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Has Steve Jobs Lost His Magic?
TimAbdulla writes to mention a Wired article wondering if Steve Jobs has lost his magic? The keynote yesterday, author Leander Kahney says, was the most uninspiring he's yet seen out of the usually charismatic man. Accompanied by other folks from within the company, Kahney wonders what lackluster showings like this will mean for the company after Jobs steps down. From the article: "Looking very thin, almost gaunt, Jobs used the 90-minute presentation to introduce a new desktop Mac and preview the next version of Apple's operating system, code-named Leopard. The sneak preview of Leopard was underwhelming. For what seemed an interminable time, Jobs and Co. showed off one yawn after another. There's no way I can get excited about virtual desktops or a new service that turns highlighted text into a 'to do' item. Oooo."
I guess useful features just aren't as sexy as a New Brushed Metal Look, or a Genie Effect.
maybe it's a recurrence of illness?
Didn't he have surgery for a tumor?
about new stuff ? new technology ?
Are there really people whose heartbeat rises when some new tech is introduced ? Wasnt that a thing that is of the long-gone 70s-80s now ? Dont we just use something if we find it useful and dont use, if we dont, and thats that ?
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Don't I read this exact same article following every one of Steve Jobs' keynote speeches?
Has he "lost the magic" or is it just impossible for any man or any company to live up to the incredible hype the technology media puts on Apple and Jobs?
didn't/doesn't Jobs have a health issue he's dealing with? that could explain his appearance.
it's too bad he didn't have a flying mokey to release for the gawkers wanting a mac-gasm. guess we'll just have to live with a reliable, stable system.
Doesn't this follow his trend for last quarter century? When he has to prove something to the board or other people in the company he can pull off some impressive stuff. Once he is crowned king of the company, his performance slips. He's done this with apple how many times? And there is a chain of other companies he has also done it with. I'm guessing the next cool stuff he does will be with Disney since he sill has to prove himself there.
One of the hardest working Companies in the computer industry, trying to make your experience genuinely better, and some people still aren't impressed. Go wait with baited breath about what Dell is doing if you're that underwhelmed. The lines aren't nearly as long!
God is real unless declared integer.
The company can't come out with an awesome new toy every 3-6 months. Steve and Co. just had nothing to talk about, and anyways it's the WWDC. It's for developers and there were tons of new developer centric stuff Obj-C 2.0, XCode 3.0, a preview of Leopard (which I think the big things are still be held close to their chest, don't want to promise stuff like Vista and just have it trimmed every month). Wait til near Christmas, because you know there will be a new iPod or something for the masses to drool over.
Mac addicts need to remember that as their obession continues to go mainstream it's going to loose some of that "cool" in exchange for some of that "dependable, useful, ruggeded, trustworthy" crap.
-GiH
Cheers,
Ian
Well, O.K., this year's Keynote was not as spectacular as it used to be, but then again, it's just a business presentation!
The Wired article reads like it's a review for a theatre play or a movie screening. In my opinion, if you're the CEO of an multinational computer company and people are talking about your latest presentation this way, you definitely haven't lost your magic.
Hey, did you ever see a MS presentation? It's usually just a bunch of "gee, what else did you copy this time?" yawns.
Quite frankly, why must every presentation of Apple be a revelation, while it's quite ok that the rest of the industry shows us what we already knew and loved from free systems? I'm the last person to jump onto the Apple hype (I refuse to buy any of the pricy designer stuff that does essentially what my low cost and just as good stuff does), but I don't consider it fair to expect Apple to reinvent the wheel and make everyone go "ohhhh" in awe while it's quite acceptable that competitors do bland presentations routinely and it's ok.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I remember when 8.6 came out. He toted it as a "Whole New Macintosh!" when, to most users, it just meant that, when you viewed the contents of a folder, the rows alternated colors for easier reading.
I'd rather be underwhelmed and content, than overwhelmed, just to fall farther down.
