[killion]

I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”.

The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left.

There were misses under Steve like the Cube where there wasn’t a market. But the product was great. Now there is a market but the product is middling like the Watch. Yes the watch was started when he was still there but it has stagnated.

[microtonal]

The overall software quality has dropped markedly at Apple and the hardware more uneven since he left.

Mostly on the Mac. The butterfly keyboard and how Apple handled it, were terrible. And macOS quality had gone down release after release. But I have never had any serious software or hardware quality issues with the iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods or any other products. It seems that they had just lost focus on the Mac.

However, the Mac seems to be rebounding. I have a M1 MacBook Air and it is stellar - probably their best new Mac in decades. Also, I haven't had many issues with macOS 11 so far.

[nostromo]

Mac development started stagnating under Jobs though, once the iPod and then iPhone really took off.

It's well known that Jobs was basically bored with the Mac and spent all of his time focusing on the iPhone.

This is where having a single visionary in charge of everything (including small decisions) breaks down. There are so many days in the week and you can't be everywhere at once.

Cook is the better CEO, and Jobs was the better founder / early CEO in my view. I'm thrilled with the M1, and I'm not sure that would ever be something Jobs would have developed.

[adventured]

I disagree about Cook being the better CEO. He's the better chief operating officer, which is the ideal combination with Jobs as CEO. A product person should always lead a company like Apple, if you can find one good enough to do the job. If you don't have that eventually you'll miss a critical inflection and the company will tip over. Cook will extract maximum profit from the product and ecosystem foundation that Jobs left him, which is exactly what he has been doing for a decade now. Jobs installed Cook in that role because he knew that operationally Cook wouldn't screw up the product map that was already primed. However Apple will need a product person after Cook.

[killion]

I think that is exactly right. Tim Cook is the most amazing supply chain and operational leader – but he is not a product person. He doesn't have the knack for diving in and really refining how things work.

Without that centralized leadership Apple will still have components that excel, like processors, but the fundamental user experience will keep degrading.

[steve_taylor]

> This is where having a single visionary in charge of everything (including small decisions) breaks down. There are so many days in the week and you can't be everywhere at once.

I don’t agree with this. The Mac was his baby and yet it didn’t blind him to the future being in handheld and wearable computing. And it’s led to phenomenal success. He could have doubled down on Mac at the expense of the smartphone market.

[m0llusk]

It is not true that Steve Jobs was bored with the Mac. Steve Jobs loved the Mac and would have preferred for it to be at the center. The thing is that Apple nearly died only just a few years before by not selling people what they wanted and by that time what people really expressed desire for using their money was personal devices.

Apple had many problems dealing with processor suppliers over the years and probably would have looked for solutions beyond Intel when they floundered no matter who was at the top.

[pcmoney]

Jobs started their own chip division to bring it in house shortly after his return despite knowing that bet wouldnt pay off for 5-10yrs and despite needing to resuscitate a dying company in the short term. He started the process that lead to the m1.

[bluedevil2k]

Have you used the new Podcasts app? It can’t even do the fundamental job of a podcast app - “show me the episodes I haven’t listened to yet”

[_ank_it]

Podcasts app seriously has some big issues. I had an iPhone XR and it would heat the shit out of the phone, I thought maybe it's because I have an old phone but it's doing the same with my 13. I have subscribed to 50+ podcasts.

[dkonofalski]

What? There's a toggle to hide episodes you've already listened to. If you have that turned on, it only shows you episodes you haven't listened to yet.

[bluedevil2k]

Only on the Latest Episodes page, which doesn’t allow you to group by show. The Downloaded page lets you hide played episodes, but doesn’t hide them for 24 hours (why??). The Shows page … that’s all messed up. You can hide played episodes, but it randomly displays episodes from years past with no possible way to mark them played without first downloading it and then marking it played.

[dkonofalski]

I don't understand. The Shows page lets me hide played episodes and mark individual episodes as played without downloading them. You can click the "..." or long press on any episode in the Shows page to mark it as played.

