"The cutthroat internal politics of Apple under Steve Jobs — strong personalities with large egos — amidst tumultuous technical drama (see timeline below) sounds like the makings for a damn good show like Succession)"
Halt and Catch Fire and Silicon Valley (leaving aside Jobs) have arguably already successfully covered this ground from a reasonably safe biographical distance.
I have no idea why this sticks in my head, but way way way back when, I remember Leo Laporte being adamant, on MacBreak Weekly, that he was sure the iPhone wasn’t really running a version of OS X, because it was impossible to do so.
And mind you, as someone who has been using a Mac since System 7, and OS X as a daily driver since 10.2—yeah, at the time, it seemed wild beyond belief that a phone could run what amounts to OS X. Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.
Famously after the initial presentation BlackBerry had a meeting of important people and decided the whole thing had been faked because it was impossible.
The original iPhone (and to a degree the iPad) really seemed to have been right at the edge of what was technologically possible.
There were a lot of people in tech and the media who made all
sorts of claims that we appreciate as nonsense. One that stuck out to me was a “tech guru” stating that the screen must be using heat to detect touch, and that this means the screen will wear out with use over time.
Even back then it felt utterly comical to see that on TV.
I saw NT running on ARM candy-bar smartphone at internal MS demo in 2004. There was a start button and it opened notepad. This was surreal, but not surprising since NT was engineered to be portable from the start.
MS was dysfunctional at the time, and they continued to ship abysmal Windows Mobile instead of replacing it with NT. Not that it would help, it takes more to make a good smartphone than good kernel.
"A version of OS X" is potentially a bit misleading for many at that point, because while the iPhone had a slimmed down Darwin kernel and a slice of the same UI framework on top, its process management was completely different.
The first version of the iPhone's OS had a brutal process management approach not unlike PalmOS, as I recall -- with the exception of bits of the system apps, if the app wasn't on screen, it wasn't running.
And that really changes the equation. There's a completely different notion of performance and memory management because you don't have multitasking. There was no window management, no interprocess communication, no unix subsystem. (Essentially no text selection and no copy and paste!)
So it wasn't "running Mac OS X"; that was a red herring. It was running a Mach kernel and a big chunk of Cocoa.
My guess is that people at Palm would have understood this right from that first demo.
And it wouldn't for example have been surprising to anyone at Compaq, because the iPaq series at that point was producing not-too-dissimilar devices in terms of power, able to run Linux and X11 while multitasking.
Likewise it wouldn't have surprised anyone at Nokia that here was a very powerful device with a high resolution screen and a pretty much desktop-capable webkit browser that played streaming video and audio, because Nokia had already shipped a device with some of those characteristics and shipped it 14 months earlier; like many in the UK and Europe I had a webkit-capable 3G device in my hand on the day the iPhone was launched (an E61) and had been using it (and testing websites on it) for months.
So what Apple had done on a technical/OS level wasn't so mindblowing if you knew your way around the decisions others had made, and had a view of the devices on the market (outside the USA where it was seemingly Windows CE or nothing). They were ahead, but they weren't so far ahead as for it to be completely unbelievable.
They had made careful choices and tuned the device for them.
(Seriously: no copy and paste until 2009, right? No 3G.)
The difference was -- as it always is with Apple -- execution.
People (including me!) should have been paying more attention not to this sort of OS-level achievement but to the design and delivery of the UI and apps. Serious thought had been given to capacitive touch and multitouch, which Apple didn't invent but did perfect, right out of the gate.
The CPU performance, the OS technicalities, whether it was OS X or not, didn't sell it to _anyone_. Indeed, Apple confounded anyone interested in features over benefits -- it didn't support third party applications.
What sold it was that it was understandable and comfortable.
> Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.
I ran OS X on day one of the public beta, on a blue and white iMac, and I don't recall its performance being bad (apart from the absence of sound). I remember it being amazing. But it's important to note that OS X on a Mac was a very different operating system; a fully preemptive-multitasked, multi-window OS with a BSD subsystem, IPC, swap, etc. etc., and running on hard disks, not flash.
I don't mean to understate the accomplishment, but the pedigree of OS X was NeXTSTEP. That was released in 1989. I'm sure a lot of bloat was added over the decades, but the underpinnings were running on hardware almost 20 years old at the time.
That 2004-2007 period is really quite incredible from the perspective of Steve Jobs. To have that many balls up in the air simultaneously and getting every decision, even in hindsight, correct while raising children and recovering from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis scare. On top of that he was under undoubtedly intense pressure from internal feuds, external competitors (Motorola), buyout negotiations (Disney), suppliers (Foxconn) and the telecom industry (AT&T).
