Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs Resigns As Apple CEO
An anonymous reader writes "The title says it all, really; Steve Jobs has resigned as the CEO of Apple, and would like to become Chairman of the Board. Reasons are not specified, but his declining health of recent years is a likely candidate. He's named Tim Cook as his successor."
Well on one hand, its better to do these things while everyone is still healthy and of sound mind. It's a sad day for sure, but on a positive note, Steve has set a high bar for Apple to maintain. Combine this news with the fact that Steve's official BIO has been pushed up to be released sooner than expected...it doesn't look good. Be well Steve!
Will the Turtleneck of Power be passed on to Cook?
Or will it instead be enshrined in a glass case at Apple HQ?
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Take it easy... didn't want to work himself into an early grave.
is rumoured to have Flash, USB ports, AND a 3.5" floppy disk.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Become, beget, begone. Thanks for all you've brought to market, Steve. Cheers...and, best wishes.
Not this time... ;(
it usually takes weeks for news to get here, erm Slashdot may be turning a point multiple stories withing minutes of happening the last few days
I felt a great disturbance...as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror...
Prove it.
We'll miss you, Mr. Jobs. Wish you good health.
Sincerely,
Apple fans everywhere
Apple will continue. They still have strong leadership, Jobs will be chairman, and progress will continue. It's not like they're suddenly going to stop making Macbooks, iPhones, and iPads.
If I were into buying stocks, I'd watch to see whether APPL takes much of a dive, and get ready to buy.
They waited until after the NYSE had closed to make the announcement.
Everyone's going to jump on the short train anyway.
This is the end of an era. I can only hope that his health is not too bad, but I have my concerns.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
Next steve ballmer?
without jobs barking and yelling around everyone's idea becomes great =)
Functionality > philosophy
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Even though I don't qualify as an Apple Fanboy, Steve's impact on the world of computing is felt everyday by all of us.
While Xerox PARC did the original GUI environment, and invented little things like the Mouse, Steve's vision with the Mac changed the computer world. It made computer accessible, influencing Windows and other OSs to make their system accessible to the masses.
Apple, Next, Pixar, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPads.
I believe Steve made the world better.
Steve Jobs got them this far, its up to Cook and the rest of Apple, to either (1) remain the new king of the hill or (2) fuck it up royally. Should be interesting either way.
Regards,
MBC1977,
Time for a X mac!
First the earthquake, then this. And this is probably more frightening for them.
on where AAPL stock will be tomorrow.
Put your feet up, go fishing, read some books. Lord knows you've earned it. And nope, I'm not an Apple man - but I recognize hard work when I see it.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Illness sucks :-( Time pass by fast, isn't. (Disclosure: The last product from Apple I bought was over 25 years ago.)
short it, short it now!
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Jobs has certainly been a brilliant CEO for Apple, but I think their biggest wins have been from their good design and their cheap but decent supply chain. It's not clear to me just how much Jobs had to do with that. Jonathan Ive had the lead on the design, and maybe it was Tim Cook all along who played hardball with Foxconn and Intel to squeeze out those healthy profit margins. I sure hope so. I don't want Apple products to become just ordinary now that mere mortals are in charge.
For those wondering if Apple will continue to enjoy success after Jobs, remember:
* He has left before off and on to little effect.
* Jobs has worked hard to instill a corporate culture with the same values he shares, and not just at the top levels...
* Most importantly, as good as Jobs is Ive is probably as much or more responsible for the designs we think of as being Apple - he's still quite alive and designing like mad.
Good stock buying opportunity ahead...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm rather saddened by this news. Jobs' attention to detail and intolerance of crap amazes and inspires me.
It's simple, really. We should all have such high standards, perhaps then the world would be full of more exquisite and useful things.
Dallas is experiencing thunderstorms and now this?!? I'm holding my breath. Something bad is round the corner.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
down 6%. Better sell.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Although I do not like some of what he has done, he has had a great influence on the shape of PCs and we would be poorer without having had him. I hope that he can keep his health problems at bay to enjoy his family and continue as chairman.
Oh, before anybody winges - an Apple Mac is often used as a Personal Computer and is thus a PC -- regardless of what the marketing people want you to think.
What does that entail?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Full-in? Pussy. Buy on margin, you'll be a multimillionaire before you know it.
I wonder if the next Steve Jobs will be whoever puts on his turtleneck and blue jeans, The Santa Clause-style.
This will not please the Human Resources Dept. I'm guessing none of the execs or board members will serve as a reference for him when he applies for his next job.
I guess he knows he can't continue working much longer, and he is the only one who knows how much time he has left.
Tis well.
You can't handle the truth.
No, buy. I'm going full-in. I'll be an millionaire.
