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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 want an iPhone! Gimme gimme gimme gimme now!!!!!
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 ?
Read radical news here
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
I think we can all agree we don't want either.
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.
I wondered if Jobs, who was treated for cancer last year, was sick. Was he sharing presentation duties to save energy? When I saw Jobs introducing the iPod Hi-Fi at Apple's headquarters in late February, about five months ago, it looked to me like he was tiring quickly and was glad to get it over.
Gosh, I wonder if his fight with cancer has anything to do with him feeling sick.
Way to ignore pertinent facts to make a story.
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
Etc... etc... Etc... Same thing with the PowerBook, the Cube, the switch to Intel, ad nauseam. I wish these people could stop writing that FUD, already! Apple will disappear when it will disappear, in the meantime, its financial position looks excellent.
I personally think Macintosh, and Ipods, and Mac OS X are very sexy beasts. They are much too expensive for my taste, they run expensive proprietary software, and everything Apple does is way too costly for me, but Gosh, aren't they sexy.
The fact is, Apple has survived. Every single "Apple is dying" has been proved wrong time and time again. They have top-notch engineers and designers and they will keep on making great products for the time being. Sure, the last WWDC may have been unexciting, but guess what? Even great companies won't release great (hardware) products every six or eight months. These things take time.
And dissing Steve Jobs for looking thin is simply disgusting. The guy recently survived cancer, for (bleep) sake! Give him a break: he is not going to look plump after chimio or whatever he had to do to overcome cancer! Sheeesh. Tech Journalists sound more and more like bottom feeder, these days.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
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...
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.
So, umm, no.
Tom Geller
One thing i wish Mr. Jobs would do is credit the prior-art. A thank-you to virtual desktops would have been nice, followed by the wiz-bang of zooming out to see all 4 (I haven't seen THAT done before).
What I really want to see is the ability to run two displays on the computer, but each with a separate log-in and separate key/mouse set. We could then claim our lab had 20 seats even though we only had 10 computers, each with 2 displays, 2 chairs, 2 keyboards, 2 mice. When the lab is sitting mostly empty (most of the time) each user would have 2 displays.
Tadd
.. Blub falls right in the middle of the abstractness continuum. -- Paul Graham
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.
The event is called the Apple World Wide Developers Conference.
Steve Jobs talked about the new version of the OS and new high end boxes. These are the products that will most directly impact the lives and work of those who develop software for Apple systems. This conference has never been about targetting consumers. It's all about things that matter to developers.
The next version of the iPod, the next revision of the iMac and laptops, as well as any other devices Apple has up its sleeve (iPhone, Tivo-esque Mac Mini settop box, tablet, etc.) are all consumer focused items. Anything Apple wants to release to consumers will be released a little closer to the holiday season, making it harder for imitators to be able to produce knockoffs in time for Christmas. Anyone who thought they'd see an iPhone, new iPod, or any other strictly consumer-centric item at WWDC has put their desire for new gadgets ahead of Apple's desire to maximize its profits. That said, stay tuned for a product announcement sometime before October with Apple's slate of holiday season offerings.
-JMP
Apple needs to be more than "the Cult of Steve". Having Phil Schiller and other members of the management team participate in keynotes is a good step in Apple's maturity. For years after the return of Steve Jobs' return to Apple, it really did need a strong charismatic leader. As the company and its products mature, it is necessary for the public (including investors and analysts) to see that there is more to the company than just one individual. IMO, Mr. Jobs is very smart to get his management team out in front of the public now.
I'm just thankful that Apple doesn't have anyone on their management team like Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer. I would feel far more comfortable in the Apple managment team leadership in Steve Jobs' absence than I do with MS.
Reference the Spice Girls?? what the hell?!
I wasn't there. I didn't watch the keynote. I know nothing about the presentation. I don't have a Mac or even an iPod.
However, I did mosey over to the Apple website yesterday to look at the new stuff. The new Pro desktops look like a nice new iteration of what's become a workstation line. Will they enable developers and media-content people to work more quickly and efficiently? Yup. That's all they really need to do. Are the new servers keeping pace on price, performance and management features? Yup. So far, no problem.
