Comment by nirava
8 hours ago
He famously shipped the original Macintosh with a keyboard without arrow keys to force buyers to use the mouse.
His vision of perfection didn't always match common sense. There are quite a few examples of this.
I always cringe a little when I read these "jobs would have rolled over in his grave" comments.
He would've not let the abysmal slop like iOS 26 UI to ship ever.
Some things he didn't appear to care much about, the polished UX was his schtick.
I am 100% sure that Steve Jobs could have shipped a broken Czech keyboard if that was in pursuit of some random abstract like purity or minimalism. "iOS keyboard has too many keys. Reduce keys make them larger. People should not use these obscure symbols anyway". (extrapolated from a couple of biographies and a couple of books on 1980s Apple I read, this is very consistent with his character).
As for iOS 26, no reasonable person would have let it ship. From one source (John Gruber -> "Bad Dye Job") the previous head of Apple's UI design team who lead the UI team was just not a UX designer, he was just a visual designer or something. I think it shows.
You are over-exaggerating.
As much of a snob that Jobs was it's nonsensical to say that he would've knowingly insisted on changes that locked users out from their devices. That's just nonsense. At the very least there would've been a prompt to change the password phrase or some such in upgrade. And if it did happen as an oversight, it would've been patched on the first report and some heads would've rolled.
But that's the difference. Jobs might've done something like this for a reason. That's not what happened here. He probably wouldn't have tolerated it as a bug.
Jobs was a perfectionist and a minimalist. Part of minimalism is that sometimes you delete marginal features (arrow keys) that you still end up wanting back.
If you never delete too many features, you aren’t deleting enough features.