[Apocryphon]

I thought Podcasts was derided even when it was first released within a year after Jobs' passing, so it being a bad app is continuity from that era if anything

[mlinsey]

Podcasts feels like one of those apps Steve wouldn't have used, so it wouldn't have seen as much polish. I suspect this is why Keynote is fantastic but Pages and Numbers were unusable (at least, the last time I attempted to use them regularly, about 10 years ago)

[throwaway894345]

I generally agree, although there are all kinds of issues on iPhone as well. The one that bothers me most often is autocorrect sporadically changing correct English words to nonsense, or the complete inability to select certain bits of text properly (even in Apple apps).

[mod]

I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

There's some typos I get consistently and the correction is from a very normal word (probably, for instance) to a really seldom used word (poetically, in this example) and I'd prefer to remove poetically from my dictionary than to keep having it pop up.

Repeat this for a couple dozen very common words that consistently give me problems.

[maxwelljoslyn]

> I'm so mad at all the phone keyboards for not having some kind of priority for predictive. And ability to remove words.

Now imagine how frustrating it is having to deal with an additional layer of invisible predictions, silently changing a word after you've typed it and moved on, consistenly only allowing you to say "1/4" instead of "one-fourth" with nowhere to change it ...

I have to deal with this every day because I use dictation do most of my typing. Due to a hand injury (RSI).

I am someone who cares very very deeply about precise and novel expression. It is very very difficult to do that when I have to fight multiple layers of tools that think they know better, with no way for me to provide feedback to the system, as you say"Priority for predictive."

For instance, just looked at how Mack OS voice dictation chose to punctuate and space the string

> say"Prio

Above. Or look at how it misspelled its own name, in the previous sentence!

[zebracanevra]

GBoard allows you to remove words, and the gesture is very simple. For example, "pepsi" is corrected to "Pepsi" but who wants that. So, just type "pepsi", and "Pepsi"'ll appear in the bar above the keyboard. Drag it up, and it won't be corrected again. Easy. As usual with gestures, zero affordance...

[sulam]

Sounds like the machine thinks you're writing too prosaically. I'd give in and indulge its flights of fancy.

[mulmen]

I turned off autocorrect a year ago. It’s easier to correct typos by tapping them than have to proof read for whatever properly typed word Apple changed for no reason.

The original iPhone had a much nicer cursor behavior and placement was easier with a tap or a hold-and-drag than it is to this day. I forget when this changed, I think it was about a decade ago.

[hnzix]

Tap and hold on the spacebar works pretty great for cursor placement.

[neillyons]

Thank you. This works so much better that tapping on the word to place the cursor.

[mulmen]

Thanks, I didn't know that was a thing.

[Lio]

I wish I could up vote this twice. Text handling on the iPhone is incredibly frustrating.

I'd add to the list of issues how hard it is to trigger the spell checker for underlined words and how poor its suggestions are when you finally do trigger it.

There are whole websites devoted to embarrassing errors caused iPhone text handling. I can't see why Apple don't bother to fix it. Even small iterative improvements would be OK.

[duped]

Apple Maps directions now mispronounces the word "South" (who knew it had three syllables?). This word is so common in street names I'm shocked it made it out of testing.

[mulmen]

Apple Maps is horrible for driving navigation. Relevant information like route number of the next turn is much smaller than it needs to be.

The directions are floating in space over the map which looks nice but wastes space on the margins. The directions themselves are in a box that also wastes tons of space.

If you reach a destination navigation is cancelled but you cant re-start navigation from there. So if you arrive but Apple Maps wants you to make a left turn across a median it cancels nav and you are in the dark for finding a route around.

I wish usability was a priority but modern UX doesn’t seem to consider it at all.

[selimthegrim]

In New Orleans today Apple Maps a) directed me across a bridge closed to vehicular traffic since Katrina b) directed me down a flooded street -- all in the same trip!

[thom]

My Siri can’t pronounce the letter ‘y’.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Mostly on the Mac.

iOS 11 and 13 were both pretty crappy, not to mention weird misses like the Podcasts app. I can't see those releasing when Steve Jobs was at the helm, unless the situation was desperate. (An example of a desperate situation would be when you’re current products run Mac OS 9).

