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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

This is a fun story, but also just reminded me of how destructively eccentric Jobs could be. All the shenanigans to pretend the author lived in the US, flying him back and forth from Ireland, planning his interactions (or lack of interactions) with Jobs so the deception wouldn't be exposed, and everything. What a colossal waste of time, money, and stress just to cater to the ego of Steve Jobs.

And then they threw all that work away, seemingly mainly because it was done out of the wrong office. Presumably the final Dock that shipped was significantly different from the author's version, but throwing away all the code and doing a full rewrite is rarely warranted.

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> how destructively eccentric Jobs could be

last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

not saying he deserved it but he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late, hard to feel sorry at all for him at that point.

also I heard he was a massive twat irl

If he'd've gone into politics, the net total outcome could've been much much worse.

Luckily there is no indication that he was interested in this sort of things. Contrary to…others.

Insert Bill Burr on Lance Armstrong "just keep him on the bike" quote.

> last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

The tragic last act of Jobs' infamous reality distortion field

> last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

People who tend to go the "alternative healing" route usually do so because the traditional healing route hasn't worked.

> he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late

Did he? Guess you are the expert.

Cancer treatment isn't an exact science. Millions of people who go the traditional route die. It's always the know-nothings who talk with such confidence of absolutes.

> also I heard he was a massive twat irl

Did you now? I guess it takes one to know one.

It was widely documented at the time that Jobs chose non-medicine over medicine very soon after diagnosis, and then went through heroic real-doctor efforts once it was too late: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

It's hard to take an article seriously when they write "was one of the 5% or so that are slow growing and most likely to be cured."

There is no cure for pancreatic cancer. There are people who survive it, but nobody knows why.

> and then went through heroic real-doctor efforts once it was too late:

If it was "too late" why did these "heroic real-doctor" exert any effort? Shouldn't they have known better? Being "heroic" and "real" doctors.

The guy chose to be a lab rat after his 9 months of "alternative medicine" and 5 years of "real medicine" failed him. These "heroic doctors" failed him just like the "unheroic doctors".

As I said, cancer isn't an exact science. People who think it is either know nothing of cancer or are just unthinking bootlickers. Hopefully one day we'll have a cure for cancer.

He was diagnosed with a gasteroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. Neuroendocrine cancers make ups about 5% of all pancreatic cancers, are slow growing and in many cases curable.

I understand the scepticism, but in this particular case is unwarranted.

I think one of the first things we need to adapt is calling it more than just "cancer" instead of something more descriptive. Like Alzheimer's, it's not actually "one" thing but many things together or separately are labeled with it. Each type of cancer can have its own cause, treatment, and prognosis.

Once we better recognize it's a family of ailments, the populace can better understand the challenges to its various treatments and how we need to invest more into it.

“Heroic” had a specific medical meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_measure

I wasn’t saying the doctors were heroic. I was saying the drastic measures to help him after he dicked around too long with fake healers meet the description.

I assume that the Cork development team was built up before Jobs took over, which also explains why they were all laid off shortly after the author quit. Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino? If he were still around, he would probably hate home office/remote work and join Elon Musk in the "people can have all the home office they want as long as they work 40 hours per week in the office" camp...

One wrinkle here is that Jobs himself was by all accounts the person most responsible for Apple opening a Cork facility in 1980, and for whatever Apple and the Irish government promised each other as part of that deal. There's some indication that Irish governments were unhappy with what they got from it https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-... but it's hard to be sure exactly what happened there: Apple was probably not in the best shape to carry out ambitious relocation plans for much of the '80s, for one thing.

While I don't have boundless love for either Jobs or RTO mandates, and as an Irishman I would very much rather not see Cork getting the dirty end of the stick, I have to defend Jobs' desire for centralisation a bit here. There's considerable evidence that having nearly all the central product and design people within easy reach of SJ stalking around 1 Infinite Loop did in fact work very well for Apple in the second Jobs era. Maybe it was still a wrong decision, despite appearances, but you can hardly say that it was an eccentric one. (And in 2000 the tools for offsite or multi-site collaboration weren't even as not-entirely-great as they are now.) It was other people who brought in the madcap element of trying to hide things from the boss, not Jobs himself.

All else being equal, for team-based, creative, knowledge work, having everyone collocated is more productive.

But not all is equal. You can't necessarily attract the all the talent. It doesn't scale without extremely disciplined organizational and physical space design - working remotely in the office, is the more common norm. Your team is spread over different locations and buildings anyway so you aren't really working locally in practice. Strong communication and collaboration practices are what dominate - so just having people together in one place and expecting osmosis doesn't beat good async tooling and discussion practices (like those from the best OSS projects).

> Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino?

Looks like it. There were still people working on iSync, iCal (and presumably software for the first iPhone) in an office in Paris. I think that ended in 2005.

In an alternate and very charitable timeline, after being healed of his cancer by top doctors, Jobs grows greatly in love with science and medicine, and faced with the covid pandemic, makes Apple permanently remote work (with office option for those who want it), and donates sums of money to bootstrapping vaccine production for all the world.

A boy can dream.

Maybe (I think so) it was more about aligning every detail with the standards Jobs had in mind...

> “how destructively eccentric Jobs could be”

I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.

Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.

Jobs is on the whole probably better than the modern "tech right", yes, if only because supposedly he turned down opportunities to get seriously into politics. OTOH, who knows what kind of strange political or personal journey he might possibly have taken if he'd been around for the past decade and more. And in fact I think he may have contributed to the US getting where it is now in (at least) one significant way. By committing his options-backdating caper and then avoiding punishment for it he contributed to the feeling that the Special Boy is too precious to suffer criminal consequences for his actions, something which has likely had consequences for the later career of Musk in particular.

