BREAKING: Elizabeth Holmes has turned herself into the Federal Prison in Bryan, Texas. pic.twitter.com/JmdAqQH4mk
— Ben Peck – KAGS 🦚👍 (@TheBenPeck) May 30, 2023
When less-than-optimal things happen to terrible people, per the Associated Press:
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes entered a Texas prison Tuesday where she could spend the next 11 years for overseeing a blood-testing hoax that became a parable about greed and hubris in Silicon Valley.
The minimum-security facility — where the federal judge who sentenced Holmes in November recommended she be incarcerated — is about 95 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Houston, where she grew up aspiring to become a technology visionary along the lines of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
As she begins her sentence, Holmes is leaving behind two young children — a son born in July 2021 a few weeks before the start of her trial and a 3-month old daughter who was conceived after a jury convicted her on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022.
She was free on bail up until Tuesday, most recently living in the San Diego area with the children’s father, William “Billy” Evans. The couple met in 2017 around the same time Holmes was under investigation for the collapse of Theranos, a startup she founded after dropping out of Stanford University when she was just 19…
Together, Holmes and Balwani promised Theranos would revolutionize health care with a technology that could quickly scan for diseases and other problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.
The hype surrounding that purported breakthrough helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from enthralled investors, assemble an influential board of directors that include former Presidential cabinet members George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and James Mattis and turned Holmes into a Silicon Valley sensation with a fortune valued at $4.5 billion on paper in 2014.
But it all blew up after serious dangerous flaws in Theranos’ technology were exposed in a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal that Holmes and Balwani tried to thwart. Holmes and Balwani, who had been secretly living together while running Theranos, broke up after the Journal’s revelations and the company collapsed. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department charged both with a litany of white-collar crimes in a case aimed at putting a stop to the Silicon Valley practice of overselling the capabilities of a still-developing technology — a technique that became known as “fake it ’til you make it.”
Holmes admitted making mistakes at Theranos, but steadfastly denied committing crimes during seven often-fascinating days of testimony on the witness stand during her trial…
Adam Lashinsky, in the Washington Post, “As Elizabeth Holmes heads to prison, has Silicon Valley learned anything?”
… Holmes’s saga was always a Rorschach test for how to think about the valley, a cautionary tale that either exposed the “fake it till you make it” mentality of start-ups or served as a prime example of the deep-seated misogyny in the technology industry. How is it that a woman is going to jail while the Valley, although chock-full of geniuses, still shields a remarkable number of entitled male grifters cashing in on all the ready money?
More likely, Holmes will be remembered as a colorful executive who lied about what her company could do and suffered the consequences. When her trial began in September 2021, much was made about what her case said about an industry that changed the world — and not always for the better. Yet despite her black turtlenecks and Stanford dropout cred, neither Holmes nor Theranos was really of Silicon Valley. Her venture capital backers weren’t among the A-list investors who had funded the likes of Apple, Google and Facebook. Theranos was a medical device company, a totally distinct — and, truth to tell, junior varsity — subset of the information technology ecosystem.
But with a bit of hindsight, it’s already clear that Holmes’s conviction and Theranos’s failure have had zero impact on the hubristic culture of the start-up world, tut-tutting predictions to the contrary. As you read this, entrepreneurs and investors who run the gamut from charlatans to visionaries are setting aside business plans focused on vague cryptocurrencies and the blockchain and refocusing instead on generative artificial intelligence. (Sad you never figured out crypto? Don’t be.) VC investments in the technology behind the popular ChatGPT revolution grew more than tenfold to $4.5 billion last year from 2018. A new gold rush has begun…
A self-serving argument has crept up of late that somehow Holmes was singled out for something other than defrauding investors. Holmes was acquitted on all counts related to patients, and the jury couldn’t agree on whether she defrauded early Theranos investors. To some, that means Holmes is being incarcerated only for having hoodwinked the big-money likes of Rupert Murdoch and Betsy DeVos…
… I attended day after day of her ennui-inducing nearly four-month trial in San Jose, and I saw just how fair a shake Holmes received. She was convicted by a diligent jury of her peers, responding to instructions by a judge who gave Holmes every opportunity to defend herself. Having been there, I can confirm that the trial was very much about what Holmes did and didn’t do at Theranos. (And let’s not forget the Theranos fiasco also snagged a guy: Sunny Balwani, Holmes’s former romantic and business partner, who was also convicted and sentenced to federal prison in a separate trial.)
Silicon Valley, in all its brilliance and arrogance, its paradigm-shifting moonshots and its spectacular failures, just keeps iterating, in most ways oblivious to its own shortcomings. The captivating rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes did nothing to change that.
The BBC: “Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison. Will she ever pay victims too?”:
… The disgraced entrepreneur was sentenced to over 11 years in prison and ordered to pay $452m (£365m) with her former business partner Sunny Balwani to dozens of high-profile investors they defrauded through a blood-testing start-up.
It’s a sizeable bill for the former billionaire, who has claimed she does not even have enough money to pay her lawyers…
In Holmes’ case, she has been ordered to pay back some of the wealthiest families in America.
Donors included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the Walton family, known for founding American supermarket chain Walmart.
But after it was revealed her blood-testing technology did not work, many lost a fortune.
Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reportedly gave Holmes $100m while the Theranos founder has been ordered to pay back media mogul Rupert Murdoch $125m, according to court documents.
She will not be able to just declare bankruptcy and shed her debts that way, experts tell the BBC. But victims of her crimes should not get their hopes up about recouping their cash…
A judge has recommended Holmes report to Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, where all inmates are obligated to work and make between 12 cents and $1.15 an hour.
Half of the small sum she earns – usually around $25 every four months – will go to her victims, said Randy Zelin, a professor at Cornell Law School.
Once her time in prison is finished, she will still not be able to purchase any large assets, including a home, without intervention from the federal government. The government can’t, however, seize assets owned solely by her husband, hotel heir William Evans.
Holmes has acknowledged her dismal financial fate, telling the New York Times this month she will “have to work for the rest of my life” just to pay millions of dollars in legal fees…
In lower profile cases, the US government does not have the resources or the time to investigate every defendant’s assets, sometimes putting the onus on victims to track their financial moves, Mr Zelin said.
But the headline-making nature of Holmes’ fraud – as well as her recent financial choices, including living in a $13,000 a month Silicon Valley estate – means former Theranos investors are more likely to keep watch over her and push prosecutors to get them their money back, experts said.
“They’re not going to stop looking,” Ms O’Neill said. “She’s not going to be able to put a dollar in her bank account… without the government seizing it.”
She’ll have a very nice life, once she’s out… as long as she stays married to Billy Evans, rich sucker. Oooh, I see a 2035 reality-show spinoff: ‘Liz’ Holmes strives to protect her marriage against a bunch of would-be replacement brides, with or without the assistance of the teenage children who barely know her…
Acts of Kindness: We Are All Flavored Differently
JaySinWA
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch of suckers. I wonder if they will find a way to put the bite on Billy?
schrodingers_cat
Has anyone heard from the Warrior Monk who fell for this con and served on Theranos board?
Jerry
Since this is an open thread, I just want to quickly mention that season 2 of Somebody, Somewhere cemented this show in my top 5 of the past few years.
JPL
SAD not for her but the others that she stole from.
JPL
@Jerry: Loved the first season
Delk
So, was the kid a ‘please don’t throw me in jail I’m a new mom’ ploy?
Manyakitty
@schrodingers_cat: that same patriot who held and continues to hold his tongue about his former boss. And then there’s war criminal Henry Kissinger. Huh. Not finding much sympathy for these clowns.
BellyCat
Sad for the kids. Nobody else.
Roger Moore
An important difference from my standpoint is that Holmes actually tried to get her defective machines into service where they could provide incorrect diagnoses for real patients. I say “from my standpoint” because that isn’t what Holmes was actually convicted of. She was only convicted of cheating investors, not of harming customers.
That said, there was clearly a lot of fraud going on in Theranos. They knew their machines didn’t work, and they hid it from everyone. They made clearly fraudulent statements about how they were testing using their machines when they were actually using standard machines. They knew what they were doing was wrong, and they kept doing it. That’s substantially different from the usual “fake it ’till you make it” scheme, where the fakes are mockups of what the company is planning on doing, rather than lies about what the company is currently selling.
Also, too, the basic argument is flawed. That other people are getting away with what Holmes was successfully prosecuted for is a terrible argument. If anything, it’s a sign we should be looking harder at fraud in startups and going after any we find, not that we should go easy on the fraudster we bothered to prosecute.
oldster
I don’t shed any tears for her, and I accept that she was convicted and sentenced fair and square.
But I still think that she got put away for things that a lot of guys have not been prosecuted for, and that she was singled out in part because she is a woman.
It’s like when Martha Stewart got convicted of tax fraud. She was a tax fraud! All tax frauds should go to jail!
Except, tens of thousands of male tax frauds do not go to jail, and Martha did.
Compared to her not going to jail, it is fair for Holmes to go to jail. Compared to the thousands of tech bros doing worse and getting away with it, it is not fair for Holmes to go to jail.
I don’t want her out of jail. I want all the rest in.
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
What does AP mean by “serious dangerous flaws in Theranos’ technology”? As I understood it, there never was any technology — it was nothing but a Potemkin village from the start.
Trollhattan
“Stay at Stanford.” If only.
Manyakitty
@oldster: fair point.
Anne Laurie
IIRC, the excuse behind the latest kid in that NYTimes puff piece was ‘I’ll be too old to birth more kids eleven years from now, waah waah.”
With the subtext ‘Should Billy Baby-Daddy get distracted by some other chick’s ‘mind-blowing creativity’ while I’m not around, the new little guy buys me an extra two years of child support‘…
Roger Moore
@Delk:
The kids (plural) might also have been “I’ll be too old to have kids when I get out of prison” plan. Her biological clock was ticking, and who knows if her boyfriend would still be interested when she gets out. It was now or never.
planetjanet
I hope today is the last I ever hear her name. I am disgusted with all the articles worried about what will happen to poor little her. Let justice be done.
WaterGirl
@oldster:
I don’t think Martha Stewart was imprisoned or convicted of tax fraud.
I think she went to prison for lying to the FBI. A boatload of people have done that and never gone to prison for it, and I believe that they singled out Martha Steward.
