[WillAdams]

Big change from when Steve Jobs killed the Newton and one unspoken reason was the USMC having just had a _very_ successful trial and being in the process of getting Apple approved as a DOD vendor.... (yes, I'm still salty that the only Apple products I've bought since my MessagePad were OpenStep 4.2, and two iPods for my daughter --- the MacBook I use doesn't count since work bought that --- at least Samsung and Amazon use Wacom EMR in their products, though neither is fully a replacement for my Newton....)

[tokyobreakfast]

You're forgetting Casey Fucking Ryback!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDlpPs19NU0

[Teever]

I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive.

Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.

Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.

[pokstad]

Jobs was the rare person outspoken with unconventional wisdom. Don’t assume he would agree with your popular opinions.

[gehsty]

He would have understood the potential of LLMs straight away. If he would have delivered a successful product no one knows but 100% would have understood how LLMs could become another interface to computers.

I think his pitch would have been like garage band but for making apps “now anyone can make an app” feels very Jobsian.

[awad]

There's this old gem about being able to ask Aristotle a question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzLMPm3Jgw

[HerbManic]

I suspect Jobs would have held off for a few years just to see where the road is going before making a move. In that sense, Apples current lack of real dedicated to move into the LLM space has become a happy accident. They have avoided the hype cycle and the potential blow back once the more exuberant part of the AI craze fade away.

They have pulled an accidental Jobs move.

[ChicagoBoy11]

Why are you sure it was an accident? Couldn't the people who rose up the ranks around his orbit have learned the right lessons, and this having been very intentional?

[gehsty]

I don’t think so, I think he would have thought Apple could deliver a better user experience (LLM Siri) and gone into it whole heartedly.

My perspective is that Apple doesn’t hold off to see what the market is doing. They hold off until technology can create a viable, usable product (iPhone was ahead of anything, Vision Pro less impactful but similarly advanced, iPod was smaller than any hdd based mp3 player - just some examples where they pushed the boundaries).

They 100% missed the transformer being a technology that could create a viable product, and I don’t think Steve Jobs would have missed that.

[scottyah]

He for sure would loathe their current state though. They are a perfectionist's nightmare and detrimental to many brands. He wouldn't even allow Apple^Red for his friend's charity- there's no way he would let AI slop come from Apple products.

[gehsty]

100% would hate to see the current state of Siri, and then even worse that others are doing what Apple can’t.

I agree that I don’t think he’d want slop, but I do think he would want Siri to be like ChatGPTs conversations, and he would have loved Claude Code.

[toyg]

Maybe. Or maybe he would have just sent a close associate or relative, like his big friend Ellison does.

[dijit]

MacOS doesn’t use ZFS because Ellison owns it. Don’t read too much into their “friendship”.

[toyg]

Come on. ZFS was created by Sun and opened up in 2005. Oracle took over Sun in 2010, and Jobs died in 2011. The relationship between Jobs and Ellison has nothing to do with it.

[dijit]

Literally does though, because they abandoned ZFS integration as a direct result, its actually well documented.

[peyton]

Tim gave Trump the paper weight.

Steve met once with Obama and complained about the fact Obama did not ask for the meeting personally, that it was too hard to build factories in America, and that teachers unions were kneecapping the American education system.

All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.

[macintux]

Jobs to Murdoch:

> “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”

[1986]

Yeah, we're talking about the guy who leased a new car every 6 months in order to avoid having to put a license plate on it, and then parked it in handicap spots, right? Absolute same "rules for thee, not for me" energy

[WillAdams]

This earned a story at folklore.org

https://folklore.org/Handicapped.html

[joe_mamba]

>All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.

Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me.

We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint.

Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.

[SpaceManNabs]

I rarely see tech hero worship pushback on here. I hope to see more of it.

We are all human after all.

[scottyah]

There's always plenty of pushback everywhere, all the social media apps are full of critics and hate on anyone who does anything in the world mercilessly. I like coming here to see people admire other people who worked hard to create something that made society better, and not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.

[joe_mamba]

>create something that made society better,

How is society better off thanks to Steve Jobs? Are we better off now with everyone addicted to their phones for dopamine hits?

>not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.

