Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster

Jobs’ Obsession with Performance & UX

• Many see Jobs’ insistence on fast boot/wake and polished UX as rare among CEOs, who often default to “buy faster hardware” rather than optimize.
• Others argue this wasn’t unique or “revolutionary” in the 80s–90s, claiming most engineers then did care deeply about performance due to hardware limits.
• There’s agreement that today, “fast enough” has become acceptable and that good UX now routinely tolerates lags.

Apple Then vs Now; Apple vs Windows

• Several commenters feel macOS quality and polish have declined under current leadership: more bugs, visual glitches, and slower or more chaotic experiences (boot, multi-monitor behavior, new UI themes like “liquid glass”).
• Some still find Macs clearly better than Windows in UX and features like sleep/wake; others report Mac wake quirks or argue Windows laptops now wake just as fast.
• A contrasting view says Apple is just “good enough” in a closed ecosystem, similar to old home computers, while PCs remain more open and customizable.

Industry Culture on Performance

• Repeated theme: decades of rapid hardware improvement created a culture of apathy toward efficiency (“it’ll be fast next year”), leading to today’s bloat.
• Slow, naive implementations accumulate across teams, turning “a little lag” into minutes of delay. This also sets a low bar for third‑party apps on a platform.
• .NET and SQL Server are cited as rare Microsoft projects where performance and quality clearly matter.

Jobs as Leader: Inspiration vs Abuse

• Some admire how he directly framed performance work in user terms (“time saved across millions”) and set clear, demanding goals (e.g., iPad‑like wake).
• Others emphasize his history of yelling, bullying, and tantrums, rejecting the idea that excellence requires tolerating abusive behavior.

“Saving Lives” and Time as a Resource

• The “boot 10 seconds faster = lives saved” framing is debated: inspiring heuristic vs dishonest exaggeration.
• Several link it to standard cost–benefit practices (e.g., transport planning) where aggregated small time savings are monetized or valued like safety gains.

Design, Ecosystems, and Bloat

• Sharp disagreements over Apple’s design choices (one‑button mouse, sealed devices, special screws, liquid‑glass aesthetics): user‑centric simplification vs walled garden and tackiness.
• Some stress that design must target a specific audience; power users complaining about non‑repairability “aren’t the audience.”
• Multiple comments lament extreme modern bloat (e.g., chat apps using gigabytes vs 90s messengers running on 8 MB RAM) and its environmental and social cost, especially for users who can’t continually upgrade hardware.