Steve Jobs has a great quote about this, from The Lost Interview:
“… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
Acquaintance of mine bought an iPad. Proudly showed it to me how he can draw this and that. 6 months later he somehow forgot the password, entered it wrong too many times and the iPad is a brick. He's 75 years old. He can't find a receipt, there's no way to restore it. There's no way to put Linux on it. There's no way to do anything.
Another example - my mom. I was feeling generous, bought her an iPad as a present. Now nothing works on it anymore. You need some type of ID. The one I have never works. The whole thing is a brick. Useless piece of crap. She's 77 years old and uses her small phone screen to do anything.
So that's Apple products for you. They benefit the company, not the owner. You shell out thousands of dollars, end up with a brick. I will never buy another product from Apple again. (My wife just bought a brand new iPhone. Lol). Let's see how long that will work for her.
The problem here is that apple, in their infinite arrogance, feel that they continue to be the owner of the device you bought. The owner is who gets to set the policy. Apple here is setting and enforcing this bricking policy thus they are effectively the owner. But they still want you to pay for the device as if you were purchasing it!
The job of a vendor is to provide mechanisms to implement any kind of policy the buyer wants; the job of a buyer is to establish the policy that is best for them.
Apple wants to sell a device but continue being both the vendor and the owner of it. That is wrong.
Because 90% of the people are irrational buyers. They buy to impress their annoying cousin, or prove that they're more worthy than his wife's sister's husband. Because Apple's products are pricey and iPad case costs more than a iPad's competitor itself.
Same reason why my friend business owner in Dubai says his employees from India buy the most expensive phone with their first salary. Just because you buy the most expensive product, doesn't mean you get the best quality. And good marketers know it.
> Makes you wonder why they are so popular if this is the average user experience right?
Because people in general don't do risk analysis. Like in the 80s when everyone still smoked despite the risk of death being well known. Oh it won't happen to me!
Then when you have to throw away that perfectly functional $1000 apple device because apple decided you can't use it anymore, only then you realize you've been had.
> He can't find a receipt, there's no way to restore it.
These stories are semi-ridiculous. I don't doubt this person is in the predicament you describe. But why can't he just go to an Apple Store and have them unlock it? Does this person not own an ID?
This has disturbingly happened to just about every apple device made I've owned, except the older apple computers.
The older macos devices (pre-t2 chip) are always usable. You can usually get old data off them, or they can be re-initialized.
But old ios devices? Had an old ipad, it glitched and it needs an apple id password. but it hadn't been hooked up for years and you can't connect it to wifi without it. old ipod touch? same mess.
It seems if older ios devices get out of sync of current os, it becomes hard to recover them unless you have a mac with macos that matches ios by year.
Whoever set up the device is to blame. An iPad can do everything your phone can do so its security is taken seriously. Just write down the password if you can't remember it. Or make it your dog's name. If you can't find the password anywhere then how can you expect Apple to tell the difference between you and some criminal?
I think your sentiment might be rooted in never having worked with a good product manager. What Jobs described is what I expect from a good PM. However, frequently PMs have so little understating how the product they manage works and is built and aren't that amazing at their own core skill set that developers either must push them up a hill or make these decisions instead of the PM turning the product manager into more of a project manager or mouth piece at best. It's a real shame because a good product manager can provide exactly the value Jobs is describing.
I'm not sure about the pm part. They certainly have to worry about it, but scheduling and delivery logistics to a large degree need to be a shared responsibility between product and engineering leadership. This is where the role responsibilities can get quite messy.
I don’t think people realize how shitty everything you make is. It’s only through continuous improvement and iterations that it becomes really nice.
Unless it’s something you’ve done many times before, if no one is pointing out problems with your design in the first version, it’s probably hot garbage.
I recommend finding people who worked at Apple while Steve Jobs was around. He was more involved than just barking I want "An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator."
Steve Jobs founded Apple. It revolutionized the world. They fired him, Apple became a joke. They hired him back, it revolutionized the world again. He died, and... they're becoming a joke again. Say whatever you like about the man, but whatever he did actually drove innovation like nobody else.
