[cogman10]

If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience. You simply don't find that quality in a lot of tech CEOs. Jobs was willing to burn a load of developer time doing performance tuning. Most other CEOs then and today had an attitude that was more along the line of "We'll just buy more/faster hardware. It's a waste of time to make things faster".

A lot of the reason people are hating on windows now-a-days is because "fast enough" has become the name of the game for UX. Unacceptable lags in working with a computer have just become accepted.

[cosmic_cheese]

He was like that not just for performance, but user experience across the board. “Good enough”, aka mediocrity, didn’t cut it and he didn’t care if he had to spend extra resources or even burn bridges to raise the bar to where he thought it needed to be.

It’s a stark contrast to current industry norms, where anything that won’t keep the engagement and MRR bar charts on a steep incline gets vetoed. It’s more likely that memory consumption will be tripled and UI will be modified to harass users into compliance with whatever hare-brained thing product managers are pushing than it is for the software to become more efficient, pleasant, and useful.

[Esophagus4]

Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering.

Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions.

He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

[skeeter2020]

>> He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical…

What history have you been reading? Sure we can find examples of each of these by I can also give you counter examples - big ones - off the top of my head. 1. Did his absolute best (but failed) to cut the Apple II product line, even though it was the only money maker for the company, to support several losing prduct lines. 2. I agree - though he made as many bad big bets as good ones: no expandability of the original Mac, the iMac, PowerPC, are a few examples 3. was deeply technical? compared to his peer tech leaders this was just not true. He was a great product manager, but not particularly technical. I'd suggest you look at his entire corpus before you lionize a spectacular PM & designer, and incredibly flawed human being.

>> I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)

So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?

[milch]

> So all you want is your CEO to make repeated big bets and be consistently right?

Isn't that what they get the big pay package for?

[mixmastamyk]

He got better as he got older, as most of us do.

[throw5t43e4r]

There was a story in one of his biographies where he spent a lot of time making sure the machines that made one of his products actually looked good too!

One of his biographers gave an example of how some cabinet makers only use good wood on the front and side, but Jobs would want good quality wood on the back as well.

[pwthornton]

There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster? And then he told them to fix it and make Mac laptops sleep/wake just as well as iOS.

Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.

[chihuahua]

How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.

[array_key_first]

Yes, provided it's not dead because it didn't actually sleep or you have to boot it up because it decided to shut itself down at some point (windows update?)

Sleep on windows is a hot mess, I've never had an experience I had any amount of confidence in.

[hbogert]

It's become unreliable under linux as well. It used to work fine. The whole UEFI including the new si0x or whatever that word is again destroyed a perfectly fine experience all because it seemed like a good idea by microsoft.

[seec]

They just need to feel superior about their Macs. My experience is that Windows wake just as fast if not faster.

But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.

Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).

[Maxatar]

This happened about 15 years ago back in the Windows 8 era.

[flax]

Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.

[ValentineC]

> There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster?

As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.

If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.

[giancarlostoro]

I think .NET is one of the few projects Microsoft maintains that I admire that feel like they care a lot about quality, you can tell the people working on it are focused on performance and making sure its really well rounded. I would argue that .NET is Microsoft's greatest achievement / work of all time.

[SoftTalker]

.NET has viable competitors. Windows, due to its monopoly, dominates the PC world no matter how bad it is.

[giancarlostoro]

Yeah but it is arguably not well done as described, it has strengths but they have been on a downward spiral of marketing driven development.

[malux85]

Because of legacy and momentum, not merit.

[SoftTalker]

Yes, due to its monopoly. Edited my comment.

[skeeter2020]

MS has had very little to do with the execution, but it has their logo on it, so I think you can count most Microsoft hardware (pre-Copilot button) as quality.

[dijit]

Agreed.

SQL Server is of equally high quality.

We just have postgres in the open source world (which is truly exceptional) so our expectations are higher.

I am the first to hate on Microsoft, their OS is a dumpster fire that I feel is forced on me. But sometimes they knock it out of the park.

[giancarlostoro]

Thats a solid callout. Not everyones favorite but honestly I never have insane issues when I work with it, nothing out of the ordinary anyway.

[JoeAltmaier]

Hm. The one-button mouse? That was part of the design impact - for user experience, it wasn't much of a win.