So, you're telling us your a billionaire then?
BM3
This guy is so far above influential in everything that he did, such a tribute to American creativity. I was just thinking that it is just a shame that there seems to be no one who's on his level. I mean, this guy brought ideas about graphical user interfaces to reality. His visions shaped the courses of his competition. He's the Walt Disney of our era. I never really found Apple products useful enough for me personally to own, but I enjoy the fringe benefits of touch screen phones, simplified user interface (think why Windows 7 looks like it does), and of course films from Pixar and Disney. Who's going to fill the void?
Epic fail at being human. I see why you posted as AC.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
... that this will trigger a huge blowout sale of Apple stock, which will enable me to buy a pile and get rich when it quadruples in value the next few months.
Then I remembered that the stock marked already has crapped out so I don't have any money to buy Apple stock with. Crap!
Anyway, just shows what the tech world has come to; even us engineers are greedy bastards who think of nothing but money. Sad news, indeed.
So Android requires someone to die before it's successful? Yeah, sounds like a morally superior choice, sure, buddy.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
This announcement reminds me of the recent passing of another charasmatic leader who provided a huge boost to his organization, had a struggle with cancer, and stepped down from his post.
I really hope this turns out better for Jobs.
I stole this Sig
May you live in interesting times. And while this may seem trivial compared to war and terrorism, the times did just get a bit more interesting.
Good luck to you and your family, Mr. Jobs.
#DeleteChrome
End of an amazing run. Steve took a company I disliked (I was hugely anti-apple in the 1990s) and, in the last decade, made it into a company whose products I looked forward to each new announcement!
While i think Steve is a Jerk and have never been fond of him, he cared about his company and gave it direction.
Last time he left the company just wandered around in a fog. I would expect that to happen again this time.
No matter how much market you control, if you don't have leadership you can kiss it good bye.
Disclaimer: I like apple, always have, and will still be a fan as i watch them slowly disintegrate.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Mr. Steve, thanks for all the years of hard work, and vision beyond the next quarter. You are a genius and has helped millions.
*hugs*
Have a happy retirement.
-Woof woof woof!
Apple's stock lost half its value within a year.
If Microsoft is anything to judge by, this very well may be a huge mistake, just like when Gates resigned as CEO and put Ballmer in charge. Let's just hope the Cook is better than Balmer at steering the company and not just counting the beans.
Whatever you say about Steve Jobs, you will have to admit that he had a good index finger. He could simply point at things and they would get done.
Only founder CEOs have that ability and never as powerfully as Jobs had it. His word was 'the word'.
Steve Jobs was Apples savior, he was resurrected to save them. Tim Cook is an Apple Employee, I bet there are plenty of people who think of him as a peer - who may start to feel they have the ability to assert themselves more. To many cooks spoil the kitchen.
If Apple isn't careful it could lose it's focus. With the nature of Apple's products, it won't take long for any competitor to take advantage of a lack of direction.
There may soon be plenty of infighting over at Cupertino. We can all see what's happening at Microsoft now that Gates is gone.
...they fail to get it [as usual] ---
Ballmer, to shareholders: "Today will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Jobs, and will soon see the end of the Apple Rebellion."
Good luck, Steve, and thanks for all of the dogcows.
Can't stop the Beta? Time to evacuate to ##altslashdot at webchat.freenode.net - Slashcott in effect.
And look at what happened to Apple last time!
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
And I bought my first ever Mac today as well. At least I bought it during Steve's reign though...
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Actually, he was kicked out in 1985, but you had to read the article to find that out, of course. The summary was pretty much rampant fanboyism.
Apple wont quite be the same, and the culture will change.. not a crazy amount, and Apple will be still be making mounds of cash. But it wont be the same Apple, some of the employees will feel it, and some will flee. Most of the evacuees will go to Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon as expected. Though a few will have some cash, and forge off on their own. They'll be the folks that know what they hate about Apple, and know what they love about it.
While I don't expect another assault on the desktop, as Be tried 20 years back, I see an assault on the tablet/cell space in the near future. I see phone apps that are smart enough to silence the ringer at a funeral, that can take into account your schedule and location to know when to act politely. Apple and Google have reasons that prevent this kind of app from existing.
The right applications for a cell phone could cause some interesting changes to the the space Google and Apple are battling in.
Yes, because being "hacker-friendly" is what the mainstream public wants from Apple products.
"Then, maybe, just maybe, I could consider buying a Mac. But then again, more factories like Foxconn wouldn't exactly be great."
Right. Because those Foxconn components in your Dell, HP, or Lenovo PC, or Android phone are made by the *not* evil Foxconn. You know, the one in Iowa where everyone makes UAW level wages, gets free health care and plenty of paid time off.....