I have no sympathy, however, for Holmes. She deserves every day in prison. What a horrid, awful person who did horrid, awful, illegal things.
Ken
What an interesting way to phrase it; as if it was just a few technical issues, rather than an outright fraud that never did, and never could have done, what was claimed.
@Delk: That is widely thought to be the case.
Roger Moore
@oldster:
I don’t buy it. What Theranos was doing was way beyond what most Silicon Valley companies try. Most of the “fake it ’till you make it” stuff is showing early stage prototypes, or even mockups, as if they’re final products. Theranos did something much more dangerous, which was to start selling technology that didn’t work and to use that to fool investors. There’s a substantial difference between lying about a future product and lying about something that’s for sale today.
karen marie
Odd choice to turn herself into a prison. It doesn’t seem like a choice I would make but here we are.
Oh, the writer meant she turned herself in to prison?
Well, that’s different. Carry on.
Bunter
@oldster: If I remember correctly, Martha Stewart was convicted of lying to the FBI regarding insider trading of a biotech stock that I don’t recall the name of Amgen?). Leona Helmsley went to jail for tax fraud/not paying taxes. She of the “only little people pay taxes” comment. Probably not the exact quote but close.
Manyakitty
@karen marie: hahahaha 🤣🤣🤣
karen marie
@Manyakitty: That and rein/reign make me want to break things.
Roger Moore
@Bunter:
Very close. The full quote is, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
Manyakitty
@karen marie: #PedantsUnite! Words matter. Come sit by me. 😀
oldster
@Bunter:
Thanks to you (and Water Girl) for straightening me out on Martha Stewart’s conviction. I was probably thinking of Leona Helmsley for the tax fraud case.
sanjeevs
Say what you like about Elizabeth Holmes but anyone who set fire to $125m of Rupert Murdoch’s money isn’t all bad.
Baud
@sanjeevs:
Under that theory, the Fox personalities that lied about Dominion machines aren’t all that bad.
patrick II
She wanted to be like Steve Jobs who actually knew something about computers, so she wore a black turtleneck like Steve and puts on a show, but like so much we are seeing now it is just magical thinking with little attachment to reality.
Edmund dantes
@patrick II: and the voice. Never ever forget the voice.
As to the fake it till you make it?
Tesla Full Self Driving (Beta). Cause the fact he throws beta on it, absolved him of all the lies he has told about it.
I mean I have been using my self driving Tesla as a taxi now for 3+ years all by itself. Haven’t you?
Baud
@Edmund dantes:
John should rename the blog Balloon Juice (Beta).
eversor
That plucky 20’s crypto scammer SBF is next up for his turn going to the slammer.
This is something that’s going to end up blowing up (figuratively) and also ending (litterally) SanFran and a good portion of California in spectacular fashion. Most of these companies are bullshit. Meta, twitter, crypto, Uber, Theranos, and on and on are all at the core scams. They don’t actually produce or make anything useful and are kept up by an ocean of venture capital in the form of cheap interest rates from DC and foreign sovereign wealth funds. It’s all fake. Which means SF and The Valley are all fake. Which means all of California’s modern economy is built on nonsense.
That’s all going to blow up in our faces nationally and globally sooner or later.
Say what you will about the less sexy legacy tech companies but they aren’t vaporware. Sure they have their share of duds. Catch is Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, intel, nVidia, actually have solid assets and most importantly make things that the modern world actually requires to function. There’s just no “get rich quick” in them anymore. Even IBM, the least sexy old man of the tech gods, actually makes mainframes with custom chips that run shit like the banking system and are required. These companies may screw up, but they do not dabble in bullshit. They make boring, mundane products, that work.
Kent
The media still can’t get it right.
There weren’t “dangerous flaws” in Theranos’ technology. There was no Theranos technology. The whole thing was a complete fraud. As anyone who has worked in laboratory science probably already knows, there isn’t going to be some black box Star Wars Tricorder that is going to diagnose all diseases with one drop of blood. Diagnosis of each disease requires separate lab tests with separate reagents, reaction times, indicators, etc.
When Theranos ran demos for investors they were completely faked.
Ruckus
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:
If you got your blood tested on one of those machines and the results trusted by your doctor, what might the results be if you got the wrong medication or an operation that you didn’t need and oh, let’s say you died from? Or if it said you were fine and didn’t get treated at all and suffered or died?
I don’t disagree with oldster @10 that she’s not the only one scamming people but her scamming could, likely would cause massive harm to many people if she had successfully sold the machines. Sure if you had nothing wrong it would just be a scam but I’d bet that if they were successful in selling the POS concept then they had to show some people having issues that required something they did or absolutely didn’t need and being IOO% BS. I’ve taken quite a few blood tests over the last 10 yrs, if I got worse or became ill because of their BS machine output, I’d be, oh let’s say somewhat pissed off. And I’d bet anyone here would be the same. As they should be.
So while she may not be the sole scam artist in the world (hint-she’s NOT) her’s was more than making money off a scam, which is bad enough. It was scamming you and me and the entire healthcare business with a quite likely very dangerous con.
eversor
@patrick II:
Jobs actually didn’t know shit about computers and ran apple into the ground to the point where it had to be bailed out by Microsoft of all companies.
