew about this. I'm sure he told Cook to milk the market cow wide and deep to ensure survival of Apple while maintaining a steady brand, in the event that somehow something real genuine emerges again from Apple and they're ready to fire with 200B of cash.
smoldesu 5y ago
> Other Apples are emerging all the time How so? Are other people creating closed software platforms where they charge 30% off the top for their developers? I agree that they've gone more corporate over the years, but it was only after the realization that they could exploit the market with their install-base. It's quite literally, step-for-step identical to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer parable that got them in so much trouble. They're taking advantage of a market without any other options, which is not something that an emerging company can do, much less at the scale Apple does it.
gumby 5y ago
Yeah, too bad they don't develop new ideas like the watch or AirPods or design their own CPUs from scratch.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Yeah, real show-stoppers for a company that's quite literally the largest, most powerful corporation in modern history.

duxup 5y ago

I think that's true, but there's also a danger of asking someone to 'be that guy' who isn't Steve. That seems like a bigger risk. And in the meantime Apple still has its own fairly cohesive idea of how you use their devices and software ... while places like Google cancel and re-releases apps with half the features as the one they canceled, and I don't think they have a real idea of how people use their stuff.

killion 5y ago
Definitely, I don’t see a way you could elevate someone to the level Steve was at. I think the plan was to have Jony Ive be the final word on design person. But with iOS 7 Ives showed he didn’t get software and the “design is how it works” concept.
- Bud 5y ago
  Not really. iOS 7 is an insignificant blip. Hundreds of other times, Ive showed that he was the best in the entire world at the "design is how it works" concept. Ive was the embodiment of that for his entire time at Apple. Jony Ive is the person who made it possible for Steve Jobs to say that without being laughed at. Don't diss Jony Ive. He is the man.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    iOS 7 was absolutely huge at the time, it was Apple shifting away from skeuomorphism and the industry soon followed. Granted, Google Material Design seemed to have been independently invented in the same timeframe, but iOS 7 led the charge. For good or for ill, iOS 7 is not to be discounted for its significance.
  - na85 5y ago
    Jony Ive is the reason Apple has a fetish for thinness at the expense of functionality, is he not? He's a chump.

systemvoltage 5y ago

This is apparently not cool these days. I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great. Now it’s just identity politics, pessimism and general stagnancy as Peter Thiel puts it. I honestly kind of want to go back to 2005 - what a time to be alive.

amelius 5y ago
> I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great. Innovation is what made SV great. Now it is just evolutionary updates at a very slow pace.
- naravara 5y ago
  Don't forget "tech companies" that are basically just thinly veiled excuses to engage in regulatory arbitrage and skirt employment laws.

dkarp 5y ago

I didn't know about the Cube[1], so thanks for sharing. Only sold for 1 year and then discontinued. Laptops are now dominant and have outsold desktops for a long time, but in year 2000 that wasn't the case. So the Cube seems like a false start down that path. Kind of like Jobs knew the future, but was a little too ahead of his time on that one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube

gumby 5y ago
Oh, then you missed the time they staged an entire press event to announce...an iPod dock! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi Hell, I own an Apple battery charger for AA batteries. Actually at the time it came out it was reasonably priced, plus it uses the same AC power connectors as apple computer chargers so was actually handy when traveling. But nevertheless, absurd.
Lammy 5y ago
Stebe seemed to have a thing for cubes. The G4 Cube is a throwback to the much more famous NeXT case design, though the original black cube running "Next Step" was perhaps a little too on the nose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube http://www.magicgatebg.com/Books/Aleister%20Crowley/Heart_of_the_Master.pdf#page=18 http://www.magicgatebg.com/Books/Aleister%20Crowley/Heart_of... There's also the 30ft glass cube Apple Store that opened in Manhattan in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Fifth_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Fifth_Avenue

microtonal 5y ago

The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left. Mostly on the Mac. The butterfly keyboard and how Apple handled it, were terrible. And macOS quality had gone down release after release. But I have never had any serious software or hardware quality issues with the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods or any other products. It seems that they had just lost focus on the Mac. However, the Mac seems to be rebounding. I have a M1 MacBook Air and it is stellar - probably their best new Mac in decades. Also, I haven't had many issues with macOS 11 so far.

LewisVerstappen 5y ago
Have you used iOS 15?
- killion 5y ago
  Agreed. Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired. Multitasking in iPadOS is also a good example of non-Mac software being near unusable.
  - blowski 5y ago
    > Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired. In which case, it sounds like a good thing they have a more sustainable culture. But I'm not sure your comment is true anyway. Of course, Apple made all sorts of mistakes under Steve Jobs. In such a creative company, only a culture of freedom to make mistakes could produce extreme success. But now, because of a nostaglic cult of personality, any mistake meets with howls of "this would never happened under Steve!". That hero worship is a bigger problem for Apple.
  - mhh__ 5y ago
    iPad in general screams of directionless product development. I have an M1 iPad Pro. The thing is so fucking fast, just let me do a bit of coding on it. ... or let me rename file extensions.

skeeter2020 5y ago

The guys at Pontiac who had this power with the Aztek probably thought they had taste; who defines this? Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.

