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Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

folklore.org

21–30 of 113 posts

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#21
Hertzfeld dismisses the idea, but I think it’s something more devs should take to heart.

Could someone build a tea timer app in React and save some time? How much impact to humanity does the GBs of RAM and untold CPU cycles the app now require that could be put to use elsewhere, or causes systems to be landfilled due to inefficiency?

I had a phone with GBs if RAM and a multicore processor that could barely run a single current app. I can buy a new phone, but what about the billions of people that don’t have that option?

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#22
post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

I think .NET is one of the few projects Microsoft maintains that I admire that feel like they care a lot about quality, you can tell the people working on it are focused on performance and making sure its really well rounded. I would argue that .NET is Microsoft's greatest achievement / work of all time.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does it matter? Eventually a bean counter will be in charge of the legacy you built up with this painstakingly acquired good UX and high quality, and take less than a decade to make most of what you spent your life fighting, the new reality.

Mac is still more than fast enough and good enough than Windows, so it matters.

That's awfully subjective

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac is still more than fast enough and good enough than Windows, so it matters.

Enjoy your tacky, Vista-esque, liquid glass.

It's tacky, but not the end of the world.

It remins me of some gnome themes from 2005-2009.

I'd choose that a thousand times over an ad filled start menu

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#25
post #11

In the same vein many years later: -- After the original iPad was released, Steve Jobs held a meeting with the MacBook engineering team and demonstrated the difference in wake speed. He woke up a current MacBook (with an Intel chip), which took a few seconds. He then instantly woke up the iPad (with an Apple A-series chip) by pressing the home/power button on and off rapidly. Jobs told the team, "I want you to make t…

It also didn't always work. At no point did the MacBook boot nearly as instantly as an iPad. That said, Jobs' obsession with UX was a powerful driving force and your point stands.

Wake from sleep, not boot. I have a MacBook sitting in front of me and I just tested it: It wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#26
post #11

In the same vein many years later: -- After the original iPad was released, Steve Jobs held a meeting with the MacBook engineering team and demonstrated the difference in wake speed. He woke up a current MacBook (with an Intel chip), which took a few seconds. He then instantly woke up the iPad (with an Apple A-series chip) by pressing the home/power button on and off rapidly. Jobs told the team, "I want you to make t…

I'm confused, doesn't it literally exist now (post-Jobs) that we have Apple silicon on the Mac?

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#27
post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

He was like that not just for performance, but user experience across the board. “Good enough”, aka mediocrity, didn’t cut it and he didn’t care if he had to spend extra resources or even burn bridges to raise the bar to where he thought it needed to be.

It’s a stark contrast to current industry norms, where anything that won’t keep the engagement and MRR bar charts on a steep incline gets vetoed. It’s more likely that memory consumption will be tripled and UI will be modified to harass users into compliance with whatever hare-brained thing product managers are pushing than it is for the software to become more efficient, pleasant, and useful.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#28
post #2

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster". A lot…

I think .NET is one of the few projects Microsoft maintains that I admire that feel like they care a lot about quality, you can tell the people working on it are focused on performance and making sure its really well rounded. I would argue that .NET is Microsoft's greatest achievement / work of all time.

Agreed.

SQL Server is of equally high quality.

We just have postgres in the open source world (which is truly exceptional) so our expectations are higher.

I am the first to hate on Microsoft, their OS is a dumpster fire that I feel is forced on me. But sometimes they knock it out of the park.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#29
post #11

In the same vein many years later: -- After the original iPad was released, Steve Jobs held a meeting with the MacBook engineering team and demonstrated the difference in wake speed. He woke up a current MacBook (with an Intel chip), which took a few seconds. He then instantly woke up the iPad (with an Apple A-series chip) by pressing the home/power button on and off rapidly. Jobs told the team, "I want you to make t…

It also didn't always work. At no point did the MacBook boot nearly as instantly as an iPad. That said, Jobs' obsession with UX was a powerful driving force and your point stands.

It does now with M series chips. iirc Apple made a point of demoing the quick wake in the announcement too.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#30

I like this story about Jobs because it also points out what a bullshitter he appears to have been. These engineers aren't ignorant—I'm sure they saw the disconnect between the number of accumulated seconds saved and actual human lives somehow being saved. Somehow Jobs thought he could pull one over on them though with this "logic", ha ha.

It's actually not bullshit. Saving time is worth it. People use that metric when sitting in traffic...why not use it for computer response time?

How many decades have been wasted in Windows waiting for updates?

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