Was Steve Jobs ever wrong?

[theluggage]

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).

Not sure what your point is. The Mac was sufficiently close to the Lisa in concept to vindicate the concept and prove the value of years of development work...

The Mac Plus, LaserWriter, and Aldus (later Adobe) PageMaker software together created the desktop publishing industry, which was the Mac's first "killer app."

Yup, DTP was critical to the Mac's success... but that didn't materialise fully formed in 1985, Jobs' fingerprints are all over the history of the LaserWriter and Apple's relationship with Adobe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserWriter#Apple's_development

($2500 in 1984 = nearly $8000 now)

So? All "serious" personal computers were expensive in 1984. The price of a Mac in 1984 was in the same ballpark as a floppy-based IBM PC. The contemporary 128KB PC XT was about $5000 (although that did include a massive 10MB HD drive that accounted for a couple of grand). This was before the market was flooded with cheap PC clones and the price crashed (which was what put nearly every other non-PC platform out of business). The alternatives were mainly 8-bit "home" computers which just weren't in the same league.

I don't know why people keep quoting this "$8000 now" factoid as if it reveals anything about the 1984 price of a Mac. We know that the "today" cost of all electronics products has dropped exponentially between 1984 and today. All consumer electronics - you could buy a color TV for $300 in 1982. You can buy a bigger, better color TV for $300 today. Applying an average "general inflation" rate to a commodity that you know hasn't been affected by general inflation makes no sense.

...buying a computer doesn't even have the same "social" significance/value today: A PC or Mac in 1984 would either be a business purchase requiring a strong business case, or you'd be a very committed and deep-pocketed enthusiast. Now, an iMac or MacBook is something parents expect buy their kid for "back to school". The sort of enthusiast/pro who bought a Mac in 1984 is someone who might well be looking at spending $8k on a system today.

 

[mdcmdcmdc]

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.

Another example is the original 2008 MacBook Air. It wasn't very powerful and had limited connectivity, but it wasn't meant to be a "main" computer like the Apple Silicon MacBook Airs of today. The idea was that you would do your "real" work on your desktop Mac, and use the Air when you needed mobility. That was Steve Jobs' vision.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Another example is the original 2008 MacBook Air. It wasn't very powerful and had limited connectivity, but it wasn't meant to be a "main" computer like the Apple Silicon MacBook Airs of today. The idea was that you would do your "real" work on your desktop Mac, and use the Air when you needed mobility. That was Steve Jobs' vision.

Right.
And I think we are all coming to the same conclusion which should be that applying Steve’s methods and views on what a product, or in this case Apple, should be in 2006 directly in 2026 isn’t particularly relevant or useful. The world is different, people’s technology habits and needs are different, the expectations and realities of computers are very very different.

 

[mdcmdcmdc]

Not sure what your point is. The Mac was sufficiently close to the Lisa in concept to vindicate the concept and prove the value of years of development work...

I don't disagree. If you're talking about the concept of a computer that allows humans to interact with it in an intuitively human way, and not have to learn cryptic commands, then the Mac vindicated the Lisa concept. But the actual Lisa product was a perfect example of Steve Jobs' "no compromises" view taken to the extreme, with a large engineering team operating without any guardrails from the business side.

So? All "serious" personal computers were expensive in 1984. The price of a Mac in 1984 was in the same ballpark as a floppy-based IBM PC. The contemporary 128KB PC XT was about $5000 (although that did include a massive 10MB HD drive that accounted for a couple of grand). This was before the market was flooded with cheap PC clones and the price crashed (which was what put nearly every other non-PC platform out of business). The alternatives were mainly 8-bit "home" computers which just weren't in the same league.

I don't know why people keep quoting this "$8000 now" factoid as if it reveals anything about the 1984 price of a Mac. We know that the "today" cost of all electronics products has dropped exponentially between 1984 and today. All consumer electronics - you could buy a color TV for $300 in 1982. You can buy a bigger, better color TV for $300 today. Applying an average "general inflation" rate to a commodity that you know hasn't been affected by general inflation makes no sense.

...buying a computer doesn't even have the same "social" significance/value today: A PC or Mac in 1984 would either be a business purchase requiring a strong business case, or you'd be a very committed and deep-pocketed enthusiast. Now, an iMac or MacBook is something parents expect buy their kid for "back to school". The sort of enthusiast/pro who bought a Mac in 1984 is someone who might well be looking at spending $8k on a system today.

I think your last paragraph answers the "so?" question. $8000 today is a lot of money to most people. So, actually, is $2500, which is why the MacBook Air and Neo are so important for Apple. As an enthusiast, I'm used to the idea of spending $2500 or more every few years when I upgrade, but that's still a lot for a lot of people.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Ping.

