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Steve Jobs Says PC Folks' World Is Slipping Away

Posted by kdawson on from the freedom-from-porn dept.

theodp writes "Provoked by an iPad ad promising a 'revolution,' Valleywag's Ryan Tate fired off a late-night missive to Steve Jobs. Jobs responded, and the two engaged in an after-midnight e-mail debate over lockdown, Cocoa vs. Flash, battery life, and whether 'freedom from porn' is a bug or a feature. 'The times they are a changin',' quipped Jobs, 'and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.' Tate was unswayed by the Apple CEO's reality distortion field, but did come away impressed by Jobs' willingness to spar one-on-one over his beliefs — at two in the morning on a weekend."

3 of 1,067 comments (clear)

  1. haha by timmarhy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    steve gets a little market share and it goes to his head.

    here in the real world, he hasn't hardly made a dent in personal computing. I'd admit he has cornered the wanky new toy gadget market, that's about it.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
  2. Try this one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Go out, buy nothing but an iPad and tell me how good your computing experience is 12 months from now.

    No cheating. Not a single transaction on a single machine that isn't an iPad.

    I dare you.

  3. Re:Sounds to me... by BasilBrush · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Apple still forces you to resize windows from the lower-right corner.

    And the cost of being able to resize from any edge in Ubuntu for example? The need to have a fugly border all the way around every window, which on the one hand consumes display real estate, whilst still being narrow enough that it proves hard for some users to be able to grab easily.

    Forcing the user to do things Steve's way is not a benefit to the user.

    Limited numbers of geeks like to customize stuff. For most functionality for the vast majority of users it's better for the designer to make a reasonable decision. Ref: The Paradox of Choice.

    In terms of learning curve, their interfaces are slightly ahead. In terms of productivity, their interfaces are years behind.

    Your abstract opinion. I'd argue that people are most productive on well designed UIs, and Apples UIs are way ahead of anything Linux has.

    They took NeXTStep's dock and ruined its defaults for prettiness instead of muscle memory, for example.

    That's probably a fair point (not that I ever actually experienced NeXT myself.) And the reason is Fitt's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law

    And you have to move the mouse farther (and on a large display, actually refocus your eyes) to use the single menu bar.

    And there you are wrong. A menu at the edge of the screen is easier (more productive) to use. Again because of Fitt's law. Plus it also is more economic on screen real estate.

    And until OSX, Apple didn't even have minimize/maximize, instead using the same multifinder approach they've been using (annoyingly) for years.

    i.e. It doesn't work like Windows. And Linux copied the Windows functionality. The paradigm in Mac OS is not to run applications full screen - instead of maximizing, the zoom button only increases the size of a window's height or width until the scroll bar is no longer needed (or the extent of the screen is hit.) Any extra growth of a window beyond that takes up screen real estate without revealing any more of the document. It's a waste.

    You are used to Windows and/or Linux, and you assume that it's the right way to do things. When the real issue is that it's just the way that you are used to things being done. That doesn't mean it's the best way.