Steve Jobs' cabinet
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Steve Jobs' cabinet
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Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#2Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#3I think I follow this philosophy. You spend a lot of time looking at the insides of the things you build, even if no one else does - why shouldn't I get to see beauty too.
Related but distinct from aesthetic beauty, there's a sort of mechanical beauty. Simplicity and elegance and all that. All the parts that came out of the Macbook were held in with one screw - good - but all those screws look to be different shapes and sizes - less good. Maybe it isn't possible to have both. For my money I spend a lot of time going back and forth between the two.
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#4It is a little funny that car manufacturers have figured this out in a silly way.
Basically, a lot of new cars are very simple and elegant when you open the hood, showing clearly fluid reservoirs, a sculpted engine, and some elegant plastic covers to tie it all together.
... but basically the plastic covers are a "second hood" with the ugliness pushed down one level.
I will say that powermac G* and mac pro systems have always been kind of cool - they were made to be opened and there were always really nice engineering details.
Things I remember are the carefully stored hard disk screws for slide in drives on the powermac G5. Or the pci express card locking systems. Or the case opening procedure on any of the systems.
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#5Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html
Wow, the interesting part there—at least for anyone who already knows the cabinet story—is how it ends:
"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".
"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."
So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.
That's interesting because (a) it's a story of how the cabinet principle didn't prevail, and (b) it's a brilliant example of how to communicate.
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#6Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html
Wow, the interesting part there—at least for anyone who already knows the cabinet story—is how it ends: "Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically". "OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back." So we invested anoth…
He would've loved liquid glass then
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#7This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty.
To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#8I can do nothing but agree - but don’t tell the author about Louis Rossmann, who has been opening, repairing, and bemoaning the horrible electronics design of Apple products.
Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#9My last two MacBooks have had keyboards which have just been junk. And a keyboard isn't something which is just hidden away--it's out, front and center.
Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet
#10I can do nothing but agree - but don’t tell the author about Louis Rossmann, who has been opening, repairing, and bemoaning the horrible electronics design of Apple products. Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.
Rossmann has competing business interests to defend.