[dwaite]

Counterexamples: iBooks and the iMovie rewrite that they just shipped with nowhere near feature parity.

[Wowfunhappy]

iBooks wasn’t replacing a previous offering, and I don’t think it was abjectly terrible, just limited.

iMovie is a better example but I still think it was a decent update for the software’s target audience. And they offered everyone the older version for free! An even better example might be Final Cut X, which I actually think was a great product but for a very different audience for FCX.

The through-line is that these products were good products-they did something well and without bugs—but they weren’t targeted correctly, ignoring the needs of an existing customer base with (completely reasonable) expectations. That’s different in kind from something like iOS 13.

[LewisVerstappen]

Have you used iOS 15?

[killion]

Agreed. Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired.

Multitasking in iPadOS is also a good example of non-Mac software being near unusable.

[blowski]

> Even a little thing like Safari having the close button on the wrong side in iOS 15 would have gotten someone fired.

In which case, it sounds like a good thing they have a more sustainable culture. But I'm not sure your comment is true anyway.

Of course, Apple made all sorts of mistakes under Steve Jobs. In such a creative company, only a culture of freedom to make mistakes could produce extreme success. But now, because of a nostaglic cult of personality, any mistake meets with howls of "this would never happened under Steve!". That hero worship is a bigger problem for Apple.

[mhh__]

iPad in general screams of directionless product development.

I have an M1 iPad Pro. The thing is so fucking fast, just let me do a bit of coding on it.

... or let me rename file extensions.

[simonh]

You can code in Swift Playgrounds, including developing GUI apps using SwiftUI, and the next version will be able to release apps to the store directly from the iPad.

That's aside from the third party apps like Codea and Pythonista that have supported coding and app development on the iPad for about a decade. If you've not been coding on your iPad, you've been seriously missing out.

[mhh__]

That's great if you're a swift programmer...

When I can build the compiler I work on, on an iPad then I will consider it a coding platform.

[nodesocket]

I am also waiting for the new 16" MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon) with great enthusiasm. I expect it to bring back Mac back to their glory days.

[pico303]

Every time I see some usability flub in Mac software—like the new Safari tabs—I think that Steve is just a little more gone. Despite his flaws, he really understood how people interact with computers in a way not many others do.

[tptacek]

I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without the rich Corinthian leather, the PowerPC, and the colored plastic. The new keyboards aren't great, but I've dropped this MBP at least 30 times and it still keeps chugging; I'm pretty sure an errant dust particle could have take out my first Intel Macbook.

[dilap]

With the glaring exception of the butterfly keyboard debacle (typing on, what, my fourth right now? and already showing some signs of wonkiness), I agree hardware quality is amazing & best its ever been.

The software though... Fit and finish has fallen off a cliff. So many weird glitchy anims and dumb usability issues.

[kevinmchugh]

The wireless mouse that can't be used while being charged is the one that gets me. I don't know that Jobs would've approved that

[duderific]

It seems likely that he would have, because the port being on the bottom (making it so you can't use it while charging) allows the form factor to be that much sleeker. Jobs would generally opt for the form factor over convenience - ever making phones/laptops slimmer and lighter at the cost of battery life, for example.

[prawn]

Was he there for the hockey puck mouse?

[tptacek]

I've been a OS X user since the Titanium Powerbook and wouldn't trade Mojave for any cat version --- and, in particular, wouldn't swap the aesthetics of Mojave for any of them either.

This is a thread about Steve Jobs, and, again, when I think of Jobs, I think of rich Corinthian leather. What a nightmare.

[dilap]

Haha, yeah I'm not going to argue for rich Corinthian leather, or the aesthetics of the old iTunes UI or brushed metal or whatever. The visual style now is great. But the usability and quality of the animations and general fit-and-finish is much lower now, I think.

Some examples of pretty glaring failures that exist now:

Tabs in mac Safari: Very unobvious, sometimes even anti-obvious, which tab is currently selected.