Steve Wozniak was the person who did know about computers and got it going. Jobs was more like Musk. A glorified hype man. Like Musk he was a horrible and abusive corporate overlord who often got into shit he didn’t grasp and made it worse and was a terror to his workers. Also most of his wins were investing in companies that were already producing good products (in terms of already working graphics design workstations and pixar) and then taking credit for it after the fact.
Musk, and Holmes, are firmly of the Steve Jobs legacy but not nearly as personally toxic.
MomSense
@BellyCat:
Ayuh
Sebastian
@eversor:
What about NeXT? (Sp?)
H.E.Wolf
There’s a centuries-old legal tactic known as “pleading the belly”, famously used by pirates Ann Bonny and Mary Read in the early 1720s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleading_the_belly
WaterGirl
@Baud: I think that after 20 years you are not legally allowed to use the term “beta”.
Alison Rose
@WaterGirl: Maybe the rebuild could count as restarting the clock.
laura
@oldster: my friend, I, too, thought she may have been the fall girl, but I was wrong and the damage she caused….. it’s a case history if ever there was. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vYmFkYmxvb2Q=
patrick II
@eversor:
Jobs wasn’t faking it. Woz was the technical guy but Jobs was not just a hype guy but a visionary who understood the machines well enough to see the potential of what you could do with them. As for Microsoft, Jobs made the mistake of working on a combined project with them and Microsoft, like they so often did, stole the code from MAC for the first version of Windows.
Jobs also made the mistake, when Apple started getting too big for him to manage, of hiring a business major from Coke who pushed Jobs out and ran the company into the ground. Apple eventually hired Jobs back to run the company and became one of the big success stories in business under Jobs. Comparing Jobs to either Holmes or Musk is ridiculous.
eclare
@Jerry:
I am still in the first season and loving it, no spoilers!
Jeffro
Here’s hoping that the first thing a fully-processed-and-settled-into-her-cell-block Elizabeth Holmes saw on the communal TV was a report about Tara Reade “defecting” to Russia and was like, “Damn…you can DO that?”
LOLOL
Eolirin
@eversor: If you think Musk is not as toxic as Jobs you’re not paying attention. He’s even less competent but no less toxic.
eclare
@WaterGirl:
I also thought she went to prison for lying to the FBI. She handled prison well, to her credit.
NotMax
@WaterGirl
Not a-gonna call a couple of the types of VCRs still kept around the abode just “max.”
;)
hells littlest angel
Prisoner 457823 wants you to forget about Liz Holmes.
schrodingers_cat
Meanwhile news and images out of India are disturbing as hell. Don’t know whether it has made the news here. I haven’t seen much in the news outlets here.
oldster
@laura:
No, no — I’m not saying that Holmes was a fall-girl in the Theranos case. She is getting what she deserves in the Theranos case.
I’m saying: now let’s do the rest of the white-collar criminals, the guys.
Like — Holmes never even had a hope of killing as many people as the Sackler family has killed by marketing Oxy, after they knew that it was deadly addictive. Then let’s move on to the cigarette merchants. And down the line.
Grifters, fraudsters, outright murderers — and very few get punished, if they have XY chromosomes and enough cash. Hell, one of them even got to be president recently.
Like I said — I don’t want her out of jail. I want them in.
Kirk
@patrick II: On the one hand, I agree that Jobs knew his way around a breadboard – and a computer. At a minimum his earlier computers.
On the other hand I laugh every time the claim of Microsoft stealing the GUI and mouse from Apple comes up, given Apple stole it from Xerox PARC. For roughly equivalent values of “stole”.
Alison Rose
I feel for the kids, especially the baby. Losing regular contact with your mother at that age can be traumatic. I do hope they’ll allow visitations, for the kids’ sake.
In better news, I’m watching the Dead & Company show on some random streaming site a friend sent me, and they’re playing Franklin’s Tower, so I’m happy.
different-church-lady
But on the plus side, she scammed Henry Kissinger.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I haven’t heard anything. What’s going on?
oldster
@patrick II:
“….hiring a business major from Coke…”
Sculley? He came from Pepsi. (Not that it matters to what you were saying.)
different-church-lady
@eversor: There’s not much you’re not wrong about.
Ken
@patrick II: Interesting idea — Theranos as a cargo cult, imitating the successful company in hopes that riches will descend.
Come to think of it, the “fake it until you make it” credo is pretty much the essence of cargo cult thinking.
schrodingers_cat
@oldster: Her product didn’t (couldn’t) do what she promised it could do. That is different from Sacklers and the tobacco companies who were selling dangerous products under false advertising.
Also pharma bro Shkrelli (sp?) did go to jail and so will the bitcoin guy eventually.
Eolirin
@patrick II: Jobs wasn’t that visionary and really wasn’t terribly knowledgeable, though he wasn’t Musk level clueless. He did have good employees and was great about taking the credit his workers were known for manipulating their demos to get him to go the directions they wanted.
And let’s be honest about Apple here. Nothing they’ve done has been visionary since the iPod. It’s all been really solid iterative design on work that’s already being done by other people. I don’t mean to knock that, it’s hard to do as well as Apple does, though some of their decision making has always been weird. But nothing they were doing was nearly as magical as Jobs liked to sell it as. A lot of the features that he’d tout as transformative were already being done by competitors. In some times for years.
