As a working furnituremaker, it depends on the client's budget. I try to get a sense of budget early in the design process so that I can both provide the best bang for the buck for the client and also a uniform level of quality throughout the piece. If push comes to shove, though, I'm not going to turn a job down because there isn't budget for a frame and panel back. I'm not going to turn someone's work away because they can't afford a higher-end option that nobody will ever see. That's not how to treat people with dignity.
In a couple instances, I've turned down work because the budget and expectations were wildly incompatible, but that's as simple as saying "I can't do the work you're looking for at that price." I'll offer suggestions for a more cost-effective alternative if I can. In one instance, that's turned into work down the line when the client came back with a different project with a budget more in alignment with their goals.
Lastly, while everything Nancy Hiller (RIP) has ever written is worth reading, these two pieces are highly relevant to the question of standards, budgets, and delivering the whole project.
The same applies to software: it's common to criticize someone's work without knowing the context or the story behind the system. The typical triangle dilemma is budget, time, and quality.
I’m add to existing legacy Code. I can’t be judgy most of the time. Sometime I can suss out the first build then the additional features tacked on at later dates which is where things get messy.
I’m at the fourth update and I did a little clean up. I didn’t tear it and start from zero, but I cleaned it up so future me will be happier when the next change comes (and we now know they keep wanting updates to this)
The original way worked and was clean and I just assume that the next updates were done under some time constraints. A lot of code here just keeps working for years with no updates so it made sense to do it faster with less flexibility.
Not everything needs to be great when more good enough functionality is more useful.
This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty.
To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".
This can also be seen as a way to filter the customers. "We only care about customers who care about the visual quality of the board that nobody ever sees." In other words, customers who are driven by aesthetics, and who have the means to support the habit of buying extra quality things, maybe with a whiff of conspicuous consumption.
If anything, it's a good, high-margin market. Beside the actual piece, you sell both self-appreciation and status. Apple long tried to make their products closer to fashion accessories, with some success.
A real estate agent walked through my house I was putting for sale. He examined the switch plates carefully. I asked why. He replied that a good craftsman lined up the slots in the top screw and bottom screw, and this was a "tell" that he'd done a good job.
I finished building a cabinet for my shop last week. It holds 58 small parts cases from floor to ceiling. I didn't put a crappy piece of plywood on the back, I put three separate crappy pieces of plywood on the back. I used the worst leftover pieces that I though had the structural integrity to keep the cabinet rigid.
And instead of losing sleep over it, I would have lost sleep if I had used a perfectly good large sheet of plywood, and lost the opportunity to make something nice with it. Real wood? Forget about it.
Steve Jobs' imaginary carpenter must be too rich to care about stretching her materials as far as they can go.
and plywood is probably the material of choice for cabinet boxes, straight, strong, not prone to warping, etc. Actually, seems crazy to use nice wood where it won't be seen.
Most importantly it's dimensionally stable. As the seasons change it won't get significantly longer in one dimension. This is most important for the back of the cabinet because it has to deal with grain going different directions, so you can't pick an orientation that will just work.
I spend a LOT of time woodworking and have made a few cabinets.
I would love to use solid wood for cabinet backings, but I don't. The reason? $ and time cost will be 5x, and it will not be as durable as layered ply. Plywood actually makes a better cabinet!
The difference between me and SJ? He could sell the shit out of that expensive, not-as-good cabinet. And that got artists and engineers excited to start making high-quality things to go in that expensive cabinet.
This quote could only come from somebody that knows nothing about trades. Examine any "high style" cabinet from the federal period, or any other period really. The backs of highboys are the worst, rough-sawn, uneven, knot-riddled pieces the cabinetmaker had.
I think I follow this philosophy. You spend a lot of time looking at the insides of the things you build, even if no one else does - why shouldn't I get to see beauty too.
Related but distinct from aesthetic beauty, there's a sort of mechanical beauty. Simplicity and elegance and all that. All the parts that came out of the Macbook were held in with one screw - good - but all those screws look to be different shapes and sizes - less good. Maybe it isn't possible to have both. For my money I spend a lot of time going back and forth between the two.