Apple are becoming a joke? I must have missed that memo. That was certainly a possibility when Jobs died but you have to hand it to Tim Cook, Apple has drifted far less from its Jobs-era culture and style than many people predicted. It's been nearly a decade and a half since Cook took over, but Apple are still doing tremendously well. The Apple Vision Pro might not be the right category of product to go mass market, but none of the reviews suggest it is anything less than Jobsian in its attention to detail and overall approach.
Compare that to the level of change between Ballmer-Nadella or Schmidt-Pichai. Apple has displayed remarkable constancy.
I agree that Apple is a company that is doing quite well and making generally good products.
However, I absolutely don’t think Steve Jobs would have let the Vision Pro in its current state sit on store shelves.
I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.
> I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.
And yet he launched the iPhone, which, in its first generation, didn't even let you install apps on it. The point is not to excel in all areas. The point is to excel in relevant areas where the competition can not easily catch up with you.
I’d argue that the iPhone had way more points where it excelled. Web browsing, multi-touch, pinch to zoom, and it even offered a better cellular plan along with it (cheaper than BlackBerry).
The Vision Pro doesn’t have a lot of features where it excels. Running apps on it is inferior to using your phone or tablet. Watching movies is inferior to your home television. Productivity is inferior to a standard computer. Games are inferior to existing VR gaming systems like Index or Quest. Reviewers universally describe it as lonely, dystopian. Eyestrain is still a problem, dizziness is still a problem.
The iPhone had things about it that were better than existing solutions in a product category (cell phones and smartphones) that was proven and growing.
The most optimistic thing you can say about the Vision Pro is that if it were more like a pair of sunglasses and got rid of all the downsides to using it, it might be a really good true AR experience where your brain forgets about the fact that you’ve augmented reality. The problem is, there is no physical hardware technology that is on the horizon that will ever feasibly bring it to that place.
Not being able to install apps was completely resolvable by a software update. The hardware problems of the original iPhone like the lack of 3G were resolved within a calendar year with the next model, and the original model had an acceptable level of battery life.
If a similar situation to the iPhone was happening we should be seeing a Ming Chi Kuo type of rumor about a Vision Pro coming in 2025 that scuttles the external battery, enables the system to get through an entire Hollywood movie without charging, and solves the problem of the headset messing up your hair and making you interact with the world through ski goggles. These improvements are impossible within the next 10 years or so.
There was also way more urgency with smartphones. If Apple had waited one or two years the iPhone would have been snuffed out by competition. We would see a market dominated by other players in the market like Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Palm.
In contrast, the VR/AR market is literally a contracting one with the only major players being Valve and Meta. The iPhone entered a market that was clearly in an upward trajectory.
Would anyone be surprised if Meta announced the shuttering of the Quest division within the next 5 years or so? It has never made money. It has never come close to breaking even, it’s a complete moonshot money sink for Meta. The Quest 3 is selling slower than the Quest 2 did. Microsoft quit on the market before Apple even entered it. Valve hasn't made a follow-up headset and might not ever do so.
This is a product that was in development hell that had pressure to ship. A more courageous executive would have seen the struggles at Meta and killed the project years ago.
The Apple Car idea was legitimately way better and would have taken less time.
You can't be serious. The "public sentiment" toward Apple could not care less about the nerd rage du jour, they are as oblivious to it as ever. All evidence suggests that normal people don't care about any of this, same as every other time. It isn't like everyone is using a Linux desktop with Firefox, chatting over Signal, running their own mail servers, using GNU software, etc. The people that care about this are a small bubble, even within the broader tech community.
Most non-technical people I know genuinely like Apple, it is a great experience for them. They don't know, and don't care, what "side-loading" etc means.
Steve was great because he hired great people. For that he deserves a lot of credit. He also (for better or worse) had a very keen idea of what was workable or reasonable in terms of UX - essentially he had taste.
Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.
That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.
Are they? I don’t see it. They’re more profitable than ever and are still extremely competitive in multiple markets.
