That analogy breaks down almost immediately. I get your point that when you go out and try to do things sometimes you will fail, but the problem is that many of his design failures were seen _even at the time_ to be failures.

I don't necessarily think Ive is going to succeed, but if you're going to make a lot of bets, taking one bet on someone who succeeded before seems pretty reasonable. He wouldn't be the first person to rise to great heights, fall, and rise again, even in the Apple world.

I absolutely agree right up until we start talking about price. Obviously this deal was all in stock from someone who has a history creative corporate control structures, but nevertheless the on paper cost of was $6.4 billion. That's a hell of a bet.

This whole thread seems weird to me. There's no way on Earth this is to acquire talent, let alone one person alone.

For this price, I'd figure something already exists.

Sam did say he took one of the prototypes home and he thought it was "the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen"

since we're torturing the analogy... you don't measure a baseball team's success by the # of HR's one player records in a season, you talk championships over time. Sometimes they're related, but less frequently than you'd think.

But even those best home run hitters reach a point where the hit rate drops way below average...

A good batter knows when the pitch is bad and you take the balls and get a walk.

I hate sports analogies, because they're arbitrary

A good QB will complete 65% of his passes

A good goaltender will stop 90% of shots

A good bowler will get a strike 95% of the time

This gave me an idea: a Slack AI that will give me an analogy to support my point, whatever it may be.

“Hey Analogai, help me out here.”

“Ah I see what Chip Frumpkins, Director of Looking Relevant is saying. It’s basically that we need to throw a lot of paint at the wall to see what sticks. And if we fail, at least we’ve got a Jackson Pollock.”

Baseball is the hardest sport, but it’s a zero sum game. The .300 batting average is against equally elite pitching. Engineering or design is about adding value.

Taking the raw engineering of the components and interfaces that defined the iPhone and making a system of it is design at its peak and almost art.

Taking a proven form factor like a laptop, not talking to users and making it worse is just a misstep. It wasn’t a complete disaster only because the bar is so low, the defective Apple laptop is still the best laptop in the market.