> I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore.
This is what I see. The biggest test was the Vision Pro. Amazing hardware but only "another iOS" software vision for it, which is a tremendous dropped ball. Another toy-app/media kiosk with its service subscription lanyard.
To me, the Vision Pro screams out that it wants to have a richer interface than a Mac, with spacial friendly windows, a serious work environment, unfettered by a screen boundary. Ironically, to the point of tragedy, the Vision just allows importing of a Mac screen ... as a larger Mac screen.
The Vision screams out for a full spacial development environment, that by being a better place to develop software for any device, Mac or iOS, also pulls developers into creating spacial applications, by default, for themselves as much as anyone else. Again, tragically, Vision Pro development is limited to happening on 2D Mac screens (physical or imported). Xcode, terminal, JIT capable, etc.
Finally, if there is an obvious new dimension of AI that has not been tapped yet, relevent to Apple's greatest heritage, it is the combination of AI and spacial to enable entirely new modes of interaction. AI allows 3D content to be created in more efficient ways than ever before. A perfect and novel fit for spacial hardware and software, that natural habitat for 3D.
Those are three powerful and related software extensions for computing, that will happen, each within the hardware capabilities of today's Vision Pro.
I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces, with AI in a supporting role, beyond the Mac in power and capabilities. It would have made the $3500 price tag completely sustainable. Many of us buy MacBook Pro's loaded up well above that price tag.
But, along with software innovation, Apple has lost the bicycle for the mind philosophy.
> I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore.
Reminds me of when Intel was trying to create a completely new instruction set with Itanium. They tried to frame the failure as "our customers wanted backward compatibility". The scarier reality was they could no longer design new instruction sets anymore.
In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.
Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was worried about which direction we were pointing."
The Apple board had hired a series of presidents who, in the short term, were good for the stock, but bad for the company strategically. The one good thing they did was hire a guy who didn't give a shit about any of that, tore up the old products and wanted a clean start. Thus, the iMac and iBook was born.
> Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away... They just...
This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.
Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.
Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.
Not sure what point exactly you are making. But the Wall Street Journal had a bunch of stuff about Apple engaging what was later known as 'Enron-style accounting'. They were a big company, and they did have a serious cashflow problem. So they needed a bailout from someone. (which happened to be Microsoft rather than wall street)
Also disagree with GP's point - Apple is definitely not Next. Next was an enterprise software company. If they were more successful they would be in the same category as Oracle.
What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS
NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.
At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.
All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
Yeah, I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS demonstration when I asked how the slides were printed (at that time, BeOS did not have print drivers).
I agree. While it's definitely technically possible for Apple to transform BeOS into a more Mac-like experience much like how OPENSTEP was transformed, what saved Apple wasn't Mac OS X alone (which wasn't available for consumers until 2001), but Apple's cleaning up house and then gradually launching a revitalized product line, which brought in many new customers (especially the iMac). These things encouraged software developers to keep targeting the Mac and also bought time as people waited for Mac OS X. Apple also did a good job with Mac OS 8 and 9.
I don't think Apple under Jean-Louis Gassee would have successfully made these steps. Apple probably would have ended up getting purchased by some larger tech company by the end of 1999; Apple almost got purchased by IBM sometime around 1992-1993, and in early 1996 Sun made a serious proposal to buy Apple.
>Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then.
So? No shortage of "multi-billion dollar companies" that became footnotes. Blackberry. Nokia. SGI. ...
Let's be overly dramatic, cause it's more accurate to how bad they had it.
>> They just had very bad supply chain management.
The crazy thing is Joe O' Sullivan had set out a two month training for Tim Cook to learn the supply side of the company. Cook mastered it in two weeks and O' Sullivan was forced to step down a lot sooner then he anticipated.
You could easily say it was Cook, not Jobs that saved the company.
With the utmost respect to Tim Cook, Apple was saved by the
iMac, which was designed and built in the year leading up to his hire. Everything after that, though, he certainly deserves more credit for than he gets.
I must have missed the bit where Steve Jobs was trying to create “legion” of his offspring, supported far-right parties in Europe and tried to foment civil war in the UK.
Even then, Musk didn't cut fat and then produce multiple revolutionary products. He tanked Twitter's ad revenue and wound up with a much smaller business that had to get bailed out by SpaceX, otherwise it doesn't pay for the acquisition costs.
Keep in mind Apple was dispersed across a multitude of confusing and overlapping products, from computers, to PDAs, cameras, scanners, printers (laser and inkjet), application software, servers, things made by Apple, and things that only got Apple's label, and so on. A common complaint was that not even Apple employees could figure out which Mac was more powerful just from the model number.
Jobs simplified the lineup - two sets of laptops, two sets of desktops, one professional, one personal. This shut down a significant part of the operations across the board.
You are implying that firing a lot of people is a bad thing, or at least that firing a lot of Apple or Twitter employees is a bad thing.
I don’t think I’m really that qualified to stand in judgment of the Twitter employees, but after the massive house cleaning, the only major negative changes to the company’s fortunes that I know about is that a lot of liberals decided to flee the platform. But that doesn’t seem connected to the layoffs - that would’ve still happened because of either their policy changes or his overall unpopularity with that crowd. We didn’t see any more notable stability problems with the platform than it had at any point in its long existence. And new features kept being shipped.
In the case of Apple, given that the company was so close to insolvency, I don’t see how anybody could seriously argue that most of management was in severe need of replacement. And when you’ve built an organization to do what turned out to be a lot of the wrong things, it’s likely that a lot of roles really do need to be replaced with different job descriptions.
The only way you can argue mass layoffs are always categorically bad is if we are viewing companies as jobs programs rather than pursuing any other mission (and I’d argue that this holds true even if that mission isn’t to make money).
I am no fan of Jobs, but ... his goal when he returned was to "right the ship" which is his mind translated into "create cool products". You might think that he & Apple succeeded at that, or you might not, but I don't think that you can dispute that this was the goal.
Musk had no similar goal for Twitter other than to turn it into a platform for his techno-fascist creed. The only complaints about Twitter that he wanted to act on were that too many people were mean to techno-fascists.
That's how chapter 11 type bankruptcy works. The business continues to run but the debtors are now the owners. There's also chapter 7 where the business shuts down and stripped for parts to pay the debts.
Apple was NeXT but not anymore. All the NeXT people were pushed out. Turns out, most of the work was being done by the NeXT people. Probably when Scott Forstall gets stabbed in the back by Tim Cook, that was the end of the NeXT era of Apple.
Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.
It's batshit that people still talk like apple is lost technically when apple silicon has absolutely crushed, airpods are the default headphone of the world, and macbooks are the best overall package available at all price points. And why? because they arent interested in VR and the glass aesthetic is kind of janky? Absolutely minor issues.
True but people also forget Microsoft invested a lot of $ into Apple to keep it going. M/S did that so they could point to Apple as a competitor during their anti-trust trials.
That investment gave Jobs time to turn Apple around, otherwise it would be gone.
