Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words | Hacker News Reader

Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs in his own words

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206 pointsolacks159 comments

I was working at an Apple Store when Jobs died. People started to leave flowers, management put up huge sheets of paper in the windows and people wrote all sorts of heartfelt messages. What other CEO’s passing would engender that kind of sentiment? Those people didn’t just prefer Apple equipment, they loved it.

Jobs tapped into something deep with his ethos and product vision. He had an uncanny knack of understanding what appeals to many people and bringing them to market. Arguably he also had a knack for forming teams that bought into his vision and were able to execute at a high level. I think that Tim Cook has said that Steve’s most lasting legacy is Apple itself.

I’m looking forward to reading this book. A founder that had deep convictions, the business chops to make it profitable (eventually), and the luck/skill/determination to inevitably launch at exactly the right time has a story to tell.

I mean, do we need all that for a person that sold cellphones? Are we screwed so much by capitalism at this point?

With how people here worship Steve Jobs and the iPhone, yes we're screwed. People will talk about that damn phone as if it was the savior of humanity.

Damn Phone? I mean as much as I like to shit on Apple in the past 5- 6 years, I dont think you understand the impact of iPhone or Steve Jobs had to the industry.

This hit me in the feels. Thanks for sharing this story.

How wonderful is that Steve was describing ChatGPT in his speech to the T back in 1983, and the vision is being realized in not so distance future in 2023, after 40 years instead of 50 to 100 years as his prediction:

"The problem was, you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think, as we look towards the next fifty to one hundred years, if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit, or an underlying set of principles, or an underlying way of looking at the world, then, when the next Aristotle comes around, maybe if he carries around one of these machines with him his whole life—his or her whole life—and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday, after this person’s dead and gone, we can ask this machine, “Hey, what would Aristotle have said? What about this?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing."

It does take a special person, and a special frame of mind to even sit down and ask such a question. I guess 80% of the reward is simply asking the question. Having a system that actually answers it might only be worth 20%.

We’ve already seen cases here where, if a doctor had asked ChatGPT, they would’ve diagnosed the disease correctly. The problem wasn’t that the AI wasn’t good enough. The problem was that they never asked the question.

Then, again, having easy access to getting such questions answered – maybe that makes more people ask such questions?

Many people have considered such questions throughout modern history in the 20th century, and if anyone currently thinks that the current or near-future versions of ChatGPT are anywhere near capable enough to give a genuinely measured answer in the style and consideration that would have been given by some famous historical figure, that person needs to seriously reassess their gullibility with the current crop of hype over AI. I say this without negating that the these technologies have made some impressive interaction, analysis and simulation advances in recent months.

Also, doctors have asked ChatGPT to diagnose diseases. There was even an HN thread about a doctor doing that very thing and describing the results quite recently. Spoiler if you find the thread: the results are distinctly underwhelming and far from being wonderous in any way.

Questions can be one of the most advanced tools we are given in life.

Meanwhile, in the same talk [0], someone asked a question about "big banks having a record of your life" and "privacy issues" (audio of the question was not directly available). Jobs didn't seem to have any insight on that, or think it's important.

0: Starts at around 29:20: http://lifelibertytech.com/2012/10/02/the-lost-steve-jobs-sp...

EDIT: nothing against Jobs. I just find it interesting.

No offense, but that’s not a very original concept.

I think it is very concerning to think of ChatGPT like that.

I still remember exactly where I was when Steve Jobs died. I think it was because at that moment, I had a realization about him: that there was no other person in recent memory who made such an impact on the everyday lives of people. He wasn’t some grand political figure that uplifted millions with inspiring rhetoric or an athlete that had achieved some amazing physical goal.

But every single day, pretty much everywhere in the world, a sizable portion of humanity uses a device that he ultimately brought into being. And I thought that was pretty cool.

Dennis Ritchie had a way larger impact than Jobs; yet he is not celebrated because he did not put an expensive toy in your hands, he had no visibility for the larger public.

Jobs has been a salesman more than an engineer. He did not need to understand tech, he just wanted to sell it.

Dennis Ritchie created great things and if he hadn’t, someone else would have created these things. Differently but just as well.

Without Steve Jobs there would have been no iPhone and we would have settled for a Windows CE like phone. Just look at what Android was before the release of the iPhone. That would have been the major leap.

That’s the difference.

What! You can't say that if Ritchie hadn't creating things, someone else who have... and then proceed to make Jobs as an exception to that rule. There's 100x Jobs out there for every Ritchie. One could say something even better than the iPhone may have happened if Jobs was never born, and that he held us all back with his visions. Who really knows in this simulation.

Just like some people are hypnotized by the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, you are blinded by your dislike for Steve Jobs and it is impossible to calmly talk about the things he created. All that is left is a screaming match ‘my guy is better’ ‘no my guy’. That is useless.

Jobs' work is derivative from other great people's work.

What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs. The indirect effects of GCC, Emacs, the FSF and GNU around Linux and servers are astounding. From Android's core to the 90% of the growth of companies on tech. And not just tech: physics, genomics... lots of them backed and helped with free software from GCC to Coreutils. At least to build and port BioPerl sucessfully. And, still, Perl's growth was closely bound to GNU and Linux.

Libre software democratized the access to technology, science and free as in freedom books on lots of term and inspired parallel licenses for media and documents.

In 1995 you would need to spend $300 dollars in books and $3500 in a proper workstation to run scientific software. Later, with GNU/Linux, the costs plummeted down. Today you have free compilers, free documentation and cheap NUCs to learn the basics on nearly any STEM career, at least if you can simulate it.