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
I know you're a dumb troll, but Slashdot has actually turned sharply against Apple since Android came out. Basically, the site is opposed to any of Google's direct competitors, even if they once admired them.
Steve hasn't been working as CEO since January. He's been on medical leave all this time. I'd say they've been doing well this year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY&feature=player_embedded#
My wife is a medical research doctor.
She commented 8 months ago that Jobs outlook seemed bleak, he may only have a few years left.
I fear this may well come true, my Mother was just diagnosed with cancer too.
A terrible affliction indeed.
All the best Steve.
Chill dude. Steve is not dead yet, and this is only a complete surprise to those not paying attention. Tim Cook, by most accounts, has already demonstrated his ability.
Of all of Apple's concerns, your misplaced outrage is not even a tiny blip.
It's too bloated with carrier-loaded crapware to move.
Maybe they could follow the model Linux fans use and start their own Slashdot to tell them what to think.
Everyone begin comparisons now, from consumers to the employees..
Steve Jobs is going to be patent trolling in heaven soon.
Members of the Sadducees approached RMS and asked him, "A man patents his design for a hammer but then dies, passing the patent on to his brother in his will. If the brother then dies, which of them owns the patent in heaven?" to which RMS replied, "In Heaven, patents are neither given nor retained." He then departed to a lonely place but the crowds followed him, and he fed them with crumbs from his beard. And the number fed was 4000.
We know why he resigned (health). Competition will continue as normal, Apple will do its thing as a company. Business as usual.
The contributions, whether agreeable as successes or failures amounts to a wealth of experience that he has given to the tech community deserves recognition.
I think all we can say is "thanks Steve, good luck, and live well, you deserve it."
End of an era. I started with an Apple ][+ and am typing this on my iPad 2. These definitely been ups and downs, and I still love the old NeXTStep OS.
On the plus side, it looks like the short term (next 1-2 years) is taken care of.
iPhone5-cross carrier
iPad3
The new paradigm machines due out later this year (not sure what this is besides an A5 ultralight/ultra cheap)
AppleTV becomes a game console.
Live well, Steve. You may have been pompous and arrogant, but you cared about the design.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Best CEO ever.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
Apple itself announced that Jobs has been elected chairman of the board.
dude, the original apple ][ clones were just photocopies of an original design, down to the roms.
those companies (esp. the *original* chinese/taiwanese computer clones, which copied apple's hardware) were litterally rip-offs coat-tailing on apple's success.
compaq et al, on the other hand, were actual, bona-fide clean-room reverse engineering efforts and deserved to live/succeed. well, imo.
Don't worry, there are plenty of trolls all to eager to tell us what they seem to believe we are thinking...
Yeah, not-evil Foxconn is amazing. I heard they get free shiatsu massages for up to 3 hours a day - WHILE you're on the clock!
Well, "on the clock" is misleading - they don't make employees even punch in or out on a timecard, their work hours are "whenever you feel like showing up, if you feel like showing up, until whenever you feel like leaving."
Any company that makes a practice of telling the customer that they are wong (what ...
Yes, not all customers are wong. Some are wu, and some aren't even Chinese.
Use the spatula, Luke
It is already successful. It has more than twice the user base of iPhones.
SHORT SELL!!!!!!111!!!!
Any company that makes a practice of telling the customer that they are wong (what else can you call apple's behavior concerning user demands for flash, and interpreted code execution?)
A company that doesn't give customers the products they want, but the products they love. Sounds like a good plan to me. And what customers are asking for interpreted code execution? And Apple will continue systematicilly attacking companies that copy instead of competing, and rightfully so.
His name is Steve Jobs not Steve Job, the apostrophe belongs on the other side of the "s". That should read Steve Jobs' resignation.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I'd like Apple to use their resources to make laptops and desktops the way they've made iPhones.
They already have? At least for laptops anyway. A whole slew of manufacturing decisions that give the MacBook Pro it's efficient shape, design, and solid construction are being copied by the rest of the world.
Cute. Post was made from an android smartphone, with stubby little chicklet buttons for keys.
Typos are unavoidable.
Do you feel better now that you called me out on an unregistered button press?
Steve Jobs changed my life. First I bought an Apple ][, and the rest is history. No. Really. It made my career. Now, several thousand PCs later, I'm retired. Rock on, Steve. And thanks.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Now they'll have to appoint one of his patent lawyers to the CEO position lest people go on thinking he's a one-of-a-kind douchebag. On the bright side, he and Bill Gates now have plenty of time to sit down, have a few beers, count their money, and regale eachother with grand tales of putting volunteers out of work with vicious litigation and political lobbying that has been of tremendous detriment to their customers and the people that actually care about serving them.
