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Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

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Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#41
post #38

That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people. You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc. IIRC, if…

What companies do this CBA? Deloitte?

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#42
post #38

That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people. You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc. IIRC, if…

The value of saving a human life is a huge factor in civil engineering and varies pretty widely in the western world.

IIRC it's over 10m USD in the us currently, but only about 6m USD in most of the EU.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.NET has viable competitors. Windows, due to its monopoly, dominates the PC world no matter how bad it is.

Because of legacy and momentum, not merit.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#44
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…

Absolutely, and Cook-era Macs remind me of that frequently.

For example, my last Mac was a Cook-era machine with two third-party displays. Its normal boot process is a visual atrocity: the screens repeatedly blank off and on, the progress bar jumps arbitrarily to new positions and dimensions on the screen, the log-in window animation has drawing quirks...

...when I watch this orgy of complacent design, I often dream of what would happen had the Apple DRI presented it to Steve Jobs.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#46

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.

You can simply not upgrade to Tahoe and iOS 26. I didn't upgrade and am simply waiting for the next version which will hopefully ditch liquid glass. If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#47
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…

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.

Just because it goes away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#48
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 th…

Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering.

Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions.

He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#49

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 sing…

Absolutely. There’s very little mass-market software that has any reasonable justification for being unusable on any machine that’s roughly Core 2 Duo era or newer. It’s perfectly possible to work within those constraints and not even really that difficult, it just requires a modicum of care and understanding of what’s happening under the hood.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#50
post #38

That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people. You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc. IIRC, if…

This reminds me of a story I heard about a bus driver who would always pull away from the stop right on schedule even if a regular rider was running up. His calculation was the 30 seconds spent waiting for one rider was an aggregate of many minutes lost by the riders who were on time for their stops. What looked cruel to one was a kindness to many.
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