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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

#91

Post by ValentineC »

pwthornton wrote: post #51
cogman10 wrote: 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.

> 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?

As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.

If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#92

Post by astrange »

NetMageSCW wrote: post #78
astrange wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah and they suck at it. They keep having to cancel entire features like MPX!

But to do this, Intel CPUs have updatable microcode, which is a feature that comes at a cost and which not all CPUs have.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#93

Post by astrange »

apple4ever wrote: post #90
astrange wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All of which are managed by people who don't care like Jobs did

Ah, so what you're doing here is confusing "caring" with "borderline personality disorder".

This is also why men like dating crazy girls. It's not actually a good relationship or management style.

(To balance this out, one thing I noticed reading those bios of Jobs where he shouts at everybody, is that the people being shouted at were all director/distinguished engineer level or higher, so they were all earning millions per year. It's not like he did that with everyone.)

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#94

Post by Maxatar »

chihuahua wrote: post #82
pwthornton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.

This happened about 15 years ago back in the Windows 8 era.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#95

Post by apple4ever »

astrange wrote: post #93
apple4ever wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of which are managed by people who don't care like Jobs did

Ah, so what you're doing here is confusing "caring" with "borderline personality disorder". This is also why men like dating crazy girls. It's not actually a good relationship or management style. (To balance this out, one thing I noticed reading those bios of Jobs where he shouts at everybody, is that the people being shouted at were all director/distinguished engineer level or higher, so they were all earning milli…

No I am using "caring" to mean "caring." I use the words I mean to, so please don't tell me I don't mean what I say.

And while Jobs implementation of "caring" was not as good as it could've been, and he could've solved the same problems a bit nicer, he still "cared" and still solved the right problems.

The people at Apple today don't have the same level of care, especially the senior leadership. If they would, I wouldn't have all these bugs that show it.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#96

Post by apple4ever »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #55
fennecbutt wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure Steve Jobs was known for yelling at, belittling and bullying people, throwing tantrums and making threats/ultimatums. Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wa…

I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for. But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women. I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best. Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their li…

Same here. My management style is far from his, but my principles match his, for the reasons you mentioned.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#97

Post by andrekandre »

ForceBru wrote: post #46
santoshalper wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  > 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.
i felt the same with the ui/ux changes with big sur, and funny enough, when trying the older os after while i realized i was (mostly) fine with look of the new os... the bugs on the other hand... they just seem to pile up with each release...

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#98

Post by throw5t43e4r »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #27
cogman10 wrote: 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…

There was a story in one of his biographies where he spent a lot of time making sure the machines that made one of his products actually looked good too!

One of his biographers gave an example of how some cabinet makers only use good wood on the front and side, but Jobs would want good quality wood on the back as well.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#99

Post by cogman10 »

abanana wrote: post #79
cogman10 wrote: 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…

> "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then.

Not what I said. And I think you are the one that's doing historical revisionism now.

Even in this email from 1983, it starts off with

> since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II

From the 80s through the 00s (which I was alive through and very aware of), computer hardware was frequently doubling in performance. The common wisdom then was to make things fast enough. Anything more was a waste of time because in a year or two hardware would be twice as fast.

The wastefulness of today came directly from that past wisdom. I can guarantee you that ever since I've been conscious around discussions about software there's been people that have bemoaned how sloppy and wasteful software has become. People complained about how bloated Windows XP was vs 98.

Ruby, python, perl, java. All these bloated and slow programming languages got their starts in the 80s and 90s. Exactly because of the wisdom that "it's slow today but hardware tomorrow will make it fast". Heck, even C and lisp are manifestations of this. Consider that people weren't writing all software in assembly during the time period in question. There were clear performance benefits of doing so as compiler at the time were particularly bad.

I've worked with a lot of older devs and they all hold the attitude that performance optimization is a complete waste of time. They've been the hardest ones to break of that notion. Younger devs tend to more intuitively know that performance optimization are important. That's because over the last decade, hardware performance improvements have stagnated.

So yes, absolutely yes. In the past if you could make writing software more ergonomic by sacrificing some memory or performance, that's a tradeoff most of the industry would gladly take. They wrote for today's hardware and sometimes tomorrow's.

Re: Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

#100

Post by array_key_first »

cogman10 wrote: 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…

The main problem with the "a little lag is fine" mentality is that, in most organizations, it's becomes cancerous. It spread and infiltrates every team, every corner.

When you have hundreds of teams and they're all doing suboptimal things for shits and giggles, that extra 500 milliseconds is now a minute.

And, the real kicker is that usually the slow stuff isn't even simpler or better. It's just naive and poorly thought out. Usually it's super simple stuff like use a hash map instead of iterating through an array a bajillion times over. Or, do this network request asynchronously instead of just blocking for no reason. Or, in the case of some suspicious Microsoft GitHub code, just use sleep() instead of spin locking.

These things aren't harder, they're just different. So it's not even laziness really, it's something else. Apathy, maybe?

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