5 ms·

Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products. Tim Cook i

by altern8 9mo ago

Steve Jobs was an extremely unusual CEO. He was hands on, talked to designers, developers, and users, and actually cared about making good products. Tim Cook is more of a regular CEO that wants to make money for the shareholders. He started doing stock buybacks and in general prioritizing making money. macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO--if you can manage to avoid upgrading to Tahoe--but Apple seems to definitely be on its way down. Hopefully something changes.

graemep 9mo ago
Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did. That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term. A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.
- altern8 9mo ago
  Yes, I agree. So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?
  - zlies 9mo ago
    That would be awesome
  - graemep 9mo ago
    Maybe! Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
    - altern8 9mo ago
      Well, I'm not upgrading to Tahoe though, so I'm not buying anything new they come out with...
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    Woz comes to the West Coast VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) from time to time. For geeks of a certain age, he's a very engaging speaker and it's clear he loved the tech as much as the other older engineers who typically come to such events. The vibe I got from him was he was very happy doing what he's doing and was happy to let Apple be the company it evolved into rather than the company it was in 1977.
- silvestrov 9mo ago
  I'd say that it was not so much that he was a founder, but that he was the kind of business person that was happy talking to Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and similar nerds. He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle. I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    Steve Jobs famously did not make friends with his engineers. I do not know where you get this info. Or rather... he was the type of friend who probably made you prefer your enemies. a. He dicked Woz on the Breakout design, telling him he would split the proceeds 50/50 - turns out it was more 25/75. b. He dicked Dan Kottke (very early Apple employee and friend from Reid College with whom he backpacked in India) by cancelling his stock options when apple IPOed - Woz stepped in and gave Dan some of his share allocation. c. The last time I saw Burell Smith, he was homeless living on the streets in Palo Alto - very friendly of Steve to not do anything for him. d. Steve dicked Jef Raskin (who kicked off the original Macintosh project, thought Jef's idea was WAAAAY different than the Mac that eventually emerged) What I learned working with (not for) NeXT in the early 90s was "Steve is not your friend."
    - mckn1ght 9mo ago
      It sounds strange that someone could go from lofty Apple engineer to homeless (though it certainly wouldn’t be the first fall from grace in human history). I read the brief wikipedia page about Smith, which states he has bipolar disorder and has at least one incident that was publicized in the early 90s. Was your encounter with him before or after that? Sadly, with some people it doesn’t matter how much money they have or how much help you give them behind the scenes. I’m not saying Jobs went to the end of the earth for him, I don’t know. But I know people from my own life where it didn’t matter, so it’s in the realm of imagination at least. The stock bs sounds dickish though.
      - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1] Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing. [1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s. [2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.
  - nathan_douglas 9mo ago
    I'd love to read that memoir. I feel like the NeXT era is really interesting but somewhat less covered than other periods.
  - etblg 9mo ago
    I feel like you have to expand the taxonomy of people expressed in milli-jobs. Does anyone out there exceed 1000 mJobs? Does anyone come the closest? Is there a suitable conversion to other systems of measurement?
orthoxerox 9mo ago
> macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that. Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging. NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept. Valve for heavily investing into making games run well. GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX. Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts. There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.
- JakaJancar 9mo ago
  Ah yes, Linux on a laptop: wifi, sleep, graphics - pick any two
  - dgan 9mo ago
    Hm i have all three
    - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      Dell XPS? They were pretty good there for modern-ish devices. Not so much for random Inspirons. Lenovo had fairly decent support for their midrange on up models. HP makes crap, so it's unlikely I'll every touch another HP laptop in my lifetime. But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows. But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...) Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
I believe you never worked with Steve Jobs. This is not my memory of working with him.
- altern8 9mo ago
  You believe right :-)
Molitor5901 9mo ago
I agree, Tim Cook is a businessman, Steve was someone who constantly put himself in the customers shoes. Apple needs a visionary like that, a dictator to demand a specific user engagement, and a design team able to carry it out. IMHO Tim Cook has never filled this role, and needs to step aside.

by altern8 9mo ago

graemep 9mo ago

Steve Jobs was a founder of the company. He expected to remain CEO for many years (until his illness). I do not know whether he still have a large stake but its likely he did, and he certainly formed his approach when he did. That motivated him to look at the long term as he expected to benefit from increases in the value of the business over the long term. A regular CEO looks more at the short term. The value when the next options vest or the next bonus or whatever.

