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.
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.
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!)
>> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." — George Bernard Shaw
It also didn't always work. At no point did the MacBook boot nearly as instantly as an iPad. That said, Jobs' obsession with UX was a powerful driving force and your point stands.
That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people.
You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc.
IIRC, if you hit a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.0 or higher, the project is considered 'high value' and has a good shot at getting executed.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a bus driver who would always pull away from the stop right on schedule even if a regular rider was running up. His calculation was the 30 seconds spent waiting for one rider was an aggregate of many minutes lost by the riders who were on time for their stops. What looked cruel to one was a kindness to many.
A bus can easily carry 50 passengers. 30 seconds times that many is 25 minutes. That's a lot of aggregate time wasted indeed.
Also assuming this 30 seconds delay is not compensated later, it can influence significantly more people than the bus capacity. And if someone misses a connection because of it that's even more time wasted.
Economic BCAs are typically handled by large eng firms like Arup, Jacobs, and WSP. However, the tricky task of modeling time savings (given that transport systems are complex) is often subcontracted to more specialized firms such as Steer.
Deloitte, KPMG, etc are usually more involved in writing the financial case (how to fund the project).
I like this thinking about other people's time as opportunity cost. I do that a lot and always encourage others to keep it in mind, too.
An example: a few years ago, there was a recurring unnecessary traffic congestion on my commute because of a malfunctioning traffic light. On the third day, I did some numbers while waiting and came to the conclusion that over hundreds of people, this was quickly adding up to months of lifetime wasted in total.
I then called the responsible municipality right on the spot to notify them there's a problem. They thanked me and had it fixed the next day.
Hertzfeld dismisses the idea, but I think it’s something more devs should take to heart.
Could someone build a tea timer app in React and save some time? How much impact to humanity does the GBs of RAM and untold CPU cycles the app now require that could be put to use elsewhere, or causes systems to be landfilled due to inefficiency?
I had a phone with GBs if RAM and a multicore processor that could barely run a single current app. I can buy a new phone, but what about the billions of people that don’t have that option?
Absolutely. There’s very little mass-market software that has any reasonable justification for being unusable on any machine that’s roughly Core 2 Duo era or newer. It’s perfectly possible to work within those constraints and not even really that difficult, it just requires a modicum of care and understanding of what’s happening under the hood.
Pretty sure Steve Jobs was known for yelling at, belittling and bullying people, throwing tantrums and making threats/ultimatums.
Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wall in a fit of anger.
I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for.
But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women.
I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best.
Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their life makes them impossible pricks in others.
Extreme excellence in one facet of life is what I admire people like that for.
I think you're setting up a false choice, but maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree then, because I absolutely, 100% will not be nor work with assholes to accomplish something. The tech world is FULL of genuine nice people who has acomplished remarkable things, and while I do respect people like jobs for what he accomplished, I do not let them skate for the mean or hurtful things they have done.
There are a lot of stories about Jobs acting in completely unhinged and highly toxic ways. I agree that the particular situation you’re describing is a good though.
> "If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience."
You're talking about specific user experiences based on Jobs's dogmas. There's also absolutely nothing revolutionary about quality and user experience for that existed long before Steve Jobs "invented" it. ;)
> "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."
Apple is good enough married to a closed-off eco system. Almost like 16-bit home computers back in the day, but worse. The off-the-rack experience, just with modern enshittification.
PCs can be good enough, too. But here I have the option for something made-to-wear or even bespoke. That includes the many-flavored Windows; fast enough UX is an almost negligible part of the equation.
My sisters iPad just bricked itself during an update, and nothing I've tried has been able to revive it. And it's an unrepairable disposable piece of tech, so it's going into a landfill.
I like this story about Jobs because it also points out what a bullshitter he appears to have been.
These engineers aren't ignorant—I'm sure they saw the disconnect between the number of accumulated seconds saved and actual human lives somehow being saved. Somehow Jobs thought he could pull one over on them though with this "logic", ha ha.
Saying 'it saves life' might sound less dramatic. Using a corporate windows machine certianly feels like self harming, and if I was at a low ebb, it could potentially be fatal.
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.
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.
