Big change from when Steve Jobs killed the Newton and one unspoken reason was the USMC having just had a _very_ successful trial and being in the process of getting Apple approved as a DOD vendor.... (yes, I'm still salty that the only Apple products I've bought since my MessagePad were OpenStep 4.2, and two iPods for my daughter --- the MacBook I use doesn't count since work bought that --- at least Samsung and Amazon use Wacom EMR in their products, though neither is fully a replacement for my Newton....)
I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive.
Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.
Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.
Steve was a real, well known, and well documented person with many surviving first-hand witnesses. In his biography, for example, it mentions him pressuring Clinton to tell the truth.
I think it's disingenuous to map one's insight into Steve to an insulting comic about a fictional character.
He would have understood the potential of LLMs straight away. If he would have delivered a successful product no one knows but 100% would have understood how LLMs could become another interface to computers.
I think his pitch would have been like garage band but for making apps “now anyone can make an app” feels very Jobsian.
I suspect Jobs would have held off for a few years just to see where the road is going before making a move. In that sense, Apples current lack of real dedicated to move into the LLM space has become a happy accident. They have avoided the hype cycle and the potential blow back once the more exuberant part of the AI craze fade away.
Why are you sure it was an accident? Couldn't the people who rose up the ranks around his orbit have learned the right lessons, and this having been very intentional?
He for sure would loathe their current state though. They are a perfectionist's nightmare and detrimental to many brands. He wouldn't even allow Apple^Red for his friend's charity- there's no way he would let AI slop come from Apple products.
Steve met once with Obama and complained about the fact Obama did not ask for the meeting personally, that it was too hard to build factories in America, and that teachers unions were kneecapping the American education system.
All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
> “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”
Yeah, we're talking about the guy who leased a new car every 6 months in order to avoid having to put a license plate on it, and then parked it in handicap spots, right? Absolute same "rules for thee, not for me" energy
>All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me.
We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint.
Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.
There's always plenty of pushback everywhere, all the social media apps are full of critics and hate on anyone who does anything in the world mercilessly. I like coming here to see people admire other people who worked hard to create something that made society better, and not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.
It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.
And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!
But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.
He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.
This comment confuses me. You call Jobs idiosyncratic, but then try to backwards-justify his political stance with stereotypes about anti-establishment politics and Californian ideals. What makes you convinced that he'd resist neoreactionary politicking any better than Cook?
Jobs was fickle, I agree with you there. I just don't think that a fickle iconoclast would last more than two weeks fighting against Trump, especially if he was threatened with an FTC antitrust probe. The only difference with Cook is that he's not as coy, and recognized that there was no way for a monopoly like Apple to fight the fed and win. Trump can disembowel Apple's profit margins, and neither Cook nor Jobs nor Jesus of Nazarath could convince the shareholders that morality is worth more than $AAPL. 2016 Jobs would be retired by the board of directors before he even threatened to make a conscientious objection, reality distortion be damned.
I have no love for the sitting administration, but it is a fantasy to pretend that a FAANG business could resist federal coercion. Just because Apple enjoys a moral halo-effect does not mean they're better positioned than Microsoft or AWS to do the "right" thing. Apple's inability to prosecute NSO Group is a recurring example of how heavily the US can muzzle them.
All those things may be true but at the end of the day guys like Jobs and Trump are like oil and water personality wise.
Trump would have invariably said some stupid shit about Jobs publicly or to his face privately and Jobs would have never forgot it and would have obsessed with hurting Trump over it.
For better or worse that's just the kind of guy he was.
Did you know him or ever speak with him in person?
I have while working in Apple in a critical engineering group, and the negatives you keep citing seem to have died off in his 20s, at which time they indelibly (deservedly) tainted public perception. the post NeXT 'return' seemed very very different than what you describe, from in person experience.
If we have to rely on the canny benevolence of a random CEO to prevent the world from going to shit, then we truly deserve to live in the shit world. Steve made businesses larger-than-life, and I expect his behavior played no small part in conditioning tech enthusiasts to respond to Trump and Elon's hyperbolic, baseless rhetoric.
Apple has grown quite dramatically in value since his death. Not sure if he would have the leeway to oppose Trump as an officer of a publicly traded company when he's shown to be quite vindictive against companies he doesn't like.