The arguments against this have been the same for decades: Apple is overpriced, Apple’s product are inferior to competition, and yet here we are with large chunks of the market share and larger chunks of market gains.
Some products are stupid, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t pushed dead products out before.
> > Say whatever you like about the man, but whatever he did actually drove innovation like nobody else.
Sure, it was him alone doing all that, not the 10,000 employees, within a 40M people ecosystem such as California which is the tip of the spear of a yet bigger ecosystem such as the United States which in turn is the tip of the spear of the entire 4 million history of mankind progress up to now.
The cult and the propaganda causes a whole lot of illusion/delusion. Then you actually get to meet these people and you are as disappointed as the groupies who were asked to self cut their veins by Led Zeppelin for their satanic rituals.
The fact that there were 40M people in that ecosystem and only one Steve Jobs is exactly the point. Yes it took an environment like that to make it possible, but it also took a certain person to make it actually happen. (A deeply flawed person to be sure, but that's not the point here).
Nope, it would have happened anyway and the lucky guy would have been Stuart Bojs with his company called "Pear"
Humanity as a whole makes progress, individual humans just partecipate in a giant lottery for monetary and recognition allocation. The latter has nothing to do with the former, much like winning a car race on a racetrack has nothing to do with building the track nor the car.
Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP. The GP , the cars, the track itself are the byproduct of billions of humans at work and every minute of work towards that has approximately the same value, if there's a positive outlier is very minimal and perhaps that person has never been to the track at all or doesn't even care about car racing.
This is what happens when there's 8bn of us right now with a total number who ever lived standing at 10-12bn
If we can credit physicists like Albert Einstein for being the ones to discover fundamental facts about the universe that someone was going to discover sooner or later anyway, we can credit business founders for creating businesses a certain way that weren't necessarily ever going to be created that certain way. They're not the same thing in many ways, but I'd rather err on the side of giving more credit rather than less.
Had Einstein or Jobs been born in Laos they'd have had very different worries and concerns, and besides what does "credit" even mean practically speaking besides singing the praise which is essentially worthless gossiping anyway.
Let's make a practical example in order not to keep talking past each other:
If you owned a resturant and they were still alive would you offer them a steak or cancel another reservation to make room for them?
I wouldn't , don't care if you are Jesus H. Christ, you gotta pay me.
I suppose using switched-mode PSU in the Apple II was revolutionary to me at the time, but someone else would have figured that out pretty quick. They were already in TVs.
This may be true. A lot of the things that fans ascribe to him though, have been invented elsewhere and then were copied, or bought. He was not the visionary inventor, that he is often believed to have been.
I didn't say he wasn't a jerk. Totally, and it wound up infecting every company after the iPhone success because that's the lesson people got from him - be an asshole and find success. Not the good part about being insightful, having good instincts, and seeing beyond user feedback to what people will actually want, etc. etc.
I'm simply pointing out he's not the same category of non-technical founders being discussed in this post
We know a lot more about hardware and software development than we did even 10 years ago let alone 50.
Those of us who came into tech in the last 20 years through today did not have as many unknown unknowns to stumble through. It’s all so much more streamlined. There inherently cannot be another Jobs or Gates in IT land same as there will never be another Christopher Columbus
Idolizing the prior generation is a fools errand. The discovery phase is over. We get the maintenance phase
Just as everyone else did in the 80s. Judge people by the times they lived in, for you will be judged the same.
(Without a doubt, something you think is OK, and everyone else does, will be seen as a horrible monstrosity by your descendants. It won't be something you can think of, and yet you'll be judged for it as a monster by some.)
He was a pretty huge jerk to his wife and kid even by the standards of the day. He seems to have just not been a very nice guy. Jerks can invent interesting tech, right?
Even in the 1980s, people who intentionally parked their unregistered Porches in handicapped spaces were considered monsters. Don't try to retcon Steve Jobs into something he was not. He was a brilliant scumbag.
A little voice in the back of my head, recalls something along the line of this.
There are a mandated number of unassigned, non-employee dedicated handicapped parking spaces per overall building size/parking spaces. And that in some cases, there are far too many for the building/business's use case.
