(Im not from the US, so Im not aware of local specifics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_B._Anthony_dollar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacagawea_dollar
Dollars are worth a lot less now than they were. If vending machines start charging integer numbers of dollars, maybe dollar coins will catch on.
Concurrent dismay and delight.
That's exactly what I felt at the time too. To me it was always three-quarters delight and one-quarter dismay. A jangling rain of dancing gold coins is a delightful thing. Sure, now I have to go to the bank; but until that time I will walk around as a pirate, pockets full of doubloons.
"Woah, look at this, I just got it as change from the vending machine. I think it's Middle Eastern. Very exotic."
"It's a dollar coin, US currency."
"Woah! No way, how can you tell!?"
"It says United States of America one dollar?"
"Oh."
They are "designed" for circulation, but only ever get sold as collectors items. Banks won't stock them but you can order rolls or bags of them from the US mint for a little over face value (I ordered a roll of the space shuttle ones to the UK)
I'm not sure what stops the USA using dollar coins in circulation, I assume there's no legal requirement for banks to stock them?
(The fact that's there's currently at least three different sizes of US dollar coin that is legal tender probably doesn't help either)
But cash register drawers usually do not have a space for them, they’re relatively heavy, and people don’t use them because they don’t use them.
Vending machines famously went ham trying to use them which annoyed people.
It didn’t help that the old Susan B dollar coins were almost a quarter shape and size if you weren’t paying attention.
The dollar coin SHOULD be small, a bit bigger than a dime, imo.
Or just skip the dollar coin and go right to a three dollar coin.
We have a dollar bill
In the US, change is already an annoying factor because sales tax is rarely included in eg, 4.99. So no one is jumping up and down to go from five slices of paper to five rattling coins.
> His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection
i dont associate "reflection" with him. not to disparage him in the slightest, but its just not in the top ten of things i associate with him.
I then made myself laugh by trying to imagine a depiction of Bill Gates in the same pose
To: Steve Jobs, sjobs@apple.com
Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:08PM
I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.
I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine.
I did not discover the mathematics I use.
I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.
I am moved by music I did not create myself.
When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.
I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.
I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.
just out of pure curiosity.. what's the context of this? He wrote a poem.. to email to himself? and.. how did he get access to his private emails?
I can't think of any other example of people writing and mailing poems to themselves
The archive was launched by Laurene Powell Jobs in 2022
How many people’s emails have you checked to see if they do this?
That is funny, although nothing will ever top Deborah Feingold's 1985 photoshoot where he lies on his desk and flirts with the camera
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:800/1*l85kSwZf...
It always reminds me of Manet's Olympia.
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4D12AQHLC366nJwa1A/art...
> This design presents a young Steve Jobs sitting in front of a quintessentially northern California landscape of oak-covered rolling hills. His posture and expression, as he is captured in a moment of reflection, show how this environment inspired his vision to transform complex technology into something as intuitive and organic as nature itself. Inscriptions are “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA” and “CALIFORNIA.” Additional inscriptions are “STEVE JOBS” and “MAKE SOMETHING WONDERFUL.”
I'm literally quoting the passage you're citing and talking directly about it. And then you quote it back to me.
mind = blown.
Or, you know, just early Steve Jobs.
I like the photo though. Maybe I'm just a hi-fi dork. Is it a McIntosh tube amplifier behind him? Would be befitting.
https://pinkfishmedia.net/forum/threads/steve-jobs-stereo-sy...
Wired summarized that discussion into a photo gallery:
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/steve-jobs-stereo-system/
- Michell MK1 Gyrodec turntable
- Denon TU-750s tuner (Sitting atop Threshold pre amp)
- Threshold FET-One pre amp
- Threshold STASIS-1 amp (Not in photo, seems to be an educated guess. Some debate whether the speakers are powered and maybe an external amp wasn't needed.)
- Acoustat Monitor 3 speakers
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5554660-dont...
(Note this is the way to do it, instead of splitting the difference fairly, they’re just always rounding down - eating a few cents here and there)
Alternatively why not Seymour Cray instead of the Cray-1?
Or why not use one side for the inventor and the other side for the invention?
Jobs sitting there in an empty field just throws the whole set for me.
For completeness, mobike refrigeration is for Minnesota and Dr. Normal Bourlag is for Iowa
Bourlag's work directly saved millions of lives. Out of those mentioned so far, he's one that truly deserves more name recognition.
You can of course debate which is better and there are hundreds of other choices that could be put on either coin - both humans and inventions. I would probably pick different things (not people) for both - but this is a reflection of my biases and not some universal truth.
Why it is a CEO? Why Jobs and Edison?