The interesting point here is that an off the shelf consumer product has been approved by NATO for any level of classification for the first time, not which level of classification.
> The devices are now officially approved to handle classified NATO information up to the "restricted" level. This is not about specialized, rugged phones built for the military or locked-down, government-only hardware. It applies to regular iPhones and iPads running standard iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. According to Apple, no other consumer devices have this distinction.
NATO RESTRICTED is not a particularly high classification. Its handling requirements are a very, very small step above unclassified.
What holds Apple back in the classified space is not security shortcomings in the platform per se, but the fact that there’s no way to initialise and manage a fresh iPad without public internet connectivity. That’s an absolute dealbreaker.
I understand that this is mainly about the Apple business where having an endorsement/certification is a barrier of entry for others, even if it's artificial.
"NATO Restricted" is the lowest-tier of NATO classification. It does not require security clearance to access, and mostly exists to prevent the leaking of information.
Presumably most NATO personnel will have a significant amount of data at higher restriction levels, arguably making these devices of little use to them.
It's a pain using a device that you can load some data, but not other.
Commercial products don't generally go from unclass to TS/SCI in one jump. We should anticipate this isn't the end, given how these types of contracts are generally structured.
Big change from when Steve Jobs killed the Newton and one unspoken reason was the USMC having just had a _very_ successful trial and being in the process of getting Apple approved as a DOD vendor.... (yes, I'm still salty that the only Apple products I've bought since my MessagePad were OpenStep 4.2, and two iPods for my daughter --- the MacBook I use doesn't count since work bought that --- at least Samsung and Amazon use Wacom EMR in their products, though neither is fully a replacement for my Newton....)
You're forgetting Casey Fucking Ryback!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDlpPs19NU0
I've wondered how the world would be different right now if Jobs was still alive.
Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.
Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.
Jobs was the rare person outspoken with unconventional wisdom. Don’t assume he would agree with your popular opinions.
He did it, GP's comment is the HN version of the famous meme, amazing: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fa...
Steve was a real, well known, and well documented person with many surviving first-hand witnesses. In his biography, for example, it mentions him pressuring Clinton to tell the truth.
I think it's disingenuous to map one's insight into Steve to an insulting comic about a fictional character.
Maybe. Or maybe he would have just sent a close associate or relative, like his big friend Ellison does.
He would have understood the potential of LLMs straight away. If he would have delivered a successful product no one knows but 100% would have understood how LLMs could become another interface to computers.
I think his pitch would have been like garage band but for making apps “now anyone can make an app” feels very Jobsian.
There's this old gem about being able to ask Aristotle a question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YzLMPm3Jgw
I suspect Jobs would have held off for a few years just to see where the road is going before making a move. In that sense, Apples current lack of real dedicated to move into the LLM space has become a happy accident. They have avoided the hype cycle and the potential blow back once the more exuberant part of the AI craze fade away.
They have pulled an accidental Jobs move.
Why are you sure it was an accident? Couldn't the people who rose up the ranks around his orbit have learned the right lessons, and this having been very intentional?
He for sure would loathe their current state though. They are a perfectionist's nightmare and detrimental to many brands. He wouldn't even allow Apple^Red for his friend's charity- there's no way he would let AI slop come from Apple products.
Three things come to mind, up front:
- Steve Jobs wouldn't have personally donated $1 million to the Trump campaign.
- Steve Jobs probably wouldn't have presented a gold bar to Trump.
- Steve Jobs would have been better at manipulating (reality distortion field) Trump.
Tim gave Trump the paper weight.
Steve met once with Obama and complained about the fact Obama did not ask for the meeting personally, that it was too hard to build factories in America, and that teachers unions were kneecapping the American education system.
All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
Jobs to Murdoch:
> “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”
Yeah, we're talking about the guy who leased a new car every 6 months in order to avoid having to put a license plate on it, and then parked it in handicap spots, right? Absolute same "rules for thee, not for me" energy
>All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me.
We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint.
Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.
I rarely see tech hero worship pushback on here. I hope to see more of it.
We are all human after all.
There's always plenty of pushback everywhere, all the social media apps are full of critics and hate on anyone who does anything in the world mercilessly. I like coming here to see people admire other people who worked hard to create something that made society better, and not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.