I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical misperceptions.
It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.
Interesting, this seems to have been around for quite a while, though not as long as AfterStep and Window Maker. I wonder why the author decided to write their own version instead of helping out with one of those projects.
If you want more on this, I recommend Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Stross. I’m not sure, but it might be the only extensive book about Next other than this new one.
Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs.
In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.
While maybe biased, also shows a bit about the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field, and why Apple hardware costs what it costs, even when the delivery isn't up to the premium price.
If you want another take from that period the 1997 book "Apple" by Jim Carlton (WSJ reporter) is pretty good. The inside jacket starts "Whatever happened to Apple Computer?" and the forward by Guy Kawasaki frames the book as an after action review of a company that has failed. It has its own problems, but by avoiding the confusion of Apple's later success I think it provides more interesting coverage of some the stuff they did in that middle period while Jobs was out.
>>the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field
A lot of things come in full package, same person putting in the same effort(if not better) in a different place/situation doesn't give the same results.
I once worked with a senior engineer/leader at a electronics company who delivered great products/results and ran the shop to literal perfection for like a decade. The company got sold, and he moved on. He was just not able to replicate the same success after that ever, despite by his own admission he tried even harder else where.
Despite the fact that Jobs was like the greatest ever, Im sure without Apple, its culture and overall company inertia he wouldn't be able to do much either.
This is also why if you have some kind of a winning combination you are better off sticking with it even if its not entirely perfect. Anything else could be way worse.
If you read books like the one mentioned above, even if biased, you will see that he did not do pretty well with NeXT, it was actually a mess.
Outside the impressive hardware and NeXTSTEP, NeXT was bleeding most of the time, had it not been for a few generous VCs that had Steve Jobs in high regard, NeXT would not have survived until the moment of Apple's acquisition proposal.
Having your company acquired by Apple, having them base vital parts of their business on your technology, and having your leadership merged into theirs could be seen as a successful outcome.
Maybe my memory is wrong. I haven't read it in years but I don't remember it being a hit piece. I remember liking it quite a bit and thinking it was a really interesting look at NeXT. It is an interesting artifact because it came out in 1993 and the author couldn't have predicted what would happen to NeXT or Jobs.
Why did it need to be charitable? Jobs was hardly a saint.
I remember that era well, working for an early (potential that never happened) NeXT software developer, then one of NeXT’s 1st commercial accounts. It was a quite horrible workstation, if pretty. The pre-release rumors about it _were_ enough to push Sun into the SparcStation 1 program (heard from a very connected person at the time). So, thanks Steve.
Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross covers the NeXT years extensively and in period. Highly recommended also to do some “archeological” read/research into what it was like to sell computers in the late 80’s, early 90’s
Jobs' life story makes me reflect on the choices we make in life. My impression is that yeah he changed the world, but he was really embattled with himself and the world, and he made a lot of enemies, partly because he stood on his principles and beliefs, come what may, but I'm sure there's more to the story
I've seen variations of this line so often from incumbents
"Oh, some Apple folks", he addressed us in a condescending tone"
I remember reading an account about NVIDIA from its Riva-128 days very early on where the incumbent 3DFX (later acquired by NVIDIA) came over to their booth with a condescending tone, and the Riva made 3DFX's flagship product look like a toy
It's always the damn condescension, it seems to trigger greek tragedy endings and honestly world changing products -- the Mac, the GPU, it's always some asshole disrespecting an underdog to the point of rage
I bailed on the official bio when I got to the part where Jobs is (belatedly) crediting his adoptive father with showing young Steve the importance of (paraphrasing) "giving as much attention to the parts of the product that the customer will never see".
It was clear at that point that this would be a Jobs-directed bio and I saw no point in continuing to read that.
I think it was about the back of a cabinet, and that attitude certainly exists in woodworking. It's reasonable for learning to appreciate that as an adolescent to have a big impact on a person.
And even if that book were fully dictated by Steve Jobs, it can still be valuable to know what such a person thinks (or claims to think) about things.
I'm not denying that the sentiment exists—but everything ever written about Jobs and his relationship with his adoptive parents has shown Steve to have been dismissive of them.
This 11th hour "coming to Jesus" for Jobs where suddenly he's heaping praise on them… smelled off to me.
cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring. the only transferable skill is in finding the next one (me, obviously, xP), so that we can similarly talk ourselves into how it was obvious and evolutionary and etc.
i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.
Anyone with a hot negative take on Steve Jobs should watch some of the interviews and presentations he gave as early as the 80s. To me he comes across as a really sharp and surprisingly genuine person. Certainly with flaws but compared to others he just seems real, for lack of a better word.
The things he says are sometimes amazingly prescient, like the interview was made in the 2000s instead of decades earlier, and it's interesting how much effort he puts in to trying to explain it to those who had no idea. It certainly impresses me, when I see it with the benefit of knowing what happened.
I would have loved to see his take on the current AI developments. There is a primordial stew bubbling now that reminds me of both the personal computer and smartphone revolutions but nobody in the circus seems to have any real idea what the most important implications are. I think Steve might have.
> it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring
Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.
Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.
> the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses"
In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.
When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.
When I was younger I read the book "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing". It was a book about Steve Jobs and NeXT, written before Apple bought Next but far enough along that it was clear that NeXT wasn't going to work out.
It's a really interesting book because it was essentially saying that Steve Jobs was a terrible manager and NeXT was a disaster. I don't think it was wrong either. NeXT was a disaster for its investors.
The lessons I take from that story are: You can do a hundred things wrong and one thing right and the one thing may save you. Most everything NeXT did failed but they created OSX. No one is a perfect genius, everybody makes mistakes, and the most effective people learn from their setbacks.
I consider that Steve Jobs saved the macintosh as a commercial product twice, not only at his second coming, but also when he overrode Jef Raskins ideas in the first iteraction.
Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work:
- Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design
- Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation
- Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel
- Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible
- Mike Paquette who wrote Display PostScript (and then, repeated that by writing Quartz, née Display PDF after the Apple bought NeXT) --- his posts to Usenet:comp.sys.next.* are a hoot and well worth looking up
- John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep
(for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause)
That NeXTstep included a number of major advances/breakthroughs (7) was noted in the advertising at the time, suggesting that the reader of the ad could then create the balance for a total of 10 --- some of my favourite apps:
- Lotus Improv --- Lotus didn't dare kill of Lotus 1-2-3, so they wrote a new program, which had SJ sending them bouquets of flowers --- a recurring theme in _NeXTWorld Magazine_ was a list of applications which were wanted, and when developed were described as "in the bag" --- really wish I could justify Quantrix at work, or that someone would update the code for Flexisheet so that it would compile....
- Altsys Virtuoso --- v1 was created by the team behind Freehand v1--3, and v2 of AV was ported to Mac OS and Windows as Macromedia FreeHand 4 (a .vrt file could be opened by FH4 by changing the file extension of the .vrt file in the document bundle to .fh4)
Other ports were notable, but more prosaic w/ WordPerfect being notable for taking full advantage of Display PostScript and Services and being done in just 6 weeks time (easily done since they started w/ a working Unix version).
