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Steve Jobs' cabinet

perfectdays23.substack.com

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Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#71
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno man, Apple's PCB designs are incredibly space efficient. Compare the sandwich PCB of a modern iPhone against the main board of something like a Samsung Galaxy. Apple is sweating out every cubic millimetre it can, while Samsung is perfectly fine with a load of empty green PCB all over the place.

Does discrete circuit density correlate with engineering quality somehow? Are we back around to the parable of Master Foo and the Hardware Designer in the year of our lord and savior 2025?

It correlates with how much stuff you can pack into a small device.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#72
post #54

> 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, e…

I will moderate (modulate? attenuate?) my objection to this line from the bio more in the future because of your quotes. Nonetheless there is still no direct connection to his adoptive step-father in the quotes you provided — only in Job's bio with Isaacson does he make that connection.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#73

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…

[dead]

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#74
post #2

Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html

Jobs knew a lot about hardware design, sure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III

> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly.

> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhere in hell, there are a bunch of automotive engineers doing difficult maintenance tasks which they designed into vehicles such as bleeding the brakes on Ford Escorts, or spark plug changes on AMC Javelins (it actually required unbolting the engine and using a hoist to get at the last sparkplug).

How about this? No dipstick for the automatic transmission on a Mercedes. No way to tell what the fluid level was in it.

That is common on many vehicles.

I also remember some corvettes (C5?) required the side of the car to be removed to change the battery.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#77
I recently saw an interview without someone on the mac team and what's interesting is that the original Mac team had a lot of friction because of this philosophy. Jobs constantly asked unreasonable design constraints of his engineering team, the team prepared two laptops one with the "esthetic" laptop and one with the pragmatic design. One vastly outperformed the other and Jobs conceded, this was a constant pattern for the engineering teams at Apple. What you see before you is not the esthetic version but the pragmatic version. Sometimes Jobs was right but most of the time he was delusional.

Re: Steve Jobs' cabinet

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..... aaaaaand another measure just became a target...

so when selling the house you figure people will do this work before calling a realtor?

Why not? There are companies dedicated to sprucing up houses for sale. They will even bake bread for you before inspections to give the place a "homey" smell.

Half an hour with a screwdriver seems doable

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