Lets talk about this "Reality Distortion Field". People claim that Jobs can make you believe things that aren't true by simple application of charisma. Is anyone here willing to admit to being swindled in this way? I am not. I am not aware of Jobs ever saying something that was actually false (though I'm quite aware of many manifold lies told about Jobs.)
For instance, remember the introduction of the iPhone? How about the introduction of the iPad? Everyone here should be old enough to remember one or both of these keynotes. Surely Jobs "Reality Distortion Field" would be deployed to maximum effect at such keynotes-- and after both of them I remember much derision and claims that Jobs had the RDF on maximum and how those products were going to be complete failures, and how everyone needed a keyboard on their phones and how the iPad was a terrible, terrible name, inspired by female hygiene products, etc. etc.
IF you go back and watch these, can you find a single lie? Can you find any reality that was distorted? Sure, Steve Jobs called the iPhone revolutionary. That's obviously a characterization based on an opinion, but that opinions seems to have held up-- before it, there were only feature phones, really, and now every phone that isn't an iPhone is some sort of iPhone counterfeit (e.g.: has a touch screen) It clearly revolutionized the phone category, and created the app ecosystem. Similar things happened with the iPad.
Because Apple is successful, and because Apple does things its own way, people feel the need to attack Apple. And of course, they attack Jobs.
Most of these attacks have clear motivations-- people who bought another product who want to feel it is superior, or people who work for a competitor, or -- and this is the biggest source, I believe-- hack journalists who want to create a sensational story (I still remember a claim that Apple switched from ATI to NVIDIA chips in laptops the week before they were announced because of a leak from ATI... as if Apple could even do that so quickly for a product that was about to ship.... but people believe it. The story was "Steve got really mad and now the new MacBooks will ship with NVIDIA chips!" I know for a fact this is false because you can't change production that fast... but people believe those kinds of lies. After all, they've been told for year that Steve Jobs is an asshole, and, despite never showing this side of himself in public, they believe it.
[1] True because I know it to be true either because I witnessed it, or I'm more informed on the issue than Isaacson is. I've been an Apple watcher for 20 years, and I have noticed that much of what people believe about Apple is based on oft repeated myth without substantiation in fact. I remember Apple trivia fairly well, and the specifics of things that often happened before people writing about them now were out of grade school. (EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!) Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
You're remembering the story wrong. It wasn't about laptops, and the switch took 6 months rather than a week. What happened was that in July 2000, when the Mac G4 Cube was about to be launched, ATI accidentally pre-announced the product with their press release about their Radeon chips being used in the Cube.
Six months later it was time for another MacWorld and another set of Mac updates. All the new G4 Macs used NVIDIA graphics boards instead of ATI. This was the first time in several years that Apple wasn't using ATI GPUs at all, and people speculated that this change might be due to ATI's PR slip-up.
In any case, as a long time Apple observer, you'll remember that the RDF was coined by Apple engineers (probably Bud Tribble, at least according to this story). It was both a characterization, an expression of admiration and, yes, of frank criticism.
Steve Jobs was a man, and that's OK.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
more: http://folklore.org/ProjectView.py?topic=Reality%20Distortio...
At the time of writing, nirvana has written comments on this post totalling 3931 words, most of which defend either Apple or Jobs. Don't play chess with pigeons.
You're talking to the person, rather than to the point. I'm not the point.
"Steve Jobs was a man, and that's OK."
Translation: Whenever someone says something false about Steve Jobs, the only reason someone might correct them is because they're a koolaid drinking cultist who cannot tolerate the idea that Steve Jobs was anything other than the second coming of christ.
Yeah, I'm glad you didn't "go all ad hom".
Edit: I'm sorry if this post feels like it is making you the point. It actually is not intended to be that way. I'm trying to illuminate the tactic. Just as I'm trying to illuminate a tactic in my original post, and Gruber is illuminating the tactic Issacson used to discredit Jobs. The fact that the RDF was coined during the Mac project by the Mac team was known to me, and is a very different use of the term than the popular one I'm addressing.
In return for the tour of Xerox PARC, Jobs gave Xerox the opportunity to buy Apple stock (100,000 shares for $1 millon). Xerox did make money on that.
However, Xerox never gave Apple any license for its technology. Eventually, after Apple sued Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, but the lawsuit failed.[1]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-s...
For what's worth, Microsoft gave Xerox money too, and also hired key people like Charles Simonyi from PARC. So it wasn't exactly like the movie where Bill Gates was yelling "I got the loot Steve! I got the loot!"
"You don't want a radio in your portable music player" was pretty damn false. Another is "people don't want porn on their machines" - like it or loathe it, the popularity of porn is pretty clear.
There's been a few things over the years we've been told by Apple that 'aren't in our interest' or 'we don't really want', but either are things we want, or suddenly become 'you want this' right after Apple starts providing that product.
Then there's the whole walled-garden thing, which isn't really about what users want (as it is presented), but about Apple wanting to shape users' expectations into something they can make money from. One clear example of this is the mac: once upon a time it was 'any colour you want, to suit who you are!', now it's 'you get one choice, regardless of who you are!'.
Mostly the 'lies' are just regular marketing stuff (and Apple does marketing well), but to paint Jobs as some uber-honest man is doing everyone a disservice.
The RDF as a management tool is not unique to steve jobs, there are many charismatic people around who can make their teams really believe in a mission without any fact at all to backup this belief, (most cults start this way).
"there are many charismatic people around who can make their teams really believe in a mission without any fact at all to backup this belief,"
I believe your perspective is in error when you get to the part about "without any fact at all to backup this belief". I believe that Steve Jobs was certainly charismatic, and probably one of the great people at getting his team to believe in a mission-- but I don't think this is "reality distortion", nor do I believe this was "without any fact at all to backup this belief".
In fact, I believe the reason he was so good was because he did have facts-- facts that the mainstream may not have been aware of-- but that were true. The thing is, many people still dispute these facts. (Eg: "The iPad is just a big iPod touch" disputes the killer app of the iPad, but the reality of iPad sales shows that they were wrong.)
