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Comment by siglesias | Hacker News Reader

The point is that we, he, and Jobs would pick our preferred software on an inferior hardware device over our preferred hardware running inferior software, not the particulars of the choice.

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This doesn't require a Steve Jobs mind-meld though.

When everyone stopped buying NeXT's elaborately designed hardware, Jobs slapped the OS onto beige 486 clones faster than you could press the turbo button.

In an ideal (or even sane) world, we wouldn't have to pick. We'd just run the software we want on the hardware we want.

Perhaps. But that flexibility is a tradeoff. That's the point here. The reason the pieces fit so well together is that they were designed to fit each other without regard for compability with a larger ecosystem (I'm being deliberately vague here whether I'm talking about the relationship of hardware to its case, or software to hardware, or subsystems to each other). If you want flexibility then you have to accept some wiggle room in how the pieces work.

The particulars of the choice are telling. The context called for a piece of clearly inferior hardware, and he picked a design legend. There are many outstandingly crappy examples of laptop hardware, and instead he picked a polarizing but very highly regarded design. He did it on purpose -- you don't accidentally choose the only laptop on display at the Museum of Modern Art as your exemplar of bad design (though, if you're a bit arrogant and poncey, it's a clever mistake to pretend to make.) You do it to polarize the debate and filter your readership to the folks who are likely to agree with you.

By not reading on though -- you missed the link in the footnote:

Famously, upon returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs used a ThinkPad running OpenStep until, presumably, Apple shipped a PowerBook that met his standards. http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2209

"The context called for a piece of clearly inferior hardware"

No, you misunderstood the article. The context called for a piece of SUPERIOR hardware. Your entire complaint here is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the point Gruber was trying to make.

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