Ask HN: Do you miss Steve Jobs in 2020?
Some people worked with him, many people knew him, and millions of people heard his name and saw his achievements. Do you miss him now? What would he do if he were still alive?
“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life.
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”
- Steve Jobs
That's one man's opinion. Likely an unhappy man's opinion.
In Isaacson's biography of jobs, he said that his last wishes before he died was to get to know his children better. Maybe he changed his mind.
an ambitious man who died fairly young having regrets is hardly evidence of anything.
Looks like it touched a nerve, but I think you are reading too much into it. It's a very limited life by definition as it's the life that's formulated for you by society. Accepting things are the way they are because you are told so and living your life accordingly is a limited life. Especially compared to his definition of the "broader life". Don't think he meant it's the life everyone wants or should lead or that you should feel bad or insecure about it.
Also his fact is very insightful : "one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."
I feel sorry for the kids being told that.
I imagine a number of kids effectively told to not make waves, not rock the boat, learn their place and do what they're being told. Though in my experience that's a minority, and a ton of schools and parents tell their kid they can change the world is they work hard enough for it.
On the other side most kids tend to give up too easily or stay within their limits if they are not pushed or encouraged to push their boundaries.
That quote is an important message, I wish fewer and fewer people will need it in the first place.
Would this be different if he were still around? Maybe... but it started with the iPhone, and he was in charge for the first few iterations of that.
Is that actually a fact? Really, "everything around you"? Are we talking about smarter than me, you (reading this now), Jobs? It's a guess at best, an assumption that you're smarter than everyone else. Why assume that?
I’m going to admit I’d be curious to know what he’d do in this world (because as another poster eloquently puts it, we have no idea what he would be doing), but other than that... no.
I’m sure his family miss him though and I am not being dismissive of their anguish and sorrow.
Bill Burr on Steve Jobs (5 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3s-qZsjK8I
p.s. My answer is No, I didn't know the guy. Strange question. List of dead people I miss: my mother.
Given what we've been told about Jobs, it's very unlikely he achieved the same degree of self-actualization by the end of his life. And, if I had to guess, it's because he, quite ironically, never quite found the "thing" that computers get you to. He was perpetually chasing an elusive frontier of progress, at the expense of his soul.
I think we should not conflate people's perceived excellence in work life with their personality, and extrapolate "success" to mean they were also great personalities. I don't miss Steve, and hope someone/something knocks Apple to their senses to stop abusing (over-charging).
But yes, in a sense, I do.
I want my "wall screen" to let me same-screen collaborate with others in the same room, since we can all see it. I want room level video conferencing to be easier.
I want a gesture based user interface, or some other interface that allows for complex applications being used by one person or multiple people collaborating. Not a little TV remote.
Watching videos should be like phone calls, still important but a fraction of what a computing device can do.
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I also think Steve is rolling over in his grave while Tim Cook says "yes" to producing TV shows. What a waste - work that many other companies already do, and which Apple is an un-innovative follower from the beginning.
I'm pretty Jobs would be doing the exact same stupid shit Musk is, just without the weird twitter meltdowns I guess.
We all get one song called life and it is meant to be danced to while it is still playing. Have you ever asked yourself: “am I dancing?”
I don't miss the likes of Steve Jobs, no matter what he put together. The talent of Wozniak and Jony Ive and scores of others at Apple would have been discovered and given joy in other ways. Kindness before product evolution.
(1) Steve placed the highest priority on optimizing the user experience.
(2) He was a benevolent dictator. Software requires someone to trash the code and the people who write it when it is bad. No one likes it when someone does this, but it is necessary.
Now we have change for the sake of change. Interfaces get redesigned because someone wants to leave their mark, not because it improves usability.
We have things constantly being redesigned to optimize profit and claim turf, even at the expense of an optimal user experience.
And we have a load of buggy, undocumented, poorly-thought-out APIs that exclude the most crucial functionality because someone figured out a way to make a few extra pennies per unit.
We have some of the best hardware ever created, like the iPad Pro, that you can't use for any meaningful, creative or intelligent purpose because of artificial limitations.
Apple is a behemoth now, and I wonder what sort of products we would have if he was still here.
The iPhone changed our lives, but a decade later all phones now look like the iPhone and we have face unlock and a notch. Cool.
The Macbook is still the same pleasant to use machine, and still functions as any other laptop.
Would the iPad have replaced laptops completely? Maybe we'd have a world in which offloading everyday heavy tasks to the cloud (gaming, video editing, etc.) was super normal and we all were disconnected from carrying heavy devices everywhere. The new VSC integration in GitHub is cool, but maybe that sort of paradigm would have been everywhere.
