[gitpusher]

I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid

[mathiaspoint]

Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.

[Lio]

Completely agree.

I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.

Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.

It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.

What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?

It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.

A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.

I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.

[brabel]

I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.

[valiant55]

I was just thinking about Linux/Linus the other day. How will Linux fair when Linus is no longer with us?

[chubot]

Latency is actually an interesting case, because it’s one of those things that, by default, nobody owns end-to-end

If you’re booting a computer or building web search, every subsystem can contribute to latency. If you have more teams and more features, you’re likely to have more latency.

In the early days of Google, Larry Page would push hard on this as well, in person. So Google search was fast.

But later the company became larger and bureaucratized, so nobody was in charge of latency. So then each team contributes a bit to latency, and that’s what ends up shipping.

Google products used to be known for being fast, but they’ve reverted to the mean

[pierrefermat1]

The instant on thing actually bothered me enough to make switch from windows back to Mac( by proxy the idle battery drain on windows was also pretty terrible)

[csb6]

Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.

[ttoinou]

Try saying the same things over and over to adults for years

[arrowsmith]

Yeah, with an attitude like that it's no wonder his products were such failures.

[robertlagrant]

> Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.

See from the replies to this how well you got your point across.

[eru]

Yes, Steve Jobs was a jerk.

Alas, human don't come fully customisable. You get to pick from the packages on offer. And it seemed like for Apple Steve Jobs' good parts only came as part of a package that also included his bad parts.

[jbs789]

To me it sounds like the symptom (emotion) of someone who deeply cares.

These things need to be well-placed to be effective. Sounds like it was.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!"

When did the OG MacBook Air have instant on at launch in 2008?

IIRC the M1 brough Instant on and Jobs wasn't around anymore.

[elzbardico]

Most macbooks I remember since a long time ago were pretty much instant on way before apple sillicon. Maybe you had some corporate crapware installed in yours/.

[m4rtink]

Does not look like it was a healthy work culture.