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Was Steve Jobs ever wrong?
- Thread starter Bubble99
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I remember that Woz was the computer geek and Jobs the businessman. How soon we forget.
ISTR you saying "are we going to hold Steve to the same standards people are holding Tim to?" - Tim is/was CEO, not chair (Arthur Levinson is chair and nobody here has been calling for him to resign over Airpower).
I didn't say Jobs was some powerless middle manager, but he wasn't CEO and certainly not the sort of "supreme leader" he became after 1998. Having a sizeable vote doesn't mean having a majority vote.
Everything I can find says he was forced off the Lisa project and had no control over the product that actually launched. He didn't have the power to cancel it. He was only a couple of years away from being forced out of the company entirely.
Some confirmation bias here, I think.
Apple II ended up with slots, back when Apple was a three-man band & Jobs had far more control.
You're also ignoring NeXT, the blue+white PPC towers, the G5 cheesegrater, the classic Mac Pro - all launched when Jobs was in a far more powerful position - which didn't just "have slots" because that was the most economical way to build them, they had industry-leading, user-friendly tool-free access.
Seems to me that Jobs well understood the difference in design constraints between a mass-market "appliance" like the classic Mac and iMac and a pro/scientific workstation like the NeXT, G4/G5 Towers or Mac Pro. Of course, while he was working at Apple on the original Mac, he was most interested in his project - which was a GUI appliance.
As for the original Mac and hard drives - in 1983, a hard drive alone cost the thick end of $3000 and was the size and weight of a couple of housebricks (as Miniscribe later found out 🙂). The IBM XT had an internal HD, cost over $5000 and was a massive desk-hogging box. Even if Jobs had wanted to, he couldn't have created the Mac SE in 1983/4 without a time machine to source affordable 3.5" hard drives from 1987. Since he was out of the company by the time it became feasible to fit a hard drive in something like a classic Mac, we'll never know how the Mac design would have progressed under Jobs.
I'm pretty confident that he'd have strong opinions on the current state of affairs.
Positive or negative? We'll never know.
It's an example of him being right, unless you ignore the context. If you ever owned a pre-iPhone smartphone with a toothpick stylus you'd know exactly where he was coming from.
Particularly the Windows phones of the day - which needed a stylus on account of the UI being too small and fiddly to operate with a finger. Those styluses were useless for drawing or writing.
The Apple Pencil - compared with an iPad-sized screen - was something completely different, not something necessitated by a cramped UI, more akin to a Wacom graphics tablet. Also, I don't see people demanding to be able to use their Apple Pencils on an iPhone (...maybe with the foldable one?)
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
You're making good points, and I certainly don't intend debate this endlessly, but we are in this thread for a reason so...
Isn't it a bit inconsistent to give Jobs credit for the success of the Mac but not the failure of Lisa? Steve also wasn't the CEO responsible for the Macintosh.
Jobs may have been one of a smaller number of people in the Apple II program but I don't think he had more control. If Woz walked, Apple was done. Woz had been carrying Jobs' water for a long time when it came to actually doing the work.
If the box was going to have exchangeable parts, it was going to be the best designed mechanism in the industry. That's not evidence that exchangeable parts was the goal though, just that it was accepted.
The Mac wasn't just a GUI appliance, it was the future of computing. Do you think Jobs saw it as a toy? Unless we think the 2013 Mac Pro was conceived of and shipped in less than 2 years, we can assume Jobs was involved in its design. No slots. Socketed DIMMs, because that's how RAM shipped and was configured, but external expansion only despite the "Pro" moniker.
One of many interesting reads on this site:
Folklore.org: Diagnostic Port
As stated above in this thread, Jobs' resistance to muggles mucking with his products is well documented. This line seems directly relevant to what triggered this exchange: "But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party." Sounds exactly like what people accuse Cook of.
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WebHead
macrumors 6502a
It's easy to forget Apple initially missed the MP3 revolution. They were so focused on digital video, you could get Macs with DVD burners but not CD burners. Sales cratered, as did the share price.
