Twelve years after the death of Steve Jobs, the cracks are starting to appear at Apple
Twelve years after the death of Steve Jobs, the cracks are starting to appear at Apple
People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
By any metric other than "line must always go up" Apple is doing just fine.
"Oh no, they haven't found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won't continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come...better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins", the horror.
To be fair, we saw formerly what Apple without jobs did, it was a failure. So one might wonder when the new Apple might run out. The catch being that the iPhone, app store, and iTunes are all indefinite money machines, except maybe iPhone one day. So they had a steak of ever increasingly wildly successful products that culminated in the iPhone and then no mind blowing follow-up, but they don't need one. Folks may like the narrative that Jobs death coincided with their last big product category though
We also saw Jobs without Apple, also pretty much a failure.
It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
Look at NeXT right before Apple 'bought' them. They were pretty much on their deathbed. Turns out, marketing $10,000 workstations to college students isn't such a smart idea.
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.
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.
Quick plug for the Behind the Bastards series on Jobs
I fucking love that podcast. So well researched and perfectly presented
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".
and found it funny that his own bullshit killed him in the end
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.
The amount of credit people give Steve Jobs is such a kick to the nuts to all the engineers that designed those products
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.
Steve Jobs was a piece of shit human being who contributed nothing to technology.
That said, he was a hell of a skilled bullshitter/marketer. Most people fucking looooove to be bullshitted, and Americans more than most.
It's why we elect virtually no wonks/technocrats, even though thats who we should elect almost exclusively. We'd rather some snake oil motherfucker sell us on magical lies while telling us we're pretty.
I've never complimented, or defended Steve Jobs before, because he was a grade A piece of shit...but, Steve Jobs transformed technology precisely because he was a phenomenal salesman, with a great eye for technical talent.
Just because he wasn't an engineer, doesn't change the fact that he forged Apple into what it became, and that absolutely contributed to modern technology - for better, and worse.
Just because he wasn’t an engineer, doesn’t change the fact that he forged Apple into what it became,
I think the big complaint about Jobs is not the lack of engineering skills, but that he got where he did through deception, taking advantage of people, and often treating folks like garbage. Many of us view him as unworthy of celebrating, because the ends don't justify the means.
(There's also the fact that what Apple became was not all good, but perhaps that's a separate discussion.)
I think marketers should get to take credit for ad campaigns they create, and engineers should get to take credit for technology they create.
Capitalists just want to take the credit for what others do. Societal leeches. I don't buy into their false narrative that providing the means of production they hoard out of greed means they deserve most to all of the credit for what they permit talented people to engineer and produce by the swear of their brow and the migraines of their solutions.
We should be rewarding the Teslas of the world for what they invent, and punishing the Edisons that would claim other's inventions as their own. But we suck, so we won't.
After listening to the recent Behind the Bastards episode on him, yeah absolutely. It's amazing his legacy isn't judged more harshly.
I work in tech and specialize in Apple hardware. I get really sick of industry folks talking about Jobs as being inspiring and other nonsense. No, he was an asshole and we should not celebrate him.
It’s also partially because any decent engineer/technocrat both lacks sufficient charisma and cash flow, and more importantly looks at public service and says “there’s no reliable way I can keep my morals and make a difference there.” As an engineer myself, I can’t imagine dealing with the general public. Choosing the correct, logical path will never win over people who put opinions and faith/feelings over reasoning and science. We’ve seen it time and time again and I’m not going to bang my head against that wall.
Instead I help friends and family, contribute to open source and projects I believe in and be the change I want to see in the world. Trying to do that as an elected official would foster insanity and pushback from those who don’t care and only want their side to win, regardless of the overall outcome.
Also: yes SJ was a POS, but he was a POS with charisma, a plan, and smart enough to surround himself with people who could make his ideas happen… and then micromanage them.
wonks/technocrats
...Knowledge Fight-like typing detected?
I had the same thought!
who contributed nothing to technology.
If it wasn't for jobs Wozniak would still be putting breadboards together in his garage. We have no idea what the personal computer ecosystem would have looked like without the apple 2. He gets a lot more credit than he deserves sometimes but the idea that he contributed nothing is absurd. If he had contributed nothing you wouldn't know his name.
Jobs was the fucking cracks. The reason why zoomers have no fucking idea where their files are on their computer are because of the shitty attitude instilled into iphones/ipods.
