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Comment by crims0n | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder what an alternative history would look like if Jobs was still around. Apple has done well, but they have largely played it safe. Even their riskiest product, the Apple Vision Pro, seemed like less of an innovation and more a response to market expectations.

Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses. He did it with desktop and mobile computers, he did it with the mp3 player, and did it with the smartphone and tablet. What has post-Jobs Apple done? Maybe the smartwatch… but one could argue that in itself is an iteration on the iPod (remember the Nano and Shuffles?).

Credit where credit is due, they are killing it in silicon - but that is a bit opaque culturally.

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Jobs brought product to the table, but I don’t he did so because it was niche. I think he chose the products because it was solved a personal problem.

I remember a pre-iPod MP3 player where, to get to the 200nd song (a somewhat common thing if you listen to music a lot), it was absolute struggle.

Well then the iPod came out was its analog wheel. Suddenly selecting and listening to music was enjoyable.

I continually think about this: I feel like a lot of products, from kitchen tools to vehicles, have never been used by the people who make them.

His personality aside, what I think Jobs brought to the table was that he was a head guy with taste that was actually making things for himself and that he actually used what his company made day to day. It created a feedback loop that I think many companies lack (that or the head people have no taste).

> Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses.

It was more than this. He understood how to communicate to both customers/employees why what they bought/worked on mattered. For all the stories of his assholery, very few people bring up that the same people who complained about his assholery also acknowledge that he brought the best work out of them.

TBH when it's not you engineering the product it's quite easy to say "no" to others until they do it for you.

I'm gonna say that we need MORE "assholes" in the industry, the way things are now. Or rather, that being a perfectionist kinda makes one an asshole, because by definition you don't tolerate anyshit less than perfect.

Recall all the things in tech that have peeved you since a long time:

If you were to be given charge of those companies, would you waste time asking people nicely?

I mean, sure, maintain basic humanity, don't devolve into Linus Torvalds, but to make major changes you HAVE to not put up with bullshit.

iTunes in Jobs' era had no overly intrusive DRM; you could literally copy purchased songs to another computer and play them there.

Now, Apple TV+ is so anal about DRM that skipping a few times causes it to get stuck, while it tries to reestablish that you are free of sin. Trying to watch on iPad on a slower-than-lightspeed connection while on travel requires a restart of the app every few minutes. I had to cancel my subscription and just pirated a copy of Severance just to be able to finish the show.

You can't even take screeshots. You can't even copy text from Books.app (in some/most books). There's so much user-hostile bullshit in iOS/macOS now that would get employees/managers lashed if Jobs was there. And I, a user, would be all for it.

I could keep going but I don't want to ruin my own day.

> Jobs excelled at taking a niche product category and reinventing it for the masses.

Huh? Jobs didn’t invent much of anything. Woz reinvented personal computing, Jobs built a money printing machine around it.

Hullot convinced Jobs to have an engineering group work on turning the iPod into the iPhone.

Apple wouldn’t be what it is without Jobs but the people who give him all the credit for inventions he had almost nothing to do with gets exhausting.

About the only thing I think was HIS idea was the Lisa, and that was an absolute disaster.

I think you're reading "reinvent" here too literally. I doubt the OP literally thinks that Jobs personally designed every part of the iPhone and simply directed mindless drones to just do the dirty work of manufacturing it. But I think it's fair to say that Jobs' vision and direction of what the iPhone can and should be absolutely "reinvented" the category of "smart phone" for the masses.

> But I think it's fair to say that Jobs' vision

And I think it’s fair to call that revisionist history of the worst kind. It wasn’t his vision at all. Someone else had the vision and had to sell Jobs on it who was initially skeptical.

So are you saying that had Hullot taken his ideas to any other company, the result would have been the same phone? Again, no one is saying that Jobs was solely responsible for the things Apple has done, or that other people weren't major parts of that. Even Hullot's own words tell us that the phone design he had in mind was not the touch based keyboard-less design that the iPhone became[1]:

    In 2006, Steve decided to make this telephone: the iPod was on the decline and 
    he had the brainwave of producing a laptop without a keyboard - something that 
    was unthinkable at the time, and which caused quite a stir at Apple. We were 
    a secret project, barely known to Apple France.

He says he pushed the idea that Apple needed to create a phone with "the equivalent of Mac OS 10", but that's a very nebulous statement, that could range from iOS style to WindowsCE style. But again, no one who talks about the vision Jobs had for products (or at least no one who actually knows Apple history) believes that Jobs himself was responsible for everything and handing down fully formed ideas and designs from on high.

[1]: https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...

What do you think would happen to Woz if he never met Jobs?

I’m sure he would’ve been a very successful engineer regardless but I doubt we would even know his name.

I’m not saying this to dispute his achievements etc. But it’s very one sided to attribute all the achievements to either one of them.

> What has post-Jobs Apple done?

The Airpods are one of the most successful products ever

That blows my mind.

I walk by an apple store regularly, its full of people standing around, even at like 2pm on a weekday.

I'm always confused. What are those people doing?

I get buying apple products, I generally don't, but they're good at somethings and bad at others, so you know, choices.

But why go to an apple store, much less stand around? Apple products are just generic at this point. There's a new phone, which is exactly the same as the last 10 phones. Or a laptop or a tablet, etc.

They’re probably waiting for someone to bring back their iPhone with a replaced screen after they dropped it.

> Apple products are just generic at this point. There's a new phone, which is exactly the same as the last 10 phones.

This is way too much of an exaggeration to be taken with any amount of seriousness! If you can’t see the huge upgrades in capabilities over the last 10 phones, you’re not the target customer for any smartphone and haven’t been paying attention to the announcements every year.

10 might be a slight exageration but this is probably more just a reflection of being old and jaded and stuff.

Personally every couple of years I buy the latest samsung phone, its a bit nicer, but not the kind of thing I need to go look at before buying. It's more like milk lol

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