California Nominates Steve Jobs for Its American Innovation $1 Coin | Hacker News Reader

California Nominates Steve Jobs for Its American Innovation $1 Coin

gov.ca.gov

45 pointsgnabgib93 comments

When you get $1 change, Apple takes $0.30.

> When you get $1 change, Apple takes $0.30.

This $0.30 is the innovation.

I really miss him in today’s world. I fantasize how he would have had the intellectual ability to dissect the craziness we’re seeing and putting it into perspective with some smart words.

I think he'd be lined up with the other tech leaders just doing what's needed to gain power. He wasn't a saint, he was just a bit of a visionary with the greed to succeed.

Personally, I hold him in somewhat high regard. At the same time, he made billions while conspiring to deprive many HN users of their just rewards. This should not be forgotten, or forgiven.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/24/306592297...

https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/y9eyxq/til_d...

> just rewards

* liberalised labour market rewards

unless you think there is inherent moral justice in being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to write software

Yeah, I escaped communism as a child, so please excuse my potential bias. While I think that pure libertarians are just as silly as pure socialists, I do believe in the benefits of a well regulated market economy.

If the market economy indicates that a dev with particular skills can be paid even 10M per year, then heck yes. Good for them. If the companies who hire these devs could not pay that, then the market for them would not exist. They could, and conspired not to. This is why they settled the case.

Seems more moral than their employer conspiring to deprive them of that

true

okay britta - are there people starving in uganda too?

I guess if you harbour skills that exceed those rewards you could start on your own taking your own risks. There are some tradeoffs and simple marxism does not take into account all the variables

He was a criminal who literally conspired to steal billions.

It wasn’t just deprivation; it was stealing.

I’d say he was… half as bad.

“greed to succeed” is a simplistic trope. He was already wealthy by the time he went back to fix Apple.

"Already wealthy, no desire for more" is a trope as well

Greed is not a good driver for risking so much time on a failing company

I meant it a bit differently. You can still have drive to succeed even when money doesn't have much marginal utility. Social capital is a thing, not to completely discount money as a motivator.

I don't think anyone has claimed he was a saint...

He had a genius for dreaming up products the world didn't know it needed yet, and for developing those products to perfection.

Several of those products were quantum leaps that the world would not have figured out for several years, if ever, without Jobs.

Um, bullshit.

Apple II: Very similar to contemporary products. Interesting improvements added by Wozniak.

Lisa: Stolen from Xerox (and made worse). Jobs' contribution: cosmetics, mostly.

Mac: Oops, the Lisa was too good.

Next: A somewhat better Xerox ripoff with a mix-in of other common stuff.

Newton: OK, somewhat innovative.

iPod: Stolen from a whole bunch of people

iPhone: Nothing but a PDA with a phone integrated in it. Obvious next step.

As for "developing to perfection", well, if a smooth, candy-colored shell around a deliberately limited device is perfection, then yeah. I guess you can credit Jobs with a willingness to break from standards, but not with unusually good judgement about when to do it.

To recap:

• Steve Jobs's bad judgment led to the Apple II, Mac, iPod, and iPhone.

• John Sculley's good judgment led to the Apple Newton.

That assessment seems like a refusal to be impressed by the public idolatry of Steve Jobs. Yet even if he wasn't some superhuman philosopher king, nor even supremely technical, he still had talent, and did help bring some seminal tech products into the world.

It's an "innovation" coin, not a "judgement" coin or a "profitability" coin.

For some reason, people get the idea that innovation comes from executive management. It doesn't. Popularization may. Commercial success may. Innovation generally doesn't.

Jobs had talent for (a) packaging up existing stuff, but not in shockingly innovative ways, (b) recognizing and refusing to accept garbage products, and (c) selling the stuff. That's all execution, not innovation.

This involves two questions. They're sort of tedious questions to discuss, because they don't have definitive answers.

1) in a team, how does one determine who deserves credit for an accomplishment?

2) what makes a product truly innovative?