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!)
>> 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?
He got better as he got older, as most of us do.
Wow, did he shoot your dog or something?
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.
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.
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.
.NET has viable competitors. Windows, due to its monopoly, dominates the PC world no matter how bad it is.
Because of legacy and momentum, not merit.
Yes, due to its monopoly. Edited my comment.
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.
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.
Agreed. The "Apple Vision Pro" would have (rightfully so) never been released under Steve Jobs.
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.
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.
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.
Just because it goes away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.
Mac is still more than fast enough and good enough than Windows, so it matters.
That's awfully subjective
Enjoy your tacky, Vista-esque, liquid glass.
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
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.
Yeah, you nerd. ENJOY IT.
In the same vein many years later:
--
After the original iPad was released, Steve Jobs held a meeting with the MacBook engineering team and demonstrated the difference in wake speed.
He woke up a current MacBook (with an Intel chip), which took a few seconds.
He then instantly woke up the iPad (with an Apple A-series chip) by pressing the home/power button on and off rapidly.
Jobs told the team, "I want you to make this" (pointing to the MacBook) "like this" (pointing to the iPad), and then walked out of the room.
---
This no longer exists at Apple.
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." — George Bernard Shaw
I'm confused, doesn't it literally exist now (post-Jobs) that we have Apple silicon on the Mac?
They mean «this kind of demand/leadership» no longer exists. Not the particular feature of the wake up time.
"this" meaning that level of care, not the wake-up speed
It also didn't always work. At no point did the MacBook boot nearly as instantly as an iPad. That said, Jobs' obsession with UX was a powerful driving force and your point stands.
Wake from sleep, not boot. I have a MacBook sitting in front of me and I just tested it: It wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.
Was that a hardware or a software improvement?
My Dell laptop running Ubuntu wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.
It does now with M series chips. iirc Apple made a point of demoing the quick wake in the announcement too.
That's actually the standard model for evaluating transport projects: aggregating small time savings across millions of people.
You basically take those millions of saved hours and multiply them by a government-standard 'value of time' (roughly £15/hr in the UK). That usually makes up the bulk of the benefits, though they also price in things like safety (a prevented death is worth ~£2m), carbon, noise, etc.
IIRC, if you hit a Benefit-Cost Ratio of 2.0 or higher, the project is considered 'high value' and has a good shot at getting executed.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a bus driver who would always pull away from the stop right on schedule even if a regular rider was running up. His calculation was the 30 seconds spent waiting for one rider was an aggregate of many minutes lost by the riders who were on time for their stops. What looked cruel to one was a kindness to many.
>many minutes
A bus can easily carry 50 passengers. 30 seconds times that many is 25 minutes. That's a lot of aggregate time wasted indeed.
Also assuming this 30 seconds delay is not compensated later, it can influence significantly more people than the bus capacity. And if someone misses a connection because of it that's even more time wasted.
The value of saving a human life is a huge factor in civil engineering and varies pretty widely in the western world.
IIRC it's over 10m USD in the us currently, but only about 6m USD in most of the EU.
It doesn't make sense to compare such numbers without PPP adjusting thought.
What companies do this CBA? Deloitte?
Economic BCAs are typically handled by large eng firms like Arup, Jacobs, and WSP. However, the tricky task of modeling time savings (given that transport systems are complex) is often subcontracted to more specialized firms such as Steer.
Deloitte, KPMG, etc are usually more involved in writing the financial case (how to fund the project).
I like this thinking about other people's time as opportunity cost. I do that a lot and always encourage others to keep it in mind, too.
An example: a few years ago, there was a recurring unnecessary traffic congestion on my commute because of a malfunctioning traffic light. On the third day, I did some numbers while waiting and came to the conclusion that over hundreds of people, this was quickly adding up to months of lifetime wasted in total.
I then called the responsible municipality right on the spot to notify them there's a problem. They thanked me and had it fixed the next day.
Hertzfeld dismisses the idea, but I think it’s something more devs should take to heart.
Could someone build a tea timer app in React and save some time? How much impact to humanity does the GBs of RAM and untold CPU cycles the app now require that could be put to use elsewhere, or causes systems to be landfilled due to inefficiency?
