this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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I was reading an interesting article the other day about how after World War II people were obviously opposed to populism, and by the '80s and certainly the '90s people that were born after the war had lost the awareness of the danger that hero worship creates.
At the same time, many organizations including government organizations had failed to update themselves over the years, so people romanticized the idea of someone walking in and magically making the correct snap judgments that would remedy the situation. This was so pervasive in the business world I think in part because it allowed corporate executives to justify f****** over ordinary employees. If the company makes or breaks because of one person at the top, who cares if you're paying people minimum wage and they can't even afford to pay for dental care or a car.
What amazed me is how long that vision of Steve Jobs stuck around. Even in recent years people have been praising him, but if you think of the value in his company, it's mostly a load of s***. Those phones and computers are incredibly overpriced, and they have so many bad aspects, especially lock-in, which most people intuitively understand these days. And still we have Apple addicts.
This is the internet. You can say the word fucking.
Especially considering it's what about 95% of all the websites are based on.
I'm not an Apple fan, I never liked the way he dictated form and function and told everyone to fuck off about their feelings. Now that said, his leadership did bring some things to market that would not have grown organically, for better or for worse.
The competition had to contend with good phone battery life, unibody laptops with high DPI screens, and large touchpads with physical feedback. Left to their own devices, these companies would have just kept regurgitating/iterating the same cheap designs they had made for decades.
He wasn't magic; if he had any superpower, it was attracting and retaining talent.
Jobs created toxic work environments. That’s nothing to envy. Nothing to replicate. But we’re in a capitalist society so fuck your feelings.
I don't think that word, or anything like it appeared in my statement.
...and so did Linus Torvalds*
he's certainly not the embodiment of capitalism. But I absolutely have a huge amount of respect for Torvalds, even if I don't approve of his way of interpersonal/professional style.
(I used to run Arch btw [but I run Debian now].)
*He's supposedly taken steps in the right direction here and has made improvements.
Pretty sure Apple just packaged shit other companies made with extraordinary marketing. Like the ipod circle everybody went nuts for they settled a lawsuit with creative because of patent infringement. I actually had a creative zen and loved it because it didn't have Apple software trying to control my music library.
I think if they would have kept the original tactile wheel that spun they would have been fine. When they redid it into a touch sensitive ring they were screwed.
A lot of the design elements came out of Johnny Ive, honestly I never really liked most of their design elements. But they did try to bring some premium look and feel in a time when every laptop out there was just plastic trash.
Your take feels incredibly aggressive. Most people do not want to tinker, they just want their tech to work… Regarding Steve Jobs, are you saying he did not steer Apple to a level of success and prosperity that 99% other companies dream of?
Your opinion of what is overpriced is just your opinion. Apples sales numbers says otherwise, they do not have a monopoly in any market they compete in.
Congratulations, you have defended ultra capitalism and the destruction of workers and competition for the personal profit of the shareholders.
Yes I’m an ultra capitalist because I recognize history? Good one bro
okay so you are right about people wanting their tech to work, but it really is categorically untrue that Apple is the only way to achieve that, or that they achieve that consistently at all.
Take for example the Google Pixel: price competitor to the iPhone, has parity with iOS on software updates, features, and functionality. I got my mom the Pixel 6 4 years ago, and she has never had an issue using that phone. in fact she uses it so heavily you'd think she's a power user, despite having used a flip phone until 2018. it certainly can break, but I can buy Pixel genuine parts on iFixit and replace my battery or a friend's.
Windows is actually ass, I'm not defending it - but it does "just work" for many non-technical folks, as bad as it may be.
and let's talk about MacOS and Mac computers in general. Have you tried doing something as basic as snapping a window on stock MacOS, or worse, had one fail in some way and needed to have it repaired?
Soldered SSDs that you can't remove are not user friendly and don't "just work" when 20 years of photos just went up in smoke because you needed a board-level repair expert to de-solder and read the NAND chips only to discover that they're dead, not to mention having to buy a new machine every few years as the chips continue wearing out, and are serialized and paired to the device so you cannot replace them. Obviously, the customer won't understand all that. But they will understand that they lost their photos and spent thousands of dollars that they could have saved, not because the repair tech wasn't skilled at their job, but because hostile Apple design lost them 20 years of photos and forced them to get a new computer.
not to mention Apple's literal crime against privacy in the UK. Also, those SSDs I mentioned? FileVault backs their encryption keys up to iCloud by default, meaning if your key goes to iCloud in the UK, the police and anyone who gets access to iCloud can decrypt and read the full contents of your machine by booting it into recovery mode and decrypting the volume with said key, because Apple bent over for regulators instead of just disabling iCloud for their users entirely and blaming regulators, or just leaving ADP as is.
I'm not sure what you're defending Apple for.
Why is everyone so aggressive about history and facts? Please take your blind rage back to Reddit. This thread is about Steve Jobs, acting like he did not lead Apple to numerous successes is a bold face lie. You might not agree with his methods but that doesn’t mean he accomplished nothing.
Your example proves my point, the alternative, Google, is just as if not more evil than Apple… just because they allow third party stores and less lock-in does not mean their product is better. Each person can choose the product that suits their needs.
I can't speak for everyone but I find facts and history important when discussing the behavior of any person or organization's behavior.
Steve Jobs did make Apple very successful - but at the same time, Apple still did bad things and those things are a part of what he did, for better or worse, and refusing to critique them is also not advisable.
less lock-in is better for user choice and user experience, as defined by the meaning of lock-in. If a user is massively inconvenienced by a service or device when they attempt to move away from it or if something else fits their needs better, that stifles user choice because the switching costs are too high.
your original comment mentioned that users want their devices to "just work" - do you think Apple's more aggressive lock-in is conducive to devices "just working" when the user wishes to switch to Android or PC as opposed to iOS or Mac?
Of course he did bad things, he’s human, every great person has said, you learn and grow from your failures.
Apple’s iOS was far more polished than Android in the beginning. Hell, Apple’s iTunes Store paired with its iPods revolutionized the cell phone with the iPhone.
The lock-in has both pros and cons. Do i think it’s hard to move off of Apple once you’re in it? No not really, again they don’t own a monopoly in anything. They just provide a very polished experience in what they do aka “it just works.”
The only thing you can’t really transfer is one-time Apple App Store purchases.
Is it easy to switch from Gmail? Yes, creating a new email is easy, do you get the same benefits leaving the market leader? Most likely not…
More like he was one person in a company and gets all the credit because society can't fathom that anybody other than the leech on top has the impact they really do