[joe_mamba]

>All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.

Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me.

We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint.

Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.

[SpaceManNabs]

I rarely see tech hero worship pushback on here. I hope to see more of it.

We are all human after all.

[scottyah]

There's always plenty of pushback everywhere, all the social media apps are full of critics and hate on anyone who does anything in the world mercilessly. I like coming here to see people admire other people who worked hard to create something that made society better, and not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.

[Teever]

'Tech hero worship' is a gross misrepresentation of my comment and I'm not sure how you could draw that conclusion from a comment that used words like "asshole" and "vindictive" to describe Steve Jobs.

[quesera]

You are very wrong about Steve Jobs.

It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.

And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!

But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.

He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.

[bigyabai]

This comment confuses me. You call Jobs idiosyncratic, but then try to backwards-justify his political stance with stereotypes about anti-establishment politics and Californian ideals. What makes you convinced that he'd resist neoreactionary politicking any better than Cook?

Jobs was fickle, I agree with you there. I just don't think that a fickle iconoclast would last more than two weeks fighting against Trump, especially if he was threatened with an FTC antitrust probe. The only difference with Cook is that he's not as coy, and recognized that there was no way for a monopoly like Apple to fight the fed and win. Trump can disembowel Apple's profit margins, and neither Cook nor Jobs nor Jesus of Nazarath could convince the shareholders that morality is worth more than $AAPL. 2016 Jobs would be retired by the board of directors before he even threatened to make a conscientious objection, reality distortion be damned.

I have no love for the sitting administration, but it is a fantasy to pretend that a FAANG business could resist federal coercion. Just because Apple enjoys a moral halo-effect does not mean they're better positioned than Microsoft or AWS to do the "right" thing. Apple's inability to prosecute NSO Group is a recurring example of how heavily the US can muzzle them.