He was a good salesman. That’s all he really was.
different-church-lady
C’mon you people: “Doesn’t do anything” is quite a serious flaw in technology.
karen marie
@Manyakitty: It’s especially annoying when the obvious error is by a person who is paid to communicate via the written word.
While very annoying, it’s not surprising. The both-sidesing motherfuckers are on some kind of eternal vacation where nothing matters.
eversor
@Sebastian:
That was already in progress before Jobs got into it and a massive dud. It only worked because Sun Microsystems got involved.
Sun with a partnership with Fujitsu made the SPARC range of chips which are nothing like the x86 and ARM chips we use now. Likewise the Motorola, IBM POWER, then intel, chips apple bounced about with were not made by them either and Jobs never had fuck all to do with it. Just as his OS was first ripped from Xerox and then Free BSD. It was all given or stolen. Jobs, Musk, were/are extremely toxic but effective hypemen who slapped their names on things that they really didn’t have much, if anything, to do with. Musk and Jobs just happened to make money off it with the odd loss. Even now the chips in apple products are really ARM chips with some changes and a graphics core from PowerVR tech modified up.
This is a problem with the entire “tech” world. It’s based off CEO worship and founder worship. Most of which once upon a time had a good idea but then function as tyrants and hypemen who really aren’t doing fuck all when it comes to the products that come out.
Shit let’s throw Bezos in there as well. Though he’s less of a drama queen than the others.
CEO culture is bad and it needs to go, throw founders into the burned at the steak while we are at it.
Mr. Bemused Senior
I had a gig at Apple in the time just after John Sculley left and Michael Spindler was in charge. It was a company in deep trouble. Later along came Gil Amelio, who also had no clue what to do. His stroke of genius was to re-hire Steve Jobs, who promptly fired him.
I never met Steve Jobs but certainly there are plenty of stories. I will say, though, he definitely saved the company.
Here is my favorite tale of the early history, A Legend For Our Time
And here, Jobs introduces the I-Rack
different-church-lady
@eversor: Without Jobs being an asshole, we’d all still be interacting with a C prompt.
Raven
@Alison Rose: Have you listened to the Grateful Dead segment on Andrew Hickey’s “The History of Rock in 500 Songs”
Episode 165: “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead
It’s really long and I didn’t hear your dad mentioned in the first couple of hours but it’s really interesting.
Jeffro
Btw this is hysterical and it’s great to see Olsen, that reliable GOP flack, in a tizzy about it:
Kari Lake’s VP ambitions should make the *GOP nervous
*he – or the headline writer – forgot to include “the non-trump-boosting” part. =)
Never fear, though: Olsen is as always only concerned about Party First:
Well shoot, now that trumpov is openly bashing Kayleigh McEnany, who else has been more loyal and wears a skirt? Lake is the obvious choice here, especially since Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears to be on the short list for DeSaster.
What. A. Party.
Eolirin
@Kirk: Jobs was never an engineer. He was smart enough to understand what Wozniak was telling him, but he couldn’t build stuff on his own. He wasn’t like Gates.
Rebel’s Dad
Those who are saying that she got off easy by going to a federal pen have never spent a summer in Bryan, Texas. It’s the taint of the Lone Star State.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin:
It’s not so much that Jobs gets too much credit as it is Woz doesn’t get enough.
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: Nonsense. Xerox created the stuff that MS would adopt and Windows brought the GUI to the masses, not Mac. They would have ended up in pretty much exactly the same place without Apple.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Modi got himself a scepter from some obscure denomination in Tamil Nadu and inaugurated the new parliament building using religious rites.
Women wrestlers, (some who are Olympic medalists)who have been protesting against sexual assault by an elected BJP rep (IIRC he was in charge of wrestling federation) were forcibly removed and beaten.
eversor
@patrick II:
Both MAC OS and Windows were based of an OS designed by Xerox Labs that they were giving away. Furthermore Mac OS new is ripped from BSD UNIX, again for free. Unlike Apple though Microsoft contributes a ton of stuff to linux and open source software and standards where Apple fights all of that with a legion of lawyers.
From an ethical standpoint Apple is one of, if not the, biggest offenders from open source, theft, IP issues, closed environment, slave labor, and conflict minerals out there. But that’s the nature of the beast. I have Apple products and all sorts of products from other companies. But I don’t kid myself that Apple is the worst corporation of the lot.
Alison Rose
@Raven: I’ve meant to but haven’t gotten around. I don’t know if my dad would be mentioned, he wasn’t really a pivotal figure or anything. Often when the jug band is mentioned, they only name Jerry, Bobby, and Pigpen, and then say “and some friends” or something. And then as business manager, well…not really a glam role in the music biz :P
different-church-lady
@Eolirin: Xerox was letting it rot in a lab.
Amir Khalid
@patrick II:
Actually, John Sculley was a Pepsi alumnus. It’s an understandable mistake.
patrick II
@Kirk:
True enough, but if that was so easy, why didn’t Microsoft steal it from Xerox PARK? Having the idea for a window and a mouse in a lab setting is not the same as coding it for your platform. Anyhow, the best implementation of all of those things in a commercial company was an Amiga, which also had a parallel grapics processor, could open 48 windows simultaneously and had over 4,000 colors. They failed in the market though, and Apple didn’t in the end.
patrick II
@oldster:
@Amir Khalid:
Yeah, I could never tell the difference.
xxxx
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid:
You gotta admit, Sculley had experience with being on the wrong side of market dominance.