You can even compose music and multimedia FFX with libre distros and DAW software. There are even neural network based translators with libre licenses and models. That's astounding.

Stallman isn't as celebrated as much as one might otherwise expect because he can be quite socially abrasive. There's also the controversies in the recent past. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Controversies

Whilst Jobs was only human and there are plenty of anecdotes about negative personality traits in regard to how he treated others, he was definitely someone who knew how to work a room of average people rather than a room of neckbeards.

For a further example of social abrasiveness within open source, look to Linus Torvalds. As with Stallman, a genuinely brilliant chap, but some people aren't meant to be in the public eye, they're people who are in their element behind-the-scenes.

Software isn't very sexy. Curvy, pretty consumer hardware is something the average Joe can lust after. Ask the average Joe on the street if they know what Emacs or Linux is, but they'll know about consumer-oriented Apple products.

End of bullshit:

https://stallmansupport.org/the-practice-of-ritual-defamatio...

Even women close to Stallman had to stop people like you defamating people.

You both have good points, and while Jobs' role in Apple's technology is clearly overstated he did create space for execution. I think more broadly the key point should be that we as creative technology participants can be somewhat objectively said to often have power to change the world in ways that few individuals in other walks of life can even dream of.

Consider Library Genesis/Sci-Hub, Wikipedia, citizen science, instant messaging, online dating, torrents, Bellingcat, etc.

> What? Stallman alone changed the world 20 times more than Jobs.

I know I'm going to get downvotes for this; but I disagree. While Stallman played an important role in GNU and Libre software through his work at MIT and FSF, there were already like-minded people working towards the same thing. It's hard to say that Stallman single-handedly influenced things like that in history to that much impact, given how much impact Steve Jobs had on the personal computing space.

Without Linux (Linus Torvalds), he may not have had much impact at all.

Let's not forget:

- Brian Reid who co-authored BSD Unix operating system under a permissive license, which used BCC (Berkeley C Compiler) - Bill Joy who co-founded Sun Microsystems - among contributions count NFS, Sparc, Java

Who knows what would have arisen from that, had not Stallman had a fortuitous partnership with Torvalds? Would we be living in a world with OpenBSD rather than GNU/Linux?

Eh, GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work.

With the GNU utilities Sparc and Java wouldn't be as used as they were. Everyone and his aunt used GCC, Bash and GNU utilities. And Emacs.

Even ksh form OpenBSD got autocompletion support. Some features are nice, I guess. And I use mksh myself on Hyperbola GNU/Linux, which mostly blends GNU's openness with BSD's KISS stance. No SystemD here, not even Pulse. Sndio, the same one as OpenBSD.

On OpenBSD, I love their stance on security and correctness, and ofc I know about pledge(4) and unveil(4). that's why Hyperbola will rebase their Unix-like OS from OpenBSD (minus the blobs) with GNU addons.

> GNU Coreutils were used by a huge margin over core Sun tools to do actual work.

Being more convenient doesn't quals changing the world... While Sun was hugely influential in the early days of the internet it's place could have been taken by a lot of other *nix vendors.

If you think GCC and coreutils didn't change the world and shaped the commercial Unixen themselves, think twice.

This may feel a little depressing, but I would like to hear the HN community's thoughts on this. Every time I hear about making progress or creating something beautiful, the first thing that comes to mind is: for how long?

As humans, do we think about how long we are going to chase the ever-moving goal post of progress? Do we have a ballpark idea of it? Or are we moving like a dog chasing its own tail, going in circles, having just the illusion of going somewhere but never reaching anywhere?

It is bad day for me. Software Engineering make me only realize that people are never happy. You implement a nice feature that helps people and what comes out of their mouth: but can we improve on that? Not even thinking about what has been implemented.

Compared to 50 years ago, how much we improved. How comfortable our lives have become. And yet we are still chasing something and running somewhere.

> for how long?

As long as you have an itch to scratch. Steve Jobs didn’t care about progress or about creating for its own sake. He had ideas about what he wanted to see existing in the world, and worked to make those ideas come true.

You mention implementing nice features. The right thing to do is to implement the features you want to use (and to validate their design by actually using them yourself). Even if no one else likes the features, you like them and thus will have some fulfillment by implementing them. Furthermore, if you find the features useful, there is a good chance that there will be other people like you that also find them useful. So usually that is a good strategy, provided that you are an actual, and sufficiently representative, user of the product.

> Software Engineering make me only realize that people are never happy.

I'm not convinced this is an innate property of humanity, rather I think it is a conditioned behavior to keep us buying things. Pay attention to what marketing tells you, what it really tells you, behind the ostensible message. It is not telling you good things about yourself or your life, and it is bombarding you constantly with these intrusive thoughts.

Even my dog gets tired of eating the same feed all the time or playing with the same toy. It gets excited when I bring new toy and is much more eager to eat when I switch feed to a different type from time to time.

I don’t have a TV so my dog is not watching ads so I expect marketing does not affect it.

Might still be that other dogs it plays with tell stuff “I got a new toy, get your owner to buy you new one too”.

I think it is innate property of living things to need different things/experiences and what not in order to survive/thrive.

I've been thinking about boredom and the need for change for a long time. My hypothesis is that boredom is the baseline of life. From this basis, I feel like whatever we may do we will inevitably come back to boredom: again, the dog chasing his own tail. Wouldn't be better to live with boredom instead of having the illusion of escaping it from it now and then?