It is just how it is...
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/10/03/business/trump-coin-treas...
[...] the law specifically says “no head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of any coin “created to mark the US anniversary”.
The proposed design features a wider illustration of Trump on the reverse side, a move that legal experts said would fall outside the ban on a “head and shoulders portrait or bust”.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/03/trump-coin-t...
The KKK was founded in Pulaski, TN, which is about an hour from where I was raised. It wasn't until July, 2021 that the bust of the founder of the KKK (Nathan Bedford Forrest) was removed from the state capitol building. It's now been relocated to the 'TN State Museum' which was magically opened mere days after the bust was removed.
I could provide countless more examples of things I have heard, read, and witnessed, but I am certain you do not need any more examples, and honestly, even thinking about it all really depresses me.
(Elvis is also from Mississippi, btw)
It's like carving away all of the marble that doesn't look like David.
Neal Stephenson wrote a really great Substack about art and how it's the end product of many small decisions. That's exactly what Jobs did on the hardware he worked on.
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/idea-having-is-not-art
That's an achievement.
Anyway, at least I'm happy the Nobel prize committee isn't based in the US. Otherwise we'd soon see the Nobel prize for advertising.
I'm thinking Elizabeth Holmes should either be on a coin or get some kind of Nobel.
(he said in jest)
But seriously, Lee de Forest (Iowa or New York), Chester Carlson (Washington, New York), Charles Martin Hall (Ohio), Philo Farnsworth (Utah)…
"So, meanwhile, Steve’s friend Wozniak comes in the evenings. He would be out there during burn-in tests while these Tank games were on the production line, and he’d play Tank forever. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t care. He was a cool guy.
I found that what really had happened was that Jobs never designed a lick of anything in his life. He had Woz do it [redesign Breakout].
Woz did it in like 72 hours nonstop and all in his head. He got it down to 20 or 30 ICs [integrated circuits]. It was remarkable… a tour de force.
It was so minimized, though, that nobody else could build it. Nobody could understand what Woz did but Woz. It was this brilliant piece of engineering, but it was just unproduceable. So the game sat around and languished in the lab."
The Jobs coin has Jobs himself.
There are also collector-oriented coins but pretty much none of those are actually intended for use.
Edit: fun fact, there are also $2 bills (but those are way more rare and someone might not believe it's real).
I had someone pocket a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin and put their own money in the register to replace it, but that was because it was a rare coin, not because they thought it was fake.
Meanwhile, in my 25 years of living in the US (NJ, SoCal, and NorCal), I can count on one hand the number of times I've come across them "in the wild".
I started collecting them in 2004 by keeping every one I ran into in person and I now have: 3.
At one point you could order $1 coins from the mint at face value and with free shipping, and they were really happy when they thought that lots of people were starting to use them. They were less happy when they realized just a few people were purchasing them on credit card with cashback, and just instantly depositing them back at the nearest bank to pay their credit card bill.
One of the most important features for cash is that it actually be accepted widely, and if I recall, that is a significant problem for $1 coins. I expect the majority machines that accept cash don't accept them, and trying to use them with a cashier is likely to result in amusement or confusion at best, rejection as a very possible outcome, or even accusations of fraud. That there were few instances where an individual would ever get these in normal activities probably made recognition and use even worse, especially as the instances I cam remember often seemed like attempts to push them inconveniently; I seem to remember that some government machines, I think in post offices, would insist on giving change with enormous numbers of one dollar coins, which would likely generate some resentment for users expecting change that would actually be accepted elsewhere.
It likely doesn't help that the design is rather large, eg, it is wider than a two euro coin and almost as heavy, and that one dollar notes are still being produced. For some reason, the US seems far less willing to be decisive in these changes.
Worse. What wound up happening was that the feds encouraged (probably grant funded, IDK) support for it and the only implementers were other governments and the easiest way to check the box was to make all your mass transit ticket machines and the like spit them out as change despite often times not supporting them as payment so a machine would eat your $20, give you a $2 ticket and spit out 18 items about as useful as Chuck E Cheese tokens.
This has mostly gone away as those machines have mostly switched over to cashless.
The real key is they don’t stop making the dollar bill and force the issue.
But hey the penny is finally dying so who knows?
26.50 mm (1.043 in) - $1.00
24.26 mm (0.955 in) - $0.25
I am not exactly sure of the reason that the mint is so resistant to making the coins a bit bigger (they used to be).
The dollar coin has been the same size since 1979, and the same colour since 2000.
They got the wrong Steve.
That’s not touching any of the other areas like helping to drive Pixar. Woz did not have a second act, which is perfectly fine and I deeply respect him but he doesn’t have quite the same cultural impact.
