Item — HN Reader

While reading this comment, two of Steve Job's line pops up in my head. I think it was the Apple Park opening, and Steve response to insult in WWDC 199x.

> "We need to be true to ourselves, and remember what is important, that is what going to keep Apple Apple, is if we keep us, us."

> "You have got to start with the customers experience and work backwards to the technology.

Right now it feels a lot like Apple without Steve Jobs the first time round. On paper there are a lot of cool tech being worked on. But in the end it was tech from NeXT that really shines.

And a lot of these tech don't actually benefits the customers. If the choice was a language and framework that is slightly harder to developers but brings overall higher quality Apps because the barrier is higher. Compared to a language that wants to replace Assembly to Javascript while being easy to learn like Visual Basic and for everyone to code. I would much rather pick the former.

Edit: I suddenly remember I also submitted a Core Animation introduction video from Steve a while ago on HN [1]. 20 years later we have gone backwards on a lot of things.

[1] https://x.com/lucaslovexoxo/status/2082098579632783441

2 comments

I remember this video, from way back. Then, it was impressive, but it also felt logical that machines of that era were able to do it. So it wasn't magic. Just good engineering. Now everything is jank & stutter and my 64GB 25 times more powerful machine just refused to play back a YouTube video in my Safari tab since I have too many windows open.

My iPhone 16 Pro is the jankiest user experience I’ve had on a new iPhone ever. On my Mac the settings app pauses and stutters. Jobs would have thrown things if he ever saw this.

I knew Apple was lost when they dropped the “Home” button, just after spending a $1B to build a Palo Alto headquarters in the shape of the “Home” button.

I suggest reading Steve Jobs biographies regarding those kind of expenses at Apple, Pixar and NeXT.

What would the biographies say? He opposed them?

My base 2019 macbook pro 15 on Mojave is actually faster than new macbook pros today on some tasks.

There’s no way Apple doesn’t know about that internally. So I don’t see any other explanation… other than a lack of care, or a bozo explosion.

Which tasks ? I don't believe your claims.

If you dont believe me… nobody is stopping you from testing various things on the same model?

And if you dont have it already… then what could I possibly say that would motivate you to buy a used one to do the testing to confirm?

Edit: And even on my ipad pro m2 doing literally nothing other than swiping to the app library often causes a visible stutter and lag for hundreds of miliseconds… so if you really think it’s flat out impossible to find consistently slower things on the much more complex macos… idk what to say.

Why should I need to do any testing ? I'm just going to keep on not believing you until you back up your claims.

And your iPad example doesn't make sense at all, you compared 2 Macbooks and now you're talking about another OS altogether.

> idk what to say.

You could just tell us one example of something that's faster on your 2019 Macbook Pro 15 versus a M5 Macbook pro and how to reproduce it.

If you dont ever intend to do any testing… then why would anyone care about what you believe or not?

Why post random noise opining?

Since when did asking someone to give a single example to support their point become "noise"?

How can they do any testing, if you refuse to tell them what to even look for?

> Why should I need to do any testing ? I'm just going to keep on not believing you until you back up your claims.

And why should he care what you think, because you have already made up your mind and don't care at all about facts or the truth.

On the contrary, they care enough about facts not to take a random, implausible and unsubstantiated claim at face value. Please don’t resort to Bulverism.

What makes you think I don't care at all about facts or the truth ?

You’re shifting the burden of proof. You made a claim and refused to substantiate it in any way whatsoever.

I’m not trying to prove anything…?

I just don’t care that much either way about what others think if it’s adversarial, even if thousands of HN users come to this comment chain to opine about this or that macbook model.

If you mean my claim that some team in Apple already knows about it, there’s literally no way to prove that to passing readers.

> I’m not trying to prove anything…?

That’s exactly the point. Why would you expect others to even entertain a vague claim like that if you give them no reason to find it plausible? “Just test it yourself” (test what?) i.e. “prove me right yourself” is not going to be very successful.

I completely agree. Apple went from making “wow” products to “meh” products. Everything started to decline after Steve passed away.