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Twelve years after the death of Steve Jobs, the cracks are starting to appear at Apple
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this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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The amount of credit people give Steve Jobs is such a kick to the nuts to all the engineers that designed those products
Jobs basically had one job - be the screaming obnoxious asshole in charge who harangued the engineers until they came up with something to his liking. And then took the credit when they did. Basically just the Elon Musk of his day.
Crying smelly barefoot goblin man. Jobs was such an asshole.
"I'm vegan! I don't need to shower! I don't produce mucus or smell because of my superior diet. Brb I'm gonna go wash my feet in the toilet!" -Steve Jobs
fly me to more liver transplants, stat! The last one didn't get rid of my cancer!
Except I can look at Jobs' history and see an actual progression in technology. With Musk there is literally nothing but nonsensical hyped up promises.
Why can't you make the same argument for that dick hole musk? Neither one has any engineering capabilities, and were a non-technical figurehead overseeing people with the actual talents making the technology better.
Jobs may have had an actual design element of input that I doubt musk has, but neither one of them actually improved technology; they have smarter people working for them that can do it. That's especially true of Jobs with Woz, one of the actual people who improved technology at apple.
Im not praising musk, and i really think he fucked up his lead on twitter and tesla, but he is very much similar to jobs. Neither musk nor jobs have done really any of the engineering work, but both have had their hands in some pretty remarkable tech. Musk with paypal, spacex, tesla. Again, im not saying hes a good engineer, he hasnt done anything, but to discredit those companies is unfair.
Progression Jobs didn't do though, just Apple's engineers.
I think we can give Musk credit for progressing technology - electric cars & space rocketry and some other things. But he is also an incredible asshole, has little regard for the people who work for him, has no inner filter and has some incredibly stupid hot takes.
Except he didn't. Jobs progressed technology by essentially bullying engineers into making it a reality. Musk didn't even put that effort in. He bought companies that were already doing these things
I think that is disingenuous. It's clear Musk has been a driving force in Tesla and to a lesser extent in SpaceX and Starlink. And while I hate the guy with a passion and think he is a massive prick who is an awful boss and who takes credit for other's work, I have no doubt that if not for him EVs wouldn't be a mainstream technology they are today. Just like with Apple and smart phones, Tesla did not invent the electric car but they made the first cars people actually wanted to buy.
Gwynne Shotwell deserves quite a lot more credit for SpaceX than Musk. Someone has to keep the place running until the ketamine clears his system.
The same with Musk. People are seeing him as the sole engineer of Tesla and SpaceX while in reality anonymous engineers did all this possible.
And it doesn't help Musk calls himself lead engineer or whatever at times.
I think in one of his autobiographies he was claiming that he self educated how to build rockets from some books and I wonder how much of this is true and how much is coming from his ego.
From Mr. "make rocket pointier because LOL"? I'll put my money on the latter option.
True, but without him both Tesla and SpaceX would not be here. Same for Jobs, without him Apple probably would not be what it is.
Quick plug for the Behind the Bastards series on Jobs
I fucking love that podcast. So well researched and perfectly presented
But did they wear jeans and black turtlenecks?
I do have a black turtleneck and without thinking I came into work wearing it with jeans. That with my glasses, well I got teased a bit.
But did you gain reality distortion powers?
Im not gonna sit here and shill for people like job and musk. But i have to say there is somethkng to be said about steering a ship in the right direction.
Jobs knew how to market the products, and steer the engineers in the right direction.
One thing he always said was that there only needed to be one iphone and one ipad. I recall that the with the ipad he said it was the perfect size and didn't need alternatives or it would become less functional.
Then he died and the ipad mini was released, as well as the iphone 5c.
In 2012, the year following the iphone 5c and the year of the ipad mini apple lost its global market lead to android.
They diluted the product and confused the market of loyalists and general consumers by releasing multiple versions of their main product and if you ask me, thats when the cracks started to show.
Apple havent had a majority of the global market share for years now.
Jobs knew marketing, but that is about it.
It was Wozniak with the great ideas.
I think what Jobs really understood was that in a world of Ford, people crave a Ferrari.
Making the best be beautiful and accessible is hard, but you do it through focus and intentionality. Jobs, despite his many, many faults did that well.
It's one thing to make a tool accomplish a task.
It's another thing to beat the engineers until grandma can operate the tool.
I didn't like the guy either, and found it funny that his own bullshit killed him in the end, but he did add "value".
Which is also what all those people credit him for, the kind of thinking that gets you killed by choosing "alternative medicine" over science. Apple devices make that seem to be a valid approach to the world.
It beats me how they don't see the irony.
I listened to an interview with Scott Forestall several years back and he discusses the meeting he was in where Steve Jobs basically gave them the idea for the iPhone. He had seen the multi-touch displays, initially just used for very large displays, and also was seeing mobile phones take off at the same time. He was the one who put those two together and told the team to work on it. Sure, the product managers and designers came up with the details of the product and engineers figured out the tech to support it, but without that initial idea and leadership’s support to expend resources on building it, it may not have happened.
There are a lot of companies with bad uninspiring leadership that just ship what everyone else is shipping. Apple under Steve Jobs was trying to innovate.
I mean, certainly he gets more credit than deserved. But I find it hard to deny the major impact he had. When he was hired back as CEO in the late 90s, Apple already had talented engineers, but there was no coherence or direction in what they were working on, and the next gen OS was never going to happen. Back then, CEO Michael Dell was asked what he’d do if he were in charge of Apple and he said he’d shut it down. Apple was a punching bag in the industry.
Jobs immediately made radical changes at the company, eliminating most of their product line which was superfluous and confusing, shutting down software projects that were “neat” but didn’t fit into a vision, putting them on the path to release OS X (which his company had envisioned and developed the basis for while he was away from Apple), changing their marketing strategy, making the most clear-cut product line I’d ever seen, and turning conference keynotes into must-see TV. And in addition to that he pushed Apple towards the iMac, the iPod and the music store, and the iPhone.
It took amazing engineers and a lot of work and pain to actually deliver these products. And Jobs does get more credit than deserved. But I think he does deserve a whole lot of credit.
Even if we think about commerce and popularization stuff - people like Bill Joy or James Clark or many other names are much cooler than this particular salesman.
Try to lead an engineering team and make them all pull the same way and create a high quality, cohesive offering. It's not as simple as you think. Good engineers should be recognized, but so should actual good leadership and technical vision. Steve's visions may not always have been hits (and he often struggled with pricing) but it's undeniable he had vision.