Perhaps you didn't hear that Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, then Apple failed in his absence, then Jobs came back and orchestrated the greatest comeback in corporate history, and made stockholders like myself a fortune.
Apple also bought NeXT from Jobs for millions, and it became the Mac OS.
Oh, and this thing he bought called "Pixar" for $5M? He turned it into the most successful movie studio in history, and sold it for like $6 billion.
Epic history fail.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Customers that want to do ANYTHING with .net or java?
Business apps, emulation of any kind, that sort of thing?
And no. I don't love apple products. I recently had the toe curling misfortune of repairing a macbook pro. Thing had a very sick sounding disc mechanism in the dvd drive, and would not boot on the *supplied* OSX install DVD. My customer had to break down and hunt online for snow leopard because the default version of leopard that came on it was one subrevision newer than was on the install dvd. (The EFI loader would not permit loading the dvd.)
White plastic and a sensation of feeling posh are not justification for what apple does.
Best Wishes to Steve and his family.
Here's hoping that Apple keeps on keepin' on.
FIRST TO SAY:
I nominate FAKE STEVE JOBS as his immediate replacement!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
is the internet. which is open.
if you want closed, go back to Prodigy and Compuserve.
I feel a great disturbance in the internets, as if millions of fanboys suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
I wonder how much of this has to do with that news story a little while back about that new experimental treatment for leukemia. From what I understand, it was amazingly successful and has applications in other cancers, including pancreatic cancer (my assumption is that it would apply to both the common kind and the one that he had). Since cancer risk never goes away, and since he was looking to transition out at some point, and that cancer has affected his life so deeply, and that he has extremely deep pockets, I wonder whether he will be pulling a Gates move in the area of cancer research.
This was a tag on a Jobs story once, and it should be for this one.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Pretty much my feelings!
That's probably true to a large extent, but it will take some time.
Goodbye.
Try posting more than a few lines of text from a smartphone with staggered keys, and get back to me.
...and, *crickets chirping* ?
sig: sauer
Exactly right, selling now is silly. Buying tomorrow will be rewarded about the middle of October when iPhone 5 is near.
But the day the iPhone 5 out all the stock appreciation is already baked in, so sell again.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Dictators die too old, good folk die too young
But Steve Jobs' death is juuuust right.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
He mostly set it in design. But realistically, he took the whole open platforms and devices to really bad direction with the closeness of iOS
iOS and MacOS are built atop a huge number of open technologies:
GCC (slowly moving to LLVM)
Webkit
Grand Central Dispatch
OpenCL
OpenGL
Darwin (the kernel)
Contrary you your assertion, I would say there are few other companies besides IBM that have done AS MUCH to promote open source and open technologies.
Yes they have locked down the OUTER part of the platforms they have developed, because they are actually trying to move the computer industry forward by developing systems where people are not in constant peril of harm if they do not care to become system administrators. But you can always get inside and make use of a fabulous array of perfectly good open source frameworks.
In the case of MacOS you aren't even a little right. Apple has closed down nothing, they have build a platform atop which you can place applications if you like, packaged in a way a user can be a little bit more sure they are valid and will be up to date. How is that closed? MacOS is as open as ever, and built atop all those same technologies....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Does GE make it easy for you to reprogram your microwave? Lookup appliance in a dictionary.
You must have missed the part where I gave Jobs credit for his marketing talent.
He didn't miss that part. It was simply wrong.
Oh sure Jobs has some marketing talent. But far more than that, he has the ability to EXECUTE a product.
That means taking raw technologies and forming them into something people actually want to buy. It means betting on the right technologies for a long lasting platform, or having the skill to make what you picked work for you (really a mixture of both).
Marketing is the very tiny tip of the iceberg where you try to get through to people what you have actually made. But it doesn't help at all unless people want to buy what you have made. You can't market a bad product from a cold start with no rep, and unless you have built up a good reputation over time with products people have liked using they are not going to trust that your product is what you say it is.
Jobs is also really good at being willing to move on to new frontiers instead of simply milking what they have to death. That is what I think he spent to most time trying to drill into Cook and other Apple execs, hopefully the message has got through.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I lived there for a number of years. Why you would think it odd at all for there to be rain in Texas is quite beyond me... I saw tons of it while there over many years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is one of those things I wonder about.
Way back in 1984, Apple developed their desktop interface (with licensed inspiration from Xerox PARC). They copyrighted parts of it but made the mistake of licensing those parts to Microsoft. When Microsoft came out with Windows 2.0 in 1987, Apple took them to court and lost mostly due to that license.
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
There are various quotes attributable to Steve Jobs while he was away from Apple about how Apple should be really pushing to develop "the next big thing." He's said a few times that the way for Apple to stay in front is to out innovate and be the best choice. Quotes about "skating to where the puck will be" and such.
