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Steve Jobs' cabinet

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Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#51

Post by iJohnDoe »

Apple, like any company, had to learn how to properly craft things in an efficient and elegant way. They certainly didn’t do it right out of the gate. They did ship products that were a disaster inside, including iPhones and MacBooks. Foxconn publicly said Apple needs to get their act together if they ever want to manufacture and assemble things in an efficient and cost effective way. The complexity and amount of screws for certain products were crazy.

Now, with all that said, Apple has tried to improve in all these areas and have since been innovative in how things are actually put together.

So, the takeaway is if if the quote from Jobs did inspire people then it was a good thing.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-25184

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#52

Post by userbinator »

sonofhans wrote: post #14
woodpanel wrote: post #8

I 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.

Yeah, Rossman’s entire brand is being anti-Apple. If you think Apple’s engineering is poor, I’d love to know who you think does it better.

IBM

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#53

Post by userbinator »

WalterBright wrote: post #43
q3k wrote: post #22

Apple device innards are made to appeal to people who have no idea about hardware engineering / repair. For the rest of us the design just screams wankery. No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits. A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy e…

I've had an interesting experience taking apart my 72 Dodge and putting it back together again. It's clear that there was a great deal of thought put into its design. It's simple, easy to take apart, easy to fix, easy to put back together. The money is only put where it is needed. Frankly, it's first class engineering. Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged b…

"German (over)engineering" is a common term in the automotive community for that reason. As someone who has also looked at this in detail, the difference between domestic and import cars of that era was the former tended to value simple and "brute force" designs, while the latter focused on short-term optimisations and some amount of "showing off" the complexity thereof.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#54

Post by mproud »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #35

> I was reminded of what Steve Jobs, relating a lesson from his father on cabinet-making… I confess, I found that quote from Walter Isaac's biography on Jobs to be kind of gross. It felt to me like a bullshit line that Jobs asked him to put in. By all accounts, Jobs was completely dismissive of his adoptive parents — this felt like an attempt to rewrite history by Jobs.

Andy Hertzfeld, on the original Macintosh team at folklore.org (https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html):

> George Crow, our recently hired analog engineer, interrupted Steve. “Who cares what the PC board looks like? The only thing that’s important is how well that it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”

> Steve Jobs responded strongly. “I’m gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”

People tell stories all the time that may have some non-truths in them (we can never truly know, can we?) Where it’s appropriate to call bullshit is when someone claims something that isn’t realistic, just doesn’t fit, or simply can’t be true. In this case, Steve really did obsess over the “back of the cabinet” stuff at his time at Apple:

> “The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys by the way.”

That’s a direct quote from where he introduced the iMac. A product that had translucent plastic so you could see the insides of the machine.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#55

Post by pfranz »

dang wrote: post #5
Hatrix wrote: post #2

Steve 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…

There was a similar story where he insisted on painting manufacturing machines for aesthetic reasons. It cost a lot of money, the paint caused problems with the machines, and the stuff they were manufacturing didn't sell well. I think I heard it in the Isaacson book, but here's a site telling the same story. https://professornerdster.com/from-steve-jobs-life-a-clean-f...

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#56

Post by pilingual »

delichon wrote: post #17

I finished building a cabinet for my shop last week. It holds 58 small parts cases from floor to ceiling. I didn't put a crappy piece of plywood on the back, I put three separate crappy pieces of plywood on the back. I used the worst leftover pieces that I though had the structural integrity to keep the cabinet rigid. And instead of losing sleep over it, I would have lost sleep if I had used a perfectly good large sh…

Your anecdote instantly made me think Woz.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#57

Post by handbanana_ »

The quote assumes that "good looking" wood is inherently "good" which is not always the case. You could have a very ugly piece of wood facing the wall but it could be the most structurally sound and durable wood ever. Value isn't always in appearance.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#58

Post by bdcravens »

WalterBright wrote: post #29
ary wrote: post #7

This 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 (usu…

A real estate agent walked through my house I was putting for sale. He examined the switch plates carefully. I asked why. He replied that a good craftsman lined up the slots in the top screw and bottom screw, and this was a "tell" that he'd done a good job.

Joke's on my agent if I ever sell my house, I use snap on plates.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#60

Post by WalterBright »

userbinator wrote: post #53
WalterBright wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had an interesting experience taking apart my 72 Dodge and putting it back together again. It's clear that there was a great deal of thought put into its design. It's simple, easy to take apart, easy to fix, easy to put back together. The money is only put where it is needed. Frankly, it's first class engineering. Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged b…

"German (over)engineering" is a common term in the automotive community for that reason. As someone who has also looked at this in detail, the difference between domestic and import cars of that era was the former tended to value simple and "brute force" designs, while the latter focused on short-term optimisations and some amount of "showing off" the complexity thereof.

For another fun one, it had a mechanical fuel injection. The drive shaft to the injector had a fine-toothed spline on it, meaning you had 50 or so wrong ways to install it. Get it wrong and the engine just ran badly. The assembly had to be done blind. There must have been some trick to getting that injector on correctly, but I couldn't figure it out.

The correct way to engineer this is to have the male spline with an extra tooth and the female with a missing tooth - then it can only be assembled one way. A cost-free improvement, saving a lot of aggravation for the mechanic. (BTW, this is what Boeing does.)

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