Steve Jobs Would Have Celebrated His 69th Birthday Today

[Ctrlos]

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.

Required reading for every forum member here should be The One Device by Brian Merchant. The story of how the iPhone was a crux of convergent technology in the making for over a century prior is riveting in itself but its development within Apple even more so. The multi-touch interface started out as a skunkworks project by senior employees right under Jobs' nose. As far back as 2004 they had a projected display on a dining table that read finger positions. It started out as a tablet idea before Jobs got two internal teams, the iPod and Mac divisions to compete against each other for the design after the Motorola debacle. Corning's Gorilla Glass was developed in under 6 months after their shelved experimental windscreen prototype was fast-tracked at Jobs' own request to the company owner.

Jobs was foremost a student of design and it would be interesting to see what he would have made of the modern market. I have a feeling that ideas like the butterfly keyboard would never have reached market because Steve reined in Ive's design excesses so products struck a balance between form and function. Once Steve passed Ive becomes the golden boy president of design and nobody dares question him.

I have a strong feeling he would fire the entire iOS design team for its lack of ergonomics.

 

[Avatar74]

The multi-touch interface started out as a skunkworks project by senior employees right under Jobs' nose.

No, it didn't. It started out as a CERN project in the 1970s, and then MIT under Jeff Han. that "table" you're talking about was Han's, and wasn't a projected display but an LCD.

It's worth noting that Brian Merchant was a journalist from Vice Media, which has a terrible reputation in the journalism world specifically around their lack of due diligence and proper sourcing. So I'd take anything written by a Vice journalist with more than a few grains of salt.

Jobs was foremost a student of design

I know this is a bit of a figure of speech, but Jobs' understanding of design is constrained by his own biases. This is also hugely discounting the work of Susan Kare, who did her Ph.D. at NYU. Kare and Jef Raskin are largely responsible for the visual language and rules of interface design, encompassed in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (a copy of which sits in my office next to Tufte; I'm a data analytics manager). That's the DNA of Apple's design ethos. It's more accurate to say that Jobs had lots of ideas, and sometimes, some of them worked in a practical and elegant way... many other times, they didn't.

 

[bodhisattva]

RIP Steve. Entrepreneurs pale in comparison today.

 

[webkit]

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.

Incorrect. The "increase" was £400 not £450 and you're comparing two very different phones including storage and display sizes. The iPhone X (£999) had a 5.8" display and 64GB starting storage while the iPhone 7 (£599) display was only 4.7" and 32GB starting storage. Even the 7 Plus had a smaller display and less starting storage than the X and the price difference between it and the X was only £280 (£719 versus £999). Only £180 (£819 versus £999) when comparing like storage. Plenty justified the higher price and it was not "artificially inflated."

Buyers also had a new option of going with a much less expensive phone in the SE.

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.

In the UK, there have actually been multiple years of price DECREASES. The starting price with VAT of the Pro models went from £1,049 for 11 Pro to £999 for 12 Pro (decrease #1) to £949 for 13 Pro (decrease #2) to £1,099 for 14 Pro to £999 for 15 Pro (decrease #3). And, all of this is without factoring in inflation and increased starting storage levels. You also can't blame Apple or Tim Cook for price changes due to currency fluctuations out of their control.

 

[MNWildFan]

I know Vision Pro hasn’t exactly set the world alight

And it probably won't for some time; especially not until a more feasibly priced version comes out

 

[Ctrlos]

No, it didn't. It started out as a CERN project in the 1970s, and then MIT under Jeff Han. that "table" you're talking about was Han's, and wasn't a projected display but an LCD.

It's worth noting that Brian Merchant was a journalist from Vice Media, which has a terrible reputation in the journalism world specifically around their lack of due diligence and proper sourcing. So I'd take anything written by a Vice journalist with more than a few grains of salt.



I know this is a bit of a figure of speech, but Jobs' understanding of design is constrained by his own biases. This is also hugely discounting the work of Susan Kare, who did her Ph.D. at NYU. Kare and Jef Raskin are largely responsible for the visual language and rules of interface design, encompassed in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (a copy of which sits in my office next to Tufte; I'm a data analytics manager). That's the DNA of Apple's design ethos. It's more accurate to say that Jobs had lots of ideas, and sometimes, some of them worked in a practical and elegant way... many other times, they didn't.

I mean, the Apple multitouch was a cobbled-together project. You are correct in stating Apple did not invent multitouch at all.

Jobs as a student of design is more that he had a knack for seeing things other people could not. I think the iPod and fishtank story sums it up best.

 

[ZMacintosh]

I have a hard time believing that 2024 Jobs would still be CEO of Apple. Far too controversial a personality to survive in today’s ESG-obsessed corporate world.

honestly, I dont think alot of the mindset we have today would have been around. alot of dynamic shifts in corporations, politics, etc did us in...I dont think it would have been a problem and apple would have navigated it pretty gracefully.

 

[aj_niner]

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.

Your 'member-berries are a bit foogie.

It isn't about PowerPC being underpowered by 2005. They were stuck pre-65nm so performance per watt sucked for battery-powered devices. Steve pointed to him promising a PowerBook G5. He never delivered one.

