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Steve Jobs Would Have Celebrated His 69th Birthday Today
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I would have preferred Apple to stay smaller and run the way it did before the iPhone was released. Companies go to pot when they get too big.
When he passed away in 2011 the companies road map was already laid out until 2016. So he already knew what the iPhone 6 would be. Tim Cook basically had a free ride until 2017-2018. After which we saw the iPhone X and along with it yearly price hikes as he floundered for ideas and did the only thing a bean counter knows to do and jack up prices.
Nobody can replace a founders passion. He built Apple from the ground up with Woz.
They sold more because of the foundation Steve Jobs laid. Sales were always going to naturally increase as the products grew more popular. Steve would have had similar figures. Apple was already on a steep upward trajectory when he died.
Desktops & Laptops have plateaued YoY for more than a dozen years.
Billions more people benefited from Apple & Google entering the multitouch smartphone space.
Are you one of the fellas who believe that pre-Mac Pro M3 Ultra desktops have the same relevance as 2005 PowerMac G5 or 2010 Mac Pro Xeon?
Market trends do change and user preferences goes the same route also.
Over 80% of Macs sold in the past decade are laptops. This was the reason Steve Jobs ditched PPC by 2006 as their tech node was stuch at larger than 65nm.
Apple would still be stuck on 14nm Intel chips in 2024 if their iPhone chip R&D wasnt funded that well.
The 3nm A17 Pro, M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max & M3 Ultra benefited from Apple focusing on multitouch smartphones.
We'd all be stuck on 14nm for over 9 years if it wasn't for the iPhone.
we could bicker about his his personal life and if he was a good guy or not all we want, but ultimately I wish he was still around. I’m just curious what Apple would be like today if he was still in charge. No matter what he was a pivotal figure in the technology space.
Don’t tell me what to do. I never once said the iPhone wasn’t a breakthrough, so don’t misquote me.
My sole point was that the AVP is as beta as the iPhone was, and there is nothing you have said that is extraordinary. You have not in a single way, shown how iPhone was any less beta than the AVP is now. The fact that you admitted that it was "awesome in 2007" demonstrates that you are aware that the technology was good in that context, and it is in the EXACT same way that the AVP is as good as it is in this early stage of its development.
Please continue on, and try not to be offensive or insulting. It just demeans you.
I love how he challenged people and got the best from them. I wouldn’t want to work for him because I doubt I could live up to his demands. But he shaped the future by pushing peoples minds into areas of discomfort.
The biggest growth comes from being prepared to work outside the comfort zone.
But a lot of this is his own myth making. The reality of how things got done has a lot more to do with people who didn't listen to him. Just go read some of the stories at folklore.org for a while, which is the basis for the book Fire In the Valley, which was semi-adapted into Pirates of Silicon Valley. Apple succeeded because and in spite of him... He came back a better manager (sort of), after being humbled by NeXT's failures.
I manage teams of engineers/developers. If a manager is calling all the shots and taking all the credit, they're not a good manager and they're going to lose that talent they put in the pressure cooker. I did some of my best work under horrible managers but that wasn't because of the manager no matter what you think.
Let's call it the anthropic HR principle... if you don't do your best work under a horrible manager, you either leave or they fire you. So how do you know who Steve lost to other companies and what they're capable of?
I was so stressed out in one job I gave up half a million in stock options just to have my peace of mind. Now I do my best work under a better manager. I don't care about the money or the prestige... Also, you simply cannot sustain good performance under a bad manager for very long.
When someone does nothing but sing Steve's praises, and you never hear them talking about Bill Atkinson, Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, Burrell Smith, Joanna Hoffman, or Susan Kare, take it with a grain of salt. Hell, I can count on one hand the number of people in this room who know who Bertrand Serlet or Avie Tevanian is. And I can count on one finger the number of people in this room who know who Bob Anderson is, despite the fact that Apple would not have survived past 1997 without him.
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While price changes (both up and down) have occurred in some markets due to currency exchange rate fluctuations (out of Apple's control), it wasn't yearly price hikes. The UK, for example, has seen years with price decreases too.