Using slave labor, creating mass addiction and environmental destruction via planned obsolescence, is a "little thing" to you?

[Teever]

'Tech hero worship' is a gross misrepresentation of my comment and I'm not sure how you could draw that conclusion from a comment that used words like "asshole" and "vindictive" to describe Steve Jobs.

[quesera]

You are very wrong about Steve Jobs.

It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.

And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!

But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.

He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.

[bigyabai]

This comment confuses me. You call Jobs idiosyncratic, but then try to backwards-justify his political stance with stereotypes about anti-establishment politics and Californian ideals. What makes you convinced that he'd resist neoreactionary politicking any better than Cook?

Jobs was fickle, I agree with you there. I just don't think that a fickle iconoclast would last more than two weeks fighting against Trump, especially if he was threatened with an FTC antitrust probe. The only difference with Cook is that he's not as coy, and recognized that there was no way for a monopoly like Apple to fight the fed and win. Trump can disembowel Apple's profit margins, and neither Cook nor Jobs nor Jesus of Nazarath could convince the shareholders that morality is worth more than $AAPL. 2016 Jobs would be retired by the board of directors before he even threatened to make a conscientious objection, reality distortion be damned.

I have no love for the sitting administration, but it is a fantasy to pretend that a FAANG business could resist federal coercion. Just because Apple enjoys a moral halo-effect does not mean they're better positioned than Microsoft or AWS to do the "right" thing. Apple's inability to prosecute NSO Group is a recurring example of how heavily the US can muzzle them.

[quesera]

I'm saying that personality-wise, Jobs would absolutely not have any tolerance whatsoever for Trumpism and its associated bozos.

Of course Apple would observe US law.

But the comment I responded to was calling Jobs a monster and likely pedophile. This is unhinged and ugly.

[Teever]

All those things may be true but at the end of the day guys like Jobs and Trump are like oil and water personality wise.

Trump would have invariably said some stupid shit about Jobs publicly or to his face privately and Jobs would have never forgot it and would have obsessed with hurting Trump over it.

For better or worse that's just the kind of guy he was.

[jjtheblunt]

Did you know him or ever speak with him in person?

I have while working in Apple in a critical engineering group, and the negatives you keep citing seem to have died off in his 20s, at which time they indelibly (deservedly) tainted public perception. the post NeXT 'return' seemed very very different than what you describe, from in person experience.

[WillAdams]

I really wish that there was an equivalent to the Mac's

https://folklore.org/0-index.html

for the NeXT stage of things --- Luciano Dadda's recent book _Inside NeXT_ is nice for covering at least the hardware, but just not quite the same w/o the personal anecdotes

[bigyabai]

If we have to rely on the canny benevolence of a random CEO to prevent the world from going to shit, then we truly deserve to live in the shit world. Steve made businesses larger-than-life, and I expect his behavior played no small part in conditioning tech enthusiasts to respond to Trump and Elon's hyperbolic, baseless rhetoric.

[Hamuko]

Apple has grown quite dramatically in value since his death. Not sure if he would have the leeway to oppose Trump as an officer of a publicly traded company when he's shown to be quite vindictive against companies he doesn't like.

[surgical_fire]

He was a billionaire. It's foolish to believe he was any less of a sociopath than other billionaires.

Most likely he woult thrive as a contemporary oligarch.

[astrange]

He was a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar, not because of Apple. In a strange sense it was an accident.

[runjake]

Three things come to mind, up front:

- Steve Jobs wouldn't have personally donated $1 million to the Trump campaign.

- Steve Jobs probably wouldn't have presented a gold bar to Trump.

- Steve Jobs would have been better at manipulating (reality distortion field) Trump.

[frumplestlatz]

Do you have a source for that USMC trial and that “unspoken reason”?

I don’t remember any such thing at the time, and I can’t find any source for the claim.

[WillAdams]

If memory serves, the trial was covered in a sidebar in _Pen Computing Magazine_ as well as _The Marine Corps Times_, and the whole thing was discussed on comp.sys.newton a bit, with SJ not wanting to be a defense contractor being put forward as one reason among many (not profitable, not working well, bad publicity ("Eat up Martha"), pet project of Sculley, &c.)