Who the hell is Steve Jobs?
He might’ve been a marketing genius
Oncology… not so much
Steve Jobs did actually have multiple operations
Where is the “genius”?
I was reading an interesting article the other day about how after World War II people were obviously opposed to populism, and by the '80s and certainly the '90s people that were born after the war had lost the awareness of the danger that hero worship creates.
At the same time, many organizations including government organizations had failed to update themselves over the years, so people romanticized the idea of someone walking in and magically making the correct snap judgments that would remedy the situation. This was so pervasive in the business world I think in part because it allowed corporate executives to justify f****** over ordinary employees. If the company makes or breaks because of one person at the top, who cares if you’re paying people minimum wage and they can’t even afford to pay for dental care or a car.
What amazed me is how long that vision of Steve Jobs stuck around. Even in recent years people have been praising him, but if you think of the value in his company, it’s mostly a load of s***. Those phones and computers are incredibly overpriced, and they have so many bad aspects, especially lock-in, which most people intuitively understand these days. And still we have Apple addicts.
I’m not an Apple fan, I never liked the way he dictated form and function and told everyone to fuck off about their feelings. Now that said, his leadership did bring some things to market that would not have grown organically, for better or for worse.
The competition had to contend with good phone battery life, unibody laptops with high DPI screens, and large touchpads with physical feedback. Left to their own devices, these companies would have just kept regurgitating/iterating the same cheap designs they had made for decades.
He wasn’t magic; if he had any superpower, it was attracting and retaining talent.
Jobs created toxic work environments. That’s nothing to envy. Nothing to replicate. But we’re in a capitalist society so fuck your feelings.
Jobs created toxic work environments.
…and so did Linus Torvalds* — he’s certainly not the embodiment of capitalism. But I absolutely have a huge amount of respect for Torvalds, even if I don’t approve of his way of his interpersonal/professional style.
(I used to run Arch btw [but I run Debian now].)
*He’s supposedly taken steps in the right direction here and has made improvements.
That’s nothing to envy.
I don’t think that word, or anything like it appeared in my statement.
Your take feels incredibly aggressive. Most people do not want to tinker, they just want their tech to work… Regarding Steve Jobs, are you saying he did not steer Apple to a level of success and prosperity that 99% other companies dream of?
Your opinion of what is overpriced is just your opinion. Apples sales numbers says otherwise, they do not have a monopoly in any market they compete in.
okay so you are right about people wanting their tech to work, but it really is categorically untrue that Apple is the only way to achieve that, or that they achieve that consistently at all.
Take for example the Google Pixel: price competitor to the iPhone, has parity with iOS on software updates, features, and functionality. I got my mom the Pixel 6 4 years ago, and she has never had an issue using that phone. in fact she uses it so heavily you’d think she’s a power user, despite having used a flip phone until 2018. it certainly can break, but I can buy Pixel genuine parts on iFixit and replace my battery or a friend’s.
Windows is actually ass, I’m not defending it - but it does “just work” for many non-technical folks, as bad as it may be.
and let’s talk about MacOS and Mac computers in general. Have you tried doing something as basic as snapping a window on stock MacOS, or worse, had one fail in some way and needed to have it repaired?
Soldered SSDs that you can’t remove are not user friendly and don’t “just work” when 20 years of photos just went up in smoke because you needed a board-level repair expert to de-solder and read the NAND chips only to discover that they’re dead, not to mention having to buy a new machine every few years as the chips continue wearing out, and are serialized and paired to the device so you cannot replace them. Obviously, the customer won’t understand all that. But they will understand that they lost their photos and spent thousands of dollars that they could have saved, not because the repair tech wasn’t skilled at their job, but because hostile Apple design lost them 20 years of photos and forced them to get a new computer.
not to mention Apple’s literal crime against privacy in the UK. Also, those SSDs I mentioned? FileVault backs their encryption keys up to iCloud by default, meaning if your key goes to iCloud in the UK, the police and anyone who gets access to iCloud can decrypt and read the full contents of your machine by booting it into recovery mode and decrypting the volume with said key, because Apple bent over for regulators instead of just disabling iCloud for their users entirely and blaming regulators, or just leaving ADP as is.
