Amen.
What makes Apple is the user experience and easy barrier of entry on their devices.
Apple is 99.9% UI, to the consumer, including the design/quality of their hardware! And, as those elite qualities are slipping, so is the company… All while the competition has closed significantly.
I was a fanboy, then just a loyalist (for a decade), and I still love my shit, but I’m also looking around to save 50% with a 5% sacrifice.
Also, I am not alone.
Pssst. Wall Street: Time. To. Sell.
Hmm, no, I don’t think that’s true.
At the time, Jason said, “If I were Apple, I’d be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.”
On the positive side, Apple has been a staunch ally in full-device encryption, which basically doesn’t exist in Android (yet) and is on by default on every modern iOS device since iOS 8.
Do you really believe anything on your cell phone is private?
Yeah, because the feds are super pissed at Apple. All the Golden Key talk, etc.
Last time I checked OS X, iOS, and android are all based on unix.
See here for that rock-solid unix foundation in OS X
Or here for a more on OSX and iOS connections to the unix community and codebase
And of course, everything at google runs on linux, including android.
So, how exactly have the thousands that contributed time and effort to improving unix and linux not winning here? That shared vision is powering everything now. I don’t see VAX/VMS on phones and tvs, and I don’t see DOS running music players. OS/2 is still limping along in ATMs, but I don’t see it making it the 22nd century. No more AmigaOS running around (a real visionary machine). I wager that long after OS X is gone, Unix and Linux will still be around.
I assume everything I do online (i.e. on my phone) is being monitored/recorded/logged/stored.
If you have any secrets that are really worth keeping, I’d suggest actually keeping them safe… i.e. completely offline.
I guess it depends on your definition of “winning.” Apple’s the richest company in the world, thanks to Jobs (well, partially thanks to him. I’d put a HUGE amount of that success on Jony Ive, as well)… But isn’t that primarily off mobile device sales, as opposed to PCs? I agree with you that his vision for computers is brilliant, though I’m still not convinced it’s “winning” the market, and I’m not sure it ever will as long as Windows remains the de facto standard in offices around the world. I just wish there was a way for them to bring the costs down a bit to better compete with the Windows side of things, and TRULY get these machines out to the masses.
People who worked with him described him as exuding a ‘reality distortion field’:
“Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.”
Anyone requiring confirmation that he was worse than Hitler should note that he regularly parked in a handicapped space.
Samsung?
Yeah Samsung’s not-so-secret edge was that they made large phones, and people wanted large phones. Once the iPhone 6 and 6+ were introduced… 
From a pure comics perspective…this kinda sucks. The drawing is primitive. There are overly crowded (and ill-designed) pages You lose the thread of of the narrative in drawings stuffed with info. But seriously, these are crappy drawings, sketches really.
The crude drawing style may be a marketing decision. Periodically, advertisers and other marketeers decide the way to counter the natural suspicion of fakery that arises with regard to advertising, propaganda, and hagiography, is to make things look sort of rough-hewn and half-finished. (This style alternates with slickness and artiness.) I have no desire to go over the obfuscated text, but even a careless glance revealed an error or lie: it says the mouse had not been invented in 1976, whereas it had not only been invented but demonstrated publicly by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. What Steve Jobs was good at was slick marketeering, and given the propensity of most humans to follow one another like sheep with psychopaths in the lead, that did lead to the creation – after so many years! – of computers that could be used by ordinary people. The hagiography is unnecessary, but it will probably sell well among the fans and true believers.
There was one thing that Steve Jobs did well: He drove his creative staff to make the thing the best that it could be. Other companies ship when it’s nearly good enough. He had them make it just ever so.
(No need to quibble; this is a generalization.)
We have different metrics, so really we aren’t even arguing. My frame of reference is family/dog/plants > tech. And I work in tech 
so that is where I am coming from.
Maybe, except for a lot of people, tech is how they get to see and communicate with their family (and extended family) these days.
Coming soon, Facebook for plants.
Yeah… Five years ago I wrote that. Data disaster destroyed it, and I walked away. Ingested climate data and species needs, and told you when to plant, fertilize, and water.
That isn’t winning? To have the products of your own success grow and outlast you?
Most of us can accept that Jobs was an asshole. But also kind of a genius. Without him, there’s no NeXT. No NeXT, Apple fails. It’s not all that simple, but any distillation of history in a narrative is only going to cover the most germane details. (But I guess every piece of coverage is only acceptable if it covers every sordid point in excruciating detail. Only then can it avoid being called a hagiography.)
Frankly, I’ve always felt that if you made everyone else experience computers like techies do it would be pretty crummy for computing. If we did, manual typewriters would probably become viable business machines again, but I really like InDesign, so I’m not sure where my allegiances should lie.
This Cult of Steve stuff is just sad. It’s weeeeird, strange stuff. I mean, if you searched/replaced his name with “Kim Il Sung” and sent this shit off to North Korea, they’d give you a fucking medal.
Sure, Apple products are elegant, and what Jobs accomplished is impressive. But Steve Jobs was a winner in a competition that threatens to destroy humanity, and possibly all life on Earth.
