Steve Jobs

secretsam

redhanded wrote:

Wallace1492 wrote:

But he was doing things that already existed, just packaged and marketed them well - yes a very shrewd businessman, but an inventer? Not really. (IMHO)

But denying his own daughter (fact, not alleged) and stopping all philanthropic donations. Not good. Sad story.

Stopping philanthropic donations refers to what happened in 1997 when Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Hardly surprising they were cut then, is it?

"Just packaging and marketing" is also missing the point IMO. To illustrate - I bought a Creative mp3 player about 6 months before the first iPod was released. I thought the Creative was the best available product at the time but it was still sh!te. A total dogs dinner of a product. Awful user interface, difficult to use and the design was just a copy of a portable CD player. Now that didn't really bother me as I'm a bit of a geek and like playing with new tech but there was no way the Creative would have become a mass market consumer product. When I first saw an iPod, my reaction was - wow - now that is what an mp3 player should be like. The Creative went on eBay the next day.

Now Creative had access to all the same technology as Apple, and I'm sure Creative didn't sit down and decide to design a sh!te product, but they still did.

Creative just copied the design of a portable CD player. Apple had the design objective that the product should be usable if it was held in one hand. That is one reason why Apple dominated the mp3 player market and Creative, despite having product before Apple, went nowhere.

I've got a Creative MP3 that I bought in 2005 and it's still OK - a little worn but it delivers OK - at the time it was reckoned to be better than an I-pod. The success of many apple products is their design and marketing, IMHO - although some of their stuff is clever, eg I-pad - but it's not really 'new', is it?

Wallace1492

redhanded wrote:

Wallace1492 wrote:

But he was doing things that already existed, just packaged and marketed them well - yes a very shrewd businessman, but an inventer? Not really. (IMHO)

But denying his own daughter (fact, not alleged) and stopping all philanthropic donations. Not good. Sad story.

Stopping philanthropic donations refers to what happened in 1997 when Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy. Hardly surprising they were cut then, is it?

"Just packaging and marketing" is also missing the point IMO. To illustrate - I bought a Creative mp3 player about 6 months before the first iPod was released. I thought the Creative was the best available product at the time but it was still sh!te. A total dogs dinner of a product. Awful user interface, difficult to use and the design was just a copy of a portable CD player. Now that didn't really bother me as I'm a bit of a geek and like playing with new tech but there was no way the Creative would have become a mass market consumer product. When I first saw an iPod, my reaction was - wow - now that is what an mp3 player should be like. The Creative went on eBay the next day.

Now Creative had access to all the same technology as Apple, and I'm sure Creative didn't sit down and decide to design a sh!te product, but they still did.

Creative just copied the design of a portable CD player. Apple had the design objective that the product should be usable if it was held in one hand. That is one reason why Apple dominated the mp3 player market and Creative, despite having product before Apple, went nowhere.

My point exactly!! It was not a new invention, but a very well packaged and thought out variation of it. Personal audio player was already there, Apple just did it in a much more user friendly version. I think it a superb product.

notsoblue

Apple is the only company capable of making hardware that my grandma could use. The iPad is just so user-friendly and intuitive. I've never personally owned an Apple product, I stick to PC and Android, but I still appreciate they make pretty awesome kit.

Clever Pun

I'll be ordering a commemorative 4gs shortly.. anyone want to buy a 3gs with optional carbon fibre case?

il_principe

notsoblue wrote:

Apple is the only company capable of making hardware that my grandma could use. The iPad is just so user-friendly and intuitive. I've never personally owned an Apple product, I stick to PC and Android, but I still appreciate they make pretty awesome kit.

This. Even my dad can just about work an iPhone. He's really struggled with everything else and couldn't work out android at all.

It's funny how Apple creates so much positive and negative emotion among consumers. More so than any other brand IMHO. In fact Charles Arthur wrote a good article about this in the guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/06/why-do-people-hate-apple

I swapped over to Apple about 5 years ago. Cannot envisage going back to Windows now and too happy with Apple to consider Linux. Lucky that my new job runs Macs as well.

Also the iPad and iPhone are wonderful bits of kit - was using Airplay to show a friend our wedding pics at the weekend swiped through them on the phone and displayed them all on the TV, effortless and sodding brilliant. It's stuff like that that I really appreciate.

I know there are other products that do similar things, it's just that IME no one does it better than Apple. Suspect iCloud will be a good example of this, hardly a new idea but it's in the execution. They don't try and cram in all the available features, just the ones they think will work best. It's an approach that clearly works and keeps most of their customers happy. What amazes me is how poor other firms are at imitating Apple's products - take the Zune for example... MS really should have been able to marry their software with inhouse hardware, but they've never really got it right, even the XBOX isn't as nice to use as say the PS3.

graeme_s-2

If you're a full time US employee of Apple, then they'll match any charitable donation you make up to $10,000 a year. That sounds fairly philanthropic to me.

The thing with his daughter is true, he denied paternity for the first 2 years of her life when he was 23-25, but did then take on his parental responsibility and raised her.

I'm sure he was no saint, but he was certainly an amazing business man.

walkingbootweather

Clever Pun wrote:

I'll be ordering a commemorative 4gs shortly.. anyone want to buy a 3gs with optional carbon fibre case?

Does that come in a wooden box rather than a carbon fibre case? :oops:

Giraffoto

By being "cool" and "stylish" he made several new technologies mainstream - some ideas like the graphical interface and the mouse were out there already, but Apple is generally credited with getting them to a wider market. So quite a big plus there.

Shutting down Apple's charitable programs - huge minus, if proven to be entirely as described.

As for the crime of providing a shiny electronic conversation piece for countless pub bores and bourgeois bohemians - I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and regard that as an accident

bearfraser

iRP ? sad to see him go.

sketchley

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/scie ... 110064389/

sketchley

and a slightly different take from New Thump

http://newsthump.com/2011/10/07/tribute ... ry-worker/

rodgers73

Says a bit about how shallow our lives have become that a man that sold pretty walkmans and mobile phones that can also calculate how many calories are in your muffin is regarded as having "changed lives" and is compared to some of the great pioneers of science. Honestly!?

Zombie_donkey

Rolf F wrote:

BBC Radio 4 came up with a corker of stupid journalism last night. They commented on the fact that his products had "transformed many peoples lives". Now, with the best will in the world, I can understand that some folk love all things Apple and that's fine (me, I don't like control freaks but there you go) but how desperately sad would you need to be to be able to say that your life has been transformed by Apple products (unless you made a business out of it but I don't think that was what the comment was meant to imply)? I mean - how can your life have been transformed by the fact that your laptop has a shiny white paintjob? Or that your MP3 player has a particularly slick interface?

Apple sure changed Forrest Gumps life.

afcbian

A genius ? Without doubt.
Visionary ? Definately
Nice guy ? Uuummmm !

It's sad that so many people judge someone's life by how a gadget they invented has "changed their lives".
Let's be straight here..........he didn't cure cancer, end poverty, solve famine or bring world peace. He invented some very clever gadgets that actually work very well.
Let's all get a grip.

It's nice to be important but far more important to be nice