History Repeats Itself — Mac & the iPad

Keith found an interesting story telling a bit about how Steve Jobs operates. It involves small teams of young engineers willing to work 90-hour weeks in total secrecy, and a complete willingness to throw away bad ideas without flowery language. The iPad is surprisingly similar to the Mac."

Comments

Paranoid hippie leader and all

[elrous0]

"a tiny group of intensely-focussed young people working in extreme secrecy . . . sets them to work for '90 hours a week and loving it.'"

You mean like a cult?

Re:Paranoid hippie leader and all

[bsandersen]

"You mean like a cult?" No. Like a start-up. There are engineers who thirst to make a very cool thing, something they can look back upon with pride and the knowledge that "I did that." It isn't about the money (though thinking about the potentially big payday helps keep you going when things get tough or weird); it is about the chance for that sense of accomplishment. I never had an opportunity to work on something as cool as the iPad. I wish I had. Most of us will work 40+ years and never have the sense of triumph that the iPad team now enjoys.

It could also be said

[arcite]

That the state of consumer technology has caught up to Steve's ambition. Could it be that we are on now finally able to realize the 'magical' devices that Steve has had knocking around in his head these past few decades? Perhaps. Or maybe Steve is just a really lucky guy. ---or he is just a genius.

Article premise is completely wrong

[gatkinso]

Let's conveniently leave out any mention of OS 9, NeXT Step, and the fact that for a while it looked like Apple was going the way of the Dodo.

Re:Article premise is completely wrong

[StuartHankins]

To have success requires failure at some point -- you must have that experience or your success isn't complete. As a company, Apple picked themselves up and regrouped from failures, eventually releasing some stellar hits such as OS X, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and now the iPad. Don't forget along the way they picked up and helped a lot of other projects including CUPS.

In many of these cases -- the Newton for example -- Apple was simply too far ahead of its time. It took decades for customers to understand why these products were needed and to be sophisticated enough to want them.

There are other companies whose stock has been in doldrums for years, who haven't yet figured out that their business model can't continue forever and rely on upgrades instead of innovation for the majority of their income. Those other companies will be in for a rude surprise by the time the dust settles because they DON'T realize they're in trouble -- they believe they're succeeding so they can't fix the problem.

Re:Article premise is completely wrong

[bigstrat2003]

The fact that he is listed on the patent tells me that Jobs has a great deal of hubris and wants to have his name on things, not that he actually is inventing them. Do you seriously expect me to believe that he has anything to do with product development beyond generic ideas ("Hey, let's make a phone"), and testing the prototypes out ("I like this, I don't like that, fix it")?

Who gets to decide what the iPad is?

[betterunixthanunix]

The iPad has everything that any other computer has...so who is to say that it is not a computer? Apple can market it as a "media device" all they want, but if people want to use their iPads in other ways, they should be allowed to do so. Nobody, not Apple, and certainly not Steve Jobs, should be dictating what people are allowed to use their iPads for (except perhaps as a deadly weapon).

The iPad does not need to "mute" anyone, as the Time article puts it. Apple is dictating that it should, because of their desire to do business with book publishers.

Re:Who gets to decide what the iPad is?

[elrous0]

The iPad has everything that any other computer has...

You mean like USB ports, the ability to create and run your own software, the ability to chose your own OS, the freedom to download software from anywhere you chose, Flash support, the ability to export and import files at will, etc.?

Re:Who gets to decide what the iPad is?

[Bakkster]

Which was exactly my point, and which is immoral on the part of Apple.

Immoral, really? It makes it no longer a PC, that's all. Your alarm clock has a microcontroller on it as well, is it immoral for them to tell you how you can use it? Is it immoral that my microwave oven's warranty is voided if I replace the firmware?

Its uses are intentionally limited for the sake of people who aren't geeks. If unrestricted access is a necessity for you, then just don't buy the damn thing! Or, you jailbreak it and accept the consequences of the voided warranty.

There is nothing 'immoral' about building a device without general-purpose software access. Just because you think it is, or want it to be a PC, that doesn't make it wrong for Apple not to make it one.

Re:Who gets to decide what the iPad is?

[voidptr]

People pointing out the problems with hyped products is extremely useful.

The problem is the people pointing out problems seem to refuse to accept that other people are capable of comprehending those problems. A minority of people are complaining about limitations those of us who are interested in the product either doesn't see as a limitation, or limitations that are outweighed by other benefits of the product.

I don't need another device for doing "content creation". I already have one of those I use when I'm at work. When I'm at home or traveling, I want something light I can use to keep in touch with people and entertain myself; I'd rather carry an iPad than a 7 lb laptop. Even at the office, my laptop is tethered to my desk all day, and it's something of a pain to undock it, reset all the open network sessions, and fire up the VPN just to take it into a meeting. With an iPad, I still have a way to check email, read PDFs, and interact with our internal engineering wiki without disturbing my laptop.

My mother doesn't do content creation. She emails her kids, plays light games, and bugs us on Facebook. I'd much rather give her an iPad and force her into Apple's walled garden where she's guaranteed some minimal level of protection from malware than spend another weekend cleaning shit off her Windows laptop because some friend of hers sent her some crappy game with a bunch of spyware inside.

Re:Who gets to decide what the iPad is?

[Bakkster]

I assume you refer to removing Other OS.

The difference, of course, is that Sony advertised Other OS as a feature, and it was purchased as such. The iPad and iPhone never advertised nor implied that you could run any general user software.

It is wrong to remove an advertised feature, but it isn't wrong (particularly from a moral standpoint) to not add something that wasn't advertised.

Closed Developer ecosystem, !"Closed system"

[derinax]

The fact that Company X makes a closed system is nothing new, nor is it noteworthy. Closed systems are a dime a dozen.

