Asshole as he was, there's no way he would have stood for the kind of shit that is going on in America, and he would have vindictively used all of his resources as the largest shareholder of Disney and CEO of Apple to fight it.
Jobs was obviously not the greatest guy, and harmed a lot of people around him but it's unlikely that he would be seen within a mile of the current President and certainly wouldn't have been photographed in the WH handing him a tacky gold and glass paper weight like Cook.
I think it's disingenuous to map one's insight into Steve to an insulting comic about a fictional character.
I think his pitch would have been like garage band but for making apps “now anyone can make an app” feels very Jobsian.
They have pulled an accidental Jobs move.
Steve met once with Obama and complained about the fact Obama did not ask for the meeting personally, that it was too hard to build factories in America, and that teachers unions were kneecapping the American education system.
All signs point to Trump and Jobs becoming thick-as-thieves. Sorry.
> “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.”
Yep, this. We're talking about a guy who basically abandoned his biological daughter, had his stuff manufactured by slave labor in factories with suicide nets to save costs and increase shareholder value, and GP imagines Steve Jobs as this leftist freedom fighter that would fight Trump instead of work together with him to increase profits even further. People's delul, historical revisionism of people who were just cutthroat unscrupulous businessmen at the end of the day, saddens me.
We can agree has was good at business, without trying to whitewash him as some humanitarian saint.
Don't worship people you never knew personally as some sort of heroes because you never know. For all we know he could have been a client on some else's island, like Steven Hawking.
We are all human after all.
It's easy to be wrong about Jobs, because he was iconoclastic and idiosyncratic. And very very public.
And he did some personally, individually, shameful things. Especially in his 20s when he hadn't learned how to be an adult, much less a billionaire. And the latter protected him from needing to be the former for a while!
But if you believe for a second that Jobs would have tolerated Trump's wholesale ignorance and cruelty, you are making a huge mistake of understanding. That was never in Steve Jobs' personality -- in fact he was very outspoken about the excesses of power over people.
He was an anti-establishment Californian by birth, not a xenophobic RealAmerican™. These streams do not cross. If you do not understand the difference, you cannot possibly understand Steve Jobs.
Jobs was fickle, I agree with you there. I just don't think that a fickle iconoclast would last more than two weeks fighting against Trump, especially if he was threatened with an FTC antitrust probe. The only difference with Cook is that he's not as coy, and recognized that there was no way for a monopoly like Apple to fight the fed and win. Trump can disembowel Apple's profit margins, and neither Cook nor Jobs nor Jesus of Nazarath could convince the shareholders that morality is worth more than $AAPL. 2016 Jobs would be retired by the board of directors before he even threatened to make a conscientious objection, reality distortion be damned.
I have no love for the sitting administration, but it is a fantasy to pretend that a FAANG business could resist federal coercion. Just because Apple enjoys a moral halo-effect does not mean they're better positioned than Microsoft or AWS to do the "right" thing. Apple's inability to prosecute NSO Group is a recurring example of how heavily the US can muzzle them.
Of course Apple would observe US law.
But the comment I responded to was calling Jobs a monster and likely pedophile. This is unhinged and ugly.
Trump would have invariably said some stupid shit about Jobs publicly or to his face privately and Jobs would have never forgot it and would have obsessed with hurting Trump over it.
For better or worse that's just the kind of guy he was.
I have while working in Apple in a critical engineering group, and the negatives you keep citing seem to have died off in his 20s, at which time they indelibly (deservedly) tainted public perception. the post NeXT 'return' seemed very very different than what you describe, from in person experience.
Most likely he woult thrive as a contemporary oligarch.
- Steve Jobs wouldn't have personally donated $1 million to the Trump campaign.
- Steve Jobs probably wouldn't have presented a gold bar to Trump.
- Steve Jobs would have been better at manipulating (reality distortion field) Trump.
> The devices are now officially approved to handle classified NATO information up to the "restricted" level. This is not about specialized, rugged phones built for the military or locked-down, government-only hardware. It applies to regular iPhones and iPads running standard iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. According to Apple, no other consumer devices have this distinction.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-iphone-ipad-nato-classif...
What holds Apple back in the classified space is not security shortcomings in the platform per se, but the fact that there’s no way to initialise and manage a fresh iPad without public internet connectivity. That’s an absolute dealbreaker.
Even the monthly consumption of toilet paper on a base has this classification.
Both Ukraine and Russia use Discord to stream live drone footage.
Ukraine uses various Android tablets to run it's super-classified Delta battlefield management system.