I first heard this SJ quote maybe 15 years ago and I've carried it with me since.
I've always prided myself on taking a craftsman-like approach to software engineering... thinking deeply about interfaces, ownership, lifetimes, how the public API looks, how using the public API feels...
Lately, though, with the advent of LLM-assisted coding this mindset is starting to feel hollow. Why spend 1.5x as long crafting something robust when, in all likelihood, it will be replaced or refactored by LLM tooling within the next 5 or 10 years?
Wow, the interesting part there—at least for anyone who already knows the cabinet story—is how it ends:
"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".
"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."
So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.
That's interesting because (a) it's a story of how the cabinet principle didn't prevail, and (b) it's a brilliant example of how to communicate.
The best-looking cabinet you can make that stays up is more beautiful than a beautiful back wall that collapses.
More cynically, these stories are also a way for Steve Jobs, who lacks technical skill but is still the boss of the technical geniouses, carves out a niche for himself where he is the undisputed leader and no oen can challenge him: his own subjective sense of aesthetic.
There was a similar story where he insisted on painting manufacturing machines for aesthetic reasons. It cost a lot of money, the paint caused problems with the machines, and the stuff they were manufacturing didn't sell well. I think I heard it in the Isaacson book, but here's a site telling the same story. https://professornerdster.com/from-steve-jobs-life-a-clean-f...
I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college.
I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.
I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.
I dunno man, Apple's PCB designs are incredibly space efficient. Compare the sandwich PCB of a modern iPhone against the main board of something like a Samsung Galaxy. Apple is sweating out every cubic millimetre it can, while Samsung is perfectly fine with a load of empty green PCB all over the place.
Does discrete circuit density correlate with engineering quality somehow? Are we back around to the parable of Master Foo and the Hardware Designer in the year of our lord and savior 2025?
Apple definitely refurbs boards. They just don't do it in the back of an Apple Store. It's far more economical for them to do full logic board swaps (or other components) than spend the time and effort doing component level repairs in the back of a retail store.
> I was reminded of what Steve Jobs, relating a lesson from his father on cabinet-making…
I confess, I found that quote from Walter Isaac's biography on Jobs to be kind of gross. It felt to me like a bullshit line that Jobs asked him to put in. By all accounts, Jobs was completely dismissive of his adoptive parents — this felt like an attempt to rewrite history by Jobs.
> George Crow, our recently hired analog engineer, interrupted Steve. “Who cares what the PC board looks like? The only thing that’s important is how well that it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”
> Steve Jobs responded strongly. “I’m gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”
People tell stories all the time that may have some non-truths in them (we can never truly know, can we?) Where it’s appropriate to call bullshit is when someone claims something that isn’t realistic, just doesn’t fit, or simply can’t be true. In this case, Steve really did obsess over the “back of the cabinet” stuff at his time at Apple:
> “The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys by the way.”
That’s a direct quote from where he introduced the iMac. A product that had translucent plastic so you could see the insides of the machine.
I will moderate (modulate? attenuate?) my objection to this line from the bio more in the future because of your quotes. Nonetheless there is still no direct connection to his adoptive step-father in the quotes you provided — only in Job's bio with Isaacson does he make that connection.
As I fiddle with the aesthetics of my source code, how it’s organized right down to highly OCD symmetries of comments across similar parts of my code base, I spy things, and discover connections, that improve both the code and the abstract geometry of its source topology.
Should I spend that time futzing around so much? Objectively it sounds like a terrible use of (a lot) of time.
But the results speak for themselves. I can’t think of a better way to both study my own code (with all the advantage of intrinsic motivation), see it from so many directions, and yet have so much free unconstrained brain capacity at the same time, lost in deep long-hot-shower let-the-universe speak to me receptor mode.
Major design wins. Surprising bugs pressed out, before they even got to show themselves to the world. Poor things.
And I really like how my code looks when I have to look at it again!!!
Pride in craftsmanship and excellence are aspirational virtues missing in most of contemporary American society. It's an absolute shame because I saw and remember that version of America.
