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Someone requested an open thread to talk about the death of Steve Jobs, a conversation to which I have nothing to add. Other than owning an iPod, I’ve never been an Apple guy. Not that I have anything against Apple, I just started on PCs and stayed with them so I never learned to use Macs. But Steve Jobs has certainly been a huge figure for decades and I’m sure people have lots to say about him.
RIP Steve Jobs
October 5, 2011 at 8:38 pm 
Ed Brayton 
Posted in Uncategorized 37 Responses to “RIP Steve Jobs”
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I can’t say I was a fan of his products at apple or his presentation style but you can’t deny he was an important part of the industry so he’ll be missed.
Jobs was a huge figure in American history.
he will be missed.
BTW, I love my mac pro. It beats any PC I ever owned.
First computer I ever touched was an Apple II. The first computer I ever owned was a Mac 512ke. Even wrote my senor paper on the guy in 1990 (titled ‘the journey is the award’ after an early jobs biography). Those that aren’t a fan of Apples early products or their products in the last decade simply do not understand nor appreciate what good design is or even means.
I bought a bottle of 12 year old japanese whisky tonight and will be drinking heavily from it.
Apple’s website is a large photograph of Steve. Appropriate I think.
We used to have Apple computers all over the place up until about 1997 when we were forced to “standardize” on Windows. The Apple users, who never experienced crashes were less than impressed. It’s taken Windows 14 years to get where Apple was back then.
“Those that aren’t a fan of Apples early products or their products in the last decade simply do not understand nor appreciate what good design is or even means.”
This from a guy who is going drink Japanese whisky! [/whisky snob] :)
Once I figured out that it was impossible to get into the machine language of Apples I knew that this was a product for morons who wanted style over substance.
Sorry but I’m big fan of neither man nor product.
Having said that, I am sorry he is dead (Jobs died too young, and in a nasty way. Nobody deserves that) and he did much to promote design in computing.
In that sense it is a loss.
Dingo
” Other than owning an iPod, I’ve never been an Apple guy”
How do you feel about Pixar?
I’ve never owned an Apple product, because when I was getting started with computers they were priced well out of my reach. And I haven’t been in the market for an iPod or iPhone simply because I don’t listen to music and just use my phone to make calls. Not to mention the iPhone being tied to AT&T.
My big gripe with Jobs has always been that he took a superior technology — the Mac OS — and restricted to forever being a niche product by tying it exclusively to Apple’s overpriced hardware. He made Bill Gates, who provided an inferior product people could afford, a billionaire.
Still, you have to admit he changed the world. Not many of us will ever do that.
Back in the day, I would disagree with this statement. Apple computers historically had the best hardware technology available. SCSI drives, which were very expensive and typically found in servers for example.
Now, I got to wonder though. You can get some really good hardware in a Mac but you could buy the same stuff at New Egg much cheaper.
I worked at Apple during the Job-less years right after I graduated from college (entry level position). I learned an incredible amount in my three short years at Apple and thoroughly enjoyed working with some of the smartest most competent people I’ve ever encountered. His legacy in the late-80s/early-90s still loomed large there. There was an old truism that whatever you learn at college you may as well forget when you start your career; that it’s useless “in the real world”. In fact Apple was energetically immersed in developing business practices based on the leading edge recommendations of academia. They tried to exploit every lesson myself and the rest of us ever learned.
It’s hard to over-state Steve Jobs contributions.
He was a product-marketing genius who really elevated industrial design inside the tech industry. He was a leader because he disdained the lowest common denominator so common amongst American marketers of the time and instead sought “insanely great” products, which he consistently delivered contra DJ’s astonishingly clueless remarks.
Apple’s quality and reliability foreshadowed other U.S. manufacturers being eventually forced to radically transform their culture to be one of constant change and continual improvement. They didn’t stand alone but the population back then was small.
Mr. Jobs also had an enormous impact on the then-unique cultural developed within the tech industry compared to other industries. Differences many other industries have since attempted to emulate. This aspect probably would have happened without him, but IBM, DEC, Motorola, and HP’s cultures’ and enormous presence back in the 80s argues otherwise.
From an employee and consumer perspective he made it impossible for big corporations to centralize control of creativity and instead empowered the individual. That was not a fore-ordained outcome but one that came precisely because a few people like Steve Jobs existed and made it so.
