> "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" ... shrill

I think these are fans of apple who have lost something.

Personally I think steve jobs was a good integrator - he got people together. Sometimes the people were apple <-> customers, sometimes music industry <-> computers, etc

If there was controversy, he stepped in and lead - and stepped into the spotlight and explained.

I don't see the same sort of leadership nowadays. Controversies like the app store woes, pricing, monopoly behavior, bad service to developers, even tariff stuff.

Also he was good at creating/choosing new next products and killing not-quite-there products.

yeah, but that ship has sailed.

I think what Steve added to Apple more than anything was being the biggest asshole in the room who was willing to point at a fellow high-up person and tell them their idea sucked ass, and you may be surprised to read what comes next, I think that's critical to a good product line. There are numerous problems caused by having too many stakeholders, too many cooks in the kitchen if you will, steering your given ship, and sometimes exactly what you need is one guy who knows damn well what needs to be made, and isn't afraid to tell you to take a hike if you want to die on the hill in question.

That all being said, he got it wrong a lot too. You have the good decisions: the original Macs, the iPhone, banning Flash from iOS, backing Pixar, demanding the iPad Mini be better before it goes to market, etc. But he got it wrong a lot too: the Apple III, very strict App Store policies, not replaceable batteries in the iPhone which would eventually infect every Apple product, and I'm sure there's plenty more.

The one thing though that prevents me from truly looking up to him though is he was, by all accounts, an absolute fucking asshole to work for. I appreciate a man with a vision absolutely, as should be evident, but there's also something to be said for being able to navigate those difficult conversations with class and kindness, even when you need to tell someone their idea sucks ass, you can do it in such a way where they don't want to quit outright. And those failings were mirrored in Jobs' personal life, too. Dude just had no fucking ability to People at all.

So yeah. Complicated guy. I think he represents both the best and worst of what can happen when you empower one person with a lot of good ideas- and some bad- to lead a company. I think it's broadly a good thing; and I also think if I worked under him, I probably would've ended up knocking a tooth of his out.

About non-replaceable batteries: from what I understand, if a battery can be replaced by any random device owner you must design it with a robust cell to avoid risk of it being punctured, breaking, being crushed.

And therefore you have more shell, less actual battery and therefore it lasts less.

This does not mean that I believe this was done exclusively for altruistic reasons. More like: this will result in a slightly better experience for the user... and more revenue for Apple. So let's do it.

I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and they fawn over apple because the products are so thin.

If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems".

A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about device thickness.

Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't matter.

There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable batteries, making a device water proof and have a replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.

Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of a deal now days.

We need to stop making products for reviewers.

No one wants to, but that is how many consumers decide on what to buy. It is especially how early adopters tuned into the review scene for their favorite products decide what to buy.

I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.

Worse still, if you’re too polite, many people won’t “get” the message.

“Oh, he just thinks my baby has interesting and unique features.”

> I’m convinced you can’t have your cake and eat it too. There’s no nice way to call someone’s baby ugly. They’re going to be upset, no matter how delicately you phrase it.

I agree in a vacuum, but we're not in a vacuum, we're talking about Steve Jobs. A dude who would semi-regularly send coworkers and subordinates out of rooms in tears, throw shit around the office, and in general make a complete ass of himself.

Like, I agree with you, it's gonna be hard to tell someone their baby is ugly. There's a better way to do it than throwing a stapler at the wall above their head and calling them ugly too.

I don't mean to pick on you in particular but we seriously need to shred this societal idea that visionaries, rockstar devs, auteurs, whatever, have to be anti-social fucking monsters to make whatever they happen to make. It's stupid and it sucks and it excuses tons of abusive behavior. I'm all for making great shit but if you have to hurt people to do it, then I don't think it's worth it at all.

I once worked for a leader who wanted to be like Jobs, complete with the black shirts.

So anyways, going into a design review I (UI dev lead) had warned early on that the new design was bad. I said it was going to be bad. Listed why it was going to be bad, and politely gave my feedback to UX, and I was ignored.

Walk into the review, it gets torn apart. It was really horrible. The GM looks over at me, asks for my take. I reply that I gave my feedback weeks ago and I hadn't approved of the design.

GM proceeds to lay into the UX team, swearing, yelling, and such, and basically asking why they hadn't listed to my initial feedback. It ended with an ultimatum that henceforth the design team was going to listen to me if I said no to a design before they wasted his time.

We were at the time outsourcing UX work to an obscenely expensive design firm who hasn't done software work before, just physical media. Some of the team was good, but a few of the designers were violently incompetent.

(A short time later we nixed the entire team, hired the good ones, and built our own,amazing, internal UX team.)