Now, one interesting angle of this is that Apple "look-and-feel" lawsuits started with Windows 2.0 in 1987, after Steve had left the company. When Steve came back, one of the first things he did was make peace with Microsoft over the various lawsuits that Apple had filed against Microsoft and the two companies entered into a patent cross-licensing agreement. Part of Steve's rationale behind this at the time was to get the whole lawsuit thing out of the way so Apple could procede to innovate.
Now Steve has been away from Apple for awhile. Tim Cook has been interim CEO while Steve has stepped down. And we see Apple not trying to out-innovate it's competitors but, instead, to sit on it's lead and sue everyone who comes close. Just like back in the mid and late 1980s where Apple sued GEM and Microsoft and HP.
Of course, one difference between now and then is that there is no licensing. The court didn't really rule on whether Apple had a valid copyright claim because Apple had already licensed everything to Microsoft. The few claims that were not covered were ruled "obvious" and Apple lost those claims. So we may get a look at what the world would have been if Apple hadn't licensed the desktop GUI to Microsoft.
Let's face it Apple's bread and butter is their iPhone
And before that, their bread and butter was the iPod. Before that, the Mac.
And pretty soon, their bread and butter will be the iPad. That's too bad that it doesn't support one feature that you feel is a show stopper (USB without an adapter. You know the iPad does support USB with an adapter), but to millions of normal people out there, that doesn't seem to be such a big deal.
I can't wait to see what Apple's next innovative and genre defining product will be. And I cant wait to laugh at all the Apple haters who claim that that new revolutionary product is worthless crap because it doesn't support X feature.
"interpreted code execution"
You mean like javascript? Just sayin'.
Maybe you should get an iPhone? :)
Wow. I thought I've already seen all the zealous and delusional Apple-hating posts on Slashdot. Yours definitely takes the cake, impressive and amusing at the same time ("user demands for flash"? What the hell...).
If you don't like the direction that computing is taking with Apple at the helm, you're sorely out of luck, because things will only accelerate from here. It'll be a glorious new era of computing, more people-friendly, more user-focused. Bring it on!
The above is just one of many examples that illustrate how crappy, inconsistant and counterintuitive the MS Windows version of iTunes is. It's almost as if it is deliberately designed to make the MS Windows platform look bad and shift people onto Apples. The built in help does not reliably inform the user how to do a backup of all of their purchased and downloaded content. You have to turn to google for that.
Any other cheap and nasty mp3 player that you can trust to run every day of a leap year lets you copy everything the same way as anything else in MS Windows, OS X or whatever.
But yet, Apple's very elegant interface design still makes it superior to Google's Android in many ways.
It will be VERY interesting to see what Google does with Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"), which is supposed to have a much-revamped interface and a far more elegant design of the interface. It may become the first version of Android to become a true competitor to Apple's iOS.
Or does anyone else find it a bit ironic that the in-depth stories on the linked WSJ article contain photo essays on Jobs that are in .... FLASH?
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Steve Jobs' dedication, skills and successes have been outstanding for decades.
The market value of Apple, Jobs' brainchild, the only cosmetic manufacturer in the computer industry (pc's with lipstick), is the unequivocal testimony to Jobs talents!
The 3rd generation of the iPhone was the first and only Apple product I could have imagined buying for myself. The iPad? No, the new Samsung Galaxy outclasses it, and Apple knows that.
Too bad for the Mac OS it didn't receive any injections of Steve Jobs' talents. It still sucks.
Steve Jobs will be missed. But his loss can only be good for Apple's competitors. So Samsung. Get going! Get those Samsung Galaxy out.
Last I heard, Steve had taken leave earlier this year. Even then, most of the stories you heard were about how Cook had arranged to buy up all the production for touchscreens for the next three years. How Cook was managing the supply chain. I'm guessing that this is not a surprise to Tim Cook, most of the upper levels of Apple, and the reigns had already all but been passed over some time ago and he's been de facto CEO since at least earlier in the year. Cornering the supply chain, patent lawsuits, etc. That is all been the new Apple.
Someone gifted me with a Shuffle. I was familiar with some earlier MP3 players I had purchased -- Creative Nomad (parallel port) . Samsung Yepp.-- that simply acted as removable drives. When I tried to load my non-DRM mp3s on the Shuffle I nearly went looneytoons over Itunes, which you so perfectly characterized as a "bloated chunk of software that may erase all the music on your iDevice as it automatically syncs to an empty library."