Lets take some key products where Jobs got his team to believe in a mission to make something that was significantly different:
The Macintosh, NeXTSTEP & the iPhone.
For the Macintosh: The facts: Most computers were difficult to use. Apple had strong experience with this for the apple // which was command line based. The Mac team went to Xerox and saw some of the key technology working and saw how it was more efficient (technology that Apple had a license to with the deal). Another Fact: The Apple // was a very integrated computer for its time, but a competing company (I forget the name at the time) had gone one step further and integrated the monitor with the computer. Thus the mission of the Macintosh: An integrated computer with the footprint of a phonebook that was sold like an appliance and that anyone could use because of its GUI, was not a distortion of reality, nor did it lack "any fact at all" to back up the mission. All the key elements existed elsewhere, though of course the schedule was completely unrealistic (but back then the fact that software was always late was not as widely accepted as it is now.)
NeXTSTEP: The facts: Unix is powerful, multi-tasking is powerful. Object Oriented Software allows for component re-use. The mission: Build a unix workstation at reasonable cost that allows for rapid application development using object oriented software. True, NeXTSTEP was the first OO operating system (like the Mac was the first real GUI) and so there was some leap of faith to think they could do it or that it could be successful, but this is not based on a distortion of reality. Pre-emptive multitasking is really useful, and OO can allow for code re-use, and in the NeXT environment (and now OS X and iOS it really is a force multiplier for developers.) I don't see how he distorted reality or the facts there-- except, again, he set a deadline for delivery based on the fact that they were a startup. The deadline was unrealistic, because software takes too long and they missed it.
The iPhone: The facts: The phone market was a mess. People hated their phones. (I did some research in this area, and found the churn rate was something like %83 and the dissatisfaction with ones phone was something like %70, though I may have those numbers reversed.) The software market for phones was locked down by carriers. The interfaces were terrible- often just a numeric keypad and if you had a full qwerty keyboard it made the phone unwieldy. A touch interface would be better, obviously ,right? Well, Apple bought Fingerworks. They knew touch interfaces could work because Fingerworks invented them. People hating their phones, the software being locked down by carriers, bad interfaces and limited usability due to physical keyboards are all things that you can't really dispute. There was a leap of faith in believing a completely touch based phone would work, and they spent many years working on it (and the iPad project which was started earlier). And again the timing for when they thought they could ship it was unrealistic and they had to bring in engineers from the OS X side of things to make their date. Did Jobs distort reality to get the team to work on the iPhone? I don't see why we should believe that. Did he get them to work on a mission without "any facts at all" to backup the belief that it could work? I don't think so-- that the phone industry was broken was obvious to a lot of people. I myself worked on a completely voice driven phone project in the late 1990s, but stopped due to being unable to get sufficient horsepower in a battery powered device to do the voice recognition.
In all three cases the market need was pretty clear. The technology precedents were visible. Both of these are facts that back up the belief in the mission. Neither of these rely on a distortion of reality.
All projects for new products require some faith. But getting people to believe something is possible, even when it hasn't been done before, doesn't mean necessarily doing it without any fact,s and in these cases, the facts to support the project were there.
If his crime is making people believe that the software won't take as long as it actually does, I can't fault him, and to be honest, he seems to be no worse in that regard than any manager I've ever had. (many of whom were deliberate about it.)
At Microsoft, for instance, when I worked there it was common practice to name the next release of windows something like "Windows 93" so that the employees all knew it had to come out in 1993, even though management knew it wouldn't be ready til 1997. Didn't want them to slack off thinking they had 4 years to get it done!
"and now every phone that isn't an iPhone is some sort of iPhone counterfeit (e.g.: has a touch screen)"
"Because Apple is successful, and because Apple does things its own way, people feel the need to attack Apple. And of course, they attack Jobs."
Now there's a RDF if I've ever seen one.
But honestly, which is the bigger reality distortion: Jobs saying that the iPhone is "revolutionary".
Or Bill Gates saying that none of NeXTSTEP made it into OS X?
Why is Jobs confusing his opinion for reality such a crime while flat out fabrication is given a free pass?
It is far more common for people to criticize Jobs for "reality distortion" than it is for people to criticize Gate for telling lies (and Gates is almost pathalogical- for years he managed to kill companies by lying about what Microsoft was going to do.)
Neither I, nor John Gruber have done so.
"What is reported in the biography come from multiple eye witness accounts of the people and events."
Really? Can you name any of these people who have witnessed none of the NeXT OS making it into OS X? Surely, there must be hundreds of Apple engineers who would have witnessed this. Surely there would be lots of corroboration. In fact, it should be obvious to any competent engineer who looks at the technical documentation about OS X or iOS.
The reality is, it is obvious to any engineer who looks at this technical documentation. The OS is completely NeXTSTEP, in fact, the classes still contain the prefix "NS" which is short for "NeXTSTEP". Its "NSScrollView" not "APScrollView" or "MCScrollView", etc.
If you review the technical literature, you'll find that OS X is more accurately described as NeXTSTEP with a Mac UI on top of it, than "Mac OS with a NeXT kernel" as Bill Gates describes it.
But maybe I'm completely delusional. I've only been working with this software for 20 years. Please, show us some of these eyewitnesses to the fact that the NeXT operating system wasn't used.
"What you are basically doing is libeling (since it is in written and not spoken word) Isaacson by accusing him without proof that he misreported events in his book."
Well, the truth is a positive defense in Libel, isn't it? The fact of the matter, as any competent engineer can confirm for you, is that OS X is essentially NeXTSTEP, evolved of course over the years, with a Mac Like UI on top. It got the menu at the top from the Mac, but it carried over the Dock from the NeXT days. The kernel, the Frameworks, the operating system, everything essential was NeXTSTEP. And most of the "Mac" things really were a new UI-- an evolution of the Mac UI called Aqua.