And the new OS X features? Looking over the short screencasts on the website, lots of that stuff sounds mighty nice. Time Machine is pretty darned revolutionary: an API and systemwide user interface for user-friendly browsing of data snapshots over time from within any application! Spaces looks like an extremely well thought out expansion on the virtual-desktop concept, with all sorts of visual cues and clever UI bits that will make it useful for people without photographic memories. If the Core Animation APIs are any good, they'll make developers mighty happy. The visual dashborad widget creator opens up widget creation to pretty much everybody. What is there even remotely like it in the Windows world? Even the mail client's editor component leapfrogs everything else out there and will probably sell a lot of consumer Macs the same way iMovie, iPhoto and Garageband have.
Much of it makes Vista look dated enough that Apple shouldn't have a problem keeping up its market share.
Production is off pace for Apple. In their Mad Rush to move everything to Intel, including their OS (For production). A lot of resources were diverted to Redevelop their product line. Noramlly these changes are paced out much more slowly so you can get a Big thing every keynote. PowerBook/MacBook Pro, iBook/MacBook, MacMini, iMac, PowerMac/MacPro, XServe. Then a bunch of Ipod updates and a Major OS once a year/Year in a half. This normally happends in a 3 year cycle. With about 3 New OS happening (at each WWCD) and a new iPOD at MacWorld, Mixed with some new software from Apple and 3rd party companies...
But 2006 Was a 2/3 of a year of Major Macs upgrades. That is a lot of work, and there was no supprise about it. Leapord needed to be set aside and the Demo is of a beta version that is not to be released for almost a year, they say it is Top Secrete, but in truth it is probably not at Keynote Presentation level yet. Most the application teams have been working to make all their apps Universal Binary. Not much time for massive exterior case redesign, new software, or Highly inovative stuff that can make the keynote great.
I bet Apple is extreamly greatful that Long^H^H^H^HVista has been delayed so many times, It gave Apple a change to do a Major undertaking, and still come out ahead of Microsoft. With rumor sites giving more and more hype on what can come up with next, people are expecting apple to come up with the impossible. Heck I still want my holographic display iMac.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hmmm... Looks like he has better chances than most:
_ Pancreatic_Cancer_is_Very_Rare.html?print
http://atlas.kpix.com/news/local/2004/08/02/Jobs'
If you post it, they will read.
I thought exactly the same thing yesterday when I watched the WWDC webcast. Steve Jobs looked, in my estimation, terrible. I'm pretty sure he's grown out his beard to hide how thin his face looks. And, it's also true that he didn't seem to have his usual blend of piss and organic vinegar that he generally shows off at these things.
(I do think I know where Steve's weight went, though: into Phil Schiller! That guy should take a page from the Steve Jobs cookbook. Man!)
But I thought that there were some great features in the Leopard preview they showed off. For example, Time Machine looks simply astounding. Maybe the sci-fi effects are a little over the top, but being able to look for a lost file by browsing through past versions of the folder in which it's contained is really cool.
I'm also really jazzed about the Web Clip service in Safari. I can think of lots of times when that would be handy. And, I will say that I really enjoyed the comparisons between a Windows Vista desktop and a Mac OS X Tiger desktop. Microsoft even stole the "lickable" aqua sphere!
It's entirely possible that Steve might be trying to take a step back from these keynotes. And it's also entirely possible that this was a sort of "test" for these three guys to see which one would have the ability to do these presentations in the future if Steve can't. However, the company itself is still the same as ever. Lines like, "Redmond, start your photocopiers" and "Mac OS X Leopard: Introducing Vista 2.0" are classic.
Let's also not forget that the new Mac Pro is pretty astounding: four cores, standard! And, let's also not forget that Steve did say that the best new features of Leopard are, as the slide said, "Top Secret". I think Apple really felt like they got burned by Microsoft when they copied, feature for feature, everything that was new and exciting about Tiger for Vista. My guess is that, since Leopard is slated for Spring, Apple wants Microsoft to release Vista, which is truly lackluster, and then release Leopard in rapid succession. Those, "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" ads might take on a whole new antagonistic dimension! For example:
(Cue cutesy music)
PC: I'm a PC
Mac: And I'm a Mac. Hear me roar.
