I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal):
"Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked:
'Can we make the phone smaller?'
The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it'
Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank.
As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and said 'I see air bubbles coming out of the phone. That would lead me to believe there is still unused space in the phone!' "
I wonder if anyone at Apple these days has that intersection of:
- attention to small details
- able to communicate which details are the most important
- has the sway to be able to do the above an make changes
Obviously a made up scenario because systems engineering (as the discipline most likely to be involved in the provided scenario) is all about balancing competing requirements and dealing with design constraints such as available choice of materials, or acceptable cost to consumers, or any other number of criteria.
Systems engineers would have responded by informing this hypothetical Steve Jobs that if he wanted to make the phone smaller by 20%, the phone would lose 10% processing power and lose 30% battery capacity, 9 months and $50m would need to be expended to retool the factories, and 12 months and $40m would need to be expended to redesign software UI for a smaller screen. And for an accurate answer, those systems engineers would have needed to have been able to consult with materials scientists, software engineers, engineers designing factory tools, and dozens of other different types of disciplines.
He actually publicly did just this with the first iPhone. At introduction in January 2007 it had a plastic screen. He noticed the screen scratched easily in his pocket and they moved to a glass screen (and announced it) before it shipped in July.
I heard a Steve story from a relation that was a high level exec during his tenure. They were running a meeting about failure rates of (Macbooks, phones, I can't remember which exactly). They knew their stats well, parts, how to source, costs, etc. They spent months on research. They presented it to him from an operations nature, e.g. the costs and such. His response was along the lines of: TV's are amazing technology, they've improved in every way, and are cheaper than ever. But when is the last time your TV broke? They don't break. They never break. And they always work. That's our strategy. Make it happen.
Obviously it didn't quite work out that good (although I guess in my personal use cases, it has). But the point of telling me the story anyways, which I think matches here, is he had a way of pattern matching the average persons expectations based in reality, and applying it to their technology, and then aligning people towards ambitious goals that were on some level based in reality (i.e. people use TVs, they are similar technology, people don't expect them to break). I don't know how much credit is him or others and all. But I know from these kinds of stories, and from my own experience elsewhere, that some people just regularly and instantly "get it", and Steve Jobs seemed to be one of those people, and to also have the station to force others to go along.
Here I think its pretty obvious Apple is both the worst performer in AI, and also the best positioned to capitalize on it. In that sense their current state is clearly demonstrative of some major failure. Its hard to imagine someone like Jobs being in the same position in today's rate. LLM's are phenomenal technology and their use cases are vast. And we've all got these devices ready to take advantage of them, ready to listen, to respond, to coordinate, etc. And here i am asking Siri to turn down the volume and it either turns it up, gets confused, or misinterprets and goes on some tangent. There's a wildly large gap in what Siri does now, and what we 100% know it could do based on the existing tech many of us are using every day.
> But the point of telling me the story anyways, which I think matches here, is he had a way of pattern matching the average persons expectations based in reality, and applying it to their technology, and then aligning people towards ambitious goals that were on some level based in reality (i.e. people use TVs, they are similar technology, people don't expect them to break).
Not relevant to what you are discussing related to attention to detail (which I agree with).
This is my imaginary scenario -- if Steve Jobs were to tell me in a meeting, "I see air bubbles coming out of the phone", I (as an engineer) would reply to him, "Dude, that air is carrying excess heat out of the phone via convection. If you don't leave any space in between hot electronic components, your phone will be a toaster or a clothes iron".
It's fine to explain why it is the way it is, but at the end of the day that's still just an engineering problem you need to try and solve. Sometimes Apple made mis-steps in that size/heat scenario but they've done it a hell of a lot better than anyone else for a long time. Sometimes you need demanding product types to force you to put serious effort into an engineering challenge you don't deem worthwhile.
There aren't a lot of phones that have air vents, except for the ones that also have fans. Convection doesn't work at those sizes and power levels. Thermal design for phones is all about conduction, getting the heat out to the surface of the device and spread evenly enough that there's no hotspot that would be uncomfortable for the user holding the device.