I don't know how many more examples to give you, but its clear that for you to believe that I'm "without proof that he misreported events in his book", you're going to have to give something more than assertion. I've cited many areas of the operating system that are direct descendants from NeXTSTEP and NOT from Mac OS. You've given none.
"Please keep in mind that Steve Jobs specifically sought out Walter Isaacson to do the biography because he believed that he would tell the story completely and honestly, which is what Steve wanted."
Yes, and I want you to please keep in mind that this was not the first time that a hack reporter that Steve trusted betrayed him because he wanted to sell more units of his writing. I don't know if Isaacson was the most honest biographer-- in some areas he was quite correct, accurate and fair, though this mostly seems to be because Andy Hertzfeld did the heavy lifting.
In Steve Jobs earlier years he was more immature, and more problematic and probably a lot less likeable. Notice also that you've not heard a peep from me (or Gruber) about an unfair portrayal in that time period.
The fact of the matter is that these kinds of lies-- like the claim that NeXTSTEP wasn't used, or that Apple stole from Xerox -- are repeated as articles of faith by people who wish to attack Apple. Yet they are very trivially refuted. And when refuted, the response is to pretend like the refuters are just unhappy that someone said something bad about Steve.
Well, lots of bad things were said about Steve that are true. We're not objecting to those. We're objecting to the lies.
Hell, if Steve engineered the purchase of NeXT by Apple even when NeXTSTEP wasn't useful at all, and thus had to be scrapped when building OSX (as Gates essentially alleges) that would be an example of Steve Jobs being one hell of a powerful salesman. I wouldn't even see that as something to be embarrassed about. Why would I object to that?
No, the objection is to the fact that its a lie fabricate from whole cloth, and trivially disproven. Which both I, and John Gruber have done.
Sure it's terse, but it's a long way from telling them they're doing it wrong. Jobs isn't known to be always nice and given this person's situation his suggestion is the best way to fix the problem in the short term. Apple later made amends here, too; admittedly only because people complained, but if the success of the iPhone 4 is a good indication (you can decide) this really was never really a problem.
Apple talks a lot about how "well-engineered" their products are, and yes, the 4 was cool, but Job's answer seemed like something from http://thereifixedit.com. Don't hold it that way? It's a phone.
People wanted a proper response and they didn't get it until they were big enough to make a big stink about it. That's not good customer service.
Wow. What's your take on whether Al Gore invented the Internet?
It wasn't just patents--Microsoft had, via a third party, stolen the source code to QuickTime.
Jobs said iPhone was the first phone with a full web browser.
Opera had mobile browser using proper "desktop" rendering engine (Opera Mobile, not Mini) on mobile phones before the iPhone.
Of course iPhone was the first to add capacitative touch screen and multi-touch gestures to the mix (rather than have click-to-zoom with a stylus) and that blurry line between stated "first full mobile browser" and meant "first full mobile browser that we think is really cool" is the RDF.
I've attended some Apple keynotes. My first one, I was expecting to be mesmerized. Alas, Jobs was ok. Nailed the demo, said what he was going to say, nothing more, and then left the stage. A real pro. Grade 'A', but not life changing.
I've seen RDF. Ever watch a charismatic evangelic Christian minister in action? A motivational speaker? A politician with the gift on the stump?
Reading the early stories of RDF, I have the impression the RDF (charm, seduction) referred to a one-on-one phenomenon.
As for public appearances, what distinguished Jobs from his peers is execution. Sorry fellas, but most of us geeks are introverts and shouldn't be giving demos. And sales pukes who make pitches are too often clearly full of crap.
Further, most tech pitches that I've seen required why too much suspension of disbelief. Jobs @ Apple always had a clear vision he was selling. I didn't always buy in (too bad for me). But it was never like he was pulling a con.
I never saw the RDF in quite that light. It always seemed to me to be a way that Jobs could convince people that something was revolutionary, earth shattering, world changing...even when it wasn't (or at best, a well executed evolution built on previous ideas). It was the pinnacle of salesmanship -- turning customers into religious followers. Something to be admired and feared.
That's why the figurative iShitinabox was such an on target joke. The idea was that Jobs could have put shit in a box, but a diminutive "i" before the name and had people lined up around the block for a week before launch ready to buy it -- all swearing that it's going to change the world.
And always, nobody in that line was ever willing to just fess up that they were camped out in front of the Apple store because Jobs told them to be there and buy his stuff. On questioning, they would all say, and perhaps even think, that it was an original idea for them to go there and stand in that line -- and that they were especially smart and clever people for having arrived at that idea by themselves -- and this cleverness is supported by the other 500 clever smart people who are camped out a week before they can actually buy iShitinabox -- or at least an amazing coincidence. They're all different(ly thinking) in exactly the same way.
And then in the months following, there'll be some segment of that buying population that will, deep down, be dissatisfied in some way with their iShitinabox, but can't quite get the mental lens in focus to really notice it because the RDF has them in its grips, and they'll flood internet forums talking about how iShitinabox is the best thing in the history of things and will fight detractors to the death -- deflecting constructive criticism, covering over product flaws, giving testimonials about how their life has changed, start marginally successful businesses around the iShitinabox that would be more successful if they also sold almost their exact same product to the other 50% of the planet that doesn't think iShitinabox is a herald of the second coming.
That is what Job's magic power was, his Reality Distortion Field.
It's not blind loyalty, that's wrong. The iProducts really are very good -- you get a damn fine product when you buy it. But it's the religious fervor that Jobs could generate, the obedience and recitation of the doctrine by Jobs -- bolstered by a tangible thing that you could point to.
What was it about Job's delivery that caused this to happen? I remember the first iPhone launch and people were lining up with stacks of thousands of dollars in cash so they could buy 20 or 30 of the phones at launch. People literally weeping in the street when the inventory was sold out and they couldn't get theirs. I've known at least a dozen people who bought every single iPod, iPhone and iPad like they were collecting Pokemon -- some even while barely making rent.