It is notable that for a long while, WebObjects was basically keeping the company alive, with major vendors including the USPS and Dell (that latter was a major embarrassment to MS, and their efforts to change Dell over did _not go well and garnered some notable press).
Sad my Cube no longer boots, it w/ a connected Wacom ArtZ, paired w/ an NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running Go Corp. PenPoint (and later an Apple Newton MessagePad 110) represent the high-water mark of my GUI experience and got me through college --- these days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and a MacBook w/ Wacom One, but I still run Freehand/MX....
My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.
Thanks to both you and the GP commenter for the references. I've queued both of them up to download. CHM's oral histories are priceless, though finding the right ones to listen to can be difficult with the volume.
I don't have the book, and I don't have much faith in writers, esp. when writing about NeXT, e.g., David Pogue writing in his column in _MacWorld_ and noting that Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad (correct) running Windows 95 (incorrect) since he couldn't be bothered to check that the ThinkPad model in question (I believe a 760C) was of course on the NeXTstep Intel compatibility list, and so, was of course running NeXTstep --- Lighthouse Design's Presentation.app was used as the model for Apple's Keynote.app
Will concede that David Pogue is a bit of a hack compared to the other biographers. I didn't think his recent book added much except for some stories from the Tim Cook era.
I don't think so --- it was originally a Mac application done by a company named Forethought, Inc. in 1987 (per Wikipedia), while the NeXT didn't come out until late in 1998
Yeah, I was a beta-tester for Freehand/MX and argued then that the NeXTstep code should have been revived to make a Cocoa app rather than the MacOS front-end to make a Carbon app.
Much respect to Steve and the engineers at Apple. However, I hate using a product from Apple that actually causes me physical pain after using it. The magic mouse. I use that for 10 minutes and my palm and wrist hurt badly. Many have experienced the same symptoms and yet Apple hasn’t changed its design. I get that Apple is creative. Do they change their product design based on feedback from actual users in their creative process?
I have an older magic mouse that I replaced with a Logitech one. I won't say the Apple one caused me pain after ten minutes but I really didn't like the design after using it for a while. Much more comfortable.
I’m so confused. Your complaint is that Apple don’t make a mouse that you like?
Are you in some situation where you are being forced to use a Magic Mouse?
Other manufacturers make mice in every form factor you can imagine. I don’t believe any apple product comes with a Magic Mouse bundled - you’re not forced in any way to buy one.
Apple don’t make any headphones that I like. I don’t feel like this is a failing on Apple’s part?
Magic Mouse isn't ergonomic. You can't use it plugged in. Its little ball gets dirty quickly and becomes hard to use. The buttons are hard to distinguish by touch.
Kind of surprising how bad it is since it's their official, heavily advertised option.
Thankfully the walled garden at least has ports for outside equipment.
The Mighty Mouse (the one with the little trackball on the top) was so much better except for the weekly cleaning required. My last one died a few months ago.
I still use the first generation Magic Mouse when I have to, and I hate its sharp edges.
I don't know anyone who likes it, they usually say they prefer the trackpad.
It helps that non-Windows trackpads were the first ones I could really use. (Deliberate phraseology; trackpads on Thinkpads running Linux worked pretty well for me too.)
Interestingly, seem to work better on Windows these days as I've discovered inadvertently. Bought a cheap used/surplus Thinkpad to install Linux and discovered it came pre-installed with Windows 11 and it actually works well.
Depends what I'm doing. I'm very happy just using a trackpad day to day but there are some things like photo editing where I prefer a mouse.
I have a Thinkpad style USB keyboard meant for server racks. Has a trackpad and that little joystick. It's only flaw is it that it's too old for that windows key.
There are newer versions which have that key: Lenovo Group Limited Lenovo ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint (I bought half-a-dozen the last time they were made so that I would be sure of having one in the future).
Apple sells an ergo vertical mouse on their website. It's not made by them (it's Logitech), sure. There's are also different options depending on your needs, like the kenisis dxt mouse, a plethora of trackballs, etc. Why are you demanding Apple specifically reinvent an ergo mouse?
Yeah, I meant to work that into my post as the final twist --- his book _Weaving the Web_ was written using one of my favourite tools, NaviPress, a WYSIWYG HTML editor which supported the HTTP Push protocol (AOL later bought them out and made it available as AOLpress) --- really bummed that Amaya has been dropped and that there isn't a nice/free/opensource alternative (that I'm aware of).
They are hardly forgotten considering the OS was a key influence of Mac OS X and you can see clear features of it today. It was hugely important in the mid 90's graphics and 3d animation era too. Such a fabulous piece of design, both software and hardware.
I would much have prefered a world where Next and Mac OS never combined and we had both, as the Mac O7-9 were also a real treat to use.
NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features by running a command that edits a XML file that really is just a large dictionary to remove or modify features
This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager.
From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word
By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc
To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.
Microsoft brought in an external OS designer (Dave Cutler) who had experience designing robust kernels that were actually used (most famously VMS). NT also was not required to be an instant switchover, and was "tested" first in niche (and often new) roles as a back-office server OS and NT/win2k corporate desktops for years before the general public was exposed to it via Windows XP. But Microsoft supported windows 3.11/9X/ME for more than a decade after windows NT was first released in 1993.
Apple had less resources, especially in the dark 1990s, to support such a move. It was made even worse by the fact that its leadership was probably not even aware of the difficulty in moving over, as well as the fact that 1990s Apple wasn't exactly a place people expected to "change the world?".
Mac OS was a step in a different direction, however development was far less compelling for OSX than classic. Think C was far more enjoyable and created far smaller and less power hungry apps, which allowed for a greater range of possibilities on low powered chips.
Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely:
Jobs:
I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube.
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
One thing that often gets overlooked is how much failure and constraint shape better leadership. It seems like the NeXT years gave Jobs the space to rethink product focus in a way that likely wouldn’t have happened if Apple had kept succeeding uninterrupted.
In Many ways, Jobs was just like Elon Musk. He fired people left and right (check out any documentary about the apple days).
Politics rules everything. You can be liberal and literally get away with murder. Gates was hated from 2000 on and loved again when the tech community found out he supported forced vaccinations and climate change.
And now, the thing people are most likely to bring up is him partying with Epstein and attempting to slip Melinda some antibiotics after he got an STD.
> I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore.
This is what I see. The biggest test was the Vision Pro. Amazing hardware but only "another iOS" software vision for it, which is a tremendous dropped ball. Another toy-app/media kiosk with its service subscription lanyard.
To me, the Vision Pro screams out that it wants to have a richer interface than a Mac, with spacial friendly windows, a serious work environment, unfettered by a screen boundary. Ironically, to the point of tragedy, the Vision just allows importing of a Mac screen ... as a larger Mac screen.
