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Comment by loosescrews | Hacker News Reader

Steve was a notoriously hard person to work with. Realistically, anyone who Steve was likely to name as his successor would be a follower, someone who went along with whatever Steve said and told him what he wanted to hear. What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve.

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> What Apple needed was another person like Steve, but unfortunately, by letting Steve select that person, they ended up with someone completely unlike Steve.

Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2012:

"I was talking recently to someone who knew Apple well, and I asked him if the people now running the company would be able to keep creating new things the way Apple had under Steve Jobs. His answer was simply "no." I already feared that would be the answer. I asked more to see how he'd qualify it. But he didn't qualify it at all. No, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. Apple's revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup.

I realize it sounds preposterously ambitious for a startup to try to become as big as Apple. But no more ambitious than it was for Apple to become as big as Apple, and they did it. Plus a startup taking on this problem now has an advantage the original Apple didn't: the example of Apple. Steve Jobs has shown us what's possible. That helps would-be successors both directly, as Roger Bannister did, by showing how much better you can do than people did before, and indirectly, as Augustus did, by lodging the idea in users' minds that a single person could unroll the future for them.

Now Steve is gone there's a vacuum we can all feel. If a new company led boldly into the future of hardware, users would follow. The CEO of that company, the "next Steve Jobs," might not measure up to Steve Jobs. But he wouldn't have to. He'd just have to do a better job than Samsung and HP and Nokia, and that seems pretty doable."

– http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

Bezos isn't following the example of Walton, Sears, or Montgomery Ward. Jobs didn't follow the example of Hewlett. Musk isn't following the example of Henry Ford. It would be a huge mistake for any startup to try to become the next Apple by following the example of Jobs. The Jobs worship has got to stop. He was a unique man in a unique historical circumstance. That time is over. Whether the next big thing comes from Apple or from someone else, it's not going to come from someone who is worshipping and trying to follow Jobs.

There's a difference between "following an example" and "learning from an example."

It's hard. Also, there wouldn't have been Steve Jobs without that crazy and convoluted history. Getting fired from the company, then founding a new one then getting brought back?

People focus too much on the 'nasty' side of jobs, but it's easy to be nasty, and a lot of people do that, what's hard is having the other aspects that might be more subtle

in his biography (or most likely I read it somewhere else), the group that worked with him had a whole way of presenting things to him, that "made" him go for the best solution. It was a ruse, which he might have been aware or not, but it worked. And of course people were on their feet to present the best products

Jobs had a very finicky way of thinking about products, but I guess that created a dynamic in which other people that worked with him also stood for things that they believed in and that resulted in a balance of qualities that is lacking

Also Apple is not thinking about experience. When they took the floppy disks from the Macs I assume people were more than happy to see they go. Heck even display port has some advantages (you need one tiny interface to plug whatever kind of monitor you want).

Now we get a crapfest of different very similar cables with USB-C with different ports that look the same (charging/display/etc) and we killed an existing interface that for the most part works

And guess what Apple, your Keyboard and Mouse may be wireless and bluetooth but they still need an USB cable to be charged! Which cable comes with it? USB-A

I'm assume Steve would be testing the aerodynamic properties of the latest MB line, if you know what I mean

> When they took the floppy disks from the Macs I assume people were more than happy to see they go.

There were a lot of complaints, even more than you're seeing now.[1][2] At the time it was still the main way people transferred files.

[1]http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB901747560996300000 [2]http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/11/business/fi-48540

> if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players

This is a great pitch for an early-stage fund. Sort of like the kind pg peddles :).

(I mostly agree with the analysis, but the bias is worth noting.)

As a customer, I wouldn't buy such a device from a new entrant out of fear of the dreaded "Our amazing journey" blog post when the start up is inevitably shuttered or acquired. The existing players are likely to still exist for the 4+ year device lifetime, which is handy for security updates, warranty and service and replacement purposes.

Although it would be helpful to remember that:

1. The big companies also shutter projects. Minus the "amazing journey" blog post. Their announcements usually have the tone of "Thanks for being part of the gigantic data collection experiment although you wouldn't quite know that yet. Here, take this gratuitous 6 month window to take your data out and then go f yourselves."

2. The security updates, warranty and service and replacement etc also involves occasionally bricking perfectly running systems (ala Windows 10), so it is hardly a comforting thought.

The point is shuttering a product is rarely the end goal for a larger companies product.

It is the end goal for almost every startup in the current climate.

