I wouldn’t expect the situation to be any better with Windows laptops, at least not the thin aluminum high-performance kind that compete directly with the MacBook Pro. Memory sockets affect performance and increase size. Soldering components directly onto a PCB gives you the best performance and the lowest profile for a product where people want it lighter and thinner, and that most people replace in 3 to 5 years.
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Was Steve Jobs ever wrong?
- Thread starter Bubble99
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What the hell are you talking about most PCs do not soldered things and really upgradable and repairable.
BSDnostalgia
macrumors 6502
I appreciated the fact that he didn't like fans and fan noise. Unfortunately, given the technology at the time, every reasonably fast microprocessor used too much power to run fanless. In fact, even with fans most chips were too hot, and, adding a GPU card made them even hotter. That held true until cell-phone processors advanced to the point they are now. So, I don't fault him for trying, but, I would fault him for not accepting the physics of the situation.
As for monochrome vs color thing: the best high-res monitors back then were monochrome. You could do monochrome at something like 1200x800 (sometimes 800x1200), and color was 640x480. A lot of engineers, scientists, writers and editors, liked the higher-res monochrome monitors, but, I noticed, a lot of managers preferred color even at low-res. I always wondered about the psychology of that.
Back to Jobs right/wrong: He was right that it made sense for everything from smaller portables to high-speed desktops to run on a common RISC architecture, but, as it turned out, there wasn't enough cohesion in the PPC market to make the timing of that work out.
Easy, dude. You said MacBook Pro, not desktop minitower.
It wasn't because he didn't think the concept of an iPhone was a bad idea, it was because the cellular networks at the time had too much control over the end user experience. Jobs was not willing to accept anything but full control over product experience. You'll notice all those articles mentioning that when he "changed his mind" was in 2004 after the iPod mini was a huge success, iTunes and the Muisc store were a hit on Windows. It wasn't until then that Apple had the cultural influence to even start to position something like the iPhone. He was wrong about a lot of things, but I think his hesitancy to green-light a phone was strategic timing.
You can thank Apple Retail and the Genius Bar success for most of that. If you've ever had to replace a hard drive in a white iBook G3/G4 or Aluminum PowerBook G4/Early MacBook Pro, you know what a time sucking pain in the butt it was. With Apple doing in-store repairs, it was also a cost/profit sucking pain in the butt. You can bet that the end-user benefit of being two captive screws away from the HDD and RAM (the most common components needing repair/replacement) after popping out the battery in the OG MacBook was just a happy coincidence. Just like now, a big part of Apple's business strategy was AppleCare and Service/Repair. They were going to charge you the same amount to replace the failed HDD anyway, being able to do it in 1/3 the time was a business move.
There are many laptops and ultra thin laptops that really reparable.
Apple seems to be changing curse now with right to repair laws. The Neo is most reparable Apple computer in 10 years of Apple.
I never buy AppleCare has most computers don’t break down in three years. Most computers if they break down break down in 30 to 60 days period and if they live past that live on to 5 to 8 years
Apple also hopes to sell a tone of these to schools and institutions that that need to be able to fix a broken unit and get it back in the hands of the student/teacher ASAP. Apple gives these institutions training and certification to do their own authorized repairs and keep stock of spare parts as part of whatever deal/contract they sign to get the MacBooks in the first place. Making sure the Neo is as easy, or easier, to repair as the average Chrome Book is again a business move with happy side-effects for consumers. I don't expect it to cary into their higher tier devices.
IvyKing
macrumors 6502a
I had to check before replying about the relative timing between PARC's Alto and Lilith. I remember Jerry Pournelle mentioning Lilith in his columns, which suggested late 70's/early 80's.
My recollection was that a lot of the work on the original MacOS was done in a heavily modified version of Pascal, with Pascal having been written by Wirth a few years before he worked on Lilith.
Laptops may die young, but the 2010 Mac Pro still works, (16 years) the 2002 G4 still works (24 years) and the IIe still works (40 years minimum, the beige model was replaced with the platinum in 1987).
The original Mac System was written in Pascal, with portions compiled to assembly and hand-optimized. The original toolbox APIs were all based on Pascal. The official Apple-sanctioned way to write Mac apps in 1984 and early 1985 was on a Lisa (later called Macintosh XL).