The Vision screams out for a full spacial development environment, that by being a better place to develop software for any device, Mac or iOS, also pulls developers into creating spacial applications, by default, for themselves as much as anyone else. Again, tragically, Vision Pro development is limited to happening on 2D Mac screens (physical or imported). Xcode, terminal, JIT capable, etc.
Finally, if there is an obvious new dimension of AI that has not been tapped yet, relevent to Apple's greatest heritage, it is the combination of AI and spacial to enable entirely new modes of interaction. AI allows 3D content to be created in more efficient ways than ever before. A perfect and novel fit for spacial hardware and software, that natural habitat for 3D.
Those are three powerful and related software extensions for computing, that will happen, each within the hardware capabilities of today's Vision Pro.
I believe Steve Jobs would have gone all in, to deliver the next big thing in software interfaces, with AI in a supporting role, beyond the Mac in power and capabilities. It would have made the $3500 price tag completely sustainable. Many of us buy MacBook Pro's loaded up well above that price tag.
But, along with software innovation, Apple has lost the bicycle for the mind philosophy.
> I think they’re still going to make great [software]. It’s just not going to be the cutting-edge anymore.
Reminds me of when Intel was trying to create a completely new instruction set with Itanium. They tried to frame the failure as "our customers wanted backward compatibility". The scarier reality was they could no longer design new instruction sets anymore.
In many ways modern Apple is largely Next. The Apple that was dying when he returned largely faded away. Folks forget that Apple was literally days away from simply going bust. One of the most amazing comeback stories in the history of business.
Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then. They just had very bad supply chain management. A bunch of old Macs sitting in warehouses not selling and too many people on payroll without any clear objectives. As Steve put it, "the ship was sinking and Gil (D'Amelio) was worried about which direction we were pointing."
The Apple board had hired a series of presidents who, in the short term, were good for the stock, but bad for the company strategically. The one good thing they did was hire a guy who didn't give a shit about any of that, tore up the old products and wanted a clean start. Thus, the iMac and iBook was born.
> Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away... They just...
This is historical revisionism, and there's a lot of it around, where Apple is concerned. Since those days, Apple has done a great job of controlling the narrative in the media, and has managed to bury a great deal of what was written back then.
Microsoft was in the middle of one of their antitrust investigations, where they were accused of monopolising the market for computers. They had demonstrated others in the courtroom, running non-Microsoft OSes and office suites, including an Amiga and a Mac. But Commodore had already gone bust, so there was only Apple left.
Then came the news that the previous post was referring to - Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. By all accounts of the time, Microsoft absolutely shat themselves, expecting the biggest fine in antitrust history. They could not allow Apple to fail, so investing was their only option. Nowadays, even that investment is sometimes framed as yet another amazing feat that could only be carried out by the deity that is Steve Jobs. Jobs even had to drop their still-ongoing OS look-and-feel lawsuits against Microsoft as part of the deal.
Not sure what point exactly you are making. But the Wall Street Journal had a bunch of stuff about Apple engaging what was later known as 'Enron-style accounting'. They were a big company, and they did have a serious cashflow problem. So they needed a bailout from someone. (which happened to be Microsoft rather than wall street)
Also disagree with GP's point - Apple is definitely not Next. Next was an enterprise software company. If they were more successful they would be in the same category as Oracle.
What? Next an enterprise software company is one of the weirdest takes i’ve ever heard in my 3 decades in the industry. They were a workstation manufacturer with impressively cute UIs and an interesting software stack over MachOS
NeXT became an enterprise software company when it shut down its hardware division around 1993. At first it only sold its operating system, which got ported to x86, PA-RISC, and SPARC. Then, NeXT started selling development tools and libraries. The OpenStep API was developed as part of a joint project with Sun. OpenStep is an Objective-C API that is based on NeXTstep’s libraries, but made to be portable. OpenStep was the native API for the OPENSTEP (note the capitalization) operating system and was also available for Sun Solaris and even for Windows. I have a CD named OPENSTEP Enterprise, which is installable on Windows NT and Windows 95. There was also Portable Distributed Objects, which was NeXT’s take on distributed objects, which was big in the 90s (like CORBA). Finally, NeXT had a web server named WebObjects that had major customers such as Chrysler in 1996.
At the time Apple purchased NeXT, NeXT was definitely an enterprise software company. The black workstations were gone, the operating system was not marketed to casual users but to developers and others who needed software that used the OpenStep API, and it sold various developer tools.
All that is true, but only the first part of the story. The OpenStep stuff was also not really successful and effectively became a very expensive MS Windows dev tool (or least that's where 99% of revenue came from).
Next's only real successful product was WebObjects. (Which imo was a terrible take on a web server framework and it was just about to be obliterated by J2EE when Apple bought them out.)
eta: I guess its fun to romanticize this and pretend they only made cool black computers and portable unix software. But if Next was successful, HN would hate their fucking guts.
Their stock price was less than the estimated liquidation value of the company when I bought in ~2000 as dot-com was dot-bombing.
I bet if they had went the BeOS route instead, wouldn't be talking about Apple today.
Yeah, I was just about bodily ejected from a BeOS demonstration when I asked how the slides were printed (at that time, BeOS did not have print drivers).
I agree. While it's definitely technically possible for Apple to transform BeOS into a more Mac-like experience much like how OPENSTEP was transformed, what saved Apple wasn't Mac OS X alone (which wasn't available for consumers until 2001), but Apple's cleaning up house and then gradually launching a revitalized product line, which brought in many new customers (especially the iMac). These things encouraged software developers to keep targeting the Mac and also bought time as people waited for Mac OS X. Apple also did a good job with Mac OS 8 and 9.
I don't think Apple under Jean-Louis Gassee would have successfully made these steps. Apple probably would have ended up getting purchased by some larger tech company by the end of 1999; Apple almost got purchased by IBM sometime around 1992-1993, and in early 1996 Sun made a serious proposal to buy Apple.
>Let's not be overly dramatic about that period. Apple was not days away from going bust. They were months away from filing bankruptcy. They were still a multi-billion dollar company even then.
So? No shortage of "multi-billion dollar companies" that became footnotes. Blackberry. Nokia. SGI. ...
Let's be overly dramatic, cause it's more accurate to how bad they had it.
So that's Intel few years later too. Looks good on the book, looks bad on the bone
>> They just had very bad supply chain management.
The crazy thing is Joe O' Sullivan had set out a two month training for Tim Cook to learn the supply side of the company. Cook mastered it in two weeks and O' Sullivan was forced to step down a lot sooner then he anticipated.
You could easily say it was Cook, not Jobs that saved the company.
With the utmost respect to Tim Cook, Apple was saved by the iMac, which was designed and built in the year leading up to his hire. Everything after that, though, he certainly deserves more credit for than he gets.
and gave a gold trophy to the current US president
It's funny how many people Jobs had to fire during this period, but is still seen as a good guy to many in the tech community.
Not that different from when Musk took over Twitter.
