Hacker News Reader

Comment by gist | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who doesn't recognize what Jobs did for Apple doesn't understand business. The better mousetrap does not have consumers beat a path to your door. (Technology? See Sony Betamax vs. default VCR).

Wozniak on the other hand is way overblown in capabilities. It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role. Jobs was truly unique and while he had for sure people who helped him realize the dream (and of course luck and timing ... that he was able to motivate and berate with his reality distortion field etc) no question he was the unique driving force behind Apple (when they started and when he returned after being forced out).

View on HN

But it's not like Jobs first stint at Apple (or really Apple itself) was necessarily such a remarkable success (at least compared to what happened when he came back). In the second half of the 80s and in the 90s Apple was merely the best of the also-ran.

> But there were many that could have filled that role.

Wasn't Apple II pretty much the thing that kept the company afloat? The Lisa was a disaster and the early Macintosh despite the impressive marketing wasn't such a great machine either. Between 1984 and 1989 Apple still sold about 3.5x more Apple 2s than Macintoshes. Of course Macs were generally 2-3x more expensive but still it seems pretty remarkable that a computer Wozniak pretty much designed singlehandedly back in 1977 remained competitive for more than 10 years with not that many fundamental changes.

By the Macintosh truly successful (not compared to Wintel of course) Jobs and most of his influence on the company and it's culture etc. were long gone.

The same thing happens with Musk. I hate Musk as much as the next guy, I am anything but a fanboy and I don't have or want a Tesla. Still it is delusional and childish to insist that Tesla and SpaceX would have been just have successful without him.

I read something like "the internet has killed nuance" and it's so true. Could terrible people also be successful businessmen? Nope! All good or all bad any anyone who says anyone in between is blinded by their adoration.

> I hate Musk as much as the next guy

I really don't understand this meme. If you want people who deserve hate, the history books are full of them.

Just based on politics alone, many people feel morally obligated to hate him now because he's decided to hang his hat on one particular side of the toxic US political system. And as addicted as he is to attention and pop culture relevance, he can't stop attracting ire by doubling down on every hot take he has.

That may be reason to dislike him, but is a pretty weak reason to hate him.

> I really don't understand this meme. If you want people who deserve hate, the history books are full of them.

100%.

I see more people saying they hate Musk and Zuckerberg than I see people who say they hate Hitler or even modern authoritarian rulers and mass murderers.

I think social media has made us all more sensitive, cranky, and judgmental. It's a recent phenomenon.

We used to hate bin Laden. Now we hate CEOs, celebs, and social media personalities.

I mean, to be honest, Bin Laden and Hitler are dead. They don't cause major change on the world any more through their actions alone.

> It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role.

Tell me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller[1] without telling me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller.

Apple shipped hardware in the summer of 1977 that took the rest of the industry *three years* to catch up to, and that only happened when Atari (and later Commodore) dedicated VLSI designers and fab bandwidth to custom chips that had like 9x the die area of the chips that shipped in the Apple. Woz had it working with a bunch of junk you could get at Radio Shack.

No, there's no one contemporary who was doing anything remotely like that. But it's sort of true that brilliance like that doesn't scale, so post-1979 or so he really didn't have much to offer and later products were produced via different means.

[1] Or the original board's timing and scanout brilliance too, but the disk controller really is his best single masterpiece.

The floppy controller was probably his last significant contribution to Apple. He seems to have just lost interest after that.

He suffered a TBI in an airplane accident in 1981 or so. Though IIRC, most of the design of the original Mac's framebuffer design (likewise done with in-house engineering and not with a off the shelf VLSI controller as was seen in other contemporary platforms) was his work.

On a related note, Ben Eater recently made a video going through Wozniak's system monitor code for the Apple I.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpG8rgI7Hec

There are some pretty insane optimizations for code size, and the result is a remarkably capable program in just 256 bytes. You don't get this stuff from a replacement-level engineer.

Yup. To put it another way, if any company back then had Woz building things with that high a capability to cost ratio, it would have been very easy for them to punch way above their weight and capture significant share with even modest marketing talent.

And arguably, Apple could have been much more successful in the 80s and 90s if they had leveraged technical excellence at an Apple II-like price point, instead of ascending into the pricing stratosphere like they did in our actual timeline. Jobs arguably realized this a bit, as he priced the iMac ($1299) a lot better than the Macs that came before it (about $1699 for a comparable all-in-one in 1997).

I'm sorry, but this man got critical UI/UX paradigms right twice (iPod, iPhone) and used that position of strength to inflict his controlling views upon the entire computing industry.

I want to be in the universe where this didn't happen. Where there are six major types of smartphone. Where Google Android isn't the most open things can be. Where your smartphone provider isn't your email provider, isn't your photo bucket, isn't your banking, isn't your movie film entertainment provider. Where you can install what you want and easily switch devices. Where no company is too big.

Smartphones aren't computers in the Jobs universe. They're branded platforms wholly and totally owned by the company that makes them.

The 1990 - 2010 era was the best time we had in computing. The web was so open and everyone used it for everything. After Jobs showed what level of top-down control was legally possible, everyone has been chasing the "App Store" model and the "Platform" model and the "Walled Garden" model.

Zoomers don't know how awesome RSS and bittorrent were. How you could use any program to consume content and ingest it, schedule it, remix it. There were programs where you could create your own TV channels. Your own news streams. You could run it on all of your devices.

Now everything is super locked down, product manager-ed to a single customer experience, and rented to you. Meanwhile, Google is trying to DRM what's left of the web. Things are looking incredibly bleak.

Jobs put us on this path of not having devices and data streams open. But now you can choose one of three premium experiences.

> I'm sorry, but this man got critical UI/UX paradigms right twice (iPod, iPhone)

Thrice? Lisa/Macintosh were WIMP for the masses. Not globally original but how many people ever used a Xerox Alto?

iPod is what put them on their stratospheric trajectory. Any company with that product and that execution at that point in time could have achieved the same outcome.

iPod-iPhone wasn't a pivot, but it was different than everything that came before. It opened up a massive new market and made them who they are today. They struck gold: right time, right place, right mindset.

Android owes their huge level of success to entering the market at the same time. From that they were able to establish their duopoly. Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm, and Nokia took too long and got forever shut out.

Timing matters. Holding a captive audience with low churn also matters (even if keeping the jail cell locked is one of the techniques used to accomplish it).

But back to my earlier point - if everything wasn't so incompatible with everything else, we'd see a market that supports more than just two players.

Yes, and it's extra painful that most "apps" on the "App Store" are just thin wrappers around web technologies anyway. You have to have an iPhone[1] or Android because you "have to use the app" for lots of things from mobile food ordering to ticket purchasing -- and yet most of these apps have little to no native code, and despite our phones being 100x more powerful, these apps are more laggy than a BlackBerry or Sidekick app was, because they're bloated beyond belief.

[1] From my experience, even Android is an iffy choice in America, because 99% of the execs here who allocate the resources in companies use iOS, so they don't mind when the Android app is barely usable. This is a peculiarity of the US though, elsewhere Android is considered equal or greater in importance.

VHS was the better format, actually.

One million percent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com