I don’t think people realize how shitty everything you make is. It’s only through continuous improvement and iterations that it becomes really nice.
Unless it’s something you’ve done many times before, if no one is pointing out problems with your design in the first version, it’s probably hot garbage.
Unfortunately, a lot of PM's only check the project manager box.
Compare that to the level of change between Ballmer-Nadella or Schmidt-Pichai. Apple has displayed remarkable constancy.
Most non-technical people I know genuinely like Apple, it is a great experience for them. They don't know, and don't care, what "side-loading" etc means.
However, I absolutely don’t think Steve Jobs would have let the Vision Pro in its current state sit on store shelves.
I just can’t imagine him greenlighting a product so close to the prototyping stage, especially in an environment where Apple had zero urgency compared to the past.
And yet he launched the iPhone, which, in its first generation, didn't even let you install apps on it. The point is not to excel in all areas. The point is to excel in relevant areas where the competition can not easily catch up with you.
The Vision Pro doesn’t have a lot of features where it excels. Running apps on it is inferior to using your phone or tablet. Watching movies is inferior to your home television. Productivity is inferior to a standard computer. Games are inferior to existing VR gaming systems like Index or Quest. Reviewers universally describe it as lonely, dystopian. Eyestrain is still a problem, dizziness is still a problem.
The iPhone had things about it that were better than existing solutions in a product category (cell phones and smartphones) that was proven and growing.
The most optimistic thing you can say about the Vision Pro is that if it were more like a pair of sunglasses and got rid of all the downsides to using it, it might be a really good true AR experience where your brain forgets about the fact that you’ve augmented reality. The problem is, there is no physical hardware technology that is on the horizon that will ever feasibly bring it to that place.
Not being able to install apps was completely resolvable by a software update. The hardware problems of the original iPhone like the lack of 3G were resolved within a calendar year with the next model, and the original model had an acceptable level of battery life.
If a similar situation to the iPhone was happening we should be seeing a Ming Chi Kuo type of rumor about a Vision Pro coming in 2025 that scuttles the external battery, enables the system to get through an entire Hollywood movie without charging, and solves the problem of the headset messing up your hair and making you interact with the world through ski goggles. These improvements are impossible within the next 10 years or so.
There was also way more urgency with smartphones. If Apple had waited one or two years the iPhone would have been snuffed out by competition. We would see a market dominated by other players in the market like Nokia, Microsoft, BlackBerry, or Palm.
In contrast, the VR/AR market is literally a contracting one with the only major players being Valve and Meta. The iPhone entered a market that was clearly in an upward trajectory.
Would anyone be surprised if Meta announced the shuttering of the Quest division within the next 5 years or so? It has never made money. It has never come close to breaking even, it’s a complete moonshot money sink for Meta. The Quest 3 is selling slower than the Quest 2 did. Microsoft quit on the market before Apple even entered it. Valve hasn't made a follow-up headset and might not ever do so.
A reminder of this story from a few years back: https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/13/apples-ar-vr-headset-repor...
This is a product that was in development hell that had pressure to ship. A more courageous executive would have seen the struggles at Meta and killed the project years ago.
The Apple Car idea was legitimately way better and would have taken less time.
Are they? I don’t see it. They’re more profitable than ever and are still extremely competitive in multiple markets.
The arguments against this have been the same for decades: Apple is overpriced, Apple’s product are inferior to competition, and yet here we are with large chunks of the market share and larger chunks of market gains.
Some products are stupid, but it’s not like Steve hasn’t pushed dead products out before.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BA/financials/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/net-inco...
Hmm...no it didn't.
I suppose using switched-mode PSU in the Apple II was revolutionary to me at the time, but someone else would have figured that out pretty quick. They were already in TVs.
Sure, it was him alone doing all that, not the 10,000 employees, within a 40M people ecosystem such as California which is the tip of the spear of a yet bigger ecosystem such as the United States which in turn is the tip of the spear of the entire 4 million history of mankind progress up to now.
The cult and the propaganda causes a whole lot of illusion/delusion. Then you actually get to meet these people and you are as disappointed as the groupies who were asked to self cut their veins by Led Zeppelin for their satanic rituals.
Humanity as a whole makes progress, individual humans just partecipate in a giant lottery for monetary and recognition allocation. The latter has nothing to do with the former, much like winning a car race on a racetrack has nothing to do with building the track nor the car.
Max Verstappen won the Las Vegas GP. The GP , the cars, the track itself are the byproduct of billions of humans at work and every minute of work towards that has approximately the same value, if there's a positive outlier is very minimal and perhaps that person has never been to the track at all or doesn't even care about car racing.
This is what happens when there's 8bn of us right now with a total number who ever lived standing at 10-12bn
Let's make a practical example in order not to keep talking past each other:
If you owned a resturant and they were still alive would you offer them a steak or cancel another reservation to make room for them?
I wouldn't , don't care if you are Jesus H. Christ, you gotta pay me.
Apple has numerous very talented people who do all the rest of the required work to get products created and built.
That he defrauded his buddy Woz on one of their first ventures when Woz was the one doing all the tech work is really the ironic part. When it came to running Apple, Steve was very good. But he hired good people and those people are doing well (if not as good as Steve) now.
I'm simply pointing out he's not the same category of non-technical founders being discussed in this post
We know a lot more about hardware and software development than we did even 10 years ago let alone 50.
Those of us who came into tech in the last 20 years through today did not have as many unknown unknowns to stumble through. It’s all so much more streamlined. There inherently cannot be another Jobs or Gates in IT land same as there will never be another Christopher Columbus
Idolizing the prior generation is a fools errand. The discovery phase is over. We get the maintenance phase
(Without a doubt, something you think is OK, and everyone else does, will be seen as a horrible monstrosity by your descendants. It won't be something you can think of, and yet you'll be judged for it as a monster by some.)