Apple device innards are made to appeal to people who have no idea about hardware engineering / repair. For the rest of us the design just screams wankery.
No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits.
A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy epoxy river pour with embedded 24 carat gold flakes that has no business being there.
Every time I casually chuck my iPhone onto a surface instead of gingerly placing it down with reverence and care, I think about those epoxy rims doing the job they're there to do.
Bingo. Those Macbook internals are designed as show ponies you shoot the second they're injured. Raise your hand if you've ever had "replace topcase/logic board" as the solution to a component-level issue before. Yep.
It's startling to imagine what Apple would be capable of, if survivable hardware was a remote business priority for them.
I've had an interesting experience taking apart my 72 Dodge and putting it back together again. It's clear that there was a great deal of thought put into its design. It's simple, easy to take apart, easy to fix, easy to put back together. The money is only put where it is needed. Frankly, it's first class engineering.
Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged by being bolted to inexpensive parts. It was difficult to assemble correctly. Money was spent in the wrong places. I had a long list of complaints about the erratic engineering in it.
For example, it had sodium-cooled valves, something one finds only on a race engine. They are used for cooling. The values slid into bronze valve guides. The bronze valve guides were pressed into aluminum heads. The trouble was, aluminum expands at twice the rate of bronze. So when the engine got a little hot, the valve guides would come loose, and you'd have to rebuild the cylinder head. The sodium-cooled feature was completely sabotaged by those valve guides. A proper design would have mechanical retention of the valve guides, and not rely on a press fit.
"German (over)engineering" is a common term in the automotive community for that reason. As someone who has also looked at this in detail, the difference between domestic and import cars of that era was the former tended to value simple and "brute force" designs, while the latter focused on short-term optimisations and some amount of "showing off" the complexity thereof.
For another fun one, it had a mechanical fuel injection. The drive shaft to the injector had a fine-toothed spline on it, meaning you had 50 or so wrong ways to install it. Get it wrong and the engine just ran badly. The assembly had to be done blind. There must have been some trick to getting that injector on correctly, but I couldn't figure it out.
The correct way to engineer this is to have the male spline with an extra tooth and the female with a missing tooth - then it can only be assembled one way. A cost-free improvement, saving a lot of aggravation for the mechanic. (BTW, this is what Boeing does.)
with the component density of their PCB right now, it would be impossible to put silkscreen for every component. Also nowaday we use boardview software to find component, so silkscreen is not that needed anymore.
My last two MacBooks have had keyboards which have just been junk. And a keyboard isn't something which is just hidden away--it's out, front and center.
Apple, like any company, had to learn how to properly craft things in an efficient and elegant way. They certainly didn’t do it right out of the gate. They did ship products that were a disaster inside, including iPhones and MacBooks. Foxconn publicly said Apple needs to get their act together if they ever want to manufacture and assemble things in an efficient and cost effective way. The complexity and amount of screws for certain products were crazy.
Now, with all that said, Apple has tried to improve in all these areas and have since been innovative in how things are actually put together.
So, the takeaway is if if the quote from Jobs did inspire people then it was a good thing.
It is a little funny that car manufacturers have figured this out in a silly way.
Basically, a lot of new cars are very simple and elegant when you open the hood, showing clearly fluid reservoirs, a sculpted engine, and some elegant plastic covers to tie it all together.
... but basically the plastic covers are a "second hood" with the ugliness pushed down one level.
I will say that powermac G* and mac pro systems have always been kind of cool - they were made to be opened and there were always really nice engineering details.
Things I remember are the carefully stored hard disk screws for slide in drives on the powermac G5. Or the pci express card locking systems. Or the case opening procedure on any of the systems.
Somewhere in hell, there are a bunch of automotive engineers doing difficult maintenance tasks which they designed into vehicles such as bleeding the brakes on Ford Escorts, or spark plug changes on AMC Javelins (it actually required unbolting the engine and using a hoist to get at the last sparkplug).
We recently had two gaming machines built by different vendors. The second hada higher spec than the first.