Since I actually know where my files live, and where I want them to go, I just wanted to see the Shuffle player as a drive, like I do with my other players, and load the freaking thing with my music and audio books. But, no, I had to work within the confines of Itunes' peculiar grammar and create "playlists" and "sync" them. *shivers in horror* Nothing was transparent about the process. And I felt like I was in the grips of a nightmare virus. It was not hard to suss out. But it seemed so...pointless. What's hard about drag and drop? At least provide it as an option. And if it is an option it is not an easy-to-find option.
My wife used the Shuffle for a couple of months, but Itunes kept wanting to update itself every two days as an excuse to try to sell me DRM music. No thanks. I buy Redbook CDs and rip them with EAC into high quality MP3s. Finally, I deleted Itunes, which IMHO is practically malware. I bought my wife a Sansa.
Sorry about Steve, however. It is a terribly early frost for him if he is truly sick unto death this time around. A lot of Apple products have been great. And he is an authentic pioneer.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Yes, actually.
If you can't be bothered to proofread what you just wrote, we certainly CAN be bothered to mock you unmercifully.
The Internet is no place for the weak, the stupid, or the inattentive.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
"sig: sauer"
I see what you did there.
Kudos.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Apple is Jobless now! :(
I'd say the bigger question is this: can they keep the vision? Lets be honest folks iPhone 5 and iPad 4 and probably one or two more iPods were already in the pipe under Job's watch, but what after?
Like it or not it is the vision of Jobs that made Apple. look at how they sucked without him before, it ended up an MBA clusterfuck, hell look at what happened to MSFT when they lost Gates, another MBA clusterfuck.
To me the difference between Jobs and the MBAs can be summed up by a story I read by one of the guys that was designing iDVD..."So we hear Steve is gonna be in the next day to look at what we had done, so we have all these mock ups, with tabs and buttons for all the features, when in walks Steve. he completely ignores our mockups walks to the whiteboard and draws a box. he says 'This is it, this is the product. you drop a video in here and a single button that says burn appears" and he walked out. We just stood there shocked"
And THAT is what is gonna be damned hard for Apple to replace. It is damned hard to get people who can see the forest past the trees and cut through the bullshit and Jobs was damned good at that. remember it ran alright for a little while after he left the first time, it took about three years for the MBA clusterfuck to really take hold. I'd wish him well but sadly he has lived longer than most with that type of cancer and this move is probably him putting his affairs in order.
So while I'm sure the company will be fine now, the bigger question is will it still be innovating in 3 years, or like before will they end up coasting on past successes while all the PHBs jockey for position.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Everyone's health is deteriorating. His influence was profound, yet the fruit of his labor at best is a fractured market of equally vile products. I give a shit if he's dying. May Apple die too. Those are my genuine thoughts, not flamebait. Call me a cold-hearted bastard if you will; perhaps I am.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
I am not sure of his choice of Tim Cook to be CEO. You know what, Steve Jobs has consistently managed to attract, find, and choose the best scientists, creatives, and imaginative people in the world to design products for Apple. The only time Steve Jobs has made a mistake in this regard has been in finding a good CEO. So, I wonder .. is Tim Cook going to be as great a CEO .. is he going to have the same kind of vision, love of technology, focus on quality, and ease of use that Steve Jobs has had? It sort of worries me that Tim Cook never started a business .. and are his names on any Apple patents? You'll find Steve Jobs name on the iPhone's design patent as well as a bunch of other stuff .. but is Tim Cook's name there?
Good point, as it shows just one of many facets of Apple's recent hypocrisy.
I kid you not, when I opened /. this story read:
"Read the 666 comments"
An omen?
"Boy, was that company suckered."
That's John Dvorak in his last column for Infoworld 1985 when Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple.
http://books.google.com/books?id=jC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=%2Bdvorak+steve+jobs+leaving+apple+1985+infoworld+suckered&source=bl&ots=pJ8NZY9Wgv&sig=2YM64qODziCzfzYWR3lYJ6Zhu2U&hl=en&ei=t_xVTr6iDsb54QS3l52jDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA
In 1997 Michael Dell added "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders".
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html
How could they be so wrong? They weren't. Steve Jobs just had luck, plenty of it.
Slashdot's positive/negative karma system ensures that a specific viewpoint coagulates and eventually governs the comments section. You're obviously aware of the impact of group moderation on an account since you're posting anonymously.
AppleTV becomes a game console
At least that they add an app store to it and extend the iOS SDK to cater for it as well...
.....lets give him a big hand.....
That box ... what shape were its corners?
One day, perhaps when Apple is a shadow of its former self, and Linux is a term only used by geeks and forgotten to the general public, perhaps we'll all look back with rose-tinted glasses on this era. We'll forget the patent wars, the bickering, the excessive advertising and anti-competitive tactics, and savour the thought that for a moment, consumer electronics devices were elevated to the status of art. That products were beautiful, that elegant design was hugely important, and that for a while the progress of IT was headline news and talked about by nearly everyone.
