Steve Jobs RIP 1955-2011

he was an island that touched so many people

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/politics/lost_smoke_monster_post.jpg

lol

hahahahaaaa

+1

i mean maybe if steve jobs actually invented a bunch of shit instead of just marketing it to people

― funk master friendly (moonship journey to baja), Wednesday, October 5, 2011 11:37 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/08/24/technology/steve-jobs-patents.html

I got into that debate on another thread about Jeff Bezos. With Steve Jobs, there are stories going back to the early Macintosh days where he worked day-to-day with teams that were developing products and prodded them into different decisions and guided development. There's also always been a strong sense that Ive is his designer, Cook was his supply chain man, and so on. I never got the impression that the last decade of Apple was a system where you could rise just by doing well -- you had to do things the Jobs way.

This is maybe more for the other thread, but

I have traveled to southern China and interviewed workers employed in the production of electronics. I spoke with a man whose right hand was permanently curled into a claw from being smashed in a metal press at Foxconn, where he worked assembling Apple laptops and iPads. I showed him my iPad, and he gasped because he’d never seen one turned on. He stroked the screen and marveled at the icons sliding back and forth, the Apple attention to detail in every pixel. He told my translator, “It’s a kind of magic.” -- http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html?_r=1

That article starts with a claim that Steve Jobs hated nostalgia. GUESS THE REPORTER HASN'T USED iCal OR Contacts LATELY!

there was a Q&A from when jobs just came back to apple where all the fans are asking, "when's apple gonna make a flying car", stuff like that, and the response is there are already plenty of technologies in the workstation world already that they know how to do, that can drastically improve computing experience for regular people if it were brought to them in the right way, that that's what apple should do, and in fact, that's what apple has done since the beginning, and he's right. there is already an abundance of innovation; what's lacking is a will to bring it to the masses in any half-decent way.

Like making a pizza isn't theoretically very difficult but when a great pizza place opens up near you, of course you get excited.

100% not trying to open up a huge can of worms, but did I at some point miss some story that directly linked Jobs to the suicides in these factories? I mean, obvs the chain ultimately runs up to him, but it feels so weird that people are like personally blaming him for the deaths. I mean when Wal-Mart does something terrible the accustations are usually "Wal-Mart is a terrible company" not like strugging to hold the Walton kids directly responsible. If that makes sense. I mean, I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but I'm struck by the ire at Jobs directly. There's quite a few people below him that could have probably been more involved with preventing the suicides and improving worker conditions/pay/etc.

steve jobs did in fact push every single one of those workers off the ledge

100% not trying to open up a huge can of worms, but did I at some point miss some story that directly linked Jobs to the suicides in these factories?

people at the top are there to be blamed. this is their job. applies to the President, CEOs, generals, etc.

because if Steve Jobs had said "Apple is not going to tolerate substandard and cruel working conditions" you can bet your ass the company would have ensured that his directives were obeyed.

"buck stops here" etc

to be fair, apple has substandard and cruel working conditions for its stateside workers, too (allowing for the differential between tech workers in US & China)

Right, I'm not necc. disagreeing with that, but I don't feel like I've seen this stuff singled out a specific head of many other multinational corps with horrible records of the way their overseas workers are treated. Is it because Jobs is a more visible head?

it's more at discord with apple's image as an environmentally friendly, left leaning company

people totally went after Phil Knight

but dayo OTM that's a big part of it too, the disconnect between marketing image + reality

Late RiP for Steve. Agree that some of his business practices (and areas of his personal life) were far from sterling, but I have to respect his innovation. How many people are famous primarily for being intelligent in this day and age?

Per capita the number of suicides is high, but the living/working conditions are not unlike a college dorm, the deceased were mostly around 20, and the suicide rate tends to be naturally higher in those situations. Publicizing a suicide also has a proven copycat influence, and word would spread quickly in the area given the fact they jumped off a building.

Blaming Apple, when not only are there other companies manufacturing at foxconn and the very circumstances would lead to an increased suicide rate, seems a little overblown.

there's more of a narrative hook to other people suffering for your luxury good than other people suffering for your cheap good, because in the case of say a cheap bicycle, sure maybe it was made by a kid under candle light, but the brakes are really bad and you could die, too, so there's a kind of parity in suffering. also there's an expectation that some of the premium for buying a luxury good goes towards making sure everyone in the chain gets treated properly, so people are cheated out of the guilt-free premium.

like if you paid 30c more for fair trade banana and it turned out there's still body parts being severed haphazardly, you'd be mad!

Actually, the suicide rate on college campuses is, on average, four times that of Foxconn employees that year.

Yeah, and have you seen how popular Apple devices are on college campuses? Coincidence? I don't think so.

It's also that Jobs's schtick was "I can change the world" -- he took on the music and movie industries and bent them to his will because he wanted them to work differently. When you do stuff like that, "it's just the industry, we can't change this, but at least we're the best of a bad bunch" isn't really good enough.

Like making a pizza isn't theoretically very difficult but when a great pizza place opens up near you, of course you get excited.
Hah, superb!

