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I think Steve truly believed at his core, very simply: your laptop is your diary, and they have a responsibility to that. I don't think Tim would be CEO if he

• musicale 2y ago
  It is weird. Jobs was divisive and (not infrequently) abrasive, and why would you miss a tech billionaire anyway? Yet I also feel indebted to him and to the folks at Apple who helped to produce some of my favorite products like the Mac, the iPod, and the iPad. Jobs also said a lot of things that still resonate with me. Recently Apple introduced a "classic Mac" screensaver that shows how carefully designed the original Mac GUI was. I'm sure nobody misses the days when app bugs could crash the OS, but I wish Apple were as obsessive now about detail now as they were back then.
  • neom 2y ago
    Now that I'm becoming an old man, I've taken the time to go back and listen to him properly, to analize his thoughts and words a bit more contextually, and I've come to believe that Steve Jobs was quite misunderstood, both by us, and by himself. When I miss him I think: his thoughts were so very refined for his time, it is quite incredible and I wish he was around to hear more of them. I guess I'm a fan? Oh well...worse things to be. (the article is good but giving you the hn for comments too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131299)
    • 6stringmerc 2y ago
      I still think about how he tried to cure cancer with crystals and then when that didn’t work he used his wealth to get residency in a different state to jump in line for a transplant and still died before his yacht got completed. I don’t misunderstand him at all. Especially the parking in handicap spaces part. Very easy to understand what kind of person he was through his actions. Perhaps we will never see eye to eye, and I feel posts like yours do deserve legitimate opposition as applicable.
      • colechristensen 2y ago
        Ok, but more or less everyone is going to have a few things about them that you’re not going to like. When your whole life is up for scrutiny and you have unlimited resources, that’s how it is. If you had a billion dollars there’d be plenty of things people would criticize about you. And anybody else who did too.
      • pstuart 2y ago
        There's plenty to not like about Jobs as a person, but Apple exists because of him (twice).
      • al_borland 2y ago
        He didn’t jump the line, he just got in multiple lines.
        • hansvm 2y ago
          Sure. On the one hand, everything adhered to the letter of the law. On the other, he used his money to get served before other people in an otherwise similar position would have been able to do. I personally view that as more of a failing in the system itself (why are there multiple lines to begin with when organ transport is a solved problem?), but it's not unreasonable to look at somebody exploiting that broken system and question their character.
          • auggierose 2y ago
            I know very few people who would't use their wealth to try to save their lifes, or that of their loved ones. It's kind of what wealth is for.
            • sapphicsnail 2y ago
              You know that's still bad right?
              • 2y ago
    • joseppudev 2y ago
      [dead]
    • astrange 2y ago
      He's definitely misunderstood. If you read his biography it's incredible how much the author of it misunderstands, but if you read between the lines you can see through them. In particular you should note how he changes before and after getting married. The biography is really awful though. It constantly misquotes people - Bill Gates is directly quoted as saying something so technically inaccurate he can't possibly have said it. I also remember that every time his son is quoted it's because he was telling a dick joke. At one point the book claims this is why Apple Park is a circle. Why the author did this is not clear to me. (Btw, I have an unreported Jobs story about this myself. Actually two. I'm not going to tell them, so feel free to just imagine.)
      • al_borland 2y ago
        I don’t remember many details from the biography at this point, but I remember not liking it either. It seemed like it was written with the assumption the reader already knew the about Steve’s more public life and career, and skipped over much of it. It didn’t feel like it would be a good source for future generations to learn about Steve, as it seemed to largely ignore the entire reason a book was being written about him. I also remembering it seeming largely negative, trumpeting the views of critics, and while downplaying the good to balance it out. Though this could also be my memory fading, feel free correct me if I’m wrong. It was my first Isaacson biography, and didn’t leave me excited for another one.
        • alpaca128 2y ago
          > I also remembering it seeming largely negative It definitely was, but at least parts of that must have been warranted given Jobs refused to read it, saying something along the lines of "I know I wouldn’t like what it says"
          • al_borland 2y ago
            I think that was him trusting the author to be fair and show a balanced view of who he was; maybe that trust was misplaced.
        • 2y ago
    • pepinator 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • APPLE_LOVER 2y ago
      [flagged]
  • baggy_trough 2y ago
    > why would you miss a tech billionaire anyway Because we miss new instances of the great products they created to earn all that money.
    • astrange 2y ago
      I could easily be wrong about this but I don't believe Jobs or anyone else at Jobs-era Apple became a billionaire because of it. Because of early infighting/getting fired, ownership was too dispersed for that. He became a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar.