One of my favorite bumper stickers still resonates: Windows ’95 = Mac ’89.
i have an iPod, that’s about it. I’ve been a pc user my whole life, it works for me, that’s all i need. Jobs was an innovator though.
“Those that aren’t a fan of Apples early products or their products in the last decade simply do not understand nor appreciate what good design is or even means.”
good job refuting the stereotype that apple users are a bunch of slavering snobs. To me, Apple is like religion- i got nothing against it. It’s followers on the other hand…
I’ve been an Apple user all the way back to the ][e. I had one of the first Macs as part of the developer program when they released it. Back then, you had to have a Lisa in order to write software for the Mac -- it didn't have a native development environment.
I'm certainly not a fanboi; my roots go back to IBM mainframes, I work a lot on Linux and half the computers in my household are PCs. But I've always admired Apple and Jobs in particular. Far superior design to PCs and Windoze in almost every way.
Was it a mistake to tie the Mac OS to the hardware? Possibly, but others succeeded quite well with the same approach. IBM was doing great with it until the DoJ stepped in.
Steve Jobs will be sorely missed in the industry. As Michael Heath pointed out, his influence goes far beyond Apple. I work for IBM now and can see that influence here.
@ DingoJack
Huh? I've written assembly-language code for the ][e (6502), early Macs (68000) and later Macs (PowerPC). Where did you get the idea that you couldn't? I'm afraid that remark says more about you than it does about Apple or the people who use them or develop on them.
doog says:
Many of the best aspects of your PC experience were first marketed by Apple.
doog says:
That’s one aspect of the people that gravitate towards Apple and its products. Some of them also worked for Apple. When I was there a book was published titled “Apple Magic”. It was a list of quotes and truisms, many sayings were truly cringeworthy. Ironically this book was bound in red flaps similar to Mao’s Little Red Book. However it’s a strawman to extend that group’s attributes onto all their employees or fans; they were small part, mostly in the non-techy or non-manufacturing parts of the company.
I was a participant and observer watching corporate America transform itself from a few business people having computer terminals to everyone having a PC. During the late-80s until Windows 95 companies which had Macs had their business-centric employees already locating their Macs right where they sat at their desk. It was a central part of what they did and the work they produced. Those business-people who worked for companies using MS-DOS didn’t have almost always had their PCs off to the side, sometimes even on wheeled carts sitting by a wall. The companies with Macs had already integrated much of what their employees did with their Macs while the PC companies only had a few at best of their processes linked to their PCs, like really bad email apps.
Microsoft Office remains a central part of how business is still conducted, especially when it comes to analysis and communications. Office was mostly developed first on their Mac platform until Windows matured. The increased quality of work product that came from having Microsoft Excel as an analysis tool is hard to imagine except to those of us who had to perform such work prior to its invention, one of the most individualistic empowering tools ever developed for making more calculated, well-framed, and more-aware business decisions. (Yes, I was previously a Lotus 123 user and assert within that context).
Ah the days of programming 6800 and 8080, that brings a smile to the dial.
As I recall the Apple devs were very shy about telling anyone where anything was in memory. Sending a 20th of a second burst to the I/O was hideously indirect guesswork. Not a good customer service experience. Although to be fair the Amiga was even worse.*
Dingo
—-
* Remember the Amiga? Pioneering WIMPs before Stevie-boy got into the action.
Here’s some quotes from Jobs that the Huffington Post aggregated: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/05/the-best-steve-jobs-quote_n_997300.html#s338862
I am the happy owner of an original MacBook, a first generation iPad, and an iPhone 4. I’ve had a love/hate attitude about Apple, and yet when all’s said and done I think that its products are undoubtedly the best on the market. I was looking forward to the release of an iPhone 5 this year, and I was pretty disappointed when only an incremental upgrade was announced just yesterday. Now I think I know why the upgrade was so incremental and took so long to be announced. RIP Steve Jobs.
Apparently they have a lot of cool gadgets and a cool OS, but from over here in PC land I wonder why the software like Quick Time and Safari and iTunes is so crappy. Quick Time is a cool codec and was a pioneer but the Quick Time player is a piece of crapola. That’s about all I know about the whole thing.
