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Steve Jobs Interview with Time Magazine

Posted by Hemos on from the apple's-sort-of-messiah dept.

broohaha wrote to us with the online version of Time's interview with Steve Jobs. It's the cover of this week's edition, and gives an interesting perspective into the labyrinth of his mind. The most interesting part is the Pixar stuff, IMHO. Just waiting for Toy Story II right now.

9 of 205 comments (clear)

  1. heyo by Suydam · · Score: 3
    While this is a fun article to read there really isn't anything all that earth-shattering here.

    Some of the things he attibutes to Apple as reasons why it's great are pretty right-on the mark though.

    Example: Apple WAS able to add USB to their boxes without worry about anything. They just did it. But I don't know if I wholly agree with his reasoning why. It seems to me that apple could make a jump like this precisely because they'd become a small niche-player in the industry. The smaller warrior always moves faster.

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    Werd.
    1. Re:heyo by smileyy · · Score: 3

      Large numbers of USB peripherals did not start to appear (and in correlation, appear cheaply) until Apple forced the issue with the iMac.

      Since the PCs still had traditional serial ports, companies saw no compelling reason to start producing USB peripherals, despite the superiority of technology.

      Of course, USB support in the various Windowsen also aggreived the problem.

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      pooptruck
  2. Hrm... by G-Man · · Score: 5

    Interesting rhetorical gymnastics. Too bad they're either misleading or flat out wrong.

    I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"

    The very quote you use says "don't need", as opposed to "make sure..does not". Quite a different logical meaning there. Perhaps you would be happier with a car or television that *forced* the user to be intimate with it's underlying technology? Maybe you should have to manually set the fuel-air ratio in your Honda? Screw channels, you should have to manually tune your TV. The entire computing world is built upon the concept of functional abstraction, otherwise we'd be trying to send web pages using assembly language. Apple is trying to 'abstract' up to the user level by integrating software and hardware. Many users may not know how a computer works. So what? Perhaps, God forbid, they actually want to do other things with their lives.

    Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...

    Gee, that's funny, my cable modem dowloaded a file the other night at 180KB/s. That pipe seems pretty full to me. Perhaps my Macs are running NT without my knowledge...

    Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace

    Hardly. I don't see Sony products anywhere in my workplace, and they seem to do okay. People bought two million iMacs because they were easy to use and looked cool (at least to their eyes), while the computers at work were neither. Frankly, I'd be less likely to buy the same product I see at work (phone, VCR, company car) because I know PHBs only care about buying what the herd mentality tells them they should buy, and what fits with the corporate culture. They're gonna buy the white Ford Taurus GL, not the SHO, and surely not a Beetle/Audi TT/Ferrari/anything mildy interesting. As people see how clueless some IT departments are, they'll come to the same conclusion about computers.

    Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)

    So the world needs another kernel? Avie Tevanian did a lot of work on what became the Mach kernel. Avie worked for Steve at NeXT. Apple bought NeXT. A lot of the other technology (e.g., QuickTime) was "homegrown" at Apple. People used to complain that Apple had NIH-syndrome. Now you criticize them because they didn't reinvent the wheel? So what are we to make of companies that now support Linux? How about IBM? Is this an indictment against OS/2 and AIX, or is it just good business? How about SGI and IRIX?

    So what if Jobs has his own ideology about technology? Since Apple is a vertical integrator, they will never dominate the overall market. You can take Steve's vision or leave it. If I don't like Saab's vision for the automobile, I don't buy one, but I'm not frightened by them. I'm more frightened by a company that's wants to have a piece of everything. Now who could that be?

  3. How is it that we cap on Steve? by gsfprez · · Score: 3

    His products sell, his products' have inspired all of consumer electronics, over 90% of iMac owners are on the internet, and Apple's stock has travelled from $14 to over $70.

    I'm still looking for why people are "scared" of him, why they don't "get" him, and feel compelled to bag on his goals.

    Everything he's done at Apple has helped Apple and made better products and made everyone involved money.

    Last time i checked, even people that use Linux would like to accomplish goals like that.
    ___
    "I know kung-fu."