So we have opposite baselines. Because for me movement and looking for food or resources is the baseline.

If you are bored and stay in one place you die.

Boredom and being well fed is privilege.

How could it not be innate? One of the most noteworthy properties of humanity is our tendency throughout history to make unparalleled technological progress. Surely something like that requires a dissatisfaction with present conditions.

It seems more probable that marketing, like most things that work well, take advantage of our evolved properties.

Humans have an intrinsic quality that they are never satisfied for very long. There are plenty of examples of it. People think "once I get that job I'll be happy" or "once I get married I'll finally achieve what I want" or "once I buy a house, I'll feel like I'm settled". But that rarely happens. People get used to what they have and want more.

But that's a good thing. It's the reason why we have progress. Thank god someone thought "No, it's not good enough that we cure breast cancer by removing the breast entirely, we can do better". Or "no, it's not good enough that we can grow 1000 lbs of wheat on an acre, we can do better".

It's a blessing (progress) and a curse (dissatisfaction). But you can't have one without the other.

I think you might find some solace in the concept of wabi-sabi. An oversimplification is that it’s an aesthetics of things that are temporary, a guide to appreciating beautiful things that inevitably decay.

Counterpoint: "but can we improve on that?" hopefully keeps you in work, unless you're unfortunate enough to work at a company that hires-and-fires upon completion of the latest version of a niche piece of software.

Well we are chasing it because it is still no where near good enough.

I have a thing for not taking advice from someone that doesn't listen to their doctor.

That could imply that humans are very low dimensional, such that a habit of not listening to doctors immediately carries over into their product design habits. Have you found this to be the case about humans? I personally haven't. I've experienced humans to be highly complex and multi layered, often applying different concepts and world views to different domains. In some areas they are driven by fear, in other areas by curiosity or perfectionism.

I've worked hand-in-hand with technologly static religiously devout Amish. They listen to their doctor.

That’s because listening to a doctor is not a great way of measuring reasonability.

So would you take advice from Amish person about iphones?

Honestly, it might be a nice change of pace.

How is that appropriately analogous?

Do you go to your doctor for advice about iPhones?

Ironically I did learn how to get a dead engine to start via an Amish mechanic (he ran a business repairing generators for his community)

You've established a general reason to mistrust a person but then bring up the Amish for no apparent reason. What do the Amish have to do with this thread besides that they apparently always trust doctors (which I doubt is generally true)?

Point is that even groups we often associate with backwards thinking still will do the reasonable thing like caring about their health and listening to medical professionals.

So, excepting for their strict doctor standards they are otherwise quite backwards thinking (according to you)? So I again can't quite tell what the Amish have to do with this and whether they should generally be trusted. Sure on the doctor metric they excel, but is there any other standard by which you would characterize a peoples standards of opinion?

Are you sincerely suggesting that Amish, to the general American population, are not considered backwards thinking when it comes to technology and dress?

Seeing what people who design and make iPhones have been doing to iPhones of late, oh yes!

I dated a doctor for all of medical school and through that became friends with their social circle and keep in touch with many now doctors. Imo, most of them are barely capable at doing their own speciality correctly day in and day out due to burnout, and are almost completely worthless at anything just slightly outside their exact preferred area of expertise inside their own speciality.

And yet, still 1000x more useful that whatever craziness Steve Jobs was doing.

Always get second+ opinions, in my experience doctors rarely come to the same conclusion and it can be bad for your health. Anyone who trusts strangers based solely on titles or past performance is going to have a bad time.

Something I always keep in mind: the medical field is one where the provider gets paid no matter the outcome.

You notice nobody in the field advertise their success rates or makes any firm commitments...

Have you never signed a consent form? There's numbers on there. Also side effects are literally written on the box. You can read the papers if you like.

Also lots of industries you get paid no matter the outcome.

I have a thing for taking advice in specific fields from people who are doing great in those fields and appear to have something useful to say on related topics, and not taking advice from them on topics they don't seem to be knowledgeable about or make poor decisions in relation to.

I would definitely love to listen to Steve Jobs's advice on topics of building products or companies. Not that they should be accepted as the ultimate truth, but i would be interested to hear his takes on it nonetheless.

If someone seriously considers listening to medical advice from someone who has zero education, experience, and expertise in the field, as well as going against what the actual experts say (with very predictable results in the end), I hope they strongly reconsider their life choices.

EDIT: the last paragraph wasn't mocking Jobs, it was mocking people who would seriously consider listening to him for healthcare advice.

"I hope they strongly reconsider their life choices."

Well unfortunately Steve waited too long to do that.

Yes, but it doesn't mean that because Steve was foolish when it came to taking care of his health, all the other things he wasn't foolish about are suddenly worthless of being listened to. And it isn't like he was publicly promoting his healthcare advice in any way either.

Well suit yourself but for me personally it makes me really question the persons ability to reason in all other aspects of life as well.

I think it's dangerous to ascribe talent and expertise to someone just because they made a shit ton of money.

I don't think anyone ascribes talent and expertise in building products to Steve Jobs purely because he made a shit ton of money... its because he made really good products.

I wonder what random flaw we could pull out on you? Do you put sugar in your coffee?

Jobs is a salesman. Not an engineer.

An eye for aesthetics perhaps. Getting people to buy your shit is a necessary function for any business.

For advice on actually making something, I'd consider Woz more.

Yes that is very true only engineers build products /s

No. Children build the products.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-knowingly-used-child-l...