Of course Steve turned things around pretty quick with iTunes, "Rip. Mix. Burn." and then the world-changing iPod.
As for Steve being "against" the iPhone, the iPad was actually in development first, with the iPhone coming out of that. Gates at the time was all-in on tablets and Steve wanted to show him how to do it right.
Of course Steve turned things around pretty quick with iTunes, "Rip. Mix. Burn." and then the world-changing iPod.
As for Steve being "against" the iPhone, the iPad was actually in development first, with the iPhone coming out of that. Gates at the time was all-in on tablets and Steve wanted to show him how to do it right.
maxoakland
macrumors 68000
People criticize Cook more because he did a worse job and has been at the helm at a time when the company's quality and innovation have slumped noticeably (to most people)
matthew12
macrumors regular
Yes. He was wrong several times. He said no to the App Store on iOS originally, the Power Mac G4 Cube was terrible in performance due to the design, he promised 3 GHz G5 chips, the 90's puck mouse was terrible, thinking people would buy the expensive Lisa, the 3rd gen buttonless iPod Shuffle was replaced after only a year and a half, he said a smaller iPad wouldn't be wanted by anyone, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting too.
aevan
macrumors 601
No, quality and innovation slumped noticeably to some people, but considering Apple grew by like a 1000%, a lot of people don’t think it was noticeable.
Everything you’re saying is very subjective. I think both CEOs brought a lot to the company.
If you really want to compare Cook and Jobs like-for-like, then anything pre-1997 (Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, Mac) would be off the table since, until then, their roles and powers were really not comparable. mid-1980's Jobs had influence, but he was in constant battles with the board (who treated him as a loose cannon) and didn't command the sort of back-me-or-sack-me support that a CEO (certainly in post-1997 Apple) could command, and he wasn't where the buck stopped.
If you're going to look at the 80s, then I tgink you have to be a bit nuanced. Jobs was thrown off the Lisa project some time before it launched, when there was still time for it to shift direction or cancel. He then took over the Mac project, which was otherwise going to be a sort of Apple IV, steered it towards his vision of the Lisa, and saw it through to launch.
Also, I don't think the Lisa was a total writeoff: the GUI shared a lot of design & development with the Mac, raised a huge amount of industry & customer interest and did a lot to create a demand for an affordable version just in time for the Mac. With future hindsight, the Lisa and the Vision Pro might turn out to be an apt comparison (although it may be more like AVP vs. Newton...)
Jobs was forced out of Apple entirely before we got to see where he'd have taken the Mac... What we did get to see was Jobs' NeXT which was a modular "pro" system more akin to the Mac II than the original Macintosh.
"Appliance" doesn't mean "toy".
It's something you buy to do a well-defined, established job (e.g. WP, DTP, Spreadsheets) without having to bury yourself in the underlying tech or agonize over multiple configurations. One aspect of that is that the base configuration should be adequate for the job (given price constraints). You don't expect to have to retro-fit a larger drum to your washing machine, and only a total petrol-head would buy a new car with a view to upgrading the engine.
Then there are higher-end machines like the NeXT and the G3/G4/G5/Xeon towers which are designed for more diverse, bleeding edge applications and need to be adaptable.
It's actually right there in Jobs' famous 1997 "4 quadrant" diagram - the iMac "appliance" and the exoandable PowerMac each get their own quadrants - at a time when Jobs was having to strip back the company to its core products to save it from bankruptcy - not a constraint that Cook has ever faced.
IMHO a major reason for the 2013's failure was that it was marketed as a replacement for the classic Mac Pro rather than a new product category "appliance" for running FCP, Logic etc. The classic Mac Pro hadn't been kept up to date under Cook and was discontinued immediately the trashcan was released (actually a year earlier in the EU because Apple didn't spring for a plastic fan guard to meet the regs).
Cook was CEO for most of its final development and launch (and had effectively taken over some time before Jobs died). He certainly had time to read the room and change things. Releasing an updated Mac Pro tower while the new concept proved itself was certainly in his power.
