'Modern Computing' was happening with or without Steve Jobs. He certainly was an exemplar visionary that put the right parts together at the right time.
But, he did not create or define. Technological progress has it's own immutable momentum.
I shared the same ignorant view until I saw with my eyes what really happened. Everything done in the early 2000s was done by Apple first(and for the most part really well) as much as I hate to admit that.
All Windows did was copy much of the functionality(and did a terrible job at it). If you go through the Keynotes during Steve Jobs return to Apple from 1999-2002 you can see WiFi coming out at least 1 year before anyone, high quality, performing laptops with good battery life and WiFi before anyone.
Take a look at the OS X Aqua interface[1](which hasn't changed much even to this day) coming out 1 year before even XP. Lets not even forget the failure of Vista. It took almost a decade for something even close to come out on Windows.
Spend hours and hours going through the unedited version of history and judge for yourself. You can see the birth of many industries(Youtube-Mac Streaming, Google Search - Sherlock) in those keynotes and its refreshing to see it done so well. I'm not saying Jobs succeeded at all these things, but he definitely saw these things way way before anyone.
Dude...that sounds a lot like a "no true scotsman" line of argument. if by "real computers" you mean devices for programmers to train ML models, then yeah, Apple is pretty lacking, if by "real computers" you mean devices which operate end-user facing software, well, the spectrum widens enough to show you why Apple is approaching a trillion dollar market cap.
put another way, a lot of the _reason_ that companies like facebook and google are doing any computation in the first place is because of the level of data and interaction that people are doing on devices made by apple. You are welcome to make a distinction between a Cray and a MacBook pro, bu it is kind of pedantic.
It’s an interpretation, on what all but the extremes on either side can agree is a subjective inquiry in the first place. Also, a bit of a futile and misguided one if used to minimize other’s contributions in the field.
But for the same reason, it’s folly to discount Jobs as not a, if not the, closest thing to a creator. This is true despite engineers’ immutable/incorrect belief that actually creating product value + building working software = changing the world is inevitable, this video proves otherwise (back room computing vs actually empowering operations using computing) and reminds us that real artists ship.
Had Steve not, who knows what computing would look like 2008-2018, but it’s certainly not a stretch to posit that it’d look a whole lot different, which is what it seems gg99 was saying.
Whooaa, that's quite a stretch.
'Modern Computing' was happening with or without Steve Jobs. He certainly was an exemplar visionary that put the right parts together at the right time.
But, he did not create or define. Technological progress has it's own immutable momentum.