[lbo-talk] Jobs

Nathan S. n.crazeddoberman at gmail.com
Thu Oct 6 15:59:52 PDT 2011


All this talk on Jobs prompted me to join the list.

I'm fairly certain that Apple employers programmers, designers and artists with names that are not "Steve Jobs". I'm also fairly certain it contracted labor to Chinese firms that permitted Apple to net something like 30000% on each iPhone, and the conditions of those production appear rather connected (and correlate, I presume) with very high suicide rates among the actual assemblers.

Bracketing that and focusing on JobsApple the Randoid Superhero, I'm glad to read that he was hostile to the word "innovation". The idea of running a stable UNIX-derived kernel on a heavily-controlled hardware base (hence the system's stability) is so 20th-century, as in, it's a Fordist production model, that it's amazing that Apple had to practically go bankrupt before doing it and that no one else did at all. You can have a Mac that works with any chipsets you want so long as they're the original ones it shipped with. What's amazing is that Apple was the only game in town doing this. Anyone could have, like Apple, grabbed the BSD kernel, stripped it to a restricted hardware universe, and written a software suite in either 100% portable, or 100% machine language, code base , and probably have achieved if not the commercial success the same technical one: a personal computer that just worked. Microsoft, which really introduced the PC (vs. IBM's failed efforts IIRC), was and is so, I don't know, I can't begin to diagnose the problem. The other marked JobsApple innovation was an eye to, yes, case/housing design. Apple IIRC introduced finger-friendly bolts back in the '80s on some models and has always made durable prodcuts, but JobsApple made them look good. They hired artists to do the icons, for example, at least, I think they did. The iPad is a retarded device and not innovative at all (it's a giant iPhone with slightly more power), but it sure looks good.

The analysis here, though, is controlled by something simple: price. OSX sells for a remarkably affordable $30, making it far cheaper than any Windows suite of software with that amount of function, but pretty much demands an Apple device as its hardware base. Apple easily charges a 60%, and in all honesty more like 100%, retail premium, for a computer that has the same amount of hardware power as something priced at half that much from another manufacturer. You can build a Hackintosh and dodge that huge Defenestration Tax, but if you have the technical skill to do that, you have the technical skill to use linux or BSD, which means you aren't really benefiting that much from Apple's 'innovative' interface design, and clearly not from their physical design. So price essentially undermines the creative potency that JobsApple brought to computing. I.e., rather than seek to sell a "just works" product for a large consumer base, JobsApple sold a boutique product. In other words, it offers Fordist product--mind you, a markedly superior one--at artisan prices, essentially mitigating whatever spread of 'potentials and powers' it unlocks. Which turns the innovation and beauty of Apple into another damn status symbol. Windows has done a lot of catching-up, but until Windows adopts a UNIX-like base or introduces a totally new approach to the operating system it is going to remain utter garbage regardless of implementing Minority-Report-style finger-waving devices like the Kinect, etc.

This isn't so much the case with the iPhone, as it sells around the same as other high-end smartphones with similar power.

Don't get me started on iTunes, which is a Rube Goldberg contraption of an internet store. That's not aesthetically pleasing or easy to use at all, except the 1-click-buy function.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list