Important to put quotes like that in the context of the actual product and actual time. Jobs's priority at that point was leading the team making the classic Macintosh, and there's no doubt he wanted that particular product to be an "appliance".
Anyway, encouraging customers to muck around inside a classic Mac would have come with a body count and lawsuits thanks to the lethal voltages that hang around on a CRT long after it is turned off. There weren't easy-to-fit DIMM sticks back then, either - you'd have to plug individual chips into sockets (potential for bent pins, back-to-front chips etc.)
Nevertheless, people did upgrade the RAM - there were no technological barriers - but you'd need to know which end of a soldering iron got hot & get hold of a Torx bit welded to the end of a long metal rod...
Analog Kid
macrumors G3
This has probably run its course. The question at the top of the thread is simply "Was Steve Jobs ever wrong?" irrespective of his role, and "Would he disagree with Tim Cook". I don't disagree with many of your points, but for this discussion they were worth looking at with a critical eye. I think people go out of their way to forgive Steve his many mistakes even while they hold others in contempt for similar decisions-- at least in part because people have a gauzy, nostalgic memory of Jobs colored by his own, famously persuasive, stage presence. People want their heroes.
Likewise, as I've said earlier, I'm sure Steve would disagree with Cook on certain particulars, because he never fully agreed with anyone, but I think Cook has been more in line with the Jobs legacy than many are willing to recognize. I think all evidence indicates Jobs would be fine with the trend toward appliance computing. I think he would have been excited by Vision Pro, but probably would have done a better job selling its virtues. I don't think he would have baulked at Apple's profitability, and I think he would have been fine partnering on AI just as he did on search. It's easy to convince ourselves that a past hero would agree with us, but I don't think the evidence supports that.
The scale of modern Apple changes how people view it, and I suspect by now people would be saying "Steve isn't who he used to be" if he were still at the helm. Steve flew the pirate flag because there's a romantic notion of a rebel breaking rules to live their adventure, but that romance doesn't scale to robber barons.
Oh, undoubtedly!
We'll have to wait and see if - a few years down the line - people are fuming "this disaster would never have happened if Tim Cook was still in charge!"
DankeBrutus
macrumors regular
I believe this was because he thought that Web Apps would take over?
phoenix-mac-user
macrumors regular
It goes to the blind hero worship cult that Jobs created that this is a question here.
Steve Jobs was wrong all the time.
The most hilarious example is that he was so obsessed with the iPod that he refused to green light the iPhone, because he thought iPhones would cut into iPod sales. Some accountant (who only cared about money like Tim Cook does lol) had to eventually talk him into it. Had he not created the iPhone he wouldn't have had the hero worship he has now. Those keynotes became a thing with the iPhone and Apple is what it is now because of the iPhone.
And he might have killed the iPhone had he not died. He kept insisting that nobody wanted a phone bigger than 3.5 inches, and the iPhone was hemorrhaging users because of that. I left during that period. As soon as he died, they immediately started producing and releasing bigger phones up to the sizes we use today. And what makes is comment even more hilarious is you can't even buy those itty-bitty iPhones anymore so obviously everyone wanted an iphone bigger than 3.5 inches.
So not only did he make huge mistakes, but his legacy was saved by Tim Cook.
Steve Jobs was wrong all the time.
The most hilarious example is that he was so obsessed with the iPod that he refused to green light the iPhone, because he thought iPhones would cut into iPod sales. Some accountant (who only cared about money like Tim Cook does lol) had to eventually talk him into it. Had he not created the iPhone he wouldn't have had the hero worship he has now. Those keynotes became a thing with the iPhone and Apple is what it is now because of the iPhone.
And he might have killed the iPhone had he not died. He kept insisting that nobody wanted a phone bigger than 3.5 inches, and the iPhone was hemorrhaging users because of that. I left during that period. As soon as he died, they immediately started producing and releasing bigger phones up to the sizes we use today. And what makes is comment even more hilarious is you can't even buy those itty-bitty iPhones anymore so obviously everyone wanted an iphone bigger than 3.5 inches.