Likewise the faulty power cords and noisy power supplies (no choke on the power cable, because it looks ugly!)

How about the soldered-down components and device cases with special screws to keep users from ever opening them? That was not 'for the user', that was more 'walled garden'.

In fact, I'm not sure where this myth of 'quality and user experience' came from. It was all about selling, baby.

[pear01]

These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative.

And then ending with the sanctimonious line about selling. Like you eat off of selling nothing. Go screw in whatever you like just understand your critique comes across as little more than entitled griping against a majority. You're the people he fought against the entire time, people obsessed with their own personal agenda/minutia with no understanding of the overarching mission or who the customer is. This video comes to mind https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o

Design without an audience in mind is not design. Don't dismiss the work simply because you're not the audience.

[JoeAltmaier]

I get it. Lots of people fall for design over usefulness. Not very technical, so a mac is enough.

but lets never fool ourselves into thinking they are more useful, more efficient or flexible. That's tiresome, and it's repeated endlessly as well.

People buy all sorts of things that are not very good. Audience is an excuse; salesmanship is not about selling what the customer needs.

I'm no newb, just ranting about macs. I've been around, even before the mac existed. Written code for them, for nearly every platform around. I'm not sanctimonious; I'm educated. The Mac OS was a pile of bad code. The current Mac OS, dev tools, documentation, deployment environment is among the worst.

Not entitled; just very tired of fighting it.

[seec]

I started on Macs and I tend to agree.

They have some good things on the hardware side but you have pay a lot for it, and it's not just about the money.

[thomassmith65]

Absolutely, and Cook-era Macs remind me of that frequently.

For example, my last Mac was a Cook-era machine with two third-party displays. Its normal boot process is a visual atrocity: the screens repeatedly blank off and on, the progress bar jumps arbitrarily to new positions and dimensions on the screen, the log-in window animation has drawing quirks...

...when I watch this orgy of complacent design, I often dream of what would happen had the Apple DRI presented it to Steve Jobs.

[seec]

And sometimes it randomly scramble the output for no good reason.

I think their HMDI implementation completly suck as well, I have had to get an USB-C adaptor to make it work properly.

Macs with external displays don't make a lot of sense, it basically against their initial idea about computer (standalone, with everything needed built-in). They don't even have chips that get very hot, it makes zero sense.

[array_key_first]

The main problem with the "a little lag is fine" mentality is that, in most organizations, it's becomes cancerous. It spread and infiltrates every team, every corner.

When you have hundreds of teams and they're all doing suboptimal things for shits and giggles, that extra 500 milliseconds is now a minute.

And, the real kicker is that usually the slow stuff isn't even simpler or better. It's just naive and poorly thought out. Usually it's super simple stuff like use a hash map instead of iterating through an array a bajillion times over. Or, do this network request asynchronously instead of just blocking for no reason. Or, in the case of some suspicious Microsoft GitHub code, just use sleep() instead of spin locking.

These things aren't harder, they're just different. So it's not even laziness really, it's something else. Apathy, maybe?

[cogman10]

> So it's not even laziness really, it's something else. Apathy, maybe?

My hypothesis is that it comes from a bygone of tech.

Consider the lyrics from Weird Al's "It's all about the pentiums" (1999)

    My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
    But it was obsolete before I opened the box
    You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
    Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

    Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
    If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

From around the 80s all the way up until ~2010, one of the most reliable ways to make software run faster was to wait a year. You could get 50 or even 100% faster CPUs in a matter of a year or two.

Tech CEOs weren't blind to this fact. I have a lot of old software dev coworkers that lamented that era because they never had to think about performance problems. It was always "this won't be an issue if we wait a year".

I think that era has mostly built in an industry wide sloppiness and attitude.

[kalleboo]

Also for a platform vendor, it also infects everyone who develops for their platform.

Writing iOS apps, I've been in meetings where the discussion has basically made Apple's equivalent a benchmark. You can't make your feature slower/worse/buggier than theirs, but making it faster/better is optional.

[apple4ever]

And you can tell the difference with how long he has been gone. MacOS is terrible now. So many weird bugs and performance issues. Not that Jobs was perfect, of course. But he cared in a way others didn't, like you said. Cook clearly doesn't.