Everyone’s an Apple guy, whether they know it or not. Home computers, GUIs, the world-wide web, smartphones… would any of these exist now without Jobs? Well, maybe, but certainly not in the form we know them today.
Dingojack, I remember the Amiga. It came out in 1985. The Macintosh came out in 1984.
Well, I think even you realized that statement was a little over-the-top before you completed the thought!
No doubt Job was a highly influential man in the field of personal computers and personal computing devices over the last 30 years, but I have a hard time believing that any of the things you listed would not have existed in some form today. There would have been no iPods, iPads, iMacs, iPhones, perhaps, but there would have been equivalent devices, and some may have even been more innovative, than Apple’s current line up. We’ll never know (unless we start making wormholes to alternate realities!).
“Even more innovative”? Please, that’s ridiculous. We’d be years behind where we are now, at best. Of that, I have no doubt.
Quick Time is a cool codec and was a pioneer but the Quick Time player is a piece of crapola.
Actually I guess it’s a container…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mov
Yeah, you can tell I’m a real expert. Anyway, Quick Time = yay! Quick Time Player = big pile of crapola.
I started using Macs professionally in 1997, when I joined Industrial Light & Magic to work on the visual effects for “Star Wars: Episode I”. I had rarely used a computer before, and my department was one of the few at the company that used Macs (back then, the vast majority of the work was done on Silicon Graphics workstations running Unix). A surprising amount of the effects in that movie were accomplished on Macs, including the alien worlds, cityscapes and planets. (Matte painting is my gig.)
When I left the company in 2001 to start freelancing from home, I bought a (then top-of-the-line) Mac G4, the exact same model I had at ILM. I finally had to retire it in 2008, not because it no longer worked, but because the software I regularly used for my job simply wouldn’t run on it anymore, and needed newer hardware and OS version. I still have it, and it still plugs along as well as the day I bought it.
In 2008, I upgraded my system to the Mac Pro, have used it steadily ever since, and expect to go on using for it several more years. What I learned was that Macs may (and do) cost more, but they last beyond expectations, and are incredibly well designed and manufactured.
I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, not even an iPod. I do occasionally work on PCs when I do in-house jobs at various companies. Windows seems to have finally gotten its sh*t together after many years of trying. But my experience with Macs sold me on their quality a long time ago.
RIP Steve Jobs. If it weren’t for your products, I wouldn’t have the career I have today.
I initially learned to program on an Apple II+, and our first family computer was an Apple IIc. That said, I’ve found Apple products to be too limiting in my life, so while I’m not opposed to the products, I don’t seek them out either. I own an Android phone primarily because of the physical keyboard (personal limitation), but I would have been equally happy with an iPhone if they offered that option (which is the big problem with Apple…their way or the highway).
Steve Jobs, regardless of your feelings towards Apple, was someone with massive charisma who knew how to sell. He understood the need to take what was out there and wrap it in great packaging, and emphasize that packaging with a PR department that is 2nd to none.
I sincerely hope Apple continues to do well. I think the revival of Apple from the dismal 90s had spurred competition in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and I hope that competition continues on. Actually, I wish that there were a few dozen companies like Apple competing, but that is only a dream…
I first used the original Macs in college. Since then, I’ve owned PCs, mainly because of price. I’ve often wished Apple would come down on price for their computers because I would be more than willing to switch to a Mac for my personal use. On the other hand, I own an iPod and iPhone.
Jobs’ main contribution was to bring design principles to tech products and make them more user-friendly. Yes, it was done at the expense of locking down the hardware and OS. If you’re the kind of person who wants to build your own PC from scratch, then Apple’s products aren’t for you. But there’s no denying the influence Jobs had in generating mass appeal for tech products. He was a natural showman who had a knack for getting people excited about his products.
Yeah, he had his flaws, but think about where he’s put his stamp on things. It’s no secret that Windows has been heavily influenced by the Mac OS over the years. Portable music players and cell phones have been radically changed with hundreds of new features. iTunes has probably done more to reduce internet piracy than the RIAA’s lawsuits simply by providing a legal means for people to download audio and video content. He almost single-handedly created the tablet craze.
Most importantly, he got people excited about what would come next. Perhaps that’s his greatest legacy: Being a beacon of optimism about the future in what otherwise is a very pessimistic era.
