Steve Job's Yacht - Venus | Hacker News Reader

Steve Job's Yacht - Venus

mashable.com

38 pointsgorans46 comments

So the Dutch shipyard crew finishes an 8 or 9 figure yacht (that you know had to be not as easy as a regular 8 or 9 figure yacht) and they get handed a $25 iPod and a thank you note written in English?

That kind of came off as tacky. Or a fitting summary of Jobs' career.

Except that, these employees were paid by the manufacturer of the yacht company. The Jobs' didn't have to give them anything. A thank you note was already above. The iPod was beyond.

Paradoxically giving a cheap gift often makes you appear stingier than giving no gift.

A cheap gift? These guys make yachts, not buy them.

Or...maybe they got paid as usual and enjoyed working on an very interesting and challenging project.

Incidentally 86% of Dutch people speak English, from my experience that is higher in coastal / docklands areas. Also an iPod shuffle is $49. I thought it was a nice gesture.

You don't think the Jobs family gets a company discount on iPods? C'mon.

So the value of a gift, unlike the value of a product, depends on what the giver paid for it? I would expect the value of the gift to be what it would cost me to acquire it, surely?

Not necessarily. Depends on whether you would have bought it for yourself.

Or you made an incredibly stupid leap of logic and forgot to consider the fact that these guys most likely are employed by a company that compensated them for their work throughout the months or years that it took to build the ship.

Think of it like you bringing out food and drinks for construction workers fixing your roof.

If you were fixing the roof of a $100,000,000 mansion and the owner comes out at lunch time and hands you a warm can of Wal-Mart Cola, what would you think? See dagw's comment above.

If the owner came out, I'd be pretty pleased that he was taking an interest. If his estate manager came out, I'd be pleased they were being considerate.

Clearly that's not what you would think, but that just denotes that you have a fuzzy idea of how being contracted to do a job works.

I've done yard work and demolition for a few very rich people and I was always appreciative when they came down with drinks--most didn't do anything other than hide out upstairs and wait for us to leave. If someone had come down with WalMart Cola, I probably would have thought, "I can't believe this guy owns a chain of restaurants and still goes to Wal-Mart to buy soda."

Exactly, look at it this way... How many yachts did they make WITHOUT getting a thank you note?

Unless it was one of the Walton family... =)

It's easy to go "A cheap iPod Shuffle? Come on.", but it's not about getting the gift it's about getting the memento of the work that was done.

Plus that iPod Shuffle is probably now worth about 20 iPod Shuffles.

Speaking as a longtime Apple user, Steve Jobs fan, blah blah -- that is one butt ugly boat (it's hard to imagine Steve Jobs signing off on the chrome bit), and an iPod Shuffle as a gift does seem kind of lame. Surely an iPod Nano at least.

(Heh, maybe it would have been a nano if they'd figured out how to get rid of the chrome thing.)

Its a gift of gratitude. They came over and acknowledged the work of the persons who build this boat. They could have sent someone to pick it up.

How would you feel when you finish a multi-year multi-million project for a client and they would send someone over to thank you for everything and even handing out some gift. (this rarely happens in our industry)

As it does matter how much they paid for it the company made a lot of money of this, so did the worker. And you dont sell Yachts like hotdogs on the street. From your comment i would suspect they had to come and hand over 10k+$/person for doing their day job?

The funny thing is that the sum seems less than the parts here—nothing looks really all that bad in isolation[+], but as a whole it's awkward and unbalanced, looking like unrelated pieces sort of crammed together as an afterthought. Utterly without grace.

I wonder what Apple's industrial designers think about it...

[+] Aesthetically, mind you; judging from comments on other sites, the hull shape is not so good for an ocean-going vessel...

So you're saying that it's an aesthetically pleasing piece of work that while functional isn't the absolute best you can get? Sounds like Apple products to me. (I wonder if this'll kick off a big yacht buying trend?)

No; please read what I wrote again.

I would like someone to confirm that is Steve Job's Yacht and that he was involved in the design process.

That yacht seems the antithesis of a Jobsian yacht.