What the blogs are on fire about, and what we ALL should be worried about, is a closed developer ecosystem. It's Apple's new focus, and if it's allowed to propagate to the open platform we're all screwed.

Re:Closed Developer ecosystem, !"Closed system"

[derinax]

The end does not justify the means. Anything that restricts developer and user freedom in a mass-market channel should be argued against.

And anything NOT open source can be considered a "closed system". Windows is a closed system. What Apple did was to extend the closure to the developer channel, such that it provides a single, monolithic, commercial gateway to the system, which has been very rare in the industry. Not even Microsoft at their most abusive would have attempted that kind of developer lockout.

90 Hour a week slackers.

[Anonymous Coward]

A giant customized Starbucks in Cupertino California where lattes and no soy skim macchiatos are given out free to all employees. The background music involves a playlist of Nora Jones, David Matthews, John Mayer, and Bono on loop from an Ipod docked somewhere in the Apple/Starbucks facility. Hours are long but morale is surprising high as developers, hardware and software, are given 30 minute breaks to masturbate to the new itunes interface.

All developers sit at cafe type tables with a Mac Book Pro while their lord and master Steve Jobs stands deskless in his predictable attire of a turtleneck and jeans. In fact, this is the preferred (mandatory) dress code at Apple. Jobs walks around to each and every department, separated by latte and vegan preferences, and checks on the performance and efficiency of his developers. At any given point in the day one may see Mr Jobs yelling at a programmer for not implementing a button in the perfect shade of corn flower blue (#6495ED) and immediately sends him to the apple punitive chamber, consisting of a HP Compaq running Vista Basic.

There are 2 software development departments and 2 hardware development sections in Apple. For software there is the Apple core team, Apple Open Source team. In hardware there is the Apple systems and management team and the iDevice team. Since the OSX kernel consists of a BSD darwin kernel there is no real need for low level programmers and as such the entirety of the Apple core team consists of UI designers and photoshop junkies. All software churned out from the core team is designed in a program strikingly similar to Visual Studio's form designer but with Cocoa Objective C generated instead. The 16 hour day (Jobs demands 16 hour days since he himself never sleeps) of a core dev involves lining up the right shade of chrome with the latest photoshopped graphite button and maintaining the correct color scheme, not an easy job at all.

The Apple open source team involves a little bit more coding, which is mandated to be done in TextEdit or the option of a $80 third party mac text editor. The Apple open source team doesn't actually create much code but searches the internet for interesting BSD licensed software and modifies it as it's own through obfuscation and conversion to objective C. Many of the items a mac user sees comes from the open source world stamped by apple such as the ability to play music taken from 67 different originally linux based players, CD burning, and the overall ability to click a mouse. Apple's legal department has no qualms about this practice and has assured many that since most of the code is BSD and if any is GPLed many Linux hippies should be grateful that Apple fostered WebKit by using KHTML and adding some Gecko bloat. Perhaps one of the most important items that the open source team has done to date is use parts of the FreeBSD to keep the kernel up to date.

There's not much to say about the Apple systems and management team. I suppose they can be classified in to desktop and laptop systems. Because hardware work is beneath Apple in general and thought of being only worthy of Windows Users and as such can be found working on these beauties in the starbucks bathroom. Desktops are currently made by buying dell machines and putting them in Lian Li cases, where the majority of the costs goes to buying titanium Apple emblems to paste on the sides. Laptops consists of the rebranding of only the most silver and black Sony Viaos but talk has been going around about rebranding Asus EeePCs for a new Apple netbook but you didn't hear that from me, for fear of my life.

The iDevice team's job is to develop for the ipod, iphone, itouch, and many other portable electronics apple may release in the future. Their jobs are very interconnected with the open source team as well as the core dev team. Using firmware from random samsung devices and giving it an OSX skin the ipod stands as a shining example that infringement only applies to greasy file sharers and that the music player remains the best in market

Re:the ipad is not a success

[Thanshin]

I use my iPad at home, you probably won't see me walking around with it.

I'd be ashamed too.

You could paint it orange and pretend it's a brick.

Or glue some hair to it, a rope, and pretend you're walking a chihuahua.

Why 1st gen. Apple products lack "features"

[Gallamine]

For those that didn't RTFA, this paragraph, on the small team approach, is golden:

It is this small-team approach that, of necessity, results in important capabilities being left out of the first release. The payoff, though, is that Steve ends up with a central core of perfectly-integrated functionality instead of a rambling labyrinth of disjointed “features.” This design framework is so well conceived that it can be built upon for years, even decades, without being stripped out and restarted. Compare that with the history of Windows, with false start after false start, resulting in their repeatedly beginning design anew.

Re:the ipad isn't a computer

[PineHall]

If I have a beef with the iPad, it's that while it's a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn't do much to facilitate its creation.

Yes, Grossman does get it right. That is my disappointment too. The iPad is all about consuming content, being a consumer. It is unlike a PC which can be used to create content. The iPad is a passive device.

Re:Either this is wrong, or it's wrong.

[Raffaello]

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Re:the ipad isn't a computer

[Sancho]

The same could be said of televisions. Does Grossman own a TV?

Or radios. Does Grossman own a radio?

Why are you disappointed with the iPad due to its difficulty with creating content? What were you expecting, exactly? If it doesn't suit your needs, don't buy one. They aren't replacing computers, you know....

Re:First Post?

[segedunum]

For anyone who doesn't know what is meant by a boat anchor then watch Hunter Cressell's highly amusing (and still the best) Mac parody:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg7Xh0m_Oco

A lot of it is outdated, but stuff like the filesystem stuff is still true. That always makes me laugh as I had to do it many years ago: "You run to the store to buy the Mac version of Norton Utilities, you run back only for Norton to go 'You idiot! You own a Macintosh! The file is fucking gone!'"