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I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive. Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit th
by Teever 8mo ago
I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive.
Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.
Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.
- toyg 8mo agoMaybe. Or maybe he would have just sent a close associate or relative, like his big friend Ellison does.
- dijit 8mo agoMacOS doesn’t use ZFS because Ellison owns it. Don’t read too much into their “friendship”.
- toyg 8mo agoCome on. ZFS was created by Sun and opened up in 2005. Oracle took over Sun in 2010, and Jobs died in 2011. The relationship between Jobs and Ellison has nothing to do with it.
- dijit 8mo agoLiterally does though, because they abandoned ZFS integration as a direct result, its actually well documented.
- Hamuko 8mo agoApple has grown quite dramatically in value since his death. Not sure if he would have the leeway to oppose Trump as an officer of a publicly traded company when he's shown to be quite vindictive against companies he doesn't like.
- bigyabai 8mo agoIf we have to rely on the canny benevolence of a random CEO to prevent the world from going to shit, then we truly deserve to live in the shit world. Steve made businesses larger-than-life, and I expect his behavior played no small part in conditioning tech enthusiasts to respond to Trump and Elon's hyperbolic, baseless rhetoric.
- junofan 8mo agoTim gave Trump the paper weight. Steve met once with Obama and complained about the fact Obama did not ask for the meeting personally, that it was too hard to build factories in America, and that teachers unions were kneecapping the American education system. All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
- Teever 8mo agoAll those things may be true but at the end of the day guys like Jobs and Trump are like oil and water personality wise. Trump would have invariably said some stupid shit about Jobs publicly or to his face privately and Jobs would have never forgot it and would have obsessed with hurting Trump over it. For better or worse that's just the kind of guy he was.
- jjtheblunt 8mo agoDid you know him or ever speak with him in person? I have while working in Apple in a critical engineering group, and the negatives you keep citing seem to have died off in his 20s, at which time they indelibly (deservedly) tainted public perception. the post NeXT 'return' seemed very very different than what you describe, from in person experience.
- WillAdams 8mo agoI really wish that there was an equivalent to the Mac's https://folklore.org/0-index.html https://folklore.org/0-index.html for the NeXT stage of things --- Luciano Dadda's recent book _Inside NeXT_ is nice for covering at least the hardware, but just not quite the same w/o the personal anecdotes
- joe_mamba 8mo ago>All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry. Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me. We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint. Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.
- gehsty 8mo agoHe would have understood the potential of LLMs straight away. If he would have delivered a successful product no one knows but 100% would have understood how LLMs could become another interface to computers. I think his pitch would have been like garage band but for making apps “now anyone can make an app” feels very Jobsian.
- awad 8mo agoThere's this old gem about being able to ask Aristotle a question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzLMPm3Jgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzLMPm3Jgw
- HerbManic 8mo agoI suspect Jobs would have held off for a few years just to see where the road is going before making a move. In that sense, Apples current lack of real dedicated to move into the LLM space has become a happy accident. They have avoided the hype cycle and the potential blow back once the more exuberant part of the AI craze fade away. They have pulled an accidental Jobs move.
- ChicagoBoy11 8mo agoWhy are you sure it was an accident? Couldn't the people who rose up the ranks around his orbit have learned the right lessons, and this having been very intentional?
- gehsty 8mo agoI don’t think so, I think he would have thought Apple could deliver a better user experience (LLM Siri) and gone into it whole heartedly. My perspective is that Apple doesn’t hold off to see what the market is doing. They hold off until technology can create a viable, usable product (iPhone was ahead of anything, Vision Pro less impactful but similarly advanced, iPod was smaller than any hdd based mp3 player - just some examples where they pushed the boundaries). They 100% missed the transformer being a technology that could create a viable product, and I don’t think Steve Jobs would have missed that.
- 8mo ago
- pokstad 8mo agoJobs was the rare person outspoken with unconventional wisdom. Don’t assume he would agree with your popular opinions.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago[flagged]
- thejazzman 8mo agoSteve was a real, well known, and well documented person with many surviving first-hand witnesses. In his biography, for example, it mentions him pressuring Clinton to tell the truth. I think it's disingenuous to map one's insight into Steve to an insulting comic about a fictional character.
- joe_mamba 8mo ago> it mentions him pressuring Clinton to tell the truth. Truth about what? Did he also pressure the CCP to tell the truth about Tiananmen Square after he moved manufacturing there? Virtue signaling to the press in a democratic country is cheap when your company is not at stake and politicians won't retaliate if you run your mouth. He wouldn't try that with the CCP and not with Trump today.
- runjake 8mo agoThree things come to mind, up front: - Steve Jobs wouldn't have personally donated $1 million to the Trump campaign. - Steve Jobs probably wouldn't have presented a gold bar to Trump. - Steve Jobs would have been better at manipulating (reality distortion field) Trump.
- surgical_fire 8mo agoHe was a billionaire. It's foolish to believe he was any less of a sociopath than other billionaires. Most likely he woult thrive as a contemporary oligarch.
- astrange 8mo agoHe was a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar, not because of Apple. In a strange sense it was an accident.