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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

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines.…

[flagged]

Not your parent commenter but at least they back their argument.

Your comment lacks any content other than a shallow emotional reaction.

To add to the discussion, this anecdote ending says it all:

> I honestly liked and respected the guy; but it was agreed among us Apple engineers that having Steve Jobs know who you actually were was usually not a good thing. It meant your future with Apple was going to be shorter than you would probably like.

https://www.quora.com/How-awful-was-Steve-Jobs-as-a-person

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's awfully subjective

Everything is subjective. That doesn't mean you can't compare Dodge Neon of operating systems to Lamborghini Huracán.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#73

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…

What amazes me is back in the day ICQ ran in the background happily on a computer with 8MB RAM and 60Mhz CPU. Same with IRC clients.

These days Slack is occupying 4-8GB of RAM and is less snappy than a native app.

Yeah, in-lining giphy images is kinda fun. But 1000X memory consumption seems like a horrible trade off.

A modern desktop PC would have been a damn supercomputer not long ago. Today it’s kinda adequate.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#74
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…

There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS. Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.

Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#75
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…

There are many performance engineering jobs open at Apple if you would like to search the careers page.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"this" meaning that level of care, not the wake-up speed

How much care do you think it takes to design a CPU correctly? Remember, you can't patch out any bugs in it.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#77
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine apply overnight while I sleep. As long as they don’t mess with my alarm or brick try device, the time doesn’t matter.

My sisters iPad just bricked itself during an update, and nothing I've tried has been able to revive it. And it's an unrepairable disposable piece of tech, so it's going into a landfill. https://www.apple.com/environment/ LOL

Apple will take back all devices and recycle them. Please do not let her put it in a landfill.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"this" meaning that level of care, not the wake-up speed

How much care do you think it takes to design a CPU correctly? Remember, you can't patch out any bugs in it.

Intel patches out bugs in their CPUs all the time.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#79
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…

> one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs...

No. Absolutely, unequivocally, no. You're talking about the difference between then and now in the way software was/is built, not the difference between Jobs and everyone else! The deification of Jobs is bad enough without the constant historical revisionism.

Back then, generally tuning/maximising performance and quality was a top priority for the majority of people in the industry, software engineers and senior staff alike. "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then. Many who were there in those days now bemoan the way their modern equivalents no longer prioritise efficiency, which leads to the awful slow UX you're referring to that really shouldn't be seen as acceptable, but somehow is.

Even if we see Jobs as being at the extreme - more focused on these things than most top-level execs of his day - then to treat the entire rest of the industry together as though they were at the opposite extreme (i.e. at today's level of not caring) and call him "revolutionary" in his day as a response to this, would very much be fallacious.

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