back
1 comments
If they are so clever it's weird how they end up with butterfly keyboard, walled garden software, glassy iOS themes, and fight against EU initiatives such as replacable batteries.

Apple is a super late stage company, why would a clever person join them just to work under some middle manager.

There are plenty of hard problems that need solving.

One co-worker, for example, has headed up the team that convert the proprietary RAW format from various camera vendors to a standard RGB format that can then be edited/adjusted in Photos, etc. The cameras (vendors) never rest and as such he's kept quite busy.

Another coworker was the guy you turned to who could walk a stack, read registers, and then tell you that you were trying to dispose of an object on a different thread than you created it on (and the framework that handled the object had stashed important data in the creation thread that it needed for disposal—bad framework).

I turned to another coworker when a stack of transforms had my brain in a knot (early bring up of Preview to allow scaling (zoom), translation (scrolling) and rotation while trying to select text (hit-test in the transformed PDF). "The matrix you want to invert should have been created in the reverse order of the transforms that you had applied when displaying the PDF." Oh.)

And then there were the GIT experts that could somehow fix the completely fucked up state I had got the project in…

And the Smart Guy™ who, glancing at the debugger, might announce that I had exceeded the number of threads allowed per process. (I had no idea there was a limit.)

Come to think of it, maybe I'm just an idiot. :-)

Obviously it's advanced work, but the problems might be harder due to the Apple-specific circumstances and tech debt; and not because they are globally hard for humanity.
No, you're right. No one at Apple is solving world hunger. And FWIW, these are engineers who, like I had, started at Apple in the 90's. There were of course no glass icons, etc., then. Few of us can steer the ship any longer.

Back when I began though (1995) the engineers more or less were driving—not the designers, management. (Were there even designers in the 90's at Apple?)

Of course history will show how well that worked for Apple. When Jobs came back and the company became successful (financially) again, it started sucking more and more for engineering. The lunatics were no longer allowed to run the asylum.

I suppose I could have left then, but I was also looking at retiring in a decade or so and was still an "Apple fan" from my love of the Mac from the late 80's. There is no way I was going to, for example, apply to work at Microsoft.

Appreciate your response - that was definitely a meaningful time for the company. I'm jealous. You can be proud of your contributions. I still remember my music teacher using an old Mac with the black/white UI for many years because it was so damn robust and performant.

My biggest problem with today's Apple is that every shithole dictator can hack the iPhone and there are zero ways to defend against it. First Facebook and Google stole and uploaded our full phone contact lists, then they kept the camera recording when the phone screen was turned off, and nowadays there is a christian-fundamentalist government controlling all of that.

As a European all this data is gathered from us and our families just so Epstein's colleagues in five eyes intelligence can use it to sabotage European interests.