agloeregrets 5y ago
In full fairness, the Aztek was actually a great car with really decisive styling that wasnt a hit. The same designer actually penned the Corvette C7 and Camaro as well, obvious hits. Taste is defined by society and by those who push to create a wave with their splashes in the pond. It's really a 'You know it when you see it" kind of thing. I think that many in the software world also get lost on how to make good things by getting lost in the tools and insider baseball. For every one of his "silly" omitted functional design elements...there were actually brilliant chopped concepts that made way for the future. The iMac's lack of a floppy drive and Apple I/O, the iPhone's lack of a keyboard, the Macbook Air's lack of a Disk drive. All of these are the type of thing a more feature and function-focused product would not remove but in removing them the product was freed to be a better product. Not that all of his choices were good, but generally he really hit the nail on the head. Functionally the MacBook Air in 2008 with the optional SSD is the template for the modern thin laptop today and differs very little internally from say, a Surface laptop 4.
m0llusk 5y ago
Are there really any such examples? Steve Jobs wanted excellent products and they didn't always work out. That was often because the tech wasn't quite there so either the functionality didn't quite work or the effort required to make it work resulted in a product which was just a bit too expensive. Reliability is really tricky to get right and most Apple products even now get rushed to market and then not iterated on in a big way, or at least nothing like the honing that goes into a Toyota product by contrast. There isn't really a balance of features that puts aesthetics in competition with other aspects.
NathanielK 5y ago
Most modern CUVs have a similar side profile to the Aztek. One of the reasons they look less awkward is that bigger wheels are more popular. There's a few other awkward design quibbles with the Aztek, but for the most part similar cars sell like hot cakes now.

echlebek 5y ago

How do you explain iTunes then?

tptacek 5y ago

I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without the rich Corinthian leather, the PowerPC, and the colored plastic. The new keyboards aren't great, but I've dropped this MBP at least 30 times and it still keeps chugging; I'm pretty sure an errant dust particle could have take out my first Intel Macbook.

Apocryphon 5y ago
I wouldn't mind having Ping back. Yesterday's events demonstrate the world still has room for more social networks, even if only for a few hours.
actusual 5y ago
But this isn't the point, and comparing the two eras is useless IMO. It isn't where we were that matters, it where we could have been if Steve were still driving the ship.
dilap 5y ago
With the glaring exception of the butterfly keyboard debacle (typing on, what, my fourth right now? and already showing some signs of wonkiness), I agree hardware quality is amazing & best its ever been. The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.
- tptacek 5y ago
  I've been a OS X user since the Titanium Powerbook and wouldn't trade Mojave for any cat version --- and, in particular, wouldn't swap the aesthetics of Mojave for any of them either. This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.
  - dilap 5y ago
    Haha, yeah I'm not going to argue for rich Corinthian leather, or the aesthetics of the old iTunes UI or brushed metal or whatever. The visual style now is great. But the usability and quality of the animations and general fit-and-finish is much lower now, I think. Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now: Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected. The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost. On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy. Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??) And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)

actusual 5y ago

Steve quotes in the video "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" which is of course a Wayne Gretsky quote, and I think it captures this sentiment very well. Moving from leader to follower is such a classic move for an incumbent like Apple, and with Steve they never seemed to lose that insurgent mindset, even when they were absolutely enormous. They've steadily stagnated and truly lost that founder's mentality, and it sucks. I miss Steve Jobs a lot, and think about him often.

sulam 5y ago
Honestly I don't see this. I realize it's a simple narrative, and it's one that plays well with the heroic arc, but businesses are not Aesop's Fables, sat on this earth to give us a morality tale to use to guide our children. The facts on the ground are far more complicated than "Apple was creative under Steve and isn't under Cook." Apple had MORE products when in the market when Steve came back as CEO, and he ruthlessly pared them down to the core. If Tim Cook killed half of Apple's lineup, would you say "wow, what a Steve-like move?" or would you say the company is simply resting on its laurels? Apple has been managed by Tim Cook for more years now than it was by Steve Jobs. By business measures it is significantly more successful. They haven't released the next iPhone-class product, but one does not simply walk into Mordor, nor does one make an iPhone of products every year, or even every decade. I think Apple is doing fine, warts and all. N of 1, but I've spent more money on their stuff in the last 4 years than I did in the 12 before that.
- actusual 5y ago
  I think Steve was a product guy and Cook is more likely a business guy. I'm not making a value judgement either way, but I do see a lack of product vision/innovation under Cook, and I believe product vision/innovation is what excites me most about consumer electronics. I think the fact that Steve released several "once in a lifetime" level of success products in such a short time span is evidence enough for this. Something that Steve jobs did well was understanding that building great products and successful business metrics aren't necessarily always aligned, especially in a product's nascent period.
- 5y ago

passivate 5y ago

It takes years to develop stuff, and a final gatekeeping step will certainly prevent them from shipping junk, but doesn't teach people how to create something that isn't junk.

pico303 5y ago

Every time I see some usability flub in Mac software—like the new Safari tabs—I think that Steve is just a little more gone. Despite his flaws, he really understood how people interact with computers in a way not many others do.

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Lammy 5y ago

> I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. It's probably just a coincidence but I can't help but notice how Apple didn't become a PRISM "Provider" until a year after he was dead, many years after the Googles/Facebooks of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/media/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

snowwrestler 5y ago
If you read the Wiki page you linked, you’ll see that PRISM was just the NSA internal source name for data sourced via FISA warrants—which are not optional. Apple had no choice to “join” PRISM; the timing you see on that slide was determined by the FBI.

ramesh31 5y ago

>I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. I have this recurring fantasy, where an engineer walks into Jobs's office with the new iPhone 7 prototype for the first time. The engineer holds it up, and says "Look! We've added the most advanced camera ever to be put into a phone! People will love this!" Steve then graciously takes it from his hands, flips it over, runs his fingers across the lens bump, looks up at the engineer, and calmly says "Youre fired. Get rid of the damn bump."

karmakaze 5y ago

What I think it really suffers from is that the buyer isn't Apple's target audience, it's the person watching the person using an Apple product. Second is Apple (well actually the first is to serve Apple too). This skews priorities.

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shrimpx 5y ago

When Ive bungled the laptop line with the butterfly keyboards, I feel like somebody must have said "this is shit" and hence his departure and release of better hardware since.