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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. The "Apple Vision Pro" would have (rightfully so) never been released under Steve Jobs.
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.
.NET has viable competitors. Windows dominates the PC world no matter how bad it is.
Because of legacy and momentum, not merit.
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.
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.
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
Yeah, you nerd. ENJOY IT.
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.
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.
What companies do this CBA? Deloitte?
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.
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?
Pratchett makes this same point (or has a golem make it for him) in Going Postal.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
I wonder what Steve would think of the time it takes to apply minor OS upgrades to iPhone and Mac!
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.
(Hopefully we never get to the point that we're applying these daily.)
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?
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 heating a quicker boot time.