Maybe it was kinda dull to the author because it was a developers conference. From TFA, the author didn't understand the applause on speed improvements and the technical under-the-hood wizardry. As a developer, you get why that was important and you get excited about it. I guess its the difference between being a journalist and being an engineer/computer scientist. We actually get excited about the geeky things.
Who?
I know this has been asked many times before, but at what point did the opinion of dumbarses on blogs become "news"?
(Yeah, I know there's a lot of technical wizardry under the hood, but that's for the geeks).
What part of "developer's conference" did you not understand, dickhead?
Apple's head of marketing, Phil Schiller, is the most relaxed of the bunch and has his own cuddly charm.
Hey, I'm as infected by Shillermania as the next Machead, but cuddly?
The whole article reads like a MySpace posting by a 14 year old girl disappointed by the first experience with her latest 40 year old beau.
By the summary, I can't tell if the author was unimpressed by the 'new features', or if he was simply unimpressed with Steve's delivery of it. As far as the 'features', this is all old shit that's been around for ages- why would one expect to be excited about it. You can't blame Steve for boring stuff, can you?
And for Steve? He's getting old. He's possibly sick. Or maybe he's just not as excited about this stuff as usual.
Oh well. Since I don't own a Mac, I guess I'll never 'get it', right?
do() || do_not();
The reaction to "time machine" was pretty good - the crowds seem to really like that, and it was fun how it was presented. No, there wasn't the biggest of announcements, but overall it was pretty good. I think the key point is that OS X is pretty mature and doesn't really need "that" much doing to it.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
Can the man not have a bad day without it being a cosmic event?
"That's right, Diane. Moreover, reports say the amount of water Jobs convreted into wine was down almost 35% this year from last!"
Jeeze, over the last six years under Jobs, Apple sextuples it's share price, exceeds Dell in market cap, takes over the MP3 market, practically invents and dominates the music download market, doubles the Mac's market share, successfully transitions first from OS 9 to OS X, then from PowerPC to Intel, the last several months ahead of schedule. What the hell do you people want?
Christ, Jobs could announce that from now on every single Mac would ship with a free Natalie Portman clone, and you people would be complaining that it was a disappiontment because the rumors sites said it would ship with two free Natalie Portman clones, each holding ice creame sundaes!
Crow T. Trollbot
Nobody attending WWDC thought so. Leopard has lots of cool features that beat even previous stuff like Expose and Dashboard in the dust. Time machine in particular looks like star trek computers. Apple completed a complete platform migration in less than a year, Objective C is getting garbage collection and properties.
Looks like the article's author doesn't care about anything besides iPods, but there is more to technology than just small gadgets.
I wish MS could "bore" me like this...
So what's his excuse for this whiny bitch of an article?
Didn't you read some of the posts above mentioning the fact that this is the World Wide DEVLOPER'S Conference?
What's cool to a developer (new tools, under the hood improvements, etc,) isn't necessarily cool to users. Users get excited about things that make their experience faster, easier, and, yes - cool. Different kinda stuff...
This conference is for the guys that develop the cool stuff that make our computers useful.
Yes, Jobs & Co. is saving the cool stuff for Christmas - he noted, I understand, that a lot of cool stuff in 10.5 is being held under wraps to keep them away from the Redmond copiers.
I don't think we've hit any kind of plateau - things are just in development cycles that aren't being released yet. 10.5 is coming out spring 2007 - Vista is coming out maybe then, maybe not.
Besides, Vista is the version of the Windows OS that was supposed to come out with the Mac OS's earlier versions - kinda late, idn't it? But it's coming, even so, and in a form that, while it may be behind Leopard, it's still an advance for that OS, and a major one at that.
The Mac OS is going to be just such a major advance for the Apple world.
In both, there will be features that are new and innovative for the platform they're used on. That's progress, and it'll be exciting for the folks that care about the particular platforms involved. (and I understand that there are some features in Vista that Apple hasn't chosen to mimic - of course, Jobs isn't going to mention that...)
So, if we're on a plateau, it's just until the development cycle rolls around to release dates...