The Today tab in the iphone App Store app: Try scrolling when your finger starts its drag on a button. The scroll is completely lost. In practice, this just feels like sometimes you try to scroll and it doesn't work. Way back when the iPhone first came out, Apple wrote a whole detailed tech paper on how to get this right. (It's a little tricky because at the start of the touch, you're in a quantum state: is this a button tap, or the start of a scrolling drag?) That institutional knowledge and attention to detail seems to have been completely lost.

On iPhone notifications, check out the animation as you long-tap to see options on a notification. The default behavior is a fade-transition to a slightly-smaller copy of the same content. Very jarring, almost glitchy.

Check out in mac Safari the awful opening and closing bookmarks side area animation: As you open and close the bookmark area, the icons don't animate with it, and just jump into place after the anim is done. (I wanted to share a screen recording, but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??)

And on and on. Those are just the recent ones I remember. Overall both iOS and macOS are flickery, badly animated messes. (I guess arguably the level of polish was never high for macOS, but for iOS, it used to be very high indeed.)

[reayn]

>but surprisingly there doesn't seem to be an easy, imgur-esqe site to share videos??

I thought you could upload videos to imgur? Anyhow:

Quick and easy:

https://filebin.net

https://litterbox.catbox.moe

Signing up (free tier) is worth it imo:

https://blackhole.run

My personal favorite[0]:

https://0x0.st

0. try out this little script i use to make uploading files from a CLI dead easy: https://gitlab.com/co1ncidence/dotless/-/blob/master/usr/bin...

[dilap]

Lovely, thank you!

Unfortunately, all I have to give in return in this video of a sloppy Safari animation. :-)

https://filebin.net/59kjnt15u834j7xl/safari-anim.mov

[actusual]

But this isn't the point, and comparing the two eras is useless IMO. It isn't where we were that matters, it where we could have been if Steve were still driving the ship.

[allturtles]

> rich Corinthian leather

What does this mean? Is this a metonymy for skeumorphic design?

[wtallis]

Yes, and specifically the phase Apple went through with excessively over-the-top skeuomorphism. As I recall, after the brushed metal fad had finally ended Mac OS X settled on a decent and fairly consistent look by 10.6, then in 10.7 there was a fresh excess including actual stitched leather textures: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/5/

That OS X release would have been frustrating for its usability and feature regressions even without the skeuomorphic textures, so also getting such heavy-handed, in-your-face design excesses made it a really disappointing release.

[Apocryphon]

I wouldn't mind having Ping back. Yesterday's events demonstrate the world still has room for more social networks, even if only for a few hours.

[UIZealot]

> I can't think of much I would trade from now for something in the Jobs era. I can do without

> the rich Corinthian leather

Taste, you either have it or you don't. Steve certainly did.

> the PowerPC,

The Mac switched to Intel in the Jobs era.

> and the colored plastic

Again, all Mac laptops and desktops switched to Aluminum in the Jobs era.

It seems to me you're going out of your way to not give credit whom (Steve Jobs) it's due, why is that?

[actusual]

Steve quotes in the video "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been" which is of course a Wayne Gretsky quote, and I think it captures this sentiment very well. Moving from leader to follower is such a classic move for an incumbent like Apple, and with Steve they never seemed to lose that insurgent mindset, even when they were absolutely enormous. They've steadily stagnated and truly lost that founder's mentality, and it sucks. I miss Steve Jobs a lot, and think about him often.

[sulam]

Honestly I don't see this. I realize it's a simple narrative, and it's one that plays well with the heroic arc, but businesses are not Aesop's Fables, sat on this earth to give us a morality tale to use to guide our children. The facts on the ground are far more complicated than "Apple was creative under Steve and isn't under Cook." Apple had MORE products when in the market when Steve came back as CEO, and he ruthlessly pared them down to the core. If Tim Cook killed half of Apple's lineup, would you say "wow, what a Steve-like move?" or would you say the company is simply resting on its laurels?

Apple has been managed by Tim Cook for more years now than it was by Steve Jobs. By business measures it is significantly more successful. They haven't released the next iPhone-class product, but one does not simply walk into Mordor, nor does one make an iPhone of products every year, or even every decade.

