Do you miss Steve Jobs in 2020?

One of the most important things I’ve ever heard.

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”

- Steve Jobs

For me he was a remote public figure with a cult of personality and a decidedly iffy reputation (throwing things, being abusive, & cetera). Certainly he presided over the restructuring of a large company and launch of some very innovative products — but does that make him venerable? Not in my mind, no.

I’m going to admit I’d be curious to know what he’d do in this world (because as another poster eloquently puts it, we have no idea what he would be doing), but other than that... no.

I’m sure his family miss him though and I am not being dismissive of their anguish and sorrow.

Probably everyone's seen this, but if you haven't..I thought it was very funny. Didn't know much about Jobs until recently, but watched Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine and Pirates of Silicon Valley and some other stuff shortly before seeing this – and thought "Ohh - he was Joe McMillan in Halt and Catch Fire, only Joe evolved into a decent guy" – and it seems pretty factually accurate at least :

Bill Burr on Steve Jobs (5 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3s-qZsjK8I

p.s. My answer is No, I didn't know the guy. Strange question. List of dead people I miss: my mother.

i think the word "miss" is raising/idolising his personality. I didn't know Steve, but based on what I have been exposed to about him, he was a person I would dislike a lot, but, how he appears to have shaped some products is impressive. It's hard to tell if it was he genius, or if he was lucky or combination of both along with other factors, however seems he had the required chops.

I think we should not conflate people's perceived excellence in work life with their personality, and extrapolate "success" to mean they were also great personalities. I don't miss Steve, and hope someone/something knocks Apple to their senses to stop abusing (over-charging).

I certainly miss the era. Maybe that’s more about me and how I related to what was happening in the tech scene. Maybe it’s because the focus was in a different place.

But yes, in a sense, I do.

Yesterday, I found myself wondering if Steve Jobs would be on board with Apple's current position in which they're asking employees to return to work in the offices soon, or if he'd be like Twitter and allow most employees to work from home indefinitely.

I don't. Why would I miss him? Thousands came before him and thousands will after. They have and they will achieve important things, but will be forgotten in the end.

I like nice things, and I like them 10x more if they are were built by people who are happy (to the extent we know), and kind. Like Fred Rogers and his show, Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Akio Morita and Sony, Stephen Fry and QI, the list is endless.

I don't miss the likes of Steve Jobs, no matter what he put together. The talent of Wozniak and Jony Ive and scores of others at Apple would have been discovered and given joy in other ways. Kindness before product evolution.

Yes, desperately. For two reasons.

(1) Steve placed the highest priority on optimizing the user experience.

(2) He was a benevolent dictator. Software requires someone to trash the code and the people who write it when it is bad. No one likes it when someone does this, but it is necessary.

Now we have change for the sake of change. Interfaces get redesigned because someone wants to leave their mark, not because it improves usability.

We have things constantly being redesigned to optimize profit and claim turf, even at the expense of an optimal user experience.

And we have a load of buggy, undocumented, poorly-thought-out APIs that exclude the most crucial functionality because someone figured out a way to make a few extra pennies per unit.

We have some of the best hardware ever created, like the iPad Pro, that you can't use for any meaningful, creative or intelligent purpose because of artificial limitations.

Yes. What would he do? No idea. That's why I miss him.

I miss his enthusiasm and true innovation focused leadership.

Apple is a behemoth now, and I wonder what sort of products we would have if he was still here.

The iPhone changed our lives, but a decade later all phones now look like the iPhone and we have face unlock and a notch. Cool.

The Macbook is still the same pleasant to use machine, and still functions as any other laptop.

Would the iPad have replaced laptops completely? Maybe we'd have a world in which offloading everyday heavy tasks to the cloud (gaming, video editing, etc.) was super normal and we all were disconnected from carrying heavy devices everywhere. The new VSC integration in GitHub is cool, but maybe that sort of paradigm would have been everywhere.