Yes that's the difference between early adopters and the mainstream market. The early adopters will take a risk but companies typically need to change strategies to go beyond that. For details see the classic business book "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey A. Moore.

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062292988/crossing-the-cha...

That means your needs are being met by current devices. That means you are not the target audience for a new disruptive technology. The initial users for this new company are desperate.

True, Graham offers a naive reading about when hardware startups can win. Yes, a start-up came up with the smartwatch(pebble), and another came up with the wireless earphones. And those were pretty good products .

Did they ever had a chance against Apple ?

No, because "pretty good" isn't good enough when your competition is Apple.

If we're honest is the Apple Watch even better than "pretty good"?

The watch2 is, watch1 no I wouldn't say it is.

> Apple's revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.

Well, revenue is already falling [1].

If you look at the first graph (revenue) you'll see that revenue is declining. Click "Trailing 12 months" to remove the seasonal trends.

[1] https://fairlyvalued.com/company/AAPL

Disclaimer: Fairlyvalued is new tool build by alch- and me.

Apple is not into the next wave. If it were, it would be a powerhouse of deep learning hardware and software. The next wave is going to be robotics and conversational agents. You can't make a new Apple with slightly better laptops and phones any more. If, at least, they developed and opened up Siri in the last few years... but it's dead in the water.

The next wave of what, though? Apple didn't get into search engines, or drones, or netbooks. They're a consumer products company. They make things they can sell. Let Google be Google, Amazon be Amazon and Apple be Apple.

Honestly I wouldn't be concerned if Apple never make a new category defining product in the rest of their existence. Jobs didn't spend his whole life dedicated to discovering new product categories, that's not how things like the iPod and iPhone happened.

Jobs biggest successes were matters of pure opportunism. Take the iphone. He couldn't have created that product in 2004, the hardware technology wasn't up to it. He was presented with a unique opportunity. A high quality OS core, world class developer and design talent, and mobile hardware that was just becoming powerful enough to run a version of that OS core. It doesn't matter how talented or how visionary he was, without those things all coming together at the right time the iPhone wouldn't have been possible.

People expecting Apple to come up with new products like that on some kind of schedule aren't taking into account how contingent these things are. Without the conditions for a new product category to emerge. Without the many different pre-requisite technologies coming together and without Apple having the right resources available to take advantage of them, these things simply won't happen. They couldn't happen, even with Steve Jobs around.

The received wisdom seem to be that SJ simply willed new products into existence and that somehow Apple should still be doing the same thing. That's magical thinking. But what they should be doing is developing their technologies and assets and applying them to new products and new problems. If that leads them into new product categories, all the better.

Do you know any good resources on the future of conversational agents? In terms of what need they fulfil - I don't use Ok Google/Siri/Cortana, and rarely use my Echo but for music, and find it hard to understand where they fit in. Home automation is the only thing that comes to mind ("only").

The term they should be able to fulfill is natural interaction with a humans.

You should be able to crawl into your car and sputter "take me cough to the hospital" to which the car vocally responds "Right away" then drives itself to the hospital.

edit: Meaning, this interaction should play out exactly the same as if you had a full time driver/butler whos only job is to sit in the driver seat of your car and wait for your commands.

Check out X.ai and Clara labs. Some of their blog posts highlight what needs they fulfil. These are not messaging agents but conversational nonetheless.

Has anyone stopped to think, "do people actually want to talk to a computer?" I think we are more simply interested in commanding them to get our tasks done easier, but this "conversational" nonsense and making it more human like is, well, nonsense.

>but this "conversational" nonsense and making it more human like is, well, nonsense.

Can't say I've ever been impressed when one of these systems fails to understand me and replies with a human-like response. Feels disingenuous.

Then you'd expect all the executive team at Spple to be Steve's hand selected Yes Men, a bunch of followers unable to do their own thing. Yet what we hear from people who actually worked for Steve that this isn't how he operated or selected talent at all. He ruthlessly weeded out Yes Men. What you're representing is the caricature of Steve Jobs, but a one dimensional personality like that could never have achieved what he did.

This is a very clever analysis. Thanks for that, it makes a lot of sense.

It also explains why it's shifted from being a computer company that makes gadgets (Jobs) is now becoming a gadget company that happens to make some computers as well (Cook).

In all this, the gates are wide open for Microsoft to score some good points here towards devs.

Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along.

The true value of Steve Jobs is the reality distortion field. That's really was is missing here with the new Mac.

