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.

I wonder what Steve would think of the time it takes to apply minor OS upgrades to iPhone and Mac!

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.