You are very wrong about Steve Jobs.
It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.
And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!
But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.
He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.
This comment confuses me. You call Jobs idiosyncratic, but then try to backwards-justify his political stance with stereotypes about anti-establishment politics and Californian ideals. What makes you convinced that he'd resist neoreactionary politicking any better than Cook?
Jobs was fickle, I agree with you there. I just don't think that a fickle iconoclast would last more than two weeks fighting against Trump, especially if he was threatened with an FTC antitrust probe. The only difference with Cook is that he's not as coy, and recognized that there was no way for a monopoly like Apple to fight the fed and win. Trump can disembowel Apple's profit margins, and neither Cook nor Jobs nor Jesus of Nazarath could convince the shareholders that morality is worth more than $AAPL. 2016 Jobs would be retired by the board of directors before he even threatened to make a conscientious objection, reality distortion be damned.
I have no love for the sitting administration, but it is a fantasy to pretend that a FAANG business could resist federal coercion. Just because Apple enjoys a moral halo-effect does not mean they're better positioned than Microsoft or AWS to do the "right" thing. Apple's inability to prosecute NSO Group is a recurring example of how heavily the US can muzzle them.
All those things may be true but at the end of the day guys like Jobs and Trump are like oil and water personality wise.
Trump would have invariably said some stupid shit about Jobs publicly or to his face privately and Jobs would have never forgot it and would have obsessed with hurting Trump over it.
For better or worse that's just the kind of guy he was.
Did you know him or ever speak with him in person?
I have while working in Apple in a critical engineering group, and the negatives you keep citing seem to have died off in his 20s, at which time they indelibly (deservedly) tainted public perception. the post NeXT 'return' seemed very very different than what you describe, from in person experience.
If we have to rely on the canny benevolence of a random CEO to prevent the world from going to shit, then we truly deserve to live in the shit world. Steve made businesses larger-than-life, and I expect his behavior played no small part in conditioning tech enthusiasts to respond to Trump and Elon's hyperbolic, baseless rhetoric.
Apple has grown quite dramatically in value since his death. Not sure if he would have the leeway to oppose Trump as an officer of a publicly traded company when he's shown to be quite vindictive against companies he doesn't like.
He was a billionaire. It's foolish to believe he was any less of a sociopath than other billionaires.
Most likely he woult thrive as a contemporary oligarch.
He was a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar, not because of Apple. In a strange sense it was an accident.
The interesting point here is that an off the shelf consumer product has been approved by NATO for any level of classification for the first time, not which level of classification.
> The devices are now officially approved to handle classified NATO information up to the "restricted" level. This is not about specialized, rugged phones built for the military or locked-down, government-only hardware. It applies to regular iPhones and iPads running standard iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. According to Apple, no other consumer devices have this distinction.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-iphone-ipad-nato-classif...
NATO RESTRICTED is not a particularly high classification. Its handling requirements are a very, very small step above unclassified.
What holds Apple back in the classified space is not security shortcomings in the platform per se, but the fact that there’s no way to initialise and manage a fresh iPad without public internet connectivity. That’s an absolute dealbreaker.
I understand that this is mainly about the Apple business where having an endorsement/certification is a barrier of entry for others, even if it's artificial.
Restricted?
Even the monthly consumption of toilet paper on a base has this classification.
You could possibly infer an estimate of base staff based on that info; not like a great number, but a number.
What actually is military-grade technology:
Both Ukraine and Russia use Discord to stream live drone footage.
Ukraine uses various Android tablets to run it's super-classified Delta battlefield management system.
"NATO Restricted" is the lowest-tier of NATO classification. It does not require security clearance to access, and mostly exists to prevent the leaking of information.
+1 I came to make the same point. Basically unclassified. Pretty weak press release!
So most NATO people will have access to this level, so it's where most devices will be sold.
Presumably most NATO personnel will have a significant amount of data at higher restriction levels, arguably making these devices of little use to them. It's a pain using a device that you can load some data, but not other.
This deserves to be the top comment.
Commercial products don't generally go from unclass to TS/SCI in one jump. We should anticipate this isn't the end, given how these types of contracts are generally structured.