Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#41

Post by chris100 »

10ren wrote: post #3

So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself. I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC). Steve's tale…

The iPod is a great example of how Jobs was unique.

Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.

Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...

That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.

Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#42

Post by GeneralMaximus »

Tichy wrote: post #37
philwelch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mum is dead now, but she happily owned a succession of iMacs for about ten years prior to that. My elderly father does just fine with the iMac too, though I actually had to turn off the right click to keep him from getting confused. By the way, the "unintuitive" things you mention aren't unintuitive, just different from Windows. It's no less "unintuitive" than whether or not you set your parking brake with a pedal…

Maybe it only works for some people - fair enough. It doesn't work for me. I had to google for renaming a file. On other OS I just have to remember one rule: try the right mouse button. Instant expert. As for not closing apps, I find that hard to believe. Maybe if you only ever use 3 apps it is OK. Otherwise, why even have a mechanism for starting and stopping apps? Could just start them all upon booting. (Actually t…

A running app takes up a certain amount of memory it needs for performing basic startup tasks and loading menus/bundles. After that, each document takes a tiny amount of extra memory. For example, Safari with no windows takes about 25megs of memory. This shoots up to about 100megs on opening one window after which it only takes about 10megs of memory per tab (this depends on the size of pages you're loading, of course).

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#43

Post by philwelch »

Tichy wrote: post #37
philwelch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mum is dead now, but she happily owned a succession of iMacs for about ten years prior to that. My elderly father does just fine with the iMac too, though I actually had to turn off the right click to keep him from getting confused. By the way, the "unintuitive" things you mention aren't unintuitive, just different from Windows. It's no less "unintuitive" than whether or not you set your parking brake with a pedal…

Maybe it only works for some people - fair enough. It doesn't work for me. I had to google for renaming a file. On other OS I just have to remember one rule: try the right mouse button. Instant expert. As for not closing apps, I find that hard to believe. Maybe if you only ever use 3 apps it is OK. Otherwise, why even have a mechanism for starting and stopping apps? Could just start them all upon booting. (Actually t…

There's just as much arbitrary difference you have to look up if you're used to a Mac and using Windows. Why the hell does "Display" (which you think would change monitor settings) control your desktop background image (and why is it called a "wallpaper"?) What's the GUI to figure out your IP address? (wait, there is none...)

If you close all the windows of an app, clicking the app icon in the Dock usually opens a new window. It does for Safari at least. Anyway, the main difference is that Windows doesn't consistently differentiate between windows and applications, and Mac does. On the Mac side, a window is just something that's opened up by an application as an interface, whereas on Windows, the window is the application, which is why if you need to open more than one browser window you have multiple instances of Microsoft Internet Explorer running, but it's really okay because secretly they're all running off the same DLL's. Or something like that.

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#44

Post by kjhgftgyui »

philwelch wrote: post #35
10ren wrote: post #3

So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself. I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC). Steve's tale…

No, the iPod was in development outside of Apple but Fadell had trouble getting investment.

But was Fadell going to create itunes, and run a brilliant marketing campaign to persuade people to pay 10x as much as an MP3 player from Walmart?

Apple's (and Steve's) genius was to sell them to people who didn't know or care what MP3, gB or bitrates meant.

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#45

Post by philwelch »

kjhgftgyui wrote: post #44
philwelch wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the iPod was in development outside of Apple but Fadell had trouble getting investment.

But was Fadell going to create itunes, and run a brilliant marketing campaign to persuade people to pay 10x as much as an MP3 player from Walmart? Apple's (and Steve's) genius was to sell them to people who didn't know or care what MP3, gB or bitrates meant.

A company called "Casady & Greene" actually created iTunes. It was called SoundJam MP and it was pretty cool. Then Apple bought it and turned it into iTunes. (Just SoundJam and the employees who worked on it, not C&G as a whole. C&G declared bankruptcy, and then Apple hired some of their remaining employees if not all.)

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#46

Post by 10ren »

swombat wrote: post #8
10ren wrote: post #3

So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself. I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC). Steve's tale…

Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better Doing this is at least an order of magnitude harder than any purely technical or directly productive work. People are fickle, ever-changing, unpredictable, complex, etc. Brilliant people are even more difficult to manage. The art of surrounding yours…

I hope you don't think I wasn't praising him in that line.

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

chris100 wrote: post #41
10ren wrote: post #3

So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself. I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC). Steve's tale…

The iPod is a great example of how Jobs was unique. Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen. Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of b…

[deleted]

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#49

Post by yardie »

Tichy wrote: post #18
bumblebird wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like comparing a Porsche to a Lada. The amount of time people have to waste on PCs waiting for the OS, doing anti virus stuff, staring at blue screens of death, rebooting because it's got confused, etc etc But this isn't an OS war thread :) Suffice to say, "It's still just a PC" is completely missing the point. A top class restaurant still 'just' serves food, but you can't really compare it to Macdonalds. A…

It's so funny that all Apple fanboyism is automatically voted up. Incidentally I currently use a MacBook that is less than a year old. In recent weeks I frequently had to hard reset it because it froze to an eternal spinning sand clock. Earlier this week I noticed with Disk Utility that there were errors on the disk. I tried to repair them, had to boot from DVD for that. The repair failed. After that OS X didn't boot…

If it's less than a year old why even bother doing all that work? The disk is bad. The wipe only masks the inevitable. Formatting maps out bad sectors, but these tend to grow as time goes by.

Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn’t Returned To Apple In 1997?

#50

Post by invisible »

Tichy wrote: post #13
invisible wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's like saying a house is just a house, a car is just a car, or a job is just a job. When the details are left out, there is no comparative analysis and it pretty much fails at making a point.

I don't think it is. There are only a few categories for PCs (server, desktop, notebook, netbook), stuff like that. I think if you say Apple most people have an idea in which categories to compare. It's not like comparing a Hummer to a Porsche. More like comparing a VW to a Toyota or something. You make it sound as if Apple PCs are beyond comparison, a class of their own. Which they aren't. I am not saying they are n…

I was not saying they are in a class of their own. I was saying that you are grouping "PCs" into a category and saying that is all that it is noteworthy. Well, sure, that huge mansion is JUST a house, but you know so is that one bedroom apartment. Now you could say, "Windows PCs are great because they are cheap and powerful. Macs are great because they are stable and thoughtful."

I didn't even imply that Macs are better. Although I do think that Apple controlling the hardware and software has allowed them a lot more time to focus on the software than the bureaucracy Microsoft has to deal with to help software publishers and PC manufacturers. There is a lot of stuff I can only do on Windows and that in itself is important to note.

Post reply on HN