And we'll also recall that Steve was a big part of that. So thanks, Steve. Without you, we'd be stuck in the land of Nokia interfaces, of Windows 95, of 1990s interfaces.
RS
Since this comment has lasted about 4oo posts, here is an idea-
If you don't like a closed platform, don't buy it!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I can see the next gen iPad coming with USB. Unless they try to put the new Thunderbolt interface in. That would be interesting.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
So i guess this is the part where their stuff gets shit again :D...
Does this mean there will be a "Third Coming"? Will Jobs return in another 10 years after setting up another tech company to create Apple's neXt operating system (lets hope it uses an exokernel or something better than mach)
Get ready to dust off that old mahogany unibody macbook classic in 2020, and log on to buy up Apple shares at their all time low just before they acquire "LatER Step" and Jobs returns in a new cybernetic clone of his body. When he saves the day... with just one more thin and shiny thing.
I have patented the process of resigning as CEO and becoming chairman of a company.
Steve Jobs owes me millions, mwha ha ha ha!
It's turtlenecks all the way down!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The difference between Steve Jobs and the wannabes is Steve Jobs is an asshole with taste.
The wannabes can only emulate the asshole bit. And that is why they fail.
How do you hire people with taste if you yourself have no taste? It takes a lot more effort, esp with lots of lying assholes around.
You wouldn't think so, to hear the eulogizing.
Not sure. He seems a competent AdC, but they rarely make great generals.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It won't have USB, because USB doesn't carry the audio/video signals that the proprietary connector does. And for the mobile products Apple wants visual simplicity. One multi-role connector, not multiple connectors.
It looks like the economy has lost 1 more Job.
On a serious note, I remember the last time Jobs left Apple. They weren't as innovative and they didn't do as well with marketshare. I don't use Apple products, but I hope that doesn't happen again.
I suspect a lot of people don't think about that expression "Can't see the forest because of all the trees in the way". But that seems to be life for the vast majority of people. When it comes down to it, the way almost everything works is wrong, somehow. But it's like a local minimum, almost nobody seems to look past a few small tweaks and adjustments to see the global minimum.
Related, but separate, something that bothers me about most technically minded developers or engineers trying to design things - almost all of them never bother finishing the race. When designing the interface for something, they will develop it until it's possible to accomplish a task, but usually no further. A classic example is digital clocks - how to adjust the time on them. Even now, the interface for most sucks into the negative digits, but the earlier ones were painfully stupid: Hold the "time" button, then either the "fast" or "slow" as the clock advances - past the time you want to set. Repeat this for another 12 or 24 hour cycle and miss again. Repeat until frustrated. Newsflash designers, you can add buttons to go backwards! Yes, you need to redesign the chip to subtract, but you only do that once. Millions of people have to set the time over and over.
And why doesn't every clock just have a "DST ON/OFF" switch? Is that really so impossible?
I see this over and over again, from things like Java libraries, Unix networking, Windows (classic press "start" to stop the computer - and why are there seven options, any why should I care which does what?), the damn "smart" photocopier (I needed to copy a slip of paper onto a page, the copier rotated it and cut off the bottom. I rotated the slip to match the new orientation, the copier rotated it and again cut off the bottom. Should I try diagonal?) - it's like technical types go as far enough to see the finish line, and say "theoretically we can finish the race, so let's just stop here".
This is the thing that separates a genuinely innovative product from others, actually getting to the destination. GUI word processors let you see the format, rather than imagine how special codes would make it look like eventually. iPods couldn't do as much as the competition, but the competition only made it possible to do more, iPods were easier to do more. Nintendo Wii games didn't require reading an instruction manual. A Roomba vacuum just had to be plugged in and turned on.
The common aspect of these things is designing for the end use, not the implementation. It's more work, but it's work that has to be done only once. The end user that has to figure out what they hell you were thinking has to do this every single time (until they get used to, say, a list of keystrokes or menu choices written on a post-it that they don't understand). If the user has to enter an email address, help out - have a separate username and host fields, with a "@" label between them, rather than trying to parse it for validity after it's entered and just saying "keep trying until you get the format right". Basically, anywhere there are user instructions that give a list of steps to perform, make the computer do them - computers are better at following instructions!
This, fundamentally, is why almost all smart phones sucked before the iPhone - every possible operation needed a magic invocation of actions (or a long menu path) to start that you had to memorize to use them. Apple designers (not one single person, but an entire design team) broke down what was needed and got rid of all exposed implementation, and put the effort into making it just work. I have no idea how complex the technology is that measures where I tap on an iPod keyboard and guesses which of the four keys my finger overlaps is the one I'm trying to press, but it gets it right so I don't care - it should just work, and it does, so I'm happy.