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
maybe these super top secret features can be hacked together and made available for linux or microsoft within a few 'hours' but in both cases they'd generally take much longer (less for linux, more for ms) to make it into an official distribution.
if apple announced and demoed all of their super top secret features for leopard now, there would certainly be plenty of time for ms to get them in to vista if they're useful/flashy enough and thus apple would lose a little lead on microsoft. apple wants to be able to say "we're ahead of microsoft" and if a feature doesn't make it into the initial release of vista, it will usually be quite a while before it makes it in and this is exactly how apple needs to act if it wants to eat into microsoft's space.
Exactly. Why NOT have the people within the company, who deserve some spotlight time, talk about the things THEY do in the company.
Basically, I think the Wired article is doing a Dvorak, and inciting Mac users to go to the site. It's much ado about nothing.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
"When wild, over-the-top applause broke out for speed gains in new servers, the reporter sitting next to me burst out laughing."
What the hell? You are making fun of your core audience? Are you reporting for "Wired" or "Town & Country"?
Jobs may be "thin almost gaunt" because he had *cancer*. Leander Kahney apparently wanted to see a Steve Jobs monkey dance, Keith Richards shooting up on stage, and a new iPod with a laser pointer. What a stupid whiney blog.
This is more proof that the rumor sites are Apple's worst enemy. They hype things up, even though Apple purposely keeps quiet.
The things that were demoed were demoed because they pertain to developers who will need to interface with the new APIs and test for compatibility with their existing apps. For example:
The only thing I can't think of pertaining to devs is iChat, but I'm sure there's a reason they demoed it now. Also, did anyone notice it wasn't using brushed metal anymore? Straight Aqua.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Some stuff is being kept under wraps for now, lest it be "innovated" by Microsoft and appear in Vista.
Remember years back when Aqua was demoed, and not long after that XP suddenly had that ugly Fisher-Price GUI in response?
I honestly think that at this point feature-theft by Microsoft isn't that big of a threat. They've proven too inept to even get Vista out with the feature set they've got currently, much less suddenly bolt on something else to it to better compete with Leopard.
I just wish they would have demoed some of the new stuff in Leopard Server. I've been begging them for years to put together something that can replace Exchange (at least for the SMB market), and it seems like the iCal server fits the bill quite nicely, in concert with improvements to the other services that already exist in Tiger Server.
~Philly
I don't think it's Steve Jobs per se, but the fact is, and it's not limited to Apple or Microsoft, but innovation is clearly slowing down. Virtual desktops are a great addition to OSX, but as (many) others have pointed out, Unix has had it for years and you can get similar functionality from other products. Time Machine is a great idea, as is the VMS versioned file system.
It's come down to new takes on old ideas; everything that has been toted as a new feature in OSX (and Vista) can be found in some other product or OS. While OSX's great strength is its Unix roots, Unix itself has been around literally my entire life. Not much innovation there.
I'm not saying Unix isn't an awesome OS, its longevity is a testiment to this fact, but complacency has certainly set in across the research spectrum, AFAIK; where are the truly groundbreaking ideas in interfaces, storage, etc.? Why has nothing that has been put forth been greeted with anything more than a ho-hum? Can we not find something better than the desktop metaphor to organize everything by? Is there nothing better?
New ideas seems to be a well on the verge of running dry and no one cares enough to notice. Until somebody comes along with some truly ground-breaking stuff, I see Microsoft's and Apple's OS offerings getting thinner and thinner from version to version; just not enough meat to hang on the old bones.
And while I'm ranting, Linux provides the *perfect* platform for people to go nuts on...it's completely open, anyone can use it and work with it...no one has an excuse not to use it for developing the next great leap in computer technology. The banquet is all set, but who is coming to dinner? Why do we have these pointless KDE-vs-Gnome, Reiser4-vs-everybody, distro-vs-distro holy wars?
Apple isn't obligated to release any of their trade secrets. Part of Apple's success is in keeping their cards close to their chest, then revealing all and sideswiping competitors when they least expect it.