An example? A shopping mall needs lots of handicapped parking spaces. Yet an office will assign close spots to employees with special needs, as the generic spots aren't for-use by employees. Thus there can be an excess of generic handicapped spots.
There are only so many spots available close to the building, and Jobs would obviously take one. So by using one of the many never-to-be-used generic handicapped parking spaces, Jobs was saving a high value parking space with prime location. And also allowing others to have use of a close to door space, all without depriving any handicapped person of a place to park.
It was a social hack, one he may have been quite proud of.
Jobs' terrible attitude is at this point widely known, dissected and discussed to death here and everywhere else. Calling it out does not adding anything new or insightful to this discussion.
His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.
> Do you think Jobs was a hands-off idea man who let others sweat the details?
Very much not the case.
I was on the iPod software team 15 years ago, and let me tell you, we got plenty of detailed feedback from periodic "SJ reviews". My manager (a line manager of a small team) went to those meetings and came back with lots of very specific things we needed to change.
One year (fall 2008) Steve was going on vacation to Italy for a week or two, and asked for a development version of the iPod shuffle we were working on to take with him on the trip. (We were terrified, because it wasn't really ready for that level of scrutiny.) That was at a time when the iPhone 3G and the original iPad were also under development, and yet we got a bunch of feedback on the humble little iPod shuffle when he returned.
He really was in the details, to an astonishing degree, and not just for the headline products, either.
I consider him one of the true titans of the tech industry. It is easy to ignore their flaws and wax poetic, so I always try to understand the full human with all their flaws. The flaws are almost essential to their strengths. As a whole though, these human beings moved the entire tech universe through force of personality, will, and intelligence. It’s a short list. Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Page/Brin, Zuck, — what they accomplished was never obvious or a given when they were doing it. It’s easy to see the business at present. There are also “sub-Titans” as I call them that were instrumental. But the execution at that level requires so many long hard years of consistently good decision making and vision it is very hard to not admire those parts of them.
The iPod has never been surpassed in my opinion. I refurbished one and still use it to this day. I think having a clear vision for it was critical for that.
This seems to just re-enforce that he was an ideas man.
I've yet to hear a story where Jobs was the one who discovered the fix, only stories that he pointed out the things that needed to be fixed.
He's lauded as a visionary, not as an engineer. And all the stories about him are about him pushing others to realize his vision.
Edit: Lots of people seem to disagree with me, but then pointing out how he was an extremely skilled ideas man. Perhaps that term has too much negative connotation for Jobs' visions (ideas) to be associated with?
Being able to point out the right things that need to be fixed is an important skill. Most people can tell when something is off about a product but can't tell you exactly what it is.
You can easily identify the wrong thing as the problem then end up trying to hide a symptom instead of fixing the problem. Medicine is notorious for treating symptoms when the underlying problem is usually related to something else like diet or (lack of) exercise.
You can also completely fail to identify an obvious problem such as the games where you end up stuck and having to Google how to progress because the game is poorly designed. This poor design isn't going to be obvious to anybody working on the game every day because they designed and already know the solution but it would come up if somebody else played the game and got stuck.
I used to think very similar to you, I mean Woz was the engineer! Jobs didn't build or design the ipod. But I have since worked with product managers, both good and bad. I have worked in companies and on products with a good vision and a poor vision. Being able to get a good idea for a product, envision that product, and guide people through the whole process of building that product and keeping that vision through everything is very difficult and is a useful skill.
Maybe the lines are more blurry, but design, marketing, and product are not just “ideas.” I’m not going to weigh in on what Steve contributed, but it’s perfectly plausible that he did so without writing code or holding a soldering iron.
Not to say ideas guys aren’t prevalent, but for all his faults I would argue that Jobs wasn’t one of them.
From everything I’ve read, Jobs was deep in the weeds with all that stuff. In terms of asking all the relevant questions, finding the right experts, the suppliers to provide the right inputs at the right price, finding alternative solutions to problems, etc.
I doubt very many people knew more about bringing a new product idea to fruition from beginning to end than him.
“… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
It's that process that is the magic."