https://www.apple.com/environment/
LOL
- 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.
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.
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.
Perhaps implementing some other feature, or fixing a bug may save 100 lives. It may not be worth trying to save only 12.
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.
--
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.
My Dell laptop running Ubuntu wakes from sleep pretty much instantly.
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.
How many decades have been wasted in Windows waiting for updates?
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.
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?
These days Slack is occupying 4-8GB of RAM and is less snappy than a native app.
Yeah, in-lining giphy images is kinda fun. But 1000X memory consumption seems like a horrible trade off.
A modern desktop PC would have been a damn supercomputer not long ago. Today it’s kinda adequate.
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.
Deloitte, KPMG, etc are usually more involved in writing the financial case (how to fund the project).
IIRC it's over 10m USD in the us currently, but only about 6m USD in most of the EU.
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.
cogman10•2h ago
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.
embedding-shape•2h ago
wiseowise•1h ago
santoshalper•1h ago
bataowt•1h ago
leidenfrost•1h ago
It remins me of some gnome themes from 2005-2009.
I'd choose that a thousand times over an ad filled start menu
ForceBru•1h ago
wiseowise•24m ago
CursedSilicon•1h ago
wiseowise•21m ago
EGG_CREAM•1h ago
giancarlostoro•1h ago
dijit•1h ago
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.
SoftTalker•1h ago
malux85•1h ago
SoftTalker•1h ago
skeeter2020•1h ago
cosmic_cheese•1h ago
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.
Esophagus4•1h ago
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!)
skeeter2020•1h ago
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?
Esophagus4•1h ago
hu3•23m ago
Your comment lacks any content other than a shallow emotional reaction.
To add to the discussion, this anecdote ending says it all:
> I honestly liked and respected the guy; but it was agreed among us Apple engineers that having Steve Jobs know who you actually were was usually not a good thing. It meant your future with Apple was going to be shorter than you would probably like.
https://www.quora.com/How-awful-was-Steve-Jobs-as-a-person
mixmastamyk•36m ago
ajdoingnothing•1h ago
thomassmith65•1h ago
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.
pwthornton•1h ago
Sleep/Wake is one area where MacOS absolutely destroys Windows.
flax•19m ago
JoeAltmaier•1h ago
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.
pear01•47m ago
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.