altern8 9mo ago
Yes, I agree. So, I guess our only hope is to get Woz back..?
- zlies 9mo ago
  That would be awesome
- graemep 9mo ago
  Maybe! Another thought. You said "macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO". That is all they need. As long as you (and other users) feel that they do not switch it does not affect their sales or profits. It helps that Windows is getting worse.
  - altern8 9mo ago
    Well, I'm not upgrading to Tahoe though, so I'm not buying anything new they come out with...
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  Woz comes to the West Coast VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) from time to time. For geeks of a certain age, he's a very engaging speaker and it's clear he loved the tech as much as the other older engineers who typically come to such events. The vibe I got from him was he was very happy doing what he's doing and was happy to let Apple be the company it evolved into rather than the company it was in 1977.
silvestrov 9mo ago
I'd say that it was not so much that he was a founder, but that he was the kind of business person that was happy talking to Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and similar nerds. He was able to make friends with them instead of treating them like cattle. I've met so many business people that think talking to nerds is a total let down, a degradation of social status.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  Steve Jobs famously did not make friends with his engineers. I do not know where you get this info. Or rather... he was the type of friend who probably made you prefer your enemies. a. He dicked Woz on the Breakout design, telling him he would split the proceeds 50/50 - turns out it was more 25/75. b. He dicked Dan Kottke (very early Apple employee and friend from Reid College with whom he backpacked in India) by cancelling his stock options when apple IPOed - Woz stepped in and gave Dan some of his share allocation. c. The last time I saw Burell Smith, he was homeless living on the streets in Palo Alto - very friendly of Steve to not do anything for him. d. Steve dicked Jef Raskin (who kicked off the original Macintosh project, thought Jef's idea was WAAAAY different than the Mac that eventually emerged) What I learned working with (not for) NeXT in the early 90s was "Steve is not your friend."
  - mckn1ght 9mo ago
    It sounds strange that someone could go from lofty Apple engineer to homeless (though it certainly wouldn’t be the first fall from grace in human history). I read the brief wikipedia page about Smith, which states he has bipolar disorder and has at least one incident that was publicized in the early 90s. Was your encounter with him before or after that? Sadly, with some people it doesn’t matter how much money they have or how much help you give them behind the scenes. I’m not saying Jobs went to the end of the earth for him, I don’t know. But I know people from my own life where it didn’t matter, so it’s in the realm of imagination at least. The stock bs sounds dickish though.
    - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
Having had to deal with Jobs, I would like to say the man was a bit of a mercurial douche trading off his reputation. That being said... he had a great ability to see what computers could be for "normal people." Instead of stealing ideas from IBM or DEC, he "stole" ideas and staff from PARC (who stole some of the staff away from SRI.) Dude was a dick, but he used his dickishness to "encourage" people in the Apple org to make products that were better than they really had to be. [1] Tim Cook is an amazing operations guy and only sorta gets the product vision thing. Maybe 650 milli-jobs. [2] But the people in the Apple org who have a gut feeling for what makes a decent product from a customer perspective are lower on the org chart. I'm sure they're doing daily battle with the accountants who know the price of everything but the cost of nothing. [1] Someday I am going to write a memoir about what it was like to partner with NeXT in the early 90s. [2] A milli-jobs is a unit of product vision. 1000 mJobs is Steve Jobs. 650 mJobs is Tim Cook. 100 mJobs is Gil Amelio.
- nathan_douglas 9mo ago
  I'd love to read that memoir. I feel like the NeXT era is really interesting but somewhat less covered than other periods.
- etblg 9mo ago
  I feel like you have to expand the taxonomy of people expressed in milli-jobs. Does anyone out there exceed 1000 mJobs? Does anyone come the closest? Is there a suitable conversion to other systems of measurement?

orthoxerox 9mo ago

> macOS is still the best OS I'd want to use IMO Linux has low-key become a very valid choice for a desktop OS. You can thank a lot of people for that. Apple and Microsoft for sandbagging. NixOS for pioneering the immutable Linux concept. Valve for heavily investing into making games run well. GitHub for inventing Electron, the eater of RAM and the great equalizer of UX. Lots and lots of Linux and distro maintainers and contributors, achieving the opposite of the death of a thousand cuts. There are some still unsolved problems, like power management and device drivers, but I feel like we're over the hump. There's a critical mass of regular people using Linux as their primary desktop OS on modern hardware, so trying to make Linux work on a 2025 laptop no longer feels like empty struggle.

JakaJancar 9mo ago
Ah yes, Linux on a laptop: wifi, sleep, graphics - pick any two
- dgan 9mo ago
  Hm i have all three
  - OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    Dell XPS? They were pretty good there for modern-ish devices. Not so much for random Inspirons. Lenovo had fairly decent support for their midrange on up models. HP makes crap, so it's unlikely I'll every touch another HP laptop in my lifetime. But... I think the poster above should have said something like "pick any two (for a depressingly large number of laptop models.)" Also see my post above about what seems to be XPS models falling out of support after eight years or so.
- OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  Lol. Yes. I would like to say that's not true... and for quite a while my Dell XPS would do all three, but it wasn't a cheap device. I think their driver team isn't supporting my 8 year old XPS anymore as sleeping is... problematic. And power management on linux laptops has always been worse than windows. But... I will gnaw my left arm off before I go back to Mach or WinNT. (Maybe I'll try using HaikuOS as my daily driver...) Though... fwiw... I've been running a non-x version of leenucks and then booting into a X and experimental Wayland FreeBSD VM via KVM and it seems to work well. I can halt the machine and save state in about a minute and then turn off the hardware. I come back later and restore. It's not a seamless operation, but I'm happy to live with it. It's also pretty easy to checkpoint the virtual disk before installing the bazillion packages I sometimes have to install to test out various python extensions. So all I have to do is revert to a checkpoint and all that crap is gone. I don't have to worry about remembering which packages I have to manually uninstall.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

OhMeadhbh 9mo ago

I believe you never worked with Steve Jobs. This is not my memory of working with him.

altern8 9mo ago
You believe right :-)

Molitor5901 9mo ago

I agree, Tim Cook is a businessman, Steve was someone who constantly put himself in the customers shoes. Apple needs a visionary like that, a dictator to demand a specific user engagement, and a design team able to carry it out. IMHO Tim Cook has never filled this role, and needs to step aside.