During the mid 00s AMD wasn't considered Apple's CPU maker of choice because of their more limited R&D and chip production output. So why go with a company with nearly as gimped resources as the PowerPC Alliance? Intel always had better resources. AMD started selling 65nm chips by December 2006, a full year later after Intel.

After Apple moved to Intel Intel had little incentive to innovate shortly after.

Intel was stuck on 14nm from 2014-2020 & only moving to 10nm mid 2020. I largely suspect it was because Apple gave notice. If Apple stuck to Intel we'd probably be on 14+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++nm by March 2024.

That's a solid decade on 14nm? Competition forces innovation. A PC OEM monopoly causes surging margins for Intel.

By Nov 2020 Mac chips became 5nm then 4 months ago 3nm while Intel is largely still on 10nm.

This was only made possible due to a dozen years of iPhone R&D resources and money. iPhone chips allowed for 1st access to leading edge tech nodes for lower volume devices like Macs and iPads.

Over 4 of 5 PCs/Macs shipped worldwide annually are laptops & NOT desktops.

Steve Jobs saw that trend towards laptops as early as 2 decades ago so the "Intel/AMD chips combined with Nvidia GPU still outperform" only benefits computers without batteries.

Apple's chip models benefits laptop users the most. The rest of the desktop users are mostly office workers & other commercial activities where a lot of these "desktop" parts are actually repurposed laptop parts placed into mini PC desktop form factors.

How many dGPUs are there that did not become crypto mining boxes?

I am not saying there is no use case for raw performance, nevermind the performance per watt. What I am pointing out is that use case benefits a small minority of PC or Mac users globally.

It isn't a latter priority to Apple as other companies have business models that is more custom to it.

 

[aj_niner]

And it probably won't for some time; especially not until a more feasibly priced version comes out

I agree.. when the iPhone came out in 2007 it was heralded as the Jesus phone by the media but for the majority of consumers it was D.O.A. because it lacked things like 3G.

1st 3G phone came out was the 2002 Nokia 6650.

3G came in 2008 iPhone 3G.

Apple Watch made sense to me when the ECG feature came out in Series 4. That's 4 years after Series 0.

Vision Pro's a developer's platform like the iPhone 2G.

 

[steve09090]

Jobs was foremost a student of design and it would be interesting to see what he would have made of the modern market. I have a feeling that ideas like the butterfly keyboard would never have reached market because Steve reined in Ive's design excesses so products struck a balance between form and function. Once Steve passed Ive becomes the golden boy president of design and nobody dares question him.

I have a strong feeling he would fire the entire iOS design team for its lack of ergonomics.

Rubén Caballero was head of the dept that made the antenna in 2010 when Jobs coined the phrase Antennagate. Caballero was still there until about 2019. No one was fired to my knowledge. I don’t know that he would have fired anyone from iOS, let alone an entire team. To quote Steve Jobs "we're not perfect. We know that, You know that. Our phones aren’t perfect."

And to suggest he would not have let the butterfly keyboard to market… well, that’s a big call. In essence, it’s a great keyboard. But that didn’t bear out in the real world. I think he would have let it continue.

Anyway, two different views. We don’t need to argue it.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Unfortunately as time tends to do, he is becoming more the myth. But I will always be thankful for the Mac 128k

Which was a significantly crappier product because of Steve Jobs.

It could have had socketed RAM and a slot. Burrell Smith (one of the REAL geniuses behind the Macintosh, not just the overhyped salesdroid) designed it that way. At least he managed to make the RAM easily expandable if you knew how to solder, but Jobs screwed up the slot.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

I miss the excitement before his keynotes…he was just a joy to watch on stage.

The ONE AND ONLY thing he was ever good at - marketing.

 

[Avatar74]

Jobs as a student of design is more that he had a knack for seeing things other people could not. I think the iPod and fishtank story sums it up best.

I think we're mixing terms here. At this level it's less about design than it is about capital allocation and integration. What Jobs could see that others couldn't is best illustrated like this:

Sculley looked at Hypercard and saw Powerpoint, when in fact Hypercard was the world's first web browser. All it was missing was the World Wide Web (Sir Tim Berners-Lee ironically developed HTTP 1.0 and WWW on a NeXT workstation).

Jobs had the sense to point product managers in a direction by killing off 70% of their projects and giving them this matrix to focus their efforts:

In combination with Chief Financial Officer Bob Anderson's cost restructuring and putting the company on a path to better performance per watt with Intel processors, this gave the company the financial runway it needed to invest in longer term projects like iTunes Music Store, iPod, iPhone, etc.

Licensing one-click purchasing from Amazon and acquiring Casady & Greene, along with their Soundjam Music Player is an illustration of how Jobs saw their actual potential... but he wasn't the only one. This was exactly the subject of my 1996 senior thesis. In it, I proposed the idea of buying and downloading entire albums of music from the internet with a single click. What I didn't see as part of this equation, because I'm not a hardware guy, is iPod.

