Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#221

Post by ToucanLoucan » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 1:26 AM UTC

jiggawatts wrote: post #182

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it. I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears, throw shit around the office, and in general make a complete ass of himself. Lik…

[flagged]

> I’ve heard the same story about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and of course, Steve Jobs…

Is this supposed to be a positive point? Gates has exploited numerous legal maneuvers to create yes, a gigantic software company, and one of the absolute largest blights on tech as an industry. Name a Microsoft product that doesn't suck ass. Elon Musk hasn't done a fucking thing, he got lucky with PayPal, bought and booted the founders of Tesla, and has been coasting on it ever since. And since he fired his PR team his public image has gone to shit and all of his companies, save Space X and only because of generous Government contracts, are going down the drain.

> Being an “asshole” is very strongly correlated with the ability to build the best or biggest company in your field.

No, being an asshole is what one can get away with once one has struck it rich in tech. For all the shit talking I would do about Jobs, and do it I will, he is the only one on this list who did it in the direction you're talking about, where he was the asshole first, who THEN built a ridiculously successful business. Gates was a nepo baby who got access to computers at an incredibly young age when that was borderline unheard of. Musk would've never left his mothers basement if not for his father's wealth.

> It’s like girls in dating. They say they want a sensitive guy, but end up getting married to the jock with the big muscles.

Ah, you're also in your mother's basement I see.

> There’s this particularly western notion that no, no, no, millions of years of evolutionary advantage and game theory just doesn’t apply

We haven't been meaningfully part of evolution, survival of the fittest, since the first of our ancestors picked up a rock and tied it to a stick, and leapt to the top of the foodchain. We are by virtue of social networking and tool usage, apex predators. Nothing has been a threat to us in the "nature" way for thousands of years and nobody thinks otherwise apart from weird alpha-male guys who follow incredibly shit nature "science" to justify their unhinged anti-social behavior.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#222

Post by dgfl » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 1:56 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #193

gwd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, no? Apple Music wasn't even a thing in the iPhone 4S timeframe. You used to buy music in the iTunes Store, and play it in the music player app. It used to be if you clicked the App Store, and you had apps to update, it would take you to the "Update" tab immediately. Then they changed it to take you to the main page, and you had to click the "Update" tab. Then they changed the updates to be under your account; so…

> If I honestly thought Android would be any different I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a gen…

I haven’t used an android device in 2 years, but I was just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T), such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass, suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All stuff that you’ll never hear about in an actual review, for some reason. My music player is an app called “Music”, and my ebook reader is an app called “Books”. I have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps since they’re already included with the phone, and are not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my own and the store-bought stuff from my mac’s filesystem. Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices through iCloud, a service which I’ve spent zero minutes setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have all features I need, since all I want them to do is open my files and keep track of progress. They’re not customizable and I don’t care about it. I could download open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I wanted to. I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It works and I haven’t had problems with it. I share it with some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking for a decent ad blocker, it’s not as easy as android. I’m also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life, although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I read books and listen to music (among other things). It has some limitations, but they’re not important. I don’t want to have to think about setting up a media server to listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once again because it’s been 3 years since I last set it up and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have to think about this and get on to more important aspects of life.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#223

Post by rhetocj23 » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:15 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #175

ndepoel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.

I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact. His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely fo…

The magic of Jobs is/was he truly was a self-starter and self-taught man; he had the rare mix of traits necessary to be a visionary.

Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by the time he was dead.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#224

Post by mulmen » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:18 AM UTC

com2kid wrote: post #217

mulmen wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what’s the lesson for future business leaders? Someone has to be first. What can a first mover do to get to that second generation product?

Apple is the often sung master of this. Jobs waited for the right time for mobile and tablets. Apple also waited for smart watches as well. Same goes for Car Play. They seemed to have ran out of patience waiting for AR/VR.0 There was a company called Kosmo (Kosmo?) during the first .com bubble. Basically door dash / Uber eats but way too early.

