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It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built.

>When the Apple founder called [NY Times reporter] Bilton to complain about a story shortly after the iPad's launch, Bilton asked how his kids were enjoying the wildly popular new product.

"They haven't used it," Jobs responded. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home."

https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/why-steve-jobs-bill-gat...

The same was true with Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai, among others.

Yeah but that’s because Jobs was famously a minimalist and limited his own attachment to worldly possessions. (His biography goes into it in detail.)

Not really due to minimalism.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/05/how-bill-gates-mark-cuban-an...

Basically every parent quickly realizes that not setting limits is bad for their children. At least the more educated ones do.

The act of setting limits is incredibly important to a child's development, even more so than what the limits ultimately are.

> It's worth remembering that Steve Jobs, like many other tech titans, limited their own children's exposure to the tech they built.

You don’t have to be a tech “titan”. When I was on a school board (in Silicon Valley), there was a big push to have kids be trained in “technology”. Inevitably (in that era) that meant things like PowerPoint and Word.

The only people who pushed back? A programmer, a tech startup CEO, and an engineering VP from what is now called FAANG. But we were overridden by the other board members.

I still believe the kids (including my own) learned more by playing outside and writing with pens.

Why is it worth noting that "parents parented their kids"?

Jobs came for a different era too. An era where things where more scarce due to pre-internet structures. It might have been difficult for him to think '1000 songs in your pocket' would end up as an generalized addictive stream of pages and sucking peoples attention instead of helping good human contact.

It's always the same butterfly effect, when you put something in the world, it might really succeed at that but you never know how the system will grow around it. Kinda like this static1.squarespace.com/static/527deb7fe4b009d7ee74d609/t/54f93e21e4b025c50f0e090c/1425620525003/avoiding_pain_desire_path.jpg (well far fetched analogy tbh)

Your link doesn’t seem to point to anything.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/527deb7fe4b009d7e...

pretty sure that extra path was carved for/by bicycles

That’s the Netherlands if I’m not mistaken. The stairs have a well for bike wheels on either side, so people went out of their way to make a new path that wasn’t as steep.

i don't see anything there that accommodates bikes. and in either case it would not be an example of GP's point.

if someone gave me a fork to eat soup with, then i would invent the spoon because the fork is inadequate for that purpose; not because forks had some unforeseen spoon ecosystems grow around them. if doctors started using forks as medical instruments, then sure.

The track is there. I can see it in the photo. I was just providing context, I don’t really have any stake in this conversation.

The dirt path is obvious to us, but you also described a "well for bike wheels on either side", which neither I nor GP can see any evidence for.

It’s right here:

https://simplymagicaltravlers.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/im...

That looks like a raised section of concrete to hold the dirt back from falling onto the steps, and too close to the handrails for bikes to use - your leg and the bike pedal would be hitting it. The bush at the top is also overlapping it, so there's no way to get onto it in the first place...

Yeah, maybe the pic is distorded and it's narrower than it is in real life but to me, unless you're an experienced biker .. no one will attempt going down on a thin concrete strip like that.

Oh. Lol. Yeah, you don’t ride your bike on it. You get off your bike and put the bike in the groove there. Then, you walk up the stairs using your bike’s breaks as needed while pushing/pulling the bike up/down the stairs. The bike’s wheels fit in the groove so the wheels spin easily while traversing the stairs. It’s a very common thing here.

Ohh I thought it was a quick path to avoid walking altogether. Ok now it make sense somehow.

That's plausible, I just wanted a nice set of stairs with an improvised path.

There are tons of them that aren't for bikes.

Yea I find it hard to believe that science fiction has been predicting little rectangular computers used for nearly any purpose imaginable for several decades but it was completely lost on Steve Jobs that putting a computer in a person's pocket might result in them using it as much as much as people use other computers.

> I don't call NYTimes work worthless easily.

Nor should you in this case, because this isn't NYT work. It's a guest essay by Cal Newport, who isn't an NYT employee. At best, you could argue that it doesn't meet their standards for guest essays or that they should have higher standards:

https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014809107-How-...

The NYT needs to do a better job perhaps distinguishing opinion from news and guests from columnists from editorial board work. In the print edition, it's clearer from the layout, but on the web, it all runs together.

That said, this is clearly marked in red at the top as "opinion" with the author's name. It's also from the "Sunday Review" section which is all opinion pieces:

https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion/sunday

I have a house. It has a front lawn. If I set up guest chairs on my front lawn and invite the world to sit on those chairs and give their opinion, it’s still opinion being broadcast from my lawn with my endorsement implied by the fact that I set the whole thing up and charge for advertising banners laid out at the speakers’ feet.