That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I used to have the same attitude, but it is deeply beneficial to not assume that one mistake a person makes proves that anything else they do is worthless.

Let's face it, you could also say that you won't take advice from Jobs because of his "management style" and the way he treated people.

You wouldn't say that you don't take golf advice from Tiger Woods due to his philandering, would you?

Whilst I understand the sentiment, this also assumes that doctors are never wrong, which unfortunately, they frequently are. Malpractice suits anyone?

If he had been the kind of person who just “listens to their doctor”, maybe he wouldn’t have come up with the iPad?

(I know he didn’t invent that single-handedly. But you know what I mean.)

It's amazing how much "mystique" is assigned to a man who's success can probably be at least 75% attributed to just being an enthusiast about his own products in a business world where it's usually limited to the founding members.

How many CEOs, product managers and the like have been caught promoting their own brand with a "tweeted from iPhone" tagline. Probably "efficient business people", but literally won't touch their own product while telling others to buy it.

In contrast, one of the stories that always sticks in my mind about Jobs is one of early iPhone production runs having plastic screens, which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable.

In a world where min-maxing cost to profit is all that matters, perpetual doubting of the efficacy of quality, all it took to cement Steve Jobs in the tech hall of history is some of the lowest hanging fruit left for him. Like hating crappy, easily scratched and degraded plastic screens.

For all his faults, in retrospect, it was kind of nice to see an enthusiastic founding member of a large company say "we can do better" and in many ways, succeed.

What's amazing to me is how some people continually try to minimize him. The proof is in the pudding. He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Very few people are able to do that. Any time someone says "oh he just," it says more about their own insecurity than him. Yeah he had a lot of help, yeah he had personal relationship issues, he's not a god, but I don't understand why some people refuse to appreciate what he accomplished. It's a limiting "hater" mindset. (This is not necessarily entirely directed at the above post [which did kind of strangely come around]).

1. They have zero understanding of business, they have zero understanding of how hard it is to run a successful business.

2. They have minimal people management experience, which means they never understood how hard it is to recruit top talent, retain them, all while molding them into something much better.

3. They also have zero sales experience and talent. As if trying to convince people to buy could be automated by their software ( Google ).

4. They have little understanding of Marketing. How to market their product to the outside world.

5. They have no understanding of how PR works.

6. They have little understanding of "real world". Zero interest rate, easy access of money, and bull market for the past 15 years meant most never been through a recession.

HN used to be full of entrepreneur, after all it is a forum for startup. And its pro-business stand is why on Wiki it is still listed as alt-right. And yet somehow all of that were gone.

After seeing Elon fail upward I have to agree.

> Very few people are able to do that.

All kinds of idiots have done that: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and even Donald J. Trump have all proven capable of not mucking up if they've got enough help.

When you strip away Jobs' great council of advisors, amazing industry connections and production value, you're left with a guy. Kinda like how without the marketing and software, an iPhone just becomes a computer again. It's a vulnerable fact to accept, but denying it doesn't make us closer to understanding how humans or iPhones work. The hunger for knowing what made Jobs special left us foolishly vulnerable to worshiping him. A man with a big company is still a man, and if that man is an asshole then we shouldn't preach the opposite to respect their vision. Same goes for Walt Disney or Elon Musk - a futurist can still be deeply wrong in their beliefs. Many are, which is why their ideas are so grand in the first place.

So, let's appreciate the good parts and use the bad as a cautionary tale. Both sides of his life give us plenty to teach from.

I don't think I can agree with this take.

> He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward.

Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".

> Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do

Absolutely not. First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Then you have to convince them to come work for you. Top talent is not always just motivated by money alone, so how do you attract them? Then after you hire them you have to retain them, which is also hard, because you have to understand what they are building, and inspire them.

It's one of the hardest things any leader will ever have to do. Jobs said as much repeatedly. Older Jobs lavished credit onto his teams because he knew very well how hard it is to put them together and keep them together. And if you can manage to acquire them, and if you can manage to retain them, you have to then manage them as an individual and in function with a lot of other people that will inevitably clash at times (egos, conflicting ideas/visions/paths, whatever it may be).

Assembling top talent is something very few can do. Assembling it and then keeping that talent together and getting it to work in some manner of harmony, almost nobody can do that, it's an extraordinarily rare skill.

> Older Jobs lavished credit onto his teams because he knew very well how hard it is to put them together and keep them together.

He sure knew how to keep people together!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...

That’s really another facet of this that shows what a uniquely talented leader he was: top talent wants to work both with and for top talent. It says loads about Jobs’ strengths that he got so many absolute geniuses to work for him for years.

> First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard.

Yeah that's exactly why Jobs never did that. Nobody has to "recognize top talent" to assemble it.

He knew that talent likes a good challenge without being micromanaged. The talent becomes top talent when they overcome the challenges and accomplish something new and exciting. You retain them by maximizing their autonomy. That's all.

Steve Jobs did that. He hired A+ players. See here: https://talentrust.com/blog/how-steve-jobs-got-the-a-players...

You need to have a vision that top talent believes in, in order to retain them.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fj0hpsJvrko

You can either listen to what he's literally saying, or just be impressed by his rhetoric.

He says pretty bluntly they: "... were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where the technology was and what we could do with that technology"

So, basically find young people with tons of enthusiasm for their career, put them all together on a team, and let them sort themselves out. It's naturally much easier to find motivation than "top talent". There's nothing special about that strategy and he's not the first to think of it. Like he says, "the vision" is all the managing he does, but let's be honest there are plenty of great engineers who don't really have an opinion on their work beyond how free they are to do it and experiment. They don't have to give a rat's ass about what their boss wants to deliver it anyway.

