Steve Jobs Made the iPhone Because He Hated Some Guy at Microsoft

Megalith

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Steve Jobs is not the only one that the fruit party should thank for their beloved iPhone: evidently, Microsoft played a substantial role, although it was more of a hostile one. An MS executive bragged about how the company was going to rule the world with new tablets and pens, and it pissed Jobs off enough to abandon his own related project for what would become the iPhone. He thought that they were “idiots” for using a stylus, and this belief led him to pursue fingers and capacitive touchscreens. But, Apple Pencil…

"It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft. That's the actual origin of it," said Forstall. "Any time Steve had any social interaction with this guy, he'd come back pissed off." It wasn't Bill Gates, noted Forstall, but a Microsoft executive who was the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. Apple had been working on a tablet project and at the time touchscreens relied on resistive touch. Jobs' apparent frustration with this executive's bragging about a stylus and tablet drove him to look at fingers and capacitive touchscreens.
 
Dammit if only the guy from Microsoft would say things as "travelling faster then the speed of light" "world hunger" "water in the desert" Steve jobs could have meant something for mankind , then again what did you expect from some guy at Microsoft ;)
 
That does seem to make a better tie-in with hating tablet concepts. Though, the phone part still works too, since Windows CE/Mobile was heavily-based around the stylus (and I'm probably super-weird, but I liked it fine).
 
That does seem to make a better tie-in with hating tablet concepts. Though, the phone part still works too, since Windows CE/Mobile was heavily-based around the stylus (and I'm probably super-weird, but I liked it fine).
II enjoyed my Palm Treo.
 
Jobs is rolling over in his grave because of the apple pencil and you know it..
 
II enjoyed my Palm Treo.
Ditto. Had a Palm Treo 700wx running Windows Mobile. Awesome phone.
Followed it up with the HTC Touch Pro 2 - probably the best phone I ever owned. Slide-out keyboard, tilt screen, stylus, running Windows Mobile.
Actually dual-booted Android on that thing for a while. Those were the days.
 
*warning* - while I do remember watching videos and reading about all this, I can't and won't bother to factcheck. And I've been drinking tonight. So sue me, this is a forum, not a courtroom.

OK, (I remember watching a documentary about this 15 years ago) so what he's talking about was what originally going to be the ipad, but the capacitive screen was so expensive and temperamental they shrunk it down to a useless size to make it work and get the cost down, and then realized they had another "Newton" on their hands which was not what Apple wanted. Then someone had the bright idea to rip off blackberry but make it a full screen/no button phone. Tada the iphone was born. I'm paraphrasing but that's the gist of what I got from that documentary. Fast forward a little and someone at Apple had the idea to make a "big" iphone with a much bigger screen. Jobs shot this down like it was an idiotic idea and cursed out the people that brought it up. Who in their right mind wants a "big" phone, it won't fit in their tiny designer jean pocket? But then Steve-o changed his mind and suddenly "he" had the idea for the ipad, a big flat touchscreen device. Only years later would the large screen phones become commonplace.

And the projector stuff this guy is describing was very similar to a "Surface" like interface projector system MS also was developing, but never took off. I can't remember the name of that, but I remember seeing a demo of it in the 2000's, first it was a table, then it was a huge wall interface. I seem to remember windows xp tablets around this same timeframe that used a stylus, my manager had one and hated it. It sat in it's upright docking station on his desk and did nothing for the entire time he was there.

I know all that fails as a book report since I can't remember the proper sources and I'm too lazy to google it all up. But the short story is, MS has given away more good ideas than it has capitalized on.
 
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I'm of the opinion that Jobs was an all-around smelly douche to which I give no respect. I give Woz and Gates the props and respect.

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You can say water you want to say but there is no denying his vision and acumen was far superior to what its out there. Hey, at least his wasn't getting government subsidies to build cars just like Elon. At least we have another Steve who happens to be Jeff Bezos.
 
I'm of the opinion that Jobs was an all-around smelly douche to which I give no respect. I give Woz and Gates the props and respect.

