People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
By any metric other than “line must always go up” Apple is doing just fine.
“Oh no, they haven’t found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won’t continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come…better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins”, the horror.
He was very much the Elon Musk of his times, and it’s very possible he would have gone down the same route of extremist views and decisions that completely failed because of his egoism.
He died because he didn’t listen to his doctor’s advice. That is somewhat extreme.
He believed in the teachings of a 20th century cultist who said you excreted mucus based on dietary choices, and therefore didn’t have to worry about health or bathing unless you ate poorly. (Stinky dude who also made an 8 yr old cry for eating a cheeseburger).
Wish everyone health but guy was as extreme as it gets in regards to being an asshole. Denied his daughter, settled child support days before taking Apple into the public market, etc.
To be fair, we saw formerly what Apple without jobs did, it was a failure. So one might wonder when the new Apple might run out. The catch being that the iPhone, app store, and iTunes are all indefinite money machines, except maybe iPhone one day. So they had a steak of ever increasingly wildly successful products that culminated in the iPhone and then no mind blowing follow-up, but they don’t need one. Folks may like the narrative that Jobs death coincided with their last big product category though
We also saw Jobs without Apple, also pretty much a failure.
NeXT was successful at being an application for the position of CEO at apple.
The amount of credit people give Steve Jobs is such a kick to the nuts to all the engineers that designed those products
Jobs basically had one job - be the screaming obnoxious asshole in charge who harangued the engineers until they came up with something to his liking. And then took the credit when they did. Basically just the Elon Musk of his day.
Crying smelly barefoot goblin man. Jobs was such an asshole.
“I’m vegan! I don’t need to shower! I don’t produce mucus or smell because of my superior diet. Brb I’m gonna go wash my feet in the toilet!” -Steve Jobs
fly me to more liver transplants, stat! The last one didn’t get rid of my cancer!
Except I can look at Jobs’ history and see an actual progression in technology. With Musk there is literally nothing but nonsensical hyped up promises.
Why can’t you make the same argument for that dick hole musk? Neither one has any engineering capabilities, and were a non-technical figurehead overseeing people with the actual talents making the technology better.
Jobs may have had an actual design element of input that I doubt musk has, but neither one of them actually improved technology; they have smarter people working for them that can do it. That’s especially true of Jobs with Woz, one of the actual people who improved technology at apple.
Im not praising musk, and i really think he fucked up his lead on twitter and tesla, but he is very much similar to jobs. Neither musk nor jobs have done really any of the engineering work, but both have had their hands in some pretty remarkable tech. Musk with paypal, spacex, tesla. Again, im not saying hes a good engineer, he hasnt done anything, but to discredit those companies is unfair.
I think we can give Musk credit for progressing technology - electric cars & space rocketry and some other things. But he is also an incredible asshole, has little regard for the people who work for him, has no inner filter and has some incredibly stupid hot takes.
Except he didn’t. Jobs progressed technology by essentially bullying engineers into making it a reality. Musk didn’t even put that effort in. He bought companies that were already doing these things
I think that is disingenuous. It’s clear Musk has been a driving force in Tesla and to a lesser extent in SpaceX and Starlink. And while I hate the guy with a passion and think he is a massive prick who is an awful boss and who takes credit for other’s work, I have no doubt that if not for him EVs wouldn’t be a mainstream technology they are today. Just like with Apple and smart phones, Tesla did not invent the electric car but they made the first cars people actually wanted to buy.
The same with Musk. People are seeing him as the sole engineer of Tesla and SpaceX while in reality anonymous engineers did all this possible.
And it doesn’t help Musk calls himself lead engineer or whatever at times.
I think in one of his autobiographies he was claiming that he self educated how to build rockets from some books and I wonder how much of this is true and how much is coming from his ego.
From Mr. “make rocket pointier because LOL”? I’ll put my money on the latter option.
Im not gonna sit here and shill for people like job and musk. But i have to say there is somethkng to be said about steering a ship in the right direction.
Jobs knew how to market the products, and steer the engineers in the right direction.
