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Comment by crikli | Hacker News Reader

My "status-symbol widget" is going to allow me to make a cross country flight tomorrow without carrying three sectional charts, a terminal area chart, and an airport/FBO directory. It will retain a GPS fix the entire flight, creating a moving map out of a VFR sectional chart and serving as an unofficial backup to the panel-mounted GPS.

Once I land I'll use the same "status-symbol widget" to check my email and respond to any particularly urgent requests; I'll use the same device to call my wife and tell her I'm on the ground safely. Might even take a picture to send to her if I feel like it.

Then I'll get in my rental car, where I'll use my "status-symbol widget" to help me get to my ultimate destination, a hotel room I booked using the same device that's going to help me get there.

Once there, I'll fire up the device to find someplace good to eat.

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So you have phone GPS (like many phones) and you can read your email (like many phones) and you can make calls (like most phones) and you can use it to browse web pages. There have been small electronic devices doing combinations of these things for a long time, none of this is in any way exclusive or original to the iPhone. This all rests on decades of preceding technology not proprietary to Apple. Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white.

It's always very sad when a human being dies. But excuse me if I don't worship the corporate hero who produced the object you use to do things which aren't necessary using non-unique technology.

I'll grant that one thing Steve Jobs did develop was the brand strategy that makes you rabid when someone challenges your decision of buying small electronic devices you don't need at a significant markup, because it's become a part of your personal identity.

"Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white."

I think that sums up the difference between Jobs and Ritchie quite nicely. I'm not celebrating or mourning either of their deaths, but I recognize that Ritchie's contributions to our industry affect what I do on a daily basis from the OS level up. Jobs' contributions? Not so much.

Are you honestly claiming that the person who spearheaded teams that created the Mac, NeXT, Mac OS X, the iPhone and the iPad had little effect on your computing experience? Forgive me if I don't believe you.

I think those that complain about 'status symbol widgets' while complaining of persecution by Apple loyalists should consider that just taking a diametric stance doesn't make you any more objective.

>Ritchie's contributions to our industry affect what I do on a daily basis from the OS level up. Jobs' contributions? Not so much.

Yes, but Jobs work affect non-geek's life in the same way. Not everybody is a programmer. Sure C was the a big milestone but you cannot say that I iPhone didn't revolutionize the smart phone market and put it into those people's hands who would never have bought such a thing otherwise.

Agree with piccadily, my main critic of Steve Jobs is that he is the inventor of the iFanboyism and misused the teenage envies to create status symbol gadgets which tech-wannabes use to show off here and there. They continuously ignored the deficiencies of what they held in their hands previous lack of true multitasking, a notification system which sucked, a walled garden which excluded threatening businesses, a simple button interface which didnt have widgets etc). However those iFanboys polluted all true tech discussions, by bringing such constructs to tech discussions like 'I love my ' , 'I browse the internet with my ...', 'Non-iphone users stink, or are poor etc', to further enlarge the status-widget.

On the contrary, Dennis Ritchie and other great tech people talked to our minds, for example, to give us a philosophy of how to create small programs to combine in a Lego fashion to create bigger ones (Unix philosophy), or to better program the machine underneath with a versatile language such as C. They are far more profound.

Second sad fact is that Steve Jobs gave minimal back to open source community (for example, BSD..), and defended a world where the company milks the users to the full limit.

> However those iFanboys polluted all true tech discussions, by bringing such constructs to tech discussions like 'I love my ' , 'I browse the internet with my ...', 'Non-iphone users stink, or are poor etc', to further enlarge the status-widget.

Don't forget one of the worst forms of iPollution: "Sent from my iFoo". Why should people reading your messages care?

My old Blackberrys did this well before the iPhone.

Agreeed. The reason was to ask to be excused for misspellings and sloppy abbreviations in the text of the message.

Even if others did it before, it is still an annoying line noise.

> Steve Jobs didn't make it new, he just made it white.

He made it accessible and usable for non-geeks.

It is interesting with some geeks and HCI-design: It is not that they consciously don't like or value good HCI - it is more like it is invisible for them. They don't realize that it even exists! So they think Apple products becomes successful because they are white and have rounded corners (something that should surely be easy for the competition to copy), and they think the users love their products only because of the brand (which is really a circular argument, for how did Apple end up with a brand that people love?)

I think the "like many phones" point is key. The iPhone pulled everything in this direction.

In retrospect general aviation's use of devices like the iPad should have seemed obvious. It's a demographic that likes and can usually afford technology. Anybody who flies a plane has the ability to use a binder in the cockpit, so there's no new clutter created. A perfect match.

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