The fact that I nudge-nudge wink-wink don’t endorse these opinions, and that I don’t formally employ the speakers is wildly irrelevant. If I don’t want to be accountable for the quality or correctness of their opinions, I shouldn’t put out the chairs and invite people to sit down and hold forth.

I think we need to get rid of this pretend distinction between “opinion” and “editorial.” It’s all stuff a newspaper promotes, just as every talking head on Fox News is something Fox chooses to broadcast for money.

> If I don’t want to be accountable for the quality or correctness of their opinions, I shouldn’t put out the chairs and invite people to sit down and hold forth.

What metric are you using to objectively decide the "correctness" of an opinion? Can you propose a system that would work? I'm sure many publications are looking for one..

> Steve Jobs DID call it a "revolutionary internet communicator" like at least half a dozen times in that presentation. And he didn't deemphasize apps. He pushed for a native Google Maps app. He did push for a native YouTube app. He thought most of third party extensibility will be web apps, but he and his team were quickly convinced they need a native store when people jailbroke the phone and made one.

Not only that, but his hook was that Apple was releasing three products: a touch screen iPod (that he led with this makes me laugh, but really, it was a big deal at the time), a mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator.

I remember at the time, one of the most amazing things was seeing mobile Safari actually rendering real desktop web pages. Ironically, Steve even loaded the NYT website as an example. At the time, the existing "smartphones" (which Steve made fun of :D) completely choked at rendering HTML, and some of the vendors were even trying to introduce simpler markup languages like WAP just for mobile devices. Regular web pages rendered normally on the iPhone, and the multitouch made them work almost as well as on a desktop.

And then I also remember a particularly funny moment when Steve made a crank phone call to an arbitrary San Francisco Starbucks, asking a barista to order thousands of coffees. It was a wonderful demonstration of the integration you could get on a phone. Obviously Steve was imagining that iPhones would enable many more of these kinds of integrated experiences (mainly provided via the web, in his mind). It's just at that time, so few of these integrations existed because the phone was brand new!

So, yeah, totally agree with you. This article is just not accurate. The journalist could have watched the launch demo a couple times end-to-end on YouTube, and have realized that the iPhone really was meant to be a revolutionary device.

WAP and WML predates html rendering browser on phones by a number of years. Not even sure WML supports images See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

I've made a pledge to never read another NYT article. They've been writing absolute dogpoop for the last decade and have lost any credibility they once had.

News is completely different from how it was a decade ago, and NYT has hired most of the best writers from every other company. They even have the Buzzfeed guy doing his strange media reporting beat where he reports on things inside the NYT as if he didn't work there.

It's really not worth ignoring them even if their politics reporting is still so terrible to the point they let Peter Baker work for them.

Whats wrong with Peter Baker?

He's a hack who was going to leave and cover Israel, but was called back to cover Trump because he has a lot of Republican sources… aka he just publishes whatever they tell him and claims it's true because they said it was true.

This is one of the reasons so many people think Trump-Russia was a hoax even though he obviously actually did it and both the Mueller report and the Republican Senate investigation said he did it.

He's also part of the NYT's gang of terminal both-sides/horse race political reporters, I believe to the point of not voting because he doesn't want to take a side.

In your judgement, which comparable organization has done better overall than NYT? They do cover a broad range of topics.

WaPo is similar audience and not nearly as bad. Foreign news organizations are probably better though.

The few times I was able to read something without the annoying paywall jumping in my face, I was disappointed and disgusted with the quality of what I read and the asinine opinions offered. I too abhor the NYT.

> News is completely different from how it was a decade ago

The article in question is very, VERY clearly not news.

It's opinion. It's a flow of thoughts. It's conjecture.

It's a bunch of things to keep our eyeballs glued, but it is most definitely NOT news.

They worded the teacher decapitation by an islamist in France as "French Police Shoot and Kill Man After a Fatal Knife Attack on the Street". They chose their side (hating on my country), I chose mine, which involve not reading nor trusting what they write.

You can flip through the evolution of the NYT article[1] and see that when the story was first published there were hardly any details available. Even the earliest archived version of the story was from 5:30pm and it had already been updated once. Since most headlines are written by an editor (and not the reporter) it’s exceedingly unlikely this was a malicious attempt to downplay what had happened and instead was a matter of a delay between the reporting on the ground and an editor getting a chance to review and change the headline in light of the new reporting. I can’t find the original story that was filed but I would be willing to bet the reporting on the decapitation wasn’t yet solidly confirmed when the original headline was written.