I know of at least one divorce over this phenomenon. After every keynote, my friend's husband would run out and buy pretty much one of everything that was put up for sale right after -- annihilating their savings for a new home.
I have a professor friend that literally can't control himself and spend thousands of dollars a month on subscriptions to various services and apps for his iProducts. In class, he will try and inappropriately push this stuff on his students like a born again preacher pushing the good news.
It's not a Field-of-Lies that comprised Job's Reality Distortion Field, but it's not really an innocent Field-of-Dreams either.
How in the world could the RDF be so powerful as to bamboozle users over the utility and novelty of features, when most of the people buying new Apple products don't even know what the specific features of the next product are?
That's what's so damn offensive about people trying to push the idea of the RDF, even when they try to soft-pitch the idea by saying the products themselves aren't bad.
The entire theory insists that the person who just used an iPod and iTunes for two years doesn't know a thing about their own experience. That their high opinion of Apple is driven not by their actual experience but by the magical mind powers of a person they've never heard speak. That they're objectively wrong and some person who's never used an Apple product for more than five minutes is right, as evidenced by some techno-gibberish on a spec sheet. And that when the happy Apple customer decides to try a Mac, because the iPod thing went so well and the Dell PC thing went so poorly, that the only possible rationalization is that they've been brainwashed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, majority of Apple's customers don't go around looking for Steve Jobs (if they know the name in the first place - before he passed away of course) videos and sales pitches.
(RDF or NOT) --> (People around SJ) -/-> (Average Apple customer)
I'm sure it will be rationalized as bad information or somesuch; but - open sourcing Facetime. The RDF is more of an exaggeration of the truth to the limit of the suspension of disbelief. If you call a product "Magical", is it not silly? What if the people that built the product actually believe it?
You seem to be a bigger fan of Apple than Gruber is, to the point of always accusing people of hounding Apple, I wonder what topics you're critical of him about.
>(EG: Just this weekend I read in "Inside Apple" the long refuted claim that Apple "stole" Xerox technology for the Mac. Amazing kind of a theft that was-- Apple paid for a license to use that technology with stock which, if held to present, is worth Billions of dollars. Quite the heist!)
In one earlier post you were claiming Xerox didn't invent the GUI, and that Apple did, and now you're saying it was properly licensed? If you're accusing others of thinking one-sidedly, you need to look in the mirror.
>Another example: for quite a time there, many windows fans believed that Bill Gates owned Apple, because to them $150M is a big "investment" and they think Microsoft bought Apple in 1997. (they didn't know that Apple had a lot more of that in cash already, and that part of the deal-- the bigger part-- was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
The biggest concession from Microsoft was that they made IE and MS Office for Mac, which kept Apple afloat for enough time to develop and launch OS X.
>was burying the hatchet on all the patents microsoft was violating, to the tune of several billion dollars a year from Microsoft paid to Apple for several years. This latter bit was reported, but kept quiet because Apple didn't care and microsoft wanted to save face... so its not widely known.)
What? Why would Apple lose billions a year for $150 million? That too wasn't a settlement but gave away actual shares of the company. If what you claim is true then Apple's management did a very crappy job and must be sued. And you say RDF doesn't exist. Like the Matrix, the ones under it's influence do not know they are in an RDF :)
I need to look in the mirror because you lied about what I have said?
I take yours and others insistence on insulting me as concession to all my points.
However, I do wish you'd been specific about what statements about FaceTime you consider to be a lie. Now I'm forced to guess. The only issue about FaceTime that I can guess would be controversial was the claim that the protocol was going to be made open or a standard, or that something might be open sourced. (I'm thinking it was the former.)
I don't think this was a lie, but an error. I suspect that this was probably Steve Jobs idea and a decision he made at the relatively last minute which turned out to be problematic either because FaceTime uses technology that Apple had licensed, and thus couldn't open source or a protocol that was licensed and thus Apple couldn't standardize. Or, it may be that they are in the process of doing this, possibly with some standards body, and are mired in bureaucracy?
I really don't know what happened (I don't even know the specifics of the alleged lie).... but in order for there to be a lie, I think there needs to be more than just saying something that is not correct.
There are lots of sources of error- misremembering, misunderstanding, misbelieving, or misspeaking. There needs to be an intent to deceive for it to be a lie, in my book.
This is a positive defense of Bill Gates too-- was he simply in error? Did he think that the Mac UI which did make it into OS X was the "real technology" and that the "kernel" of NeXTSTEP was the entire Cocoa frameworks? In that viewpoint you could say that what Bill Gates said is strictly true, though the result of that-- Isaacson thinking that the NeXT acquisition was a waste of money other than getting Jobs, is pretty deceptive.
Its possible Bill Gates is old and wasn't thinking clearly, or was deceiving himself,, or Isaacson is completely misrepresenting what he said.
[1] Note that to date, Apple has never released a Kindle competitor. It has released very different things, the iPhone and iPad. They do allow you to read books, of course, with iBooks, but Apple wasn't chasing the Kindle, and the question was whether Apple was going to compete with the kindle.
What it really comes down to is that their software is too opinionated. At every turn I get frustrated by one inanity or another until I give up and just use something that works without requiring mental contortions on my part.
I spent a long time thinking about whether the hardware or software is more valuable to me, and, in the end, I agree with Gruber. The software really does make the platform.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6857506/3.5in.png
Purple is the Galaxy SII circle. Orange is the iPhone circle.
Apparently the iPhone gives you magically larger hands for your smaller device. The confirmation bias is so thick it hurts.
Gruber, like everyone else, knows that the ThinkPad is a legendary design and that there are many people who prefer it over everything else. Picking it to serve as his example of inferior hardware was his signal that only true Mac fans should read on, so I didn't. Kudos to him for letting me know up front that the rest of the article wasn't my cup of tea.
Wouldn't it be nice if my MacBook Pro wasn't... didn't... was less... I'll spare you the complaints, and the praise for the ThinkPad T-series. They could both learn from each other.