> "recovering from his pancreatic cancer diagnosis scare"
I feel it's important to say here -- for all those with pancreatic cancer or who have lost loved ones to a shockingly awful cancer and who keep hearing about Steve Jobs beating the odds for all that time, that he didn't have a scare.
He had actual pancreatic cancer.
It's just that he was (a tiny bit) luckier with one of the rare diagnoses that has a very high degree of treatability, and as a result vastly better five year survival odds.
But he didn't so much recover as delay treatment unnecessarily for alternative therapies, and nutrition.
(Having lost a relative to less treatable pancreatic cancer, learning of this gamble made me furious at him at the time and still really does)
The treatment he might possibly have avoided with earlier targeted intervention but ultimately received (the Whipple procedure) is effective but brutal, and the long term knock-on effects of that procedure affected him as they do almost everyone; needing a liver transplant as he did has a very high probability among Whipple patients.
(He actually misled investors about the seriousness of his illness when people surmised that he was experiencing the longer-term side effects of his procedure.)
An aside: as much as people like to claim Tim Cook doesn't have Jobs's guts or heart or bravery, he literally offered his boss a part of his own (compatible) liver to save his life. Tim Cook is brave and honourable.
That picture of the "Wallabies" https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/880451736049139712 suggests that the often-repeated claim about the hardware and software teams working in mutual igorance is overblown. The Wallabies really seem not so far from final hardware, especially compared to (IIRC) some other devkits for old mobile devices. It would have been quite clear that the release hardware would be substantially thicker and lighter (assuming those things are fairly heavy, as well as bulky) and if you imagine them so you get something pretty close to the original iPhone (aside from the metal-case flash and sizzle).
I always heard things were almost always on a need to know basis. Designing a keyboard kind of requires an approximate form-factor. Like the sibling comment says, "Wallabies" were a touchscreen in a housing. It sounds like other developers were writing software for a generic grey box. To me, that makes sense if the hardware wasn't known even if they weren't trying to be covert.
It wasn't. For those who didn't read the article: Apple was considering (not very seriously) replacing the iPod OS with one based on Linux, as the existing OS codebase was such a mess it was bordering on unmaintainable.
Obviously, the idea was not implemented, but it was this proposed OS that would have been "scaled up" to the iPhone.
Maybe I missed it but was the original TED demo of the multitouch prototype part of this? I thought that had a heavy influence on the design of how the iphone software would work?
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
It's perfect on mobile. You can zoom, there's no cookie popups, there's no prompt asking you to sign up for a mailing list, and the whole article loads at once without needing to click a "continue" button. There's no ads. It's just a clean site that you can zoom in on to read.
I recall some comment he made about wanting to do a “final site redesign” to make it responsive at some point, but then never got around to it.
Still, it’s a bit of an odd oversight, because this is the most simplest of 1-column-with-a-sidebar layouts, and it’s just a matter of getting that sidebar nav out of the way.
In short, Gruber is obsessive/perfectionist/lazy, the current site is OK on mobile with a double tap, making it “just right” would mean more work for him than what it looks like on the surface, etc.
He is the kind of guy who took years to choose the right shade of blue slate, still uses Verdana because of the way it looked without anti-alias on low res CRTs running Netscape/IE.
Basically, a lot of though on small things to a paralyzing degree.
[+] [-] mellosouls|4 years ago|reply
Halt and Catch Fire and Silicon Valley (leaving aside Jobs) have arguably already successfully covered this ground from a reasonably safe biographical distance.
[+] [-] jedberg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perardi|4 years ago|reply
And mind you, as someone who has been using a Mac since System 7, and OS X as a daily driver since 10.2—yeah, at the time, it seemed wild beyond belief that a phone could run what amounts to OS X. Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.
[+] [-] MBCook|4 years ago|reply
The original iPhone (and to a degree the iPad) really seemed to have been right at the edge of what was technologically possible.
[+] [-] quitit|4 years ago|reply
Even back then it felt utterly comical to see that on TV.
[+] [-] vl|4 years ago|reply
MS was dysfunctional at the time, and they continued to ship abysmal Windows Mobile instead of replacing it with NT. Not that it would help, it takes more to make a good smartphone than good kernel.
[+] [-] unfocussed_mike|4 years ago|reply
The first version of the iPhone's OS had a brutal process management approach not unlike PalmOS, as I recall -- with the exception of bits of the system apps, if the app wasn't on screen, it wasn't running.
And that really changes the equation. There's a completely different notion of performance and memory management because you don't have multitasking. There was no window management, no interprocess communication, no unix subsystem. (Essentially no text selection and no copy and paste!)