One thing he always said was that there only needed to be one iphone and one ipad. I recall that the with the ipad he said it was the perfect size and didn’t need alternatives or it would become less functional.
Then he died and the ipad mini was released, as well as the iphone 5c.
In 2012, the year following the iphone 5c and the year of the ipad mini apple lost its global market lead to android.
They diluted the product and confused the market of loyalists and general consumers by releasing multiple versions of their main product and if you ask me, thats when the cracks started to show.
Apple havent had a majority of the global market share for years now.
I think what Jobs really understood was that in a world of Ford, people crave a Ferrari.
Making the best be beautiful and accessible is hard, but you do it through focus and intentionality. Jobs, despite his many, many faults did that well.
But did they wear jeans and black turtlenecks?
I do have a black turtleneck and without thinking I came into work wearing it with jeans. That with my glasses, well I got teased a bit.
But did you gain reality distortion powers?
I listened to an interview with Scott Forestall several years back and he discusses the meeting he was in where Steve Jobs basically gave them the idea for the iPhone. He had seen the multi-touch displays, initially just used for very large displays, and also was seeing mobile phones take off at the same time. He was the one who put those two together and told the team to work on it. Sure, the product managers and designers came up with the details of the product and engineers figured out the tech to support it, but without that initial idea and leadership’s support to expend resources on building it, it may not have happened.
There are a lot of companies with bad uninspiring leadership that just ship what everyone else is shipping. Apple under Steve Jobs was trying to innovate.
I mean, certainly he gets more credit than deserved. But I find it hard to deny the major impact he had. When he was hired back as CEO in the late 90s, Apple already had talented engineers, but there was no coherence or direction in what they were working on, and the next gen OS was never going to happen. Back then, CEO Michael Dell was asked what he’d do if he were in charge of Apple and he said he’d shut it down. Apple was a punching bag in the industry.
Jobs immediately made radical changes at the company, eliminating most of their product line which was superfluous and confusing, shutting down software projects that were “neat” but didn’t fit into a vision, putting them on the path to release OS X (which his company had envisioned and developed the basis for while he was away from Apple), changing their marketing strategy, making the most clear-cut product line I’d ever seen, and turning conference keynotes into must-see TV. And in addition to that he pushed Apple towards the iMac, the iPod and the music store, and the iPhone.
It took amazing engineers and a lot of work and pain to actually deliver these products. And Jobs does get more credit than deserved. But I think he does deserve a whole lot of credit.
Steve Jobs was a piece of shit human being who contributed nothing to technology.
That said, he was a hell of a skilled bullshitter/marketer. Most people fucking looooove to be bullshitted, and Americans more than most.
It’s why we elect virtually no wonks/technocrats, even though thats who we should elect almost exclusively. We’d rather some snake oil motherfucker sell us on magical lies while telling us we’re pretty.
It’s also partially because any decent engineer/technocrat both lacks sufficient charisma and cash flow, and more importantly looks at public service and says “there’s no reliable way I can keep my morals and make a difference there.” As an engineer myself, I can’t imagine dealing with the general public. Choosing the correct, logical path will never win over people who put opinions and faith/feelings over reasoning and science. We’ve seen it time and time again and I’m not going to bang my head against that wall.
Instead I help friends and family, contribute to open source and projects I believe in and be the change I want to see in the world. Trying to do that as an elected official would foster insanity and pushback from those who don’t care and only want their side to win, regardless of the overall outcome.
Also: yes SJ was a POS, but he was a POS with charisma, a plan, and smart enough to surround himself with people who could make his ideas happen… and then micromanage them.
wonks/technocrats
…Knowledge Fight-like typing detected?
Jobs was the fucking cracks. The reason why zoomers have no fucking idea where their files are on their computer are because of the shitty attitude instilled into iphones/ipods.
He started the entire fucking enshittification trend and everyone ate his asshole like peaches.
I agree. I had to explain to a younger family member today that when I say “open notepad”, I meant the application that’s been on every Windows version since they were born, not to Google “notepad”
Gave me a crisis that people know so little of what would have been considered basic computer usage a while back.
If it makes you feel better I gave my 16 year old daughter a laptop with a fresh Debian install and she’s figuring out things on her own without asking for help. Customizing it and making it do what she wants.