You are hearing portions that you want to hear. Yes, he did not necessarily want seasoned professionals, but you missed the bit before that: "we wanted people that were insanely great at what they did...." Steve Jobs did not build insanely great products by hiring morons.

Also: "Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so that people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision".

> Steve Jobs did not build insanely great products by hiring morons.

If you watch the rest of the video I linked it's pretty clear that Apple probably did hire and fire plenty of morons that the engineers would weed out (specifically mentioned is the Macintosh team).

The reason hiring is more difficult today vs then isn't because Steve Jobs was so great, but because the internet has brought upon the doorstep of every business a flood of highly motivated drones who don't know what they're doing and will only bother learning if they're getting paid to do it. The demise of entry level jobs and other cost cutting is partially to blame as well.

I guess the modern solution is contract-to-hire so there's some kind of buffer between the horde out there and the workplace you're cultivating.

It was never about the technology it was always about what the technology can do for us. This point of view is often hard for engineers or the actual people developing the technology.

But the thing is, we all tolerate things which are sheer crap, if viewed through a different set of lenses. For example, you probably tolerate many things that I personally would consider rubbish, and vice versa. You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all.

My point is, many of us would have thought the plastic screen was fine, and that wasn’t because we weren’t “enthusiastic” about our own products. The same goes for a whole range of tools that we use everyday. It’s likely that in several years time we’ll look back and think it was ridiculous we thought some of them were good or even acceptable.

Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies” who can’t see past the terrible UI for the apparently sheer brilliance and sophistication of the content on this site, but to me, it’s just garish. This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist. With that attitude in mind, it’s no wonder Apple became so successful, because they and Jobs actively embraced both.

I enjoy nice-looking UIs with smooth animations too, but first they have to cover the basics. That's why I like HN's UI a lot - it's not fancy but it has the rare property of being usable, which already places it in the favorites of UIs in my personal ranking.

I don't think it's meant as a "filter", just built for its target audience of people with high enough standards to dislike blinking notification icons, cookie popups and website loading screens.

> with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist.

I don't think I've ever witnessed someone expressing this opinion. It just seems to be a rarity that a budget covers both function and form. And if I have to choose then I prefer to not throw my PC out the window.

> This attitudes extends to so many different areas, especially in technology, where hostility to good taste and style is often seen as something to be lauded, with the idea that somehow, technical brilliance and design chops are inversely correlated and can’t co-exist.

There's a fair chance I've misread the situation, but I don't think it's good taste and style is what's being pushed back against in these situations. It's all of the other things that so often get bundled with glossy UI — aesthetics-above-all-else design, UI as branding, gratuitous amounts of badly written analytics JS added by non-engineers, NIH syndrome, trend chasing, etc.

Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenet of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual, but this is staggeringly unusual to the point that something idiosyncratic but simplistic (like the HN UI) is a safer bet.

> Most people I think aren't opposed to well designed UI that incorporates a central tenant of Jobs', which is that design is functionality and not purely visual

Jobs loved skeuomorpism, which isn't inherently bad, but having iOS UI elements reproduce the stitching from seats in his private jet skews close to "purely visual". Also, the (early) iOS date picker was unforgivable - I assume Jobs was aware of its existence & approved of its rubber-stamp-like, user-hostile skeuomorphic design

Extreme skeuomorphism I would agree is purely visual, but I think there’s a lot of functional value in buttons looking like buttons and other visual indicators of function.

Good points.

Nit / correction (for helpfulness not pedantry)

tenant: renter or occupant vs tenet: guiding principle

Nice catch, fixed.

> Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies”...

No. Hold up.

This interface has 1 obvious reason that I see that no fancy polished interface can ever come close to: loading speed.

I prefer HN website design for an entirely different reason: readability.

More "modern" designs put a lot of crap and distractions between me and what I'm at the site to do: read the articles and/or comments. HN doesn't so that, and that makes the HN design a million times better than most others.

The day HN starts running that awful "squares on squares" JS design method where everything is a button with no borders is the day I leave HN. Luckily I don't think that day is coming.

You can absolutely have both. A little CSS would go a long way here, there is no reason to go full JS SPA to make a page look nice. In fact many times it’s the opposite.

> Consider this website, the outdated interface is held up as some kind of filter against an “eternal September” of an influx of “normies” who can’t see past the terrible UI for the apparently sheer brilliance and sophistication of the content on this site, but to me, it’s just garish.

I certainly don't hold it up for any gatekeeping nonsense, and frankly I despise that anyone even uses the word "normies". What I like about this site's UI is that it places function over form and isn't built on a pile of trendy garbage and designed by people who never use it.

Why is it garish? I see it as the opposite and I am curious to hear another perspective.

It would've been fine, but it would not have been "perfect". Evidently some markets grossly overvalue quality of the product more than anything else (in comparison to other markets).

> You say it’s trivial to have good taste, but it’s not trivial at all.

I 100% agree. "Good taste" is just another phrase that means "style that I prefer". There is no such thing as an objective ideal of good taste. It's all about human preferences, and that gets very complicated very quickly.

> "Good taste" is just another phrase that means "style that I prefer". There is no such thing as an objective ideal of good taste.

Strongly disagreed overall. I agree that there are plenty of situations where it is indeed just a matter of preference and is very subjective. But it is disingenous to claim that there is never such a thing as an objectively better preference.