I’m not sure what you’re defending Apple for.
Why is everyone so aggressive about history and facts? Please take your blind rage back to Reddit. This thread is about Steve Jobs, acting like he did not lead Apple to numerous successes is a bold face lie. You might not agree with his methods but that doesn’t mean he accomplished nothing.
Your example proves my point, the alternative, Google, is just as if not more evil than Apple… just because they allow third party stores and less lock-in does not mean their product is better. Each person can choose the product that suits their needs.
I can’t speak for everyone but I find facts and history important when discussing the behavior of any person or organization’s behavior.
Steve Jobs did make Apple very successful - but at the same time, Apple still did bad things and those things are a part of what he did, for better or worse, and refusing to critique them is also not advisable.
because they allow third party stores and less lock-in does not mean their product is better
each person can choose the product that suits their needs
less lock-in is better for user choice and user experience, as defined by the meaning of lock-in. If a user is massively inconvenienced by a service or device when they attempt to move away from it or if something else fits their needs better, that stifles user choice because the switching costs are too high.
your original comment mentioned that users want their devices to “just work” - do you think Apple’s more aggressive lock-in is conducive to devices “just working” when the user wishes to switch to Android or PC as opposed to iOS or Mac?
Of course he did bad things, he’s human, every great person has said, you learn and grow from your failures.
Apple’s iOS was far more polished than Android in the beginning. Hell, Apple’s iTunes Store paired with its iPods revolutionized the cell phone with the iPhone.
The lock-in has both pros and cons. Do i think it’s hard to move off of Apple once you’re in it? No not really, again they don’t own a monopoly in anything. They just provide a very polished experience in what they do aka “it just works.”
The only thing you can’t really transfer is one-time Apple App Store purchases.
Is it easy to switch from Gmail? Yes, creating a new email is easy, do you get the same benefits leaving the market leader? Most likely not…
Regarding Steve Jobs, are you saying he did not steer Apple to a level of success and prosperity that 99% other companies dream of?
Congratulations, you have defended ultra capitalism and the destruction of workers and competition for the personal profit of the shareholders.
Yes I’m an ultra capitalist because I recognize history? Good one bro
An apple a day keeps the doctor away
true, with just an apple a day only the forensic pathologist will show up
If you don’t have anything funny to say, then don’t say anything at all
Steve jobs ain’t a genius. He was just a good salesman.
The sales people almost always end up doing well in companies. And then when they get high up in the company they only value others ability to make sales and work for bonuses. As time goes on a company’s e-suite gets more and more saturated with charismatic dummies who will do anything for a buck, leaving less room for good administrators and engineers.
Small thing, but I’ve never heard it called an e-suite, only c-suite. I assume the “e” stands for executive vs the “c” being chief.
He tried to fight P.C. with apples.
Jesus Christ. That is fucking poetry.
where’s the lie?
This 😂. A fucking genius choosing pseudoscience…
Jobs paved the way for Musk. I hate that he’s so often cited as a genius to look up to in the tech world
Not musk, the entire silicon valley fake it and hope you make it mindset. Jobs opened the door for Holmes. Jobs opened the door for Uber to completely make up a business plan. Jobs opened the door to Elon buying “founder” status. His genius contribution is in making the tech industry the batch of lying scum it is today.
Which is one of the reasons I’m giving up on working in tech despite having a PhD from my home country in Telecommunications. I have skills and could learn the ones I lack but I just don’t have the mindset and attitude and don’t feel like developing them. I’d rather code my own projects in my own way while remaining underemployed.
The behind the bastards episodes on Jobs was really eye-opening to just how awful of a leader he was
People mistaking Marketing people for tech genies happens to often.
