Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer
spectrum.ieee.org
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This is what I see. The biggest test was the Vision Pro. Amazing hardware but only "another iOS" software vision for it, which is a tremendous dropped ball. Another toy-app/media kiosk with its service subscription lanyard.
To me, the Vision Pro screams out that it wants to have a richer interface than a Mac, with spacial friendly windows, a serious work environment, unfettered by a screen boundary. Ironically, to the point of tragedy, the Vision just allows importing of a Mac screen ... as a larger Mac screen.
The Vision screams out for a full spacial development environment, that by being a better place to develop software for any device, Mac or iOS, also pulls developers into creating spacial applications, by default, for themselves as much as anyone else. Again, tragically, Vision Pro development is limited to happening on 2D Mac screens (physical or imported). Xcode, terminal, JIT capable, etc.
Finally, if there is an obvious new dimension of AI that has not been tapped yet, relevent to Apple's greatest heritage, it is the combination of AI and spacial to enable entirely new modes of interaction. AI allows 3D content to be created in more efficient ways than ever before. A perfect and novel fit for spacial hardware and software, that natural habitat for 3D.
Those are three powerful and related software extensions for computing, that will happen, each within the hardware capabilities of today's Vision Pro.
I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces, with AI in a supporting role, beyond the Mac in power and capabilities. It would have made the $3500 price tag completely sustainable. Many of us buy MacBook Pro's loaded up well above that price tag.
But, along with software innovation, Apple has lost the bicycle for the mind philosophy.
Meta is the best in the space and they’re scaling way back on their VR division. It’s just not working as a mainstream product.
Valve has the exact right idea to not bother over-investing into it. It’s a cool toy and a lot of people love it for immersive cool toy stuff like playing games. I think they know that gaming and porn and porn gaming for the loner demographic is the main VR market. Not a bunch of HR and marketing people who wash and brush their hair daily sitting around at a conference table with mark zuckerberg while they ruin their good hygiene and hair style with a sweaty headset.
Apple might have even had some relative success if they gave half a shit about gaming and made the headset compatible with existing controllers. Heck, make it SteamVR compatible, you’d literally have PC owners who don’t even own a Mac buying one.
We might even say that Meta glasses are more of the right direction but I don’t really think that’s the case either. I thought I read a report or two citing poor sales.
Sure, the glasses have less of the “giant robot dystopia computer strapped to my face” issue but they still have a lot of the same problems. They have the creeper factor, they are something you have to wear that many people have no intention of wearing or have very specific preferences for what they want to wear, and they basically do nothing that a smartphone doesn’t already do.
Can you wear meta glasses to a first date? That’s your test. You can’t: you’d weird out the other person.
On top of that, Meta glasses have no money making potential. They just burn data center compute time for zero post-purchase revenue.
They didn't even get the Vision OS right first.
If we're certain, and it's clear, that the technology allows for "entirely new [anything]s," why aren't you listing any of them? What are they? Why do you think you can see these so clearly, whereas the teams and engineers actually working on the technology apparently didn't or don't?
How many 3d interfaces exist in the real world, in contrast to (essentially) 2d? Can you think of any computer interfaces where adding a third dimension resulted in a better experience?
> I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces
Jobs was a proponent of skeuomorphism in interfaces, which is precisely not the "next big thing" in interfaces but rather "what we already know and are comfortable with."
It was amazing at a silicon, screen, camera level but I'd argue the rest of the product was actually insanely poor hardware design.
I understand it was originally meant to be lightweight see through glasses and in the end they went down a slippery slope and made a VR headset but what they shipped showed a fundamental misunderstanding about head mounted computing.
If someone is expected to wear something on their head you have to be maximizing for lightness and comfort, deciding to make it out of metal and glass and defaulting without a top strap is actually baffling. Heavy things on your head really tire you out while using them, the more tiring it is the more effort it feels to go back into it, ultimately engagement rapidly falls off.
Think it really demonstrates a lack of management of the design team vs the actual product vision. The design team were getting their kicks playing with curved glass for what didn't end up even being a viewport out to the world just a weird virtual eye screen adding all that glass weight in the worst possible place essentially for vanity purposes once it became a VR headset not an AR headset. Really seems the design team didn't actually use the product that much during development or someone would have corrected this, but I know that product designers get a kick out of adding something like curved glass.
The Apple board had hired a series of presidents who, in the short term, were good for the stock, but bad for the company strategically. The one good thing they did was hire a guy who didn't give a shit about any of that, tore up the old products and wanted a clean start. Thus, the iMac and iBook was born.
Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/ge...
It's just a legal way to not pay your debts as I understand.
Anyway it happened to me. Basically any stock they gave us was worthless but they kept going and paid salaries.
