Comment by AnotherGoodName
4 months ago
Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear.
I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!).
Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances with threads from others on the same issues on Apple devices. From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar to the crappy spell check and crappy spam filtering. As much as Jobs apparently came across as an asshole there’s a need for someone at the top to say ‘WTF is this, fix it or get fired!’.
I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid
Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.
Completely agree.
I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.
Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.
What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?
It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.
A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.
I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.
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I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.
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I was just thinking about Linux/Linus the other day. How will Linux fair when Linus is no longer with us?
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Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end
If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.
In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.
But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.
Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean
The instant on thing actually bothered me enough to make switch from windows back to Mac( by proxy the idle battery drain on windows was also pretty terrible)
Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.
Try saying the same things over and over to adults for years
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Yeah, with an attitude like that it's no wonder his products were such failures.
> Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.
See from the replies to this how well you got your point across.
Yes, Steve Jobs was a jerk.
Alas, human don't come fully customisable. You get to pick from the packages on offer. And it seemed like for Apple Steve Jobs' good parts only came as part of a package that also included his bad parts.
To me it sounds like the symptom (emotion) of someone who deeply cares.
These things need to be well-placed to be effective. Sounds like it was.
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>Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!"
When did the OG MacBook Air have instant on at launch in 2008?
IIRC the M1 brough Instant on and Jobs wasn't around anymore.
Most macbooks I remember since a long time ago were pretty much instant on way before apple sillicon. Maybe you had some corporate crapware installed in yours/.
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Does not look like it was a healthy work culture.
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I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".
It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.
I don't think it requires being an arsehole. Just being firm. That doesn't require arseholery.
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Skill issue. There are other ways to get those results, but being an asshole is the lowest-hanging, and is nearly free if the people around you don't have the self-respect to walk away.
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Surely there must be some counter examples. Collison brothers at Stripe ?
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Or the incentive aligned.
This is really what it is.
Not just that, but the strong leader needs to ensure that it can be fixed.
Yelling at a rank-and-file to unfuck some random system, then not giving them any time, resources, or tools to fix it is just being a dictatorial dickhead.
> From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar
One of the most aggravating things in iOS. Trips me up almost every day (and it's been there for what? 10 years now?)
Wait until you realize that the icon of the period and spacebar don't at all line up to the touch area due to touch gravitation. You can tap slightly more on the spacebar side and still end up with a period. https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1ekszul/comment/lgn...
So if you suffer from this it's not even your fault. You're literally hitting the spacebar but some incentive at Apple in their org structure has led to the period literally having waaaay too much weighting and the lack of exec oversight at Apple in the post Jobs days is leading to us all.typing.periods.whenever.we.just.wanted.to.search.
This.is.incredibly.annoying.
But.you.took.a.weight.from.my.shoulders. I always.thought. I was an incompetent who couldn't hit the spacebar correctly.
All this time (literal years) I thought I.was.losing it.
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Holy shit my phone has been gaslighting me this whole time???
rightnnextntonthenspuriousnninsteadnofnanspace
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but yes, there seems to be an increasing number of small issue with Apple devices. They aren't major stuff simply not work, but yes, spam filter being pretty terrible, text overlapping on non flagship phones (e.g. the iPhone SE). All sorts of minor annoyances.
Yep I've worked at other big tech where they had periodic "executive bug filing" where executives would flag minor things that are annoying. These minor issues would then have higher than normal priority purely by virtue of being flagged by an exec. I have a likely controversial opinion that this executive bug filing actually led to better outcomes.
It did break prioritization in the opinion of the ground level teams and their goals but I argue it's not bad to at least periodically do this since grating against the current org structure prioritization and goals is not a bad thing to do on occasion.
Chances are they'll find there's no team that considers themselves the owners of spell check or spam filtering and the goals the keyboard team are going for is likely some silly thing like "number of sentences with correct punctuation" leading to the current ridiculous outcomes where the period in the URL is way too prominent, especially considering we don't even type full URLS into the search bar that often these days.
Dear Apple leads: if you're reading this do a short initiative where execs aim to file an annoyance a day. It's not hard to find such. There will be some complaints at the ground level that these executive annoyances get too much priority but part of that will be because you're questioning lower level org priorities (a healthy thing to do!), not because the issues don't matter. The end result will bring Apple a bit more in line with the quality we saw during the Jobs period since this is exactly the kind of shake up he did on occasion.
Currrent MBPs have bright green/orange charging lights on both sides of the magsafe connector. They're bright enough I have to block them when I'm in a hotel and my laptop is in the same room.
That light was really helpful to do the occasional late night visit to the bathroom in a home where I lived where there were no light controls at the bedside.
https://xkcd.com/1172/
There has to be something going on with iOS Safari and the keyboard because my typing goes to complete shit in ways it never does in any other application.
Here are some random examples I thought of for this comment. Notice how everything is spelled wrong as though the screen input doesn’t match the location of the buttons.
- tomoroww eather in united.kingdom
- lookip exhange rate
- devopper news
- download twotter.video
I notice this as well, i think it is because the autocorrect is turned off and we may just be so used to it learning our typing habits that our "raw" typing is really that bad
> I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!).
The lack of status LEDs is actually the only thing I really REALLY hate about MacBooks!
Too often I have been bitten by the thing not properly going to sleep because SOMETHING keeps a wake lock (and of course macOS doesn't indicate this anywhere outside of Energy Monitor, nested in System Activity) and overheating in my bag as a result. A simple LED would have been a good visual indicator that it is still awake.