Pascal was originally meant as a teaching language, to teach structured programming concepts, but it was adapted for commercial/industrial use. The Lilith operating system was written in Modula-2, which was the successor to Pascal and very similar to it, but it was meant to be a "real world" language. By the time Modula-2 came along, however, most of the field was entrenched in Pascal and/or moving on to C.
IvyKing
macrumors 6502a
I seem to recall that Apple had developed an Object Oriented version of Pascal to support object oriented applications. As an example, Mac Write differed from other word processors in that a Mac Write document was a collection of objects as opposed to lines of text with formatting codes.
I first heard about Pascal in 1974 from a CS major in the same dorm I was in at Cal. He mentioned that the intent with Pascal was that a program that successfully compiled would be error free - a bit optimistic. Part of the interest with Pascal at Cal, was that Wirth did his PhD work there.
Microsoft was another company doing a lot of development in Pascal in the early 80's - remember a critical review of MASM for DOS being written by Pascal hackers for use by Pascal hackers.
Won't say much about the UCSD P-System, other than it seemed to be fading away after 1982 or so.
I do recall there was an Object Pascal but I never used it. I programmed Mac applications as a hobby while I was in college from 1984-1989, and mainly knew about the machines I had during that time (Original Mac 128K, upgraded to Mac Plus in 1986). My "bible" was Volumes I-IV of Inside Macintosh, which used the Pascal APIs. You can get PDFs of them here:
As the Mac family expanded in the early 1990s, Apple was reorganizing the Toolbox APIs, but by that time I had graduated and was working in the more traditional EE field and not programming.
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
I can’t think of anything I’d be willing to sacrifice to gain swapable parts. I wouldn’t pay a penny more, accept an extra gram of weight or mm of size, and I certainly wouldn’t accept a reduction in reliability. I’m more than capable of correctly changing components in a computer, with proper ground straps and tools, but I haven’t modified a machine in probably 15 years. Most people don’t, and those who need repairs done take their systems back to Apple. Most of the people who think they want to tinker do more harm to their machines than good. They’ll swear up and down that they know what they’re doing, but they rarely do.
baconcat_8964
macrumors 6502
maflynn
macrumors Broadwell
No question, the macintosh was also fanless I believe for that very reason.
Again, I was enthralled by the G4 Cube, and loved it, but it was not Apple's best implementation of a cool design.
chrfr
macrumors G5
No, that’s a terrible oversimplification and isn’t really correct. You really should read David Pogue’s 50 years of Apple book because it would address nearly everything you’ve brought up in this thread.
Apple’s product line was expensive and overly complicated before Amilio was hired. Amelio was also the CEO who decided to buy Next and bring Jobs back to Apple.
OP, if you haven’t read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, I recommend you do. It will clarify many things for you.
Also, The Innovators by Isaacson will also be worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)
I haven’t yet read the new 50 years of Apple book, but that could be an option too.
The audiobooks are good options, if reading is difficult for you (no judgment there — I know many people who struggle with reading but listen to a lot of audiobooks).
Also, The Innovators by Isaacson will also be worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_(book)
I haven’t yet read the new 50 years of Apple book, but that could be an option too.
The audiobooks are good options, if reading is difficult for you (no judgment there — I know many people who struggle with reading but listen to a lot of audiobooks).
If the AVP is a failure (maybe too soon to tell), Cook was CEO at the time, and the buck stops with him.
Holding Jobs responsible for the Lisa failure, a couple of years after he'd been kicked off the project, at a time when he wasn't CEO, is hardly the "same standards".
(Since he then took over the Macintosh project and pivoted it from being the Apple IV to an affordable appliance-ified mini-Lisa kinda suggests that he was right and the people who chucked him off Lisa were wrong).
I think a lot of people are mis-remembering Jobs as being CEO of Apple pre-1985. More of a loose-cannon "founder" often at loggerheads with, and at the mercy of, the board.
Then, when Jobs did come back as CEO his first task was to stop the company going bankrupt & fix a legendarily awful product lineup. I don't think anything that Cook has done is comparable to the transition from unpopular and outdated Performas of 1998 to the iPhone-driven Apple brand of 2011. Cook has done wonders to build the company financially, but that wouldn't have happened without the solid base he inherited.
