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Comment by ydnaclementine | Hacker News Reader

Want to do a mini PSA that you should (probably) read Steve Jobs' biography if you haven't, it makes posts like this much, much more interesting when you have a fuller background.

I wasn't a Steve Jobs fan so I never read it till recently. Still not a huge fan, but you can still see the tendrils of his influence that still affect today's world (adobe flash EOL last year, this stuff by not allowing you to buy books on the kindle/amazon app on iphone, continuing to control hardware and software experience). And you can see how it's gone (4 different ipads, etc)

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I spent half a day watching multiple Jobs interviews on YouTube and there is an interesting effect across these interviews: the interviewers sound dated in their assumptions, while Jobs sounds fresh and contemporary. Even though these interviews were 20-30 years ago.

One example is when Steve is being grilled about buying a “search engine company” called “Siri” and the surrounding rumors being certain that Apple obviously bought this search company to go to war with Google. Steve laughed and said “that’s not a search company, it’s an AI company.”

TBH, I wouldn't call Siri a search company nor an AI company. They were (and still are, a decade later) mediocre at both.

Ah yes, I also don't think of walmart as a retailer because I don't like it

It's not about liking it. It's about having abilities to support your value proposition.

In my experience, Siri has basically only provided my results from another search engine, WolframAlpha, or an API I'm not allowed to see/use. If that's artificial intelligence, then I'm Issac Asimov.

They were ahead of the pack when Apple bought them. Then Apple spent a year or so making them remove and reduce their functionality and then release a gimped version that was nonetheless integrated into the OS.

Then the siri founders started another company, which was then bought by samsung and eventually released as Bixby.

Oof, that's not a good look.

It's barely acceptable voice recognition product hooked into a shitty Ask Jeeves that has barely improved since it was introduced.

Amazon's Alex is way ahead of Siri and Cortana. It's as if Apple doesn't really care about Siri anymore. I don't know if they see the market for this as dead and they're purposely not putting more resources in it, or if they just can't compete here.

They hired Google’s head of Search and AI to run Siri and are investing a lot, so they care.

It seems to be taking time for the impact to show, but his fingerprints are all over iOS 15 with on-device Siri, contextual awareness, Google Lens features, etc.

It's also far more invasive in nearly every case. It's not that Apple doesn't care about Siri, it's just that Apple is working under the unbreakable rule that Siri can't send private info to Apple in order to function and so all processing needs to be done on the device. Amazon hasn't given itself this limitation so it sends data and recordings to itself every time Alexa is invoked.

Apple knows it's in a worse position now but they're betting that it's the better position to be in for the long term.

While your sentiment that Apple operates under far stricter privacy protections is totally correct (in my estimation) in fact until the latest version of iOS Siri absolutely did rely on sending audio data over the network for dictation and processing.

Case in point, it has always been possible to use Siri to turn on Airplane Mode, but until iOS 15 it was not possible to use it to turn it off (which they included in a demo at WWDC this year to somewhat humorous effect if you were paying attention)

That's not entirely accurate. You have the option of sending that audio data to Apple for processing (which is set during the setup for new iPhones and was a preference set when the update was released). It's completely optional and does affect what options are available through Siri and which ones aren't. Additionally, you have the option to change this setting after the fact and changing it deletes all the voice data stored on Apple's servers. You do have to trust that Apple is doing what they say when you choose to do that but it's not a requirement.

I just grabbed my partner's iPhone (ios 14), turned on airplane mode. Trigger Siri and it says not available without an internet connection. Try it for yourself, prior to iOS 15 Siri simply does not work without a network connection.

I think the option you're thinking of refers to whether or not to allow Apple access to your data for training purposes, not the normal use of the feature.

John Gruber discusses this with Apple execs here, they explicitly call it out: https://youtu.be/-SzbucgATjA?t=2174

This shouldn’t be downvoted. I loved Siri, but now even my 5 year olds know that Alexa is the only useful voice assistant. It’s painful in comparison…

Can you send the link?

Sorry, I had to dig.

The particular conversation is from this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps

Around the 30:15 mark. Apologies for my incorrect quoting, I was paraphrasing from memory.

So the boss “predicted” his future employee’s jobs. Well done, Jobs!

Good point. But Jobs "predicting" the future of his own company is fundamentally entangled to predicting the future of the industry. It's hard to predict markets 20 years out.

I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Jobs deserves all the credit that goes his way for killing Flash.

It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.

How many bugs Flash had? Hundreds? Thousands? Anybody knows?

From a quick CVE search, less than 1,200 bugs ( https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=adobe+flash ).