So not only did he make huge mistakes, but his legacy was saved by Tim Cook.
BSDnostalgia
macrumors 6502
Jobs chose Tim Cook for a reason and trusted his reasoning and intuition and told him to do what he thought was right and not do what he would. With that, I doubt Steve would have:
-Shipped the Apple Vision Pro
-Bought Beats
-Wasted a single dollar on the Apple car
-Tolerated the lack of quality in software
-The Siri delay would have resulted in mass firings
-Steve Jobs didn't believe in corporate charity, he thought employing people and making great products was the charity
-Steve would hate all the different models of everything and believed in simplification
Some example Steve blunders:
-The cube
-Resisting the App Store
-Insisting on smaller screens for the iPhone
-The trash can Mac Pro
-Perhaps his worst blunder: the AT&T exclusive in the US for almost the first 4 years of the iPhone. Stunted its growth and gave rise to Android at Sprint/Verizon/T-Mobile, etc.
Steve would love Apple Silicon, Airpods and would probably approve of the current Apple Watch. He would love the spaceship campus, since it was his idea. Steve would marvel at Tim Cook turning Apple's market cap into the largest company in the world.
-Shipped the Apple Vision Pro
-Bought Beats
-Wasted a single dollar on the Apple car
-Tolerated the lack of quality in software
-The Siri delay would have resulted in mass firings
-Steve Jobs didn't believe in corporate charity, he thought employing people and making great products was the charity
-Steve would hate all the different models of everything and believed in simplification
Some example Steve blunders:
-The cube
-Resisting the App Store
-Insisting on smaller screens for the iPhone
-The trash can Mac Pro
-Perhaps his worst blunder: the AT&T exclusive in the US for almost the first 4 years of the iPhone. Stunted its growth and gave rise to Android at Sprint/Verizon/T-Mobile, etc.
Steve would love Apple Silicon, Airpods and would probably approve of the current Apple Watch. He would love the spaceship campus, since it was his idea. Steve would marvel at Tim Cook turning Apple's market cap into the largest company in the world.
phoenix-mac-user
macrumors regular
If there was a market for them, the major phone manufacturers would make them. Companies like to make money.
The smallest iPhone, the mini, is 5.18 inches, and sales were so bad they stopped creating new versions after the 13.
phoenix-mac-user
macrumors regular
I said it in my post, even bigger than the App Store, if he had gotten his way initially, Apple wouldn't have created the iPhone.
He was so obsessed with the iPod at the time that he refused to green light the iPhone because he thought it would cut into iPod sales (which it definitely did lol).
With Steve Jobs' cult of personality and early passing, armchair critics in online computer forums can now invoke his memory against anything Apple does that they disagree with. "Steve never would have allowed this! It's too [ small | large | little | much | square | round | cheap | expensive | early | late | ordinary | unconventional | bland | colorful | (insert adjective here) ]!" Steve's not here to say, so it's their word against anybody else's.
Why not?
Apple specifically bought Beats for Beats Music, which pretty much took 10 months to re-skin and call Apple Music.
Steve’s Apple bought SoundJam MP and re-skinned it as iTunes back in 2000. In fact, there are still parts of the Mac music app that fundamentally go back to SoundJam.
That’s exactly the type of acquisition Steve would have done.
He also wasn’t above the “celebrities company” thing either and certainly wouldn’t have had a problem with long time music executives and artist being partnered with Apple. Anyone remember Steve’s extremely awkward intros of Madonna and Kanye West at Apple keynotes?
True … but on a larger perspective, smartphone use has rapidly degraded the quality of human to human interaction and mental health overall. It is beyond addictive.It's easy to forget that Steve Jobs was against the invention of the iPhone because of the way he introduced it with such enthusiasm in 2007. Fortunately, Apple employees convinced him to support it. By the time that special keynote in 2007 was over, I was convinced the iPhone was his idea.