      • baggy_trough 2y ago
        [flagged]
  • perfmode 2y ago
    Jobs was more than a tech billionaire. He was someone who had refined personal taste and stood on values and was willing to do what it took to see them through, despite the friction. And the outcome was a computing company that was waaaay less mediocre than 99% of these other memetic, mediocre gradient-descent chasing privacy-abusing, ad-supported companies. Apple has raised the bar so high. And the DNA of what is manifesting is Steve’s insistence and vision followed by Tim’s clarity of execution. Look at the Apple Architecture moves. They got Intel’s hot, slow CPUs out of the device. And replaced them with excellent, quiet, fast, efficient CPUs, with UMA and great features. It’s hard to nail every detail when you have the surface area of Apple 2025. A huge huge company with billions of users and dozens of device families and services. But the bar is high for most of what they do.
    • dlivingston 2y ago
      I think of Apple like I think of Disney: _consistently good_ products. Maybe not the best in all the things all the times, and some duds from time to time, but if you blindly hit "play" on a Disney movie you're going to be watching something at least pretty good.
  • eleveriven 2y ago
    It's not just about the products themselves, but the philosophy behind them. He had this relentless obsession with making technology feel right (it is all from my perspective)
  • musicale 2y ago
    And I need to be more obsessive about proofreading before HN's editing timeout expires.
• lern_too_spel 2y ago
  Steve believed at his core that locking down devices was the best way to extract business value from users. That's why you can't install any apps without telling Apple or get your location without sending it to Apple. He also believed very strongly in good marketing, and he jumped on privacy marketing very quickly after the Facebook - Google privacy spat that coincided with the failure of iTunes Ping.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    That seems very unlikely since nothing of that sort was ever attempted by Jobs on their desktops.
    • rat87 2y ago
      I'm not sure it's so much about extracting value exactly but Jobs long believed in making sealed appliances that people couldn't and wouldn't have to tinker with as opposed to more easily modify able computers sold by competitors https://folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html https://folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html > Expandability, or the lack thereof, was far and away the most controversial aspect of the original Macintosh hardware design. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability in the form of seven built-in slots for peripheral cards ... >This flexibility allowed the Apple II to be adapted to a wider range of applications, and quickly spawned a thriving third-party hardware industry. ... > Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports. > Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith and his assistant Brian Howard understood Steve's rationale, but they felt differently about the proper course of action. Burrell had already watched the Macintosh's hopelessly optimistic schedule start to slip indefinitely, and he was unable to predict when the Mac's pioneering software would be finished, if ever. He was afraid that Moore's Law would make his delayed hardware obsolete before it ever came to market. He thought it was prudent to build in as much flexibility as possible, as long as it didn't cost too much. > Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot. > But Burrell was not that easily thwarted. He realized that the Mac was never going to have something called a slot, but perhaps the same functionality could be called something else. After talking it over with Brian, they decided to start calling it the "diagnostic port" instead of a slot, arguing that it would save money during manufacturing if testing devices could access the processor bus to diagnose manufacturing errors. They didn't mention that the same port would also provide the functionality of a slot. >This was received positively at first, but after a couple weeks, engineering manager Rod Holt caught on to what was happening, probably aided by occasional giggles when the diagnostic port was mentioned. "That things really a slot, right? You're trying to sneak in a slot!", Rod finally accused us at the next engineering meeting. "Well, that's not going to happen!" > Even though the diagnostic port was scuttled, it wasn't the last attempt at surreptitious hardware expandability. When the Mac digital board was redesigned for the last time in August 1982, the next generation of RAM chips was already on the horizon. The Mac used 16 64Kbit RAM chips, giving it 128K of memory. The next generation chip was 256Kbits, giving us 512K bytes instead, which made a huge difference. > Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate soon after launch, and there were no slots for the user to add RAM. He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add. > But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.
• yalogin 2y ago
  Sorry I am sure the article about enclaves triggered this thought about Steve for you. I cannot how one led to the other, can you may be tell us?
  • neom 2y ago
    hehe, it's a good question. When you get to scale, you realize you got there because a lot of humans put you there. It's part of why scaling is hard, business is an art and science that juggles the value exchange between us in society. People still here on hackernews are angry at me personally for decisions at digitalocean, in retrospect, I wish I'd handled the wipe disk thing that happened better, for example. It's both very easy and very difficult at the same time to build a business while trying super hard to love (really actually love as humans love!!!) your customer because many many things want to prevent you from loving your customer (I have government stories too, many of us do). At the end of the day, they are doing the real work, like, the real real stuff, they don't have to, I mean, they don't right? But they will, because it's the right thing to do, because Steve said so. apple here, have taken extraordinary engineering effort to say even if you compel us, we physically can’t give you access to their diary. That is to be commended, and that, is Steve Jobs.
