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[Catloaf]

Steve Jobs:  An asshole lucky enough to be able to convince Wozniak to start a company with him, then take all the money/credit for Wozniak's greatness.

[Brentai]

Aha, and here I thought when I just completely stopped talking to my Koolaid-guzzling supervisor that I had escaped Apple conversations for the day.  My bad.

My favorite overheard conversation from being literally surrounded by admitted felatists is this:

"Hey, you know how you can open up Task Manager in Windows and force a program to quit?"
"Uh, yeah?"
"How do you do that on a Mac?"
"Why would you want to do that on a Mac?"
"Well when one of my programs locks up I need to close it."
(NOTE: Without the faintest hint of irony.) "That doesn't happen."
"Uhhhh... it happens."
"No it doesn't."
"It's happening right now."  *drags the guru over and shows him the screen*
"...oh, okay."

Then he tells the guy how to do it without even having to think about it because it's obvious he has to do it all the time.

The "Apple Cult" is no fucking joke.  I've seen these guys preach, justify, outright lie and get ridiculously aggressive about any and all perceived shortcomings of absolutely every Apple product.  It's getting to the point where I need to bite my tongue around them for fear of harassment, though fortunately for the most part it's easy to get a bunch of software developers and testers to want to talk about something besides technology for a while.

[Royal☭]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVVUNQUTGj4

[Bongo Bill]

The Onion!

[Brentai]

That's an old article but I love it more with each passing day that I hear people gushing about the iPad without ever actually seeing one anywhere.

[jsnlxndrlv]

That's an old article but I love it more with each passing day that I hear people gushing about the iPad without ever actually seeing one anywhere.

Pretend I quoted this about six more times and reposted it on Facebook and Twitter.

[Frocto]

oh my god that's so good

[Miss Cat Ears]

The latter part? I can barely get the meaning of any of the paragraphs of the article because the author has THE BACK OF HIS THROAT LOVINGLY WRAPPED AROUND THE TIP OF APPLE'S DICK

Hell, even -if- these changes were intended to bring forth the kingdom of Steve Jobs on earth, that's not what sets me on edge. Ok it IS but it's not ONLY that. The problem is that as long as you are Apple's little bitch they can change the rules of the game at any step and you can't do anything but bark like the bitch you are.

There are times when I read your posts and just sit back in awe thinking holy crap that isn't even his first language

complaining is my first language

I'm off to learn Portuguese just so I can- never mind, there's no way I'd be able to handle the brilliance.

[Bongo Bill]

[Büge]

 

[Thad]

Steve Jobs:  An asshole lucky enough to be able to convince Wozniak to start a company with him, then take all the money/credit for Wozniak's greatness.

While I like Woz a hell of a lot better than I like Jobs, he doesn't have Jobs's talent for marketing -- in fact, few people do.  Saying Jobs doesn't have any responsibility for Apple's success ignores the last 15 years of history -- the 15 years where they were on the verge of bankruptcy, hired him back on, and pretty much changed the way people consumed music.

He's not the engineering genius that Woz is, but he is DAMNED GOOD at making people want to buy his shit.

[Catloaf]

He's not the engineering genius that Woz is, but he is DAMNED GOOD at making people want to buy his shit.

A skill that I have absolutely no respect for and indeed adds more points into the asshole stat in my book.

[Kayin]

Thats rather ignorant. Without Jobs, Woz would have never even realized what he had going on. It's more than getting people to buy things, it's knowing what way the wind is blowing and what you have to do demand out of a project to make it the 'best'.

Understating that role is practically saying "I have no idea how good products get made". Though yes, it makes him even more of a douche nozzle and I hate him. BUT REGARDLESS, he brought a lot to the table.

[Cthulhu-chan]

No, he's right.  Good marketers are assholes, it just comes with the territory.

edit: derp should read your whole reply

[Kayin]

Hey good marketers or designers can be nice! Marketing work is never exactly happy work, but you can not be a jerk about it. Besides being brilliant with marketing and having a good eye for solid design, Jobs is gifted enough to have an outrageous value in his "asshole" stat.

[Bongo Bill]

Being an asshole is a handicap - not a totally debilitating one, but neither is it orthogonal to success - when any part of your marketing strategy includes making yourself into a brand, as Jobs has done. That he's an asshole just speaks the more highly of his talent.

[Sharkey]

I've heard this story from dozens of people, but I'll quote the summary from rotten's (sadly abandoned) library:

When Steve Jobs worked at Atari, the company was working on creating the arcade game Breakout, which required 80 Integrated Circuits (ICs). The less ICs  there were, the cheaper the games would be to produce, so Nolan Bushnell (Atari's president) offered $100 for every IC that could be knocked out of the design. Jobs brought Woz the challenge, and over four days and nights at Atari they put together a design that only required 30 ICs. Bushnell gave Jobs his $5000 bonus, which Jobs "split" with Wozniak by telling him it was a $700 bonus, giving him "half," or $350. Woz was delighted, but years later found out the truth. And cried.

This little story really does show the difference between the two founders: Wozniak, the classic hacker, facing challenges and improving a project so that people like himself could enjoy it, and Jobs, the goat fucker. As life has gone on to prove, it's the goat fucker that ends up running the company. Or, as might be said more poetically, In the valley of the goats, the Goat Fucker is king. Jobs would run the company for a good number of years before being shoved aside, and then return in a triumph when the company sunk to new lows in the 1990s.

Does a pretty good job of illustrating the character of the people involved, but actually isn't why I have such contempt for apple toys.

Apple is essentially AOL for hipsters. Roll that around in your mouth a little. Savor the woody textures of the metaphor. They sell devices and services that are, in every way that matters, inferior to something else except in that they're stylish and uncomplicated. If you want to pay a premium to save yourself from the time necessary to learn how something works and maybe get exposed to the guts of things, sure. I can see how that's attractive. Maybe your time is so valuable that you can't spare it for that sort of geekery. More likely, you're trying to create that impression while masking the fact that you're just really fucking thick.

[Royal☭]

Can you get that last sentence published so I can quote it without preceding it with "Some guy on an internet forum said..."?

[Büge]

Jobs = Ben Affleck, Woz = Matt Damon

[Sharkey]

Can you get that last sentence published so I can quote it without preceding it with "Some guy on an internet forum said..."?

Oh, just tell them I said it. Could have written it on a bathroom wall with a crackhead shit pencil and people would be all acting like I brought it down from a mountain on a pair of tablets.

I'm kind of a big deal, ya know.