The engineer from my company who interacted with the vendors and I were chatting about the machines and we kept coming back to the point about nicely the first guy had routed the cables and put them in the cabinet. It would be covered by a metal sheet and hence invisible but the work he put into it was obvious when we opened it up to install a RAM stick.
I don't know how to quantify the practical benefits of this but it does indicate a different mindset. I think that will spill over to other work which has more tangible benefits and that's a good thing.
The quote assumes that "good looking" wood is inherently "good" which is not always the case. You could have a very ugly piece of wood facing the wall but it could be the most structurally sound and durable wood ever. Value isn't always in appearance.
I can no longer find a link to this... But I do remember an article about the uniquely machined stainless steel screws that Apple used to assemble Macbooks. They were infact unique. Very "square threads". IMHO that was SteveJ (and perhaps Woz). They cared less about share price, and were focused on everything that could add unique value -- including the special screws. Now SHV trumps everything, and we have "...fiduciary responsibilty..." (FR) to cover all decisions no matter how anti-consumer. Sadly the FR decisions today are mostly due to the brand value built during the IDGAS era when high-quality screws were important.
I recently saw an interview without someone on the mac team and what's interesting is that the original Mac team had a lot of friction because of this philosophy. Jobs constantly asked unreasonable design constraints of his engineering team, the team prepared two laptops one with the "esthetic" laptop and one with the pragmatic design. One vastly outperformed the other and Jobs conceded, this was a constant pattern for the engineering teams at Apple. What you see before you is not the esthetic version but the pragmatic version. Sometimes Jobs was right but most of the time he was delusional.
I can do nothing but agree - but don’t tell the author about Louis Rossmann, who has been opening, repairing, and bemoaning the horrible electronics design of Apple products.
Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.
As a working furnituremaker, it depends on the client's budget. I try to get a sense of budget early in the design process so that I can both provide the best bang for the buck for the client and also a uniform level of quality throughout the piece. If push comes to shove, though, I'm not going to turn a job down because there isn't budget for a frame and panel back. I'm not going to turn someone's work away because they can't afford a higher-end option that nobody will ever see. That's not how to treat people with dignity.
In a couple instances, I've turned down work because the budget and expectations were wildly incompatible, but that's as simple as saying "I can't do the work you're looking for at that price." I'll offer suggestions for a more cost-effective alternative if I can. In one instance, that's turned into work down the line when the client came back with a different project with a budget more in alignment with their goals.
Lastly, while everything Nancy Hiller (RIP) has ever written is worth reading, these two pieces are highly relevant to the question of standards, budgets, and delivering the whole project.
https://www.finewoodworking.com/2019/09/11/dont-knock-the-la...
https://www.popularwoodworking.com/editors-blog/lets-make-ev...
The same applies to software: it's common to criticize someone's work without knowing the context or the story behind the system. The typical triangle dilemma is budget, time, and quality.
I’m add to existing legacy Code. I can’t be judgy most of the time. Sometime I can suss out the first build then the additional features tacked on at later dates which is where things get messy.
I’m at the fourth update and I did a little clean up. I didn’t tear it and start from zero, but I cleaned it up so future me will be happier when the next change comes (and we now know they keep wanting updates to this)
The original way worked and was clean and I just assume that the next updates were done under some time constraints. A lot of code here just keeps working for years with no updates so it made sense to do it faster with less flexibility. Not everything needs to be great when more good enough functionality is more useful.
If it's supported, by who
Yes! And design, too…
This quote comes up often in SJ biographies or anecdotes and they universally attribute it purely to aesthetic concerns. Admittedly the man cared quite a lot about "beauty", but I've always thought this was more about the caring and less about the beauty.
To spend time making something most people never see look just as good as the things they do see you have to care quite a lot. This care begets a wide range of (usually) desirable secondary effects brought about by diligence. In my view it's similar to the effect of spending the time to make many iterations of a thing versus one perfect thing, with the former usually resulting in an end product much closer to "perfect".
This can also be seen as a way to filter the customers. "We only care about customers who care about the visual quality of the board that nobody ever sees." In other words, customers who are driven by aesthetics, and who have the means to support the habit of buying extra quality things, maybe with a whiff of conspicuous consumption.