Steve Jobs almost prevented the Apple iPhone from being invented
Apple's most successful product might not have been created without a nudge from Steve Jobs' team.www.cnbc.com
Steve Jobs did not want Apple to develop iPhone, he hated cell phones
Despite Apple's ongoing success with iPhones, co-founder Steve Jobs originally thought the concept of the company making a phone was a bad idea.www.indiatoday.in
Perhaps the hesitation, while being bad for company profits, was better for humanity as a whole.
Yet... what actually counts is that Jobs listended to others, Apple did release the iPhone and created the App Store while Jobs was CEO, and, once persuaded, he got 100% behind those ideas - some CEOs would have doubled down on "not invented here" and killed the product.
I guess we haven't yet started to hear all of the political shenanigans behind Tm Cook's decisions, or to apply 20:20 hindsight to things like AVP or Apple Silicon.
Apparently Jobs made so many mistakes that he kept making them from beyond the grave...
ISTR the popularity of large-screen "phablets" really took off with phones like the Galaxy Note - released in 2011 a few weeks after Jobs died, and when Tim Cook had been effectively running the company for some years. The big iPhone fizzle was the iPhone 5 in 2012 which (a) doubled down on the small screen and (b) coincided with the Apple Maps fisasco - something that Cook has actually accepted as his mistake. I was using cheap Android phones up until then, but was ready to switch to something a bit more premium & was waitimg for the next iPhone, but the 5's small screen and the (at the time) awful-outside-or-the-bay-area Maps convinced me to get a Galaxy Note II (great phone!) instead.
Released 2 years after Jobs' death.
If that was such an obvious no-no, Cook had plenty of time to dodge the bullet. Releasing a decent update to the Classic Mac Pro to run alongside the Trashcan would not have been rocket science (the 2019 Mac Pro was quite obviously put together from scratch in 2 years) and avoided forcing Mac Pro users to buy the unsuitable trashcan.
During Jobs' 1998-2011 reign there was always a reasonably up-to-date modular tower Mac. That started to be neglected as soon as Jobs died. There was a much-maligned, minor processor bump in 2012 and, then, the trashcan in 2013.
Even if the Trashcan was Jobs' idea, prematurely forcing it as the only "Mac pro" option was well and truly Cook's problem, and he doubled down on that until 2017.
Possibly... (I'm in the UK, so the whole US mobile network thing looks like a dumpster fire from here - and the appeal of Android had very little to do with carrier choice and a lot to do with the phones being half the price of an iPhone).
From what I recall though, the original iPhone offered a lot of fancy telephone features, like visual voicemail, which required support from the carrier, so it probably had to be developed as a carrier exclusive. Turns out, the iPhone was a victim of its own success and "making phone calls" kinda slipped down the feature list.
I'm inclined to treat any stuff-ups from the late 00's to 2011 as being Cook and Jobs' joint responsibility.
However, lest anybody think I'm blindly hero worshiping Steve Jobs, lets fill some much needed gaps in this hall of shame:
iTunes Ping - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_puck_mouse (I think that one has already been mentioned, but it never gets old)
But also, let's remember the adage "He who makes no mistakes usually makes nothing".
StellarVixen
macrumors 68040
He was right at the time: Some pre-iPhone smartphones with touchscreens - e.g. Windows Mobile ones - came with tiny, passive styluses (i.e. pointed sticks). You could write and draw with them but this was limited by the size of the screen, but you needed them because the onscreen touch controls were too fiddly for fingers.
Later, Android tablets & large-screen phones started to include far better, active, styluses which were more like the Wacom graphics tablets & primarily for writing and drawing. You dodn't need them just to use the UI. The Apple Pencil followed.
Spock
Contributor
The Newton was a PDA not a tablet and Apple was not going to compete with the PalmPilot that was smaller and far cheaper than any Newton. Not to mention, the Newton was a Sculley project and stood no chance of survival when Steve came back.