For practical purposes, ~Aleph-nought.

Over 300 Flash bugs were discovered (and fixed) in 2015 alone:

https://www.gsmarena.com/over_300_flash_bugs_were_discovered...

Poor performance on Mac was also an issue. Web browsers on the Mac were held back by the fact that Adobes plugin was extremely slow on the Mac, and Adobe didn't care. Apple could write the fastest web browser in the world, but it wouldn't matter if Flash on the Mac had only a fraction of the performance of the Windows version.

It was a very smart move to not enable that dependency on the iPhone.

Ironically, that fastest web browser engine now determines the fates of apps on Apple's platform. At least, it prevents the building of alternative browsers like an iOS Firefox Gecko browser.

I think his hands were somewhat tied on the iPhone honestly - flash apps were borderline unusable on the flagship Android headsets of the day. You had to install an alternate browser, the apps were designed for mouse-keyboard input rather than touchscreens, they were non-responsive, they lagged with the Qualcomm chips, and they absolutely ravaged your battery.

It's no wonder Steve Jobs just decided not to straight up not the tech. The security concerns were just a convenient scapegoat.

A contrarian might ask "How many bugs were there in the HTML5 APIs that replaced it?" Probably fewer considering HTML5 is an open/modern code base? Some high profile ones in Audio though...

Jobs deserves credit for a lot of the way things went in the computing world but I don't think "killing flash" is one of them. Apple and Flash only (publicly) crossed paths when the iPhone was released in 2007. Even then, Flash was widely disliked by users for a bunch of very good reasons:

* It was yet another thing to install. (Most non-tech-savvy users didn't know how to install a web browser, let alone a browser-specific plugin.) I was an "expert" computer user and I still had trouble getting it to work quite often.

* Flash apps were very resource-hungry on the slow machines at the time. Not quite as bad as Java, but still pretty bad. You had to wait for them to load, and when they consumed an outsize amount of CPU and memory compared to the value delivered.

* A lot of enterprise software started getting written in Flash (vSphere 6, anyone?). I feel bad for every IT department that had to put up with this. Of course, before and alongside that it was Java.

* The Flash runtime was a huge source of computer-pwning exploits. "Click to play" flash was a good idea but about a decade too late to make any difference.

No, Flash was never particularly well-liked by ANYONE except animators, web video game companies, and web ad companies. It was going to die eventually. Even if we were to accept "Jobs killed Flash" as true, that would make it one of his _least_ successful endeavors since Flash only went EOL this year, 14 years later!

Java and Flash are great comparisons, as web / applet Java is pretty much the same market.

My point being that Java felt like they were stewarding a platform seriously (admittedly, mostly towards enterprise priorities).

Whereas Flash felt like they were saying yes to whatever their designer customers asked, and worrying about the details later.

And IE is just being deprecated in many places. 14 years to EOL is a snap of the fingers on enterprise timescales.

I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it working on mobile.

Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was.

Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later.

As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform.

I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.

>The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform.

In other venues, I've seen this described as "becoming 50 percent richer by being 10 percent less greedy."

90s Microsoft realized this, which is how Windows became Windows (making developers and partners lots and lots of money).

And how 90s Apple decomposed, and only really turned it around by creating enough demand via consumer device market share that developers had to come back.

Adobe had it working on mobile... arguably badly. See Flash on Android. Apple said 'no, you're not going to run that on our platform'. With Flash no longer being ubiquitous, it effectively died rather quickly after that.

It can be argued that this probably would have happened anyway with Javascipt engine performance improving rapidly and web standards beginning to provide media functionality that had been missing etc. However, it was Apple who stopped them cold and greatly accelerated its demise rather than hanging in there for another decade or more.

I remember you could get flash to work on iOS through Cydia. I don't know how that was done though.

Cydia exists outside of Apple's control. The inability to run Flash on iOS was never a technical issue, it was a policy issue.

> It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.

The amount of zero-days zero-click remote code execution that came out of iOS on the past few months...

Zerodium had to stop buying zero-days for iOS last year, as they had too many of them.

I means I won't say that Adobe did a great job on security, just that it wasn't a good justification to kill the whole product.

Flash didn't get taken down because of security issue, but because of Jobs manipulative tactics.

Flash just could not run well on power-constrained environments. Folks were allowed to run it on Android, but it sucked.

Flash was not killed, it committed suicide. All Jobs did was keep the death throes off iOS.

> Flash just could not run well on power-constrained environments. Folks were allowed to run it on Android, but it sucked.

