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Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

Sadly I have to agree. I wonder if Jobs really was that much of a visionary that the company is lost for ways to innovate without him.

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I try not to buy too much into the Jobs hype because it falls into the same line of thinking that leads to the "Great Man" theory which I don't put much stock in.

That said he did seem to have a way of understanding the whole ecosystem that Apple was trying to sell. In the post Jobs era the number of products and configurations available is getting pretty unruly and you now have an issue where you can't plug an iphone 7 out of the box into a new MBP without a dongle. That's pretty disjointed and strange. The TouchBar also seems to be misplaced on the MBP which every time I've had one for work is pretty much immediately folded up and put under a thunderbolt display (now requiring another dongle) and making the TouchBar worthless.

So yeah I don't know if you need Jobs specifically but you certainly need someone looking over the entire product range and making sure it makes some amount of sense.

>you can't plug an iphone 7 out of the box into a new MBP without a dongle

Amazing

> Amazing

ly poor foresight on Apple's part

You could say they're counting on iCloud instead of people directly plugging their devices into one another.

I think it's been two or three years since I've plugged my iPhone into my computer to do something besides charge it. Good riddance! iTunes in the later years felt awkward and hard to use.

This is the same logic as "iPhone users only ever use the bundled headphones anyway so why need a jack?" (which also can't be used with the new MBP)

Wait.. what? I thought it has a headphone jack?

As much as the hacker crowd loves to hate Jobs, he really was the visionary for the entire company. Apple has a very far lead, but if these events continue to go the way they are going I don't see that lasting another 10 years.

I believe he was. Besides being a great salesperson. Today's speakers were terrible.

It seems pretty obvious to me.

At least they didn't release any 2nd gen Newtons.

I would love a new Newton :-)

Apple under Steve Jobs didn't innovate... they advertised.

They released the first mass market all-in-one personal computer with mouse input + pixel based text rendering, multiple fonts & cursive. They pushed for USB-A standard 19 years ago. They killed parallel & serial ports. They started the trend of making beautiful devices that don't feel like minified mainframes. They made UNIX truly mass market. They made the first music player that could handle more than 8 songs. They revolutionized smartphones + introduced touch based keyboards. They created WebKit.

They also advertised. And I love most of their ads (at least those during Steve Jobs' time).

Most of these "facts" you have posted aren't true.

I can see taking issue with a couple of them.

"They pushed for USB-A standard 19 years ago. They killed parallel & serial ports."

Apple wasn't part of the initial group of companies that were involved in the USB standard. The iMac did greatly lead to its adoption. I think "killing parallel and serial ports" is a little over the top, but one could argue that the adoption of USB greatly reduced the use of serial and parallel ports.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1135017/imacanniversary.html

"They started the trend of making beautiful devices that don't feel like minified mainframes."

Subjective. Though Apple's designs have been very influential, sometimes outright copied.

"They made the first music player that could handle more than 8 songs."

I don't know what the capacities of other offerings at the time.

"They revolutionized smartphones + introduced touch based keyboards."

The influence of the iPhone was pretty significant. Was there an earlier phone that was widely known that had a touch-based keyboard?

"They created WebKit."

This one's pretty clearly not true. WebKit's lineage goes back to KHTML and KJS.

Which ones do you take particular issue with?

Edit to add portion on Webkit.

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