Steve Jobs' cabinet
perfectdays23.substack.com
perfectdays23.substack.com
In a couple instances, I've turned down work because the budget and expectations were wildly incompatible, but that's as simple as saying "I can't do the work you're looking for at that price." I'll offer suggestions for a more cost-effective alternative if I can. In one instance, that's turned into work down the line when the client came back with a different project with a budget more in alignment with their goals.
Lastly, while everything Nancy Hiller (RIP) has ever written is worth reading, these two pieces are highly relevant to the question of standards, budgets, and delivering the whole project.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2019/09/11/dont-knock-the-la...
https://www.popularwoodworking.com/editors-blog/lets-make-ev...
I’m at the fourth update and I did a little clean up. I didn’t tear it and start from zero, but I cleaned it up so future me will be happier when the next change comes (and we now know they keep wanting updates to this)
The original way worked and was clean and I just assume that the next updates were done under some time constraints. A lot of code here just keeps working for years with no updates so it made sense to do it faster with less flexibility. Not everything needs to be great when more good enough functionality is more useful.
To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".
Half an hour with a screwdriver seems doable
If anything, it's a good, high-margin market. Beside the actual piece, you sell both self-appreciation and status. Apple long tried to make their products closer to fashion accessories, with some success.
And instead of losing sleep over it, I would have lost sleep if I had used a perfectly good large sheet of plywood, and lost the opportunity to make something nice with it. Real wood? Forget about it.
Steve Jobs' imaginary carpenter must be too rich to care about stretching her materials as far as they can go.
I would love to use solid wood for cabinet backings, but I don't. The reason? $ and time cost will be 5x, and it will not be as durable as layered ply. Plywood actually makes a better cabinet!
The difference between me and SJ? He could sell the shit out of that expensive, not-as-good cabinet. And that got artists and engineers excited to start making high-quality things to go in that expensive cabinet.
A craftsman knows where to apply his effort.
And they're not selling to cabinet makers.
Related but distinct from aesthetic beauty, there's a sort of mechanical beauty. Simplicity and elegance and all that. All the parts that came out of the Macbook were held in with one screw - good - but all those screws look to be different shapes and sizes - less good. Maybe it isn't possible to have both. For my money I spend a lot of time going back and forth between the two.
I've always prided myself on taking a craftsman-like approach to software engineering... thinking deeply about interfaces, ownership, lifetimes, how the public API looks, how using the public API feels...
Lately, though, with the advent of LLM-assisted coding this mindset is starting to feel hollow. Why spend 1.5x as long crafting something robust when, in all likelihood, it will be replaced or refactored by LLM tooling within the next 5 or 10 years?
For example, the syscalls for linux are never changing IMO. The cost is unbounded to change, even with AI.
Should your APIs be treated any different?
At the very least, the LLMs work better with better APIs and data models, which yet accelerates the solving of problems.
"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".
"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."
So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.
That's interesting because (a) it's a story of how the cabinet principle didn't prevail, and (b) it's a brilliant example of how to communicate.
More cynically, these stories are also a way for Steve Jobs, who lacks technical skill but is still the boss of the technical geniouses, carves out a niche for himself where he is the undisputed leader and no oen can challenge him: his own subjective sense of aesthetic.
I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.
I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III
> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly.
> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat.
No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits.
A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy epoxy river pour with embedded 24 carat gold flakes that has no business being there.
It's startling to imagine what Apple would be capable of, if survivable hardware was a remote business priority for them.
Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged by being bolted to inexpensive parts. It was difficult to assemble correctly. Money was spent in the wrong places. I had a long list of complaints about the erratic engineering in it.
For example, it had sodium-cooled valves, something one finds only on a race engine. They are used for cooling. The values slid into bronze valve guides. The bronze valve guides were pressed into aluminum heads. The trouble was, aluminum expands at twice the rate of bronze. So when the engine got a little hot, the valve guides would come loose, and you'd have to rebuild the cylinder head. The sodium-cooled feature was completely sabotaged by those valve guides. A proper design would have mechanical retention of the valve guides, and not rely on a press fit.
The correct way to engineer this is to have the male spline with an extra tooth and the female with a missing tooth - then it can only be assembled one way. A cost-free improvement, saving a lot of aggravation for the mechanic. (BTW, this is what Boeing does.)
I confess, I found that quote from Walter Isaac's biography on Jobs to be kind of gross. It felt to me like a bullshit line that Jobs asked him to put in. By all accounts, Jobs was completely dismissive of his adoptive parents — this felt like an attempt to rewrite history by Jobs.
> George Crow, our recently hired analog engineer, interrupted Steve. “Who cares what the PC board looks like? The only thing that’s important is how well that it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”
> Steve Jobs responded strongly. “I’m gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”
People tell stories all the time that may have some non-truths in them (we can never truly know, can we?) Where it’s appropriate to call bullshit is when someone claims something that isn’t realistic, just doesn’t fit, or simply can’t be true. In this case, Steve really did obsess over the “back of the cabinet” stuff at his time at Apple:
> “The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys by the way.”
That’s a direct quote from where he introduced the iMac. A product that had translucent plastic so you could see the insides of the machine.
Should I spend that time futzing around so much? Objectively it sounds like a terrible use of (a lot) of time.
But the results speak for themselves. I can’t think of a better way to both study my own code (with all the advantage of intrinsic motivation), see it from so many directions, and yet have so much free unconstrained brain capacity at the same time, lost in deep long-hot-shower let-the-universe speak to me receptor mode.
Major design wins. Surprising bugs pressed out, before they even got to show themselves to the world. Poor things.
And I really like how my code looks when I have to look at it again!!!
Now, with all that said, Apple has tried to improve in all these areas and have since been innovative in how things are actually put together.
So, the takeaway is if if the quote from Jobs did inspire people then it was a good thing.
Basically, a lot of new cars are very simple and elegant when you open the hood, showing clearly fluid reservoirs, a sculpted engine, and some elegant plastic covers to tie it all together.
... but basically the plastic covers are a "second hood" with the ugliness pushed down one level.
I will say that powermac G* and mac pro systems have always been kind of cool - they were made to be opened and there were always really nice engineering details.
Things I remember are the carefully stored hard disk screws for slide in drives on the powermac G5. Or the pci express card locking systems. Or the case opening procedure on any of the systems.
I also remember some corvettes (C5?) required the side of the car to be removed to change the battery.
The engineer from my company who interacted with the vendors and I were chatting about the machines and we kept coming back to the point about nicely the first guy had routed the cables and put them in the cabinet. It would be covered by a metal sheet and hence invisible but the work he put into it was obvious when we opened it up to install a RAM stick.
I don't know how to quantify the practical benefits of this but it does indicate a different mindset. I think that will spill over to other work which has more tangible benefits and that's a good thing.
> They cared less about share price
And yet the value of Apple went up into the $trillions.
Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.
How would this be „competing business“?
And even if, how would this repudiate his arguments, which he documents in detail?
How come Apple never sued him if it was all fabricated?
There really isn’t an objectively correct answer. You’re basically asking what is good taste?
I think this is one of the things a good mentor can help you with.