People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
By any metric other than “line must always go up” Apple is doing just fine.
“Oh no, they haven’t found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won’t continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come…better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins”, the horror.
He was very much the Elon Musk of his times, and it’s very possible he would have gone down the same route of extremist views and decisions that completely failed because of his egoism.
He died because he didn’t listen to his doctor’s advice. That is somewhat extreme.
Had pancreatitis because of his diet. A diet in which he thought would magically avoid creating body odor.
It turned into cancer. He lucked out that it was a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer with a 90% survival rate 5 years out. Which is abnormal as most forms of pancreatic are essentially a death sentence. Survival rate past 3 years is under 10% for the more common variants.
Stuck to his diet anyway. Ignored his doctors. Died to an illness he had a 90% chance of beating because he knew better.
And to top it all off, it didn’t help his body odour at all. He stank.
Kinda crazy, because we figured out deodorant a while ago.
Jobs was the fucking cracks. The reason why zoomers have no fucking idea where their files are on their computer are because of the shitty attitude instilled into iphones/ipods.
He started the entire fucking enshittification trend and everyone ate his asshole like peaches.
You can extend this argument to saying everyone should master the command line. They’re all interfaces. There’s no “right way” to use a computer.
Jobs turned the computer into a product used by everyday people who don’t give a shit about how it works, and that’s fine. That’s empowering because it lowers the barrier to entry.
That said, we’ve been in a much worse “eternal September” since the iPhone shipped.
They’re all interfaces
My files are in a magic place is not a fucking interface.
Can you expand a bit more on this? What makes it not an interface?
I am an android and windows person (would switch to Linux in a heartbeat if my CAD worked on there) and pretty tech savvy, even run my own servers. So I hate the fact that things are getting so dumbed down but I can’t understand why it’s just an interface would be not true.
I’ll take a swing at this one.
A good interface has well defined inputs and outputs. A lot of interactions with iOS/MacOS software/applications have decently defined inputs via their UIs, but finding the outputs of those UIs can be a Sysiphysian effort. Figuring out where those outputs are beyond the defaults like “downloads from a browser end up in the Downloads folder” or “documents saved in the Pages app end up in the Documents” folder is frequently non-trivial.
It ends up being that the easiest way to find a file is to just open the original app you created it in, and find it in it’s history or whatever. To a non-technical person, this creates the impression that the only way to interact with those files is with the original app it was created in, which ends up limiting what people think they can do with their devices, and creates a bit of a walled garden effect.
So I suppose that the blanket statement of “it’s not an interface” isn’t completely fair. What is fair though, is to say that “it’s a bad interface”, if the average user can’t readily find said interface’s output.
I think I understand what you mean now, if it was an interface then it should be possible to use a separate but similar interface to access the output but here there is only one non-PITA way. Eg. If there was a competing galleries app on iOS it should be able to see all the photos. Is that roughly the thinking? Makes sense to me and thanks for taking the time to type that out.
yep, zalgotext basically did it for me. One other thing is that when you try to access files on an ipod through a non apple computer, it still uses tree based file structures, but the individual files, names, and locations are all garbled (eg : your Rancid album track 3 is in the same folder as your rush 2112 overture, but the rest of those albums are fuck knows where).
I had a joke that the original iphone wasn’t turing complete because you couldn’t run programs on it not from the istore.