All the discutable decisions about the Mac that people complain about are just similar to the trends set under Jobs, the difference is that he would make the people believe that Apple was 100% behind the Mac. There would no need for Jobs to write twice in a month to employee and the press to say that Apple was committed to it.

I'm not sure what is missing exactly, but the MBP failed at delivery rather than feature. For example, did Apple really need to can all their Mac related accessories at the same time, building up a negative climate. They could have rebranded the LG monitor. Somehow give the people a hint that Apple is behind the USB-C, not just picking up and leave it up to the third party to sort out. (which is BTW what Apple has always really done, it just seemed handled better)

Apple strategy is to keep everything secret until they do a big delivery event. They are utterly bad at delivery since Jobs is gone, and the lengthy secrecy they keep around everything is now not building hype, just building apprehension.

> Has others have pointed out - becoming a widget company was Jobs plan all along.

That's not the case: back in 2001 post-PC thinking was popular too, and Jobs stood out against it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmvmtmqqbeI . That's evidently why Jobs was so reluctant to make the iPod work with Windows PCs: his whole plan for the iPod was to have it sell his intended Digital Hub, the Mac. He did eventually come around to post-PC thinking of course, but only quite late: even in the D 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85PMSYAguZ8 he and Gates were quite resistant to it.

How do you figure there has been a "shift" like you said?

In 2007 Jobs was using the phrase "post-PC", and by the time he died in 2011, more than half of Apple's revenue was iPhone/iPad/etc.

To me it seems that Cook is just continuing the trend.

The shift is the pure neglect towards the dev community. Something that most likely would not have happened so blatant and fast under Jobs. It is also completely not necessary that making great phones excludes a company from making at least decent upgrade cycles in their computer hardware.

Why should one exclude the other?

> It is also completely not necessary that making great phones excludes a company from making at least decent upgrade cycles in their computer hardware.

You bet! all those billions sitting in their coffers and they still couldn't pull their asses to achieve progress. It is like Microsoft of the XP era.

I was pulling my hairs in 2003 cursing at Bill Gates, then switched to Mac until now. But I think the Mac era is over as well and Bill Gates is cool again. He's really great in his humanitarian work.

> He's really great in his humanitarian work.

I'm sure a lot of what Gates is currently doing is praiseworthy.

But to be even-handed, we should also remember the means by which he obtained a lot of the money he's giving away.

How do you figure "pure neglect"? What are the features you're missing in the current Mac lineup? Which products from other manufacturers make a meaningful improvement on Apple's offering for "devs"?

Well a computer with enough GPU performance to work with VR would be a nice start. Apple don't currently have anything available other than hacking an eGPU set up together.

The "current" Mac Pro is over 3 (4?) years old now. Users can't upgrade it because of the proprietary GPU cards and Apple don't seem able to keep it relevant themselves.

It's difficult to have a professional relationship with a supplier where the best options for macOS are either a dodgy Hackintosh or a used 2012 Mac Pro with a new GPU.

VR is a subset of PC gaming right now, and Apple has never offered hardware sufficient for high-end PC gaming.

GPU nowadays is almost a misnomer. They are more like supercharged versions of the old "floating-point calculation" chips. As such, they have plenty of applications beyond VR - bitcoin, data analysis, encryption etc etc etc.

GPUs are for more than VR. All 3D rendering is moving to GPUs, All machine learning development needs GPUs.

GPU is the future of professional computing in many emerging sectors. Apple currently ships no hardware compatible with any of this.

Here's one piece of anecdata, not for a "dev" but for another high-end use case: professional photography.

My wife is a professional photographer. Her current photo-editing computer is a Windows 7 desktop with 16 GB of RAM.

We know Windows 7's days are numbered, so we're starting to think about her next editing computer. The two most obvious options are (a) some Apple product, or (b) a computer running Windows 10.

Here are the major criteria for the replacement, which need to remain true for 3+ years after the computer's purchase:

(1) It must legally run current Adobe products. (2) Can support > 16 GB RAM during its lifetime. (3) There must be minimal unplanned downtime. (4) The price can't be exorbitant, relative to a medium-high end PC. TCO should also be reasonable. (5) It must be convenient to transfer photos from her camera's SD card. (6) We'd like to minimize the time and attention we put into initial setup and maintenance.

So the most obvious options (currently) are:

* Apple: MacPro, iMac, or MacBook Pro

* PC: Windows 8 or Windows 10

Here's how I score the options, although perhaps someone will correct me:

(1) Easily satisfied by all options listed.