I'm not sure how I feel about the situation. It was nice to be vindicated, and rockstar personalities rarely listen to polite level feedback. "Fuck you don't bring me shitty designs and bill me tens of thousands of dollars for them when the fucking dev team can tell the design is shit" is kind of a legit response to people who just won't listen.

It does sour relationships though, and IMHO some of that relationship between me and the UX lead took years to rebuild.

I appreciate this comment end to end and wish I could write as effectively. Thanks for sharing.

Well he was a textbook high performing sociopath, if that's a coined medical term. Very low emotional EQ, very high IQ, and the ability to rationally turn some part of EQ on if motivation is high enough... but nothing of that comes naturally and in stressful situations its elephant in the porcelain shop.

His biggest regrets before dying is how he treated his own family when looking back - again a textbook of what I write above.

Some people have immediate kneejerk reaction to the part with "sociopath" but I don't look at it as some sort of insult, rather just description of certain quality or lack of it of given person. No need to dance around the fact with many words, it is (was) what it is. If he knew better he would do it, nothing one can choose easily. And there would be some negative impact on his professional life, no doubt (some positive too but if you look at ultra rich guys not only in tech, they are +- the same stuff, it seems this is really prerequisite to rise meteorically, nice guys normally don't make it that far).

musk is similar albeit another unique mix of above. Bezos too. And so on and on.

Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.

But "The customer experience was all-important" is a bit reductionist. The hockey puck mouse stuck around for years after it became clear it was a poor customer experience. And I have cursed desktop Macs countless times for having all their ports in the back, because Jobs disliked seeing them, customer experience be damned.

Or how the iphone 4 antenna was obstructed by normal holding of the phone (including poses in apple marketing materials), and then steve just told everyone they were holding their phones wrong.

Yeah. The phone was faulty from a hardware design standpoint, and the manner Steve Jobs handled it was bad. But he was correct on one point:

Every other manufacturer at the time had a paragraph and illustration in their manual telling people not to hold their phone in a certain manner.

I think much of his bad attitude came from this fact that he felt Apple was unfailingly singled out.

>Yes, I agree that ads in maps would be a bad customer experience.

If I search for a nearby cafe on Apple Maps it pulls in data from Trip Advisor. I suspect you could provide a better experience than that even with ads (although I doubt they will).

Ads are a good way to be spammed with low-quality options that choose to pay apple.

Ads in the App Store continue to be a bad customer experience as well.

Anything you search for, the first thing at the top of the list is an ad from a competitor!

Honestly, I think that if Steve Jobs had lived, he would have continued to push the industry in a direction more aligned with his tastes, others would have followed suit, and whatever hot topics we'd be discussing today, they would be very different from the ones we are discussing now.

I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.

His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.

Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.

The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)

The magic of Jobs is/was he truly was a self-starter and self-taught man; he had the rare mix of traits necessary to be a visionary.

Frankly I think Jobs saw Cook as a key operator to ensure the firms future survival and future growth; I'd imagine Jobs foresaw the tremendous impact the smartphone would have and all Cook had to do was be a shrewd operator as Apple had built such a huge advantage over competitors by the time he was dead.

He seemed very content in the end that Apple is on the right track and set up correctly for the future. I don't think he was talking about profit margins, but rather about the soul of the company, if there is such a thing.

Sad but probably true. I hadn't really considered that aspect. Anyone so influential no doubt changed the whole Zeitgeist, not just their own company's course.

Correct. This is something that is becoming increasingly apparent with time.

>I'll be honest, I'm tired of the "steve jobs wouldn't" and "apple dying" articles, they're oh so shrill and tiresome and I think Steve would have changed with the times too ...

Ok, but it's true, the man died, the company is public, and like all companies they will eventually profit off the brand by making a shitty product.

It's all rug pulls, try a Hershey's chocolate bar, mine had soy in it.

I usually don't like those articles, but I think this one has a pretty good point.

If it was just "Steve said no to ads in MacOS X, so it's a betrayal to put ads in Maps" then I'd be right there with you. We got a lot of these. "Steve wouldn't have accepted the notch." "Steve wouldn't have made a VR headset." These are both baseless and boring. Even if it's true, so what? Steve specifically told his successors not to ask "what would Steve do?" And the objection is vague stuff about aesthetics or customer appeal or whatever.

This one is more interesting than that by focusing on the customer experience angle, and there's little room for disagreement on that. I might argue that the notch makes for a better customer experience, you might argue it would have been better without it, and we're really just putting our opinions onto a dead man. But it's very hard to make the argument that adding ads to Maps makes for a better customer experience. Doing it isn't a matter of having different tastes or opinions than Steve had. It's directly going against a fundamental principle he had for the company. "Steve wouldn't have made Maps look like that" would be tedious, but "Steve wouldn't have deliberately made the customer experience worse in order to make more money" is a message I can get behind.

Ads is a red line for me too. They're in the App Store and I hate it.