I'm certainly not writing off AVP yet. The comparison with the Lisa could turn out to be apt - except the practical, more affordable "Mac" to the AVP's "Lisa" is now overdue... Or it could be more like the Newton (not Jobs' fault) and we'll have to wait 10 years for technology to catch up with its aspirations and for the corresponding "iPhone" product to come along... AVP will be great once it can be made the size and weight of a pair of safety glasses with all-day battery life. Not sure that's gonna happen soon.
Well, you can speculate until the cows come home about what Jobs might have supported today, but there's plenty of evidence to contradict the claim that Jobs wanted everything to be a "sealed appliance" - just particular consumer-focussed products like the iMac or Mini. Plus, obviously, mobile devices.
You can't ignore the fact that Apple, under Jobs, also released the G3/G4/G5 towers & the classic Mac Pro. These machines weren't just openable and upgradeable - they went the extra mile to provide tool-free access and modular interiors. They were better than the old Performa range, and streets ahead of the typical PC tower.
In 2011 when Jobs died, MacBook Pros still had user-upgradeable RAM and hard drives. Mac Pros were still tool-free PCIe towers. Only under Cook did that start to disappear. Pretty sure that soldered-in SSD (which is truly an abomination in anything thicker than an iPad) only appeared under Cook, too.
Now, technology changes, and soldered-in RAM is now used for solid technical reasons - unless LPCAMM modules take off, LPDDR (low power) RAM has to be surface-mount soldered as close to the CPU as possible. As for PCIe towers, Apple Silicon - for better or worse - simply wasn't designed for that. Of course, those design decisions were still made under Cook...
Hindsight is 20/20, and it's easy to say that the success of the Macintosh vindicated the Lisa. As I understand, it wasn't the concept of the Lisa that was flawed, it was the $10,000 price tag (more than $30,000 in 2026). But if you watch videos of the Lisa, even the first Mac's UI feels much more refined.
The original 128K Macintosh was also expensive for its time ($2500 in 1984 = nearly $8000 now), underpowered, and didn't have a lot of support from third party software and hardware vendors. Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, the year after the Macintosh began shipping. I think Apple only stuck with the Mac after that because they didn't have anything else available.
Speaking of expensive, if you think Apple is price-gouging by charging $400 to go from 24 to 48 GIGA-bytes of RAM, try $2200 ($700 in 1985) to go from 128 to 512 KILO-bytes. That's what Apple charged in 1985.
The Mac didn't really start to move from an expensive curiosity to a useful business computer until the Mac Plus came out in 1986. The previous year, Apple had launched the LaserWriter, the first affordable laser printer (yes, a $5000 laser printer was "affordable" in 1985). The Mac Plus, LaserWriter, and Aldus (later Adobe) PageMaker software together created the desktop publishing industry, which was the Mac's first "killer app."
I thought this was a fascinating discussion of the history and influence of the Macintosh:
Completely agree here.
People aren’t going to like this, but it’s pretty true if you pay attention to the things that Steve was saying within the last two years of his life…
His ultimate view of what a computer should be wasn’t a speced out MacPro.
His ultimate view of what a computer should be, the thing he stated in June 2010 he believed would become the “standard” for the majority of the public, was the iPad.
Completely non-upgradable components, completely locked down operating system, no file explorer, no terminal, no desktop, extremely limited multitasking, no side loading or dual booting, just a sheet of glass that literally anyone at any age can pick-up and use.
On the other hand, there has been a major improvement amongst all of their products when it comes to repairability throughout the 2020s.
Pretty much any iPhone 17 version is easier to repair than its predecessor, the current MacBook Pros are significantly easier to repair than the 2016 era MBPs, and on the desktop side there has been a significant change in focus from the all-in-one iMacs to simple boxes like the Mac Mini and Studio.
It is certainly not a thing they are restricting to the MacBook Neo.
Keep in mind that a lot of this is going to be influenced by a new European legislation beginning in 2027 that requires devices to have easily replaceable batteries, so it’s likely even if Apple doesn’t want to that the next redesign of the MacBook Pros and iPads that they are going to get easier to repair as well.