I realize it's a matter of opinion which piece of hardware is superior. That's the point. Gruber threw up a billboard in paragraph four that says, if you think it's at all unclear that the MacBook Pro is the greatest laptop design of all time, read no further. If even he doesn't think this bit of hagiography ought to be read by a broader audience, who are we to contradict him and post it to a broader audience on HN?
"For me, the answers are easy. It’s the software that matters most to me. "
He then partners iOS and Mac OS software on competitor hardware because it is the software that matters most to him. He isn't using the ThinkPad as an example of "inferior hardware".
"That's the point. Gruber threw up a billboard in paragraph four that says, if you think it's at all unclear that the MacBook Pro is the greatest laptop design of all time, read no further."
No, he didn't.
When everyone stopped buying NeXT's elaborately designed hardware, Jobs slapped the OS onto beige 486 clones faster than you could press the turbo button.
There has been a lot of vilification of Isaacson's book, much of it seeming to draw ire because it presents Jobs as a mere human.
Do Apple engineers and Designers really work side by side? Or is it just that Apple prioritise design over engineering.
So rather than the engineers throwing a brick over the fence and saying "Designers, make it look good" it's designers throwing a sleek brick over the fence and saying "Engineers, make it work."
The antennae-gate was a REAL problem, that Apple changed it's design for (in the 4S)... Can we really accept there is no tension in Apple over these things (As Gruber is suggesting)?
Gruber concedes an inch to take a mile. It's a tactic as old as time and it's hardly surprising that he uses it here.
However it is the volume of the book dedicated to humanizing Jobs that turned many of Jobs greatest fans against Isaacson. As Gruber says "Isaacson got the self-absorbed hypocritical asshole right, but the world is full of self-absorbed hypocritical assholes."
In fact I think Gruber himself continued to understate the role NeXT technology played. Gruber writes:
> It is in fact, completely and utterly wrong.
> NeXTStep was not “just warmed over UNIX”.
> Apple did get NeXT’s OS to run on Mac hardware.
> Mac OS X 10.0 was a hybrid of Mac and NeXT
> technology, but it was clearly the NeXT system
> with Mac technologies integrated, not the
> other way around.
It would be also fair to say that iOS does not have any legacy "Mac" technology in its stack, and shares its spiritual lineage with NeXT alone.
I dunno. Post-Rhapsody, Apple worked hard to unify Carbon and Cocoa to provide a consistent user experience across applications. IIRC, in a surprising number of cases, the way unification was achieved was to make the Cocoa element be little more than a compatibility layer on top of Carbon. For example, I believe the save and open panels, print and page layout panels, and various dialog APIs worked this way.
It seems to me that if Carbon was viewed as a dead-end from the get-go, embedding it in many cases under Cocoa was a funny way of demonstrating that.
Carbon was a big project, and wasn't modest by any standard. Again IIRC, Apple rewrote the entire Finder in Carbon (and not in Cocoa) in order to test the Carbon library for bugs. Other things came from the Mac while their NeXTSTEP equivalents were abandoned: for example, UFS was blown away and replaced with HFS+. Quicktime was ported, as were 3D facilities and game APIs. NeXT's Soundkit was deprecated in favor of stuff for OS 9. Java, up through 1.3.x at any rate, came from OS 9. I think the font facility, always an ugliness in NeXTSTEP, was replaced with Apple's (including support for OpenType etc.). I think your depiction of this stuff as "modest" is not particularly accurate.
So anyway, Isaacson's depiction of OS X as being basically Mac technologies with a little NeXTSTEP kernel is ridiculous. But don't make the same mistake in the other direction.
It's hard when you find out that your hero was in many ways a contemptible person. And it's not a noble reaction, but certainly a human one, to go looking for some fault with the source of this news.
"the elegant sharp edges that encase many touchscreens require users to desensitize their hands in order to ignore the physical discomfort produced by the aggressive edges. Last year in Cupertino, I yelled at some people about touchscreens that paid precise attention to finger touches from the user but not to how the device in turn touches the hands of the user (and produces divot edge-lines in the flesh)."
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
It took me at least a full week to get my hand acclimated to the 4S edges.
For example, find articles on how to build Android in Snow Leopard and Lion. Besides the tool (which one escapes me at the moment) that simply shipped buggy and broke builds for many projects, the steps for getting up and running with an Android build are far more drawn out than in any Linux environment. Much of that is due to getting Xcode, or the things that Apple only ships via Xcode, git, etc.
The same was true for the iPod and especially Woz's Apple computer. It's still true for the iPad. I believe it will be true for Apple's next product category, because (hopefully) they'll continue to move to the edge of what is possible - where optimization is absolutely essential to be the first to get over that edge.
tl;dr hardware matters.
I think this is the review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5163/asus-eee-pad-transformer-... While it's true that Apple has its own SoC, this is built from existing components: it's just that the components are packaged together, instead of distributed across a mobo.
http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/06/audiences-earsmart-techn...
As time goes by, I'd expect "third party" SoC vendors to offer their customers an ever wider range of custom silicon, but there will likely always be advantages to being the "first party".
If I could mix and match here is what I'd take:
Software: iOS
Hardware: Nokia
Customer Service: Apple
Ecosystem: Amazon
Carrier: none of the above (the US sucks so bad...)
I'm curious as to why you would prefer a Nokia handset to an Apple one. I've found their designs to be uninspiring.
On the other hand, I'd take iOS running on, say, the Galaxy Nexus. If I jailbreak iOS, I can easily run iSSH, install inetutils, vim, etc, and come halfway to an amazing development device with access to the whole app ecosystem. For me, that's the dealbreaker (or maker, depending on the perspective.)
In fact, I have an 8-10 year old Dell laptop and a MBP bought within the last year or two. I planned to make the switch but I've kept using the old Dell and the MBP sits at home as a net-browsing machine for my wife.
Being as how I run a Macbook Air with Windows 7, and don't even remember what OSX looks like, my answer is pretty obvious. I've never used a laptop that feels as good (the touchpad is the best).
But Apple software? Meh.