> Several of those products were quantum leaps

And several were overpriced flops that ended up at a landfill in-box. I think "quantum leap" is the same perennial silliness people have been calling out since the coining of the Reality Distortion Field. Half this site would have you believe Bob Iger took a quantum leap in entertainment, it's praise that devalues the meaning of progress.

I'd go further as to say that today's modern struggle for privacy and software freedom only happened because of Jobs' ambivalence towards the developer community and fearmongering over parental controls and other meaningless nonsense.

> he was just a bit of a visionary

Maybe he deserves "a bit" more credit than that?

Jobs didn't believe in cancer treatment https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...

I'm pretty sure he'd have fell in line to the fascist insanity just like all other billionaires. He lived at the time of the height of neoliberal ideology, when most people believed in the conjured public images that the tech bro CEOs gave out in PR. Behind the scenes, things were quite different. Jobs has been reported to be petty, insulting and belittling of his employees

I'm not even a Jobs fanboy but let's give him the benefit of the doubt. He at least believed in things, which is more than I can say for the tech giants that are bending the knee right now.

Well I'm just going by what's been reported in the media. It gives no indication that Jobs was an anti-fascist ready to resist.

Oh they believe in things... https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

at least judging from his products sense, what he believed in was more grounded in the real world

Thank you for referencing his idiot behavior leading to his own demise, I hope that will be on his coin.

Why do you say that?

Was his refusal of cancer treatment more impactful on the world than his creation of Apple Computers?

Probably. Given the known history of Apple it's just as likely that they'd have been successful if Jobs got hit by a bus after the Apple II shipped. His legacy of irrational and unexplained digression is pretty suitably punctuated by his own unwillingness to part with his pancreas.

A timeline where Woz led product design at Apple under a less recalcitrant leader might be one where Apple Computers is still relevant for making computers. The pivot to a lifestyle brand hasn't proven to be the strongest option, in the long term.

He didn't get hit by a bus, though. He led the company for decades.

Surely you've heard how opinionated and domineering Jobs was? Every strategic decision and major product decision was either from him or went through him.

To imagine being anti-pharma, and big corporations used to be a Leftists/Hippy talking point.

Still is. Portland, OR shoots down fluoridated water every time.

You don’t need it in the water when you can get it from many other sources. I find it strange that there would be additives to something basic like water. And as I recall there are studies that show too much can be bad too. It’s hard to know your dosage if random things incorporate it as an additive unexpectedly.

Most of the world doesn't put fluoride in tap water. I appreciate that you've been raised to believe it's a "no-brainer and only idiots would oppose it", but there are actual tangible downsides to doing it and now that fluoride toothpaste is widespread there might not even be any upside to fluoride in water anymore.

Hippies were never leftists, they were liberals. And when fascists come knocking, liberals flock to fascism.

Also, being anti big pharma isn't the same as believing in conspiracy theories. You can't resist if you don't live in reality.

> Hippies were never leftists, they were liberals. And when fascists come knocking, liberals flock to fascism.

I don’t understand this, can you explain what you meant? Maybe with examples?

Democratic party and Biden (liberals) when running against republicans (fascists): "Democracy is at stake" https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-biden-speaks-on-stake...

Biden, when Trump arrives at White House: "Welcome home" https://www.yahoo.com/news/welcome-home-joe-biden-greets-160...

Also, in Germany the Nazi Party never got more than 43,91% of the votes in free elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Party_election_results Hitler rose to power through the support of the "moderate" or "liberal" right wing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler%27s_rise_to_power

Papen wasn’t even remotely left wing or even “moderate”. Hindenburg also hated democracy and wanted to destroy it.

There were barely any liberals left in the Reichstag when it voted for the enabling act (progressive liberalism as we’d understand it hardly existed in Germany back then anyway). Closest would be the moderate-conservative Catholic “Center” party who usually were historically part of the Socialist-Liberal coalition.

Anyway you cut it far-right parties had the majority of seats in 1933. Of course everyone else could have actually tried doing something instead fighting with each other or just tagging along with the nazis “since it can’t be that bad”.

Left-leaning people famously tend to disagree with each other (eg: as lampooned in https://youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4).