It was running pretty well 10 years on my LG Optimus One at the time, which was a cheap 200$ phone (not subsidized, I got it for 50$ because of a promotion that gave 100$ while it was 50$ off).

Still remember a few years ago, a bunch of friends started to play on our group conversation on the cheap HTML5 games of Facebook... theses games were so simple, yet most were complaining of performance issue. That was on phones that was now few generations better, and not the entry-level ones either...

Jobs knew how to control markets, we are on a thread about this. Flash was killed because he needed it to be killed to control the market.

But Jobs didn't kill it because of "security." He didn't like it because it allowed another way for people to write "applications" that could run on his phone, and a related issue of it being bad for battery life.

That's not true. The original iPhone didn't have an App Store. Jobs was all in on Progressive Web Apps and thought the future was going to web applications that ran natively in Safari. That's why he initially wanted things like Flash to work on iPhone. He didn't give up on that until Adobe called his bluff and major developers refused to move to mobile. He very begrudgingly introduced the App Store in the next iOS version after he realized that they needed it.

IMO Flash was as big a mess as Steve said it was at the time and it was already time to move on from it. It was mess even on the desktop (if my browser crashed, it was almost always flash). Adobe let it get that way and there it was.

What's the issue with four iPad models? iPads practically are the tablet market. Is four options too many?

There were dozens of different Android tablets at the peak. That didn't go well for any of the Android tablet vendors.

I follow Apple news a lot and still get confused with the differences between each iPads nowadays. iPad Pro.. iPad Air.. iPad "normal". iPad mini is the only one easy to understand. Some models support Apple Pencil 1st gen... some models support Apple Pencil 2nd gen. WHYYYYYY? It should all be the same.

Which iPad support the smart keyboard? What about the "magic" keyboard?

They are now doing the same thing with iPhones. 12 and 12 Pro were identical phones. 13 and 13 Pro are identical phones. Yes, there are differences in cameras, but that's really about as far as the difference goes.

"These are exactly the same if you ignore the differences."

The "differences" are in some very minor specs that don't matter to the absolute vast majority of people.

If they didn't matter to the vast majority of people then they wouldn't sell them every year in record-breaking numbers.

Could argue they sell more by fashion and desire to have the newest thing than people caring at all about specs, more ram or cpu or x% better resolution etc.

Record-breaking numbers because:

- record-breaking numbers are upgrading from multiple previous models

- smartphone market is still growing

- there's a non-negligible number of people going for the "shiny new thing"

They were selling record-breaking numbers when they only had a "pro" and a "non-pro" model, too

That's irrelevant. People are buying iPhones every year instead of switching to a different phone, repairing their existing phone, or buying the same phone (Apple offers the same models for at least 3 years after initial release). There are enough differences to matter to most people.

In general it makes a lot of sense to me, but I do find it very odd that they’re still using the first-gen pencil all these years later.

And because it charges by lightning, that means the devices that support it have to have lightning and can’t move to USB-C.

I don’t know if it’s cheaper to implement than the second-gen (that’s my guess). But for some reason it lives on.

You just need to update your hardware from time to time, not because the software needs it really, just because Apple needs to keep cash flowing in. I use the same apps on my iPhone 12 that I did on my iPhone 6, the only reason I upgrade is because Apple won't let me update the software without buying their new uneccessary hardware

It wouldn’t be so bad if they were better described. OK so there’s the “iPad” and “iPad Pro”, I guess I can figure that out, the Pro probably has better specs.

Then there’s the “mini”, which implies smaller, but is it a mini iPad or a mini iPad Pro? It turns out that it used to be a mini iPad, but today it is a mini iPad Pro. That’s confusing.

And also there’s an “iPad Air” - what the hell is that? The name implies it is thinner? Lighter? But it’s not either of those things. I have no idea.

The iPhones are just as bad, today you can buy an iPhone 13, 12, and 11. And there’s also an “SE” which doesn’t have a number and I have absolutely no idea why it’s different.

Jobs would be turning in his grave.

For most people, just buy the cheapest one with the form factor you like the best. Unless there’s something the other models have that you need/really want. I moved from a iPhone 8 to iPhone 12 earlier this year. 12 has faceId instead of touchID and a better camera, but that’s really the only difference I notice. I’m not even sure I like faceId better than touchID.

But yeah, it sucks.

Not sure what's so hard to figure out about the iPhone. Bigger number means newer. SE means budget. If you visited the homepage even for just 1 second, you'd already know as it says so in the very beginning of the page (https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/).

But, if Apple is so bad at naming things, show me one android phone maker that does it better (and has as many products, it's easy to name things if you only have 1 product).