If anything, it's a good, high-margin market. Beside the actual piece, you sell both self-appreciation and status. Apple long tried to make their products closer to fashion accessories, with some success.
A real estate agent walked through my house I was putting for sale. He examined the switch plates carefully. I asked why. He replied that a good craftsman lined up the slots in the top screw and bottom screw, and this was a "tell" that he'd done a good job.
Joke's on my agent if I ever sell my house, I use snap on plates.
Held in stark contrast to the reaction of an engineer disassembling a Macbook for repair or inspection.
..... aaaaaand another measure just became a target...
so when selling the house you figure people will do this work before calling a realtor?
I finished building a cabinet for my shop last week. It holds 58 small parts cases from floor to ceiling. I didn't put a crappy piece of plywood on the back, I put three separate crappy pieces of plywood on the back. I used the worst leftover pieces that I though had the structural integrity to keep the cabinet rigid.
And instead of losing sleep over it, I would have lost sleep if I had used a perfectly good large sheet of plywood, and lost the opportunity to make something nice with it. Real wood? Forget about it.
Steve Jobs' imaginary carpenter must be too rich to care about stretching her materials as far as they can go.
and plywood is probably the material of choice for cabinet boxes, straight, strong, not prone to warping, etc. Actually, seems crazy to use nice wood where it won't be seen.
Most importantly it's dimensionally stable. As the seasons change it won't get significantly longer in one dimension. This is most important for the back of the cabinet because it has to deal with grain going different directions, so you can't pick an orientation that will just work.
Your anecdote instantly made me think Woz.
[dead]
I spend a LOT of time woodworking and have made a few cabinets.
I would love to use solid wood for cabinet backings, but I don't. The reason? $ and time cost will be 5x, and it will not be as durable as layered ply. Plywood actually makes a better cabinet!
The difference between me and SJ? He could sell the shit out of that expensive, not-as-good cabinet. And that got artists and engineers excited to start making high-quality things to go in that expensive cabinet.
This quote could only come from somebody that knows nothing about trades. Examine any "high style" cabinet from the federal period, or any other period really. The backs of highboys are the worst, rough-sawn, uneven, knot-riddled pieces the cabinetmaker had.
A craftsman knows where to apply his effort.
It's a quote from the sales trade.
And they're not selling to cabinet makers.
I think I follow this philosophy. You spend a lot of time looking at the insides of the things you build, even if no one else does - why shouldn't I get to see beauty too.
Related but distinct from aesthetic beauty, there's a sort of mechanical beauty. Simplicity and elegance and all that. All the parts that came out of the Macbook were held in with one screw - good - but all those screws look to be different shapes and sizes - less good. Maybe it isn't possible to have both. For my money I spend a lot of time going back and forth between the two.
I first heard this SJ quote maybe 15 years ago and I've carried it with me since.
I've always prided myself on taking a craftsman-like approach to software engineering... thinking deeply about interfaces, ownership, lifetimes, how the public API looks, how using the public API feels...
Lately, though, with the advent of LLM-assisted coding this mindset is starting to feel hollow. Why spend 1.5x as long crafting something robust when, in all likelihood, it will be replaced or refactored by LLM tooling within the next 5 or 10 years?
Unless LLMs significantly improve, LLMs benefit greatly from stable APIs. Constantly changing APIs are awful for good LLM output.
is this the right way to think about LLMs?
For example, the syscalls for linux are never changing IMO. The cost is unbounded to change, even with AI.
Should your APIs be treated any different?
At the very least, the LLMs work better with better APIs and data models, which yet accelerates the solving of problems.
Steve is concerned with the esthetics of the PC board
https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html
Wow, the interesting part there—at least for anyone who already knows the cabinet story—is how it ends:
"Well, that was a difficult part to layout because of the memory bus.", Burrell responded. "If we change it, it might not work as well electrically".
"OK, I'll tell you what," said Steve. "Let's do another layout to make the board prettier, but if it doesn't work as well, we'll change it back."
