RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011
This is the Washington Post – Bloomberg coverage.
The two Steves [Jobs and Wozniak] were frequent visitors in SoCal when I worked out there, and actually attended user group meetings with new products.
The key to their products wasn’t innovation, they actually didn’t do much, it was in the design of the products and marketing. They made what they built ‘important’ to people, even if it wasn’t really. Jobs understood his customers, and instinctively knew what they would buy.
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What was impressive about the Apple II wasn’t the technology inside, which was inferior to the then-existing CP/M computers based on the 8080 and Z-80. What was impressive about the Apple II was the plastic box that enclosed it. Before the Apple II, microcomputers were these stamped sheetmetal *things* that looked more at home in a telco closet somewhere than in someone’s home. That’s because it’s *easy* to bash sheet metal — just stamp it, then screw another piece of sheet metal to the top, and voila. But Steve Jobs convinced investors that if he took Woz’s Apple I design and put it into a friendly plastic case that looked like a home appliance, he could get people other than hardcore computer geeks to buy computers. They invested in plastic molds when everybody else was, like, “what a waste of money, it won’t cool as well and it’ll put out more RF interference.” Well, yes. But it looked like something you could have in a corner of your living room, not in a telco closet, and when you turned it on, it came up with BASIC right there ready to go, no toggles or anything to boot load an OS. Whoa! And it sold millions.
What Steve had was taste. He wasn’t an engineer, he was a user. But oh, what a user — the kind of user who knows exactly what he wants, and was willing to brow-beat the engineers for as long as it took for them to give him what he wanted. And what he wanted turned out to be what a whole lot of people wanted too, Jobs Reality Distortion Field or no — easy to use *quality* appliances that didn’t require an advanced degree in Windows Registry to use.
– Badtux the Geek Penguin
Oh yeah, why I normally use a Mac: Because it doesn’t annoy me. Everything else I use annoys me. Linux annoys me. Windows annoys me. My MacBook Pro, on the other hand, *doesn’t* annoy me. It Just Works, and lets me do what I want to do with the computer, rather than spending time “managing” the computer. The true genius of The Steve was that he wouldn’t let technology out of his company unless those three words — It Just Works — were true.
When you maintain absolute control over the hardware and software, it isn’t difficult to build a good product. He only stole the best ideas, and made sure they worked before he sold the device.
He had more in common with the head of a fashion house, than most of the engineers who started most of the other PC makers. He dictated the style, and wouldn’t accept anything that didn’t match his concept.
The San Diego phone book wrapped in aluminum foil provided the necessary shielding to put a monitor on top of an Apple IIe.
The weird thing was that most of the Apple II’s I dealt with had 80-column cards, the 16k card, and the Z-80 card so they could run WordStar. People bought the Apple and turned it into a CP/M machine. It was the design, not the technology.