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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think Apple products are any different without Jobs, the problem is they’re nothing new either. With Jobs you knew he loved and lived technology and was always looking for cool new things to do with it. Most of his product launches did just that and brought some excitement about possibilities.

Current Apple products are meticulously, exactingly designed and built, but they’re losing the excitement and expectation of something truly new and original that Jobs brought. That’s the big difference I think a visionary leader can make.

Musk is doing the same thing with electric cars and space. Tesla and SpaceX could survive without him for a time, and since they’re very different industries than consumer electronics, maybe even thrive under a Tim Cook-like operator par excellence. But no guarantee.

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>Current Apple products are meticulously, exactingly designed and built, ...

I disagree. Look at the MBP keyboard issues, or the declining quality of OS X.

Under Jobs that shit wouldn't fly. Other roles aside, one of Jobs' most important functions was that of acting as a sanity check to ensure that the constiuent parts of any given product came together as a cohesive whole.

Again with the revisionist history.

Did you ever use the first 3 versions of OSX ? Because I did. And the quality was pretty unacceptable compared to OS9 or Windows. On the hardware side how long did Apple stick with the coffee puck mouse. Or how about the iPhone 1 never even having 3G or MMS or how about all of the issues with the GPU.

But yet Steve Jobs still shipped it all. Why ? Because his slogan was always "real artists ship".

Mac OS 9 didn’t even have memory protection, what are you talking about? The problem with early versions of Mac OS X were feature completeness, software support, and performance, not quality.

When did HN turn into Reddit?

Apple had issues like this when Jobs was there too. He's the reason "You're holding it wrong" is a common phrase

Me.com launch? That happened under Jobs' watch...

Yeah, it would have flown, and did. Remember when the MacBook first came out and every 5th it 6th white one had a dark yellow film? Or how the touch pads had waves and wobbles in them? The MacBook Pro exploding and misshapen batteries? The MacBook Pro thermal paste issues and how they ran at up to 100C and shut themselves down? Every time some big new production change happens there are teething problems no matter who’s in charge.

From what I understand Ives was distracted during this design cycle. Now that the headquarters are built I’m waiting to see if all of this crap is fixed in the next iteration.

But it’s getting easier and easier to skip a generation of laptop these days. My old machine is just starting to get slow enough that I notice. That’s a big problem for manufacturers.

You’re just listing things that have been described as product failures since Jobs died. Sure. But anyone can also make such a list from when Jobs was CEO.

For me the best examples of shit that wouldn't fly is the the iphone's protruding camera and the notch.

Why would you say that for example the Apple Watch is "nothing new"?

Or: what is the difference between jumping from an iPhone to an iPad (considered as genius by Jobs) and jumping from a fingerprint ID to a 3D face recognition.

Why would you say that for example the Apple Watch is "nothing new"?

Pebble.

So then the iPhone was nothing new either?

Affirmative.

Yes it wasn't new per se, they didn't created first mobile phone with a touchscreen, but you can't deny that this one device single handedly shifted direction of entire industry. Similar things, just not in that scale is happening with watch. In reality no other smartwatch is even close to the Apple Watch. There is no competition. Same as with an iPad or the iPods before that.

Indeed, and the ipod had no wireless and less space than a nomad, it was lame.

Oh wait, while Malda was technically right, it turned music files mainstream, and the iPhone turned touchscreen phones mainstream

but they’re losing the excitement and expectation of something truly new and original

It's just the technology which has matured. The innovation slows and becomes more incremental so certainly the excitement goes down. Jobs wouldn't have been able to change that. Maybe the quality of new Macs would be better or maybe he would have pushed his engineers more to make more elegant way to solve the notch problem, but that's it. Don't make a mistake, he was insightful executive, not the miraculous engineer inventing new technologies. At this stage of the company he would probably just pushed more to the services and content deals.

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