So we invested another $5,000 or so to make a few boards with a new layout that routed the memory bus in a Steve-approved fashion. But sure enough, the new boards didn't work properly, as Burrell had predicted, so we switched back to the old design for the next run of prototypes.
That's interesting because (a) it's a story of how the cabinet principle didn't prevail, and (b) it's a brilliant example of how to communicate.
The best-looking cabinet you can make that stays up is more beautiful than a beautiful back wall that collapses.
More cynically, these stories are also a way for Steve Jobs, who lacks technical skill but is still the boss of the technical geniouses, carves out a niche for himself where he is the undisputed leader and no oen can challenge him: his own subjective sense of aesthetic.
There was a similar story where he insisted on painting manufacturing machines for aesthetic reasons. It cost a lot of money, the paint caused problems with the machines, and the stuff they were manufacturing didn't sell well. I think I heard it in the Isaacson book, but here's a site telling the same story. https://professornerdster.com/from-steve-jobs-life-a-clean-f...
He would've loved liquid glass then
I had a job wire-wrapping circuit boards in college.
I expended effort to lay out the wires so they formed a neat pattern. Why spend time doing that? It made it easy to check for errors in wiring, as then the pattern would be disrupted. The end result was I almost never made a wirewrap mistake, and the work was appreciated.
I also soldered components on, and also took care to orient the resisters all the same way, and align everything neatly. I'd use needle nose pliers to bend the leads just so, too. It also made visual error checking fast and easy. Again, no errors.
Which would all be very useful if Apple actually did board-level repairs and not logic board swaps. But they don't, so it is all just for show.
I dunno man, Apple's PCB designs are incredibly space efficient. Compare the sandwich PCB of a modern iPhone against the main board of something like a Samsung Galaxy. Apple is sweating out every cubic millimetre it can, while Samsung is perfectly fine with a load of empty green PCB all over the place.
Does discrete circuit density correlate with engineering quality somehow? Are we back around to the parable of Master Foo and the Hardware Designer in the year of our lord and savior 2025?
It correlates with how much stuff you can pack into a small device.
Apple definitely refurbs boards. They just don't do it in the back of an Apple Store. It's far more economical for them to do full logic board swaps (or other components) than spend the time and effort doing component level repairs in the back of a retail store.
I have seen some Apple ][ motherboards with jumper wire(s) hidden on the back side.
Jobs knew a lot about hardware design, sure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III
> Jobs insisted on the idea of having no fan or air vents, in order to make the computer run quietly.
> Many Apple IIIs were thought to have failed due to their inability to properly dissipate heat.
> I was reminded of what Steve Jobs, relating a lesson from his father on cabinet-making…
I confess, I found that quote from Walter Isaac's biography on Jobs to be kind of gross. It felt to me like a bullshit line that Jobs asked him to put in. By all accounts, Jobs was completely dismissive of his adoptive parents — this felt like an attempt to rewrite history by Jobs.
Andy Hertzfeld, on the original Macintosh team at folklore.org (https://www.folklore.org/PC_Board_Esthetics.html):
> George Crow, our recently hired analog engineer, interrupted Steve. “Who cares what the PC board looks like? The only thing that’s important is how well that it works. Nobody is going to see the PC board.”
> Steve Jobs responded strongly. “I’m gonna see it! I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box. A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody’s going to see it.”
People tell stories all the time that may have some non-truths in them (we can never truly know, can we?) Where it’s appropriate to call bullshit is when someone claims something that isn’t realistic, just doesn’t fit, or simply can’t be true. In this case, Steve really did obsess over the “back of the cabinet” stuff at his time at Apple:
> “The back of this thing looks better than the front of the other guys by the way.”
That’s a direct quote from where he introduced the iMac. A product that had translucent plastic so you could see the insides of the machine.
I will moderate (modulate? attenuate?) my objection to this line from the bio more in the future because of your quotes. Nonetheless there is still no direct connection to his adoptive step-father in the quotes you provided — only in Job's bio with Isaacson does he make that connection.
As I fiddle with the aesthetics of my source code, how it’s organized right down to highly OCD symmetries of comments across similar parts of my code base, I spy things, and discover connections, that improve both the code and the abstract geometry of its source topology.