So it's not as good as advertised, and doesn't seem as good as when OSX is running. That said, it's still relatively great hardware; there are quite a few Windows 7 laptops around my office, and nobody is bragging about how great their battery life is.
Isaacson writes fluidly, put in the research and reporting (also rehashed a lot of other people's), but doesn't know the technology or the tech business. In fact I don't get a sense he likes them or 'got' Steve Jobs.
Hatchet job might be strong. But he dwells a lot on the charismatic and narcissistic and mercurial personality and not on why so many great people loved Jobs and worked so hard for him. Or what his insights about products and the business were (besides being a control freak and perfectionist).
The book is a good read, it's a creditable first draft of history, contains some first-hand stuff I never saw before about the genesis of the iPod and iPhone and iPad.
Isaacson gives the who, what, when, where, but doesn't really explain why. To his credit, he lets the people speak for themselves.
Jobs could have picked a lot of other people, but he picked a non-tech, non-business writer. I guess he wanted someone to just tell the story, not the strategy or product vision that makes Apple great.
Maybe Gruber should interview a bunch of people and give it a shot. It's not what Isaacson set out for or was in a position to do.
Most of the time. But sometimes he tries to explain and fails miserably.
It wasn't a newspaper article, it was a book that everyone knew would sell tens of millions of copies (even if the subject hasn't died a few weeks before). If he had sought council of one Apple observer (about his explanations, and whether they were right or catastrophically wrong) before wrapping up the book and sending it to the publisher, the book wouldn't be such a mess.
> Jobs could have picked a lot of other people, but he picked a non-tech, non-business writer. I guess he wanted someone to just tell the story, not the strategy or product vision that makes Apple great.
Or, as John Siracusa said, he might've chosen the wrong guy.
On the other hand, someone like Gruber would be the absolute worst person to write a biography. He idolizes Jobs and Apple and is the farthest thing you can get from an unbiased observer. The only truth you would find in a Gruber biography of Jobs is the truth of how Gruber himself sees the world.
He wanted a bio that would help his kids get to know him better, and that's what he got. It's not a coincidence that the most intimate moments in the book all revolve around Jobs outside of Apple. That's what he talked to Isaacson about, and that's what Isaacson put to paper.
However, I felt the Isaacson intentionally diminished Jobs' genius, and while I'm not sure why, I suspect it was an ego decision.
He made it sound like Jobs just stumbled his way onto the path of success, and was lucky to have achieved what he did.
Why? Why are we even interested in reading a biography about Steve Jobs to begin with? Because he was a narcissistic asshole? Really? Because that's the part Isaacson nailed. There are plenty of assholes, and that characteristic alone does not make for a best-selling biography. No, the reason anyone is interested in reading Steve Jobs's biography is because of his work.
And yet, Steve's work is the part Isaacson doesn't get. Isaacson falls into the same traps that the media does with regularity; thinking Apple's design obsession is about veneer, thinking it's about marketing, about fooling people, about lying. It's not, that might sell a few products, but it does not sell record quantities of products and achieve top customer satisfaction.
You'd think a person with full access to Steve Jobs and people close to him would be able to at the very least ask a few questions about what he saw that others could not, that lead to the successes of eg. the iPhone. Recall other industry big wigs laughing it off, from RIM to Nokia to Microsoft. The iPhone was a joke to them. What did Steve see that they did not? What was his thought process? What made Steve Jobs so different for him to be able to upset industry after industry? These are things I'd have wanted to know and I can't help feel a bit sad that now we will never know. Because Isaacson squandered the only chance we got.
Ironically enough Gruber is a big fan of taking offense at these entirely predictable comments from CEOs. He's basically trolling himself by taking obvious talking points seriously and trolling his massive readership by continually re-broadcasting these comments that are entirely without merit or interest.
There's nothing wrong with that in general, but if you have special, unique access to an important industry figure, who is not going to be around for very long because he's dying, and you're writing what ought to be the canonical biography of the man, you really shouldn't be wasting your time putting false competitor trash-talking on the page, and certainly not without adding "but in fact Gates is wrong about this" and similar qualifiers.
Observing something happening and writing about that doesn't mean that it upsets you, or that you like it, or that you dislike it. It only means you find it interesting or telling in some way.
It was, and so was Mac OSX. What Gruber doesn't seem to get is that warmed over unix provides a much more stable OS than Windows NT or DOS. He should be proudly admitting its warmed over unix.
Second: "It’s almost impossible to overstate just how wrong Bill Gates is here, but Isaacson presents Gates’s side as the truth."
It should be mentioned more clearly that Gates was saying this on a sales call - his ultimate goal being to have every consumer computer made running Windows NT. If he stretched the truth a bit, he shouldn't be blamed for being ignorant, only ambitious.
This is what often irks me about Gruber - he makes disagreeing with Apple out to be an act of incompetence. Most engineers that don't like Apple products simply want greater customization over their tech, something Apple denies their users to promote ease of use.
Had NeXTStep only been a warmed over UNIX, wouldn't it have been better for Apple to just use Linux and X11, or even better use A/UX which already had a Mac-like interface?
Gruber is not really blaming Gates, he's blaming Isaacson for not doing proper research. He could have literally asked anyone for more information about this, and the answers he would have gotten would have provided more insight into what really happened and why Apple succeeded.
It enabled Apple to have OSX running on Intel from day one, and it made launching the iPhone and iPad possible without reinventing the wheel (which is what Nokia, Microsoft, RIM and Palm all had to do in response to the iPhone).
No, you're missing the point. The incompetence is not "disagreeing with Apple", it's "presenting Gates' assertion as fact when it demonstrably is not."
Isaacson's task was not to convey what Gates said on a sales call. It's not a book about Gates.
Isaacson was using the quote from Gates to make a point about Jobs and Apple, and because Gates was wrong (even if justifiably so given his motivation in context), Issacson misinformed the reader.
Isaacson ought to have checked out Gates' claims, with someone who would know, like Avie Tevanian, or Glenn Reid, whoever.