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: MS was going to build on that work with or without Apple. The work the Xerox folk were doing wasn’t unknown to them.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin:
OK, but Microsoft licensing stuff in their first version from Apple. Apple still blazed the trail to the consumers.
Joseph Patrick Lurker
@eversor:
@Eolirin:
Steve Jobs lacked computer programming skills, but he was an excellent salesman and he had great instincts when it came to design of Apple products. Jobs was far less of an asshole than either Elon Musk or Elizabeth Holmes.
It’s a bummer that Holmes won’t be serving a longer prison sentence.
eversor
@different-church-lady:
No they weren’t they were giving all their IP away. That was their deal. We make it, you can take it and guide it. Ditto that the new MAC OS being a fork of Free BSD is the same silly thing. Free BSD develops it and you can take it and go wherever with it. Toss in linux because it also works the same way.
As to one of your prior comments were also all still dealing with the “C prompt” and it’s silly to say Apple changed that. All the Mac users I deal with and support are there for the .nix aspect of it and it’s command line, not the crappy GUI and cruddy hardware. Just as most high end Windows or linux systems are not dealt with on a GUI, ever. They are configured without it as the GUI is the security hitbox for all sorts of issues and things are done via commands and scripts. I can go weeks without using a GUI on Mac, Windows, or linux systems it’s just the norm at the higher levels. My home laptop is a Macbook pro because it’s cheap and I don’t need to do any heavy lifiting on it. I still use the terminal (not C but >) all the time. I’ve done AWS work as well and that’s all command line as well.
different-church-lady
@Joseph Patrick Lurker:
I think the critical difference is Jobs didn’t get a kick out of being an asshole like Musk does. Jobs just didn’t know how to be any other way. Musk chooses to be the way he is.
eversor
@different-church-lady:
No Xerox did it already exist in their consumer products. Apple has only ever had one “blazing the trail” product, ever. The iPod. Which Sony of all people actually invented the MP3 player that Apple, as always, ripped off. They only got away with it because Sony’s entertainment division didn’t let their tech division release it due to concerns over their money trough. So even that, is another apple theft.
different-church-lady
@eversor:
Yeah. You’re the guy who thinks anyone who can’t rebuild the engine in their own car is a moron.
Redshift
@Eolirin:
I dunno, we’re all using magic glass bricks with no buttons…
patrick II
@Eolirin:
It was just him and Woz in the beginning. Woz was hellacious technically but I think you are underestimating the importance of software design which Jobs contributed heavily too. Understanding what is good design, what is doable and what is marketable was a skill that few people have. You are underestimating his contribution. Apple would not have hired him back as CEO if his contributions were much more than marketing. You are underestimating his contribution.
And this started with you comparing him to Holmes and Musk which is still ridiculous.
Mike in NC
What are the odds that Elizabeth Holmes does her sentence and then runs for high office as a Republican?
different-church-lady
@Redshift:
Yeah. Funny how not much has changed since then, however. Wonder what happened? Oh yeah, that Jobs asshole died. Very odd coincidence that’s exactly when the innovations stopped, huh?
laura
@oldster: I’m patting a comfy spot on the long couch for you to come over and sit six feet apart with me.
patrick II
@Ken:
Actually, the cargo cult metaphor was the gist of what I wanted to say before I got sidetracked into this Jobs = Holmes/Musk stuff.
Eolirin
@Joseph Patrick Lurker: I question his instincts given some of the stories I’ve heard of his designers deliberately giving him a series of bad mockups alongside the one they actually wanted him to pick. He did a good job on the business end of the company. He definitely hired good designers and engineers, and that does count for a lot.
But he wasn’t a designer and he wasn’t an engineer, and those teams deserve all the credit for the work they did, not Jobs. Being good enough to see that a good product is a good product is maybe too rare a skill among CEOs, but it’s not a miraculous a thing.
I will give him credit for his salesmanship skills, he was genuinely world class at that.
But I’m an engineer at heart. I don’t really respect sales the same way. And it pisses me off intensely when the sales people take, or get all of, the credit for the engineering or design work.
eversor
@different-church-lady:
You are aware that the only reason Mac exists at all, at the corporate level, or even at all period is the terminal integrating well with .nix environments? Take the command line out of it and it’s Chromebook level silly. That’s why they use them at places like meta, twitter, and the others. It’s only the command line. That’s it.
Claming that Mac OS is good because not dealing with terminal/command line is missing the entire selling point of the OS and platform.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin:
different-church-lady
@eversor:
I just enjoy how easily I can bait you.
eversor
@Redshift:
Apple stole that as well it had been around for a while and was extremely popular in Asia, also where they stole the ApplePay concept from. Fun fact. The phones in Asia are still better than what we have here in the US and they don’t use iPhones! Don’t worry though. Apple will steal more and then use their reality distortion field to convince the rubes they created it. Same old apple, same old suckers.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@patrick II:
@Eolirin:
@eversor:
You guys reminded me of this meme:
It’s so sad Steve Jobs died of ligma…
Eolirin
@Redshift: MS and other phone manufacturers had touch screen designs that were a few years behind the iPhone. Apple got there a little earlier. The touch screen smartphone was going to happen with or without Apple too. It was the natural evolution of the work Blackberry and others were doing. Things would look different. Some of the touch inputs would work differently. Some of that would be worse, some would be better. But if you were paying attention to the work happening in the field it didn’t come out of left field.