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You're not wrong. Woz was the brains, and he's a cool guy. You could walk up to him on the street and shoot the shit with him. Steve was the used car salesman / marketing guy and occasionally had a good idea. Or more likely borrowed from others and recycled as his own. And rumor has it could be a level 10 douchebag if he wanted to be.

But hey, it's hard to argue against being successful. SJ definitely was that.
 
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You're not wrong. Woz was the brains, and he's a cool guy. You could walk up to him on the street and shoot the shit with him. Steve was the used car salesman / marketing guy and occasionally had a good idea. Or more likely borrowed from others and recycled as his own. And rumor has it could be a level 10 douchebag if he wanted to be.

But hey, it's hard to argue against being successful. SJ definitely was that.
He hovered over Gen 1 products and introduced very mature Gen 2 versions and the apple press club gladly put the Gen 1 pioneers down the memory hole. Cell phones had been getting into data still at the flip phone era and Palms had ditched the keypad for a stylus because the state of the technology. Palms basically had apps. I remember a CNet infotainment syndicated show in the 90's where the talking head was even predicting cell phones and PDA's and portable media/music players would merge. Pretty much no one invented iPhone. The writing was on the wall someone just needed to implement it. Jobs did a good job of it and going full touch was part of that. He was very aware marketing-wise but he was also up on the state of technology to know what was close to ready to explode on the market.

The unfortunate thing is in this press and public love affair with apple the Gen 1 pioneers get very little out of situation. And you wonder why Apple hasn't brought out the next big thing. The Gen 1 pioneers have pretty much dried up. There's fewer good ideas to swoop in on and clean up and mass market.
 
Jobs is rolling over in his grave because of the apple pencil and you know it..

I wish people would stop taking things out of context... Jobs said you shouldnt need a stylus to use the OS... creating / artists etc is a whole different topic which the pencil excels at but you dont need it to do normal things.
 
You can say water you want to say but there is no denying his vision and acumen was far superior to what its out there. Hey, at least his wasn't getting government subsidies to build cars just like Elon. At least we have another Steve who happens to be Jeff Bezos.

Apple avoided paying the US tax money, so that is about the same as getting government subsidies.

That said they actually have received over $500 million in subsidies. Amazon is around $575 million in subsidies.That isn't as much as the $3 billion in subsidies and bailouts as Telsa that is true. But they still received subsidies. Hell even Google has received over $623 million in subsidies. Which some of that isn't that abnormal. Many places will give a business some type of tax break or incentive to build there. Sure you might pay somebody $500,000 to put in an office but that brings jobs to your area and also brings money from taxes so it is a bet that if they stay long enough you make back more than what you spent.

As for Job's vision being far superior to anyone else out there.... He was the world's best salesmen that is it. There was nothing about Apple that was extremely different from the rest. Like everyone else they copied and combined other people's work to make "new ideas". They might have created a few new things but they were nothing that was extremely different. A fully electric car that can drive itself to even a small degree or a rocket that can be launched, landed and reused are pretty big differences to the current way that we do things. There was BlackBerry phones before the iPhone so aps on a phone were not new, they were just new for the average person.
 
Ditto. Had a Palm Treo 700wx running Windows Mobile. Awesome phone.
Followed it up with the HTC Touch Pro 2 - probably the best phone I ever owned. Slide-out keyboard, tilt screen, stylus, running Windows Mobile.
Actually dual-booted Android on that thing for a while. Those were the days.
Holy shit, how did I forget about the HTC Touch Pro 2?!?!? I had one and liked it, but wished it slid out juuust a little bit further, and there was something about the memory and some other thing was gimped by Verizon.
 
I didn't care much for the whole PDA era. Back then my least favorite ticket was "PDA not syncing with Outlook".

Today my least favorite ticket is anything, ANYTHING to do without Outlook Shared Calendar.

Seems to be a theme there :)
I hear ya. Managing device syncing was/is my least favorite thing to do.
 
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