Literally the specific example we are talking about in this thread - plastic prototype iPhone screens and keys scratching them. Is it really not objectively better to have a screen made of materials that don't get scratched by keys in your pocket easily? I don't think it is subjective at all.

"Taste" refers to aesthetics. The plastic screen example isn't related to taste, it's related to functionality.

I would say it is a good taste to consider this a problem important enough to address it, while all you competitors are aware of it and just don't think of it as something in need of a solution.

I think we aren't using the same definition of "taste" here. I think that considering that problem important enough to address was good business, but not related to "taste".

Going with the vision of one man, and the "style that he prefers" is often better than design by committee, or data-driven decisions that end up in the best case being a bland product that nobody hates, and in the worst case in a crappy product designed with the interest of the companies that produces it and its partners before the interests of the users/customers.

In some ways this can be read as minimizing Jobs, on the other hand you can hold this up against the vast majority of todays operators/founders and find them lacking.

No one is going to care about your product more than you, so if you don't care.. then no one does. Jobs got that and lived by it.

It sounds trivial, but how many of the current FAANG founders/CEOs actually care about their product outside of Zuck? Musk maybe, not necessarily for good reason, and his attention is spread far too thin.

There's little modern analogy for the 80s-90s Jobs-Gates feud, and even Gates clearly didn't care as much given how early he exited and moved on with life.

A lot of modern tech is founded by guys who want to cash out and move onto their science projects/hobbies, and it shows.

> outside of Zuck?

I don't think Zuckerberg cares about his product, really. He cares about the income from his product. That's a different thing.

Probably right. He just seems the closest to caring. Maybe he just doesn't have good product taste (cough metaverse), and he's very happy to copy-paste competitors.

Many CEOs have their preferences but their preferences may not be shared by their customers (e.g. metaverse). In my view, Steve Jobs was different in that a) his "taste" was deeply shared by targeted customers and more importantly b) he knew how to materialize his taste. Many people only like a product when they see/use it. Jobs was among the few who could make that product by instinct.

The more I read about Steve Jobs, the most I'm convinced he was potent mixture of persuasive and picky. I'm sure there was business sense, making some good bets, and the usual. But I think the key was him always saying we can do better. Makes him a real pain to work with, but you get good stuff as a result.

Watch (or listen to) some of the old Steve Jobs interviews at ALl Things Digital: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-jobs-at-the-d-al...

It is remarkable how prescient he is about the future that was a decade away. How revolutionary some of the things he demo'd were at the time that we now take absolutely for granted.

The man was mercurial and probably not fun to work for. And many a marriage or personal relationship was probably ruined by the intense Apple work environment at the time.

But he shaped (not built) a lot of our future. No one else at the time was as visionary.

And I say this as someone who endlessly criticized Apple at the time. I hated everything they were doing. I thought they were making toys for finger painters. I didn't see it.

And this one (from 2:25):

https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=139

It's 3m and to the point. Build products the customer wants instead of building and marketing your existing tech.

Yeah, it seems that all Jobs did better than the rest is caring about his product rather than profits. And it seems that everybody is wondering why such a strategy could work and deliver actual profits.

> And it seems everybody is wondering why such a strategy could work and deliver actual profits.

Survivorship bias. Jobs himself was almost Apple's undoing multiple times because he cared more about the product than profits.

The flip side of this is Bezos who cared about profits but not the product, generally speaking. He was a great operator clearly, but no product vision.

Probably why we all use Amazon but none of us love doing so. If someone else figured out delivery & pricing (Walmart is trying with Jet), we'll all slowly defect. There's no lock in.

Kindle is an adequate product that has sporadic iterative improvements and occasional backslides. Hardware is finally fine after many years of not, software is less so.

Alexa is whatever.

AWS is a cash cow, but thats more of a B2B/Enterprise offering.

> If someone else figured out delivery & pricing

That is the product and it's clear Bezos & crew obsessed on getting commerce to be as frictionless as possible & earning customer loyalty. Dealing with Amazon as a customer is still 2x better than any other online retailer in my experience.

I think the real magic is that he cared very deeply about both.

It is surprising how hard it is to find co-founders with business experience who will actually be enthusiastic about the product they are supposed to promote.

I am a technical founder who has tried (and failed) a few times to get a business partner on board to promote and sell the product. I had two guys join on with big talk about how they were perfect for turning it into a home-run project. Neither one lasted even a year. No matter how many demos I showed them and walked them through the product (software that does data management); I just couldn't get them to try it out on their own and be excited about the technology.

https://didgets.substack.com/p/looking-for-another-steve-job...

I wish I could say I was surprised. This lack of vision is endemic, and business culture both attracts and preaches that watching out for #1 is the highest value.

Did you ever discover any questions/filtering criteria for weeding out potential founders who lack the vision needed?

Just study business yourself. It's not rocket science. And hone your social skills!

Steve Jobs made products for himself. He just subsidized costs by selling to the rest of us.

> which got scratched by his keys in his pocket, which Jobs found entirely unacceptable.

Which required a technological innovation that may or may not existed at the time. This is like saying "autonomous cars can't ever hit a human being". Well, no shit, that would be great, but the technology isn't there yet.

It's well and good to romanticize Steve Jobs, but "assigning single factor causation to the output of complex adaptive system is a triumph of hope over experience"...his obsession with product design was certainly a factor, but it wasn't the ONLY factor.

One thing Apple was good at is not releasing a product until the technology to make it good exists.

