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In Praise of Bad Steve

theatlantic.com

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Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#71

Post by keenerd »

masklinn wrote: post #58
Someone wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that both devices cannot really be made without air in them. That first iPod had a hard disk. Hard disks have disk heads that float on air. Typical lenses aren't flat at the back; CCDs or films are. You could fill that void with glass with a different index of refraction, but that would only make the thing heavier, not smaller.

> That first iPod had a hard disk. Hard disks have disk heads that float on air. Hard disk drives are sealed, you're not going to get much air out of dropping an HDD (especially a 1.8" one) in water.

Hard disks are not sealed. Disks from the 1960s were. Then engineers realized they could dramatically reduce the amount of structural bracing if they left a "breathing hole" open and allow air pressure to equalize. This is why all hard drives have that little 2mm dot labeled "Warning do not cover!".

Even more amusingly, hard drives need that air inside to operate and they won't work at high altitudes.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#72

Post by ugh »

vacri wrote: post #45
msbarnett wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could argue about the domination of the Mac or the impact and legacy of NeXT and Pixar, but... You really don't think the iPod was an industry-dominating hit? They sold hundreds of millions of them, and no other company ever really came up with a successful answer to them. It was left to Apple itself to kill them with the iPhone.

The ipod was around for three years before it took off in sales, and there were plenty of other music players available at the time that were more popular and had better functionality. Most of the iPod's initial success wasn't because of anything innovative about the product , but because of very, very savvy marketing . It's very interesting to watch all this historical revisionism that paints Jobs as the mysterious…

Wha?

The iPod was an industry dominating hit. That’s a fact, not revisionism. A look at its marketshare over the years suffices.

Also: iTMS. It changed the music industry. To claim otherwise would be absurd.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#73

Post by ugh »

vacri wrote: post #56
2arrs2ells wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever own a non-iPod MP3 player? The user experience on those devices was usually terrible (especially navigating through songs without a scroll wheel). Loading songs onto those players was painful, or at least nowhere near as simple as iTunes (especially once Apple bought SoundJam). Additionally, Jobs' relentless addition/pruning of the iPod lines (mini/shuffle/nano/color/touch/etc) kept Apple with both a str…

Yes, I owned several MP3 players of the era, one of them an iPod video. I found the ipod at the time to be one of the most frustrating to load media onto - as one memorable example, it wouldn't let me load .mp4s into the 'TV' folder, because .mp4s are 'Movies'. No argument will be entered into. wtf? Loading music was no better or worse than other players I had, but iTunes was still horrendous bloatware. Why do I need…

You can’t please all the people all the time.

MP3 players sucked. You had to manually copy music onto them or use the absolutely crappy music libraries that came with them.

With the iPod you have your nicely organized music library and you sync it with your device. For the vast majority of people that so much better than manually copying music. I would never want to go back to the world where I copied music manually.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#74

Post by _delirium »

Volpe wrote: post #42
ars wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you know what disruption is. The PC industry is working just fine, and a Mac and PC are more similar than they are different. The music industry has hardly changed due to the iPod, you sell one way you sell another - that's not disruption. And the phone industry most certainly did not change, it's just an incremental improvement on the fancy phones that have been getting steadily better. The iPhone may…

Partly what you say is true. But I'd say iTunes (music store) was disruptive. It changed how the music industry operated. The iphone changed how we 'use' phones more than it changed the 'phone industry'. In fact, on writing that, I think that captures what Apple does best, it 'disrupts' how people perceive and use a product, that may in-turn distrupt an industry, but that is a consequence, not the goal (for Apple).

I see the iPhone as popularizing the smartphone concept, but not fundamentally disrupting the concept of phones and their usage. Palm I think was the real disruptor there, but Apple perfected it.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#75

Post by officemonkey »

fpgeek wrote: post #68
Udo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While NeXT might have been a commercial failure, the vast majority of entrepreneurs can only dream of having such a business once in their lifetime. In the end, NeXT was acquired by Apple and the foundation of their operating system became what is now OS X. NeXT would not be called a failure if any other person had founded it - it just seems less successful by comparison in the light of Jobs' other endeavors.

If any other person had founded it, NeXT wouldn't have been acquired by Apple.

Jobs had not taken over Apple and acquired NeXT, both NeXT and Apple would in the same boat as BeOS and Palm: failed companies, fondly remembered.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#76

Post by officemonkey »

vacri wrote: post #57
vacri wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3-4 years ago is not when the ipod got big. 3-4 years ago is when the iphone came out.

Not sure why this got downmodded. The ipod came out in 2001. It didn't really take off until 2004. The guy I'm responding to is talking about UX from 2007-08, well after the maturation of the digital music player. iRiver sucking in 2007 does not mean that the iPod didn't suck in 2002.

iPod's chief competition at the time was the Nomad (as captured in Rob Malda's classic iPod review).

I bought a Nomad in August 2001 (roughly two months before the iPod came out). I have never had more remorse at being an early adopter.

The Nomad was the size of two Sony CD Walkmans stuck together. Its interface was a series of four fiddly buttons and a dire lo-res LCD screen. The iPod was a tremendous improvement in every single respect.

The reason why the iPod wasn't an immediate hit was because it was only available for the Mac. iTunes for Windows didn't get released until 2003.

If the iPod sucked in 2002, every other hard-drive based MP3 player sucked more.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#78

Post by patrickgzill »

stickfigure wrote: post #62
MaysonL wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there were Pixar and Next.

+1 for Pixar, -1 for NeXT. You come out even.

Financially NeXT was a wash, the $400 million paid for it was enough to pay back most of the investors, so they got their money back but no profit.

For Apple, having the NeXT talent and what became OSX, it was a success for them. So NeXT had value - it was not a "-1" as a company going bankrupt would be.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#79

Post by msbarnett »

vacri wrote: post #57
vacri wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3-4 years ago is not when the ipod got big. 3-4 years ago is when the iphone came out.

Not sure why this got downmodded. The ipod came out in 2001. It didn't really take off until 2004. The guy I'm responding to is talking about UX from 2007-08, well after the maturation of the digital music player. iRiver sucking in 2007 does not mean that the iPod didn't suck in 2002.

This discussion was regarding whether or not the iPod counted as a dominant product line under Jobs. What particular year an iRiver anecdotally sucked, or whether the initial batch of iPods were as good as those brick sized Nomads is completely irrelevant to the fact that the iPod product line decimated every competitor in the market over its lifespan.

Re: In Praise of Bad Steve

#80

Post by msbarnett »

fpgeek wrote: post #68
Udo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While NeXT might have been a commercial failure, the vast majority of entrepreneurs can only dream of having such a business once in their lifetime. In the end, NeXT was acquired by Apple and the foundation of their operating system became what is now OS X. NeXT would not be called a failure if any other person had founded it - it just seems less successful by comparison in the light of Jobs' other endeavors.

If any other person had founded it, NeXT wouldn't have been acquired by Apple.

If NeXT hadn't produced a pre-emptively multitasking, memory protected, highly object oriented operating system and software development ecosystem, NeXT wouldn't have been acquired by Apple, and Apple wouldn't have had the key technology that has powered every major success they've had outside of the iPod in the last 10 years.

Remember that Apple wasn't shopping for Jobs, they were shopping for a modern OS; they only turned to NeXT after Gassée fucked-up their deal to buy Be.

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