This is a fun story, but also just reminded me of how destructively eccentric Jobs could be. All the shenanigans to pretend the author lived in the US, flying him back and forth from Ireland, planning his interactions (or lack of interactions) with Jobs so the deception wouldn't be exposed, and everything. What a colossal waste of time, money, and stress just to cater to the ego of Steve Jobs.
And then they threw all that work away, seemingly mainly because it was done out of the wrong office. Presumably the final Dock that shipped was significantly different from the author's version, but throwing away all the code and doing a full rewrite is rarely warranted.
> last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.
People who tend to go the "alternative healing" route usually do so because the traditional healing route hasn't worked.
> he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late
Did he? Guess you are the expert.
Cancer treatment isn't an exact science. Millions of people who go the traditional route die. It's always the know-nothings who talk with such confidence of absolutes.
I assume that the Cork development team was built up before Jobs took over, which also explains why they were all laid off shortly after the author quit. Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino? If he were still around, he would probably hate home office/remote work and join Elon Musk in the "people can have all the home office they want as long as they work 40 hours per week in the office" camp...
One wrinkle here is that Jobs himself was by all accounts the person most responsible for Apple opening a Cork facility in 1980, and for whatever Apple and the Irish government promised each other as part of that deal. There's some indication that Irish governments were unhappy with what they got from it https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/state-papers-... but it's hard to be sure exactly what happened there: Apple was probably not in the best shape to carry out ambitious relocation plans for much of the '80s, for one thing.
While I don't have boundless love for either Jobs or RTO mandates, and as an Irishman I would very much rather not see Cork getting the dirty end of the stick, I have to defend Jobs' desire for centralisation a bit here. There's considerable evidence that having nearly all the central product and design people within easy reach of SJ stalking around 1 Infinite Loop did in fact work very well for Apple in the second Jobs era. Maybe it was still a wrong decision, despite appearances, but you can hardly say that it was an eccentric one. (And in 2000 the tools for offsite or multi-site collaboration weren't even as not-entirely-great as they are now.) It was other people who brought in the madcap element of trying to hide things from the boss, not Jobs himself.
> Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino?
Looks like it. There were still people working on iSync, iCal (and presumably software for the first iPhone) in an office in Paris. I think that ended in 2005.
In an alternate and very charitable timeline, after being healed of his cancer by top doctors, Jobs grows greatly in love with science and medicine, and faced with the covid pandemic, makes Apple permanently remote work (with office option for those who want it), and donates sums of money to bootstrapping vaccine production for all the world.
I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.
Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.
Jobs is on the whole probably better than the modern "tech right", yes, if only because supposedly he turned down opportunities to get seriously into politics. OTOH, who knows what kind of strange political or personal journey he might possibly have taken if he'd been around for the past decade and more. And in fact I think he may have contributed to the US getting where it is now in (at least) one significant way. By committing his options-backdating caper and then avoiding punishment for it he contributed to the feeling that the Special Boy is too precious to suffer criminal consequences for his actions, something which has likely had consequences for the later career of Musk in particular.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that running a super-secretive company and building a locked-down status-symbol walled-garden product that takes way the "owner's" freedom to tinker with it pushes him in the "left the world a better place" column.
The iPhone and other Apple products are just that: products. There are not many products in history that I'd say made the world a better place. Certainly better-than-previously-available computers and phones wouldn't meet that bar for me.
Tell me about all Jobs' philanthropy and maybe I'll agree with you. But you can't, because Jobs ran what was once described as one of the least philanthropic companies operating, and Jobs' own philanthropic activities were either so secretive that we still don't know much about them, or (the more likely option) were more or less nonexistent.
I agree that Jobs was probably on the whole better than Thiel, Andreessen, or Musk, but IMO that's not saying much.
don’t get me wrong Jobs definitely progressed the technology of that time by leading Apple but what exactly did he do to make the world a better place?
I mean electric cars, solar panels, and rockets so we don't have to rely on Russia to get to and from space ain't nothin'. Then there's that torch thing.
I can take or leave the other two. Netscape was pretty cool.
I’ve only ever heard these sequentially so was interesting to read they need not be.
“while in the original system presented in the early Dharmasutras the Asramas were four alternative available ways of life, neither presented as sequential nor with age recommendations.”
I hope more people read comments like these and ask themselves: "What warrants these life suggestions? Are they justified? What would make them justified? What alternatives are there?"
I'm 47. 50+ is looking a lot like "struggling to run the red queen's race to keep my wife and furbabies safe, sheltered, and provided for, while watching the eventual deterioration of my body into uselessness and decrepitude begin, and watching ageism diminish my opportunities in the field". Affordable rejuvenation therapy in the next couple of decades is pretty much my only hope. Maybe then I could claw back another decade or two of vigorous life with my wife with greater wisdom than I had the first time around.
