I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)…
So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.
Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange.
Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.
Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable.
More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.
Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).
It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.
The one that sticks with me was the demo to the engineering team of "Aqua". A small team had been developing the new "lickable" user interface that was called Aqua. Before the release of OS X with the new UI, Jobs assembled the engineers that worked on the OS that would be tasked with carrying the UI throughout with their frameworks/apps.
In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by his earlier Apple Macintosh.
The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.
Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in shock myself.
When I came back to Apple in 2000, I remember walking to visit a friend from Eazel (John Harper) who was working on CoreAnimation and seeing your office. I was totally star struck, way more than having to deal with Steve every week. I mean, you are the guy who wrote Glider!
Ha ha, and Harper is a fucking rock star. He's a quiet guy but I recall chatting with him once about music — I thought it was awesome that he was into Elliott Smith.
I heard about that meeting from someone who was also there -- supposedly Steve also said in response to the booing something to the effect that "what the hell has Apple done in the last ten years?"
> More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.
You know, this is actually a rather good thing. So many companies are just bloated with projects that they want to see through just to see them through and they make zero sense in the grand scheme of the company. If you have a single person responsible for everything that can just make the hard choices and be the bad guy it is much more healthy for the whole....assuming that person cuts the right things and makes the right choices.
The most basic of market research would tell you that in gaming, content is king. And with Google's track record of cancelling products, nobody would trust what they offered even if it was vastly technically superior.
While other platform vendors have technical stuff, some of it deep dives into their technology stack, Google's ones are mostly about Play Store, KPIs, and when technical, very superficial, where a blog post would be enough.
How can a studio thrust such company into having what it matters to launch a AAA tile, while being asked to rewrite for their platform.
Honestly, I don't know if that's a totally fair take. I purchased exactly one game on stadia and have zero regrets (particularly since I'm apparently getting a refund - but that's a bonus, really). I was definitely the target market and it was, in theory, the perfect product for me.
The only problem is I may have been the only person in the target market so that wasn't going to work financially... And even I was going to have an exceptionally low LTV at maybe one game purchase per year (or less). And if they charged a monthly subscription, I'd never do it. So, yeah, terrible business.
But Google's track record wasn't a showstopper for me on a toy. It's different for business stuff like GCP.
Stadia should either not have been released, or vastly better supported. Sundar took the middle route of saying yes to the idea, then letting the accountants run it into the ground. Worst of all worlds.
Meta is a shitshow, but I’ll give Zuck credit for at least have A vision of *something*.
Sundars vision is to keep Larry and Sergei’s money machine humming along. That’s it. That’s the goal, cover the costs of the founders private islands by letting the CFO make all the real decisions
> usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible
I worked at Amazon for a bit and remember this kind of thing in preparation for a release/conference (Re:Invent). I don't miss it at all.
Personally I am using GoodLinks: I am most of the time on mobile and it has good support for iPhone and iPad. You can add custom tag, mark link as ‘read’ when bookmarking. Simple but does what I need.
Note at the moment, but I will work on this. Thanks for feedback! P.S. It looks much better with actual audio rather than microphone, see Instagram videos on app website.
WebObjects starting at version 5 was 100% java so it could run on any system running a Java VM, including Mac OS X.
When Apple was selling Xserve then many Apple on
Une services like iTunes, .Mac (ancestor of iCloud), Apple Online Store were running on WebObjects and Xserve thus on OS X server.
No surprise there: Craig used to be the engineering manager for the WebObjects team which included EOF. In fact, if you were running one of the example app, it was going to populate a Movie database, and I forgot the movie name but all “actors” listed there included all the real names of the engineers working on WOF/EOF.
Congrats!
I have started a similar approach for the last 2 months using LoseIt as my app to count calories, and the goal to loose around 64 pounds by end of the year (going from 244 to 180 pounds).
I did join a gym, and this weekend decided to get a personal trainer for a couple months to be sure that I build some muscle mass too: my core is definitely weak, and gaining some muscle will not hurt to strengthen my body: had a few injuries (ankle/knee) where having muscles will probably avoid it.
So far on track, with almost 20 pounds lost (19.4 as of yesterday), and going to the gym 4 to 5 times a week 45 minutes to 1 hour at a time...
Time Machine server is now built-in into macOS... it used to be part of macOS server but Apple recently moved it to standard macOS. Personally I have a Mac Mini being used as a Plex Server and now as a Time Machine server too.
You can backup to any network share---Windows, Linux, wherever. Just make a sparse disk image on the share, mount it, and set it as your Time Machine destination. Whenever you mount it in the future, Time Machine will do the right thing.
I think Apple releases phenomenally great products and the industry follows in its wake, slowly saturating the market and maturing allowing Apple to shift its focus to the next under served user.
No questions about that, as a matter of fact I just bought an iPad Pro, which is positively awesome on so many levels. The iOS ecosystem is thriving, but I'm talking about the Mac ecosystem, not Apple as a whole.
So sure Mac laptops are great†, yet:
- Mac Mini not updated in years
- Mac Mini with four cores killed years ago
- Mac Pro not updated in years, after not being updated in years
- iMac Pro entry price is far north of 5k€
- iMac are stuck with 8GB, spinning rust, or fusion drives, which means no APFS. "stuck" because RAM and SSD upgrade prices are completely insane, which makes you enter iMac Pro territory.
- MacBook Air neither killed nor updated in years (seriously, that screen? I'm not asking for Retina at that price point but it's just objectively awful by every metric right now)
- Airport team has been reassigned/fired months ago.
- Airport devices are being killed (which is not a surprise given previous point) which is a shame in itself given how awesome they are.
- This means no official support for networked Time Machine, short of using macOS Server by buying one of the above desktop machines.
- Xserve died long ago, which means having a proper CI is hell††, running on either antiquated or unfit (hence overpriced and overspecced for the task) hardware.
- macOS team has been folded into a more general team, with iOS largely taking the fair share of it[0].
- This show a lot, especially compared to things that exist in both, like the Mac App Store is a joke[0], and OS updates being unreliable.
At that point, and despite Tim Cook proud announcements that they love the Mac, when taking a step back and looking at the big picture, although individual devices are nice, it sure looks like that ecosystem has growing holes and is proceeding through inertia. I'm eagerly awaiting future developments regarding the desktop/headless side of things over the coming years. As a thought experiment, that makes for interesting times to picture Apple without a Macintosh ten years down the road!
> and the industry follows in its wake, slowly saturating the market and maturing allowing Apple to shift its focus to the next under served user.
Privacy, reliability, ease of maintenance, hardware spec consistency, I can't find an alternative right now, the closest being getting a Lenovo laptop and some Android phone, and loading them up with ArchLinux and LineageOS, but that's high maintenance and still falls short on some of my use cases.
† Although I'm holding back the upgrade of my early 2013 13" rMBP because the MB I need doesn't exist (13", function keys + CPU w/ dual fans and 4 USB-C of the TouchBar one). A 2k€ machine from 2018 would basically be a downgrade (or at best even out) from my 2013 one, which is, somehow, a testament to how awesome my current machine is.
†† Leading to either you make-doing with your own hardware, or paying terrible price for cloud offerings. Seriously, Apple should allow virtualisation outside its own hardware for CI purposes.
So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.
Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange. Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.
Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable. More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.
Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).
It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.
Edit: fixing a few typos