I had a phone with GBs if RAM and a multicore processor that could barely run a single current app. I can buy a new phone, but what about the billions of people that don’t have that option?
Absolutely. There’s very little mass-market software that has any reasonable justification for being unusable on any machine that’s roughly Core 2 Duo era or newer. It’s perfectly possible to work within those constraints and not even really that difficult, it just requires a modicum of care and understanding of what’s happening under the hood.
I am not sure Jobs was always a great boss, but if that conversation is somewhat true, it would have completely worked for me:
- Big boss doesn't just yell at the product manager who then yells at the team leads who then calls "all hands" and unloads her stress on the team
- Instead big boss explains his line of thinking and adding some nape of the napkin projections why this improvement actually matters.
You might get a chuckle out of the "life saved" point, but it's easy to understand that this is meaningful productivity over a big number of users.
Jobs was famously an asshole and many of his former employees have spoken at length about it.
Pretty sure Steve Jobs was known for yelling at, belittling and bullying people, throwing tantrums and making threats/ultimatums.
Dude had anger/I'm the hero issues...his biography notably leaves this stuff out and Woz' only covers a few incidents (because he still considers friend) though I'm sure there were more. Like when Woz invented universal remote and sent a prototype to Jobs and Jobs smashed it against the wall in a fit of anger.
I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for.
But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women.
I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best.
Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their life makes them impossible pricks in others.
Extreme excellence in one facet of life is what I admire people like that for.
I think you're setting up a false choice, but maybe we'll just have to agree to disagree then, because I absolutely, 100% will not be nor work with assholes to accomplish something. The tech world is FULL of genuine nice people who has acomplished remarkable things, and while I do respect people like jobs for what he accomplished, I do not let them skate for the mean or hurtful things they have done.
I certainly don’t model myself after his behavior, either - but again, I don’t admire him for that.
There are a lot of stories about Jobs acting in completely unhinged and highly toxic ways. I agree that the particular situation you’re describing is a good though.
Pratchett makes this same point (or has a golem make it for him) in Going Postal.
>So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
Perhaps implementing some other feature, or fixing a bug may save 100 lives. It may not be worth trying to save only 12.
> "If there's one thing that I think was revolutionary about Jobs, it was his obsession with quality and user experience."
You're talking about specific user experiences based on Jobs's dogmas. There's also absolutely nothing revolutionary about quality and user experience for that existed long before Steve Jobs "invented" it. ;)
> "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."
Apple is good enough married to a closed-off eco system. Almost like 16-bit home computers back in the day, but worse. The off-the-rack experience, just with modern enshittification.
PCs can be good enough, too. But here I have the option for something made-to-wear or even bespoke. That includes the many-flavored Windows; fast enough UX is an almost negligible part of the equation.
Adding the year to the title would be great.
I wonder what Steve would think of the time it takes to apply minor OS upgrades to iPhone and Mac!
(Hopefully we never get to the point that we're applying these daily.)
Mine apply overnight while I sleep. As long as they don’t mess with my alarm or brick try device, the time doesn’t matter.
My sisters iPad just bricked itself during an update, and nothing I've tried has been able to revive it. And it's an unrepairable disposable piece of tech, so it's going into a landfill.
https://www.apple.com/environment/
LOL
I like this story about Jobs because it also points out what a bullshitter he appears to have been.
These engineers aren't ignorant—I'm sure they saw the disconnect between the number of accumulated seconds saved and actual human lives somehow being saved. Somehow Jobs thought he could pull one over on them though with this "logic", ha ha.
It's actually not bullshit. Saving time is worth it. People use that metric when sitting in traffic...why not use it for computer response time?
How many decades have been wasted in Windows waiting for updates?
Saving time is not bullshit, equating it to "saving lives" is.
Bullshitting, inspiring, and marketing are just three different words for the same thing.
A couple of those can be honest though?
What’s dishonest about wanting a quicker boot time?
Saying it "saves lives"?
Saying 'it saves life' might sound less dramatic. Using a corporate windows machine certianly feels like self harming, and if I was at a low ebb, it could potentially be fatal.