It’s my personal observation that Mac users excitedly wait for the new OS while Windows users justifiably must be pulled kicking and screaming to the next OS though with a few exceptions (XP, 7 given how lousy the previous two releases were – especially Vista).
History was prepared to claim Apple made a strategic error not licensing its OS back in the late-80s. However that narrative is now being challenged given the leverage Apple’s had to extend the synergies they gain from controlling both hardware and software into new platforms. Apple’s current valuation is now greater than Microsofts.
No, that statement wasn’t over the top.
Apple made the first commercially sold computer with a GUI that worked like they do today. Windows was made as a copy of that idea, a fact that has been documented more than once, and has been acknowledged by Gates. PARC, where Steve got the ideas for that GUI, never would have developed it, the prototype he saw that day was never slated for development and probably no longer exists.
Without a graphics based OS, the graphics based Web would never have been developed, and I think it is doubtful that smartphones would look anything like they do today. It is also doubtful that there would be anything like iPods, and if tablets did exist, they’d probably not use graphics.
While Apple didn’t INVENT much of the technology they use in their products today, they certainly took it to new levels of integration and usage.
They were the first to popularize the 3 1/2 inch floppy and the first to remove it. They were the first to popularize the USB drive and the first to remove it. Each time, they’ve introduced another, new replacement that has ended up being accepted by the rest of the industry as a standard part of the PC.
Apple didn’t invent all of the tech used in the iPod or the iPhone, but they integrated that tech into products that were part of an ecosystem that even to this day hasn’t been successfully copied by any other company.
You may not like it, but they have built an ecosystem of products that work together like no other slate of products any other tech company has ever produced. Products that are so easy to use that people who have never even dreamed of owning a computer now walk around with one in their pocket every day. Pocket sized computers more powerful than even the most capable used in the 90′s. And few people even think of them as computers, simply as phones.
Expensive? Not on your life. Apple products today are competitively priced – the other computer manufacturers are struggling to produce laptops that can be equal in features, software, lightness, battery power and speed at even a close proximity to the same price Apple sells theirs for!
With the recent announcement, they will GIVE AWAY the iPhone 3GS with a two year contract, a move that will blow away the feature phone market, especially since T-Mobile will now be the only US carrier not selling the iPhone.
And all of this is the brainchild of one man, assisted by a company he built and has invested with his way of thinking and designing.
Apple’s design isn’t just eye candy. It isn’t just a pretty box. Good design embodies the software as well as the hardware, and Apple has raised that to an art form. Steve once said that a critical part of designing a product is knowing when to say “no”. When to stop piling on features and when to keep it simple.
Do they always get it right? No, of course not, Steve and the rest of the crew at Apple are as human as the rest of us, and yes, they make mistakes. But they come back and redo it and try to fix what they can, and they’e got a pretty good record of doing that.
The point is that Apple makes products that excite the imagination and help us in our every day life.
The fact that Apple’s stock price has risen by over 6,800% since he came back as CEO and for the last five years, Apple’s PC market sales have grown faster than the rest of the PC market by double digits speaks volumes about how the rest of the world feels about Apple products.
Steve is a unique combination of vision and the talent to see that vision through to reality, who was at the right place at the right time to make that vision alter how we look at, consume and exchange information.
His influence will be felt in the tech world for generations, and his business success will be studied for as long as people will study the business world and how it works.
Note what’s lurking in the background on Bill Gates’ desk
http://www.cashthechecks.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/bill-gates.jpg
I’ve never liked Apple products and have avoided them as much as possible, but I still have a great respect for Steve Jobs. His products have been overpriced and work better as status symbols than actually accomplishing things, but he has certainly guided the field of technology by inspiring others to make better, cheaper versions of his innovative ideas. I love my Android smartphone, but it wouldn’t exist if he hadn’t helped create the iphone first.
Lol, I had so many problems with Apple when I was in college. We had a giant computer lab, and it was mostly PCs with a few Apples for some reason. Of course the Apples were always the last to be used, and I hated going in there on a crowded day to find only Apples left. Much of my work was done with Microsoft Visio, which had no Apple version at all (I don’t know if they have it now). I didn’t have Visio on my own computer either.