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    guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
  4. jobs and genius, and woz by qwerjkl · · Score: 3

    My opinion of Jobs is finally starting to form a bit. The way he phrases his sentences is very familiar, much like the way very smart people I know phrase things, with confidence. Probably my two favorite things he said in the interview were the comment about normal vs. talented people, and woz. He said that a small group of very talented people can do much greater things than ANY number of normal people. And I think that is definately correct. He also said that the normal 'talented' label applies to usually only 30% better than normal, with twice as good being VERY good. Then he says woz was 25 times or more better than average. Wow. That's a compliment. Anyhoo... I dunno bout you guys, but I like reading these kind of stories, a bit of the history of computing, a bit of its future.

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    abrams's advice: when eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
  5. Re:Was that from a special Ad section of Time? by methuseleh · · Score: 3
    Ok, son. Time to put down your Pokemon cards and Learn a little bit about computer history. You see, before he sold all of that colored plastic, he actually sold quite a bit of beige plastic. In fact, way back in the mid 80s, when you were just a gleam in you parents' eyes, Mr. Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak introduced a funky looking little box called the Macintosh computer. And, surprisingly, that underpowered, tiny-screened, expensive little chunk of plastic did change the world. See, there's this other old dude named Chuck Geshke who developed a language that could put pretty pictures and cute letters on paper using another overpriced, underpowered, slow, expensive beige plastic box called a laser printer. And yet another old dude named John Warnock created a slow, underpowered, clunky program called PageMaker, which ran on Steve Jobs' little beige box and printed out pretty pages on Chuck Geshke's little beige box. The result was something called "desktop publishing" which really did change the world by making quality printed communication much more accessible to common folk who didn't have big DEC PDP-11s or phototypesetting machines in their garages. Sure, he didn't bring world peace or end world hunger, but he did change the world in his own small way, and with a lot of help from others. And he's done much more than just sell a lot of colored plastic. Now go on back to your Pokemons.

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    Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.

  6. Re:Pixar by Wah · · Score: 3

    Both times? :)

    I'm just saying no one (read: major movie studios) seems to think there is a market for really cool animated movies (I'm thinking like HBO's Spawn, i.e. rated R). Because of the Disney factor everyone here thinks animation means cute, fuzzy, and happy. Animation techniques have gotten so amazing I just wish someone would make a Star Wars/Hobbitt type epic. That's what my hope for the FF movie is.
    And I know Pixar ain't gonna make it.

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    +&x
  7. Re:Toy Story 2 render-farm by um...+Lucas · · Score: 4

    I remember a TV special a while back where Pixar was explaining their choice in computers. It had nothing to do with price/performance, but rather performance/cubic foot... They liked the suns because they were so small they could stack tons and tons of them in a relatively small area and get much more processing power than they could by trying to fit Onyx's or anything else into that area.

    I think that shows that there are so many other factors to consider when you're in need of processing power... Yeah alphas are cheap, but whose going to sell you 400 quad alpha systems and ships them standard in low profile enclosures?

    anyone involved in the real world can tell you that linux/xeon is the only way to go for rendring and 3d animation/modeling.

    You're just crazy! For one, so many studios and/or software companies would need to report their solutions to Linux. For two Xeon is a bum when it comes to the highend... Yeah, it's 25% faster than PIII's, but compared to Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, it's the bottom of the barrell so far as floating point performance goes... and that's what you need for rendering... lots of it...

  8. Re:Linux Sucks by evilpenguin · · Score: 3

    Because of Steve-o many killer products devloped or ripped-off) have been brought to market: -the mouse -the networked laser printer -expansion slots (Apple II)

    WARNING! NITPICK AHEAD!

    The Apple was hardly the first computer (even personal computer) with expansion slots. There were two major camps in the 8-bit computing world. Those who centered their designs around the 6502, and those who centered their designs around the 8080/Z80. Most of the early 8080/Z80 designs used something called the S-100 bus. It was a 100-pin bus and most of the designs had the CPU as just another card. You could swap everything including the processor. Not only that, but it was a broadcast bus so you didn't have this "slot address" crap you had with the Apple ][ bus.

    The Apple did a lot, and I still think Visicalc was one of the finest pieces of software writing of all time (all that functionality squeezed out of an inferior processor running in some tight memory limits, and to this day Excel doesn't give you that much more functionality), but there were much more sophisitcated architectures out there.

    They didn't win the marketing war, though.

    As I said, a nitpick. BTW, I was moving a really old couch out of my parent's basement and I found a computer hobbyist catalog from 1976 in there. How would you like to buy an S-100 bus 32k (that's "k") static memory card for $835?

    That's what these things cost assembled. No wonder my Dad and I wire-wrapped our first computer...