I must have missed the bit where Steve Jobs was trying to create “legion” of his offspring, supported far-right parties in Europe and tried to foment civil war in the UK.
Guess I’ll have to buy the book
He isn't comparing Jobs to Musk in a general sense, but specifically the way Musk took over Twitter.
Not that I agree with the point. But I wouldn't assume the poster thinks Jobs and Musk are similar in a broad sense.
Even then, Musk didn't cut fat and then produce multiple revolutionary products. He tanked Twitter's ad revenue and wound up with a much smaller business that had to get bailed out by SpaceX, otherwise it doesn't pay for the acquisition costs.
I don’t think that the good guy/bad guy reputation referred to is solely about firing a couple thousand people.
They are from the same species.
Essentially 99.9% similar.
It’s not the same at all. The only equivalence is firing people.
Another difference worth pointing, Jobs wasn't seen as a pedo or nazi. And we haven't seen him begging already convicted Epstein to go to his island to enjoy the wildest parties. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/28/elon-mu...
Keep in mind Apple was dispersed across a multitude of confusing and overlapping products, from computers, to PDAs, cameras, scanners, printers (laser and inkjet), application software, servers, things made by Apple, and things that only got Apple's label, and so on. A common complaint was that not even Apple employees could figure out which Mac was more powerful just from the model number.
Jobs simplified the lineup - two sets of laptops, two sets of desktops, one professional, one personal. This shut down a significant part of the operations across the board.
You are implying that firing a lot of people is a bad thing, or at least that firing a lot of Apple or Twitter employees is a bad thing.
I don’t think I’m really that qualified to stand in judgment of the Twitter employees, but after the massive house cleaning, the only major negative changes to the company’s fortunes that I know about is that a lot of liberals decided to flee the platform. But that doesn’t seem connected to the layoffs - that would’ve still happened because of either their policy changes or his overall unpopularity with that crowd. We didn’t see any more notable stability problems with the platform than it had at any point in its long existence. And new features kept being shipped.
In the case of Apple, given that the company was so close to insolvency, I don’t see how anybody could seriously argue that most of management was in severe need of replacement. And when you’ve built an organization to do what turned out to be a lot of the wrong things, it’s likely that a lot of roles really do need to be replaced with different job descriptions.
The only way you can argue mass layoffs are always categorically bad is if we are viewing companies as jobs programs rather than pursuing any other mission (and I’d argue that this holds true even if that mission isn’t to make money).
I am no fan of Jobs, but ... his goal when he returned was to "right the ship" which is his mind translated into "create cool products". You might think that he & Apple succeeded at that, or you might not, but I don't think that you can dispute that this was the goal.
Musk had no similar goal for Twitter other than to turn it into a platform for his techno-fascist creed. The only complaints about Twitter that he wanted to act on were that too many people were mean to techno-fascists.
If Apple went bankrupt, Everyone would be without a job.
Not it they simply went Chapter 11 and reorganized.
Is that how filing for bankruptcy works?
That's how chapter 11 type bankruptcy works. The business continues to run but the debtors are now the owners. There's also chapter 7 where the business shuts down and stripped for parts to pay the debts.
Yeah, Trump went bankrupt 3 times, and he's still here
cough 6 times cough
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/ge...
Companies in USA go bankrupt all the time and keep operating.
It's just a legal way to not pay your debts as I understand.
Anyway it happened to me. Basically any stock they gave us was worthless but they kept going and paid salaries.
Apple was NeXT but not anymore. All the NeXT people were pushed out. Turns out, most of the work was being done by the NeXT people. Probably when Scott Forstall gets stabbed in the back by Tim Cook, that was the end of the NeXT era of Apple.
Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.
It's batshit that people still talk like apple is lost technically when apple silicon has absolutely crushed, airpods are the default headphone of the world, and macbooks are the best overall package available at all price points. And why? because they arent interested in VR and the glass aesthetic is kind of janky? Absolutely minor issues.
According to his Wikipedia, Craig Federighi left Apple in 1999 for Ariba, and then returned to Apple in 2009, after Snow Leopard.
We all know that Snow Leopard is considered by many to be the peak of OS X, and Craig returned afterwards. Coincidence?
True but people also forget Microsoft invested a lot of $ into Apple to keep it going. M/S did that so they could point to Apple as a competitor during their anti-trust trials.
That investment gave Jobs time to turn Apple around, otherwise it would be gone.
I think a deeper dive into Job's evolution during the 12 years at Next is an excellent idea. However, I found statements like this concerning: "Apple version one was failure in many ways." In context, 'Apple version one' means Apple 1977 to 1985 (when Jobs left). But the Apple II product line was a huge success for more than a decade. That's a big thing to miss in an article claiming to correct historical misperceptions.
It also says "the Macintosh itself was not a commercial success" which is another strange claim. While the Mac wasn't the unit sales leader compared to [all PC brands combined], from 1984 to 1994 it beat PCs on revenue, margin and mind share.
"Becoming Steve Jobs" had a great part about NeXT and how Steve Jobs grew there to bounce back once he was back at Apple. This looks promising.
I think it's very interesting to read about how his personality grew and how he became a better manager and visionary at his time between CEO-ships.
In case you don't know yet, there is a project that tries to bring the NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux:
https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
I wish that all of these sort of efforts would be folded into GNUstep:
gnustep.org
and that we would arrive at something useful and easily installed and widely accepted.
Interesting, this seems to have been around for quite a while, though not as long as AfterStep and Window Maker. I wonder why the author decided to write their own version instead of helping out with one of those projects.
There was WindowMaker for a while too, just a window manager.
If you want more on this, I recommend Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing by Stross. I’m not sure, but it might be the only extensive book about Next other than this new one.
Though it’s essentially a long hit piece. The author really had it out for Jobs.
In fact it’s a completely uncharitable book now that I think about it. Hopefully this new book will be a lot less biased.
While maybe biased, also shows a bit about the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field, and why Apple hardware costs what it costs, even when the delivery isn't up to the premium price.
If you want another take from that period the 1997 book "Apple" by Jim Carlton (WSJ reporter) is pretty good. The inside jacket starts "Whatever happened to Apple Computer?" and the forward by Guy Kawasaki frames the book as an after action review of a company that has failed. It has its own problems, but by avoiding the confusion of Apple's later success I think it provides more interesting coverage of some the stuff they did in that middle period while Jobs was out.
Thanks
>>the real Steve Jobs without the distortion field
A lot of things come in full package, same person putting in the same effort(if not better) in a different place/situation doesn't give the same results.
I once worked with a senior engineer/leader at a electronics company who delivered great products/results and ran the shop to literal perfection for like a decade. The company got sold, and he moved on. He was just not able to replicate the same success after that ever, despite by his own admission he tried even harder else where.
Despite the fact that Jobs was like the greatest ever, Im sure without Apple, its culture and overall company inertia he wouldn't be able to do much either.
