I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.
Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.
Jobs is on the whole probably better than the modern "tech right", yes, if only because supposedly he turned down opportunities to get seriously into politics. OTOH, who knows what kind of strange political or personal journey he might possibly have taken if he'd been around for the past decade and more. And in fact I think he may have contributed to the US getting where it is now in (at least) one significant way. By committing his options-backdating caper and then avoiding punishment for it he contributed to the feeling that the Special Boy is too precious to suffer criminal consequences for his actions, something which has likely had consequences for the later career of Musk in particular.
Oh, I'm sure it's even fuzzier than that. Apple's cachet over the past 25 years was built on the type of class consumerism that reflects and then amplifies a lot of America's particular brand of social dysfunction. Much of tech during this time was focused (and continued to focus, to their market detriment, until they "wised" up and stopped) on a sort of egalitarianism; if the proposition is, "Anyone can benefit from our product," most companies whispered the qualifier, "...if you can afford it." Apple, on the other hand, shouted that last part from the rooftops, also encouraging the addendum, "...and it makes you better than people who don't use our products."
Apple was a standard-bearer for the toxic exclusivity and gatekeeping that's kind of always been a part of American society, but that we occasionally see some chance of finally throwing off.
> it makes you better than people who don't use our products.
It seemed to me that this was more of a product of the fandom. "Even though this Apple computer is less popular/useful, I'm a discerning tastemaker and am better than the unwashed Wintel masses."
I'm not sure I'm convinced that running a super-secretive company and building a locked-down status-symbol walled-garden product that takes way the "owner's" freedom to tinker with it pushes him in the "left the world a better place" column.
The iPhone and other Apple products are just that: products. There are not many products in history that I'd say made the world a better place. Certainly better-than-previously-available computers and phones wouldn't meet that bar for me.
Tell me about all Jobs' philanthropy and maybe I'll agree with you. But you can't, because Jobs ran what was once described as one of the least philanthropic companies operating, and Jobs' own philanthropic activities were either so secretive that we still don't know much about them, or (the more likely option) were more or less nonexistent.
I agree that Jobs was probably on the whole better than Thiel, Andreessen, or Musk, but IMO that's not saying much.
don’t get me wrong Jobs definitely progressed the technology of that time by leading Apple but what exactly did he do to make the world a better place?
if you believe that enabling people to easily communicate with each other and access basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge whenever they want is a good thing (ie if you think giving people iPhones so they can message each other and read wikipedia is a good thing), then you can say his work did help with that.
You can also say that Macs have helped many people express themselves creatively (iMovie, Garage Band, Logic, Final Cut...), which you might think is a good thing.
At this point in time I'm not yet convinced smartphones are a net positive for humanity. They enable various forms of internet/"social"/consumerist addictions. Sure, there are great and transformative uses for them, but it's not clear to me yet how the scales balance out.
The technology to do all of those things existed well before iPhones & Macs appeared. You may argue that "yeah but he made them popular", but the iPhone & Mac users were never in the majority.
I mean electric cars, solar panels, and rockets so we don't have to rely on Russia to get to and from space ain't nothin'. Then there's that torch thing.
I can take or leave the other two. Netscape was pretty cool.
As a customer I find a stark difference between Musk and Jobs. I have a Tesla and I was also a customer of Jobs’s Apple since 1999.
The big difference is that Jobs never lied to me. Sure, he was an enthusiastic salesman, but the products actually did what was promised. (I even bought Mac OS X 10.0 in a retail box. It was rough but it showed that their new OS is delivering.) Apple products fit my purposes and I kept coming back to buy more.
Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.
The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.
>Musk sold me a very expensive feature that still does nothing, six years later. He knew that he was lying about the capabilities of the cars, but still took my $7,500 for a feature that was worth zero. I’m never buying anything from him again.
I assume you're talking about auto-pilot?
>The same approach of bald-faced lies is evident in most of the tech industry today. Cryptocurrency products don’t serve any purpose but enriching people like Andreessen. AI is almost as bad. And now these titans of misinformation are barging into global politics. They don’t care about empowering people and creativity like Jobs did, they just want more personal power.
Yes, the tech industry went from promising Star Trek like future to Demolition Man meets 1984 where Taco Bell owns everything and spies on you. It's not great. Stallman was right, but he got conveniently pushed out of the conversation.
Jobs lied all the time, only difference was that he had the luck of not being busted cause he could realize the lies before the due date.
Not saying this makes him worse than Elon Musk though, Elon is obviously much worse. You can see this in just how he interacts politically and how he used his social media platform to influence elections.
That is not because of him. They ran into patents problems and lost a lawsuit about this.
They did contribute a couple of industry standards, including zeroconf/bonjour and OpenCL. I haven’t seen anything or anybody saying that the FaceTime thing was a deception.
Supposedly he announced it off the cuff, without consulting anyone else as to the viability, not even notifying the FaceTime team beforehand. You can get into a semantic argument with yourself about whether that is actually a lie, but no matter what you conclude, that seems to be the same kind of "lie" that Musk makes.
I assume the intent here is for it to be a question with a forgotten question mark? Otherwise, the comment devolves into ad hominem without any technical exploration, and there is no conceivable expiation for that.
Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure how to grok the question. What I am able to gather is that Musk sold a unrealized future promise on the basis of hopeful optimism as its own line item for $7,500, while Jobs sold an unrealized future promise on the basis of hopeful optimism as part of a bundle in the ballpark around $1,000, with some variation depending on the specific bundle purchased.
Is the contention around the price magnitude? Would Musk be less of a "liar" if it sold for $100 instead of $7,500? Is it being sold independently instead of as part of a bundle what is in dispute? Would Musk be less of a "liar" if that $7,500 included other features available at the time of sale? Perhaps you can elaborate?
I would ask why you believe $1,000 was charged in exchange for a promise to turn FaceTime into an open industry standard -- which would be usable by all, by definition, regardless of whether they were even customers -- but you appear more interested in put-downs. "There is no conceivable expiation for that," so I'm done; good luck!
I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.
Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.