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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs founded Apple. It revolutionized the world. They fired him, Apple became a joke. They hired him back, it revolutionized the world again. He died, and... they're becoming a joke again. Say whatever you like about the man, but whatever he did actually drove innovation like nobody else.

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Apple are becoming a joke? I must have missed that memo. That was certainly a possibility when Jobs died but you have to hand it to Tim Cook, Apple has drifted far less from its Jobs-era culture and style than many people predicted. It's been nearly a decade and a half since Cook took over, but Apple are still doing tremendously well. The Apple Vision Pro might not be the right category of product to go mass market, but none of the reviews suggest it is anything less than Jobsian in its attention to detail and overall approach.

Compare that to the level of change between Ballmer-Nadella or Schmidt-Pichai. Apple has displayed remarkable constancy.

I agree that Apple is a company that is doing quite well and making generally good products.

However, I absolutely don’t think Steve Jobs would have let the Vision Pro in its current state sit on store shelves.

I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.

> I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.

And yet he launched the iPhone, which, in its first generation, didn't even let you install apps on it. The point is not to excel in all areas. The point is to excel in relevant areas where the competition can not easily catch up with you.

I’d argue that the iPhone had way more points where it excelled. Web browsing, multi-touch, pinch to zoom, and it even offered a better cellular plan along with it (cheaper than BlackBerry).

The Vision Pro doesn’t have a lot of features where it excels. Running apps on it is inferior to using your phone or tablet. Watching movies is inferior to your home television. Productivity is inferior to a standard computer. Games are inferior to existing VR gaming systems like Index or Quest. Reviewers universally describe it as lonely, dystopian. Eyestrain is still a problem, dizziness is still a problem.

The iPhone had things about it that were better than existing solutions in a product category (cell phones and smartphones) that was proven and growing.

The most optimistic thing you can say about the Vision Pro is that if it were more like a pair of sunglasses and got rid of all the downsides to using it, it might be a really good true AR experience where your brain forgets about the fact that you’ve augmented reality. The problem is, there is no physical hardware technology that is on the horizon that will ever feasibly bring it to that place.

Not being able to install apps was completely resolvable by a software update. The hardware problems of the original iPhone like the lack of 3G were resolved within a calendar year with the next model, and the original model had an acceptable level of battery life.

If a similar situation to the iPhone was happening we should be seeing a Ming Chi Kuo type of rumor about a Vision Pro coming in 2025 that scuttles the external battery, enables the system to get through an entire Hollywood movie without charging, and solves the problem of the headset messing up your hair and making you interact with the world through ski goggles. These improvements are impossible within the next 10 years or so.

There was also way more urgency with smartphones. If Apple had waited one or two years the iPhone would have been snuffed out by competition. We would see a market dominated by other players in the market like Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Palm.

In contrast, the VR/AR market is literally a contracting one with the only major players being Valve and Meta. The iPhone entered a market that was clearly in an upward trajectory.

Would anyone be surprised if Meta announced the shuttering of the Quest division within the next 5 years or so? It has never made money. It has never come close to breaking even, it’s a complete moonshot money sink for Meta. The Quest 3 is selling slower than the Quest 2 did. Microsoft quit on the market before Apple even entered it. Valve hasn't made a follow-up headset and might not ever do so.

A reminder of this story from a few years back: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/apples-ar-vr-headset-repor...

This is a product that was in development hell that had pressure to ship. A more courageous executive would have seen the struggles at Meta and killed the project years ago.

The Apple Car idea was legitimately way better and would have taken less time.

Public sentiment is that Apple is a litigious monopolistic bully that is coasting of their former glory. There you have the memo now.

You can't be serious. The "public sentiment" toward Apple could not care less about the nerd rage du jour, they are as oblivious to it as ever. All evidence suggests that normal people don't care about any of this, same as every other time. It isn't like everyone is using a Linux desktop with Firefox, chatting over Signal, running their own mail servers, using GNU software, etc. The people that care about this are a small bubble, even within the broader tech community.

Most non-technical people I know genuinely like Apple, it is a great experience for them. They don't know, and don't care, what "side-loading" etc means.

Maybe within your particular bubble. The vast majority of people I know have positive associations with the Apple brand.

That is 100% not the "public sentiment" where I am, from anyone I know.

You’re projecting.

Steve was great because he hired great people. For that he deserves a lot of credit. He also (for better or worse) had a very keen idea of what was workable or reasonable in terms of UX - essentially he had taste.

Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.

That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.

> they're becoming a joke again

Are they? I don’t see it. They’re more profitable than ever and are still extremely competitive in multiple markets.

The arguments against this have been the same for decades: Apple is overpriced, Apple’s product are inferior to competition, and yet here we are with large chunks of the market share and larger chunks of market gains.

Some products are stupid, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t pushed dead products out before.

Only on HN can a company earn a net income (that's profit mind you, not gross sales) of nearly $34 billion and be dismissed as a "joke."

How much does Boeing make?

Boeing has had negative net income (i.e., has been losing money) for years:

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BA/financials/

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/net-inco...

You beat me to it.

> > Say whatever you like about the man, but whatever he did actually drove innovation like nobody else.

Sure, it was him alone doing all that, not the 10,000 employees, within a 40M people ecosystem such as California which is the tip of the spear of a yet bigger ecosystem such as the United States which in turn is the tip of the spear of the entire 4 million history of mankind progress up to now.

The cult and the propaganda causes a whole lot of illusion/delusion. Then you actually get to meet these people and you are as disappointed as the groupies who were asked to self cut their veins by Led Zeppelin for their satanic rituals.

The fact that there were 40M people in that ecosystem and only one Steve Jobs is exactly the point. Yes it took an environment like that to make it possible, but it also took a certain person to make it actually happen. (A deeply flawed person to be sure, but that's not the point here).

Nope, it would have happened anyway and the lucky guy would have been Stuart Bojs with his company called "Pear"

Humanity as a whole makes progress, individual humans just partecipate in a giant lottery for monetary and recognition allocation. The latter has nothing to do with the former, much like winning a car race on a racetrack has nothing to do with building the track nor the car.

Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP. The GP , the cars, the track itself are the byproduct of billions of humans at work and every minute of work towards that has approximately the same value, if there's a positive outlier is very minimal and perhaps that person has never been to the track at all or doesn't even care about car racing.

This is what happens when there's 8bn of us right now with a total number who ever lived standing at 10-12bn

If we can credit physicists like Albert Einstein for being the ones to discover fundamental facts about the universe that someone was going to discover sooner or later anyway, we can credit business founders for creating businesses a certain way that weren't necessarily ever going to be created that certain way. They're not the same thing in many ways, but I'd rather err on the side of giving more credit rather than less.

Had Einstein or Jobs been born in Laos they'd have had very different worries and concerns, and besides what does "credit" even mean practically speaking besides singing the praise which is essentially worthless gossiping anyway.

Let's make a practical example in order not to keep talking past each other:

If you owned a resturant and they were still alive would you offer them a steak or cancel another reservation to make room for them?

I wouldn't , don't care if you are Jesus H. Christ, you gotta pay me.

Could other people have been Jobs? Sure, but they weren't. Would other people have done a much worse job of it than Jobs? Yes, very much yes.

> It revolutionized the world.

Hmm...no it didn't.

I suppose using switched-mode PSU in the Apple II was revolutionary to me at the time, but someone else would have figured that out pretty quick. They were already in TVs.

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