Despite having twice the storage, the U.S. starting price of the "regular" iPhone 15 is the same as that the iPhone 12 was. Despite having twice the storage, the starting price of the iPhone 15 Pro is the same as what the iPhone 11 Pro was. The iPhone 15 Pro Max with 256GB is actually $50 cheaper than what the 256GB iPhone 11 Pro Max was. And all of this is without factoring in adjustments for inflation.
I don’t disagree with you. And no, you can’t include me on your 'hand tally'. I hear you about getting stressed out by bad managers. I think many of us can relate to that.
And you’re right, we certainly cannot just sing his praises. There are too many accounts of him being an arse. But a good manager gives people who have the ability the room to come up with ideas, to develop and to innovate, no matter the task. If you listen to people like Mark Rober, who openly talks about his experience with Apple; he was given room to come up with ideas, and was challenged to see if his ideas could develop into something useful, even though they are very strict in other areas. This is the environment set up by Jobs.
Allowing failure was one of Jobs greatest strengths. And importantly owning up to those failures. Admitting Maps, Antennagate failures and even not having enough bandwidth at an Apple event were hallmarks of Jobs (although the maps debacle was one of Forstalls doing, and failing to accept responsibility at the same time). If these failures occurred under Cook, people would be after his head.
Jobs said the best managers are those who don’t want to be managers, but are the ones who are the best ones to get the job done. That sounds like what you are being when you manage engineers. Because you understand the job.
But he harassed people over their failures despite seldom admitting to his own. You owe it to yourself to read the stories at Folklore.org if you haven't already... One that really sticks out is Steve's insistence on the Twiggy drive and the team going around his back to get the Sony team's microfloppy in place when the Twiggy inevitably failed to meet the drop dead date for the January 1984 launch.
If Jobs knew beforehand they were doing it despite his orders, he'd have killed it and none of us would be here talking about anything.
It's been around for at least 20 years (Hertzfeld created it in 2004)... but it is the single most authoritative collection of firsthand stories from the Apple ][ and Mac devs.
He did not "approved" iPhone 6" because he wasn't there.. But the wider and bigger iPhone ( known as Phablet at the time ), which was what the market needs, and a design team to look into it was approved during his time as shown in meeting notes during court case. And iPhone 5 was a step towards it.
Indeed, Happy birthday Steve. creative thinking will live on.
Power PC was lagging way behind Intel for chip development at the time so the switch made sense.
Latest Intel/AMD chips combined with Nvidia GPU still outperform anything Apple has to offer from their Apple Silicon. The only really benefit was the lower temps and power usage, neither of which ever bothered me.
Started off as a failure but needed a lot of updates and a massive price drop from the initial release to make it work. Wasn’t until Apple Watch 3 that it was a half decent product.
Also that was Jonny Ives brainchild which I would class as basically Steve Jobs influenced as he was his best friend and worked so closely with him for 2 decades. I think Steve Jobs said how cool it would be to be like Dick Tracy and be able to have a communicating device like his watch in an interview.
In the UK the jump from iPhone 7 to iPhone X in 2017 saw a £450 price increase. Nothing new on the iPhone X that would have justified that increase. It was artificially inflated.
So over the years they’ve made £50 reduction here and there to account for lack of headphones, charger etc. so the iPhone is still probably £300 over priced for what it is. So every iPhone 15 Pro should be reduced by £300 and the regular 15 about £150.
It was never a failure. It may not have met sales expectations in its 1st year, but it was hardly a failure. It did become the most sold watch in the world in 2017, but by any metric, it was definitely not a failure.
2015: 8.3 M
2016: 11.9 M
2017: 12.8 M
2018: 22.5 M
2019: 30.7 M
2020: 43.1 M
2021: 46.1 M
2022: 53.9 M
Please elaborate. Under what guise of reasonable argument can you possibly say it was a failure. Now remember, be reasonable. Please don’t tell me it was because of unsubstantiated allegations by "someone close to the source".
So here is a news flash. Apple has always had designers who either came up with ideas for products, designs or whatever. Not every device was thought up by Steve Jobs.