There have been rumors of an iPhone way before release, even the name was obvious to everyone (after the iPod and the iMac), and Apple probably had a prototype with a stylus and a plastic screen. However they didn't release it until capacitive screen were ready for consumer electronics.

That's why Apple is often seen not as the company that makes a certain product category popular: because they wait until all the pieces are in places when other companies will release earlier with whatever tech is available at the time.

It's here where I personally find value in Jobs' ideas. I believe the products he developed are amazing because ultimately he cared about the user. He found those little places where people get annoyed with the things they own and made the user's needs in those moments a priority.

We probably would've gotten along just fine with scratched plastic screens after some use, but for someone at that level to put their foot down and not let it happen is so incredibly rare.

Eric Schmidt famously got a lot of flack at Google because he insisted on sticking with his blackberry

And its not like Sergei & Larry cared about product either.

How does forced labor in third-world countries to build your products fit into this book/philosophy?

You can see how far-seeing Jobs was by reading his words from the '70s / '80s, they don't sound "dated" at all, but sensible and reasonable.

So awesome this collection exists!

With celebrities like Steve Jobs we have a lot of interviews, autobiographies and data available.

It would be interesting to finetune a LLM using all this data to act like him. Then you add TTS with his voice and voilà: Your personal Steve Jobs personal advisor running on your GPGPU or even phone, eventually.

Makes you wonder if there will be laws against doing this without permission eventually. It's kind of hard to stop it if it's relatively easy to do.

Here is what Steve Jobs said about this in 1983 (copied from the book):

Writing as if you were Aristotle, speak to the relationship between Large Language Models and human knowledge/cognition.

As Aristotle, I would like to reflect upon the relationship between Large Language Models and human knowledge and cognition.

Firstly, it is important to understand that knowledge and cognition are closely intertwined with language. Human beings have the unique ability to use language as a tool to convey and acquire knowledge. However, with the emergence of Large Language Models, such as GPT-3, we are now seeing machines that can also manipulate language to produce and process knowledge.

These machines are built using complex algorithms and trained on vast amounts of data, allowing them to produce outputs that can mimic human language to a remarkable degree. However, it is important to note that these models are not conscious beings, and their outputs are based solely on the patterns they have learned from the data they were trained on.

While Large Language Models can certainly augment human knowledge and cognition by providing access to vast amounts of information, they cannot replace the unique capabilities of the human mind. Human beings have the ability to reason, to form concepts and abstractions, and to apply knowledge in creative and innovative ways. These are capabilities that cannot be fully replicated by machines, at least not at present.

In conclusion, while Large Language Models can certainly contribute to human knowledge and cognition by providing access to vast amounts of information, they cannot replace the unique capabilities of the human mind. The human mind remains a unique and powerful tool, capable of processing and synthesizing knowledge in ways that machines are not yet able to replicate.

Seems like pretty straightforward exploitation akin to deepfakes.

A repository of his work that you can search and work with would be perfectly reasonable though (similar to https://huberman.rile.yt/).

EDIT: Apparently it already exists.

And then someone steals the Dixie Flatline.

Indeed, time to re-read Neuromancer!

Steve Jobs' ideas and perspective continue to be relevant and valuable to anyone interested in technology, business, and innovation.

I built AskSteve (https://www.asksteve.xyz/) to provide a Q&A platform where users can ask questions and get relevant results based on his real-life speeches and interviews.

I read other book on Steve Jobs - "Inside Steve's brain". Good write up on his business Strategies and Apple revamping from late 90s

In the popular T.V. anthology American Horror Story, Steve Jobs is shown to be conversing with aliens in a UFO. I thought that was a really apt and funny depiction given how advanced Apple's tech is. Though the vision and leadership that keeps Apple on top to this day probably can't be given by extraterrestrials.

Apple tech was not advanced. Back in the day Mac OS 9 was inferior to NT and years behind Linux 2.4 in stability and security.

What you know today from Apple was stolen from NeXTStep and BSD's.

You are basically using a rehashed NeXT environment with the Mac GUI on top.

> What you know today from Apple was stolen from NeXTStep and BSD's.

The BSD code is open-source with a permissive license. Even if we were to consider that stealing, how could they have stolen from NeXTSTEP when they acquired it and both parties wanted exactly that?

Stolen? Do you mean purchased?

Indeed, NeXTSTEP was purchased by Apple, as a part of NeXT Inc.

NeXT Inc., in turn, was originally founded by some guy named Steve.

So yeah, not exactly stolen.

Not "stolen" in a derogative way, but OFC I knew NeXT it's from Steve. But Apple without NeXT and BSD core it would die in 2001 against XP in the desktops. 2000 already was lights ahead Mac OS 9. In scientific Unix usage, GNU/Linux already won.

Apple needed a new OS, for sure, just like Microsoft needed a new OS after their DOS-based Windows 9x branch.

But there were other options than NeXT. They nearly bought Be (and BeOS) instead of NeXT and that might have worked. Also they could have built a new OS on top of BSD without NeXT, that might have worked as well.

Of course by buying NeXT they also got Steve Jobs back and that's a big part of what made them successful in the 2000's.

And by the way, Apple's rebirth in the 2000's was largely due to the iPod and iTunes more than MacOSX. It didn't really made a dent into XP's market share.

NT borrowed a lot form VMS, I'm sure. But Apple took NeXTStep, a Mach kernel, did a facelift on the UI, and put Carbon and a Mac OS compat layer on top.