If 'hippies' here refers to the original hippies back in the 1960s, they ran the whole range from far pipebombs-in-the-name-of-communism left, to centrist.

> Jobs didn't believe in cancer treatment

His own health choices are a private matter as far as I'm concerned. He held off too long on modern medicine and paid the price for it. Bringing it up here is irrelevant and distracting.

RFK Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

It's not distracting, it's an important detail underlining the ridiculousness of this decision.

Maybe it's just me, but I think innovation awards are for people with scientific mindsets. Jobs obviously didn't have one.

Are you suggesting Apple was not innovative, or that he did not have a role in Apple's innovation?

We can pretend all day that the Apple II, the Mac, iMac, macbook, iPod, iPhone, and iPad would have been exactly the same without Jobs. But in the reality we currently inhabit, he was the person overseeing them all.

  I'm pretty sure he'd have fell in line to the fascist insanity just like all other billionaires.

That's a take that seems based on some kind of ideology more than thinking about the actual person. The actual person was a man with a massive ego, and pretensions of being an artist and intellectual. It's a real stretch to envision Jobs being deferential to Musk or Trump, both of whom, without a doubt, still fantasize about being Steve Jobs.

Musk has massive ego too, and he's drinking the fascist kool aid, perhaps even more than Trump himself. Massive ego is more susceptible to fascist thinking, not less.

https://youtu.be/E8oEWdYfO4U [content-warning: Elon Musk]

Musk is easily on the level of Jobs and arguably beyond him, not just financially, but on the scale of what they've done for Humanity as a whole.

SpaceX and Starlink just by themselves are enough to catapult him beyond Jobs, but you add on Tesla, which pretty much single-handedly pushed electric cars into mainstream culture, and he's easily there.

This isn't even really a subjective perspective, you could objectively argue it.

The personal computer revolution (kicked off in 1977 by the Apple II), and the smart phone era (kicked off in 2007 by iPhone), have done at least as much for humanity.

> The personal computer revolution (kicked off in 1977 by the Apple II),

This is an oversimplification. Apple II was a huge part of it, but didn't kick it off. The real revolution was the IBM PC in 1981. It definitely did not kick it off single-handedly though, since you had the TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Altair 8800 before, or alongside the Apple II. You could argue the IBM 5100 I guess, but it was too expensive for most people.

And like I said above, the iPhone did not "kick off" the smartphone era. It was transformative, sure, but didn't kick it off.

IBM Simon, BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Symbian Phones, Windows Mobile, all came before it, and everyone could clearly see where the entire market was headed even in the early 2000s.

Most of the prevailing narratives about pivotal moments in technology leave out nuance. Still, to say the Apple II and iPhone kicked off new eras is closer to the truth than to credit those eras to the Altair and BlackBerry.

If a person is nitpicky, they could use the same kind of objections to minimize Musk's accomplishments - and the accomplishments of many, many others (Edison, Marconi, Watson & Crick, etc)

Woz is still here.

He’s by and large responsible for mobile phone/social media addiction, which is bad enough on its own, but also enables divisive propaganda, and you think he could offer perspective?

That’s like Henry Ford is by and large responsible for most traffic related deaths since 1910s. Technically correct, I suppose. Entirely meaningless, though…

But it wouldn't make Henry Ford the person you hope will solve your traffic jam.

This is hilariously offbase and untrue.

Social media was already taking off long before the iPhone was on the scene. Facebook was open to the public in 2006, MySpace had already taken off like a rocket at that time, receiving more visitors than Google and Yahoo in the US. Twitter launched in 2006 as well.

The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone - not even close in fact. It was just "the best" in terms of user experience, and caused a rapid acceleration of development for Android, which had started to shift to mobile phone development in 2004 anyway, but really hit overdrive when the iPhone was debuted.

Windows Mobile 6 was out at this time - 2008 - and it was straight trash. I had a T-Mobile Wing that I got in 2006, I believe it had Windows Mobile 5.1. It's usability was a joke compared to the iPhone. This pushed Microsoft to create a mobile OS, and eventually they had something that could have been a real contender, because Windows Phone had a really fantastic interface that actually was a lot more usable than iOS or Android, but Microsoft made fuckup after fuckup in a series of events that almost defies belief.