Jobs was a celebrity who was good at branding himself as a genius.
I don't consider a clever UI idea like a touch screen to be a work of brilliance, especially since he did zero engineering work, both for early and later Apple devices. Touch screen handheld devices would've come around with or without him, just maybe a few years later.
It should've been Woz.
What really set apart the Apple II from many of its peers is that it came preassembled, in a neatly designed case (though the Commodore PET and TRS-80 were pretty much released at the same time), and those esthetics were due more to Jobs than Wozniak.
Jobs did not write product code, or design boards, but he had a constant presence in the design of Apple's products and many (though by no means all) of his inputs changed the products for the better.
History being written by the victors here, I believe.
He designed some clever things for example bit-banging the floppy interface which allowed the Apple 2 to have floppies at a lower price point than competitors. Another innovation of the Apple 2 at the time was its use of a switched-mode PSU. It was almost certainly the first personal computer to have that, but designed by Rod Holt not Woz. He didn't invent the switching PSU -- they were commonly used in portable test equipment at the time.
Having been alive at the time and paying attention, I disagree that Woz invented anything very significant. Definitely an important figure, and a clever guy though.
I still don't credit Steve Jobs with starting any computing revolutions, in 1977 or 2008.
Also worth noting that the Apple 2 was really a US/North America phenomenon. For example although they were sold in the UK (my school, unusually, had one), they were not popular and pretty much nobody had one in their home. So you might as well say that the person at the BBC who decided to commission the BBC Micro was the pioneer of personal computing. Or Clive Sinclair.
They already existed. The iPod Touch was not the first one. It was certainly the most successful one though.
I don't think the Mint's goal is to celebrate developers and computer scientists with the new coins. They're celebrating famous innovators and innovations from each state.
It also makes no sense to not include a computer. I get the “California theme but Steve and hills and trees doesn’t jive.
https://majorspoilers.com/2013/10/17/toys-legend-toys-announ...
But the famous photo I do know doesn't match it:
https://milenanguyen.com/blog/steve-jobs-20s-the-head-of-a-h...
It's super cool that the US Mint is commemorating his work.
The logistical chain for keeping products products is really interesting:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_chain
Besides food, another area where it is critical is pharmaceuticals.
What's a 'vaccine injury', though?
But I use the phrase "thought to" intentionally: I don't know what the science says now, but at the time there were reported cases of myocarditis in people who took the JnJ vaccine. This was like May of 2021, so I don't know if the science ever panned out on that, but it definitely drove discussions around health equity with the vaccine
Given the most common vaccine injury is caused by improper administration, I wonder if that could be related? ie. less trained staff would potentially be administering vaccines in black neighbourhoods? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_injury_related_to_vac...
Other states should most certainly promote their successes.
* Air conditioning: In 1851, Dr. John Gorrie invented a machine to cool air, which laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning and refrigeration
* Gatorade: The sports drink was developed at the University of Florida to help the football team rehydrate.
* Sunscreen: Benjamin Green invented the first commercial sunscreen in 1944.
* IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC): A team in Boca Raton developed the first IBM PC in 1981.
* Supercapacitor: A new type of supercapacitor was invented in Florida. (2013)
There's a bunch more, seems like a number of them have to do with the weather ;) I knew about Gatorade, but had no idea about the rest.
This makes me kind of wish I had this when I was in public school as part of one of our courses, it's kind of nice to learn about the innovation around you, especially when you don't exactly live in a place known for it. I think its inspiring to a younger mind to know you can be creative and innovative living just about anywhere.
And modern cooling was invented by Carrier, with the original use case to actually control humidity to help the publishing/newspaper industry:
> On December 3, 1911, Carrier presented what is perhaps the most significant document ever prepared on air conditioning – Rational Psychrometric Formulae – at the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. It became known as the "Magna Carta of Psychrometrics."[8][9] This document tied together the concepts of relative humidity, absolute humidity, and dew-point temperature, thus making it possible to design air-conditioning systems to precisely fit the requirements at hand.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Carrier
The idea of temperature (first in cinemas and theatres) came later. People under-estimate how much humidity control is needed for comfort: many building codes are adding language to have a standalone whole house dehumidifier.
Here's a side-by-side comparison: https://www.govmint.com/learn/post/how-is-a-proof-coin-diffe...
[1]:https://www.npr.org/2025/09/26/nx-s1-5553615/gustavus-swift-...
Apple II was not the first usable by mere mortals PC. There’s a lot of contenders but one of the earliest came from Georgia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compucolor
Cray was not the first multiprocessor wide vector supercomputer, but it did innovate on it. I’d say Cray broke more fundamental innovation ground than Apple.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/07/22/138610663/doll...
