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Comment by gitpusher | Hacker News Reader

I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid

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Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.

Completely agree.

I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.

Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.

It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.

What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?

It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.

A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.

I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.

I've worked in physical product development at some companies that include names you'd recognize.

More often than not, those annoying features are direct requests from the person up top who smacks people. They want that feature because they think it will sell, and it's no use trying to argue with them because you'll just get smacked again.

Yeah I think that was one of the unusual things about Jobs; he really cared about product design for its own sake and not just for profit.

I think that is pretty unusual in large companies.

Can't you improve this product with a screwdriver (to open it up) and wire-snipper (to cut off the LED)?

Oh yeah, it's definitely solvable if you can be bothered with it.

It was more just the observation that an unnecessary light had been included that degrades the performance of the product.

I find it intriguing how that comes to be. On paper it seems like adding the light wouldn't hurt the product even if not useful but no body actually used it it seems.

There is a chance the led is also used as a important diode in the circuit, plainly removing it can greatly reduce the lifespan of the device. (more common in cheaper products)

Adding a appropiate diode in it's place is advised.

What's the physical reason for this? (elec noob here)

that chance is very low

> I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.

Kinda related but also not really, my own pet peeve is the pouring spout in many products, coffee machine, water jugs, buckets... they might look effective but I find that more often than not, they are curved too much and drip all over when actually pouring.

And I always have to wonder, after serving coffee from one of those things, did the person who design it never even try it just once? Didn't they ever use such a thing, they never ever poured water from a pot?

People in stores look towards bright lights. Objects with bright lights on them sell better.

Do you have an actual study on this or is it just a belief held by some people who don't have any better idea to make others think they are useful?

I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.

As a dev Im always noticing these little problems in my designs but my boss just wants the thing done asap without worrying too much about it being nice to use.

Same here to the point when I do leave it’s going to be one of the reasons given.

One example is how this product manager type, because of company politics, isn’t really under the same department as the other software teams.

Because of his very very narrow horse blinkers approach, he doesn’t see or even comprehend why we’d want to align with literally anything in any other team and that includes visual UI stuff.

That’s why we have a bright neon pink “Back” button. Right in the literal center of the screen. It’s insane.

It is the bottom and the top that appreciates the quality

the middle appreciate metrics and deliverables

Oh in my case it's a small company and my boss is "the top"

There is a special role for that: Test Engineer. However, testing is a cost center and is underfunded in most companies.

For most things small details unfortunately do not really matter and thus are left out

I was just thinking about Linux/Linus the other day. How will Linux fair when Linus is no longer with us?

Fare, not fair

(I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter but I couldn’t help it in a discussion on quality)

In comments on an article about spellchecking no less

In this case, both fair and fare are words in English. Which shows that spell checking needs to know a lot about grammar and context to work in general. Basically you need an LLM. Or if not a 'large language model', perhaps at least a small language model.

I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker when I was using it in school - which predated LLMs by many years!

I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice

Depends on what you mean by 'optimal'. Ie what are you optimising over?

In terms of 'can I run it locally on an early 2000s machine?' LLMs are definitely the wrong choice.

In terms of 'what can I quickly hack together in 2025 regardless of variable cost?' LLMs might be the right choice.

> I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker [...]

You can get pretty far with some lookup tables and some heuristics.

farely decent?

Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end

If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.

In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.

But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.

Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean

The instant on thing actually bothered me enough to make switch from windows back to Mac( by proxy the idle battery drain on windows was also pretty terrible)

Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.

Try saying the same things over and over to adults for years

Alignment of incentives. I'm sure the personal humiliation of being yelled at by Jobs was a reasonably strong incentive, but I'm certain the perception that failing to deliver would have him personally sending you to the dole queue asap was even more of a strong incentive.

Compare to most corporations where the only thing you can do to get fired is fail at office politics and failure to deliver/delivering the lowest quality crap that can be passed off is just business as usual.

Yeah, with an attitude like that it's no wonder his products were such failures.

> Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.

See from the replies to this how well you got your point across.

Yes, Steve Jobs was a jerk.

Alas, human don't come fully customisable. You get to pick from the packages on offer. And it seemed like for Apple Steve Jobs' good parts only came as part of a package that also included his bad parts.

To me it sounds like the symptom (emotion) of someone who deeply cares.

These things need to be well-placed to be effective. Sounds like it was.

>Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!"

When did the OG MacBook Air have instant on at launch in 2008?

IIRC the M1 brough Instant on and Jobs wasn't around anymore.

Most macbooks I remember since a long time ago were pretty much instant on way before apple sillicon. Maybe you had some corporate crapware installed in yours/.

Depends on your definition of "instant".

What we really mean is before you complete the action of fully opening the hinge to 120deg which is something like 1.5-2seconds?

AFAIK pre M1 days it would be still a few seconds after fully opening and now it's more like < 1sec.

Does not look like it was a healthy work culture.

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