I think Apple is doing fine, warts and all. N of 1, but I've spent more money on their stuff in the last 4 years than I did in the 12 before that.

[actusual]

I think Steve was a product guy and Cook is more likely a business guy. I'm not making a value judgement either way, but I do see a lack of product vision/innovation under Cook, and I believe product vision/innovation is what excites me most about consumer electronics. I think the fact that Steve released several "once in a lifetime" level of success products in such a short time span is evidence enough for this.

Something that Steve jobs did well was understanding that building great products and successful business metrics aren't necessarily always aligned, especially in a product's nascent period.

[prawn]

I agree, and I don't think the time is right for the next major product category. Force something through and you get the cube again. They'll presumably wait for head-mounted displays of some sort, and a play at cars.

[na85]

Did you know Steve Jobs personally?

I'm stupefied as to how someone who didn't know him socially can miss a CEO of a giant faceless corporation, especially one known to be such a monumental asshole.

I mean his company made consumer products. It's like saying you miss the former CEO of Braun.

I honestly don't get it.

[nbzso]

The answer of this question is complicated and requires mastery in psychology. In layman terms is something about religious experience mixed with father figure and deep symbolism. People need something to believe and worship, this is part of multinational traditions in different forms. I personally have used Apple computers from purely UX an UI motivation, never trusted a slogan or marketing "reality distortion field", never been an early adopter or Apple fetishist. Simply put, in one distant point in time Macs were the ultimate professional tools. UNIX based, clean, logical software with reliable and beautifully designed hardware.

Now they are just a services and fashion company with hardware appliances as vehicles for vertical integration.

I respected Jobs intuition towards product design and execution but never "idolized" him for a second.

Even today, people don't get it, thousands of talented and faceless people are involved in Apples success but everything that the world can see is the face of the CEO and marketing presentation (This on second thought is one of biggest Jobs innovations).

The bigger problem is that we are "stuck" in Jobs vision of "user oriented" product (which figures as Tim Cook effectively abused and shifted towards monopoly, politics and shareholders driven existence) and cannot move forward.

The success stories of Jobs and Apple are considered "The Holly Grail" of tech companies and we have even some impostors using perception tricks (Elizabeth Holmes).

It is sad and frightening at the same time. If User Centered Design was really applied (not only advertised) the current state of personal computing would include real focus on encryption, privacy, data protection and accessibility, not some fetishistic obsession with tech specs and decoration in the name of "perception of progress" or corporate profits.

[avalys]

I’m stupefied as to how someone who didn’t know him socially can miss the CEO of a giant faceless corporation

Would you have called Apple “faceless” if Steve Jobs were still CEO?

I miss Steve Jobs because he did great things and he inspired others to do great things. The world was a more vibrant and creative place with him in it. As a software engineer I have used Apple products to do almost all of my day-to-day work since 2004 and I am thankful I have not had to use Linux, Windows or Android instead. It makes me sad to think of what we might have today if he was still alive.

And in comparison, here on HN, you mention the CEO of company that makes - electric razors? Whose name you cannot even remember?

The fact that Steve Jobs was an asshole to people at times is irrelevant. You value people for their strengths, not their weaknesses.

[dtjb]

As an interesting aside, Braun was led by Dieter Rams, a towering figure in product design and one of Jobs most influential idols.

https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/andrewpacio/2016/02/19/how-a-designe...

[Lio]

Dieter Rams was the legendary head of industrial design at Braun but I don't think you could say that he led the company.

His role was more akin to Jony Ive's at Apple.

Jobs was a different kind of animal. It's hard to say exactly what the source of his magic was but the fact that he remained interesting throughout his career showed he had something special that's still worth talking about.

[simonh]

What I miss is his insight into the state of the industry, the direction technology is going, and his discourse on design and why Apple products he worked on are engineered the way they are.

Yes he was a flawed person especially when he was younger, but he was also incredibly insightful, a master communicator and was always interesting to listen to. I think it's reasonable to miss that, and hence the person.

[hota_mazi]

The stagnation started well into Jobs' era, right after the iPad.