Sure but “be second” doesn’t help that first mover. What incentive is there to innovate if your product is doomed to fail? What can a company do to both innovate and develop a viable product?

Are the corporate structures and cultures necessary for this just that different?

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#225

Post by mulmen » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

kmac_ wrote: post #197

portaouflop wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t used Apple devices back when they were good so I have always avoided all the built-in Apple bloat/adware. Because I came from Windows this was already my standard assumption - I need to violently throw out all the built-in stuff and replace it with free and good software. It’s funny because that means I never felt the same pain you feel; I just assumed that’s how operating systems are.

As a Linux user, I feel like a different breed here: I'm pretty sure the software I'll be using 10 years from now will be pretty much the same, and I'm happy about that.

I recently dusted off a CentOS 5 file server that hadn’t been powered on in a decade. It’s familiar but a lot has changed.

But to your point it has changed less than Windows or MacOS.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#226

Post by jimt1234 » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:22 AM UTC

gwd wrote: post #75

> From that point on, Steve would go on to spend lavishly on things that improved the experience, and he would reject—often brutally—any idea that diluted or harmed the experience. ...I’ll go out on a limb and say that uninvited advertising is not normally equated with a better customer experience. YES!!! SOO much of the Apple user experience has degraded due to this. I can't listen to my own music that I bought on t…

> Modern iPhones don't come with a music player. They come with a music store, that you happen to be able to put your own music into. But it's not structured to help you play your music, it's structured to sell you what they want to sell you.

VLC is your friend.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#227

Post by pzo » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:34 AM UTC

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #219

pzo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your chart shows total revenue but not per category but even so it shows the last 4 years revenue didn't grow that much as before and its mostly growing because grow in services revenue.

The last chart https://i0.wp.com/sixcolors.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2...

you can see in your linked chart that everything is pretty much flat except services in the last 4 years. iPhone revenue in 2022: 205B, then next to years down (201B) and in 2025: 210B.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#228

Post by mensetmanusman » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:38 AM UTC

Apple Maps has always had subtle ads. They show various stores and shops at different zoom levels in your town, some requiring very high zoom levels meaning you wouldn’t stumble across them.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#229

Post by ebbi » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:56 AM UTC

I probably sound like a broken record, but the death of Apple won't come from being behind on AI, from losing developer support, from bad products or services. Fundamentally, it'll be because it is optimising for being on the stock market and chasing endless revenue growth.

All other issues I've outlined is a symptom of that fundamental issue. Apple is losing its soul.

The author suggests Steve would have done something based on what Steve did in the past in that particular set of circumstances. But it's not fair to suggest what Steve would have done today, given where Apple is now. Would Steve have said "screw it" to the share price and just ran the company with the same ethos? Maybe, he was bold like that. But then he also had a Board to answer to.

Re: Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line

#230

Post by mrandish » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 2:56 AM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #215

mrandish wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I honestly thought Android would be any different I haven't used an iOS device for over a decade so I'm not familiar with exactly how it may be different now - but it sounds quite different. Here's how I use media on Android. All files are DRM-free generic formats (MP3, FLAC, EPUB) organized in folders on a removable 512GB micro SD card which auto-syncs between my desktop, laptop, Android tablet, phone and a gen…

I do it similar to you, except that I use PlexAmp for my music. But I have to note that you and I are the exception. The VAST majority of users are, I think, doing it through, if not the Play Store itself, then some other service (e.g., Spotify). That said, though, at least we have this option. But is there any reason that an iPhone user can't just use PlexAmp like I do? I'm pretty sure that Firefox is available to t…

My understanding is that Firefox on iOS is substantially limited from Windows and Android. Like they can only run uBlock Origin Lite and many add-ons aren't available. Something about Apple policy blocking browser extensions that can run scripts/code, as it might compete with Apple's app store. But that's just what I've read online from other people. It also might be somewhat different recently in the EU, at least about the installing alt app stores. As I said, I haven't used an iOS device in over a decade, so have no first hand knowledge.