Guess I’ll have to buy the book
Not that I agree with the point. But I wouldn't assume the poster thinks Jobs and Musk are similar in a broad sense.
Musk had no similar goal for Twitter other than to turn it into a platform for his techno-fascist creed. The only complaints about Twitter that he wanted to act on were that too many people were mean to techno-fascists.
Jobs simplified the lineup - two sets of laptops, two sets of desktops, one professional, one personal. This shut down a significant part of the operations across the board.
I don’t think I’m really that qualified to stand in judgment of the Twitter employees, but after the massive house cleaning, the only major negative changes to the company’s fortunes that I know about is that a lot of liberals decided to flee the platform. But that doesn’t seem connected to the layoffs - that would’ve still happened because of either their policy changes or his overall unpopularity with that crowd. We didn’t see any more notable stability problems with the platform than it had at any point in its long existence. And new features kept being shipped.
In the case of Apple, given that the company was so close to insolvency, I don’t see how anybody could seriously argue that most of management was in severe need of replacement. And when you’ve built an organization to do what turned out to be a lot of the wrong things, it’s likely that a lot of roles really do need to be replaced with different job descriptions.
The only way you can argue mass layoffs are always categorically bad is if we are viewing companies as jobs programs rather than pursuing any other mission (and I’d argue that this holds true even if that mission isn’t to make money).
I don't think Apple under Jean-Louis Gassee would have successfully made these steps. Apple probably would have ended up getting purchased by some larger tech company by the end of 1999; Apple almost got purchased by IBM sometime around 1992-1993, and in early 1996 Sun made a serious proposal to buy Apple.
The crazy thing is Joe O' Sullivan had set out a two month training for Tim Cook to learn the supply side of the company. Cook mastered it in two weeks and O' Sullivan was forced to step down a lot sooner then he anticipated.
You could easily say it was Cook, not Jobs that saved the company.
So? No shortage of "multi-billion dollar companies" that became footnotes. Blackberry. Nokia. SGI. ...
Let's be overly dramatic, cause it's more accurate to how bad they had it.
People only know Nokia Mobiles, however Nokia Neteworks never went away and is more than healthy, owning plenty of key telecommunications infrastructure world wide.
It's not exactly the pinnacle of corporate achievement owning a non-relevant for decades labs. Might as well own the birthplace of ENIAC too.
But also not very relevant to the discussion: Nokia had the infrastructure busines to rely on, while it's consumer side tanked. Apple only had the tanking consumer side. That side of Nokia is what we're comparing it with.
This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.
Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.
Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.
Also disagree with GP's point - Apple is definitely not Next. Next was an enterprise software company. If they were more successful they would be in the same category as Oracle.
At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
WebObjects was fundamentally just a bad abstraction, so good thing too.
If you know J2EE 1.0 and read the WebObjects for Java documentation, there will be very similar examples.
But... Since you mentioned it, I actually have read J2EE and WebObjects documentation. And I conclude that WebObjects was shit. It drew the 'Web MVC' line at the completely wrong place. Nobody ever cared about about DOEs or whatever, they just wanted a database driver. You look at this huge pile of industry crap and its no wonder why Rails was successful.
The daily Rails projects on HN is long gone, people eventually moved on into Clojure, than Elixir, Gleam, nowadays I lost track where to.
Some folks that missed out history lessons are now trying CORBA/J2EE with WebAssembly, WIT, and Kubernetes.
I cannot recall any 'Show HNs' based on J2EE, not that it doesn't work.
Besides interfaces (protocols), the Java runtime has plenty of Objective-C influences, even JAR files are similar to bundles.
Also as I mention in another comment, J2EE started as an Objective-C framework, later rewriten into Java, as OpenSTEP efforts ramped down.
"We'll give you a wodge of cash and we'll keep supplying Office for Mac, so you can continue to supply the market with a rival to our OS at a volume that's insignificant to us, but just significant enough to prevent Windows from falling under the DoJ's definition of a monopoly".
That investment gave Jobs time to turn Apple around, otherwise it would be gone.
We all know that Snow Leopard is considered by many to be the peak of OS X, and Craig returned afterwards. Coincidence?
Apple doesn't do servers, they decided to get out of that market.
Apple decided it doesn't care about workstation market any longer.
The desktop market worldwide is about 10%.
The mobile devices market worldwide is about 30%.
Sure it crushed, in the few countries where Apple rules like North America.
Ferrari isn't crushing it, regardless how you sell their profits over the car industry.
Apple wants to be the Ferrari from computers, which cuts their growth opportunities.
As did Alpha with Windows NT x86 executables.
It was impressive back in the 1990's.
It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.
His cube was collecting dust on the office corner.
This is how much hope people had on NeXT before the Apple deal came to be.