This is also why if you have some kind of a winning combination you are better off sticking with it even if its not entirely perfect. Anything else could be way worse.
Jobs did pretty well with Pixar and Next. So it seems he was able to do things outside of Apple.
If you read books like the one mentioned above, even if biased, you will see that he did not do pretty well with NeXT, it was actually a mess.
Outside the impressive hardware and NeXTSTEP, NeXT was bleeding most of the time, had it not been for a few generous VCs that had Steve Jobs in high regard, NeXT would not have survived until the moment of Apple's acquisition proposal.
> did not do pretty well with NeXT
Having your company acquired by Apple, having them base vital parts of their business on your technology, and having your leadership merged into theirs could be seen as a successful outcome.
Did the NeXT investors make out OK?
We really should thank Marcia Lucas for agreeing to split up with George.
Maybe my memory is wrong. I haven't read it in years but I don't remember it being a hit piece. I remember liking it quite a bit and thinking it was a really interesting look at NeXT. It is an interesting artifact because it came out in 1993 and the author couldn't have predicted what would happen to NeXT or Jobs.
Nifty book by Rob Blessin and his son Luciano, _Inside NeXT_ which is worth looking up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvxze8gZq8
Jobs really did make a lot of boneheaded decisions when running NeXT; this book just calls him out on it.
Why did it need to be charitable? Jobs was hardly a saint.
I remember that era well, working for an early (potential that never happened) NeXT software developer, then one of NeXT’s 1st commercial accounts. It was a quite horrible workstation, if pretty. The pre-release rumors about it _were_ enough to push Sun into the SparcStation 1 program (heard from a very connected person at the time). So, thanks Steve.
Steve Jobs & the NeXT Big Thing by Randall E. Stross covers the NeXT years extensively and in period. Highly recommended also to do some “archeological” read/research into what it was like to sell computers in the late 80’s, early 90’s
Why did the author have it out for him?
Jobs' life story makes me reflect on the choices we make in life. My impression is that yeah he changed the world, but he was really embattled with himself and the world, and he made a lot of enemies, partly because he stood on his principles and beliefs, come what may, but I'm sure there's more to the story
One can see a little bit about this in the stories from Folklore.org, e.g.,
https://www.folklore.org/Tell_Adam_Hes_An_Asshole.html
I've seen variations of this line so often from incumbents
I remember reading an account about NVIDIA from its Riva-128 days very early on where the incumbent 3DFX (later acquired by NVIDIA) came over to their booth with a condescending tone, and the Riva made 3DFX's flagship product look like a toyIt's always the damn condescension, it seems to trigger greek tragedy endings and honestly world changing products -- the Mac, the GPU, it's always some asshole disrespecting an underdog to the point of rage
Another book that focuses on this period is Becoming Steve Jobs
I love “Becoming Steve Jobs” much more than the official biography.
I bailed on the official bio when I got to the part where Jobs is (belatedly) crediting his adoptive father with showing young Steve the importance of (paraphrasing) "giving as much attention to the parts of the product that the customer will never see".
It was clear at that point that this would be a Jobs-directed bio and I saw no point in continuing to read that.
I think it was about the back of a cabinet, and that attitude certainly exists in woodworking. It's reasonable for learning to appreciate that as an adolescent to have a big impact on a person.
And even if that book were fully dictated by Steve Jobs, it can still be valuable to know what such a person thinks (or claims to think) about things.
I'm not denying that the sentiment exists—but everything ever written about Jobs and his relationship with his adoptive parents has shown Steve to have been dismissive of them.
This 11th hour "coming to Jesus" for Jobs where suddenly he's heaping praise on them… smelled off to me.
Same
Yeah, that's definitely my favorite book about Apple/Steve Jobs.
cannot wait for this book. it is insane that steve jobs has somehow become underrated because the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses”… that is such a painfully reductive narrative it beggars belief. there is a reason he is in/on the pantheon, and to talk yourself out of it is to do yourself a disservice. it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring. the only transferable skill is in finding the next one (me, obviously, xP), so that we can similarly talk ourselves into how it was obvious and evolutionary and etc.
i cannot summon any other product announcements that ANYONE cared about in the way that people in my (nerd) dorm did for steve. you don’t have to put his merits and demerits on a ledger to appreciate his greatness. just take “the good parts” and leave the bad. he is sui generis.
I agree, he was one of a kind.
Anyone with a hot negative take on Steve Jobs should watch some of the interviews and presentations he gave as early as the 80s. To me he comes across as a really sharp and surprisingly genuine person. Certainly with flaws but compared to others he just seems real, for lack of a better word.
The things he says are sometimes amazingly prescient, like the interview was made in the 2000s instead of decades earlier, and it's interesting how much effort he puts in to trying to explain it to those who had no idea. It certainly impresses me, when I see it with the benefit of knowing what happened.
I would have loved to see his take on the current AI developments. There is a primordial stew bubbling now that reminds me of both the personal computer and smartphone revolutions but nobody in the circus seems to have any real idea what the most important implications are. I think Steve might have.
> it’s just that a lot of his skills are not transferable because you have to cultivate the kind of taste he spent his whole life acquiring
Steve had great taste and keen insights as a PM, but what pushed him to GOAT status was his intuition for people and his capacity to rally them to his cause. Whether pre-Apple, at early Apple, NeXT, Pixar, or modern Apple, he was consistently able to identify world tier performers and get them to join the vision and do great stuff.
Witness that some of those people are still making Apple what it is 15 years after his death. That’s an insane skill that you very rarely see, whereas as a designer I see people with great taste not that infrequently.
> the lesson has become “sometimes assholes are geniuses"
In my experience, the asshole label, when faced with competence comes from people who are incompetent, insecure or, very often, both. I've seen this in action more than once.
When someone who is --to generalize-- one standard deviation more competent than a group comes into that group, they tend to be attacked like white blood cells attack foreign matter. Office politics and culture can be brutal and destructive this way. If everyone is comfortable, professionally non-threatening and at the same relative competence level, all is well. Smooth sailing. Introduce someone significantly better and you have a problem.
When I was younger I read the book "Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing". It was a book about Steve Jobs and NeXT, written before Apple bought Next but far enough along that it was clear that NeXT wasn't going to work out.
It's a really interesting book because it was essentially saying that Steve Jobs was a terrible manager and NeXT was a disaster. I don't think it was wrong either. NeXT was a disaster for its investors.
The lessons I take from that story are: You can do a hundred things wrong and one thing right and the one thing may save you. Most everything NeXT did failed but they created OSX. No one is a perfect genius, everybody makes mistakes, and the most effective people learn from their setbacks.
I consider that Steve Jobs saved the macintosh as a commercial product twice, not only at his second coming, but also when he overrode Jef Raskins ideas in the first iteraction.
Probably three times: If they don’t make the Intel transition, I don’t think the Macintosh survives the Tim Cook era. We’d all be using iPads.
Is it really forgotten considering it gets mentioned almost everytime he is?