(2) No MacBook Pro satisfies this. Fast SSD for swap is helpful but sub-optimal.

(3) Windows 10 (non-enterprise) fails this, because of unavoidable updates. MacPro and iMac fail this because (AFAIK) Apple doesn't offer loaners for these during warranty work.

(4) For initial purchase cost, the MacPro is a fail, and the MacBook Pro is nearly a fail. However, all current Apple products are potential TCO fail given the lack of user-replaceable components.

(5) AFAIK the desktop Macs fail this, although connecting an external USB reader should be easy enough. I suspect the MacBook Pro would be more hassle, given its ports/dongles mess.

(6) All of the options should satisfy this criterion well-enough.

As far as I can tell, the winner is a Windows 8 PC.

Why is no Apple product a viable winner, given our criteria?

- Nothing in the current lineup meets all our criteria.

- We don't know if/when something will be added that meets our criteria.

- We're not sure what Apple's longer-term plans are, so we don't want to invest time/money into a PC-to-Apple transition, just to need to reverse it in a few years.

The three issues listed immediately above strike me as a pointless fail in Apple's strategy, at least relative to my wife's business's needs.

Looks like the only blocker for Windows 10 is the "minimal unplanned downtime." Although Windows 10 does have mandatory updates, I have yet to see one that requires immediate and sudden reboots. Yes, if you get prompted for an update reboot and delay it a few times, the system will eventually force the update, but a simple workflow change of rebooting the system every night when you're done working with it and are going to bed would eliminate the unexpected updates and the associated downtime.

I'm not particularly concerned about unplanned reboots. The real issue is some Windows 10 updates have caused problems which made the computers unusable until remediated.

There are some points in the business calendar where 1-2 days of downtime is catastrophic. For example, shortly before the deadline for submitting highschool senior photographs to the yearbook publisher.

If we could purchase a version of Windows 10 which allowed her to delay installing updates for 1-2 months until a crunch time is over, that would probably be acceptable.

AFAIK only Windows 10 Enterprise allows that, and I'm not aware of any legal way we can get that.

If we do have to go the Windows 10 route, my contingency plan is to look into setting up a firewall (external to the Windows 10 box) that blocks all relevant Microsoft IP addresses.

The "immediate forced reboots" on Windows 10 are vastly overhyped and received much more negative press than they should have. I am yet to experience a reboot when I didn't want it. Anecdotal for sure but I've set my inactive hours inside Win10's settings and never had a problem.

Windows 10 is your best answer. It's gonna be supported very long and it's a 99.9% painless upgrade from Windows 7.

Definitely invest in a mid-to-high range PC would be my advice. I have 5-year old i7 3770 CPU and I am yet to find something that makes it choke. Only refreshment I did to my now 5-year old PC was to increase RAM from 16 to 32GB and to get GTX 980 (was 650 before). The PC is flying whatever I do -- and I'm a programmer, trust me I do a lot.

I mentioned this in another post, but the issue with updates isn't that they're immediate, it's they they're forced.

My wife needs her system to be stable during certain points in the yearly business calendar, and an unavoidable, potentially-breaking update is a serious concern.

But why Windows 10 rather than Windows 8? Both will receive security updates for a long time, and (AFAIK) Windows 8 doesn't have the issue of unavoidable pushed updates.

The only real downside I know of to Windows 8 is its bad UI, but I'm told there are 3rd-party shell replacements which approximate the Windows 7 interface.

I don't have extensive experience with Win8 first-hand, but I've heard from many people that Win10 has a much better backwards compatibility. Practically almost nothing ever broke for people, while conversely Win8 had a lot of complaints.

I can't argue either way though. I as a programmer took the plunge one afternoon around 8 months ago and never looked back. Win10 is superior to Win7 -- my girlfriend's graphical processing software (and part of her games) even started working faster after her upgrade.

All of that is anecdotal of course but strategically speaking, Win10 will be around for much longer.

For (3) check local independent repair shops. I know of several Apple-authorized repair shops that rent inexpensive loaners while they're working on your computer.

Thanks for the tip!

Indeed Jobs himself described computers as like trucks (large ute/pickup), whereas most people only need a regular car.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfJ3QxJYsw8

Jobs was a salesman. He said a lot of stuff - and not all of it stood up to scrutiny.