[ajdoingnothing]

Agreed. The "Apple Vision Pro" would have (rightfully so) never been released under Steve Jobs.

[abanana]

> one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs...

No. Absolutely, unequivocally, no. You're talking about the difference between then and now in the way software was/is built, not the difference between Jobs and everyone else! The deification of Jobs is bad enough without the constant historical revisionism.

Back then, generally tuning/maximising performance and quality was a top priority for the majority of people in the industry, software engineers and senior staff alike. "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then. Many who were there in those days now bemoan the way their modern equivalents no longer prioritise efficiency, which leads to the awful slow UX you're referring to that really shouldn't be seen as acceptable, but somehow is.

Even if we see Jobs as being at the extreme - more focused on these things than most top-level execs of his day - then to treat the entire rest of the industry together as though they were at the opposite extreme (i.e. at today's level of not caring) and call him "revolutionary" in his day as a response to this, would very much be fallacious.

[cogman10]

> "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then.

Not what I said. And I think you are the one that's doing historical revisionism now.

Even in this email from 1983, it starts off with

> since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II

From the 80s through the 00s (which I was alive through and very aware of), computer hardware was frequently doubling in performance. The common wisdom then was to make things fast enough. Anything more was a waste of time because in a year or two hardware would be twice as fast.

The wastefulness of today came directly from that past wisdom. I can guarantee you that ever since I've been conscious around discussions about software there's been people that have bemoaned how sloppy and wasteful software has become. People complained about how bloated Windows XP was vs 98.

Ruby, python, perl, java. All these bloated and slow programming languages got their starts in the 80s and 90s. Exactly because of the wisdom that "it's slow today but hardware tomorrow will make it fast". Heck, even C and lisp are manifestations of this. Consider that people weren't writing all software in assembly during the time period in question. There were clear performance benefits of doing so as compiler at the time were particularly bad.

I've worked with a lot of older devs and they all hold the attitude that performance optimization is a complete waste of time. They've been the hardest ones to break of that notion. Younger devs tend to more intuitively know that performance optimization are important. That's because over the last decade, hardware performance improvements have stagnated.

So yes, absolutely yes. In the past if you could make writing software more ergonomic by sacrificing some memory or performance, that's a tradeoff most of the industry would gladly take. They wrote for today's hardware and sometimes tomorrow's.

[seba_dos1]

> The common wisdom then was to make things fast enough. Anything more was a waste of time because in a year or two hardware would be twice as fast.

...and people would be using hardware spanning several generations that actually considerably differed in performance, as nobody but the nerds was buying a new PC every year.

[embedding-shape]

But does it matter? Eventually a bean counter will be in charge of the legacy you built up with this painstakingly acquired good UX and high quality, and take less than a decade to make most of what you spent your life fighting, the new reality.

[wiseowise]

Mac is still more than fast enough and good enough than Windows, so it matters.

[santoshalper]

Enjoy your tacky, Vista-esque, liquid glass.

[leidenfrost]

It's tacky, but not the end of the world.

It remins me of some gnome themes from 2005-2009.

I'd choose that a thousand times over an ad filled start menu

[array_key_first]

Fair, but you could have 2025 gnome, or even KDE!

My main problem with liquid glass is it's slow, and the trade off is... a worse user experience in literally every conceivable way? Wow, okay, not a very good deal.

Granted, most downgrades in things like legibility or density are very slight. But they're still downgrades. Downgrading is only worth it if you get something out of it.

[ForceBru]

You can simply not upgrade to Tahoe and iOS 26. I didn't upgrade and am simply waiting for the next version which will hopefully ditch liquid glass. If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.

[andrekandre]

  > If no such version becomes available, I'll still stick to the last non-liquid-glass OS and upgrade only if/when it becomes unusable.

i felt the same with the ui/ux changes with big sur, and funny enough, when trying the older os after while i realized i was (mostly) fine with look of the new os... the bugs on the other hand... they just seem to pile up with each release...

[wiseowise]

It is unironically great, especially tinted variant. A welcoming change.

[bataowt]

Yeah, you nerd. ENJOY IT.

[CursedSilicon]

That's awfully subjective

[wiseowise]

Everything is subjective. That doesn't mean you can't compare Dodge Neon of operating systems to Lamborghini Huracán.

[EGG_CREAM]

Just because it goes away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.