The above response is a great answer. My point was more simplistic - If you want to pick an example of Jobs being an arrogant ass, I think there are a whole lot of better examples
Also, I think the way you and Roger described it was a bit skewed, as opposed to the way it read from the book.
I'm confused, how was what I wrote skewed? "So Steve Jobs pulled his car keys out of his pocket and began scooping into the computer keyboard, violently disgorging all the keys that offended him...Only then, when he had mutilated the apparatus ... He was making a statment.... he yearned to restore the company in accordance with his vision".
I just relayed the story to make the point that Jobs was quite rigid about design choices. This is true; there are endless stories of him calling good work ****, of him dictating design down to the smallest screw hidden inside the computer.
It's a personality foible that I've seen in a lot of people - Jobs had the genius to turn it into a wildly successful product line. But it is a good reason why you have so many Apple haters - what Steve insists is the "right" way is often "a" way to do things. I love function keys, and can't imagine why someone would want to use the #s across the top of the keyboard instead of a numeric keypad for entering a bunch of numbers; yet, you will find somebody championing just that a few posts up from mine. Neither of us is right, other than right for us. Likewise, when keyboard shortcuts exist I tend to prefer them over using the GUI. I know others that hate all GUIs and still work in command line Linux whenever possible, whereas I'd hate that. Again, that person is not wrong, just different. Jobs did not appear to recognize that any choice other than his was right, and it leads to people complaining about things like being unable to remove an icon from their device, which is what prompted my original reply.
I haven't used Apple products in quite some time, but I used to use a Mac at my first job. I was preparing graphs from statistical data I was generating, and it drove me crazy that everything was mouse driven. An artist type with great hand-eye coordination would no doubt complain about a PC program that relied on the keyboard. Different strokes.
I recall my iPod driving me to distraction. I'd plug it into the computer, and it would immediately take over, updating with a bunch of podcasts and such. Well, I was trying to run out the door to catch the bus, and wanted to drop a song onto the device, but no, you have to wait while it downloads a bunch of stuff automatically, with dire warnings not to disconnect, and you can't do what you really want to do, drop a song on, and leave.
The last paragraph will almost certainly engender replies on how that is how it
should work, and why,and how I should plan ahead, etc. Well, I don't want it that way, but I'm stuck. I'm not wrong for wanting it that way. Jobs would not only tell me I'm wrong, he'd say my way was ****.
As far as lock in deals ... well ... that's part of the whole problem. Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix ... they are *all* beholden to the content providers in the area of digital content. Apple is hardly a standout in this regard. App store ? Not really sure how that is appreciably different than Google market and google experience devices. You tell me.