I'm just a consumer, so I could be wrong in my sentiment but I don't really feel like we progressed as much in the last decade as we did with the jump from flip phones and having a land line, to carrying iPhones in our pockets.
The last time I heard from him personally was when he threatened Google's VP9 with a patent pool from MPEG-LA.
Later that year, MPEG-LA released a statement they won't be going after VP9.
Not happy he's dead, either. He could have apologized and lived as a better person.
Would he have preferred the Butterfly / Current Magic Keyboard with awful low key travel. After all he was the one who wanted MacBook to be Thinkpad like because of the keyboard. Why make MacBook like Tablet, when it should have a perfect PC keyboard with decent key travel.
We wouldn't have to wait 3 years before the whole Keyboard thing was done.
Would he have trusted Iovine? He knew Iovine way before Apple Music, but he never bought him in to Apple. Even when Iovine was trying to sell him Beats, he didn't buy it. Would he have been sold to the god damn stupid "next song" idea like Eddy Cue did. At least I am glad those awful quality Beats headphones did not end up on Apple's speaker and Headphones.
May be Apple Music would have been way better designed.
Scott Forstall wouldn't have left. Jony Ive wouldn't have made iOS 7, and Apple spend the next 3 to 4 years trying to fix or revert all the damage that has done to its UI.
Where is the "real" Apple TV?
He understand Media possibly better than anyone currently at Apple. Would he have still ventured into Apple TV+ making TV series? Directly competing with Disney and Netflix? Just a note Disney+ is on course to achieve its 2024 target by end of 2020. That is 4 years ahead of its ( relatively conservative ) estimate.
Steve's Apple era worked with relatively tiny R&D. He just didn't have the luxury of insane amount of money and cash flow. Apple in 2011 had a market cap of $300B, and he was already investing to Apple SoC, larger iPhone ( iPhone 6 ), iPad and iCloud. Apple today has a lot more people on payroll, but the pace of innovation, or improvement to be precise, is rather slow.
Would Apple Store's opening be accelerated instead of being slowed down? The number of Apple Store growth between Apple having 400M iPhone user and now possibly 1B user ( They haven't announced it yet ) has been minimal. All while Apple is having a much larger product line. Ever since Johnson left, Apple didn't have proper person in charge of Retail. The guy from Dixon was a fad ( As anyone from UK would have known ) and Angela clearly dont understand Apple or tech. The fist thing Deidre O’Brien did when she is in charge.. surprise surprise revert some of the changes made during Angela era. Again in the nearly 10 years, it seems no one apart from Steve Jobs or Johnson actually understands Apple Retail.
Apple wouldn't have played so long with Intel on their modem. Would Steve have settled out their Qualcomm modem legal battle way earlier? Instead of waiting 4 years all while getting apparently the same results as Qualcomm have always had. And Steve is a guy who understand and valued the importance of patents.
In a way I think once Steve passed away, Apple started to fall apart, lots of old folks finally ( or suddenly ) got tired and left. Once the RDF generator was gone, things were a little messy. Tim Cook did a brilliant job holding everything intact. And constantly reminding everyone why Steve created Apple and what Apple stood for. But it was never the same Apple again, and possibly never will be.
I miss him.
I remember that "It just works" was never an official slogan (and they've had tons of them) but something their customers came up with that stuck.
I struggle with the fingerprint reader on my 2019 Samsung-mobile every day and I'm quite sure Samsung CEO aren't using their own products before release.
So yeah, I miss him also.
PS. I was a manager once and had a designer that I should have fired, but didn't have the heart to do so. I think it takes a special kind of person that doesn't have too much empathy to succeed in changing the world as a CEO, so I'm not sure I'd liked to work directly under him, but I can still admire him. :)
PPS. The current "It just works" is my LG-TV with WebOS, way less annoyances than Samsung and Sony.
I was once a product manager as well. It isn't as simple as the internet said about telling designer and sales to do the job. You will have to sell them the vision. And that is hard on its own. And I have similar experience with empathy as well. Firing is hard and cold. Being able to rally insanely great talent around him is a skillset so rare that there aren't many in any industry.
On the subject of TV, what are your annoyances with Samsung and Sony, just out of a matter of interest.
My last Sony would take around half a minute from power-saving mode to allowing me to use the remote. A popup box would come up telling me to wait if I tried, the thing is that I just wanted to switch channel and drop the remote, but instead I'd take the remote and click on the "On"-button, drop it and look at my phone and try to count to 30 sec in my head (there was no indication on when I was allowed to use it, you just had to know by experience) before I take the remote again and click on the channel switch button, and then wait for the UI to popup...
Samsung recently tweeted that users should check their TV with their antivirus software from time to time by going into a menu...
It's just those small annoyances that grows over time that no reviewer is going to catch, because it's never an annoyance the first time you use it.