[duxup]

I think that's true, but there's also a danger of asking someone to 'be that guy' who isn't Steve. That seems like a bigger risk.

And in the meantime Apple still has its own fairly cohesive idea of how you use their devices and software ... while places like Google cancel and re-releases apps with half the features as the one they canceled, and I don't think they have a real idea of how people use their stuff.

[killion]

Definitely, I don’t see a way you could elevate someone to the level Steve was at. I think the plan was to have Jony Ive be the final word on design person.

But with iOS 7 Ives showed he didn’t get software and the “design is how it works” concept.

[Bud]

Not really. iOS 7 is an insignificant blip. Hundreds of other times, Ive showed that he was the best in the entire world at the "design is how it works" concept. Ive was the embodiment of that for his entire time at Apple. Jony Ive is the person who made it possible for Steve Jobs to say that without being laughed at.

Don't diss Jony Ive. He is the man.

[Apocryphon]

iOS 7 was absolutely huge at the time, it was Apple shifting away from skeuomorphism and the industry soon followed. Granted, Google Material Design seemed to have been independently invented in the same timeframe, but iOS 7 led the charge.

For good or for ill, iOS 7 is not to be discounted for its significance.

[na85]

Jony Ive is the reason Apple has a fetish for thinness at the expense of functionality, is he not?

He's a chump.

[ramesh31]

>I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”.

I have this recurring fantasy, where an engineer walks into Jobs's office with the new iPhone 7 prototype for the first time. The engineer holds it up, and says "Look! We've added the most advanced camera ever to be put into a phone! People will love this!"

Steve then graciously takes it from his hands, flips it over, runs his fingers across the lens bump, looks up at the engineer, and calmly says "Youre fired. Get rid of the damn bump."

[Lammy]

> I think that Apple suffers from not having that person at the top with taste who was willing to say “this is shit”.

It's probably just a coincidence but I can't help but notice how Apple didn't become a PRISM "Provider" until a year after he was dead, many years after the Googles/Facebooks of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#/...

[snowwrestler]

If you read the Wiki page you linked, you’ll see that PRISM was just the NSA internal source name for data sourced via FISA warrants—which are not optional.

Apple had no choice to “join” PRISM; the timing you see on that slide was determined by the FBI.

[dkarp]

I didn't know about the Cube[1], so thanks for sharing. Only sold for 1 year and then discontinued.

Laptops are now dominant and have outsold desktops for a long time, but in year 2000 that wasn't the case. So the Cube seems like a false start down that path. Kind of like Jobs knew the future, but was a little too ahead of his time on that one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Mac_G4_Cube

[gumby]

Oh, then you missed the time they staged an entire press event to announce...an iPod dock!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Hi-Fi

Hell, I own an Apple battery charger for AA batteries. Actually at the time it came out it was reasonably priced, plus it uses the same AC power connectors as apple computer chargers so was actually handy when traveling. But nevertheless, absurd.

[Lammy]

Stebe seemed to have a thing for cubes. The G4 Cube is a throwback to the much more famous NeXT case design, though the original black cube running "Next Step" was perhaps a little too on the nose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube

http://www.magicgatebg.com/Books/Aleister%20Crowley/Heart_of...

There's also the 30ft glass cube Apple Store that opened in Manhattan in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Fifth_Avenue

[karmakaze]

What I think it really suffers from is that the buyer isn't Apple's target audience, it's the person watching the person using an Apple product. Second is Apple (well actually the first is to serve Apple too). This skews priorities.

[skeeter2020]

The guys at Pontiac who had this power with the Aztek probably thought they had taste; who defines this?

Jobs never cared about the type of non-functional quality that we typically do in the software world; there are plenty of cases where he picked design aesthetics over performance, reliability, and everything else.