The government is clearly trying to do away with the freedom of coinage and bills, intentionally and unintentionally through its inflation fraud, and that decline of America is rather ironically encapsulated in this kind of cheapening of the currency in several literal and figurative forms.
And these coins are not even made of any durable metals that could survive history until another civilization can collectively wonder about how America could have ruined itself so quickly, after rising so rapidly.
They could have at least made these coins at least silver or gold, so some future intelligence could at least find them. But here we are, the government creating tokens with cheap iconography made of cheap materials and a face value that literally cannot even buy you a cup of colored sugar water anymore.
Frankly, who cares? Beyond saying “that’s nifty” while looking at the images of the designs; who here expects to ever see one of these “in the wild”?
Have you seen any of the 40 presidential dollar coins in the wild? How about the 29 “American innovation” coins that precede this set? Heck, how often have you seen a Sacagawea in the wild, considering there were probably about 2+ billion of them minted by now?
Very quickly:
a dollar coin is about 550 mm^2 on a face
the Cray-1 could do 160 MFLOPS
an M1 chip has a die size of 120 mm^2
an M1 chip can do over 1 TFLOPSEDIT: And forgot to mention Jef Raskin, who together with Woz played a pivotal role engineering the first Macintosh in 1984.
[1] https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-programs/american-innovati...
This is well-documented in courts (and also on many other websites, by the way):
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
See:
"[...] Steve Jobs orchestrated an elaborate scheme to prevent poaching and drive down wages."
That is the interesting thing about tech. So many pioneers that transformed society are still around. It's a relatively young field that exploded over the last few decades.
What could be a more fitting placement than on a dollar coin? He'll be used to pay employees using an inflating dollar currency, where he can continue to pay employees less in perpetuity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre and several other incidents.
He singlehandedly set the anchor price of the entire industry so low that he set in motion the whole freemium/monetization/enshittification trend.
You add in a large screen and quick transactions and Asia would have hit f2p just as soon, with or without however America priced it.
Why are those the criteria for being on a coin? Neither Henry Ford nor John D Rockefeller are on coins.
Jobs was dismissive of concerns about US technology manufacturing jobs being offshored to China, famously saying "Those jobs aren't coming back" [1].
He was right of course, and he seems to have consciously avoided involvement in discussions about the economic impacts of the manufacturing exodus on US workers - he was a requisite globalist.
It took Obama pressing him to get him to even make the statement I referenced above.
1. https://m-economictimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/m.economi...
Me also. What does that have to do with Jobs being represented on currency?
Why not do the same for the pharmaceutical CEOs who have set up generic drug supply chains overseas, or the leaders of apparel companies who set up overseas sweatshops to enable us to have disposable clothing?
Arguably, affordable antibiotics and underwear have made a vastly bigger positive impact on standard of living than iPhones.
> Arguably, affordable antibiotics and underwear have made a vastly bigger positive impact on standard of living than iPhones.
Maybe so, but "positive impact on standard of living" isn't the theme of this US Mint collection. The theme is "American Innovation."
But yeah it's all marketing. Who better than the marketer?
Tangent: I won't understand people hesitant to put down as much money on a phone as a desktop. Especially when considering that we know it costs more to shrink technology. If that's too much, oh well. I tend to buy 1-2 years previous when upgrading. Easily halves the price and the old flagship specs are still competitive.
What he did was literally change the shape and direction of the entire human race through his ability to level up existing products (directly and indirectly) to a level that no one would have thought possible, including his own employees.
That said, he was absolute piece of shit human being and all of his successes came at great expense of himself and others. I think there are a great number of people who are far more well-rounded and, if we aren't focused on fascist ideals, we should elevate those folks instead of Jobs.
He managed to do that quite frequently. How much credit to give him for it is something I'm not quite sure of myself, but you really can't argue with the results.
Then again, that's probably what most represent America of the last 50 yearss. Selling off all its talent overseas and then trying to sell off the idea of labor afterwards.
Forgetting bad actions is an essential part of the process of deification, and since ancient times, rulers who sought to be equated with gods would put their or their ancestors images on coins with a deity on the reverse side.
Several coins in the US display slave owners because they are founding fathers, and the practice of putting presidents on coins in the US only began in the early 1900s, with the Lincoln penny, and their portraits on paper money only began 50 years earlier.
In our current era of tech industrialist worship, is it surprising that we do the same for Steve Jobs?
That said, you are absolutely right to bring it up, as a push back against that deification process.
Oh no, he only paid them $300k/year? How did they survive without selling their kidneys to the black market?