PC: I can search every file on your hard drive instantly.
Mac: I've been doing that for two years now! And, I can search network servers, other Macs, and even tell you that the remote is lost between the second and third cushion on the couch. Take that!
PC: Well, I've got transparent windows!
Mac: Oh yeah, well MY windows are so transparent you can't even see them! Our computers don't even come with displays anymore. I just read your mind and do exactly what you were thinking. Kapow!
PC: Touche
Mac: See, you finally understand what that word means. And why? Because I teach you new words while you're sleeping. Ha!
(Cut to picture of new Mac Book, now without a display!)
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
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."
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Wow, that's great for him. Except that he's a journalist, not a software developer. As such, he wasn't in a position to appreciate the things that were presented during the Keynote. I know that journalists get intimidated when presented with things they can't understand or distill into small, 3- to 4-word sound bytes, but that's no reason to shoot the messenger. This conference is not about the average user. It was about the developers. Sometimes those interests coincide, like when the Intel transition was announced. Sometimes they don't. The press need to get it through their heads that Steve Jobs isn't going to introduce a new iPod every time he gets on stage.
Xray in Xcode 3.0 for Leopard looks interesting though. http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/xcode.html .. Has some features of Solaris DTrace, with some fancy GUI to do graphs and organize your data samples.
It was WWDC after all, what do you expect. the D is for Developer.
I don't know why Leopard added a bunch of Dashboard stuff (like safari as a widget, and a widget builder). I totally don't use Dashboard and it eats a lot of memory.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Clear indication someone doesn't know design:
"It took you that long just to do that? Thats simple."
---------
They didn't show their best stuff because MS would copy them, if you did not notice they made sure to point that out to you
Many refinements were quite good-- virtual desktops is not new, but their way is the best UI for virtual desktops I have ever seen. Not every idea was mind blowing, but their UI design and cost (bundled free) can't be beat.
Time machine is the best version control UI I've seen. my mother could use that.
Jobs is phasing himself out of the limelight a bit more all the time making it so when he does go its not as much of a shock to the fans.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Steve's finally delegating.
Apple's showing the developers what matters to them.
Run for your lives!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
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
If anyone remembers the CherryOS fiasco of two years back when that weird Albanian in Hawaii stole the PearPC source and claimed it as his own "80% native ppc speed" clone, the same Leander Kahney wrote one of the biggest bullshit articles I've ever read, claiming that he felt it was the real thing (even though it didn't even get past the boot screen), and that Apple should start worrying about its hardware sales. I wrote to the guy and flamed his butt off for being such a bullshitter. The guy wrote back telling me that I was just being typical of Mac zealots. Fast forward to the present and lo and behold, we have the same brain dead idiot making the same negative "Apple's dying" (but please read my crap anyway) statements like "but that's for the geeks" at a DEVELOPER conference!
The guy is simply a more effeminate version of Dvorak. It's one of those minor trendy things amongst pseudo intellectuals (Boing Boing's rant on Apple because Apple hadn't released the sources to the x86 XNU kernel yet, for instance) to be mildly critical of Apple, YET STILL SPEND GOD KNOWS HOW MUCH TO GO AND WATCH A PRODUCT INTRODUCTION SPEECH! Apple must laugh itself to tears at morons like this who pay large amounts of cash to them for the privilege of being trendily critical of Apple.
Make no mistake, Apple is no saviour and there are many things that I personally prefer in Linux and Windows (Linux for its openess and configurability and Windows for its GUI responsiveness), but acting like a clueless consumer at a developer conference only makes you look dumber than you are, or, in this case, exactly as dumb as you are.
"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
>>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.
/. tradition, I didn't bother to read the article and instead immediately jumped to a prior-held conclusion based on emotion. I sure showed them who's boss!
Not me! In proud