No App Store.

NeXT.

Cancer treatments.

He was wrong about plenty of things, but this all reads like mental masturbation; the man has been dead almost 15 years...time to move on.

 

[darkelipse04]

I'm wondering all the things about Steve Jobs was he ever wrong about some things.

Would Steve Jobs disagree about Tim Cook doing things today?

Yes, he was human like the rest of us.

 

[mike.coulter]

Overall he was probably wrong as often as he was right. What really makes the difference is that he was so passionate about each project he was involved in that when things did go right, they got the full majesty of his influence.

 

[MadDawg2020]

The PowerMac G5 reaching 3GHz next year was famously wrong.

At least the PowerMac G5 actually existed unlike the The PowerBook G5

 

[Steve Adams]

Yeah, Steve Jobs famously hated profits 🙄

That's not what the guy meant. Steve was product and user experience above all else. He knew that would bring the profits. The probably is that he gave Jonny Ive free reign to design whatever and ruined Mac systems for many years because of it. Apple was smart to get rid of Johnny egoseed.

 

[Contact_Feanor]

Yes he would disagree with Tim Cook. Tim Cook is profit driven whereas Steve Jobs was product driven.

That’s why one of the very first policies cook implemented after becoming ceo was donation matching: if employees donated to a good cause, Apple would match it. Jobs had always resisted that. Cook is not the ceo that’s only profit-driven if you look a little bit further than your own preconceptions.

 

[Steve Adams]

Controversial thought: Maybe the world didn't need the iPhone - maybe we don't need a super computer and total communications device in our pocket connecting us with everyone and everything.

Sometimes I wish it had failed, along with social media. And both died off like a fad. Maybe early 2000s should have been the maximum, we'd have iPods, dumb phones, and big box PCs. People have lives outside of the virtual world. There's no influencers, no people going to concerts with their phones out, no dating apps, just people living their lives with reasonable amounts of tech.

And Apple Computer would still be Apple Computer.

You got that right. The phone in it's current form has done ALOT of damage to the world and its population.

 

[HiVolt]

In short he was an ******. However, he had a vision, knew what he wanted and would not take no for an answer. He did get a lot of things very right.

Reminds you of a certain tech guy that's really hated for his politics nowadays, doesn't it?

 

[mdcmdcmdc]

The CEO answers to the Board of Directors. The Board of Directors represents the shareholders. The shareholders want stock growth. Customers and employees are simply a means to that end.

Tim Cook may not be the charismatic visionary that Steve Jobs was, but his pivot to services has made Apple a ton of money and made the shareholders and Board of Directors very happy. That's why he was able to keep his job for so long.

 

[Apple Knowledge Navigator]

My issue with the original question is that it’s easy to confuse wrong decisions with pure stubbornness.

And there are many great examples of when SJ was needlessly stubborn, or refused to be seen to be wrong.

- An iPad user emailed SJ to ask if the side switch could be repurposed to orientation lock. SJ simply said no, and then Nope when asked if Apple had plans to. Miraculously, around a month/two later, Apple pushed out said update…

- SJ originally suggested the idea MacMan for the 1998 iMac. The individuals who came up with ‘iMac’ were denied by SJ on four clear opportunities, with SJ repeatedly saying it was stupid and not to suggest it again. Then later in a meeting, SJ said he had “come up with a great name; iMac”.

- The Apple III basically allowed to melt all because SJ didn’t want a fan in the computer. At NeXT, designing a product that was priced well out of the consumers reach. Back at Apple, MobileMe and Ping were duds.

These are only off-the-head examples. One of the greatest troubles we’re always going to have with any discourse of SJ, or anyone so influential, is balancing reality distortion. These people achieved or helped to influence a lot of innovation and positive change, but often the mistakes or bad press is drowned by it all.

I believe SJ’s greatest strength was his pursuit of excellence; but it was the people around him who did all the hard work and they don’t get enough credit.

 

[IvyKing]

- The Apple III basically allowed to melt all because SJ didn’t want a fan in the computer. At NeXT, designing a product that was priced well out of the consumers reach. Back at Apple, MobileMe and Ping were duds.

The Apple III also had issues with the memory DIPs not seating properly in their sockets. This is one reason why the soldered memory on M-series processors is a good idea.

 

[TaylorA]

Yes he would disagree with Tim Cook. Tim Cook is profit driven whereas Steve Jobs was product driven.

Very well said.

 

[Unami]

"If you see a stylus, they blew it" is just one example. Steve had a reputation of being a ****, but was also known for being able to change his mind.

 

[mdcmdcmdc]

Yes he would disagree with Tim Cook. Tim Cook is profit driven whereas Steve Jobs was product driven.