Should I spend that time futzing around so much? Objectively it sounds like a terrible use of (a lot) of time.
But the results speak for themselves. I can’t think of a better way to both study my own code (with all the advantage of intrinsic motivation), see it from so many directions, and yet have so much free unconstrained brain capacity at the same time, lost in deep long-hot-shower let-the-universe speak to me receptor mode.
Major design wins. Surprising bugs pressed out, before they even got to show themselves to the world. Poor things.
And I really like how my code looks when I have to look at it again!!!
Plywood is good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVxldyIa0Bg
Pride in craftsmanship and excellence are aspirational virtues missing in most of contemporary American society. It's an absolute shame because I saw and remember that version of America.
Apple device innards are made to appeal to people who have no idea about hardware engineering / repair. For the rest of us the design just screams wankery.
No one who has practical experience wants to deal with black solder mask, adhesives, non-uniform screw sizes / driver kinds, lack of repair docs, proprietary ICs and underdesigned charge circuits.
A macbook's innards isn't a beautiful piece of wood. It's a gaudy epoxy river pour with embedded 24 carat gold flakes that has no business being there.
Every time I casually chuck my iPhone onto a surface instead of gingerly placing it down with reverence and care, I think about those epoxy rims doing the job they're there to do.
Bingo. Those Macbook internals are designed as show ponies you shoot the second they're injured. Raise your hand if you've ever had "replace topcase/logic board" as the solution to a component-level issue before. Yep.
It's startling to imagine what Apple would be capable of, if survivable hardware was a remote business priority for them.
I've had an interesting experience taking apart my 72 Dodge and putting it back together again. It's clear that there was a great deal of thought put into its design. It's simple, easy to take apart, easy to fix, easy to put back together. The money is only put where it is needed. Frankly, it's first class engineering.
Contrast that with a Mercedes I used to have of similar vintage. It had expensive parts sabotaged by being bolted to inexpensive parts. It was difficult to assemble correctly. Money was spent in the wrong places. I had a long list of complaints about the erratic engineering in it.
For example, it had sodium-cooled valves, something one finds only on a race engine. They are used for cooling. The values slid into bronze valve guides. The bronze valve guides were pressed into aluminum heads. The trouble was, aluminum expands at twice the rate of bronze. So when the engine got a little hot, the valve guides would come loose, and you'd have to rebuild the cylinder head. The sodium-cooled feature was completely sabotaged by those valve guides. A proper design would have mechanical retention of the valve guides, and not rely on a press fit.
"German (over)engineering" is a common term in the automotive community for that reason. As someone who has also looked at this in detail, the difference between domestic and import cars of that era was the former tended to value simple and "brute force" designs, while the latter focused on short-term optimisations and some amount of "showing off" the complexity thereof.
For another fun one, it had a mechanical fuel injection. The drive shaft to the injector had a fine-toothed spline on it, meaning you had 50 or so wrong ways to install it. Get it wrong and the engine just ran badly. The assembly had to be done blind. There must have been some trick to getting that injector on correctly, but I couldn't figure it out.
The correct way to engineer this is to have the male spline with an extra tooth and the female with a missing tooth - then it can only be assembled one way. A cost-free improvement, saving a lot of aggravation for the mechanic. (BTW, this is what Boeing does.)
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with the component density of their PCB right now, it would be impossible to put silkscreen for every component. Also nowaday we use boardview software to find component, so silkscreen is not that needed anymore.
My last two MacBooks have had keyboards which have just been junk. And a keyboard isn't something which is just hidden away--it's out, front and center.
Apple, like any company, had to learn how to properly craft things in an efficient and elegant way. They certainly didn’t do it right out of the gate. They did ship products that were a disaster inside, including iPhones and MacBooks. Foxconn publicly said Apple needs to get their act together if they ever want to manufacture and assemble things in an efficient and cost effective way. The complexity and amount of screws for certain products were crazy.
Now, with all that said, Apple has tried to improve in all these areas and have since been innovative in how things are actually put together.