For example, the post-NeXT acquisition rant, which comes by way of Amelio, is effectively refuted by the whole life story that follows. So there's no need to spoon-feed a conclusion to the reader: "look how wrong Gates was!" Everyone gets it just about as well as Gruber does.
When he says that OSX used "some of the software that Apple had bought from NeXT", that's not a quote from anyone, it's still wrong (or grossly misleading at best, when the main reason to buy NeXT was to get the operating system). He could have asked anyone familiar with the topic, and he would have gotten the correct answer, which is that OSX is a direct descendant of NeXTStep.
Not at all; the entire rest of the book demonstrates the truth more richly than any sort of immediate-pairing-with-an-alternate-take would. It's not a compact newspaper story or a children's textbook: take it as a whole. Does it demonstrate the truth of Gates' quotes? Clearly not.
Even where Gates says, "let’s be frank, the NeXT OS was never really used", I don't see that as being presented as gospel by Isaacoson. It's just another accurately quoted viewpoint. (The presence of puffery like "let's be frank" and weasel words like "really" are clues to any reader that this assessment is very perspective-dependent.)
Gruber is probably right that Isaacson doesn't quite appreciate software or NeXT's technologies. I think Gruber was also right to refute the Gladwell 'tweaker' label, interpreted from Isaacson's work. But Gruber is wrong that leaving Gates' quotes dangling at the end of "this section of the chapter, with no additional commentary" leaves the average reader "to believe that the above is an accurate description of Apple’s NeXT acquisition." The average reader knows it's just an accurate quote of Gates' opinion, to be interpreted along with all the other info in the book, before and after.
If software were the only priority, OSX (and iOS) would be more modular, easily customizable and extensible - and it would be much more advanced than it is and than what its Unix roots allow it to be. And it would run on PCs since the 286 days (maybe with a decent graphics board). If hardware were the priority, they would have designed their own CPUs, embedded memory management functionality within the memory itself. By now, you would probably be able to SHA1 a block of memory without it ever touching the CPU data bus.
Much like a glass cockpit of a plane or your in-car entertainment system, you don't care what OS it runs or what types of CPUs are built into it. A Mac, an iP*d or an iPhone are devices you buy to cover a specific need - you want to write, crunch numbers, make phone calls, read books, listen to music, even write software... Of course, Macs are more flexible and allow a lot of customization, but it only goes that far. If you boot a Mac with Linux or Windows, is it still a Mac? Hasn't it lost something in the process? If you install OSX on an HP Envy, is it a Mac?
Jobs was a very flawed person, but he also saw differently, and did a lot of amazing things less flawed people failed at.
OS X is very customizable, and you mention the proof of this yourself: iOS. Apple was able to take the fundamentals of OS X and, within a few years, maintain it, and move code between iOS back into OS X. I don't think the evidence supports your premise, here.
> And it would run on PCs since the 286 days (maybe with a decent graphics board).
NextStep did run on Intel processors, from the get-go.[1]
> If hardware were the priority, they would have designed their own CPUs,
Starting with the iPhone 4, Apple did just this with their A5 chip.
Only if you are Apple.
> NextStep did run on Intel processors, from the get-go.
No. It ran originally on Motorola 68K processors (030 and 040) on NeXT's own hardware. It was then ported to other platforms.
> Starting with the iPhone 4, Apple did just this with their A5 chip.
But Macs ran PowerPCs (which were heavily influenced by Apple) and switched to commodity Intel processors. Apple did, for some time, design its own exotic hardware, but didn't went much beyond rendering expansion very difficult.
Isaacson was the perfect writer for this biography, in my opinion, thanks to his lack of technical knowledge. When you know the technology, it's easy to get lost in the things that don't matter. Isaacson has a fresh and often more objective perspective than any tech writer could. The details surrounding which kernel was used in Mac OS X and how much NeXT was responsible for really does not bring much value to me as a reader. Like I said, if I cared deeply about this, it's well documented already and easy to get from other sources.
What I got out of the book was a remarkably intimate look at the man himself: What made him tick, what his philosophies were, what the politics were and what the major obstacles were that he had to overcome. All of this, wrapped in an enthralling narrative and surprisingly intimate detail.
Isaacson may not have understood the technology, but he definitely understood Jobs' humanity, or sometimes lack thereof.
Even so, Isaacson did a really poor job of analyzing Steves personality, and never really confronts him about it. The closest we really get is Steve saying "well, that's just who I am", and a theory by Ive (or Hertzfeld?) about Steves motivations for being so cruel at times.
Couldn't Isaacson have confronted Steve about this theory? How about asking him how this fits in with his relation to Buddhism? Or maybe that would be too technical..?
Isacsson said that the book "wrote itself". As someone else pointed out, books rarely make good authors.
And hat author could be one of us. It can only be someone with the perspective to set it straight. It certainly won't be a writer thinking more about himself than his subject. In history, perspective matters more than profession.
It seems like something Gruber would agree with if phrased slightly differently (e.g. "the most important thing Apple got from NeXT was Steve Jobs") so I don't know why he's getting so bent out of shape about a quote from another book which Bill Gates himself immediately questions the truth of in the the Jobs bio.
(And is it just me or is it a stretch to attribute the iPod interface to NeXT? Choosing an item from a list and going to a sublist isn't something I remember them inventing.)
Gruber presents this as the best example of Issacson not trusting something true Jobs said and "trusting" the lies of others (as do you) but really it's just nerdy nitpicking about how far you should emphasise and editorialise the subjectivity of 3rd party accounts, there's no quote from Jobs being disproved in this example it's just Amelio (who in the anecdote just picked NeXT over NT!) describing Gates angry reaction at the time and Gates commenting about it later. Gruber's reaction is a total non-sequitur. He can't cope with an angry outburst by a rival that's just lost a business deal being left unchallenged, when the context is clear.
This is not to say Apple doesn't make good software, but there is very little in the actual output of the company that supports Gruber's notion.