Everyone else being worse is not an excuse for you not to be better.

Edit: For some reason I can’t reply to the following comment so I will reply here:

I didn’t realize that constantly striving for improvement would be controversial? Yes, I do believe that everyone should always be striving for improvement. For me that might even be the closest possible thing to “the meaning of life”.

Without wanting to sound too much like a Star Trek episode, if we are not constantly trying to better ourselves, what is the point of anything?

And so we should complain about everything and everyone then? Surely we can think of SOMETHING to always improve, right? Therefore everyone and everything must always be better!

That's a pretty toxic approach to things. That's like saying I as a person should always strive to be better, and it's not okay being who or what I am right now.

Edit update regarding above edit: My point was merely that always complaining is imo why so much negativity exists in the world. Nobody is happy with anything. Always something wrong / X Y Z doesn't satisfy me / Apple has a new HR person whose face I don't like so I will leave the whole ecosystem now / Touch ID sucks / Face ID sucks / Apple sucks.

I realize HN folk LOOOOVE complaining, and not being happy with anything, and perhaps that is an inherent feature of start-up founders, but would it kill you once think "You know what, this is alright!"?

I don't know why I couldn't reply before but I can now, but I just wanted to say I appreciate your viewpoint and I apologize if I seemed hostile.

They really need to unify the design language across all mobile devices. You need to have one iThing that is available the following sizes:

XS — 6.1" (iPhone) S — 6.8" (iPhone Max) M — 8.3" (iPad Mini) L — 11" (iPad) XL — 12.9" (Big iPad)

That's it. Same design language, same thing. Pick your screen size, storage amount, whether you want cellular or just Wi-Fi, and color, and you're good.

This completely unifies everything—iPads, iPod Touches, and iPhones. You could even do a second Pro line alongside this.

I'm sure there are manufacturing difficulties involved here, in addition to having a single chipset that conforms to each size, but this should be getting a bit easier as they move into the M-series architecture. Or you just keep the A-series in the XS and S models and put an M-series chip in the iPad mini eventually.

6.1" counts as XS nowadays? Maybe I really should get the new IPhone mini before its too late...

As a proud owner of an iPhone mini, I agree with you. I wish this trend towards larger screen sizes would turn around.

I was on the site yesterday looking at the watch - the array of options is also confusing

> Jobs would be turning in his grave.

Jobs originated the multiple model strategy at Apple by filling out a wide variety of iPod SKUs. He also originated the idea to keep older iPhones in production to fill out lower price points.

It’s funny how often “Jobs would never allow this” comments refer to things he actually did. And of course Apple’s market performance in the phone and tablet space is obvious.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276635/market-share-held...

What are you talking about? Apple is at 30% market share for tablets. That is a far cry from dominating the market.

I have hardly seen an android tablet in the last five years, except in POS systems or some other industrial equipment.

I've seen iPads even in "android homes". But I think most tablets are used in the home and I don't go into a lot of peoples' houses, much less see tablet when I'm visiting, so there may be a vast dark pool of personally-owned android tablets.

Things like Amazon's Fire being so cheap are probably propping up the Android (or non-Apple, whatever) side of the ledger.

I have a Fire because it was very cheap and it's a reasonable "small thing that plays videos" device. I don't really have a use for a tablet to do anything else.

Your link it's about tablet market share. It's based on the number of shipments from each company. Does a Kindle count as a "tablet" in that? Does an Echo Touch count as a "tablet"? I don't know that I'd agree that Apple dominates the market either but I think you need to use a better metric to justify your opposition than the one you posted.

https://dazeinfo.com/2019/08/21/tablet-browser-market-share-...

This is just browser use and the Safari version of iPad is only available on iPads and yet makes up 48% of use. My primary browser on my iPad is Firefox and I know others use Chrome so that does put them squarely in the "leader" category based on that.

Steve was famous for brutally streamlining Apple's product offerings, and making it stupidly easy to understand the differences between product tiers.

I don't necessarily think four iPad offerings is too many, but I don't think Steve would've ever found it acceptable. He loved debuting with a single product, then adding a cheaper "mini," then eventually creating a holy trinity (mini/regular/pro), and leaving it that way forever.

The complexity of Apple's product offerings is not that new. iPod consisted of a bunch of random variants over the years (Shuffle, Mini, Nano, Color, etc.) and people were complaining about conflicting product features back in the day (Now it's USB-C vs. Lightning, back then it was Firewire vs. USB).

If you want really revealing information read the redacted security clearance investigation.

https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_documents/Jobs.pdf

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