Exactly. The combination of those things is what enabled the cancerous growth of facebook and twitter. Perhaps "by and large" irked you, but Jobs' contribution was essential.

His vision for PC based world even far surpassed of Gates with the Next platform in which two important technology underpinning the online world were invented using the platform namely the WWW by Berners-Lee and the Doom by Carmack. Not to say that now most of the Apple devices from smartphone, laptop, PC, tablet, smartwatch, etc, are currently using Next derived system as their operating systems.

He also envisioned one of the ultimate aim of computers is creating an experience where we can resurrect Aristotle intelligence and interact with him to receive his wisdom, not unlike something like LLM that we have today.

What exactly did he invent though?

I kind of like Steve Jobs and think Bill Burr's take down is a little unfair; but it's funny and not without merit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1liOZ1fW1F8

I came here wondering if someone had posted this :)

Getting tech products that were 10*% better than the competition to the stage where you could actually buy and own them.

Steve Jobs is one of the founders and the long-time CEO of Apple Computers, which makes products that are widely regarded as some of the most innovative in tech. If you're familiar with the original Mac, for example -- that was Apple. The iPhone went against the grain of the time and introduced the touch-only interface (with multi-gesture). There's lots of other examples.

Exactly. Thanks Xerox!

Ah yes, Jobs saw the mouse and windows UI at PARC in 1979, and therefore nothing they ever did was original and they deserve no credit for innovation. :thumbsup:

woz $2 bill please

Wozniak would be a better choice.

If we aren't producing the penny, why continue to make $1 coins? Almost nobody uses them in the US. I don't think I see a single one in the wild most years, and the only time I get them is change from some train ticket machines.

Because as inflation continues, there's a risk of all those quarters in your pocket collapsing into a black hole? And the dollar bills crumbling to dust?

Admittedly, I haven't really used coins (or bills) on a day to day basis for years. I live in Canada but doubt the US is that different.

I use cash regularly, $1 bills regularly, but not dollar coins. Unlike in most countries they're just not a thing here. Dollar bills do need to be taken out of circulation and replaced, but it's not a problem in practice in the US.

I've heard that some other countries (e.g. Ecuador) that use USD like the dollar coins for their longevity, although that seems a funny reason to produce them. Ecuador coins their own 1, 10, 25, and 50 cent coins, so they could produce a dollar coin if they really needed to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_centavo_coins

> Unlike in most countries they're just not a thing here.

Probably because the bills are still available. People don't change without some kind of reason.

I did live in the US until 2007, and I do think that, if you are going to keep using cash, the wear the dollar bills get is a problem. They get pretty ratty pretty fast, and they're not free to print.

„The last one CEO who cared about the product quality”

No updates taking 2 years to finish, no melting connectors, no overheating new phones. And firing people who proactively work against company they are hired by.

The faulty keyboards of 2016-19 [0] were IMO the most egregious of Apple's hardware faults. Apple worsened it by taking forever to admit fault.

Trying to chat, code (or do anything quickly and precisely) with a keyboard that didn't do what your fingers told it to got extremely frustrating extremely quickly.

I recall public faux pas due to mistyped public chat messages, and CI runs failing due to two characters being where one should have been.

[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/392126/290197

Gross. Jobs was a wife-beating pathetic bully who took credit for the work of others and is dead today because he thought fruit smoothies would cure his pancreatic cancer. People who look up to him are idiots who just don't know the truth or immoral deplorables who do.

Putting Woz on that coin would have been a better choice. Woz would hate it, because he has humility, something Jobs didn't.

His preferred currency was back-dated stock options.

Gross.

Innovation in marketing?

I mean, that is the most obvious choice. Even if Woz was publically well known, giving it to someone who is still alive is kind of tacky.

At least they’re not giving it to Elon…

Pathetic.

Traitorous eight would have been cooler

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