So it wasn't "running Mac OS X"; that was a red herring. It was running a Mach kernel and a big chunk of Cocoa.
My guess is that people at Palm would have understood this right from that first demo.
And it wouldn't for example have been surprising to anyone at Compaq, because the iPaq series at that point was producing not-too-dissimilar devices in terms of power, able to run Linux and X11 while multitasking.
Likewise it wouldn't have surprised anyone at Nokia that here was a very powerful device with a high resolution screen and a pretty much desktop-capable webkit browser that played streaming video and audio, because Nokia had already shipped a device with some of those characteristics and shipped it 14 months earlier; like many in the UK and Europe I had a webkit-capable 3G device in my hand on the day the iPhone was launched (an E61) and had been using it (and testing websites on it) for months.
So what Apple had done on a technical/OS level wasn't so mindblowing if you knew your way around the decisions others had made, and had a view of the devices on the market (outside the USA where it was seemingly Windows CE or nothing). They were ahead, but they weren't so far ahead as for it to be completely unbelievable.
They had made careful choices and tuned the device for them.
(Seriously: no copy and paste until 2009, right? No 3G.)
The difference was -- as it always is with Apple -- execution.
People (including me!) should have been paying more attention not to this sort of OS-level achievement but to the design and delivery of the UI and apps. Serious thought had been given to capacitive touch and multitouch, which Apple didn't invent but did perfect, right out of the gate.
The CPU performance, the OS technicalities, whether it was OS X or not, didn't sell it to _anyone_. Indeed, Apple confounded anyone interested in features over benefits -- it didn't support third party applications.
What sold it was that it was understandable and comfortable.
> Those first versions of OS X were not snappy.
I ran OS X on day one of the public beta, on a blue and white iMac, and I don't recall its performance being bad (apart from the absence of sound). I remember it being amazing. But it's important to note that OS X on a Mac was a very different operating system; a fully preemptive-multitasked, multi-window OS with a BSD subsystem, IPC, swap, etc. etc., and running on hard disks, not flash.
[+] [-] pfranz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedunangst|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|4 years ago|reply
This was a man at the peak of his life.
[+] [-] unfocussed_mike|4 years ago|reply
I feel it's important to say here -- for all those with pancreatic cancer or who have lost loved ones to a shockingly awful cancer and who keep hearing about Steve Jobs beating the odds for all that time, that he didn't have a scare.
He had actual pancreatic cancer.
It's just that he was (a tiny bit) luckier with one of the rare diagnoses that has a very high degree of treatability, and as a result vastly better five year survival odds.
But he didn't so much recover as delay treatment unnecessarily for alternative therapies, and nutrition.
(Having lost a relative to less treatable pancreatic cancer, learning of this gamble made me furious at him at the time and still really does)
The treatment he might possibly have avoided with earlier targeted intervention but ultimately received (the Whipple procedure) is effective but brutal, and the long term knock-on effects of that procedure affected him as they do almost everyone; needing a liver transplant as he did has a very high probability among Whipple patients.
(He actually misled investors about the seriousness of his illness when people surmised that he was experiencing the longer-term side effects of his procedure.)
An aside: as much as people like to claim Tim Cook doesn't have Jobs's guts or heart or bravery, he literally offered his boss a part of his own (compatible) liver to save his life. Tim Cook is brave and honourable.
[+] [-] leoc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfranz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encoderer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasjudge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] temac|4 years ago|reply
The OS of the iPod was Linux-based?
edit: hm I should have read all of the article before commenting, although the way it is written at the start is quite misleading, I find
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|4 years ago|reply
It wasn't. For those who didn't read the article: Apple was considering (not very seriously) replacing the iPod OS with one based on Linux, as the existing OS codebase was such a mess it was bordering on unmaintainable.
Obviously, the idea was not implemented, but it was this proposed OS that would have been "scaled up" to the iPhone.
[+] [-] withinboredom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingkong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhojb|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] ninkendo|4 years ago|reply
All sites should be this good.
[+] [-] perardi|4 years ago|reply
Still, it’s a bit of an odd oversight, because this is the most simplest of 1-column-with-a-sidebar layouts, and it’s just a matter of getting that sidebar nav out of the way.
[+] [-] tambourine_man|4 years ago|reply
In short, Gruber is obsessive/perfectionist/lazy, the current site is OK on mobile with a double tap, making it “just right” would mean more work for him than what it looks like on the surface, etc.
He is the kind of guy who took years to choose the right shade of blue slate, still uses Verdana because of the way it looked without anti-alias on low res CRTs running Netscape/IE.
Basically, a lot of though on small things to a paralyzing degree.
[+] [-] NZ_Matt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyist5eva|4 years ago|reply