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Comment by takahisah | Hacker News Reader

Ten years ago I was at Infinite Loop, when Apple held a special event in memory of Steve. Everybody was wearing sunglasses to hide their tears, even Tim and Jony. I remember Jonys speech quite vividly as it showed how truly close they were. He joked about how he would never unpack his bags upon arriving at a hotel because Steve would call him and say the hotel is shit so they had to move immediately after checking in. I think it’s those human connections he made that made him so great. Lots of people have their Steve Jobs story. I don’t know of many other people that make that kind of connection with people on such a deep level. Thanks Apple for posting this and thanks for remembering and celebrating him. I’m no longer an employee, but always a fan. May your best inventions be in your future.

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> He joked about how he would never unpack his bags upon arriving at a hotel because Steve would call him and say the hotel is shit so they had to move immediately after checking in. I think it’s those human connections he made that made him so great.

This is awful, no? There are people like that who can never be pleased. Usually narcissists. I fail to see where the human connection is in being a crybaby Karen.

Not to diminish Jobs' accomplishments, but it's one thing to say "he was a complicated man, achieved a lot but was difficult to deal with" and quite another to being up that story as a positive. That just seems like Stockholm syndrome.

Maybe the hotels really were shit, and the response was somewhat reasonable?

That shouldn't have happened enough times that Ive developed a Pavlovian reflex to avoid unpacking his bag. Or if all hotels they stayed at were that shitty, perhaps some stern words should have been said to the people responsible for booking travel.

But this sounds like a case of someone being a diva. Hardly the mark of a great leader and role model. I've known people like this by the way. They act like any accommodation is beneath their princely person and berate the servant class members unfortunate enough to be assigned to caring for their majesty. It actually stems from a deep sense of insecurity and the need to overcompensate by appearing larger than life.

Obligatory disclaimer: Jobs still achieved great things and I like my iPhone just fine most days. We can celebrate his accomplishments while acknowledging that he was not a perfect person. None of us are.

A lot of hotels are shit, and often in way that aren't justified by cost. A most obvious example relevant to Steve's lifetime is wifi. 10-20 years ago, many hotels had unnecessarily restrictive wifi with tedious fees and tedious limitations. It's not a problem these days because hotels have finally given up being customer hostile—and because most people can rely on 4G anyway. But that kind of attitude pervades many aspects of the industry.

I dont think someone like Jony Ive is going to stay in shitty hotels.

Yes. Reading threads about Jobs you'd think everyone's brother had died.

My guess is this was a "Brown M&M" -thing[0].

Steve reserved a hotel with requirements X, Y and Z. Hotels might skimp on the requirements a bit because most clients don't care and won't bother to leave if something is wrong.

Steve cared.

So he left and took his money somewhere else.

[0] https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9

I heard a Jobs story from someone who shall remain nameless:

They all went out to dinner with Jobs (this was before his return to Apple), eight or more people. Jobs announced that he'd order for everyone, ordered all vegetarian dishes, and then ate nothing himself.

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