Times are hard, but don't confuse the person with a bowl of rice with the people who own thr rice factory. Even if that is a lot compared to the scraps you have.
If we’re not doing “deserve” then no, they should have had more money if illegal wage suppression hadn’t been happening. Else the illegal wage suppression wouldn’t have been needed.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, on February 24, 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali (Arabic: عبد الفتاح الجندلي)
...
His cousin Bassma Al Jandaly has claimed that Jobs' birth name (prior to adoption) was Abdul Lateef Jandali (Arabic: عبد اللطيف الجندلي).
Perhaps also a good moment to remember this Banksy art
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/11/banksy-...
(...from where we read..)
In a rare statement accompanying the work, Banksy said: “We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple ... only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.”
Humans are flawed. Putting humans on money -- as symbols -- is going to make us go in circles about their imperfection. From Washington as a slave owner to Steve Jobs suppressing wages.
This is not an issue if we just put the symbols on the money instead of using people as proxies. If we want a coin for innovators, but Providentia on the coin.
Sadly, with that mentality we wouldn't have celebrities or perhaps even that many leaders. Fests like this are what drive some of the most driven people, and our biology makes us want to follow and admire other people as a former pack hunting species. The best we got is thst we can't put any living person on a coin (though, guess what the rumors are trying to say?)
Purity testing has ruined liberal politics.
I was using the examples as examples. I agree with you about people who can't handle nuance and imperfection. My point is only that putting people on the money is just dumb to begin with, because it misses the point of what people are trying to do.
Probably nobody lives without ethical gaps.
and the impact of ethical gaps of someone who has been able to achieve a lot, and are more visible to judge, are likely to both be and seem to be, proportionally greater.
Could it be enough to simply honor people who, overall, have done inspiring, positive things, while not giving them a pass for their mistakes and deficiencies, assuming they are legitimately smaller in scale?
I am not a fan of “purity” viewpoints.
so much easier to be severely critical, than open oneself up for judgement.
I am a fan of realism in both accomplishments and failures. The good impact and the bad. And taking inspiration and warning, from those whose accomplishments weigh more heavily to the former.
Being realistic has another advantage.
it doesn’t strongly imply, without actual evidence, that the speaker is somehow less prone to mistakes.
Borland was the software company.
Maybe I missed the joke?
One week after someone far more important died: the co-creator of the most influential computer program in history (Unix) and the most influential programming language in history (C). Very few news media outlet reported the death of Dennis M. Ritchie.
I argue that Ritchie's legacy runs deeper and wider than Jobs'. Almost all CPUs and microprocessors existing today run code that was implemented using technologies created by Ritchie, from ABS breaks to satellites. But, even in this forum, many people don't know about him.
The engineers were very smart but it’s hard to see us knowing their name or having such an impact on technology without Steve. Woz was destined for a comfortable 30 year career at HP.
Just implementing something isn't enough. You need to also be able to ensure that it is usable by non-specialists.
And this is something that Jobs really drove in the tech industry in it's early days, when non-technical users were basically an afterthought.
That is the reasoning behind their choice for Jobs, and honestly it's a valid one.
The way he got the notoriously staunch record labels on board with their $1/song plan to make iTunes possible and make music infinitely more convenient and accessible overnight was unforeseen.
Not many people have repeatedly proven themselves many times over like he did. I do believe he was one of the greatest business men of all time, and for all the things you can complain about with Apple, I'm glad they exist to inject some sense of taste into computing, and a standard for every other computing device to be compared to (cue examples of bad design decisions that came from Apple. Don't bother, doesn't disprove my point)
For example, VECSEL lasers were added to the iPhone in 2017 to power FaceID. At the time, they were a low volume, high cost component (used primarily in fiber transceivers) with generally poor yields.
Today, thanks in large part to the sheer number demanded by iPhones, they are a cheap, near commodity component with >90% yields.
https://www.electrooptics.com/article/vcsels-deliver-mega-im...
It was he and Apple that really drove the tech industry to recognize that User Experience and developing simplified products for non-specialists matter.
Even the Mint gives that explaination for why he's included as an "innovator".
aanet•3mo ago
I wonder if these coins are available for purchase by the general public? anybody know?
derektank•3mo ago
https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-programs/american-innovati...
aanet•3mo ago
This is delightful.
I used to be a coin-collector as a kid. Kinda outgrew the hobby as I grew older. But I still love new/old/unusual coins (among other things). I think I might get my hands on some of these.
cjk•3mo ago
Cthulhu_•3mo ago
bombcar•3mo ago
They’re great to use as board game coins; much nicer than plastic chits.
RobotToaster•3mo ago