He started the entire fucking enshittification trend and everyone ate his asshole like peaches.
I agree. I had to explain to a younger family member today that when I say "open notepad", I meant the application that's been on every Windows version since they were born, not to Google "notepad"
Gave me a crisis that people know so little of what would have been considered basic computer usage a while back.
If it makes you feel better I gave my 16 year old daughter a laptop with a fresh Debian install and she's figuring out things on her own without asking for help. Customizing it and making it do what she wants.
I just thought she would watch YouTube videos on it and be content. Instead she's talking about the nuance of installing programs on it, and how different it is from Windows.
Not all hope is lost.
Such is the result of Fisher Price'ing their devices.
You can extend this argument to saying everyone should master the command line. They're all interfaces. There's no "right way" to use a computer.
Jobs turned the computer into a product used by everyday people who don't give a shit about how it works, and that's fine. That's empowering because it lowers the barrier to entry.
That said, we've been in a much worse "eternal September" since the iPhone shipped.
Apple managed to capture lightning in a bottle, twice. First by making a better Walkman, and then again by making that device a phone with internet access. They were able to leverage that success to revitalize their computer hardware business and act as a platform for selling accessories, and all of that made them very successful.
But the stock market doesn’t care about past success, it cares about growth, and without a major new, or buzz worthy product, investors might start to turn against Apple. Problem is, they have ridden the iPod horse about as far as it can go. They tried putting wheels on it, but that failed, and the jury is still out on whether tying one to your face will work out or not.
Yep. Doesn't matter how healthy or stable a company is... when infinite growth is no longer feasible, investors would rather pick the bones clean than let it be.
Why does a company that has already achieved it's success need investment? When company potential is how we value society, this is an inevitable end result.
APPL is second only to MSFT by market cap. So far, the stock market doesn't care.
Yeah, but investors really don't care about the price of a stock, they care about how much the price moves once they own it.
It's the inherent problem with publicly owned companies. Even if you perfected a mode of profit, unless you improve upon perfection next quarter you're in hot shit.
You can only squeeze so much profit out of any one gimmick, after that the only way to mimic growth is by cutting labour costs, and eventually diverting investment funding into profit for shareholders.
Idk, more and more people are switching to mac and ditching windows. If their m1 thing continues being successful they're going to have a more severe monopoly than Microsoft ever did. It's one thing to patch Microsoft's half ass attempts to embrace extend destroy Linux but that isn't going to work out as well anymore once all the mainstream stuff is quarantined to an entire different cpu architecture and computers that no longer use off the shelf parts.
Luckily the only software they really have right now that Linux doesn't is that s tier video editor and then no one wants to use their stupid Metal graphic acceleration so games are going to have a hard time taking off as well. Too bad most people think "command lines are too hard".
The common person is going to lose access to computers as we know them today if Apple wins. If it gets to the point where the only modem mainstream systems left are M1 macs, everything computer related is going to get 10x as expensive. $1000 for a potato ass MacBook Air is already obnoxious but when that's the only choice, that potato ass MacBook Air is going to cost $10k.
Idk if I agree with this. I feel like 1000 goes further for a Mac than 1000 on on an equivalent PC, least as far as user experience goes. Windows arm isn’t there yet as far as support from vendors goes. With apple everyone hopped on the train fast , it was a smooth transition for average workflows. It will be faster and/or more efficient. They certainly have their problems , mainly the base storage , and display limitations but at least they’re fixing the latter of the two.
Not everyone wants to navigate a computer with a terminal. Hell , apple silicon Mac’s have outperformed Mac’s that cost 3 times the amount. I think you overestimate the need of a more powerful laptop in that space. The real difference is that Mac has N AppStore and large enough dev base that unless it’s some obscure windows specific software or games , the app likely exists on Mac. Word , Spotify , adobe adobe apps , he’ll even epic has software coming to Macs for hospitals.
If the price just gets so absurd , the common person will just use cheaper and or older alternatives. But it’s not like apple hasn’t been competing in the mid to low range for iPhones. M1 Mac’s are still excellent deals to buy 3 years later and eventually they can offer Macs at a lower price point. They aren’t stupid enough to isolate the common man when other options will always exist
by making that device a phone with internet access.