I also had to use Autocad on those Macs, and it froze up every single time. There were numerous other problems that maybe could have been fixed with some updates. I dreaded using the Macs for anything other than checking e-mail.
So a computer that can’t run Visio and has numerous other problems is “good design”? Oh wait, by “good design”, maybe you mean it has a good aesthetic design, so it looks pretty even though it’s not functional.
I just started on PCs and stayed with them so I never learned to use Macs.
Come on. I was a PC user since IBM came out with the PC back in 1983, and I learned how to get used to a Mac. In about a week. At the end of the spaghetti code days. WIth OS X, it’s even easier than that.
I also had to use Autocad on those Macs, and it froze up every single time.
Funny, every app I ever used on a PC, from the most complicated to the simplest, locked up at least once a month. Apps like Photoshop and Autocad often did it several times a day.
There were numerous other problems that maybe could have been fixed with some updates.I dreaded using the Macs for anything other than checking e-mail.
So you aren’t even sure if the Macs you used were updated the way they were supposed to be, and you blame them for their performance? Seriously? And you never did indicate the age of these Apple products. If they’re old enough, no upgrade can help. Eventually, even Macintoshes can become obsolete.
So a computer that can’t run Visio and has numerous other problems is “good design”?
1) Just because a computer can’t run one app that wasn’t even made for it doesn’t mean it’s a bad computer. I mean, if you want to play that game, any computer that can’t run Logic Studio is a piece of shit. Oh–it’s not available for Windows? Sucks to be you!
2) You don’t indicate that the Visio you were trying to use on a Mac was on a recent computer with the necessary specs, or even if it was an Intel Mac rather than the old PowerPC Mac running the program through a Windows emulator like Virtual PC. If a Mac was made before 2006 or so, then it’s not going to run a modern program like Visio on it. Hell, Visio wouldn’t run on my old Pentium II computer.
3) What other problems?
Plug and pRay? Oh, wait, that’s a PC problem, not a Mac problem.
Having to download drivers anytime you want to run a new program or use a new device? Oh, wait, that’s a PC problem, not a Mac problem. So tell me how I’m supposed to think it’s NOT a problem having to go through the installation processes for drivers and setup menus and the rest, rather than installing ZERO drivers to get a third-party mouse to work? That’s right. I had to install exactly ZERO drivers to get my third-party mouse to work on my Mac. On my PC, with the exact same mouse, I spent nearly an hour getting the drivers straightened out. I have better things to do than that.
Blue Screen of Death? Oh, wait, that was a PC problem, not a Mac problem.
Having to install virus protection updates just about daily? Oh, wait, that’s a PC problem, not a Mac problem.
Paying $2500 for a top of the line computer that is obsolete in less than 3 years? Oh, wait, that’s a PC problem, not a Mac problem. That $2500 PC? I bought it, and junked it for a Mac that was in heavy use, as a business computer for no less, for five years–and would still be working if it hadn’t been dropped moving it to another room. Cost of the Mac: $1500. I was still using my sunflower iMac (cost: $1800–with AppleCare) that I bought in 2002 and was using for all of my computer needs up until 2009. Show me a PC with the same features and specs that was doing what I could, as much as I was, with a 7-year-old computer. That computer is still running, by the way, and I use it for some old Classic apps I don’t want to get rid of.
Yeah, so many problems, but not with the computer you think.
bananacat:
Do you go to animated movies or view multi-media content? Do you work with business people who depend on MS Excel, which was built around the Mac OS? Do you communicate with others through your computer without having to know text command strings? Do you embrace the idea that computers should be designed in a way that empowers individuals rather than being terminals where people contribute to some single central/all-powerful authority?
Their products are way beyond mere status symbols, they allowed creative people who weren’t necessarily techies to exploit their own talents. They’re especially useful in small companies in certain industries who can’t afford a large tech support staff. T
Certainly other companies put out compelling products, but who first marketed many if not most of the features that allowed most humans the ability to individually exploit the potential of computers?
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The Atlantic just published an article about Jobs that I find relevant to the discussion. Short version: Jobs was successful and he was an asshole, but he wasn’t successful because he was an asshole. I couldn’t agree more. Just because you’re successful doesn’t give you license to treat people like crap, and it certainly doesn’t cover up the smell when you do.
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