121–130 of 259 posts
I cant help but think Apple is using Steve to tell us what Apple really is. Since Tim Cook has failed to communicate that message across to its audience. ( May be apart from certain ideology group ). It may also help to temper the new born hatred against Apple from their long time supporters. I really wish he was still alive, and continue to be the yard stick of quality so we dont have Apple Music, spending two years…
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Apple has moved from being an incredibly innovative company under Steve Jobs to a much more corporate, mature company that relies more on incremental growth. They don’t really have any incentive to change because of their success, and this fundamental pattern happens to every company (see GE’s history after Edison). Apple simply isn’t the company it was before, and that’s a natural part of capitalism. Other Apples ar…
Yeah, too bad they don't develop new ideas like the watch or AirPods or design their own CPUs from scratch.
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With the glaring exception of the butterfly keyboard debacle (typing on, what, my fourth right now? and already showing some signs of wonkiness), I agree hardware quality is amazing & best its ever been. The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.
I've been a OS X user since the Titanium Powerbook and wouldn't trade Mojave for any cat version --- and, in particular, wouldn't swap the aesthetics of Mojave for any of them either. This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.
Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now:
Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected.
The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost.
On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy.
Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??)
And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)
I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left. There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he w…
The guys at Pontiac who had this power with the Aztek probably thought they had taste; who defines this? Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.
I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left. There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he w…
Steve quotes in the video "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" which is of course a Wayne Gretsky quote, and I think it captures this sentiment very well. Moving from leader to follower is such a classic move for an incumbent like Apple, and with Steve they never seemed to lose that insurgent mindset, even when they were absolutely enormous. They've steadily stagnated and truly lost that…
Apple has been managed by Tim Cook for more years now than it was by Steve Jobs. By business measures it is significantly more successful. They haven't released the next iPhone-class product, but one does not simply walk into Mordor, nor does one make an iPhone of products every year, or even every decade.
I think Apple is doing fine, warts and all. N of 1, but I've spent more money on their stuff in the last 4 years than I did in the 12 before that.
I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”. The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left. There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he w…
Every time I see some usability flub in Mac software—like the new Safari tabs—I think that Steve is just a little more gone. Despite his flaws, he really understood how people interact with computers in a way not many others do.
>> and most of all to stay humble in our own beginner’s mind. This sounds highly revisionist based on how he approached and treated people who knew more about him in many areas. and this: >> We were blessed to have him as husband and father. My own father may be a nobody to history but he's a superior husband and father to Jobs on any scale.
What I remember the most about Jobs' death are 2 things: 1) Most of the media did an heavy coverage of his death and legacy. 2) Exactly 1 week after his death one of my personal heroes died too: Dennis MacLister Ritchie. Almost no one paid attention. From computers to micro-controllers, from satellites to abs breaks, Ritchie's legacy goes far deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost every programmer today touches some of…
I think perhaps the reason it feeling like that is that Jobs was a figure that consumers knew, but I definitely think folks in engineering mourn Ritchie's passing more.