Most people would consider that a good thing - showing restraint and avoiding the temptation to sensationalize headlines before having all of the facts.

[1]http://web.archive.org/web/20201016193107/https://www.nytime...

The article is now titled "Man Beheads Teacher on the Street in France and Is Killed by Police" [1], but there is at least one link to it using the title you give [2], and the Jerusalem Post supports the idea that it was changed later. I wouldn't call it "hating on [your] country", but it is not the appropriate framing (and it was changed, to be fair).

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/world/europe/france-decap...

[2] https://www.15minutenews.com/article/190276644/french-police...

[3] https://www.jpost.com/international/french-teachers-murder-b...

I think this is all too common. NYTimes has lost its moral compass just like every other news source. Absolutely inexcusable and completely intentional. Publishing headlines is not something you do on a whim, it’s after careful thought and consideration.

>They've been writing absolute dogpoop for the last decade and have lost any credibility they once had.

That's pretty harsh! I'm sure you don't really mean that every article in every issue is dogpoop for 10 years. What is your real complaint?

Yeah if anything from watching Jobs talk over the years it's clear he is repeatedly reevaluating AND taking the input of those around him.

"It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."

Steve would have changed his mind, so would people around him, as anyone would.

We seem to think politicians should spring fully formed into existence, like Athena.

Bizarre that this is (at this time) the top comment with numerous replies and nobody has yet pointed out that this is not a NYTimes journalism piece; it is an opinion piece by Cal Newport.

This is a regular source of confusion on HN, usually accompanied by dozens to hundreds of comments about how you just can't trust the media, also if anyone points out the nature of opinion pieces you usually get a doubling down about how its printed by the NYT so its the same thing as reporting.

Then NYT is diluting their brand and they deserve some of the blowback anyway.

It's absolutely commonplace for newspapers to publish op-eds. In fact, I'd be more surprised if any particular newspaper didn't do it.

In print, it's usually not a source of confusion because the op-eds are on their own page or in their own column that has "Opinion" or something in the heading.

This is something that the NYT's website should try harder to emulate (or it should provide some other sort of visual differentiation between reporting and opinion contents), but "diluting their brand" is a quite extraordinary claim.

I agree. He was still around when the sdk and App Store were released. He could have squashed that if he chose to.

But of course he didn't squash it, because he loved vendor lock-in and walled gardens.

Scott Forstall ( he said it himself ) was pushing for Native Apps even before the launch of iPhone, Steve Jobs disagree and thought ( as Mark Zukerberg did ) that HTML 5 apps would take over, it would be easier to make, and just as good. Scott argued HTML5 will never be as good as native. And he was right.

Then jailbreak happens, and Steve Jobs agreed to change. Copied the App Store model. And the rest is history.

( The App Store model exist long before Jailbreak in other 3G phones and market. So it isn't really new )

> Did he imagine we'd stay 24/7 glued to our phones? Probably no, but that's also up to us, not up to our phones.

Whatever device you use to access the internet is simply the medium. The problem lies with the services you access from it, of which many have the business model relying selling your attention and thus manipulating the shit out of you into spending more time with them.

I'm able to enjoy the rare episodes of having a real life without being in my phone all the time, and I'm very picky about my notification settings. Every time I receive an unwanted or non-informative notification, I make sure to prevent that from ever happening again. Seeing /r/assholedesign on reddit, most people aren't like that though.

I agreed with you until the last line.

Company that design phones and especially apps are designing them with addiction in mind.

Isn’t addiction a personal responsibility? It’s so easy for us to externalize what we should be more vigilant about. There is an endless sea of addicting things in the world. Passing responsibility to someone else isn’t solving the problem, it’s playing the victim card.

I don't believe it's only a matter of personal responsibility. We have laws to help prevent addiction from gambling, alcohol, tobacco...

When a company hires neuroscientists to design an addictive product, how can you say the responsibility of addiction falls on the users ? Would you say the company's behaviour is ethical, or desired if it leads to profits ?

That’s true, I think these laws highlight the dangers of substance use. They inform people. We need to do the same for iPhone usage, however, majority of the responsibilities lies on the people - They need to be adept at recognizing the dangers of any addiction and act accordingly.

Substances are addictive by causing changes of actual physical biochemistry by chemical means. I have never seen any proof that phone apps are causing similar biochemical changes, people just like doing it a lot, but could stop at any time without any biologically determined issue.