Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering.

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!)

There was a story in one of his biographies where he spent a lot of time making sure the machines that made one of his products actually looked good too!

One of his biographers gave an example of how some cabinet makers only use good wood on the front and side, but Jobs would want good quality wood on the back as well.

How can MacOS possibly sleep/wake any faster than Windows? My Lenovo X1C wakes up so quickly that the limiting factor is how fast I can enter my PIN on the keyboard. Well below 1 second, maybe 0.5 seconds. Going to sleep is the same, I'm not going to measure it but it feels like it's about 0.3 seconds.

> There is also the story about Steve throwing a MacBook Air on a conference room table and asking why does the iPad wake from sleep so much faster?

As someone who has owned two Apple laptops before the iPad was introduced (my first was a PowerBook G4 in 2005), I've always just closed the lid of my laptop instead of shutting them down. They've always resumed quickly.

If this story was true, it probably wasn't an iPad.

Maybe Windows, I haven't used it in a long time. But I have noticed my son's MacBook pro (used to be my work laptop) only pretends to be available after "waking". It'll repeatedly fail to actually take input in the user login password field. It does so silently, leading to missing characters in the password and needs several attempts to actually fill out fully. I don't know what it's doing in this time, but not having the "busy beachball" is a lie.

.NET has viable competitors. Windows, due to its monopoly, dominates the PC world no matter how bad it is.

MS has had very little to do with the execution, but it has their logo on it, so I think you can count most Microsoft hardware (pre-Copilot button) as quality.

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.

These critiques are so tiresome. Like he forced people to buy macs or something. You're not the audience. For the average consumer the fact they don't even have to think about unscrewing something is a major part of the appeal. The walled garden is a plus for them not a negative.

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.

> So it's not even laziness really, it's something else. Apathy, maybe?

My hypothesis is that it comes from a bygone of tech.

Consider the lyrics from Weird Al's "It's all about the pentiums" (1999)

    My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
    But it was obsolete before I opened the box
    You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
    Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique!

    Your laptop is a month old? Well, that's great
    If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

Tech CEOs weren't blind to this fact. I have a lot of old software dev coworkers that lamented that era because they never had to think about performance problems. It was always "this won't be an issue if we wait a year".

I think that era has mostly built in an industry wide sloppiness and attitude.

Also for a platform vendor, it also infects everyone who develops for their platform.

Writing iOS apps, I've been in meetings where the discussion has basically made Apple's equivalent a benchmark. You can't make your feature slower/worse/buggier than theirs, but making it faster/better is optional.

> "Faster hardware" just didn't affordably exist for them back then.

Not what I said. And I think you are the one that's doing historical revisionism now.

Even in this email from 1983, it starts off with

> since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II

From the 80s through the 00s (which I was alive through and very aware of), computer hardware was frequently doubling in performance. The common wisdom then was to make things fast enough. Anything more was a waste of time because in a year or two hardware would be twice as fast.

The wastefulness of today came directly from that past wisdom. I can guarantee you that ever since I've been conscious around discussions about software there's been people that have bemoaned how sloppy and wasteful software has become. People complained about how bloated Windows XP was vs 98.

Ruby, python, perl, java. All these bloated and slow programming languages got their starts in the 80s and 90s. Exactly because of the wisdom that "it's slow today but hardware tomorrow will make it fast". Heck, even C and lisp are manifestations of this. Consider that people weren't writing all software in assembly during the time period in question. There were clear performance benefits of doing so as compiler at the time were particularly bad.

I've worked with a lot of older devs and they all hold the attitude that performance optimization is a complete waste of time. They've been the hardest ones to break of that notion. Younger devs tend to more intuitively know that performance optimization are important. That's because over the last decade, hardware performance improvements have stagnated.

So yes, absolutely yes. In the past if you could make writing software more ergonomic by sacrificing some memory or performance, that's a tradeoff most of the industry would gladly take. They wrote for today's hardware and sometimes tomorrow's.

Mac is still more than fast enough and good enough than Windows, so it matters.

Just because it goes away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

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

All of which are managed by people who don't care like Jobs did

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.

It does now with M series chips. iirc Apple made a point of demoing the quick wake in the announcement too.

>many minutes

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.

It doesn't make sense to compare such numbers without PPP adjusting thought.

Economic BCAs are typically handled by large eng firms like Arup, Jacobs, and WSP. However, the tricky task of modeling time savings (given that transport systems are complex) is often subcontracted to more specialized firms such as Steer.

Deloitte, KPMG, etc are usually more involved in writing the financial case (how to fund the project).

I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for.

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.

My sisters iPad just bricked itself during an update, and nothing I've tried has been able to revive it. And it's an unrepairable disposable piece of tech, so it's going into a landfill.

https://www.apple.com/environment/

LOL

A couple of those can be honest though?

Saving time is not bullshit, equating it to "saving lives" is.

> "GP clearly said that it was Jobs' obsession that was revolutionary."

And that's utterly inaccurate; nothing about that kind of behavior was revolutionary in any way; lots of CEOs were, are and will be obsessed with quality. If they can translate that into product lines, and to what extend, is written on another piece of paper.

I, for my part, was never impressed with Apple; their only product I really liked was one that Jobs allegedly hated: the Newton.

> "In bringing up modern Apple, you are arguing against things no one here has said."

It contrasts the criticism of modern Windows the guy I replied to brought up. :)

> "And are you actually claiming that Windows is an open ecosystem...?"

Uhm... no. But the IBM-compatible family obviously was and still is (x86/x64). It's not exactly Sharp's OS-agnostic "clean computer" concept, but it's the next best thing.

> "And in fact so great is its openness that slow UX isn't even a problem?"

Again, no. I said the Windows UX is, or can be, fast enough and is therefore virtually a non-problem (Windows's problems have much more to do with Microsoft's abominable corporate culture).

Unless you're computer illiterate and bloat-up your system with badly-coded applications, and/or don't do due dilligence by way of choosing, streamlining and maintaining the best Windows version for you in the first place. And yes, I'm aware that both can sometimes not be avoided as one is forced into specific toolchains.