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> Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the sho
by lapcat 2y ago
> Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not.
It's unclear how much explanatory value this has, because the Snow Leopard that everyone is pining for was during the Jobs era. After all, an Apple that goes bankrupt and out of business isn't going to make any software updates.
I find a stark difference between the Jobs era and the Cook era. Under Jobs, the early Mac OS X updates (Puma and Jaguar) came fast and furious, but then the schedule slowed considerably. Panther was 14 months, Tiger 18, Leopard 30 (delayed due to iPhone), Snow Leopard 22 months, Lion 23. Mountain Lion was the first release after the death of Jobs and came only 12 months after Lion. Thereafter, every Mac OS update came yearly, give or take a few months. That's a drastic change in release schedule.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoYeah, I should be careful to not make it appear as though there were so clear a delineation when Jobs returned. His software engineering team got to work reshaping MacOS (as we know it now) but he seemed to this software engineer to be focused on hardware and "strategies" initially. Aqua, the new UI, came down from above soon enough. Drawers, toolbars were new UI elements that arrived. In time Jobs' designers were going through the shipping apps with these new UI elements with changes for the engineers to implement. Certainly by the time the iPhone had arrived the transition to marketing (and design) calling the shots was complete.
- ttepasse 2y agoApropos Drawers: The may have looked a little bit silly back then but today almost every Mac app main windows has a big grey sidebar, so that in Exposé view almost all windows look the same. Drawers got an unfair rap, I think.