ITunes did.
eversor
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Pretty sure he died of taking quack cures for cancer. He’d be anti COVID vax right now if he was still around.
different-church-lady
@Eolirin: Isn’t it just a very odd coincidence how Apple just kept getting there first. Very strange. Not at all explicable.
different-church-lady
@eversor:
“He would have died of cancer eventually. The quack cures just got there first.”
Eolirin
@patrick II: It did not start with me doing that.
Nor did I agree with the comparison being presented.
patrick II
@eversor:
Another fun fact: Apple is the prestige phone in China.
Ken
I question your use of “then”….
However I don’t think her kind of grift is a good match for the Republican base, so I would rank it fairly low.
different-church-lady
@patrick II:
Sure, but to the eversors of the world the “prestige” part just means they’re even bigger idiots for using Apple.
different-church-lady
HOLMES: There’s nothing in the box.
JOBS: Everything in the box is stolen
MUSK: I will buy all the world’s boxes and fill them with Nazis.
eversor
@different-church-lady:
Oh no I get on owning the poors. It’s why when I shop at the mall they Rolex, have a Williams and Sonoma, thousand dollar jeans, and 200 dollar t-shirts. It’s all the same logic. You aren’t getting what you pay for. But what you are paying for is worth it simply because others can’t have it. And that’s why Apple, Rolex, Armani, are all the cool brands. But it has nothing to do with actual quality.
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: Apple is not a market leader in cloud services, or AI, or business software or any number of other product categories including chip designs and OS innovations. They started falling behind on phone OS features within a few years of Google entering the market. They were laggards on bringing the iPad up to the functionality of the Surface line by years, calling the innovations MS was making in that space silly and confused right up until they adopted all of them.
It’s all where you draw your lines around what matters. They hit a couple of inflection points, they missed others
We’re not going to ignore that iPhone and MacOS command low double digit marketshare despite their initial market dominance are we? Or that they ceded their iTunes business to Spotify?
different-church-lady
@eversor:
The fact that I’m typing this on a 15 year old MacBook notwithstanding…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@eversor:
Did you click the link? I know Jobs died of cancer. All this talk about Jobs reminded me of that meme I linked to
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: 👍❤️
patrick II
@Eolirin:
Sorry. Lost track of the comments.
different-church-lady
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
You were trying a joke on someone not interested in humor.
Eolirin
@patrick II: No worries, it happens.
different-church-lady
BTW, I just want to make sure I’m not leaving the wrong impression: when I call Jobs an asshole, I’m not doing it sarcastically or ironically.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Change? They eighty-sixed the headphone jack.
//
different-church-lady
@NotMax:
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@different-church-lady:
Oh well, what’re you gonna do?
eversor
@different-church-lady:
OK, case in point. Apples highest end computer gets smoked by items by Dell, Lenovo, HP, and various others. But those companies also sell cheap crap. Apple, at least has a floor for cheap crap even though they are still mostly cheap crap.
Take monitors for example. I actually deal with video editors and sound editors. Apples “sure it’s like six grand, but it’s a real editing monitor” is a bit of a joke. The monitors actually used for that start at ten grand, easily hit thirty grand. It’s a completely different league of item. Just as their video editing stations are monsters. Same can be said for actual sound work. Where you are talking about tens of thousands and apples stuff is just, well it’s not pro at all.
Fifteen years also isn’t all that impressive. I could post here on desktops from the late 90s I built that have no issues and I keep around because at times I want native 32 or even 16bit support. Some of that is for fun! Some games just run and look better that way and the graphics cards have VGA out for ye old CRT monitor. Again, I work in IT. So I was there for all the massive butterfly keyboard failures, battery expanding failures, screens failing after X open and closes on very recent Macbooks that were even in production in 2021. So apple wins no reliability rewards, it does have a spectacular line of hardware design failures. Then again, that applies to all these companies. Though watching Jobs defend the iPhone 4 fiasco by telling customers they are stupid and holding it wrong was amazing.
You seem to be getting things wrong. I hate most tech companies and still purchase their products. Apple just has more screwups and customer screwing in their court than the rest. I also hate CEO culture and founder culture and nobody is a more horrifying example of that than Jobs. It’s all their is to it. I won’t defend any of them, but if you are going to defend Apple you might as well defend Exxon.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@different-church-lady:
They missed the opportunity to refer to to Tim Cook as “Tim Apple”
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: Actually this is one other point, the innovations stopped well before he died. After the iPhone, they really started to go stagnant. But that was to be expected. It’s pretty impossible to keep up a chain of disruption. Nothing wrong with building a mature product line, but there’s going to be tiny incremental increases after that, and doing multiple such products is hard.
Tech puts too much of a value on disruptive innovation. It’s not sustainable or desirable as a business model. Steady reliable product is better than a constant hype cycle after a certain point.