Maybe, but then you also have people like my brother who basically worship Jobs, and say shit like “Wozniak is expendable.”
I told him people like Wozniak are the real geniuses who actually make shit work, and he told me straight faced that without people like Jobs people like Wozniak will probably just have a desk job.
People that worship psuedo intellectuals like Jobs are just coping with that fact that they’re less intelligent. Sales dudes love having sales rule over engineering. I’d go as far to say it’s difficult to be a decent human being and in sales at the same time.
The cause goes the other way
Edit: Lol sorry not sorry, salespeople
You need a desk to place the components on to build the computer and then to place the computer on, to do the programming.
I’d say, even with Jobs, Wozniak had a desk job.
Of course, unless you use a projector or floor-stands for the monitors and keep the keyboard+mouse on your lap, in which case, you can get away from the desk.
I find it really amusing to know Bill Gates ones made fun of him:
“Steve’s achievements are all the more impressive when you know that he couldn’t look at a piece of code and know what it was.”
However he also said:
“Clearly, he had so many skills that I didn’t, but we were both a little bit pied pipers in terms of getting people to work ridiculous hours.”
Which really should tell you everything you need to know given who made the money and how many people were made to work “ridiculous hours”.
Back on the old site on one of those text based subreddits there was a question posted:
Would you rather have free WiFi wherever you go, or any apple product you wish at any time.
My (then unrotted) brain was like: mmh WiFi everywhere is good, but apple cake, apple pie, apple sauce, apple spritz, apple cider, apple strudel, dried apples… Yeah I’m going with apple products
Wifi might become obsolete some time in the future, but apple pie is eternal.
Until Jimbo fucks it.
Apple cream pie
Also bought his way up the organ donor list even after he took so long ignoring it, passing over a bunch of people who should have had claim to it and some who died instead, all just so he could die anyway because he took too long to get treatment. Failed so hard multiple people died.
Source on this? I read that Tim Apple offered a donation and Steve refused. I have not read that he had the surgery.
He did get a transplant, in TN. Not in CA where he lived. He used his wealth to add himself to a areas with more donors and fewer on the wait list because he could hop on a jet unlike normal plebians.
That doesn’t describe jumping a line, it just describes waiting in more lines. Is that all there was to it?
At the surface level, but there’s more to it than that. Transplants don’t work by taking a number and waiting, they assess the person’s current condition as well. Since he waited and tried to cure cancer with fruit he fucked his liver and basically got to skip the line in another state. This was only possible because he had the transportation necessary. It’s not an option you or I could use and say, just book a flight.
That also means that someone in a slightly better condition (But mind you, still needing a new liver) would have been passed over in their own state.
You can literally just look on Wikipedia. Tim cook offered part of his, jobs said “nah I want a whole one from some poor person” and the rest is history.
Being rich makes you so divorced from consequences that you start to believe that what is in your brain is what is real. Money isn’t what we think it is.
Money is like radioactive material. Having a little bit in your house probably is fine but having a mountain of it will make you hole up in a Las Vegas hotel with tissue boxes for shoes
Or you can become president
Or even better, you can buy yourself a pet president.
These words resonate so hard with me that my head is ringing like a bell right now. “Money isn’t what we think it is.” ^5, you.
Not to mention the actual pioneer of generic-text languages, the inventor of the compiler, Grace Hopper.
She was on Letterman. https://youtu.be/oE2uls6iIEU
I highly doubt the consequences of Dennis Richie not existing. Yes, his work was foundational, but he didn’t do it on his own, and if he wasn’t around, someone else would’ve filled in.
The same is true for Steve Jobs. In fact, most of his contribution was being a jerk to people so his ideas won. He had a clear vision, but his internal implementation was… iffy.
My crusading teenage ass posted this in 2011 on social media. Nobody cared lol
Fact of the matter is way more people know who Steve Jobs is compared to Dennis Ritchie, so it’s no wonder his death garnered way more attention too. But the sentiment still stands IMO
well one is good at selling stuff including himself