0-22 - I’m someone else’s responsibility - graduated college degree in CS
22-36 - shuffled aimlessly between two meaningless jobs, a horrible mistake of a marriage (and divorce), got into real estate too heavily and the crash of 2008, taught fitness classes on the side as my only outlet.
36-46 - got remarried and became an instant father to a 9 and 14, rebuilt my career from scratch and hopped between 5 jobs, got my finances under control after walking away from 5 mortgages, built a strong marriage and both (step)sons graduated. “Retired my wife” when she was 44.
46 - present - transitioned into consulting, got first and only job at BigTech, (working remotely cloud consulting department), moved permanently into what was a vacation home in Florida, and start traveling extensively post Covid including doing the digital nomad thing. Left BigTech and enjoying a nice balanced life with my wife while I work remotely and she enjoys her passion projects.
> I LLOLed at "We’ll just tell Steve you did move."
It made me remember about that rumor of Musk firing people at random, but afterwards their immediate superiors just make them to move to another office whatsoever - Musk won't remember the next time he'd be there.
I think it's interesting that everyone's timeline here stops at 75, meanwhile we're about to inaugurate a 78 year old President, who is replacing an 82 year old President.
As much as everyone loves to hate these guys, they're the most powerful men in the world and they clearly didn't get there by fading into retirement from the age of 50 onward. I guess it depends on what you want in life but I wouldn't mind taking a hint from them. You clearly don't need to stop when you're old. For some, life appears to be a continual doubling down for higher and higher stakes.
I'm in my mid 40s and as my resources expand all I want to do is ante up and wrestle with bigger demons. Every decade for me is one more chance, maybe the last, to reclaim the stolen aspirations of my youth. The ticker will give out someday, but until then I don't want to ever stop. I'm the healthiest and probably also the angriest I've been in 20 years. Whatever else may transpire I hope to be a bit like those croaking old fuckers and never go gently.
> And twenty years when it makes no difference if you're there or gone.
That does not seem to picture today's reality all that well, considering that most power in the world is concentrated in the hands of 60+ year old people.
0-25: Arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, delusions, boring normal person
25-50: Obsessive learning/study, application, and passion, finding myself
50-75: Not there yet
I just turned 30 and I'm having a blast learning graphics and audio programming, mostly in C! Found my passion, raycasting, audio engineering, and building desktop software
Yeah the only thing i dont love about the framing is that it implies you cant still be in the learning phase later in life. Neuroplasticity can be encouraged and cultivated.
Not dead but disabled and dimwit, an annoyance to those who used to love the person you previously were, likely also short on money all the misery which
that entails? No, this is seriously worse than death to me.
Either it's a life worth living, or forced shutdown for me, while I still have a say.
> "I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked"
This near-paranoid level of secrecy was because Apple leaked like a sieve in 1997 when Jobs returned as interim CEO.
There were sites like Mac OS Rumors that reported about internal meetings and projects in almost realtime. Nothing that was started before Jobs's return was secret. Leaking seemed to be part of standard office politics at Apple.
Jobs wanted to clamp down on that. Who knows if they actually had measures like described in the article (which suggests that every screenshot of Aqua carried a steganographic hardware id) but the threat worked.
The leaks were obviously bad for Apple, but as a teenager in my first tech industry job I found them fascinating reading. It was a rare insight into the inner workings of famous tech company in faraway California (even if it was the company that everybody in the media was convinced would be bankrupt in a year or two, but that just made the product drama more poignant).
Yeah Jobs was probably afraid of anyone involved in sensitive stuff, not based in Cupertino, to be engaged in games or tricks like that. And they would be too far away to closely monitor.
I laughed at the title! My friends and I say the original quote way to much, even 25 years later. (From "Fast and Furious - Vin Diesel says "I live my life a quarter mile at a time.")
> As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA.
I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?
I was wondering the opposite: even if you don't explicitly sign some contracts, as long as you have seen them and behave as-if you are following the contract and the other party gives you their part of the bargaining, that might be legally (almost) equivalent to having signed the contract. (I'm not a lawyer, and this is speculation.)
It seems the legal term of art for this in 'an implied contract'.
Well, you hand your employees that very sheet of paper that the protagonist found unsigned in their drawer. And trade secrets are a fairly widespread concept, too. So judges wouldn't have a hard time believing that a reasonable person would recognise trade secrets in most cases.
The mention of Finder being built with Carbon APIs using OS9 as dev environment makes me wonder if that's not why some Finder APIs in 2020 still used classic Mac pathnames (with colons as separators).
Had to find some gnarly AppleScript to convert pathnames when interacting with Finder
I suspect using Carbon also helped shake out Carbon itself. Eventually the Finder was rewritten in Cocoa. Maybe one day it'll be rewritten in SwiftUI and some SwiftUI bugs will get shaken out ;)
> You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).