Fuck you WAP phones existed. Blackberries existed.
Apple made it better. There is innovation in execution (whether they "invented" things or not) and that is what Apple does. It's why Blackberries are things of the past.
And they sucked ass by only half-assing the usability
Not like it matters because they're a silicon valley giant so even the next zero change iphone will sell morbillion units.
The Apple Car was the hint the wheels fell off, because it was out of scope for Apple's focus. And the Vision Pro is the next biggest one, because Steve haaaaaaated wearable computing.
Meh, when you have a chip that powerful and that energy efficient, trying something in wearable computing is a no brainer imo.
I still don't know who wants wearable tech. Just using my phone can be painful at times. Notifications after notifications. Enable cookies, mark as read that work email, deal with the emoji in the group chat, ignore that spam call voicemail, ignore that update, dismiss that missed alarm, read the notification from my kid's school that the PTO meeting was moved....
Now imagine you can't just put it down. It is right there screaming for your attention. Just emails alone probably eat 10% or more of my working day. The very last thing I want is the screaming notifications to be on face in my field of vision.
Plus that thing is going to smell like ass in a month.
Wearable computing does not have to be a VR device, and it can be anything with a sensor, a cpu, gpu and networking features. Apple has at least one succesful wearable computing device, the apple watch. I am not touching vr anyway, it look pointless in nature and gives simulation sickness.
Trying, not releasing
he also hated non-skeuomorphic design, and yet here we are for the better in a world where we’ve moved on from that dated concept
just because he didn’t like something doesn’t make it wrong for apple to pursue
The cracks have been visible for a very long time, most fanboys don't want to see them though.
The cracks in this case are really that governments will no longer support the model that Apple created.
Cracks? Cracks! These are not cracks, these are features of our product. Their features of our business! It's what differentiates us from the fractured Windows and Android communities. You want these crac...err features, you need them because it makes our products better.
/s
The cracks have been visible on just about every teen girl's iphone screen.
Take a look at Apple stock over the last 12 years the company is worth literally 10x what it was worth when Jobs died. What a dumb framing.
Boeing's stock kept rising in the last 10 years, because they were sacrificing what they should be doing for shareholder value. Stock price alone is not a good metric for companies.
I hate how people point towards profit and claim that is an argument a company is successful.
It is easy to make a lot of money when exploiting workers, customers and all the people of the countries you evade taxes in.
It is like claiming drug barons, mafia bosses and human traffickers are successful. Successful in evading the law maybe.
His notebook finally empty?
Just nothing but pages of "exploit and abuse engineers"
I never understood the Steve Jobs worship. We knew he was a shithead bully long before he died
His notebook empty. Cook, when the infinite loop fell!
Wozniak, with Jobs at Atari - tamarian for getting taken advantage of in business
Now there is a reference I haven’t seen in a looong time. Thank you!
Yeah but in a person meetings are at an all time high and anonymous sticks of deoderant being left on peoples' desks is at an all time low.
Great choice of website:
Independent journalism is made possible by advertising.
That is the polar opposite of the truth.
NoteBookCheck is a legit website, what issue do you have with them? I always found their reviews and information and testing to be high quality
This is like shitting on GamersNexus because they removed some shitty product in every video to make money
"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs."
– Banksy
So you think they should just make no money because you're mildly inconvenienced?
I’m not saying they aren’t allowed to show ads, but I am saying that once they do, they are no longer allowed to refer to themselves as independent.
No company that wants to advertise on your website is stupid enough to sign away editorial control, i.e. once you agree to display their ads, you are no longer allowed to say anything bad about them. And even if they did, there’s still the looming risk that if you do, they are well within their rights to pull their ads and there goes your income.
If you’re going to show ads, be honest to your readers about what that means.
In opposition to popular sentiment, good journalism actually does make money. It just doesn't make as much money. And bad journalism without advertising makes no money.
I think corporations should be crushed so they are small enough to drown in a dirty used toilet.
Either you pay for access like the good old newspaper by gatekeeping the page or run unrelated ads from google AdWords and get paid by people clicking on them.
Lol, the crack appeared as soon after his death. Steve Jobs : no ipad air, no dividend for the share holders.
Guess what been announced in the months following his death.
Yeah bruh Tim Apple seems to be holding his own.
TL;DR: Wahhh apple isn't jamming enough AI crap in their products.