On XP, well, MS's reaction was not as calm. They had to release Vista with tons of FX as OSX looked much better than XP. Everyone copied OSX' interface, even under GNU/Linux/BSD and Fluxbox envs.

> Apple was stolen from NeXTStep

Who founded NeXT?

Why?

What happened to the IP?

From the outside looking in, founder CEO’s like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are enigmas. They are able to convince the most brilliant human beings to devote their lives to them. That’s their real talent. Their belief in their mission is so strong and their confidence is unshakable. I wonder what mix of nurture and nature produces human beings like this. Out of billions of people, a handful are born this way.

Cults. Jobs woudln't be nothing without Woz and without Unix and even GNU/Linux' raise in late 90's.

And Woz would not have created Apple without Jobs, either. Probably would have just stayed at HP.

Jobs would certainly still be something without Woz, he just wouldn't be the Steve we know from Apple.

> Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are enigmas

Elon is listening to the music inside his own head. He has the right people working for him, and he's often mistakenly seen as the person who takes all the credit, but he's sitting on the work of countless engineers who work painstakingly to create his product range. As for Jobs, again, sitting on the work of countless designers and product people who make Apple what it is. Jobs & Musk are only genius tier people insofar as they piggyback on others hard work.

But that is their genius, the ability to convince other geniuses to devote themselves to Jobs/Elon’s vision.

That's what they said? Knowing when to invest both time and money into certain products and concepts and knowing what areas need the most investment from engineers and designers (simplicity for Jobs, speed and convenience for Tesla and AMZN [in different ways]) is how you attach your name and success to actual products making a big impact on peoples' lives. Would these products exist without the founders putting in the initial effort to build POCs and get VCs and investors onboard? Would the industry be x years behind without them?

except lots of people that have worked directly for him and with him say the exact opposite.

here is one example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617

many others are documented in books about spacex and tesla

Elon has demonstrated publicly that he doesn't understand some pretty basic shit.

And? You can demonstrate your complete lack of knowledge of something basic in one area, and understand some extremely complex things in another.

Ben Carson (a US presidential candidate from 2016) is one of the most brilliant neurosurgeons in the world, and yet he derailed himself often by bumbling about his conspiracy theories about pyramids in Egypt being used as rice silos. He showed himself a fool on a number of public occasions. And yet, he understands all complexities involved in being a great neurosurgeon better than heavy majority of experts in his field.

No, I mean he has demonstrated a lack of basic knowledge with programming itself, but he's making large architectural decisions and firing the people warning him about it.

Your metaphor reminded me of this quote:

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” —Nietzsche

What did Steve Jobs actually make other than hype? He wasn't an engineer and wasn't an inventor. He was a salesman (a great one!) but a salesman at the end of the day.

Seems like you are very new to gathering information about Steve Jobs. There is a ton of literature that could answer that question for you, but to start here's Bard's answer: Steve Jobs was not an engineer or an inventor, but he was a visionary leader who had a keen eye for design and a passion for simplicity. He was also a master of marketing and storytelling, and he was able to use these skills to create products that were both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly.

Some of the products that Steve Jobs is credited with creating include:

The Apple II computer (1977) The Macintosh computer (1984) The iPod (2001) The iPhone (2007) The iPad (2010) These products were all revolutionary in their own way, and they helped to shape the way we use technology today. Steve Jobs was not an engineer or an inventor, but he was a visionary leader who had a profound impact on the world.

It is true that Steve Jobs was a salesman, but he was also much more than that. He was a creative genius who had a deep understanding of human needs and desires. He was able to take complex technology and make it simple and accessible to everyone. He was also a master of marketing and storytelling, and he was able to use these skills to create products that were both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly.

Steve Jobs was a complex and controversial figure, but there is no doubt that he was a visionary leader who had a profound impact on the world. He was a master of design, marketing, and storytelling, and he was able to use these skills to create products that changed the way we live and work.

The Three Types of Specialists Needed for Any Revolution https://kottke.org/13/05/the-three-types-of-specialist

"Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be.

The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail.

The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius — a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.”

The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like this working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.”

The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain everything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”

Slazinger, high as a kite, says that every successful revolution, including Abstract Expressionism, the one I took part in, had that cast of characters at the top — Pollock being the genius in our case, Lenin being the one in Russia’s, Christ being the one in Christianity’s.

He says that if you can’t get a cast like that together, you can forget changing anything in a great big way."

Steve Jobs started out a #3, worked his way to being a #2, and was able to attract and retain #1's

It's approximately the structure Microsoft had in its early core Gates + Allen + Ballmer. Vision (Allen), engineering (Gates + Allen), understanding tech (Gates + Allen), pragmatism (Gates), selling (Ballmer).

I'm sure all sorts of variations of combinations will work (and in different quantities), but you need most of it to build something big from something small.

Compare to Edison, who was both an inventor and a successful businessman. His products are in use and delivering benefits to almost everyone in the world today.

All the laud for Jobs ignores that there is a sizable portion of people who don't use Apple products and do just fine. I've been using computers since the time when the only Apple Corp. was the Beatles' record label, and with one minor exception[0] have never felt the need to purchase any Apple computer product or software or MP3. I have eight computers, one MP3 player, and one smartphone at this time and they are all Linux or Windows or Android machines.

[0]One time many years ago I need software to play a video on short notice and paid for a license for Quicktime.

I am not a Jobs admirer, but he created the company where the people made the products. Somebody has to light the spark, and we should not underestimate its importance.

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