- I certainly don’t model myself after his behavior, either - but again, I don’t admire him for that.
- I will never claim Jobs was a good neighbor or a Mr. Rogers type. Or even a fun person to work for.
But I don’t look up to him for that. Same way I don’t look up to Tiger Woods for who he is as a husband, or Picasso for… well, also poor behavior with women.
I want to play for Michael Jordan to be with the best and to be challenged to be my best.
Sometimes the thing that makes people excellent in one facet of their life makes them impossible pricks in others.
Extreme excellence in one facet of life is what I admire people like that for.
- Jobs was one of the original product managers. He brought the customer perspective right into engineering.
Unlike a lot of CEOs, he was willing to do what most product managers aren’t: make hard trade off decisions.
He cut losing product lines, made big bets (killing floppy disks) and was deeply technical… I wish my CEO had the guts to make these calls. (More importantly, when he does, I want him to be right!)
- Such a ridiculous sentiment. You can justify all you want, but I still have USB-A on my Framework :) It is not legacy because 1) I am not in China and 2) I want it.
And I noticed you didn’t touch on Liquid Glass… guessing that one is much tougher to explain away…
- Something about bluetooth keyboards... they're just awful. Laggy and glitchy things.
- Understood - a new mainboard on the Framework website is around $700, which I still prefer to a new laptop.
I'd be willing to pay more over time to have better hardware over my laptop's life. Meaning, I'd rather pay ~$3200 over 10 years for a Framework + 2 mainboard upgrades + a RAM upgrade vs ~$2000 for a laptop that slowly gets worse over the same time period.
- I still do have a few USB-A: Yubikey, mouse receiver, Streamdeck, USB sticks, webcam, old HDD hard drives I use for backups...
I guess I could, but I would rather not upgrade all of those to USB-C and I really tired of having to carry dongles everywhere.
I even like that if I were consistently using HDMI, I could actually just put an HDMI extension card into my laptop and still not need a dongle. It's customizable to my usage at any point in the laptop's life.
- Exactly - imagine if early MacBook Butterfly keyboard users had the option to simply upgrade their keyboard to a fixed version for $40...
- I thought Framework was worth a gamble.
I replaced my last laptop after 10+ years because the battery gave out, the end-of-life hardware was so old it no longer got OS upgrades, and eventually apps stopped working. I like the idea of getting to easily throw new hardware at my machine to keep it going.
(I also tired of Apple shoving bad experiences down my throat (TouchBar, Butterfly keyboards, thin glass screens that crack, USB-C and no USB-A...) so I spec'ed out my Framework with USB-C and USB-A.)
But aside from repairability when stuff breaks, a laptop's hardware slowly becomes obsolete because software is usually written for the new stuff. If you're like me and you keep your laptop for 10 years, that means: in year 1 you have 1 year old hardware, in year 6 you have 6 year old hardware, etc. So your laptop gets worse and worse performance because you can't incrementally upgrade your hardware... you only upgrade in a big bang every 10 years when you buy a new one. Towards the end of its life, you're really struggling to keep the thing above water.
With a Framework, in theory I can upgrade the hardware incrementally over time rather than needing a big bang every 10 years. So instead of having 6 year old hardware at year 6, I'll probably have 2 year old hardware again. So I'll more closely match the industry improvements curve.
Will this work in reality? Will it be expensive to replace all the parts, and will the case be able to cool new CPUs, and will I have to get a new mainboard, etc? Who knows. But I thought it was interesting enough to take a gamble on the laptop. And worst case, it's not a fatal decision... I can just go back to MacBooks...
- Can you buy a cheap donor laptop and strip it for parts?
- Ah sorry, I must be thinking of the Apple of 2025 that still hasn’t added USB-A to their laptops (even though my Framework has 2) and expects me to carry a dongle everywhere, because after all, it’s my fault for not completely rearranging my world to do what Apple wants.
Or I must be thinking about the Apple of 2025 that rolled out Liquid Glass, an OS so disastrously bad I have to toggle accessibility settings just to make it usable.
I’m pretty comfortable saying modern Apple has had a sad and shitty fall from its peak.
- I had an old MacBook Air that I ran until it eventually lost battery function and new software just wouldn’t run well on such old hardware, and I stopped getting updates for the OS which meant apps slowly became incompatible.
Loved that machine. 10+ years of use from the best laptop I ever had.
I would’ve bought a new one when I eventually gave up on it, but the Apple of 2025 is worlds apart from the Apple of 2012.
Experiments with Touch Bars and software escape keys, butterfly keyboards that frankly just suck, thin glass screens that crack, USB-C ports requiring dongles everywhere…
I didn’t buy a new MacBook and migrated away from Apple instead.
- We got credit for it.
Shame about your employer, though.
- But ise1 is down 4x more than use2 (AWS closely guards the numbers and won’t release them, but that is what I’ve seen from 3rd party analysis). Don’t you want your customers to say, “wow, half the internet was down today but XYZ service was up with no issues! I love them.”
I can’t tell if it’s you thinking this way, or if your company is setup to incentivize this. But either way, I think it’s suboptimal.
That’s not about “risk profile” of the business or making the right decision for the customer, that’s about risk profile of saving your own tail in the organizational gamesmanship sense. Which is a shame, tbh. For both the customer and for people making tech decisions.
I fully appreciate that some companies may encourage this behavior, and we all need a job so we have to work somewhere, but this type of thinking objectively leads to worse technology decisions and I hope I never have to work for a company that encourages this.
Edit: addressing blame when things go wrong… don’t you think it would be a better story to tell your boss that you did the right thing for the customer, rather than “I did this because everyone else does it, even though most of us agree it’s worse for the customer in general”. I would assume I’d get more blame for the 2nd decision than the 1st.
- us-east-2 goes down far, far less frequently than us-east-1. AWS doesn’t publicly release the outage numbers (they hold them very close to the chest) but some people have compiled the stats on their own if you poke around.
The regions provide the same functionality, so I see genuinely no downside or additional work to picking the 2 regions over the 2 regions.
It seems like one of those no brainer decisions to me. I take pride in being up when everyone else is down. 5 9s or bust, baby!
- Bizarre way of making decisions.
us-east-2 is objectively a better region to pick if you want US east, yet you feel safer picking use1 because “I’m safer making a worse decision that everyone understands is worse, as long as everyone else does it as well.”
- If it could be profitable, the private sector would fund it.
Government funding can help with things that we decide are good for society, but not quite profitable financially.
Examples: CDC lead exposure research, Earthquake Early Warning System… even the tech we use today came out of non-commercialized funding (NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography and ARPANET).
Framed this way, sure. But for the most part, I like Uber. The competition it "killed" was monopolistic and stagnant, and the "shitty service" was the legacy taxi industry that Uber forced to modernize. Yellow taxis got phone apps and credit card processing devices because Uber forced them to keep up.
I remember trying to order a taxi to the airport 15 years ago in one of the most populated cities in the world. I had to look up taxi companies on Google, call their dispatch, and ask for a ride. 40 minutes and several calls later, none arrived, so I had to call a different company's dispatcher as I scrambled to catch my flight.
Now, I've called countless taxis with the push of a button in several countries. I get an estimate of pricing and arrival times up front.
For me, Uber/Lyft is an incredible service. I'll leave the labor rights discussion for a different thread. (inb4 a HN contrarian jumps down my throat about this.)
But that was a long winded way of saying: to me, the author's analogy seriously weakens his point. I could argue that highly personalized entertainment is way better than 800 cable channels of bleh. We still have plenty of non-enshittified communication (I text and call and Whatsapp and Telegram my friends).