Jobs was once asked about what helped to set Apple apart from other companies. In response, he spoke of his fondness of a quote from ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky who once said what set him apart as an ice hockey player is that “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Yet this is exactly where Apple finds itself right now, especially in relation to generative AI. While it is true Apple has long integrated AI technologies into the iPhone and its other devices in the form of features like computational photography and Siri, it has also trailed in these areas as well.
Google, conversely, AI from the start, making it a centerpiece of its Pixel smartphone strategy from the moment the original Pixel device shipped over 8 years ago with Google Assistant its heart coupled with computational photography chops. It has been focused on bringing useful and advanced (non-generative) AI-based features to users on a much broader scale than Apple, such as Call Screening, Google Lens, Top Shot, Smart Compose, among many others.
Pffft. Fuuuuuuuuck that.
Thanks for saving me a click (and multiple eyerolls)
To be honest my old 2 gen iPad started showing cracks several years ago...
Do you mean your second generation iPad or your iPad that is 2 generations old?
Well kinda both. Got it used from my brother and I think it was the second gen made. It's dead since a few years tho. The battery died.
This article is garbage. The only thing that Steve Jobs did was have ideas and enough narcissism to force them on other people. Engineers and designers far smarter than he did the actual work.
To be fair, he also had an eye for good product design. Not the skills to implement it but the ability to see whether a design is good.
Of course he expressed this skill by yelling at his engineers and designers. A lot. Because he was an asshole.
Starting? lol
Wow is that really what the Apple campus looks like? That's hilarious. Like if Nintendo HQ was a big warp pipe.
Except the warp pipe would be cool.
"starting to"
Lol
Maybe Apple will have their Balmer moment but, as much as I would like to see that, I don't expect it any time soon.
Steve Jobs was an awful person, the brand was already cracked
Big companies with no vision of the future are often ripe for disruptive tech to harvest. We'll see what happens. The apple "visio pro"" is not the future of the company.
12 years... F...
Feels more like 20.
I think people love to hate Steve. The one thing people love more than a great figurehead, is hating one. I think that Steve had a great internal model of how to combine form/function.
iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it may as well have been. It brought the smartphone to the mass market.
Part of it was a great advertising campaign, which unlike the smartphones at the time, pitched it as a luxury good as opposed to an executive enterprise one. You owned a blackberry to answer emails wherever and whenever you were, you owned an iphone so you can check Google Maps. A large part of it was redefining both the form factor, and use case of a smartphone.
I'm pretty sure the main reason people hate Jobs is because by all accounts he was an absolute ass and was objectively a wackadoodle when it came to that homeopathic healing shit and not showering.
Yep. He was the Elon Musk of those years. Great at marketing but an asshole to work for and likely would have started spreading his insane crap at some point to the masses.
Oh, he was an absolute asshole. Seems I deleted that sentence. RIP me.
"I have enabled and ushered in a new age of knowledge access like no other, here's a cool way to eat that goes against all reasonable nutritionists' advice. Sounds good to me!" - Really seems like a fitting way to kick off this century IMO.
At the time iPhone 1 didn't seem like anything smarter than an iPod that could take calls. I was hyped over the Nokia 770 and eager to see what else would come out with Meamo OS. It took till mid 2008 until iPhone 3G and iOS 2 (and app store) were released.
Jobs’ vision was fundamentally to make technology accessible to the masses.
Bullshit, maybe Woz had that, but Jobs? No way! His goal right from the Apple II was clearly to make money, and maximize it by controlling the tech instead of setting it free.
Already with Macintosh it was a "walled garden", with many closed aspects to secure Apple had control. With iPhone it became even worse, and has NOTHING to do with making tech accessible, on the contrary. He made it easy because there's money in that, he didn't make it accessible, the price structure alone makes that an obviously false statement.
Jobs had an eye for design, but to call it that he wanted to make it accessible, is like arguing a fashion designer makes expensive designer clothes to make it accessible to people.
The fact that people associate Apple's early history with Steve Jobs is sad. There were so many extremely talented people who did amazing work. Woz, Bill Atkinson, and Susan Kare are a lot more important. In a lot of ways Jobs just got in the way.
I can't see how that's ever arguable since Apple has only been about premium high-end products since Jobs took over. That's literally the opposite of Henry Ford.