I just thought she would watch YouTube videos on it and be content. Instead she’s talking about the nuance of installing programs on it, and how different it is from Windows.
Not all hope is lost.
Such is the result of Fisher Price’ing their devices.
You can extend this argument to saying everyone should master the command line. They’re all interfaces. There’s no “right way” to use a computer.
Jobs turned the computer into a product used by everyday people who don’t give a shit about how it works, and that’s fine. That’s empowering because it lowers the barrier to entry.
That said, we’ve been in a much worse “eternal September” since the iPhone shipped.
They’re all interfaces
My files are in a magic place is not a fucking interface.
Can you expand a bit more on this? What makes it not an interface?
I am an android and windows person (would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if my CAD worked on there) and pretty tech savvy, even run my own servers. So I hate the fact that things are getting so dumbed down but I can’t understand why it’s just an interface would be not true.
I’ll take a swing at this one.
A good interface has well defined inputs and outputs. A lot of interactions with iOS/MacOS software/applications have decently defined inputs via their UIs, but finding the outputs of those UIs can be a Sysiphysian effort. Figuring out where those outputs are beyond the defaults like “downloads from a browser end up in the Downloads folder” or “documents saved in the Pages app end up in the Documents” folder is frequently non-trivial.
It ends up being that the easiest way to find a file is to just open the original app you created it in, and find it in it’s history or whatever. To a non-technical person, this creates the impression that the only way to interact with those files is with the original app it was created in, which ends up limiting what people think they can do with their devices, and creates a bit of a walled garden effect.
So I suppose that the blanket statement of “it’s not an interface” isn’t completely fair. What is fair though, is to say that “it’s a bad interface”, if the average user can’t readily find said interface’s output.
I think I understand what you mean now, if it was an interface then it should be possible to use a separate but similar interface to access the output but here there is only one non-PITA way. Eg. If there was a competing galleries app on iOS it should be able to see all the photos. Is that roughly the thinking? Makes sense to me and thanks for taking the time to type that out.
yep, zalgotext basically did it for me. One other thing is that when you try to access files on an ipod through a non apple computer, it still uses tree based file structures, but the individual files, names, and locations are all garbled (eg : your Rancid album track 3 is in the same folder as your rush 2112 overture, but the rest of those albums are fuck knows where).
I had a joke that the original iphone wasn’t turing complete because you couldn’t run programs on it not from the istore.
Apple managed to capture lightning in a bottle, twice. First by making a better Walkman, and then again by making that device a phone with internet access. They were able to leverage that success to revitalize their computer hardware business and act as a platform for selling accessories, and all of that made them very successful.
But the stock market doesn’t care about past success, it cares about growth, and without a major new, or buzz worthy product, investors might start to turn against Apple. Problem is, they have ridden the iPod horse about as far as it can go. They tried putting wheels on it, but that failed, and the jury is still out on whether tying one to your face will work out or not.
Yep. Doesn’t matter how healthy or stable a company is… when infinite growth is no longer feasible, investors would rather pick the bones clean than let it be.
by making that device a phone with internet access.
removed you WAP phones existed. Blackberries existed.
The Apple Car was the hint the wheels fell off, because it was out of scope for Apple’s focus. And the Vision Pro is the next biggest one, because Steve haaaaaaated wearable computing.
Meh, when you have a chip that powerful and that energy efficient, trying something in wearable computing is a no brainer imo.
I still don’t know who wants wearable tech. Just using my phone can be painful at times. Notifications after notifications. Enable cookies, mark as read that work email, deal with the emoji in the group chat, ignore that spam call voicemail, ignore that update, dismiss that missed alarm, read the notification from my kid’s school that the PTO meeting was moved…
Now imagine you can’t just put it down. It is right there screaming for your attention. Just emails alone probably eat 10% or more of my working day. The very last thing I want is the screaming notifications to be on face in my field of vision.
Plus that thing is going to smell like ass in a month.