On a website with huge margins at the sides. I think the OSX Dock is a pretty good thing, but it makes so much more sense to keep it on the side of the screen and preserve vertical pixels. Unlike (some versions of) the Windows Taskbar, the icons are all square with no text, so you're not even sacrificing readability.
> I loved doing UI stuff, but somehow ended up working on a command line Mac OS X Server authentication component for At Ease that was to be used with a new line of diskless netboot computers that nobody had actually seen. It turned out I’d actually been on the iMac project all this time, and in the end they got hard drives.
“During a speech trumpeting the network computer for the Harvard Computer Society earlier in December, Larry Ellison, Oracle chief executive officer and Apple board member, responded to a question about Apple's role in the NC space.
Ellison said the Macintosh NC would be available in April, with a near-300-MHz processor and a 17-inch screen. The Mac NC will run on the Mac OS and cost less than $1,000, according to attendees. Ellison added that the NC would not ship with a hard drive, but one could be added to the unit for an additional $100. ”
Readit News
And then they threw all that work away, seemingly mainly because it was done out of the wrong office. Presumably the final Dock that shipped was significantly different from the author's version, but throwing away all the code and doing a full rewrite is rarely warranted.
last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.
not saying he deserved it but he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late, hard to feel sorry at all for him at that point.
also I heard he was a massive twat irl
The tragic last act of Jobs' infamous reality distortion field
People who tend to go the "alternative healing" route usually do so because the traditional healing route hasn't worked.
> he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late
Did he? Guess you are the expert.
Cancer treatment isn't an exact science. Millions of people who go the traditional route die. It's always the know-nothings who talk with such confidence of absolutes.
> also I heard he was a massive twat irl
Did you now? I guess it takes one to know one.
While I don't have boundless love for either Jobs or RTO mandates, and as an Irishman I would very much rather not see Cork getting the dirty end of the stick, I have to defend Jobs' desire for centralisation a bit here. There's considerable evidence that having nearly all the central product and design people within easy reach of SJ stalking around 1 Infinite Loop did in fact work very well for Apple in the second Jobs era. Maybe it was still a wrong decision, despite appearances, but you can hardly say that it was an eccentric one. (And in 2000 the tools for offsite or multi-site collaboration weren't even as not-entirely-great as they are now.) It was other people who brought in the madcap element of trying to hide things from the boss, not Jobs himself.
Looks like it. There were still people working on iSync, iCal (and presumably software for the first iPhone) in an office in Paris. I think that ended in 2005.
A boy can dream.
I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.
Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.
The iPhone and other Apple products are just that: products. There are not many products in history that I'd say made the world a better place. Certainly better-than-previously-available computers and phones wouldn't meet that bar for me.
Tell me about all Jobs' philanthropy and maybe I'll agree with you. But you can't, because Jobs ran what was once described as one of the least philanthropic companies operating, and Jobs' own philanthropic activities were either so secretive that we still don't know much about them, or (the more likely option) were more or less nonexistent.
I agree that Jobs was probably on the whole better than Thiel, Andreessen, or Musk, but IMO that's not saying much.
I can take or leave the other two. Netscape was pretty cool.
I'm 45, so I'll mark my 2nd quarter-century in the not-too-distant future.
Very approximately, so far:
0-25: learning
25-50: doing
50-75: TBD
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80%C5%9Brama_(stage)
0-25y grow and study
25-50y develop your household, your family, your community and gain wealth (non-extractive, provide value).
50y-75y hand over all worldly things to the next generation, advise, teach and help those around you. Focus on your spiritual enlightenment.
75y- renounce the world and disappear into the forest as a monk / hermit.
The "Andrew Carnegie Dictum" was:
- To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
- To spend the next third making all the money one can.
- To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.
“while in the original system presented in the early Dharmasutras the Asramas were four alternative available ways of life, neither presented as sequential nor with age recommendations.”
In my case it was closer to:
0-25: dicking around, with some incidental learning
25-35: learning how one gets screwed in business deals (by getting screwed in business deals)
35-40: dicking around pretending to work and thinking this is called "startups"
40-50: actually doing stuff, working on meaningful things that people pay for and making a good living off that
I am looking forward to the future :-)
0-22 - I’m someone else’s responsibility - graduated college degree in CS
22-36 - shuffled aimlessly between two meaningless jobs, a horrible mistake of a marriage (and divorce), got into real estate too heavily and the crash of 2008, taught fitness classes on the side as my only outlet.
36-46 - got remarried and became an instant father to a 9 and 14, rebuilt my career from scratch and hopped between 5 jobs, got my finances under control after walking away from 5 mortgages, built a strong marriage and both (step)sons graduated. “Retired my wife” when she was 44.