Presumably, the book goes into depth about the folks who actually did the work:
- Susan Kare and Keith Ohlfs who did the UI design
- Caroline Rose (Author of _Inside Macintosh_) who wrote the documentation
- Avie Tevanian (the most heavily recruited CS student at that time w/ job offers from Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft) who wrote the Mach Micro kernel
- Brad J. Cox (author of https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1945013.Object_Orient...) who created Objective-C
- Jean-Marie Hullot who created Interface Builder and which made Steve Jobs' "5 Minute Word Processor Demo" possible
- Mike Paquette who wrote Display PostScript (and then, repeated that by writing Quartz, née Display PDF after the Apple bought NeXT) --- his posts to Usenet:comp.sys.next.* are a hoot and well worth looking up
- John Anderson and Bill Tschumy who wrote WriteNow, first for the Mac, then porting the ~100,000 lines of assembly to NeXtstep
(for a couple of years, MacExpos were SJ showing off things previously shown at NeXTexpos to thunderous applause)
That NeXTstep included a number of major advances/breakthroughs (7) was noted in the advertising at the time, suggesting that the reader of the ad could then create the balance for a total of 10 --- some of my favourite apps:
- Lotus Improv --- Lotus didn't dare kill of Lotus 1-2-3, so they wrote a new program, which had SJ sending them bouquets of flowers --- a recurring theme in _NeXTWorld Magazine_ was a list of applications which were wanted, and when developed were described as "in the bag" --- really wish I could justify Quantrix at work, or that someone would update the code for Flexisheet so that it would compile....
- Altsys Virtuoso --- v1 was created by the team behind Freehand v1--3, and v2 of AV was ported to Mac OS and Windows as Macromedia FreeHand 4 (a .vrt file could be opened by FH4 by changing the file extension of the .vrt file in the document bundle to .fh4)
- the map builder for a little game called _Doom_
- a full-fledged desktop publishing app by Glenn Reid (author of PostScript Language Design (the Green Book) and https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8260463-thinking-in-post...) Pages.app by Pages, Inc.
Other ports were notable, but more prosaic w/ WordPerfect being notable for taking full advantage of Display PostScript and Services and being done in just 6 weeks time (easily done since they started w/ a working Unix version).
It is notable that for a long while, WebObjects was basically keeping the company alive, with major vendors including the USPS and Dell (that latter was a major embarrassment to MS, and their efforts to change Dell over did _not go well and garnered some notable press).
Sad my Cube no longer boots, it w/ a connected Wacom ArtZ, paired w/ an NCR-3125 (since donated to the Smithsonian) running Go Corp. PenPoint (and later an Apple Newton MessagePad 110) represent the high-water mark of my GUI experience and got me through college --- these days I use a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, and a MacBook w/ Wacom One, but I still run Freehand/MX....
My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.
- Steve Naroff who basically hacked together Objective-C++ in a few weekends. His interview with the Computer History Museum is worth a watch.
Caroline Rose also has an interview there, and it was also well-worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RikO_3jedlY
Thanks to both you and the GP commenter for the references. I've queued both of them up to download. CHM's oral histories are priceless, though finding the right ones to listen to can be difficult with the volume.
Weird to state all these details, leading with 'presumably'
I don't have the book, and I don't have much faith in writers, esp. when writing about NeXT, e.g., David Pogue writing in his column in _MacWorld_ and noting that Steve Jobs used a ThinkPad (correct) running Windows 95 (incorrect) since he couldn't be bothered to check that the ThinkPad model in question (I believe a 760C) was of course on the NeXTstep Intel compatibility list, and so, was of course running NeXTstep --- Lighthouse Design's Presentation.app was used as the model for Apple's Keynote.app
Will concede that David Pogue is a bit of a hack compared to the other biographers. I didn't think his recent book added much except for some stories from the Tim Cook era.
Wasn't PowerPoint also based on an application initially made for NeXT?
I don't think so --- it was originally a Mac application done by a company named Forethought, Inc. in 1987 (per Wikipedia), while the NeXT didn't come out until late in 1998
I was on the Virtuoso team at Altsys. Until Freehand was murdered by Adobe, there was still a ton of NeXT flavor in it.
Yeah, I was a beta-tester for Freehand/MX and argued then that the NeXTstep code should have been revived to make a Cocoa app rather than the MacOS front-end to make a Carbon app.
Much respect to Steve and the engineers at Apple. However, I hate using a product from Apple that actually causes me physical pain after using it. The magic mouse. I use that for 10 minutes and my palm and wrist hurt badly. Many have experienced the same symptoms and yet Apple hasn’t changed its design. I get that Apple is creative. Do they change their product design based on feedback from actual users in their creative process?
I have an older magic mouse that I replaced with a Logitech one. I won't say the Apple one caused me pain after ten minutes but I really didn't like the design after using it for a while. Much more comfortable.
I’m so confused. Your complaint is that Apple don’t make a mouse that you like?
Are you in some situation where you are being forced to use a Magic Mouse?
Other manufacturers make mice in every form factor you can imagine. I don’t believe any apple product comes with a Magic Mouse bundled - you’re not forced in any way to buy one.
Apple don’t make any headphones that I like. I don’t feel like this is a failing on Apple’s part?
Magic Mouse isn't ergonomic. You can't use it plugged in. Its little ball gets dirty quickly and becomes hard to use. The buttons are hard to distinguish by touch.
Kind of surprising how bad it is since it's their official, heavily advertised option.
Thankfully the walled garden at least has ports for outside equipment.
I’ve used the Magic Mouse for years and love it. I have no doubt that it is bad for you, but it’s also fine for many.
Thats me and the desktop trackpad, which lots of people seem to like.
Logitech mx 1-4. You don't have to marry Apple
The Mighty Mouse (the one with the little trackball on the top) was so much better except for the weekly cleaning required. My last one died a few months ago.
I still use the first generation Magic Mouse when I have to, and I hate its sharp edges.
I don't know anyone who likes it, they usually say they prefer the trackpad.
It helps that non-Windows trackpads were the first ones I could really use. (Deliberate phraseology; trackpads on Thinkpads running Linux worked pretty well for me too.)
Interestingly, seem to work better on Windows these days as I've discovered inadvertently. Bought a cheap used/surplus Thinkpad to install Linux and discovered it came pre-installed with Windows 11 and it actually works well.
Depends what I'm doing. I'm very happy just using a trackpad day to day but there are some things like photo editing where I prefer a mouse.
I have a Thinkpad style USB keyboard meant for server racks. Has a trackpad and that little joystick. It's only flaw is it that it's too old for that windows key.
There are newer versions which have that key: Lenovo Group Limited Lenovo ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint (I bought half-a-dozen the last time they were made so that I would be sure of having one in the future).
Apple sells an ergo vertical mouse on their website. It's not made by them (it's Logitech), sure. There's are also different options depending on your needs, like the kenisis dxt mouse, a plethora of trackballs, etc. Why are you demanding Apple specifically reinvent an ergo mouse?