So, the takeaway is if if the quote from Jobs did inspire people then it was a good thing.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-DGB-25184
It is a little funny that car manufacturers have figured this out in a silly way.
Basically, a lot of new cars are very simple and elegant when you open the hood, showing clearly fluid reservoirs, a sculpted engine, and some elegant plastic covers to tie it all together.
... but basically the plastic covers are a "second hood" with the ugliness pushed down one level.
I will say that powermac G* and mac pro systems have always been kind of cool - they were made to be opened and there were always really nice engineering details.
Things I remember are the carefully stored hard disk screws for slide in drives on the powermac G5. Or the pci express card locking systems. Or the case opening procedure on any of the systems.
Somewhere in hell, there are a bunch of automotive engineers doing difficult maintenance tasks which they designed into vehicles such as bleeding the brakes on Ford Escorts, or spark plug changes on AMC Javelins (it actually required unbolting the engine and using a hoist to get at the last sparkplug).
How about this? No dipstick for the automatic transmission on a Mercedes. No way to tell what the fluid level was in it.
That is common on many vehicles.
I also remember some corvettes (C5?) required the side of the car to be removed to change the battery.
We recently had two gaming machines built by different vendors. The second hada higher spec than the first.
The engineer from my company who interacted with the vendors and I were chatting about the machines and we kept coming back to the point about nicely the first guy had routed the cables and put them in the cabinet. It would be covered by a metal sheet and hence invisible but the work he put into it was obvious when we opened it up to install a RAM stick.
I don't know how to quantify the practical benefits of this but it does indicate a different mindset. I think that will spill over to other work which has more tangible benefits and that's a good thing.
The quote assumes that "good looking" wood is inherently "good" which is not always the case. You could have a very ugly piece of wood facing the wall but it could be the most structurally sound and durable wood ever. Value isn't always in appearance.
I can no longer find a link to this... But I do remember an article about the uniquely machined stainless steel screws that Apple used to assemble Macbooks. They were infact unique. Very "square threads". IMHO that was SteveJ (and perhaps Woz). They cared less about share price, and were focused on everything that could add unique value -- including the special screws. Now SHV trumps everything, and we have "...fiduciary responsibilty..." (FR) to cover all decisions no matter how anti-consumer. Sadly the FR decisions today are mostly due to the brand value built during the IDGAS era when high-quality screws were important.
What value did square threads provide?
> They cared less about share price
And yet the value of Apple went up into the $trillions.
I recently saw an interview without someone on the mac team and what's interesting is that the original Mac team had a lot of friction because of this philosophy. Jobs constantly asked unreasonable design constraints of his engineering team, the team prepared two laptops one with the "esthetic" laptop and one with the pragmatic design. One vastly outperformed the other and Jobs conceded, this was a constant pattern for the engineering teams at Apple. What you see before you is not the esthetic version but the pragmatic version. Sometimes Jobs was right but most of the time he was delusional.
I can do nothing but agree - but don’t tell the author about Louis Rossmann, who has been opening, repairing, and bemoaning the horrible electronics design of Apple products.
Like someone here noted, the scapegoat of our times, Car manufacturers figuring out how to „appear nice on the back“, Apple managed to hide its poor engineering behind the veneer of branding and shiny materials.
Yeah, Rossman’s entire brand is being anti-Apple. If you think Apple’s engineering is poor, I’d love to know who you think does it better.
IBM
I was always amused how Rossmann would complain about making a ton of money.
Rossmann has competing business interests to defend.
He details gazillions of design flaws, all the while Apple customers are also his main customers.
How would this be „competing business“?
And even if, how would this repudiate his arguments, which he documents in detail?
How come Apple never sued him if it was all fabricated?
Who else would be better informed about flaws in a competitor's product?
i am confused as to if you agree to apple shit engineering or not
You can always make something more beautiful. So how do you know when to stop?
When you are proud of it.
There really isn’t an objectively correct answer. You’re basically asking what is good taste?
I think this is one of the things a good mentor can help you with.
who else thought this was going to be about turtlenecks and 501s?
Also remember the New Balance sneakers.
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