Wearable computing does not have to be a VR device, and it can be anything with a sensor, a cpu, gpu and networking features. Apple has at least one succesful wearable computing device, the apple watch. I am not touching vr anyway, it look pointless in nature and gives simulation sickness.
Trying, not releasing
Not like it matters because they’re a silicon valley giant so even the next zero change iphone will sell morbillion units.
The cracks have been visible for a very long time, most fanboys don’t want to see them though.
The cracks in this case are really that governments will no longer support the model that Apple created.
Cracks? Cracks! These are not cracks, these are features of our product. Their features of our business! It’s what differentiates us from the fractured Windows and Android communities. You want these crac…err features, you need them because it makes our products better.
/s
Take a look at Apple stock over the last 12 years the company is worth literally 10x what it was worth when Jobs died. What a dumb framing.
Boeing’s stock kept rising in the last 10 years, because they were sacrificing what they should be doing for shareholder value. Stock price alone is not a good metric for companies.
Lol, the crack appeared as soon after his death. Steve Jobs : no ipad air, no dividend for the share holders.
Guess what been announced in the months following his death.
Great choice of website:
Independent journalism is made possible by advertising.
That is the polar opposite of the truth.
NoteBookCheck is a legit website, what issue do you have with them? I always found their reviews and information and testing to be high quality
This is like shitting on GamersNexus because they removed some shitty product in every video to make money
The dude who wrote the message you responded to is probably a Linux user and privacy weirdo or something.
This is Lemmy. EVERYONE is either a Linux user, a privacy weirdo or both.
Source: I’m both
I showed up because of the IPO at that one website.
Me, the laziest person ever, motivated to come here. Truly an accomplishment.
…we need normal people on this platform…
The dude who wrote the message you responded to is probably a Linux user and privacy weirdo or something.
I can understand the Linux part not being common.
But to say privacy is a weird thing is really sad. The average person should go out of their way to be privacy-conscious. In the US, we got people getting arrested for miscarriage, people getting on lists for watching YouTube videos/, and companies now getting people’s ID before they can visit a site.
Not being privacy-conscious is just being stupid.
They should be preaching their privacy thingies to the people in real life, not on the internet 🙄 for maximum reach, like how the evangelists do.
Agreed. Lemmy shall be the tool to increase Linux adoption.
Our fediverse comrade
Da!
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
removed that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– Banksy
So you think they should just make no money because you’re mildly inconvenienced?
No. If you make money from ads your clients are the adversers and your readers are an asset you seek to capitalize. That is in opposition to journalistic integrity.
I’m not saying they aren’t allowed to show ads, but I am saying that once they do, they are no longer allowed to refer to themselves as independent.
No company that wants to advertise on your website is stupid enough to sign away editorial control, i.e. once you agree to display their ads, you are no longer allowed to say anything bad about them. And even if they did, there’s still the looming risk that if you do, they are well within their rights to pull their ads and there goes your income.
If you’re going to show ads, be honest to your readers about what that means.
I think corporations should be crushed so they are small enough to drown in a dirty used toilet.
Yeah bruh Tim Apple seems to be holding his own.
TL;DR: Wahhh apple isn’t jamming enough AI crap in their products.
Jobs was once asked about what helped to set Apple apart from other companies. In response, he spoke of his fondness of a quote from ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky who once said what set him apart as an ice hockey player is that “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Yet this is exactly where Apple finds itself right now, especially in relation to generative AI. While it is true Apple has long integrated AI technologies into the iPhone and its other devices in the form of features like computational photography and Siri, it has also trailed in these areas as well.
Google, conversely, AI from the start, making it a centerpiece of its Pixel smartphone strategy from the moment the original Pixel device shipped over 8 years ago with Google Assistant its heart coupled with computational photography chops. It has been focused on bringing useful and advanced (non-generative) AI-based features to users on a much broader scale than Apple, such as Call Screening, Google Lens, Top Shot, Smart Compose, among many others.
Pffft. Fuuuuuuuuck that.
Thanks for saving me a click (and multiple eyerolls)
This article is garbage. The only thing that Steve Jobs did was have ideas and enough narcissism to force them on other people. Engineers and designers far smarter than he did the actual work.
Starting? lol