But the point is: This is not as rare a trait as people like to think. What is rare and, well, a product of fortuitous timing more so than genius, is which solution will be in the right place at the right time to take the world by storm.

The reason this tends to happen in places like Silicon Valley or Boston is because of the concentration of intellectual capital to recruit hardware and software engineers from is at Harvard and Stanford, and so that's where the financial capital goes, too. Harvard and Stanford have the first and third largest endowments of any university in the world.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

Agreed, but the world has changed a LOT even in the short years since his death. Obviously I can only speculate, but I imagine he would have said or done something by now that would have had him excommunicated persona non grata by a board of directors beholden to the yoke of ESG political lunacy.

As much as I disliked Steve Jobs, as much as I was happy he was fired in '85, as much as I still think he should have been fired again immediately after Apple bought NeXT, he wasn't a sexist, he wasn't a racist, he wasn't a homophobe, he wasn't a transphobe, and he was an environmentalist.

ESG is incredibly important, and Jobs understood that decades ago.

 

[aj_niner]

Jobs had the sense to point product managers in a direction by killing off 70% of their projects and giving them this matrix to focus their efforts:

View attachment 2353288

Fewer SKUs allows for higher quantities per SKU & leveraging economies of scale.

Apple's iPhone SKUs looks so bountiful because each iPhone SKU has reached almost all their respective KPIs.

So they priced each one by $50-100 apart.

 

[Avatar74]

Fewer SKUs allows for higher quantities per SKU & leveraging economies of scale.

Absolutely... this is something I know all too well having come from FP&A, which is why you can tell even this decision by Jobs has Bob Anderson's fingerprints on it.

 

[Ctrlos]

Fewer SKUs allows for higher quantities per SKU & leveraging economies of scale.

Apple's iPhone SKUs looks so bountiful because each iPhone SKU has reached almost all their respective KPIs.

So they priced each one by $50-100 apart.

What happened then? There are more Apple products than ever

 

[Avatar74]

What happened then? There are more Apple products than ever

You realize that was almost thirty years ago ... what we're talking about is what paved the way toward today, sparing them financial disaster at a time when they were 90 days from declaring bankruptcy.

It was my anecdote you're discussing with someone else, and the point was specifically to illustrate two things:

1. Jobs is given far too much credit for things that are a team effort.
2. His core competency is less in design than it is in seeing the forest for the trees.

 

[steve09090]

You realize that was almost thirty years ago ... what we're talking about is what paved the way toward today, sparing them financial disaster at a time when they were 90 days from declaring bankruptcy.

It was my anecdote you're discussing with someone else, and the point was specifically to illustrate two things:

1. Jobs is given far too much credit for things that are a team effort.
2. His core competency is less in design than it is in seeing the forest for the trees.

Napoleon didn’t win 52 of his 60 battles by wielding a sword or pistol. He provided the means and the vision/tactics to do it. Barely anyone would know who his Marshalls were.

 

[Victor Mortimer]

You realize that was almost thirty years ago ... what we're talking about is what paved the way toward today, sparing them financial disaster at a time when they were 90 days from declaring bankruptcy.

It was my anecdote you're discussing with someone else, and the point was specifically to illustrate two things:

1. Jobs is given far too much credit for things that are a team effort.
2. His core competency is less in design than it is in seeing the forest for the trees.

That's a common myth, but Apple was NEVER 90 days from bankruptcy. They had nearly a billion in cash reserves when MicroSloth "saved" them with the "investment" that was really a payoff for being caught copying QuickTime code in Video for Windoze.

Jobs is absolutely given FAR too much credit. One of the most despicable things he did was remove the names of the engineers from the about boxes. Before Jobs showed up, you got a list of the people who actually did the work developing Mac OS and the Macintosh. Jobs claimed all the credit, which was nothing but top-notch plagiarism.

 

[Avatar74]

Napoleon didn’t win 52 of his 60 battles by wielding a sword or pistol. He provided the means and the vision/tactics to do it. Barely anyone would know who his Marshalls were.

Right. And it cost Napoleon heavily when he fully bought into his own myth.

 

[Avatar74]

They had nearly a billion in cash reserves

Their operating losses that year exceeded a billion dollars. That figure doesn't include short and long term debt obligations and if they can't pay the interest expense, let alone fund capex/opex spend, then Chapter 11 restructuring is the next step. Operating cash flow is a more important component of the Consolidated Financial Statements than the income statement (an artifact of rev rec rules, e.g. ASC 606) or balance sheet.

It's important to understand that Chapter 11 is NOT liquidation (Chapter 7).

Source: Was an FP&A analyst in the software industry.

 

[MacFarmer]

Still missed. Seemed like a nice person, though I didn't know him personally. The only thing I know, is that he wasted his time with that Isaacson. Dude complete messed the book.

 

[imtoretto]

By "original" you mean the ones who made the Apple, then Apple II and then the Macintosh?

I was doing my research but cannot confirm if the sources are trustworth, that’s why i came to ask if anyone knows this info, now maybe my question is going towards after the passing away of Steve Jobs; how much longer the design team (probably talking about the people that was involved in the iPhone too) are still there or the team was replace or simply just decide to leave.