I love my MacBook, and I despise Apple’s own pointing devices. I ended up getting a vertical mouse that completely solved the pain problem for me.
Next and General Magic are the foundations of our modern days. Both stories are absolutely legendary !
What an amazing idea to focus solely on this time period in his life. Just ordered my copy.
I'll have to read it. Always wondered how this very influential OS and machine got created.
Did people literally forgot that John Carmack's Quake was made on a NeXT workstation...
Doom was first. John Romero did an extensive write up: https://web.archive.org/web/20140310124554/http://rome.ro/20...
Even more significantly, Tim Berners-Lee made the first web browser and server on a NeXT Computer.
Yeah, I meant to work that into my post as the final twist --- his book _Weaving the Web_ was written using one of my favourite tools, NaviPress, a WYSIWYG HTML editor which supported the HTTP Push protocol (AOL later bought them out and made it available as AOLpress) --- really bummed that Amaya has been dropped and that there isn't a nice/free/opensource alternative (that I'm aware of).
Did smart phones ruin society?
They are hardly forgotten considering the OS was a key influence of Mac OS X and you can see clear features of it today. It was hugely important in the mid 90's graphics and 3d animation era too. Such a fabulous piece of design, both software and hardware. I would much have prefered a world where Next and Mac OS never combined and we had both, as the Mac O7-9 were also a real treat to use.
NeXT would have died and Mac OS would have been replaced by something . All macOS is is just a different window manager (to borrow a Unix term). Windows and Linux probably be more dominant . macOS is a better system than classic macOS when you realize you still have access to the NeXT internals and even many applications in utilities are really GUIs on top of command line utilities and you can roll back many features by running a command that edits a XML file that really is just a large dictionary to remove or modify features
> All macOS is is just a different window manager
This dramatically undersells what MacOS is and was. It was way beyond just a window manager.
From its inception in the 1980s it included a set of APIs that allowed developers to build sophisticated (and consistent) GUI applications with comparatively little effort. eg Quark Xpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Excel, Word
By the end of the classic Mac era in the late 1990s that API set had grown to include a ton of stuff. QuickTime, ColorSync, TrueType, AppleShare, sophisticated printer support, multiple display support, etc
> and Mac OS would have been replaced by something
The facts are: The only other contender was BeOS, after Talligent flopped and Copland imploded.
But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.
Source: all of the (other) Steve Jobs books
To put this into more context Apple really needed a modern kernel that for some reason had been tried multiple times and failed . Microsoft succeeded with Windows NT. Practically the acquisition of any company was motivated to just move a GUI with macOS classic like design but modern features like memory protection. I never really understood why Apple had a hard time with this.
Microsoft brought in an external OS designer (Dave Cutler) who had experience designing robust kernels that were actually used (most famously VMS). NT also was not required to be an instant switchover, and was "tested" first in niche (and often new) roles as a back-office server OS and NT/win2k corporate desktops for years before the general public was exposed to it via Windows XP. But Microsoft supported windows 3.11/9X/ME for more than a decade after windows NT was first released in 1993.
Apple had less resources, especially in the dark 1990s, to support such a move. It was made even worse by the fact that its leadership was probably not even aware of the difficulty in moving over, as well as the fact that 1990s Apple wasn't exactly a place people expected to "change the world?".
> But Louis-Gassée overplayed his hand.
Hence becoming Jean-Louis Passé.
Yes, and although most users don't care (directly), having essentially a BSD command line available on Mac OS is pretty useful for a lot of us.
A command line of any form is the biggest positive of Rhapsody and eventually Mac OS X
Do you realize Steve's other successful business used NeXT and then OpenStep? That little venture, Pixar, is where the cash to save Apple came from.
Mac OS was a step in a different direction, however development was far less compelling for OSX than classic. Think C was far more enjoyable and created far smaller and less power hungry apps, which allowed for a greater range of possibilities on low powered chips.
Going to use alternatives like Haiku that can access many modern systems but on such low powered hardware shows what wastage we have.
I fail to see how this compares to iOS which runs on phones or even devices with 15 watts of tdp laptops.
It's enough of an influence that macOS APIs had (or still have) "NS" prefixes to many functions.
Yeah forgotten, except for the OS and ObjectiveC
It's classic IEEE Spectrum, uninspiring slop since before slop was cool.
I find it interesting Steve was never close to being as rich as Elon or even Sam Altman at this point.
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> Sorry, wut.
Please avoid swipes and tropes like this on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The best direct reporting on this comes from Jobs himself in the so-called “lost” interview with Bob Cringely:
Jobs:
I had 3-4 people who kept bugging me that I ought to get my rear over to Xerox PARC and see what they were doing, and so I finally did. I went over there. And they were very kind, and they showed me what they were working on, and they showed me, But I was so blinded by the first one that One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programing. They showed me that, but I didn’t even see that. The other one they showed me was, really, a network computer system. They had over 100 Alto computers, all networked, using email, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.
https://sameerbajaj.com/jobs/
NeXT was, at its core, about getting back to the other two things.
"Wut" indeed! I was only skimming it anyway, but stopped there. I'm sorry, that paragraph is so effed up, I can't take anything else seriously from this author.
This is too often the problem with stuff about Steve Jobs. People worship him, and credit him with inventing everything. So, even ignoring how thoroughly mangled that quoted section is in every way, now he's the inventor of OOP. Did he also invent a time machine to take OOP back to the 1960s?
FWIW I don’t think they mean “object oriented programming” like Steve knew anything about ObjC, rather the frameworks and APIs of Next/OpenStep/Cocoa and stuff like WebObjects
Jobs was going around trying to sell this to programmers at wall street banks and etc, so he definitely understood that stuff (beyond the drag-n-drop sense). You can probably find some demos on youtube.
Its basically true that there wasn't anything like the Java class library widely available in 1988.
I came here to comment on this as well, but from a different angle. Not only is the description inaccurate, but I distinctly remember a fellow HN commenter writing here years ago a very different story. IIRC, they claimed to be in Mac OS X's team. They said that, at the time, Jobs explicitly told them to not use Object Oriented Programming. But, since they knew he wouldn't be able to tell anyway, they still used OOP.
"Forgotten"?
Umm no.
One thing that often gets overlooked is how much failure and constraint shape better leadership. It seems like the NeXT years gave Jobs the space to rethink product focus in a way that likely wouldn’t have happened if Apple had kept succeeding uninterrupted.
Such indeed is the gist of the story that Becoming Steve Jobs tells
In Many ways, Jobs was just like Elon Musk. He fired people left and right (check out any documentary about the apple days).
Politics rules everything. You can be liberal and literally get away with murder. Gates was hated from 2000 on and loved again when the tech community found out he supported forced vaccinations and climate change.
And now, the thing people are most likely to bring up is him partying with Epstein and attempting to slip Melinda some antibiotics after he got an STD.
Who is the closest current equivalent to Steve Jobs. Elon?