When it comes down to it, whether it's a dictatorship or not isn't important. But without some strong insistence on finishing the job, most technical developers won't bother. And even then, they can come up with some amazingly hair-brained designs (search for design failures/hall of shame sites). A dictatorship is a way to avoid them, at least.
That's because Apple, at that time, was run by the kind of people that would fire Steve Jobs.
I know. I don't expect Apple to slide all the way back to complete irrelevance again but I do expect them to begin the long slow slide to mediocrity. I expect this of almost all the major players out there. Most of the major companies have reached their peaks or will reach them shortly and will slide back in to the pack. Microsoft and Sony have already slid back, Nintendo is rapidly following, and Google and Apple will probably follow within a few years. I can't wait for the next disruptive company to come along and shake things up. Google changed the internet, Apple changed the way we use technology, what will the next big revolution be?
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
Yeah, heaven forbid that Apple actually gets to sell their own designs that they put money into creating. You do realize that the Franklin unit was a complete dupe of the Apple II, right? Right down to stealing the copyrighted software in the ROM?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The Monitor ROM (Apple II counterpart to BIOS) didn't have a clean syscall mechanism, unlike IBM PC BIOS (which used a dispatcher with the function number in the accumulator) and Commodore 64 KERNAL (which used a jump table). Syscalls were just subroutine calls to entry points scattered throughout the ROM, and each subroutine had to be the same length in bytes as the original. There was no good way to relocate a subroutine in case the clean-room rewrite ended up longer than Apple's version. Say they wanted to use a clean-room method like Compaq used: each subroutine's specification would have a description of its function, the affected memory locations, and the allowed number of bytes. I read some of the Monitor ROM when I used to program for the Apple II, and I'd bet a lot of the subroutines are provably the only way (or at least the byte-shortest way) to accomplish what each subroutine does. At least under modern jurisprudence, I suspect that this restriction would have made Apple's copyright in the Monitor ROM thinner under the merger doctrine.
Yes. By HIDING all of that stuff where the user doesn't see it.
The sure do see Webkit, or the results of it...
But none of that changes the FACT that Apple has been a champion of Open Source under Steve Jobs.
Preventing the user from running any program they want
That's not true on the Mac and only true on iOS because THAT as a default configuration is much better for most users. Technical users can still run anything they want. This layered approach is far superior to a free-for-all that lets people screw themselves over too easily.
Preventing certain types of programming languages.
They only did that briefly, sort of (they never banned Monotouch or Unity apps for instance) - no longer. If you're that out of touch how can we take any of your rant seriously? The rest of it is even more ill-informed and incorrect, I won't even bother showing you why - I'll just say try using Google sometime.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One does not have to particularly like M. Jobs, but one would have to be of extraordinary bad faith to pretend his influence in IT isn't huge. One doesn't have to like Apple products to see that they are different, sometime inspiring and often well made. Sure nobody is perfect, but Apple under his leadership has done pretty amazing things over the years, from the Apple I and ][, to the Ipad via Macintosh and Ipod, who can deny this? Yet I'm reading lots of comments, doubtless from great leaders, denigrating his influence and character. How sad.
M. Jobs is leaving most likely because he doesn't seem himself recovering enough to be at Apple's helm. I personally wish him the very best.
I am aware, but that means every time I want to attach a flash drive, I need the flash drive and two cables... pain in the ass! Steve Jobs also stated that Flash is dead, yet a ton of websites still use it and Android and Window both support it better than Mac. I want to be able to watch video content on my smart phone or computer or tablet without issues. I can list more reasons and did in my previous post on how the other tablet makers are being more innovative than Apple and more open I hate how closed the App store is more than most things. Are the Apple iPad and iPhone good products yes they are, but they miss out on usability in some areas that I feel are important. I don't hate Apple, but I do see them hitting a decline soon as others are catching up, just like other personal computer makers did in the 80s and Apple saw a decline. Can they rebound sure, but it is not set in stone.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Apple went up 6000% from the time he became CEO again until his first medical absence. Dumbest. Bunny. Ever.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
There's a "special case" when it's listed as one of the features of the software and when it's recommended when an iWhatever is sent in for repair because part of the fix is often a wipe and restore from an image.
Okay, but that doesn't change the fact that per the wiki link in the GP, Franklin admitted to copying the code, and on the Franklin machine there were byte strings referencing developers at Apple, as well as trademarks like "Applesoft"
They didn't even attempt to reverse engineer. They dumped the Apple ROM and started burning their own chips. You can't do that.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.