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Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

One big difference from Steve: it isn't the Steve show anymore. The people showing this stuff off are the people who lead the the teams that work on these things.

It's so much cooler to me to see the people closer to the work talking about it rather than just Steve Jobs, as amazing as he was to watch. I'll take slightly stilted any day of the week as a tradeoff.

Ternus did introduce a new rhetorical thing, though. He framed some of the guiding principles during the opening and throughout as ideas originating from himself, not Apple. Cook rarely said "I" in relation to a claim, other than "I'm so proud of" X, Y, Z. That's a bit more product guy, a bit more Opinionated. I am hoping for more of that.

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I disagree twice. It was very cool to see Steve Jobs, and he was heavily involved in the work and design decisions, perhaps even more than the people presenting.

How? How involved? Like what exactly did he do?

He was often critical down to the specific detail, such as amount of padding on a button.

So replier is right here: Jobs had opinions about literally every detail, he pushed people to work out those details and challenge their own assumptions, and he talked about these things in public like a designer—not just about beauty but also HCI. You could see in his presentations that he understood the fucking details about why things were good. No tech CEO is able to tell you why their version of showing that a window is currently in focus is good, and on the off chance they do, they probably wouldn’t use the term “key window” because they don’t know it.

There was a Jobs story about how he was bothering the engineer who was working on the calculator so much about the layout that the engineer just made a layout engine Jobs could play with, so he could design it himself.

I do consider that fundamentally different from the people lower in the hierarchy though. That’s what I value about the Cook era keynotes: seeing Apple as not just a single person.

That’s very true—the dude was up everyone’s ass. But there is a difference between Steve being involved as a stakeholder and people who are closer to doing the work itself.

I mean yeah if I had to choose purely for entertainment value, I’d watch Steve all day. But I think it can also be true that seeing the people closer to the metal is very cool too. And I frankly prefer it to seeing Apple as only one person.

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