    • therein 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • neom 2y ago
        Me?!? I don't even drink alcohol. I'm just being expressive, last I checked it was allowed??
        • shuckles 2y ago
          Commenters are getting increasingly cynical on here. I wouldn’t worry about it.
          • 2y ago
• eleveriven 2y ago
  Tim definitely carries that torch in his own way, but there was something about Steve's presence that made everything feel more… human? Less corporate? Hard to put into words, but yeah, I miss him too. Thanks for sharing that video.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    One of the things about Tim Cook, that people don’t really talk about (which, IMO, is appropriate), is that he’s openly gay. Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks. Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same, but I do believe that he, himself, is legitimately serious about privacy.
    • lordofgibbons 2y ago
      > Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same At the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman, that exactly is the problem with buying into such walled-prison ecosystem of devices. You're at the mercy of Apple pushing an update that can unilaterally take away your privacy and rights. They already do that with sending hashes of your photos on your iPhone and implement dark patterns to trick you to upload your data to iCloud. Just 1 CEO change away from having them from being a privacy advocate to a privacy nightmare.
      • brookst 2y ago
        Sure, and every time you eat at a restaurant they could poison you. This is mainly a concern if you are a high value target likely to be the first person poisoned. For most of us, that’s not true, and a formerly good actor turning evil would be noticed long before it came our turn. So there’s the idealist “I can’t be sure my favorite restaurant won’t poison me today, so I’m never eating there again”, and the pragmatic “the benefits I get outweigh the slim chance that today is the day they decide to attack boring people like me” outlook. I’ll never fault someone for being the idealist; the concerns are unfalsifiable. But to me it looks like a rough way to live. Maybe just because I really am that boring so it’s hard to relate to having any super secret stuff that would put me among the first to be attacked.
• amelius 2y ago
  As someone who builds industrial/scientific machines, the consumer oriented devices that Apple makes are completely unusable for me. Locking down completely capable computing devices seems like such a waste. I'm also not a fan of how Apple controls devices and the market of software after the device has changed owner. I'm staying the hell away from this ecosystem. Not sure why many so-called "hackers" are so enthusiastic about these "hood-welded-shut" systems.
  • intrasight 2y ago
    "The worse system except for all the others that have been tried." Many hackers think that about Apple computers. Many others have no choice because they develop iOS apps.
  • rollcat 2y ago
    I'm a self-branded hacker so I'll share my motivation: Shit. Works. This is critical. I can focus on my actual task at hand, rather than fiddling with the system. Some perspective: I've been on Debian for 15 years, and I still hold it in very high regard for servers. I'm also an occasional Alpine & OpenBSD user; and Windows for games. I've tried Ubuntu, couldn't stop it from getting in my way. Before you suggest Fedora, Arch, NixOS, whatever: I'm done distro-hopping. The experience is about equal everywhere. No amount of "choice" beats thoughtful design, accessibility, and vertical integration.
    • Vendan 2y ago
      I'm a software engineer at a company that does all macbooks. I hate my M1 macbook because it's way less reliable then my desktop, both software and hardware. I have to hold the power button to force it off roughly twice a month, it absolutely refuses to play nice with my KVM (that my desktop has no issues with), and the "keyboard secure input" feature regularly goes on the fritz and breaks anything that taps into the keyboard, including stuff that I've specifically installed.
      • supriyo-biswas 2y ago
• -__---____-ZXyw 2y ago
  > It's so weird, but I really miss Steve. When I see the sincere sentiment sometimes expressed towards Jobs, I wonder if something similar is being tapped into when people - often tech people - use and experience LLMs. To put it a bit bluntly, it almost feels like there's a mystical or religious element to it. As if we desperately want there to be miracles, and oracles, and god-like, caring men who can provide us with beautiful products, and rituals, and a future where everything is sleek and bountiful and timeless. As if some spiritual "hole" were being filled. I don't mean to disparage anyone who feels fondly towards Jobs or LLMs, I'm merely sharing an observation of mine.
  • 9dev 2y ago
    If you haven’t, I recommend reading Harari, specifically Homo Deus and Nexus. He writes at length about what he calls dataism, a new kind of religion filling the void liberalism and enlightenment left in us. Good reads.
• api 2y ago
  They seem like the last big PC company where PC actually stands for personal computing. It’s a left over from old Silicon Valley, the one steeped in human potential ideas with a sprinkling of actual as-in-individual-liberty libertarianism. RIP