Back in early iPhone days, one of the biggest complaints was a lack of multi-tasking in iOS -- you could only ever have one app running at a time. There were no push notifications, etc. The Apple explanation, per Jobs, was that they consciously chose to exclude that capability. A few versions later, voila -- iOS supports multi-tasking. This sort of cycle -- explain why a feature didn't exist due to some chosen policy/belieft, then include it in later revisions -- became a pattern for Apple.
Flip to the hardware side, and the story is different. When has Apple hardware, since Jobs return in the nineties, ever been a compromise? It hasn't, because Jobs focused on the hardware. While the software is important, it is really a means to an end. The hardware meets this condition too, but it is much higher in the pecking order of consideration than software.
I think we have yet to see the full spectrum of Apple's focus on software. Until the iPhone, they were hardware oriented (the Mac, the iPod). But since then, they are moving towards software. They make some of the best Mac and iOS apps after all.
But I had this nagging 'hey, I read that before!' feeling back in my head - and I was right, although I heard similar complaints before - voiced by John Siracusa (you know the guy that writes 10+ pages reviews of new versions of OS X on Ars Technica? That's him.) on his 'Hypercritical' podcast.[1] It's long (1h15m, and it's only the first part.), but in my opinion absolutely worth listening to.
If you have free time, or have nothing to listen to while commuting - give this one a shot.
I was also a little surprised by the timing of this piece, because I also felt like I'd seen/heard some of it before -- but I realize the audience for DF is bigger than the audience for the Talk Show & Hypercritical, so it makes sense & is well sourced.
I am hoping that Avie Tevanian writes a really good memoir. In a perfect world, one on par with Hertzfeld.
The author doesn't seem to understand that Isaacson isn't writing for a HN audience. To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route.
Same thing with de-emphasis of software. It is pretty much impossible to explain why a certain piece of software is good using words to a non-programmer audience - who may not even have seen an Apple device. I'd have glossed over software too especially since everyone associates Apple with brushed aluminium hardware anyway.
Just because some aspect isn't discussed in the book doesn't mean the author is ignorant of it.
These types books are meant for mass market entertainment, not a technically literate HN crowd. Of course if you measure the book against the wrong bloody benchmark then it fails miserably. And yet somehow after pages of doing exactly that the author manages to highlight his own mistake in the final 2 sentences:
>Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
If he's writing about Jobs, then it's pretty much inexcusable to fail to put it the way Jobs would, rather than how "the vast majority of people" would.
Nope. Function is how it works. Design is what it is.
Jobs got that, whatever else anyone can say about him.
The hardware is an aesthetic superior design. But I run windows 7 on it. I find windows 7 to be a far superior user experience to osx, faster, and at least on this hardware more stable. Apple provides the easiest driver install procedure for windows then any other provider, I just find osx itself... Rather primitive, most likely imo due to the insistence of Apple on providing a hermetic user experience.
No tech company, no matter how smart, has all the answers in one box.
Those are called Miller Columns, and NeXT popularized them, but they were pioneered much earlier:
http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/42 (about 18 minutes into)
When you write a book about a technology giant's CEO and you can't even get the name of the company right ("Apple Computers"), you have to wonder what else is wrong.
> But, as a thought experiment, which is more important to you? What phone would you rather carry? An iPhone 4S modified to run Android or Windows Phone 7? Or a top-of-the-line HTC, Samsung, or Nokia handset running iOS 5?
This is a fascinating question to me because though I agree with Gruber on preferring OS X on the PC hardware (for now anyway, at least vs Windows rather than Linux), I think I actually would prefer Android on an iPhone. My biggest gripe with Android is the shitty hardware and the seeming inability of any manufacturer to make a touch-screen that is not glitchy as fuck all. When it comes to software I concede iOS has more polish and there tend to be better designed apps. But on the other hand, Android has the more powerful apps. For instance, I use DoggCatcher for podcasts on android, and I've tried a half-dozen iOS podcast apps, many of which are more elegant, but they are extremely under powered feature-wise. Apple's philosophy of only have a home button is elegant serves discoverability, but I don't think it's inherently better, and for power users I think it can be a disadvantage.
Apple clearly excels at: marketing/brand, hardware, and partner/supply chain management. But Apple's software quality is all over the map. Further, Apple does not "get" the internet (and never has).
Since "hardware vs software" was the focus of JG's post, I'll briefly state my case around those two elements.
Apple gets hardware. I doubt that anyone would argue otherwise. Fabulous objects-of-desire emerge from amazing industrial designs. I can't even think of a laptop I'd consider in the same league as the Air. Ditto the iPad, iPod, and Airport. (The iPhone is in a much closer race with the Samsung gear.)
Apple also sports price-performance advantages In certain key areas. iPods have held more memory per dollar since the earliest days of MP3 players, for example. HP was unable to match the iPad. And now the Air and other "computer products" have closed the gap. This is an under-appreciated aspect of Apple's game.
Apple sometimes gets software too. I personally loath the one-button-ultra-modal aspect of IOS. But the myriad of brilliant features (e.g., pinch, scroll, etc.) blow me away, in both a design and execution sense. Apple is great at UX-in-the-small. But at application-level, things aren't so balmy.
iTunes and its syncing model are frustrating at best. Mail, iCal, and Address Book are only now getting better than (elegant) toys. These three have had serious bugs for years. iWork - forget it. App uninstall is incomplete, leaving many remnants. OSX's underlying file system is a joke, as is MacPorts. Lion's desire to mimic IOS is frustrating at best.
Apple is the greatest show on earth based mainly on their brand development and their ability to produce must-have objects.
Oh, and I'd (reluctantly) take Win7/Air and IOS/Samsung -based on the strengths of the hardware in each case. A split decision.
Bob
I'd take the ThinkPad running 10.6 thanks. 10.7 is a total clusterfuck. It pisses me off (a seasoned developer) and it confuses the fuck out of my wife (who isn't).
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/10/27/theJobsBook.html
http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/21/whyJobsChoseIsaacson...