But remember that Steve hand-picked Tim Cook to succeed him, no doubt knowing how different they were. According to Cook, Steve told him, "Don't ask 'what would Steve do,' do what you think is right."

 

[throAU]

Reminds you of a certain tech guy that's really hated for his politics nowadays, doesn't it?

No not really.

The level of obnoxious is nowhere close, the level of taste is nowhere close and the charisma is nowhere close. Ditto for morals.

Elon is an obnoxious person with poor taste, Epstein connections and a lack of concern for either customer or employee safety.

 

[ignatius345]

That's not what the guy meant. Steve was product and user experience above all else. He knew that would bring the profits. The probably [sic] is that he gave Jonny Ive free reign to design whatever and ruined Mac systems for many years because of it. Apple was smart to get rid of Johnny egoseed.

I agree that Jony Ive needed someone like Steve Jobs as a counterweight, to be sure. I was as appalled as anyone at debacles like the butterfly keyboard, but I don’t think you can entirely discount Ive’s contributions entirely. He’s also responsible for a lot of the design language that’s become deeply ingrained in Apple hardware.

 

[Analog Kid]

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.

I'm not misremembering Job's role-- he was Chairman of the Board as well as Founder with a sizeable cache of voting shares. So while there were power struggles, he certainly wasn't just some powerless middle manager, he was a (the?) senior business leader.

I get, and agree with, your point that the Mac pivot shows he had the right technical/product ideas in mind but the fact that he started Lisa then, rather than steer or cancel that project, he picked up his toys and went over to Mac was still a managerial, diplomatic and business failure.

If the argument is that this was a Markkula or Scully call, not his, then this was a failure on Job's part as founder and Chairman to establish clear lines of authority.

Again, I'm using failure here in the absolutist sense that I've seen it used in Cook's case.

 

[Analog Kid]

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...

Jobs has certain philosophical preferences that go way back. He didn't want expansion in the Apple II, but Woz won out. He didn't want, and succeeded in preventing, expansion in the Mac-- including not having sufficient cooling for internal hard drives forcing users to use Thunderbolt SCSI to external drives.

This same philosophical thread runs through the G4 cube and then the 2013 Mac Pro (after Job's death, obviously) and the Studio. Steve was forever trying to rush the future along and get to his perfect state where his beautiful boxes were inviolable. Did he ship products with upgradeable parts? Yes. Because that was a business reality of the time. But there was a clear push to always prefer external expansion, fewer fans, cleaner looks. I'm pretty confident he'd approve of the current state of affairs.

 

[IvyKing]

Jobs has certain philosophical preferences that go way back. He didn't want expansion in the Apple II, but Woz won out. He didn't want, and succeeded in preventing, expansion in the Mac-- including not having sufficient cooling for internal hard drives forcing users to use Thunderbolt SCSI to external drives.

IMO, Woz was absolutely right in insisting on an expansion bus as the then available external data transfer standards were either too slow or too expensive. The Apple II bus made it a much more versatile (and popular) computer than it would have been without it. The more recent Thunderbolt standards are the first that are fast enough to be able to replace internal buses.

The ADB on the original Mac looks like it was inspired by the HPIB/GPIB/IEEE-488 bus, but with serial connections to make it smaller, simpler and cheaper than the IEEE-488 bus.

IIRC, Jobs anathema to fans came from an early (pre Apple II) demonstration were the fan failed and the computer overheated.

As for the 128KB Mac, socketed RAM would have made the memory upgrade process a lot easier, but am guessing the experience with sockets on the Apple III soured Jobs and gang from putting sockets in the original Mac. The 128KB in the original Mac was almost as bad as the base 16KB for the IBM 5150 PC, though the 5150 was designed to make it easy to expand memory.

 

[Basic75]

"If you see a stylus, they blew it" is just one example. Steve had a reputation of being a ****, but was also known for being able to change his mind.

The stylus is not an example for Steve being wrong, he didn't change his mind. He was against a stylus as necessary for using a touch screen instead of a finger. The Apple Pencil is something else, you don't have to use one and it does things your finger simply can't.

 

[aevan]

Tim Cool understands that products are required for profit. Steve Jobs understood that great products are the best way to make products

This key difference is why Apple isn’t as cool or high quality as it was under jobs

That's debatable. I would say Apple is much bigger under Cook, and that's harder to make as cool and as high quality. With that said, we got some of the best iPhones, iPads and Macs during Cook's time, we got amazing products like the AirPods and the Apple Watch, and people are making it sound like Jobs didn't have flops or quality-related issues. I still think both men did an amazing job, they were different, but I think people like to criticize Cook more because of recency bias.