
An Apple a day keeps the doctor away.....No wait!!
US President Barack Obama has joined the outpouring of tributes to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died last night. "Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs," the statement from the White House read. The statement went on to praise the Apple co-founder and billionaire effusively, saying he " …
"Einstein was never associated to a brand which the masses can identify with."
Are you sure about that?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalmisfit/3938499234/
We've mostly forgotten now but Einstein was pretty much the first pop star scientist. The popular stereotype of the abuncular, unkept, absent minded scientist also started with him. Before that, scientists were about as popular as a prussian school master.
And then you have people like Bill Hewlett, Ken Olsen or Seymour Cray who were quite iconic in their time even though they didn't have the benefit of the personal computer revolution.
Time will tell.
...that's just the way capitalism works, and we all seem quite happy to accept the upsides.
As a matter of interest, if you really do think like that, how did you manage to post this message in the first place?
Bye bye Steve, no-matter what anyone thinks, the tech world has just got a little less interesting....
@FIA: "...that's just the way capitalism works, and we all seem quite happy to accept the upsides."
That's exploitation you're thinking of.
Capitalism[*] is about competition: We cannot compute, with any degree of confidence, what is the best way for the market to go so we let individual companies give it their best shot on the open market and let consumers decide. The companies that get it right, survive; the others go bust.
This might not be the best time for this argument but, what companies like Apple and Microsoft and Oracle and, sadly, most others want to do is to subvert the free market and avoid competition at all costs. And somewhere down the line real people suffer real consequences.
Still, as you say, we're all quite happy to turn a blind eye.
[*] Ok. That's a free market. Capitalism is about I front the money I take the big cut. But you know what I mean.
Dear coward (who's not willing to stand up and be identified),
1) Everyone is using 'chinese slave labour' right now. The whole electronics industry gets stuff made in China. How did you post your comment in the first place? Carrier pidgeon!
2) How can you play on people's greed *and* charge 'hugely inflated prices'. Surely one negates the other. People who are greedy want something for nothing not something for a high price.
3) Actually all Total Cost of Ownership studies show that apple computers are value for money. As for the mobile tech. Its no more expensive than similar specced devices from the opposition. That's why they failed and apple didn't.
"Bill Gates said it had been "an insanely great honour" to work with him: "The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.""
That's right - Jobs sold an OS that rarely crashed, Gates sold one that crashes as soon as you look at it.
So take it back to shop and ask them, with the few good manners you can muster, to repair it under guarantee (that of course you have got with you). Remember to have to hand a concise account of under what circumstances (programmes being run etc.) and when and how often this happens. As you have not worked out this action for yourself, I assume that your technical and consumer abilities are somewhat low.
Still, have a go and stop moaning about things you clearly do not understand.
Jobs wasn't an innovator. He plagiarised the ideas of others and packaged them in shiny boxes for the gullible. Worse than that, he then sued those companies whose products were too close to Apple stuff for his liking.
Apparently Obama also said "“There may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented". Er, what? According to the stats I read today there have been 128 million iPhones sold. That's not "much of the world" by any stretch of the imagination and I'm sure Obama learned of Jobs' passing on his BlackBerry.
Someone please wake me up when this madness and hype has subsided or when Jobs resurrects himself in a couple of days.
I think you may be making a bit of maths error there.
I believe there are at least four iPhone models and two iPad models. Many Apple fanbois will have owned more than one of each model and possibly a Mac too so the total number of humans is likely to be far fewer than you think.
And even if I'm wrong, which I doubt, a mere 2% is not "much of the world" in the slightest. I'm sure a considerably larger group of people discovered via TV or radio news that Big Jobby had died. A larger group doesn't give a flying f**k and an even larger group still probably has no idea who he was.
The latter two groups are made up of people more worried where their next meal is coming from, concerned that they may get shot for belonging to the wrong social/religious minority or whether they'll ever get electricity and fresh water in their village.
But hey, don't let me ruin the enjoyment you get from owning your precious shiny toys.
"Many Apple fanbois"... sure. I use a macbook. But own an HTC, and I quite like Flash too. Does that make me a "fanbois" by your black white standard or not?
I learned of the news on my macbook,.. and what of the people who didnt know until I mentioned it to them? A 2% guestimate assumes that - nobody owns a macbook, and that nobody told anyone else, (and was rounded down aswell) - so is actually a conservative estimation. Check your maths.
"so the total number of humans is likely to be far fewer than you think"??. That would be about 7 billion ish. And is not effected by how many of them own mac products.
"The latter two groups are made up of people more worried where their next meal is coming from, concerned that they may get shot for belonging to the wrong social/religious minority or whether they'll ever get electricity and fresh water in their village."
Yes, this is blindingly obvious, both to you, me, and obama, and everyone else,.. so what?
All pedantry aside - both yours and mine in this response - the point Im making is that 128 million *is* huge. And for you to say this is "not much of the world, by any stretch of the imagination", is just stupid. That is a big number. It is indeed much of the world.
