So Arrington was a lawyer, and a hot shot one at that. That may help explain why he rubs some people the wrong way - speaking as an LLB myself.
I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).
Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better. That third point reminds me of what John Cleese said of Graham Chapman:
[he] contributed comparatively little in the way of direct writing. Rather, the Pythons have said that his biggest contribution in the writing room was an intuition as to what was funny. John Cleese said in an interview that one of Chapman's great attributes was "his weird takes on things." In writing sessions Chapman "would lob in an idea or a line from out in left field into the engine room, but he could never be the engine", Cleese said. In the Dead Parrot sketch, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was initially trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman would ask "How can we make this madder?", and then came up with the idea that returning a dead Norwegian Blue parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than a toaster.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Chapman#Monty_Python
Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better
Doing this is at least an order of magnitude harder than any purely technical or directly productive work. People are fickle, ever-changing, unpredictable, complex, etc. Brilliant people are even more difficult to manage. The art of surrounding yourself with great people and getting them all working together is underrated.
Even if Steve Jobs contributed nothing to the ideas that were developed (which is unlikely, based on what I've heard), he still deserves the praise for being the human gravitational well that pulled all those people to work together and create awesome products.
And do it consistently - a lot of CEOs talk about this stuff.
But then when it comes near the end of the financial quarter or a big customer asks for something, or there is a rumor of a competitor the plan all changes.
The iPod is a great example of how Jobs was unique.
Sure, MP3 players existed before. The iPod had a very nice scrolling wheel. But it also had iTunes, meaning all the major labels had agreed to sell music online through that channel. Do you remember those times? Napster was scary for music labels. I'm sure it took serious negotiations to make the iPod/iTunes platform happen.
Geeks tend to make the usual mistake of breaking a platform into small pieces and argue that individually, each piece already existed. The scrollwheel? A program to synchronize your player? Etc...
That's missing the forest for the tree. Someone (Jobs) saw all these disparate pieces and had the vision to build a full, coherent, intuitive platform that solved a real problem and made the device a winner.
Until you understand the difference between a laundry list of features and a solution, you'll keep writing useless code :-)
The Apple ][ fundamentally changed the personal computer.
The Macintosh fundamentally changed operating systems.
Pixar fundamentally changed the film industry.
The iTunes music store fundamentally changed the way music is distributed.
The iPod fundamentally changed the way music is listened to.
The iPhone fundamentally changed the mobile phone industry.
Sure, there were predecessors and prototypes. Sure, he had a ton of help. I count more than 3 decades of contribution so far. How many times does he have to be at the helm of a fundamental change before we stop having this discussion?
Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).
Link? IIRC the term "iPod" was intended to be used for another product that may have preceeded Jobs' return but I this is the first I've heard about a portable mp3 player being developed at Apple before Jobs came back.
A company called "Casady & Greene" actually created iTunes. It was called SoundJam MP and it was pretty cool. Then Apple bought it and turned it into iTunes. (Just SoundJam and the employees who worked on it, not C&G as a whole. C&G declared bankruptcy, and then Apple hired some of their remaining employees if not all.)
Apple not only has great technical execution, they have great design execution. There are many industries with lots of excellent companies capable of this combination (automobiles, musical instruments, film, firearms, fashion) but in software this combination is rare as hen's teeth. Thus Apple's dominance in certain markets and customer devotion.
I must admit that this article rather made me realize that most of what Apple did is just to create some fancy looking PCs. The iPhone was revolutionary indeed, but overall the achievements seem overblown.
To an extent, making `fancy looking PCs' was Apple's initial strategy upon the return of Jobs, to try to obscure the creaky old OS 8 / OS 9 which they were stuck with until the very time-consuming task of turning the Next OS into a version of OS X ready for the big time was complete. Quickly make a bold, attention-grabbing statement with the iMac casing, and milk that as long as possible until the real big attraction (OS X) is ready.
The % of people who use macs because they're "fancy looking" is pretty small. Most use them for a variety of other reasons - build quality, unixy, os+hardware from single vendor=less issues etc As well as all the cool gadgety stuff multitouch/mag power connector, mag lids etc
That's like saying a house is just a house, a car is just a car, or a job is just a job. When the details are left out, there is no comparative analysis and it pretty much fails at making a point.
I don't think it is. There are only a few categories for PCs (server, desktop, notebook, netbook), stuff like that. I think if you say Apple most people have an idea in which categories to compare. It's not like comparing a Hummer to a Porsche. More like comparing a VW to a Toyota or something.
You make it sound as if Apple PCs are beyond comparison, a class of their own. Which they aren't. I am not saying they are not good (another discussion), but I don't see the supposed revolutionary part.
The way Apple has set themselves up with OS X actually does make themselves a class of their own. The decisions beyond just looks (e.g. will the software I need run? Do I prefer OS X to Windows? Do I need antivirus software?) make it so that comparing an Apple to anything else really is like comparing a Hummer to a Porsche.
Yeah but so is Linux or whatever. They are not significantly better than other PCs, just different in matters of taste. Come on, they even use the same hardware as other PCs (CPU, GPU hard drive...).