It's in Apple's best interest for people to be "underwhelmed" with the 10 features shown, especially competitors like Microsoft. All the more of an impact when Apple fully reveals Leopard at MacWorld.
"Sufferin' succotash."
I don't really think a tablet is a big item at Apple right now. The tablet PC has not been a big seller so Apple concentrates on those apps and hardware that will help them build marketshare. If they do decide to enter that market I'm pretty sure they will show it to developers before it goes public. As far as Kahney's article goes. He's like so many others. They prognosticate and then blame Apple for not meeting their desires. He's similar to Thurott and Dvorak. They are not to be taken seriously.
It's also important to remember that the keynote is just 90 minutes out of a week-long conference. Jobs' role in the keynote is to get developers excited about all of the other 120 (or so) sessions and materials. His keynote sets the tone and the emphasis for the remainder of the week. I remember very specifically lots of really cool stuff that was discussed in the 2004 WWDC in the sessions. Much of it was alluded to during the keynote but, since it was under NDA, never really made it out into the wild. Really, I think that folks like Leander need to remember that the WWDC keynote is not intended to stand on its own -- it is an intro to the conference.
Yes, you should really say "X users that know what they're doing". There's some black magic text file editing involved. I can run MythTV on my box's VGA output or on its PVR350 TV output, but I've absolutely failed to get it to run mythfrontend on the TV out while simultaneously running an independent desktop session on the VGA out. It can allegedly be done, but it's not obvious how.
If Windows or OS X had the ability you can bet it would be a matter of checking a check box in a control panel. It's great that Linux has some exotic capabilities, but not everybody enjoys scouring a bazillion different mailing lists and web forum posts for obscure clues to exactly what to put into a text file to get something to work.
As long as Microsoft and Apple keep adding easy to use features there will be vast hordes of people willing to pay money for them. Those hordes won't care that Linux could have accomplished the same thing years earlier because those hordes wouldn't have spent the hours or weeks of research necessary to make Linux do those things. But they'll gladly pay Apple or Microsoft ~$100 because their time is more valuable than that.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
I think the "problem" is that some people are looking for the next significant advance that i s AMAZING. Well, the iPod itself wasn't that amazing when it came out. What is more amazing is people bought em. Every release form Apple is not going to be awe inspiring or even that exciting. Personally what EVERYONE missed is that Apple pulled off the fastest platform switch EVER. Less then ONE YEAR after the announcement, other then repaired machines or refurbs, all new equipment coming from Apple are now running on the Intel platform. That is significant! Anyway, the new hardware kicks ass in my opinion. I probably will never have one.
Gorkman
Well iChat can now display keynote / powerpoint slides, and can remote control desktops like VNC. This is a fairly useful dev tool in combination with audio and or video conferencing.
It'll be quite nice to use this as a tool to show and illustrate specification documents, builds of software, etc.
Yet, this will only be handy if Apple develops a Windows and a Tiger client. If it only works with other Leopard users... forget it.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Apple just went through a major change in hardware by switching to Intel. This probably took a lot of man hours to verify everything worked perfect. The same man hours that would have previously been used to think of and develop new and inovative OSX features. So is anyone complaining? Maybe Steve's "magic" comes when there is a whole bunch of new things he's excited about, but this time around other things were important just not exciting.
I say, shut the hell up. You can run Windows on your Mac now. No one can ever diss your Mac again. The only person that can make fun of a Mac is someone with a better Mac.
"Macs suck, they can't run games!!"
"Really? It runs Windows, why can't it run games?"
ender-iii
"This "dumbarse" with a blog has been writing professionally, full-time, about the Mac for over ten years. I sat a few cubicles away from him at MacWEEK when he was a news reporter and I was a reviews editor, waaay back in 1996. He went on to his current job at Wired (where he's maintained the Apple beat) and has written two excellent books about Apple."
Okay, you've countered the subject line of his post; and I'm not particularly happy with the juvenile insults and name-calling found in the parent (de rigueur for Slashdot unfortunately). But the points raised are totally valid. How did a professional tech beat writer totally miss the whole point of a developer's conference?