Sorry, but I find this offensive.
According to the CIA World Factbook, 160,521 people die every day. Steve Jobs was just ONE of them.
I bet very few of the other 160,520 people who died that day ever made sinister threats to "go after" an altruistic software project like Theora, or ran around suing everyone for making "rounded rectangles" and "green phone icons". I bet they also donated a helluva lot more to charity than Jobs too, given that he apparently had some kind of objection to it, which is sort of like having an objection to love or compassion. So witnessing the spectacle of everyone from Joe Blogs to El Presidente gushing over him, like a bunch of schoolgirls at a rock concert, is absolutely sickening.
As for being a "visionary" ... the only "vision" Jobs ever had was the one he nicked from Xerox PARC. Since then he made a career out of "shamelessly stealing" others ideas, squeezing them into shiny but otherwise dysfunctional and DRM-infested toys, then branding an Apple logo on them (which was ironically also nicked, from the Beatles). Having nicked those ideas, he then fraudulently stamped his "IP" seal on them, and embarked on a vicious rampage of litigation.
And this is the guy everyone is now fawning over?
Oh, but I forgot ... he made lots of money. Lots and lots.
So did Al Capone.
Linking to celebrity deaths. Steve Jobs strikes me as being something akin to the Michael Jackson of the computing world. Fans around the world have an outpouring of grief. Whilst some of us with our cynical view of the world suggest that all they did was refangle something that was already around. Wrap it up in excellent production values and sell it back to people in an easy to consume package. Nothing wrong in that, yes he touch lots of peoples lives. I for changing peoples lives well yes. But guess what so do most technological products. Wether he should be idolised in the same light as Edison, or Van Nuemann. Provides to me that people on the intterwebs really need to brush up on the history and get some perspective.
Actually, the comparison to Edison, at least, is fairly apt. Thomas Edison was a competent and relentless tinkerer, but much of his most enduring work was the result of fiddling with existing devices that others hadn't been able to make into commercial successes. Some 20 different inventors, for example, had made incandescent electric bulbs before Edison -- he just made one that was a LITTLE bit better, and presented it as part of what we now would call an ecosystem of power generation, distribution, delivery, and use. Edison Electric and the Edison light bulb were the iTunes/iPod of their day.
Also, remember that Edison was a tireless self-promoter and that the bulk of "Edison's" patents were the result of the engineers and researchers that he kept at Menlo Park -- he just signed his name to the papers, as the head of the company.
We also, nowadays, forget the times that he was flat-out WRONG -- cast concrete houses and furniture, anyone...? -- and the lengths to which he would go to sabotage his competitors. In order to promote his dream of Edison Electric's direct current power transmission (admittedly safer than high-voltage AC, except for the environmental effects of having power generating stations every couple of square miles due to inefficiencies in transmitting DC) he took every opportunity to try to re-brand in the public mind execution by electric chair as "Westinghousing", after George Westinghouse/Nikola Tesla's competing alternating current power generation and transmission system.
He was also not averse to suing competitors whose products interfered with his profits -- Edison Manufacturing sued competitors of Edison's motion picture production company, claiming that their cameras infringed his patents -- weakening the industry against European imports. (OTOH, this was also one of the reasons for the rise of Hollywood as movie capital of the U.S: besides having more sunny days available for filming than Edison's New Jersey and New York studios -- and at this time, even indoor scenes were shot outdoors, since electric lights weren't yet bright enough to expose the movie film -- but, being so far away from Edison's headquarters, it was more expensive for him to track down and prosecute possible infringers and the circuit court of appeals for California was known for frequently denying patent claims.)
Tirelessly promoting himself and his company, incrementally improving existing technologies to make them public objects of desire, vertically integrating product and delivery service to maximize profits and squeeze out competitors, aggressively defending his company's intellectual property... No -- Love them or hate them, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs weren't ACTUALLY all that different.
"the statement from the president was perhaps a mite extravagant in its praise of dyed-in-the-wool capitalism"
Um...yes, capitalism did indeed keep Jobs and Apple going. But was this snipey statement really necessary? I don't even own any Apple products but Jobs WAS a visionary! get over yourselves!
At least the coverage in the Reg (what I've read of it - I haven't been inclined to look at the multi-part bio running now) has been reasonably accurate. The other day I caught part of an interview with Steven Levy on NPR about Jobs that was loaded with Levy's usual inaccuracies and distortions.
Of course Levy is the gossip columnist for Wired and has a long tradition of preferring the fawning recitation of anecdote to actual research. But surely Jobs is not honored by nonsense claims like Levy's statement that the Mac was the first networked computer, for example.
I'm not a fan of Jobs' design choices, or of the direction he took the industry; nor do I believe he "changed my life" in any substantial way. But he was clearly a very successful businessman and he did an excellent job of leading teams that produced products many consumers wanted.