The amount of time people have to waste on PCs waiting for the OS, doing anti virus stuff, staring at blue screens of death, rebooting because it's got confused, etc etc
But this isn't an OS war thread :) Suffice to say, "It's still just a PC" is completely missing the point. A top class restaurant still 'just' serves food, but you can't really compare it to Macdonalds.
And to many people, Apple are in a class of their own. If I didn't currently use a macbook, I'm not really sure what else I would use. Some of the Asus laptops look ok enough (At least like cheap copies of Apple design), and maybe Ubuntu is getting mature enough on the desktop to be useful, but there's not an obvious alternative.
Regarding "I don't see the revolutionary part", you don't have to be revolutionary to be better than everything else. People use Apple stuff because it works and is well thought out. It stays out of their way and lets them achieve what they want to. It's designed to make everything as seamless and useful for the user as is possible.
Some people just want a car to get them from A to B. So they buy a standard boring crappy Ford or something that looks like a dog. As long as it gets them from A to B, they're ok. Others actually love the 'driving' bit, and enjoy it, as well as having a thing of beauty. So they buy a better car. Same is true with computers (And most other things).
It's so funny that all Apple fanboyism is automatically voted up. Incidentally I currently use a MacBook that is less than a year old. In recent weeks I frequently had to hard reset it because it froze to an eternal spinning sand clock. Earlier this week I noticed with Disk Utility that there were errors on the disk. I tried to repair them, had to boot from DVD for that. The repair failed. After that OS X didn't boot anymore. I ended up reinstalling OS X (which was only possible after overwriting the disk with zeros, before that the installation failed), losing some data despite of Time Machine. (Incidentally the hard disk seems to be fine, so it wasn't a hardware failure - it was the OS).
Just saying, the "easier to use, no rebooting, no blue screens of deaths" are a complete marketing fabrication. Except that on OS X the death screens are not blue.
Edit: as for your edited part - I am not saying Apple PCs are bad (holding my opinion back), but the article made it out as if they are revolutionary. That is what I am arguing against.
If it's less than a year old why even bother doing all that work? The disk is bad. The wipe only masks the inevitable. Formatting maps out bad sectors, but these tend to grow as time goes by.
Windows/dos user for 10 years
Linux user for the next 10 years
OSX for last 3 years or so
From my experience, the last 3 years has been my most productive, and I've spent far far far far less time messing about doing unuseful things (Trying to get wifi working, trying to work around OS issues etc).
Don't just dismiss everything as 'fanboyism', I used to do that 10 years ago. I thought Mac users were rich pretentious egotistical people who didn't actually know anything about computers.
Linux, Windows and the whole PC world has also progressed a lot in the last 13 years, it seems a bit unfair to compare the state of now with the state 10 years ago. I am not saying Mac lovers don't love their PCs for a good reason - they have their personal reasons, so be it. All I said is that basically Macs also are just PCs.
Also, it is not really fair to compare Apple to all the other PC vendors out there. Some of them probably produce crappy machines, but others don't.
I was listing the OS's I use mainly. I still use windows every once in a while (When I really have to), and obviously use Linux on servers, and occasionally desktops.
One of the key things that puts Apple in a different class though is that they create the hardware AND the software. That's a big bonus and gets rid of a ton of potential hickups.
I was not saying they are in a class of their own. I was saying that you are grouping "PCs" into a category and saying that is all that it is noteworthy. Well, sure, that huge mansion is JUST a house, but you know so is that one bedroom apartment. Now you could say, "Windows PCs are great because they are cheap and powerful. Macs are great because they are stable and thoughtful."
I didn't even imply that Macs are better. Although I do think that Apple controlling the hardware and software has allowed them a lot more time to focus on the software than the bureaucracy Microsoft has to deal with to help software publishers and PC manufacturers. There is a lot of stuff I can only do on Windows and that in itself is important to note.
Conduct a controlled experiment. Spilt the world into two parallel universes. In one, give your Mum or technologically illiterate sister a Macbook, and in the other, a Dell Inspiron. You will most likely find a more positive experience with the MacBook. Computers aren't just for socially autistic engineering nerds.
This probably doesn't need repeating, but there are a lot of hackers out there who appreciate a UNIX OS that works out of the box, runs commercial software not available on Linux, and can easily sync with your iPhone.
As a matter of fact a Mac is the worst of the three options I could imagine to give to my mum. I keep saying to Mac fans, first try to explain it to your mum. Have you tried it?
It's all the small unintuitive things, like "x" doesn't close the application. There are no hints for accomplishing basic tasks like renaming a file or moving a file (Finder doesn't do cut, only copy). And so on... I consider myself experienced with computers, but on OS X I have to google how to accomplish the most basic tasks.
Really, please try it. You know, explain it to the kind of person who has to write down every step on paper. (Not that my mum is that bad - actually I have her on Ubuntu and she is doing fine). So that person has to write down "don't close the application with x, use cmd+q" - it's ridiculous.
Gestures look great in presentations - but how do you learn them? There are no hints in OS X as to what to use (OK, I can remember pinching and scrolling - but I don't resize pictures much, so guess what, it is not THAT helpful after all).