Ostentatious. Gaudy. A landlubber's office complex on water. Features and design that would make it difficult to handle on water.

Dysfunction follows form.

It does look like more like a building than a yacht

I had a similar emotional reaction to the boat. I don't know the first thing about yacht design so I'm really out on a limb here, and I don't think I would go so far as to say "ostentatious" or "gaudy" although there were a few things that seemed a bit out of place to me. The shiny bow, the boxiness of the rear decks, the symmetry of the roof lines - none seemed really consistent with what I would have expected. Of course I don't know what I was expecting, just that this didn't feel right. Even the name feels a bit off. I imagine that this is someone's boat, and I'm not totally convinced that this one belongs to the Jobs'.

Dysfunction follows form.

You're assuming the primary function of a yacht is to travel quickly and gracefully through a wide variety of waters. While some hold that view, other believe the primary function of yacht is to be an awesome office, apartment and party space that can be moved between the St. Tropez and Monaco harbors. This boat seems to fulfill latter function perfectly.

In comparison to other yachts (E.g. http://list25.com/25-most-expensive-yachts-ever-built/) "Venus" looks pretty minimalist to me.

Isaacson spoke with Jobs about it and it's detailed in his biography.

I think his love of minimalist Bauhaus design really shines through here. Not my cup of tea, but then I like furniture in my house, too :)

I remember reading his bio and wondering what this looked like--apparently it was his last big personal project that he was trying to get done before he died. It looks very Jobs-ian to me, kind of like a Star Trek spaceship landed in the water.

Am I the only one who sees this?:

http://imgur.com/jdEEx

I don't really care; people can do whatever they want with their money, _obviously_. But I am kind of surprised Jobs owned/commissioned a yacht. I always figured owning a yacht was an abject status symbol, and that somehow Jobs tried to be 'above' these things. meh

Slow news day apparently ...

That is quite the eyesore, with a complete lack of any emotion or inspiration and it has what looks like an Apple store inside.

I think it probably says something about my eye for design that I prefer the megayachts which look more like cross-channel ferries (Le Grand Bleu and Octopus) than the god awful fibreglass gin palaces.

I prefer powerboats, but the Abramovich's megayacht was awesome. afair aside of heli landings it had a powerboat inside and anti-missile protection. this Jobs' one looks like an ugly office building.

As a Navy vet and a technical guy, I wouldn't mind seeing the actual specs on this beast. As a sailor, I'd rather crew on a ship designed more for performance than luxury.

Not an expert, but I'd be worried about those hull windows around the bow getting broken as you plowed through waves. Maybe the boat is more of an Apple III than an iPhone.

It looks like something I'd accept if it were given to me as a gift, but to me personally wouldn't be worth the purchase with my money.

The front looks a bit weird.

#12 7 points by gorans 2 hours ago

#13 141 points by Pwnguinz 15 hours ago

how does it work?

Read yourself again, you wrote it. Hint: It's not a sort on points.

I know it's not a sort of points, I'm just surprised how a post with only 5 upvotes through over 2 hours can land so high on the homepage.

Originally the formula was: (points-1)/(hours+2)^1.4 , but pg changes it whenever he wants, so the "gravity coefficient" is now different from 1.4.

You can read detailed analysis of the (published) formula in 2009 in http://www.arcfn.com/2009/06/how-does-newsyc-ranking-work.ht...

And there are a lot of secret coefficient corrections, for example the number of flagging that the submission received and the number of comments (if it has too many comments, it is too polemic and it is pushed down.)

If we use the 2009 formula we get

  Points(P)  Time(H)  (P-1)^.8/(H+2)^1.8
        7        2        0.3457
      141       15        0.3177

that gives the ordering you saw.

tx!

"if it has too many comments, it is too polemic and it is pushed down." well, this is surprising.

To me it looks like an Imperial Star Destroyer.

boat aside, I'd love to see more about the instrumentation on the bridge with those imacs…

The upper section, is that an iPad mini stacked on an iPad?

I'd have to be a first-gen iPad with the rounded back. Top kinda looks like a Mac Mini from the front, but that diminishes in the other views.

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