Apple has a fairly comprehensive recycling program that probably doesn't involve children in southeast asia scraping capacitors off of motherboards into a bucket, but I might be wrong. That's a hell of a change.

also FYI music industry isn't really "working" very well btw

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I think a lot of it was overblown bullshit, but there's still something ~off~ about iPads being made in a factory by workers who never even get to *turn one on*. Compare w/Ford, who arranged higher salaries for his staff so they could afford to buy cars.

If Jobs had demanded Foxconn workers be paid enough that they could in theory afford an iPad, would it really have taken all of this $74bn surplus they're sitting on? I don't think so.

xp

I mean, I am all about talking about the shortcomings of individuals and companies, but creating issues or doubt to root around for a reason to be skeptical is kind of a bad look.

If Foxconn workers were paid enough to afford an iPad, then you're going to have to pay them enough to have all the things they'd rather have BEFORE an iPad and that's going to cost more than $74bn because you'd be basically building a whole new infrastructure for their lives.

No, that's paying them enough to have the disposable income to buy an iPad, which is a different thing. Ford didn't pay his guys so much that buying a car was a no-brainer: it'd still be stretch, something that needed saved up for etc. But a car wasn't this laughably impossible dream for them, either.

You're assuming they know how to use a computer or have internet access.

also FYI music industry isn't really "working" very well btw

― unorthodox economic revenge (Shakey Mo Collier), Saturday, 8 October 2011 09:56 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

idk the big labels seems pretty flush despite all the reactionary whining

Apple has a fairly comprehensive recycling program that probably doesn't involve children in southeast asia scraping capacitors off of motherboards into a bucket, but I might be wrong. That's a hell of a change.

― ( ) (mh), Friday, October 7, 2011 6:54 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

wait, how many people actually take advantage of this? and from what I understand apple subcontracts their recycling program out to an appraently pretty shitty third party who loves to shaft you.

in terms of environmental friendliness/social justice w/r/t jobs, those only seem to come into play if they are a byproduct of excellence -- like they'll reduce materials usage, packaging, if it makes the product more elegant. subjecting workers to decent hours and benefits don't fall under this rubric. if he's willing to work first-worlders to the bone in the name of excellence... on the other hand, I don't think foxconn china gets beer bashes. (foxconn US workers get to attend, though!)

but a "every foxconn employee gets an iphone at cost" would be a good policy, imo, even if none of them would ever take foxconn up on it.

idk the big labels seems pretty flush despite all the reactionary whining

lol you are insane

i dont think stet is proposing that the foxconn workers actually buy an ipad, or whatever, i think he means that "can this worker afford the thing he or she is making" (just in, like, numerical terms) is a good way to think about it

I'm going to stop shitting on the thread and get back to Jobs stuff, not computer/Apple industry..

Start casting the movie:

http://www.deadline.com/2011/10/sony-pictures-acquiring-apple-icon-steven-jobs-book-for-feature-film/

the article mentioned that foxconn workers make about 1100 CNY a month, which is not a lot, but it's not that much less than what college grads in china make fresh out of college, if we're speaking comparatively

noah wylie really does look a LOT like yung jobs

Final scene of the movie will be Scoble watching the very same movie on his iPhone7S or whatever, a tear down his cheek.

idk the big labels seems pretty flush despite all the reactionary whining

Total revenues for CDs, vinyl, cassettes and digital downloads in the world dropped 25% from $38.6 billion in 1999 to $27.5 billion in 2008 according to IFPI. Same revenues in the U.S. dropped from a high of $14.6 billion in 1999 to $10.4 billion in 2008. The Economist and The New York Times report that the downward trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future[8][9] —Forrester Research predicts that by 2013, revenues in USA may reach as low as $9.2 billion.[8] This dramatic decline in revenue has caused large-scale layoffs inside the industry, driven retailers (such as Tower Records) out of business and forced record companies, record producers, studios, recording engineers and musicians to seek new business models.

and this is just the big 4. smaller labels, retail chains, and mid-level artists have all taken huge hits to their incomes. this is not "reactionary whining" it is a fact.

anyway, there's other threads for this.

xp

thx for the knowledge, dayo

re: free iphone,
it'd probably be more efficient to give every foxconn employee the difference between what they'd fetch from the secondary market as a bonus.

in that article about working at the apple cafeteria, was a little blown away by the 6-figure+ engineers buying exactly $12 worth of soda to extract full value of their meal plan -- total 3rd world behavior, or at least starving college student behavior.

I mean, maybe this is a totally acceptable set-up. I suppose there are Westerners who work in factories and could never afford to own the products they make, too, like say at Boeing or Rolls-Royce. It's just a feeling, is all.

where was the cafeteria link?

I kind of wonder how the music industry compares to 1990 instead of 2000, because even without the consideration of online distribution and piracy, things were looking incredibly unsustainable by 1999.

like, I was considering taking an english teaching job in beijing, which would have paid about 4000 CNY a month. I think 4000 CNY is on the high end of starting salaries for fresh grads, unless you graduated from a top u. I think salaries of 1500-300 are more realistic for fresh grads? that is, if you can even find a job - china is graduating far more people than the job market can handle, is what I've been reading.