It's fine if people love their OS X (for whatever reason), but the claim that OS X is simpler is definitely not true.
My mum is dead now, but she happily owned a succession of iMacs for about ten years prior to that. My elderly father does just fine with the iMac too, though I actually had to turn off the right click to keep him from getting confused.
By the way, the "unintuitive" things you mention aren't unintuitive, just different from Windows. It's no less "unintuitive" than whether or not you set your parking brake with a pedal or a hand lever (so better not get your mum a Toyota if she has a Ford).
By the way, OS X is good enough at multitasking and memory allocation you don't have to actually quit your applications. It's sufficient to just close the window. That way it starts up faster when you want to use it again.
Maybe it only works for some people - fair enough. It doesn't work for me. I had to google for renaming a file. On other OS I just have to remember one rule: try the right mouse button. Instant expert.
As for not closing apps, I find that hard to believe. Maybe if you only ever use 3 apps it is OK. Otherwise, why even have a mechanism for starting and stopping apps? Could just start them all upon booting. (Actually this will probably be the future, but not yet).
Also it is very confusing if you have closed all windows of an app, but not the app itself. Because then if you click the app icon, nothing happens (it is already started, after all).
There's just as much arbitrary difference you have to look up if you're used to a Mac and using Windows. Why the hell does "Display" (which you think would change monitor settings) control your desktop background image (and why is it called a "wallpaper"?) What's the GUI to figure out your IP address? (wait, there is none...)
If you close all the windows of an app, clicking the app icon in the Dock usually opens a new window. It does for Safari at least. Anyway, the main difference is that Windows doesn't consistently differentiate between windows and applications, and Mac does. On the Mac side, a window is just something that's opened up by an application as an interface, whereas on Windows, the window is the application, which is why if you need to open more than one browser window you have multiple instances of Microsoft Internet Explorer running, but it's really okay because secretly they're all running off the same DLL's. Or something like that.
A running app takes up a certain amount of memory it needs for performing basic startup tasks and loading menus/bundles. After that, each document takes a tiny amount of extra memory. For example, Safari with no windows takes about 25megs of memory. This shoots up to about 100megs on opening one window after which it only takes about 10megs of memory per tab (this depends on the size of pages you're loading, of course).
> It's all the small unintuitive things, like "x" doesn't close the application.
That's because many OS X applications are document-based apps. All windows are either documents, or are meant for directly manipulating one single document. The 'X' is supposed to close the document, not the application. Applications in which the document-based approach does not work (Songbird, for example) will automatically quit when you close the last window. This is perfectly intuitive behavior for people who have been using Macs for a long time. Just because Windows does it differently (and Linux copies it blindly) does not mean it's the One True Way. In fact, I'd kill to get document-based apps in Linux and Windows.
> There are no hints for accomplishing basic tasks like renaming a file or moving a file. (Finder doesn't do cut, only copy)
You have a point here. I'd give anything to get 'Cut' in the Finder. But, then again, Finder is the second worst piece of software in OS X (the worst being iTunes).
NeXT could have ended in the perfect Linux distro, open sourced, leading the Linux kernel development, making the distros environment even richer (Mac Linux for mac users, Ubuntu-Debian & similars for those who don't buy Apple hardware, Chrome OS for netbookers; and minoritary distros for the ones who tweak their own flavor.)
The world would be a better place.
The hardware? Some has been good. Some really advanced to their time. Some G4Cube-ish.
NeXTSTEP wasn't based off the Linux kernel, and I think even if it had been GPL'd, it probably wouldn't have ended up that the Linux port was the preferred way to run it. Consider that OPENSTEP/Mach was contemporaneous with Red Hat Linux 4 and kernel 2.0. Everybody in the market for a desktop Linux distribution at the time would have jumped ship. If anything, the Mach 2.5 microkernel would have been stripped out in favor of a pure FreeBSD system, which would probably have resulted in Linux having the same also-ran status that the BSDs have now.
One of the biggest problems with NEXTSTEP that was addressed in the transition to OS X was the replacement of Display Postscript. The license and practice around that was horrible. I don't think the money was there to do that work without going to Apple.
I love Steve Jobs, but I think this article is disingenuous on a couple of counts. One, these disruptive industries that Jobs "created" were coming anyway. He's riding the wave, not creating it. Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).
Steve's talent (IMHO) is to get the best out of creative people, to charm people with his reality distortion field, and to tweak things slightly to make them much better. That third point reminds me of what John Cleese said of Graham Chapman:
[he] contributed comparatively little in the way of direct writing. Rather, the Pythons have said that his biggest contribution in the writing room was an intuition as to what was funny. John Cleese said in an interview that one of Chapman's great attributes was "his weird takes on things." In writing sessions Chapman "would lob in an idea or a line from out in left field into the engine room, but he could never be the engine", Cleese said. In the Dead Parrot sketch, written mostly by Cleese, the frustrated customer was initially trying to return a faulty toaster to a shop. Chapman would ask "How can we make this madder?", and then came up with the idea that returning a dead Norwegian Blue parrot to a pet shop might make a more interesting subject than a toaster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Chapman#Monty_Python