I really hope it's not true, because that would just mean he doesn't understand how elements are placed on boards - there will always be some air unless you add extra filler. (and make everything run hotter)
> there will always be some air unless you add extra filler. (and make everything run hotter)
Adding filler is how you make a passively-cooled device run cooler. Air that's not moving doesn't transport enough heat to be useful, and convection doesn't do anything in the narrow spaces between and above components on a circuit board. Thermal paste, graphite sheets, and vapor chambers are what phones these days do with volume that's not needed for circuitry or structural support.
It depends on the filler and whether you want other things around to get warmer or not. Radios for example are normally kept away from too much heat, then any temperature difference is monitored/compensated in configuration. Anyway, what I mean is - that heat is going somewhere - any extra filler will change where / how quickly.
In the context of how phones today are built, air gaps are pretty much never the right answer to a thermal concern. At best, an air gap is what you allow when the budget cannot accommodate a better solution. If you have a component you need to keep cool, it's probably because it puts out a fair bit of heat on its own, so you want to thermally couple it to its surroundings. If you have a component you don't mind getting warm, you use it as part of the path for heat to be conducted from the big heat generators out to the surface of the phone.
Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer?
The engineers know that the phone isn't literally a solid brick of electronics and "can't be made smaller" is normal human speak for "can't be made smaller without time and money we don't have to do it." The smart thing would have been just saying he wanted the iPhone to be smaller, money and resources is no object and we're willing to dedicate time/people to this project to get proposals put together.
Jobs was very good at his… uhh job but stuff like this isn't an example of it.
>> "can't be made smaller without time and money we don't have to do it."
If the CEO is telling you it is important to him, then he's telling you he'll give you the resources. Telling him it "can't be made smaller" when you admit it can is silly.
Either extreme is silly. A serious answer is: "if it's a priority, we'll produce estimates for size-vs-cost". Resources are never infinite, reasonable options are not always available. "just do it", "can't be done" is just cringe linkedin style drama.
Not sure if he did it, but from what I heard from friends who worked with him, wouldn't be surprised if he did. Really love the guy as someone who combined creativity and tech, but these kind of things is one of least things I liked about him. It is one these Trumpisuqe quality playing hard ball, etc. Very US business like tend to be very off putting.
The Isaacson biography has a section where Jobs speaks to the CEO of Corning (glass screen vendor, CEO was a materials engineer) with absolute Trumpian ignorance ("You don't know what you're doing!"). Corning wanted the business and thus had to coddle him like a baby to get him to see reality.
It's tragic that so many business leaders in the US see this kind of bloviating as something to emulate. Reminds me of Altman telling TSMC to gear up to spend $7tn on fabs and them just snickering about his cluelessness [0].
Except this led to Corning repurposing a Kentucky plant and ramping manufacturing to meet the original iPhone launch. And Weeks (Corning CEO) has publicly praised Steve for helping him better assess risk as a leader.
Well yeah, this kind of ass-kissing is what is expected of you if you want to keep their business. Our great leader is so wise and insightful. I don't doubt that Weeks could take some lessons from Jobs in the areas of business he was actually good at.
Hence the 'coddled like a baby' portion of my comment. Zuckerberg, Cook and US tech leadership are doing the same to government currently, and chucking in $1 million each for good measure.
> The smart thing would have been just saying he wanted the iPhone to be smaller, money and resources is no object and we're willing to dedicate time/people to this project to get proposals put together.
That's just bland business-speak. Jobs had a knack for illustrating things in unexpected ways and this was it. I have no doubt that whoever saw the fish tank thing had the same takeaway as if Jobs simply said he wanted the iPhone to be smaller and there would be resources dedicated to it.
"Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked:
'Can we make the phone smaller?'
The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it'
Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank.
As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and said 'I see air bubbles coming out of the phone. That would lead me to believe there is still unused space in the phone!' "
I wonder if anyone at Apple these days has that intersection of:
- attention to small details
- able to communicate which details are the most important
- has the sway to be able to do the above an make changes