I'm just a consumer, so I could be wrong in my sentiment but I don't really feel like we progressed as much in the last decade as we did with the jump from flip phones and having a land line, to carrying iPhones in our pockets.

I was never really partial to him when he was alive, especially because the glorification of his person devalued the achievements of those in his teams, but now I miss that quirky sort of utilitarian design he pushed. Especially because he never would have stood for the abomination that is current mac i/o and build quality.

I miss my friends and family. Jobs is pretty low on my list right now.

Not at all.

The last time I heard from him personally was when he threatened Google's VP9 with a patent pool from MPEG-LA.

Later that year, MPEG-LA released a statement they won't be going after VP9.

I wonder how many people at Apple wake up every morning thanking the universe that he's gone and they never have to deal with him again?

No. He made people that much more gullible to proprietary platforms, and technology went into a particularly bleak route because of individuals like him.

Not happy he's dead, either. He could have apologized and lived as a better person.

Yes. Apple would be in home robotics, cars, online education and rockets.

In a way yes. I often ponder on what he would do, which we will never know. As he was the only product guy that understands products and user better than anyone else. And on a CEO level, he was the only person who would admit mistake and change course. Something extremely rare in any large cooperation.

Would he have preferred the Butterfly / Current Magic Keyboard with awful low key travel. After all he was the one who wanted MacBook to be Thinkpad like because of the keyboard. Why make MacBook like Tablet, when it should have a perfect PC keyboard with decent key travel.

We wouldn't have to wait 3 years before the whole Keyboard thing was done.

Would he have trusted Iovine? He knew Iovine way before Apple Music, but he never bought him in to Apple. Even when Iovine was trying to sell him Beats, he didn't buy it. Would he have been sold to the god damn stupid "next song" idea like Eddy Cue did. At least I am glad those awful quality Beats headphones did not end up on Apple's speaker and Headphones.

May be Apple Music would have been way better designed.

Scott Forstall wouldn't have left. Jony Ive wouldn't have made iOS 7, and Apple spend the next 3 to 4 years trying to fix or revert all the damage that has done to its UI.

Where is the "real" Apple TV?

He understand Media possibly better than anyone currently at Apple. Would he have still ventured into Apple TV+ making TV series? Directly competing with Disney and Netflix? Just a note Disney+ is on course to achieve its 2024 target by end of 2020. That is 4 years ahead of its ( relatively conservative ) estimate.

Steve's Apple era worked with relatively tiny R&D. He just didn't have the luxury of insane amount of money and cash flow. Apple in 2011 had a market cap of $300B, and he was already investing to Apple SoC, larger iPhone ( iPhone 6 ), iPad and iCloud. Apple today has a lot more people on payroll, but the pace of innovation, or improvement to be precise, is rather slow.

Would Apple Store's opening be accelerated instead of being slowed down? The number of Apple Store growth between Apple having 400M iPhone user and now possibly 1B user ( They haven't announced it yet ) has been minimal. All while Apple is having a much larger product line. Ever since Johnson left, Apple didn't have proper person in charge of Retail. The guy from Dixon was a fad ( As anyone from UK would have known ) and Angela clearly dont understand Apple or tech. The fist thing Deidre O’Brien did when she is in charge.. surprise surprise revert some of the changes made during Angela era. Again in the nearly 10 years, it seems no one apart from Steve Jobs or Johnson actually understands Apple Retail.

Apple wouldn't have played so long with Intel on their modem. Would Steve have settled out their Qualcomm modem legal battle way earlier? Instead of waiting 4 years all while getting apparently the same results as Qualcomm have always had. And Steve is a guy who understand and valued the importance of patents.

In a way I think once Steve passed away, Apple started to fall apart, lots of old folks finally ( or suddenly ) got tired and left. Once the RDF generator was gone, things were a little messy. Tim Cook did a brilliant job holding everything intact. And constantly reminding everyone why Steve created Apple and what Apple stood for. But it was never the same Apple again, and possibly never will be.

I miss him.

No.