Adding ads to anything is going to make it significantly worse for me immediately - and I expect it only to get worse from there as the customer of the device or service is no longer the only customer of the product, and the more money the ads bring in, the more the needs of the advertisers will be weighted.

Google maps is better, except for the ads. If Apple Maps gets ads, I’ll just switch to Google. So weird that Apple wouldn’t comprehend that privacy (which requires no ads) is their moat.

The ads in Google Maps are fairly tame by modern standards. Of course, Apple can afford to not make this change and I hope they abstain. But it’s really not too offensive in my opinion.

> fairly tame by modern standards

That means they’re still early in the ad-ification of the product. After a few dozen “what if we increase the ad density” A/B tests later, we’ll get to the point Google search is now. Except with maps you’re stuck using the app without an ad blocker.

I agree I’m also tired of it. It’s all so hypothetical, trying to guess what a dead man would think. Who cares anyway? He made loads of bad decisions

> I think Steve would have changed with the times too

That's the thing that annoys me whenever someone says "what would $DECEASED_PERSON do?" We can't know! Maybe we can make an accurate guess about what Steve Jobs would have done in 2011, but it's really hard to say what he would have done in 2025, had he lived. Not just because people change over time (he was 56 when he died, and would be 70 today), but because business requirements and practices change over time, and executives -- even Jobs -- adapt to those changes.

Maybe this is exactly what Jobs would have done: resist adding advertising for years and years, but finally in 2025 decide it's necessary for the business in some cases.

(But I also agree that this sort of thing is garbage for the user experience. In my fantasy world, advertising doesn't exist, at all.)

Of course we don’t know. But regarding this specific example, bear in mind that Apple is in vastly better shape as a business than it was in 1999. So if that argument didn’t work on him then, it doesn’t seem implausible that it wouldn’t work now.

Or the opposite. The Apple might and/or its execs might think that they are in such a dominant position that purposefully lowering UX to extract a few extra pennies from their users won't cause any short term harm.

While back in the 90s the brand/reputational damage might have destroyed them.

Back in the 90s, Apple had zero brand or reputation. It had a few die-hard Mac fans and a bunch of inherited deals with public school district purchasing departments from when the Apple II dominated. They licensed Mac OS to clone manufacturers like Microsoft did with Windows. They were essentially already destroyed and waiting for the eviction notice.

Jobs, with Mac OS X and the iMac, absolutely created the unassailable perception of quality and user experience Apple is known for today. The term "reality distortion field" was used a lot in relation to how much Jobs sold Apple and the Mac in keynotes.

So it's completely fair to use his well-known positions against the company's current practices.

Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their products for short term again and hope to survive. They wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can.

> well-known positions against the company's current practices

Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.

> decide it's necessary for the business

Necessary? That implies that there is some real threat to the business that needs to be countered this way -- which is laughable.

Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares. Steve had twice the principles as Cook (on issues he cared about at least), so I don't think he'd allow "the investors want even greater growth" to force him do something he found gross and degrading to the experience.

> Necessary?

Necessary, beneficial, has more upside than downside, whatever way you want to slice it.

> Even Tim Cook had enough spine to make a principled stand once: he told activist investors in 2014 that if they didn’t like Apple’s commitment to environmental responsibility, they should sell their shares

I feel like this is actually support for my argument that people change over time (either naturally, or to adapt to the times themselves changing): I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.

> I cannot for a second imagine Cook making this sort of statement today.

Agree, but personally I don't respect Cook and agree he seems to have sold his spine sometime around when he sold his soul. I got the sense that Jobs wasn't drifting toward increased greed but rather, a knowledge that he and Apple both had more than enough "F-you money" -- to do what they thought was best for the product, knowing that that was also exactly aligned with the long-term interests of the company anyway.

> Maybe I'm bored as a car passenger and watching the map screen so my attention is free anyway

I'm glad there are always ads available to stop my mind from wandering.

genuinely the worst opinion I’ve seen on HackerNews

there are such better ways to enable these experiences without introducing the zero-sum, scam-inducing, corporate fuckery game that making it a pay-to-win ad-driven experience gives you

I’m also concerned that boredom makes you want to see ads

That sounds absolutely awful, honestly. I wouldn't want to see any of those things mess with the "natural" order of search results for whatever I've explicitly searched for.

I don’t want my phone to consume any of my “free” attention, ever, but holy cow especially not while driving.

> as a car passenger

Sometimes the driver looks at the map screen too. That's most of the reason it's there.

The 1st and 3rd are better served by Apple choosing the best result rather than who's paid for an ad.

I do agree with you in theory, though their 'attempts' at this kind of thing are comical if not absurd (witness the organic search results in the App Store).

I want to challenge the idea that any of these is an unqualified "good experience". I desire none of this.