There are a mandated number of unassigned, non-employee dedicated handicapped parking spaces per overall building size/parking spaces. And that in some cases, there are far too many for the building/business's use case.
An example? A shopping mall needs lots of handicapped parking spaces. Yet an office will assign close spots to employees with special needs, as the generic spots aren't for-use by employees. Thus there can be an excess of generic handicapped spots.
There are only so many spots available close to the building, and Jobs would obviously take one. So by using one of the many never-to-be-used generic handicapped parking spaces, Jobs was saving a high value parking space with prime location. And also allowing others to have use of a close to door space, all without depriving any handicapped person of a place to park.
It was a social hack, one he may have been quite proud of.
Clearly the handicapped are taking too many resources and we need the billionaires to have some.
His terrible attitude is also entirely orthogonal to his product management sensibility. The fact that he was a jerk does not mean he must be generally canceled and his unique product development theory and insight ignored. The two are not directly related, and it is possible to appreciate one while condemning the other.
Very much not the case.
I was on the iPod software team 15 years ago, and let me tell you, we got plenty of detailed feedback from periodic "SJ reviews". My manager (a line manager of a small team) went to those meetings and came back with lots of very specific things we needed to change.
One year (fall 2008) Steve was going on vacation to Italy for a week or two, and asked for a development version of the iPod shuffle we were working on to take with him on the trip. (We were terrified, because it wasn't really ready for that level of scrutiny.) That was at a time when the iPhone 3G and the original iPad were also under development, and yet we got a bunch of feedback on the humble little iPod shuffle when he returned.
He really was in the details, to an astonishing degree, and not just for the headline products, either.
I've yet to hear a story where Jobs was the one who discovered the fix, only stories that he pointed out the things that needed to be fixed.
He's lauded as a visionary, not as an engineer. And all the stories about him are about him pushing others to realize his vision.
Edit: Lots of people seem to disagree with me, but then pointing out how he was an extremely skilled ideas man. Perhaps that term has too much negative connotation for Jobs' visions (ideas) to be associated with?
You can easily identify the wrong thing as the problem then end up trying to hide a symptom instead of fixing the problem. Medicine is notorious for treating symptoms when the underlying problem is usually related to something else like diet or (lack of) exercise.
You can also completely fail to identify an obvious problem such as the games where you end up stuck and having to Google how to progress because the game is poorly designed. This poor design isn't going to be obvious to anybody working on the game every day because they designed and already know the solution but it would come up if somebody else played the game and got stuck.
Realizing that the iPod had to be thinner was a visionary idea. Making the iPod thinner was a technical feat.
One had the idea, the other had the technical ability (even if they had given up before Jobs pushed them harder).
I think "ideas guy" doesn't capture this. He had big ideas but also was super particular about details.
(Which doesn't justify being a prick, to be certain)
Not to say ideas guys aren’t prevalent, but for all his faults I would argue that Jobs wasn’t one of them.
From everything I’ve read, Jobs was deep in the weeds with all that stuff. In terms of asking all the relevant questions, finding the right experts, the suppliers to provide the right inputs at the right price, finding alternative solutions to problems, etc.
I doubt very many people knew more about bringing a new product idea to fruition from beginning to end than him.
Makes you wonder why they are so popular if this is the average user experience right?
Because people in general don't do risk analysis. Like in the 80s when everyone still smoked despite the risk of death being well known. Oh it won't happen to me!
Then when you have to throw away that perfectly functional $1000 apple device because apple decided you can't use it anymore, only then you realize you've been had.
Because 90% of the people are irrational buyers. They buy to impress their annoying cousin, or prove that they're more worthy than his wife's sister's husband. Because Apple's products are pricey and iPad case costs more than a iPad's competitor itself.
Same reason why my friend business owner in Dubai says his employees from India buy the most expensive phone with their first salary. Just because you buy the most expensive product, doesn't mean you get the best quality. And good marketers know it.
* Apple products are status symbols
* Induced demand through marketing
* Ecosystem lock-in, once you go Apple it's hard to switch back out
Also, it’s not bricked. Just needs to be wiped:
They'll brick both. But they'll complain more about the non-standard solution.
The problem here is that apple, in their infinite arrogance, feel that they continue to be the owner of the device you bought. The owner is who gets to set the policy. Apple here is setting and enforcing this bricking policy thus they are effectively the owner. But they still want you to pay for the device as if you were purchasing it!
The job of a vendor is to provide mechanisms to implement any kind of policy the buyer wants; the job of a buyer is to establish the policy that is best for them.
Apple wants to sell a device but continue being both the vendor and the owner of it. That is wrong.
These stories are semi-ridiculous. I don't doubt this person is in the predicament you describe. But why can't he just go to an Apple Store and have them unlock it? Does this person not own an ID?
The older macos devices (pre-t2 chip) are always usable. You can usually get old data off them, or they can be re-initialized.
But old ios devices? Had an old ipad, it glitched and it needs an apple id password. but it hadn't been hooked up for years and you can't connect it to wifi without it. old ipod touch? same mess.
It seems if older ios devices get out of sync of current os, it becomes hard to recover them unless you have a mac with macos that matches ios by year.
“… it's the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people "here's this great idea" then of course they can go off and make it happen.
And the problem with that is that there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get in the subtleties of it.
And you also find there's tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can't make electrons do. There are certain things you can't make plastic do or glass do. Or factories do, or robots do.
And as you get in to all these things, designing a product is keeping 5000 things in your brain, these concepts. And fitting them all together and kind of continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.
It's that process that is the magic."