Macintosh was in fact not successful for many years, and Apple survived by chanting "Apple II Forever!" at their legacy edu market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50
Also the fail Apple III was Jobs' machine.
Scully and Gasse made the Macintosh II line successful by marketing expensive workstations to creative professionals. That was against Jobs' "vision" so of course he discounts it. One thing which has never changed: Apple won't lift their finger unless they get a 30% margin.
Being a retro-head who lived through those days obsessively watching every twist and turn... with "strange claim" I was trying to convey it's a "commercial success" is a nuanced judgement on which reasonable people can disagree and any such absolute claims require clear definition of terms, scopes and time frames.
(The Mac press back then loved to portray Jobs as some insane cocaine addict, and local gossip backed that up. Probably not in his biographies, but that would get you fired.)
There was a single importer, Interlog, that you had to physically travel to Lisbon, or order by phone from one magazine ad.
The market was all about C64, Spectrum, Atari, Amiga and PC.
The only place I saw Macs live was a single department on the campus as alternative to UNIX and Windows for Workgroups everywhere, and the secretary on the IT department.
gnustep.org
and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.
Trivial to support. There is probably some AI slop for it. The main issue is providing an object platform people want to use.
I think it's very interesting to read about how his personality grew and how he became a better manager and visionary at his time between CEO-ships.
Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs.
In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.
It was clear at that point that this would be a Jobs-directed bio and I saw no point in continuing to read that.
And even if that book were fully dictated by Steve Jobs, it can still be valuable to know what such a person thinks (or claims to think) about things.
This 11th hour "coming to Jesus" for Jobs where suddenly he's heaping praise on them… smelled off to me.
A lot of things come in full package, same person putting in the same effort(if not better) in a different place/situation doesn't give the same results.
I once worked with a senior engineer/leader at a electronics company who delivered great products/results and ran the shop to literal perfection for like a decade. The company got sold, and he moved on. He was just not able to replicate the same success after that ever, despite by his own admission he tried even harder else where.
Despite the fact that Jobs was like the greatest ever, Im sure without Apple, its culture and overall company inertia he wouldn't be able to do much either.
This is also why if you have some kind of a winning combination you are better off sticking with it even if its not entirely perfect. Anything else could be way worse.
Outside the impressive hardware and NeXTSTEP, NeXT was bleeding most of the time, had it not been for a few generous VCs that had Steve Jobs in high regard, NeXT would not have survived until the moment of Apple's acquisition proposal.
Having your company acquired by Apple, having them base vital parts of their business on your technology, and having your leadership merged into theirs could be seen as a successful outcome.
Did the NeXT investors make out OK?
Those VCs had enough money for us to worry about them.
Jobs' life story makes me reflect on the choices we make in life. My impression is that yeah he changed the world, but he was really embattled with himself and the world, and he made a lot of enemies, partly because he stood on his principles and beliefs, come what may, but I'm sure there's more to the story
"Oh, some Apple folks", he addressed us in a condescending tone"
It's always the damn condescension, it seems to trigger greek tragedy endings and honestly world changing products -- the Mac, the GPU, it's always some asshole disrespecting an underdog to the point of rage
I remember that era well, working for an early (potential that never happened) NeXT software developer, then one of NeXT’s 1st commercial accounts. It was a quite horrible workstation, if pretty. The pre-release rumors about it _were_ enough to push Sun into the SparcStation 1 program (heard from a very connected person at the time). So, thanks Steve.
> Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs.
i agree it def feels like a hit piece, but reading it, my impression was more like 'damn, starting a business is hard' and felt more sympathetic in some weird way... like the steve as the tortured artist or something... '
also, stross does his research (mad respect, real journalism) and digs out lots of numbers and reconstructs the timeline when it was all fresh; def recommended
Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded.
But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.
Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books
Hence becoming Jean-Louis Passé.
Apple had less resources, especially in the dark 1990s, to support such a move. It was made even worse by the fact that its leadership was probably not even aware of the difficulty in moving over, as well as the fact that 1990s Apple wasn't exactly a place people expected to "change the world?".
This was during the fight for survival phase.
This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager.
From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word
By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc
It is only on UNIX land that is a mess, the only thing that people have managed to agree on are POSIX, and Khronos APIs.
It's a really interesting book because it was essentially saying that Steve Jobs was a terrible manager and NeXT was a disaster. I don't think it was wrong either. NeXT was a disaster for its investors.
The lessons I take from that story are: You can do a hundred things wrong and one thing right and the one thing may save you. Most everything NeXT did failed but they created OSX. No one is a perfect genius, everybody makes mistakes, and the most effective people learn from their setbacks.
- Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design
- Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation
- Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel
- Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Orient...) who created Objective-C
- Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible
- Mike Paquette who wrote Display PostScript (and then, repeated that by writing Quartz, née Display PDF after the Apple bought NeXT) --- his posts to Usenet:comp.sys.next.* are a hoot and well worth looking up
- John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep
(for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause)
That NeXTstep included a number of major advances/breakthroughs (7) was noted in the advertising at the time, suggesting that the reader of the ad could then create the balance for a total of 10 --- some of my favourite apps:
- Lotus Improv --- Lotus didn't dare kill of Lotus 1-2-3, so they wrote a new program, which had SJ sending them bouquets of flowers --- a recurring theme in _NeXTWorld Magazine_ was a list of applications which were wanted, and when developed were described as "in the bag" --- really wish I could justify Quantrix at work, or that someone would update the code for Flexisheet so that it would compile....
- Altsys Virtuoso --- v1 was created by the team behind Freehand v1--3, and v2 of AV was ported to Mac OS and Windows as Macromedia FreeHand 4 (a .vrt file could be opened by FH4 by changing the file extension of the .vrt file in the document bundle to .fh4)
- the map builder for a little game called _Doom_
- a full-fledged desktop publishing app by Glenn Reid (author of PostScript Language Design (the Green Book) and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-post...) Pages.app by Pages, Inc.
Other ports were notable, but more prosaic w/ WordPerfect being notable for taking full advantage of Display PostScript and Services and being done in just 6 weeks time (easily done since they started w/ a working Unix version).
It is notable that for a long while, WebObjects was basically keeping the company alive, with major vendors including the USPS and Dell (that latter was a major embarrassment to MS, and their efforts to change Dell over did _not go well and garnered some notable press).
Sad my Cube no longer boots, it w/ a connected Wacom ArtZ, paired w/ an NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running Go Corp. PenPoint (and later an Apple Newton MessagePad 110) represent the high-water mark of my GUI experience and got me through college --- these days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and a MacBook w/ Wacom One, but I still run Freehand/MX....
I still use the first generation Magic Mouse when I have to, and I hate its sharp edges.
I don't know anyone who likes it, they usually say they prefer the trackpad.
Interestingly, seem to work better on Windows these days as I've discovered inadvertently. Bought a cheap used/surplus Thinkpad to install Linux and discovered it came pre-installed with Windows 11 and it actually works well.
Depends what I'm doing. I'm very happy just using a trackpad day to day but there are some things like photo editing where I prefer a mouse.
Are you in some situation where you are being forced to use a Magic Mouse?
Other manufacturers make mice in every form factor you can imagine. I don’t believe any apple product comes with a Magic Mouse bundled - you’re not forced in any way to buy one.
Apple don’t make any headphones that I like. I don’t feel like this is a failing on Apple’s part?
Kind of surprising how bad it is since it's their official, heavily advertised option.
Thankfully the walled garden at least has ports for outside equipment.
i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.
Anyone with a hot negative take on Steve Jobs should watch some of the interviews and presentations he gave as early as the 80s. To me he comes across as a really sharp and surprisingly genuine person. Certainly with flaws but compared to others he just seems real, for lack of a better word.
The things he says are sometimes amazingly prescient, like the interview was made in the 2000s instead of decades earlier, and it's interesting how much effort he puts in to trying to explain it to those who had no idea. It certainly impresses me, when I see it with the benefit of knowing what happened.
I would have loved to see his take on the current AI developments. There is a primordial stew bubbling now that reminds me of both the personal computer and smartphone revolutions but nobody in the circus seems to have any real idea what the most important implications are. I think Steve might have.
Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.
Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.
In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.
When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.
I think of it as what happens in the show Survivor, where people sometimes team-up and vote out the strongest players because they perceive them as a threat, rather than taking advantage of them to help the team advance in the game. In other words, it's human nature.
(but isn't this a bit off topic?)
The last sacred mile of our social lives has been invaded and corrupted no?
No one enjoys a concert or sunset without feeling the need to capture and share it.
Who is to blame for that?
Steve Jobs
> Smart phones are what made social media toxic.
we probably arent super disagreeing anyways, all im saying is its kind of like blaming uber eats for delivering lots of junk food to everyone when the problem is the junk food
in other words, probably we should think about why we allow these social media companies to prey on our human biases.
hypothetical, but would you still be against smartphones if facebook or 4chan etc didn't exist or was illegal as a business? if so, whats the reason?
Pandora’s box didn’t just have social media in it.
Umm no.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
Jobs:
I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
NeXT was, at its core, about getting back to the other two things.
Please avoid swipes and tropes like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Politics rules everything. You can be liberal and literally get away with murder. Gates was hated from 2000 on and loved again when the tech community found out he supported forced vaccinations and climate change.