#DeleteChrome
Funny in a mac (given the "reputation" they have as artistic platform) that people would say crap like this. Tablet PC is unbelievably superior to an off-monitor tablet for drawing. Sure you can get to the point where you can basically draw off-monitor, but there are still a lot of issues with certain angles and the fact that you can't really rotate it. Tablet PC fixes all of these things, with the (usually) added disadvantage of really low laptop resolution.
The Farewell Tour II
Tablet PCs are very much a niche technology. Apple doesn't sell enough computers to make such an alternative model profitable. And most of the artist types already have an off-monitor tablet and know how to use it. And, you can definitely rotate them, and rotate your screen. And, you have the heavy-duty CPU for your high-end graphics card, and you can select the exact monitor you want (for color, contrast, etc.) at the resolution you want. What kind of pressure gradient is available on Tablet PCs anyway? Can it detect stylus tilt? Does the stylus have fully scriptable buttons on it? The artistic professional is either all set with what he or she has now, or would find a Tablet PC too limiting.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You don't know any professional artists, do you? I think you're definitely right about why apple isn't producing them, because they won't sell that many. But I think that tells you a lot more about who actually is using apple's computers than it does about what professional artists would "go for". I've talked to a number of professional artists who have made the comment that they'd rather have a mac tablet PC than a windows one, but guess which you can actually buy?
As for your previous comments:
"Tablet PCs are very much a niche technology."
Exactly, and artists are part of that niche market. There are very few professions where tablet PCs are more useful to the task at hand.
"And most of the artist types already have an off-monitor tablet and know how to use it. And, you can definitely rotate them, and rotate your screen."
You're bizarre "artist types" fixation aside, I've got to question if you have ever even used a tablet. You can NOT rotate them in any usable manner, as soon as you do it breaks any sort of continuity between your hand and what you are drawing. Do you even understand what rotate means? If you think it means landscape vs portrait as the GP suggested, you're sadly mistaken. I hear Corel Photopaint (or is it Painter?) has a rotating canvas feature, but can't confirm this first hand. And even then it's not nearly as natural as drawing on a surface that you can rotate freely.
"And, you have the heavy-duty CPU for your high-end graphics card, and you can select the exact monitor you want (for color, contrast, etc.) at the resolution you want."
That still doesn't replace the usefulness of a tablet PC. Are you really so clueless as to think that no one whose livelihood depends on their art can afford a second machine, especially if it is a laptop? Get real, a tablet PC is like a heavy (though not that heavy anymore) sketchpad that you can take anywhere, has unlimited undo, doesn't require scanning to get the images on a computer, and doubles as a fully functional laptop.
"What kind of pressure gradient is available on Tablet PCs anyway? Can it detect stylus tilt? Does the stylus have fully scriptable buttons on it?"
I believe they're all 256 levels of pressure on the Wacom Tablet PCs, which is completely sufficient. I believe all of the recent ones detect tilt, though I don't know what level of sensitivity (probably not hard to fucking google it, you know), and if you mean the stylus has buttons that can be mapped to other features than left and right click or whatever, I think that depends on the tablet manufacturer. The pens tend to differ between makers, for instance the Gateway's (which are about the lowest end you can get) they sell at Best Buy don't even have an eraser.
The amount of buttons available when using the convertibles in tablet mode is a bit of a problem, as most don't have that many buttons exposed (and I hear are poorly placed for lefties sometimes) and I have yet to see one with a rocker switch like a Wacom tablet on the pen. But even my Wacom pen is lacking there, where's the middle mouse button? Additionally, if apple is such a great hardware maker and artists really are a core part of their user base, how come they haven't put out a tablet PC done right? I don't even like macs and I'd buy one if apple put out a good enough model, it's not like windows is my native platform either.
Maybe you should read a review of one sometime, or something. Or better yet, go find a retail location that has demos of them. Just make sure they're running software that can actually take advantage of the pressure and don't listen to the idiot sales kid if he tries to tell you they don't support pressure.
The Farewell Tour II