46 - present - transitioned into consulting, got first and only job at BigTech, (working remotely cloud consulting department), moved permanently into what was a vacation home in Florida, and start traveling extensively post Covid including doing the digital nomad thing. Left BigTech and enjoying a nice balanced life with my wife while I work remotely and she enjoys her passion projects.
It made me remember about that rumor of Musk firing people at random, but afterwards their immediate superiors just make them to move to another office whatsoever - Musk won't remember the next time he'd be there.
As much as everyone loves to hate these guys, they're the most powerful men in the world and they clearly didn't get there by fading into retirement from the age of 50 onward. I guess it depends on what you want in life but I wouldn't mind taking a hint from them. You clearly don't need to stop when you're old. For some, life appears to be a continual doubling down for higher and higher stakes.
I'm in my mid 40s and as my resources expand all I want to do is ante up and wrestle with bigger demons. Every decade for me is one more chance, maybe the last, to reclaim the stolen aspirations of my youth. The ticker will give out someday, but until then I don't want to ever stop. I'm the healthiest and probably also the angriest I've been in 20 years. Whatever else may transpire I hope to be a bit like those croaking old fuckers and never go gently.
> Fiche bliain faoi bhláth,
> Fiche bliain ag meath
> Agus fiche bliain gur cuma ann no as.
"Twenty years growing,
Twenty years in bloom,
Twenty years in decline,
And twenty years when it makes no difference if you're there or gone."
That does not seem to picture today's reality all that well, considering that most power in the world is concentrated in the hands of 60+ year old people.
0-25: Arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, delusions, boring normal person
25-50: Obsessive learning/study, application, and passion, finding myself
50-75: Not there yet
I just turned 30 and I'm having a blast learning graphics and audio programming, mostly in C! Found my passion, raycasting, audio engineering, and building desktop software
Perhaps whatever we might call it.
0 - death -> Doing things.
This is just how it unfolds.
https://youtube.com/clip/Ugkx1T-qoilkYC6vZ48N8US2aM9nHiFTq2I...
Unfortunately I already feel like a theme of 50-75 is "forgetting."
I remember very well the stuff I learned from 0-25 but damned if I remember last month.
0-25: learning
25-50: earning
50-75: returning
0-25: Act I 24-50: Act II 50-75: Act III, the final act.
Either it's a life worth living, or forced shutdown for me, while I still have a say.
Deleted Comment
25-50: doing
50-75: enjoying
75-100: leaving
This near-paranoid level of secrecy was because Apple leaked like a sieve in 1997 when Jobs returned as interim CEO.
There were sites like Mac OS Rumors that reported about internal meetings and projects in almost realtime. Nothing that was started before Jobs's return was secret. Leaking seemed to be part of standard office politics at Apple.
Jobs wanted to clamp down on that. Who knows if they actually had measures like described in the article (which suggests that every screenshot of Aqua carried a steganographic hardware id) but the threat worked.
The leaks were obviously bad for Apple, but as a teenager in my first tech industry job I found them fascinating reading. It was a rare insight into the inner workings of famous tech company in faraway California (even if it was the company that everybody in the media was convinced would be bankrupt in a year or two, but that just made the product drama more poignant).
> As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA.
I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?
I was wondering the opposite: even if you don't explicitly sign some contracts, as long as you have seen them and behave as-if you are following the contract and the other party gives you their part of the bargaining, that might be legally (almost) equivalent to having signed the contract. (I'm not a lawyer, and this is speculation.)
It seems the legal term of art for this in 'an implied contract'.
Had to find some gnarly AppleScript to convert pathnames when interacting with Finder
fortunately I don't have to deal with it anymore ;3
On a website with huge margins at the sides. I think the OSX Dock is a pretty good thing, but it makes so much more sense to keep it on the side of the screen and preserve vertical pixels. Unlike (some versions of) the Windows Taskbar, the icons are all square with no text, so you're not even sacrificing readability.
Relevant: Macintosh Network Computer
— https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-...
— https://web.archive.org/web/20130603044116/https://sw.thecsi...
— https://web.archive.org/web/19961220160908/http://www.macwee...
— https://web.archive.org/web/19961220043823/http://www.macwee...
— https://web.archive.org/web/20000531132121/http://www.theapp...
“During a speech trumpeting the network computer for the Harvard Computer Society earlier in December, Larry Ellison, Oracle chief executive officer and Apple board member, responded to a question about Apple's role in the NC space.
Ellison said the Macintosh NC would be available in April, with a near-300-MHz processor and a 17-inch screen. The Mac NC will run on the Mac OS and cost less than $1,000, according to attendees. Ellison added that the NC would not ship with a hard drive, but one could be added to the unit for an additional $100. ”