Tim Cook is better suited to running Apple where it is in its maturation as a company than Jobs would have been.
different-church-lady
@eversor:
Please do not tell me about video or sound editing, as I do both for a living. (And no, I would not purchase an Apple monitor.)
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady:
A keyboard. How quaint.
Eolirin
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I will never not love that scene.
Or really that whole movie. So good.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Eolirin:
@patrick II:
I have to say, I personally prefer Samsung smartphones and Android to Apple iPhone. Apple is overrated imo
Manyakitty
@karen marie: must be nice, eh?
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Eolirin: yes, it is the best.
different-church-lady
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
There’s a ton of things about Apple’s iStuff that drives me up the wall. But I just didn’t want to spend the time trying to get into a different boat. Sometimes it seems like they’re dedicated to making their worst tendencies even worse.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Eolirin:
Where do you think Apple would today if Jobs had lived? Makes me wonder how he would’ve handled Trump and later Musk
eversor
@different-church-lady:
Well, we can agree on monitors then! We purchase SONY models with a price tag I’m sure you know and those fuckers are power suckers like none other. Also eyeball scorchers.
different-church-lady
@eversor:
Some form of agreement is a good place to land. :-)
different-church-lady
By the way: Van Halen sucked with Sammy.
Kent
You can’t really “defect” to Russia because Americans are free to leave anytime they want. It is called emigrating not defecting.
Eolirin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I have no idea. But I suspect they’d have been slower to make the shifts necessary to keep up with the changes Google and Samsung were making in the market and to build out the various service side things they needed to stay relevant. And that may have weakened their position. They have such dominance in profits that it’s hard to say whether that would have actually hurt them that much though. They don’t really need market share to make tons of money.
eversor
@different-church-lady:
For iStuff I’m with you here. As someone who’s desktop has a dedicated AMP, DAC, mixer stack I dislike the wireless and BT area completely. Still cranky Apple yanked the DAC dongle from their phones as a free give away. But I got a third party that’s better. I use IEMs that are tribrids (one DD, 4 BA, 1 ESTAT per side) and they need a bit of juice.
The SO swears by the air pods pro and air pods max cause wireless. I do like the integration with the OS and the seamless nature of it all, but it’s not the same. But even she will often notice when using my stuff “I hear things I didn’t hear before” to which, well yeah.
I don’t have a gripe with their headphones it does what it does and most people are not familiar with lossless highrez stuff and that’s a pricey area to go down into. You will pry my wires from my cold dead hands!
Another Scott
@patrick II: It’s my understanding that Apple licensed stuff from Xerox Parc and in return Xerox got some equity in Apple.
Lots of this thread seems to be old rumors and so forth.
I haven’t read it myself, but Cringely’s book covers all the nitty-gritty about the early battles and the pathologies of the major players.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
Fixed.
Chris T.
As for macOS, it’s a bit more complicated than portrayed so far: the kernel is based on the NeXT kernel which was based on Mach which was derived from 4.xBSD; userland is based on FreeBSD; both are pretty heavily modified at this point.
As for Steve Jobs, he is (was) kind of complicated too. Definitely not an engineer but could talk to engineers. Opinionated, asshole in part, but also very often right. His particular genius was a sort of sense of marketing style, of turning computers and accessories into fashion instead of just beige boxes of Doing Work.
He had his own screwups, e.g., the Apple Lisa, but he was mostly responsible for the big Apple Comeback of the 1990s.
Mai Naem mobile
I doubt Holmes will serve the 11 years. If worse comes to worse she’ll get time off for good behavior which will end up being close to 9 years. If Holmes’ partner is still with her and TFG wins in 2024 I can completely see the partner paying off TFG for a pardon for Holmes. And if another GOPr wins I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing happens. Same with SBF.
ETtheLibrarian
She will spend her time reflecting and come out better OR she will spend her time stewing and come out worse with a side of grievance and whining.
When she does get out I hope it doesn’t rate on the news meter, but if it does I hope everyone has to go look her up to remind them of who the EFF she is (like that Tara Reide wench yesterday).
Soprano2
My gripe with Apple is that they quit supporting IPods and ITunes. Almost every night when I want to sync my IPod I have to “repair” the part of ITunes that recognizes my IPod. I have Googled for a solution but haven’t found one. I have a driver updater that keeps my drivers up to date, so that’s not it. I’ll just keep “repairing” ITunes until it goes away.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@ETtheLibrarian: Or she is incapable of self reflection and she will come out of prison looking for her next grift. I am not sure someone who could perpetrate the medical fraud she did (on patients NOT investors) is capable of seeing that she was wrong, and trying to make amends or at least feel sorry for what she did.
Lab tests tell you if you have cancer, what kind of cancer, and what it might be treatable with. They tell people if their fetus has genetic abnormalities which may be life altering or in compatible with life. Lab tests can save and/or change your life. Incorrect lab tests can delay treatment OR result in un-necessary treatment/surgery. Cancer treatments can save lives but many are very harsh and cause severe side effects.
Ella in New Mexico
@sanjeevs: seriously do not give a single fuck about the vast majority of investors like Murdoch and DeVos.
I do feel really sad for two little babies who, through no fault of their own, will have a fractured and dysfunctional relationship with their mother at such tender times in their lives. This building yet another generation of wounded narcissists…