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Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

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Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#81

Post by kstrauser »

hi41 wrote: post #7

Much respect to Steve and the engineers at Apple. However, I hate using a product from Apple that actually causes me physical pain after using it. The magic mouse. I use that for 10 minutes and my palm and wrist hurt badly. Many have experienced the same symptoms and yet Apple hasn’t changed its design. I get that Apple is creative. Do they change their product design based on feedback from actual users in their crea…

I love my MacBook, and I despise Apple’s own pointing devices. I ended up getting a vertical mouse that completely solved the pain problem for me.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#82

Post by biggoodwolf »

hi41 wrote: post #7

Much respect to Steve and the engineers at Apple. However, I hate using a product from Apple that actually causes me physical pain after using it. The magic mouse. I use that for 10 minutes and my palm and wrist hurt badly. Many have experienced the same symptoms and yet Apple hasn’t changed its design. I get that Apple is creative. Do they change their product design based on feedback from actual users in their crea…

Logitech mx 1-4. You don't have to marry Apple

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#83

Post by dfxm12 »

hi41 wrote: post #7

Much respect to Steve and the engineers at Apple. However, I hate using a product from Apple that actually causes me physical pain after using it. The magic mouse. I use that for 10 minutes and my palm and wrist hurt badly. Many have experienced the same symptoms and yet Apple hasn’t changed its design. I get that Apple is creative. Do they change their product design based on feedback from actual users in their crea…

Apple sells an ergo vertical mouse on their website. It's not made by them (it's Logitech), sure. There's are also different options depending on your needs, like the kenisis dxt mouse, a plethora of trackballs, etc. Why are you demanding Apple specifically reinvent an ergo mouse?

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#84

Post by [deleted] »

dosisking wrote: post #47
WillAdams wrote: post #13

Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work: - Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design - Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation - Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel - Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/sho…

- Steve Naroff who basically hacked together Objective-C++ in a few weekends. His interview with the Computer History Museum is worth a watch.

[deleted]

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#85

Post by EvanAnderson »

WillAdams wrote: post #57
dosisking wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Steve Naroff who basically hacked together Objective-C++ in a few weekends. His interview with the Computer History Museum is worth a watch.

Caroline Rose also has an interview there, and it was also well-worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RikO_3jedlY

Thanks to both you and the GP commenter for the references. I've queued both of them up to download. CHM's oral histories are priceless, though finding the right ones to listen to can be difficult with the volume.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#86

Post by at-fates-hands »

yardie wrote: post #10
cmiles8 wrote: post #6

In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.

Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was wo…

>> They just had very bad supply chain management.

The crazy thing is Joe O' Sullivan had set out a two month training for Tim Cook to learn the supply side of the company. Cook mastered it in two weeks and O' Sullivan was forced to step down a lot sooner then he anticipated.

You could easily say it was Cook, not Jobs that saved the company.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#87

Post by zitterbewegung »

ktallett wrote: post #11
zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features…

Mac OS was a step in a different direction, however development was far less compelling for OSX than classic. Think C was far more enjoyable and created far smaller and less power hungry apps, which allowed for a greater range of possibilities on low powered chips. Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.

I fail to see how this compares to iOS which runs on phones or even devices with 15 watts of tdp laptops.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#88

Post by zitterbewegung »

jorisw wrote: post #21
zitterbewegung wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features…

> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded. But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand. Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books

To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#89

Post by JKCalhoun »

trvz wrote: post #65
JKCalhoun wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bailed on the official bio when I got to the part where Jobs is (belatedly) crediting his adoptive father with showing young Steve the importance of (paraphrasing) "giving as much attention to the parts of the product that the customer will never see". It was clear at that point that this would be a Jobs-directed bio and I saw no point in continuing to read that.

I think it was about the back of a cabinet, and that attitude certainly exists in woodworking. It's reasonable for learning to appreciate that as an adolescent to have a big impact on a person. And even if that book were fully dictated by Steve Jobs, it can still be valuable to know what such a person thinks (or claims to think) about things.

I'm not denying that the sentiment exists—but everything ever written about Jobs and his relationship with his adoptive parents has shown Steve to have been dismissive of them.

This 11th hour "coming to Jesus" for Jobs where suddenly he's heaping praise on them… smelled off to me.

Re: Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on his years at NeXT Computer

#90

Post by m0llusk »

dosisking wrote: post #45
cmiles8 wrote: post #6

In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.

Apple was NeXT but not anymore. All the NeXT people were pushed out. Turns out, most of the work was being done by the NeXT people. Probably when Scott Forstall gets stabbed in the back by Tim Cook, that was the end of the NeXT era of Apple.

Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.
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