indefensible: john gruber

I thought it was better than the Isaacson one

I’m not sure I agree. If someone were to ask me which one to read, I’d recommend Steve Jobs. Becoming Steve Jobs had weird pacing problems, I think. The coverage of his early years didn’t seem nearly comprehensive enough. A lot of input from Avie and Jon later on in the book, but very little from Cue. Nothing from Schiller? Some from Cook, but perhaps not enough. The Iger stuff was good. Some repetition, perhaps a lot, from stuff I’d read before. Gruber said there’d be “sensational” stuff in the book, didn’t he? Besides the Tim Cook liver incident, there wasn’t anything that fit that description. We’re never going to get a perfect SJ book. Then again the market for the type of book I’d want would be very small. (Think: multi-volume shit.)

Unfortunately, I don’t think my destiny in life is to be SJ’s Robert Caro.

But someone better do more interviewing of the principals before they all die off and get some more books out there.

Where’s Phil Schiller’s take? Someone find Scott Forstall! Tell me more about what happened inside the company from, like, mid-1997 to mid-1998.

Gruber would think a description of what Jobs' farts smelled like was "sensational"

Exactly what did Jobs do, step by step, in excruciating detail, to save the company during those months. Give me a book just about that, with interview with everybody in it!

A whole volume on the development of the iPhone!

I think those wouldn't really be biographies, more oral histories of the workplace.

Btw: https://instagram.com/p/084wz7hHQ5/

imo the ex-Apple person who had the most ongoing social power was prob Katie Cotton

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/04/06/the-obama-doctrine

this is such a baffling paraphrase of the quoted passage

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, April 6, 2015 8:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol design solutionism

about half of Apple's success has been delivering good products, the other half has been strictly controlling the narrative and perception of those products

they really use the stick/carrot approach with journalists, and I think Gruber probably has some pretty sharp night vision, if you catch my meaning

Gruber as part of the Apple-media syndicate that delivers people who "care about design," but really only maybe know web design and like to talk about Important Men

Apple doesn’t approach PR the same way now as it did before. I think Cook addressed this specifically . . . in Lashinsky’s Fortune cover story maybe?

tbf if u want to credit gruber with anything he understood the concept of user experience design before it became common place, in other words he took the right lesson from apple, or at least one of the lessons he took was right

Yes, that’s definitely not the only lesson though.

and i do think apples success is largely based on making products that just work, the marketing is nice and all but, i mean this is not jewelry (<<<), also the supply chain aspect is huge but that never wouldve been possible if the design didnt appeal to enough ppl to reach those economies of scale

There are other factors too, like picking the right products at the right time and not being afraid of cannibalization, blah blah blah.

When I was in college, they were the iPod and Mac company!

The Mac isn’t the biggest business on the planet. The iPod disappeared as a direct result of the success of the phone, but it’s possible that in an alternate reality someone else got to the phone and Apple didn’t or Apple did but never got traction or scenario C, D, E, or F.

ppl thought canceling the mini for the nano was crazy at the time!

There’s also the way Jobs thought about hiring people. That was important.

There are other factors too, like picking the right products at the right time and not being afraid of cannibalization, blah blah blah.

― markers, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:16 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

those both fall under the rubric of ux design imho at least philosophically if not as far as typically prescribed

yah maybe now, their late 90s comeback through the iPhone was basically releasing mostly-baked ideas and hoping people would get into them because they looked cool and had an ethos

OS X performed like crap for the first few years, but you could spend your time waiting by cleaning lint out of your iPod's moving scroll wheel

The fact that Jobs (eventually) listened to people who disagreed with him was crucial! No iPod on Windows!

steve jobs was the best "product guy" ever is all you need to know

also remember when iPods didn't have sudden motion sensors and the hard drives would fail because the read head would smack the platters

Click of death!

steve jobs was the best "product guy" ever is all you need to know

― lag∞n, Monday, April 6, 2015 9:21 PM (10 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my experience with "product guys" at 4m4z0n was that none of them seemed to have any insight into what anyone might possibly want

it's probably hard to be a "product guy"

You key word there is the 440 thing.

They don’t know how to make consumer electronics a lot of people want beyond that one thing for reading books that most people don’t care about.

amazon's firetv is currently about twice as useful as appletv, mostly due to apple not developing it much at all

Ah forgot about that. Some people seem to like it, sure! I don’t care about the Apple TV though. Or the entire category, basically.

you are apple

I was only around/working on website stuff, lots of people clearly want to buy things, trying to figure out dumb ways to make them want more things was really a pointless exercise

xpost Apple and I will diverge later this year probably, because it looks like they might start caring, and I don’t see how I will. The Watch is more interesting to me; I will be saving up for one of those, not so much with the TV.

amazon is a great product company! it just has a very low end shitty throw shit at the wall and see what (empirically) sticks approach, which is in its own way more fascinating and emblematic of our consumerist times than apple even imho

What products, lag00n?

the watch is an epic fail imho but we will see

ppl really like watching TV, some ppl really like playing video games on their TV, everyone hates their cable company, that business pretty much just putting some pieces together in a way that people will hurry up to pay for xps

I already know multiple people who aren't really into following technology who want the watch!

I will be shocked if Watch is not a disaster on some scale but then I don't really know any serious crossfit types

For me and for most of their customers, I think Amazon is about getting me the shit I need as quickly as possible. They provide a service. And, yes, they are very, very good at that, and I have Prime and buy pretty much all of my books through them. But the actual stuff they produce is . . . The Fire Phone flopped. The Kindle is good. Would you ever pick a Kindle Fire over an iPad? I don’t know anything about their accessories, but that’s small potatoes shit.

the product is amazon.com mostly but that consists of a million little things, like i set my dad up to get all his sponges and paper towels and dish soap delivered on a schedule, i order larabars and they get here the next day, thats all "amazon prime" i guess but its also just amazon the horrifying interconnected logistics macine

I already know multiple people who aren't really into following technology who want the watch!

― mh, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:30 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do you know anyone... who needs it... owned

yeah the "real things" amazon does are fulfillment and now AWS, everything else is window dressing and a just staggeringly bananaballs codebase

Didn’t Cook already admit somewhere that the market for the Watch, at the beginning at least, is limited because it requires certain iPhone models? Anyway, not predicting anything here; I have no idea what kind of numbers it’ll do the first year or beyond. But the fact that it’s $349 at the cheapest is also going to limit its market, and especially at the beginning a lot of people aren’t even going to see the point. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps with good reason! We’ll have to see.

i suspect the iwatch will do okay the first round and then not grow as expected cause it doesnt really have a crucial use case

I will be shocked if Watch is not a disaster on some scale but then I don't really know any serious crossfit types

― Clay, Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:31 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

its not even good as an exercise watch! and regardless that market is tiny