Oh, I'm sure it's even fuzzier than that. Apple's cachet over the past 25 years was built on the type of class consumerism that reflects and then amplifies a lot of America's particular brand of social dysfunction. Much of tech during this time was focused (and continued to focus, to their market detriment, until they "wised" up and stopped) on a sort of egalitarianism; if the proposition is, "Anyone can benefit from our product," most companies whispered the qualifier, "...if you can afford it." Apple, on the other hand, shouted that last part from the rooftops, also encouraging the addendum, "...and it makes you better than people who don't use our products."

Apple was a standard-bearer for the toxic exclusivity and gatekeeping that's kind of always been a part of American society, but that we occasionally see some chance of finally throwing off.

> it makes you better than people who don't use our products.

It seemed to me that this was more of a product of the fandom. "Even though this Apple computer is less popular/useful, I'm a discerning tastemaker and am better than the unwashed Wintel masses."

The Apple “Lemmings” ad came out in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(advertisement)

> ... but that we occasionally see some chance of finally throwing off.

That seems optimistic to me. What are you thinking of?

History would suggest otherwise. Ripping Woz off springs to mind. And is giving the world expensive Apple products making it a better place?

I'm not sure I'm convinced that running a super-secretive company and building a locked-down status-symbol walled-garden product that takes way the "owner's" freedom to tinker with it pushes him in the "left the world a better place" column.

The iPhone and other Apple products are just that: products. There are not many products in history that I'd say made the world a better place. Certainly better-than-previously-available computers and phones wouldn't meet that bar for me.

Tell me about all Jobs' philanthropy and maybe I'll agree with you. But you can't, because Jobs ran what was once described as one of the least philanthropic companies operating, and Jobs' own philanthropic activities were either so secretive that we still don't know much about them, or (the more likely option) were more or less nonexistent.

I agree that Jobs was probably on the whole better than Thiel, Andreessen, or Musk, but IMO that's not saying much.

don’t get me wrong Jobs definitely progressed the technology of that time by leading Apple but what exactly did he do to make the world a better place?

if you believe that enabling people to easily communicate with each other and access basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge whenever they want is a good thing (ie if you think giving people iPhones so they can message each other and read wikipedia is a good thing), then you can say his work did help with that.

You can also say that Macs have helped many people express themselves creatively (iMovie, Garage Band, Logic, Final Cut...), which you might think is a good thing.

At this point in time I'm not yet convinced smartphones are a net positive for humanity. They enable various forms of internet/"social"/consumerist addictions. Sure, there are great and transformative uses for them, but it's not clear to me yet how the scales balance out.

The technology to do all of those things existed well before iPhones & Macs appeared. You may argue that "yeah but he made them popular", but the iPhone & Mac users were never in the majority.

I mean electric cars, solar panels, and rockets so we don't have to rely on Russia to get to and from space ain't nothin'. Then there's that torch thing.

I can take or leave the other two. Netscape was pretty cool.

As a customer I find a stark difference between Musk and Jobs. I have a Tesla and I was also a customer of Jobs’s Apple since 1999.

The big difference is that Jobs never lied to me. Sure, he was an enthusiastic salesman, but the products actually did what was promised. (I even bought Mac OS X 10.0 in a retail box. It was rough but it showed that their new OS is delivering.) Apple products fit my purposes and I kept coming back to buy more.

Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.

The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.

>Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.

I assume you're talking about auto-pilot?

>The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.

Yes, the tech industry went from promising Star Trek like future to Demolition Man meets 1984 where Taco Bell owns everything and spies on you. It's not great. Stallman was right, but he got conveniently pushed out of the conversation.

> I assume you're talking about auto-pilot?

Full Self Driving. Tesla doesn't charge extra for Autopilot.

It's not "lies" it's "reality distortion". So much more pleasant!

Jobs lied all the time, only difference was that he had the luck of not being busted cause he could realize the lies before the due date.

Not saying this makes him worse than Elon Musk though, Elon is obviously much worse. You can see this in just how he interacts politically and how he used his social media platform to influence elections.

> The big difference is that Jobs never lied to me.

I'm sure he will get around to providing FaceTime as an open industry standard any day now...

That is not because of him. They ran into patents problems and lost a lawsuit about this.

They did contribute a couple of industry standards, including zeroconf/bonjour and OpenCL. I haven’t seen anything or anybody saying that the FaceTime thing was a deception.

Supposedly he announced it off the cuff, without consulting anyone else as to the viability, not even notifying the FaceTime team beforehand. You can get into a semantic argument with yourself about whether that is actually a lie, but no matter what you conclude, that seems to be the same kind of "lie" that Musk makes.

> [an off the cuff promise] seems to be the same kind of "lie" [as charging $7,500 for future self-driving]

No, it doesn't, and I cannot understand how they could seem so similar to you.

I assume the intent here is for it to be a question with a forgotten question mark? Otherwise, the comment devolves into ad hominem without any technical exploration, and there is no conceivable expiation for that.

Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure how to grok the question. What I am able to gather is that Musk sold a unrealized future promise on the basis of hopeful optimism as its own line item for $7,500, while Jobs sold an unrealized future promise on the basis of hopeful optimism as part of a bundle in the ballpark around $1,000, with some variation depending on the specific bundle purchased.

Is the contention around the price magnitude? Would Musk be less of a "liar" if it sold for $100 instead of $7,500? Is it being sold independently instead of as part of a bundle what is in dispute? Would Musk be less of a "liar" if that $7,500 included other features available at the time of sale? Perhaps you can elaborate?

I would ask why you believe $1,000 was charged in exchange for a promise to turn FaceTime into an open industry standard -- which would be usable by all, by definition, regardless of whether they were even customers -- but you appear more interested in put-downs. "There is no conceivable expiation for that," so I'm done; good luck!

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