He said no one would use phablets and called them the 'Hummers' of phones - this was back when a 5-inch phones were considered huge. He also denigrated 7-inch tablets by saying users would need to file-down their fingers to use them (and yet iPhone users could comfortably use 3.5-inch screens). Apple proceeded to profitably venture into both product categories with the iPhone 6+ and the iPad mini.

We are now in a post-'Post-PC' world: iPad sales have plateaued/slumped over the last couple of years. If there is money to be made selling computers, Apple will sell them regardless of what they said in the past.

Precisely. Continuing Steve's vision as best they can imagine it (not well). Don't forget when he used the post-PC phrase he was very clear PCs are still going to be needed and valued. It wasn't supposed to be either-or.

Pretty sure in 6 years Jobs would have picked up some new trends, details and directions. Pretty sure we'd not be stuck in some infinte repeat loop. Thinner. Groundhog Day. Repeat.

Looks more like post-MBP

Perhaps they should rehire Jean-Louis Gassée. Buy up the remnants of BeOS from Access, just for good measure.

I've thought about this a lot. Wouldn't Steve have realized this inherent contradiction? Is this an understood reality at the top levels at Apple?

That is, does Tim see his role now as maximizing revenue from the current position, with the goal being to hand off a healthier company to a "visionary" successor?

My personal answer fluctuates depending on my daily gut feeling about human nature. And how many times sourcekit crashes.

I think about this a lot too, and the question I have is – has there ever been a visionary who made his way to the top of the corporate ladder of ANY company, however enlightened? Would love to hear about it.

I think Satya Nadella, his vision has turned Microsoft around completely from a dull company to a company with vision for the future.

I think you give Satya Nadella too much credit. Steve Ballmer laid much of the ground work. Ballmer granted an interview to Bloomberg where he gave some candid answers [1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-04/steve-bal...

This makes me think of a sort of pendulum. Maybe what Apple needs now is to just be boring for a decade.

That doesn't really seem to be so: Scott Forstall was only fired after Jobs had left, while Cook and Ive are not really shrinking violets either. And in fact it seems that some of the missteps of the post-Jobs era, such as the too-early Apple Watch, were the result of Ive's assertiveness. The central problem seems to be two-headed: Jobs' succession plan seems to have been to put in place a Forstall/Ive/Cook trumvirate, but that arrangement went the way of most triumvirates; and to the extent that one person is in charge at Apple, that person (Cook) wasn't a "product guy" in the Jobs era and seems unable or unwilling to take on SJ's role as hands-on product monarch. Add to that Ive's apparent (and fairly understandable) increasing boredom with having to iterate away on the same old core Apple products for another large chunk of his life, combined with his increased political untameability in the post-Jobs era (what will the stock do if he announces his departure?)

> What Apple needed was another person like Steve...

They had one. Tim fired him.

What makes Forstall so great? If he's truly worthy of that comparison, perhaps Apple should buy him along with Snap; it would be hilarious if Snapchat turned out to be the NeXTSTEP of this generation.

Wouldn't Fadell be just as good?

Scott Forstall combined Steve Jobs's sensibilities and obsessive attention to detail with a deep, working background in software engineering. He championed UI usability and responsiveness, spearheaded accessibility initiatives out of care rather than for PR, and led the OS X, iOS, and Safari teams through arguably their best and most reliable years.

Scott Forstall is why the iPhone was the iPhone. Tony Fadell was almost why the iPhone was an iPod.

Scott didn't manage the "macOS" team sorry. Bertrand, Craig & Andreas, not Scott.

Yes, but Forstall was responsible for skeumorphism across all of iOS, so I'm not certain he really was as visionary as Jobs.

To be fair Jobs seemed to be a big fan of skeumorphism too - the leather stitching on the Calendar.app was supposedly modelled on Jobs's Learjet so it can't all be attributed to Forstall.

Not to mention, the Maps fiasco happened under his watch.

Whilst this was a big blunder, the Apple Maps project was an absolutely enormous undertaking. The Google Maps app itself had an almost 10 years head start, beginning life in 2003 at a startup which Google purchased. I think it's impressive what Apple managed to put out even though it fell far short of Google's work.

True, but of course the choice was up to Steve Jobs, not Apple. Also, how the hell would you hire "person like Steve" anyway?

As Paul Graham said, "So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is? None of the existing players. None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired. So the company that creates the next wave of hardware is probably going to have to be a startup." – http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

> What Apple needed was another person like Steve

I know--so obvious, right? All they needed was another Steve Jobs. Why didn't they think of that, and just go out and get one? I hear they grow on trees.

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