[agloeregrets]

In full fairness, the Aztek was actually a great car with really decisive styling that wasnt a hit. The same designer actually penned the Corvette C7 and Camaro as well, obvious hits. Taste is defined by society and by those who push to create a wave with their splashes in the pond. It's really a 'You know it when you see it" kind of thing. I think that many in the software world also get lost on how to make good things by getting lost in the tools and insider baseball. For every one of his "silly" omitted functional design elements...there were actually brilliant chopped concepts that made way for the future. The iMac's lack of a floppy drive and Apple I/O, the iPhone's lack of a keyboard, the Macbook Air's lack of a Disk drive. All of these are the type of thing a more feature and function-focused product would not remove but in removing them the product was freed to be a better product. Not that all of his choices were good, but generally he really hit the nail on the head. Functionally the MacBook Air in 2008 with the optional SSD is the template for the modern thin laptop today and differs very little internally from say, a Surface laptop 4.

[NathanielK]

Most modern CUVs have a similar side profile to the Aztek. One of the reasons they look less awkward is that bigger wheels are more popular. There's a few other awkward design quibbles with the Aztek, but for the most part similar cars sell like hot cakes now.

[m0llusk]

Are there really any such examples? Steve Jobs wanted excellent products and they didn't always work out. That was often because the tech wasn't quite there so either the functionality didn't quite work or the effort required to make it work resulted in a product which was just a bit too expensive. Reliability is really tricky to get right and most Apple products even now get rushed to market and then not iterated on in a big way, or at least nothing like the honing that goes into a Toyota product by contrast. There isn't really a balance of features that puts aesthetics in competition with other aspects.

[shrimpx]

When Ive bungled the laptop line with the butterfly keyboards, I feel like somebody must have said "this is shit" and hence his departure and release of better hardware since.

[tomjen3]

If Jobs had been there, I can't help but believe there wouldn't have been a notch on the iPhone and the watch would have a longer lasting battery. My Samsung watch can go 2 days in between charges, so it should be possible.

[_moof]

Hard to say. Jobs oversaw all sorts of whiffs. The circular mouse comes to mind. And his ability to turn these kinds of errors into "it's good, actually" was so legendary that it had its own name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

[passivate]

It takes years to develop stuff, and a final gatekeeping step will certainly prevent them from shipping junk, but doesn't teach people how to create something that isn't junk.

[FormerBandmate]

Apple has moved from being an incredibly innovative company under Steve Jobs to a much more corporate, mature company that relies more on incremental growth. They don’t really have any incentive to change because of their success, and this fundamental pattern happens to every company (see GE’s history after Edison). Apple simply isn’t the company it was before, and that’s a natural part of capitalism.

Other Apples are emerging all the time, and will continue to emerge

[paxys]

"Mature company that relies more on incremental growth" is exactly the stage where they get overtaken and fade into obscurity. It won't happen tomorrow, but slowly there will be new kids on the block who will make their tech look dated and uncool. It seems impossible to even think about but you'd say the same about IBM a few decades ago.

[gumby]

Yeah, too bad they don't develop new ideas like the watch or AirPods or design their own CPUs from scratch.

[smoldesu]

Yeah, real show-stoppers for a company that's quite literally the largest, most powerful corporation in modern history.

[agumonkey]

I'm sure Jobs knew about this. I'm sure he told Cook to milk the market cow wide and deep to ensure survival of Apple while maintaining a steady brand, in the event that somehow something real genuine emerges again from Apple and they're ready to fire with 200B of cash.

[smoldesu]

> Other Apples are emerging all the time

How so? Are other people creating closed software platforms where they charge 30% off the top for their developers? I agree that they've gone more corporate over the years, but it was only after the realization that they could exploit the market with their install-base. It's quite literally, step-for-step identical to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer parable that got them in so much trouble. They're taking advantage of a market without any other options, which is not something that an emerging company can do, much less at the scale Apple does it.

[echlebek]

How do you explain iTunes then?

[systemvoltage]

This is apparently not cool these days. I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great. Now it’s just identity politics, pessimism and general stagnancy as Peter Thiel puts it. I honestly kind of want to go back to 2005 - what a time to be alive.

[amelius]

> I think we’ve lost our spirit of what made SV great.

Innovation is what made SV great. Now it is just evolutionary updates at a very slow pace.

[naravara]

Don't forget "tech companies" that are basically just thinly veiled excuses to engage in regulatory arbitrage and skirt employment laws.