„It’s a matter of life and death” Steve Jobs believed saving seconds on start-up time would have a major impact

by

Steve Jobs is widely known as the mastermind behind one of the world’s most recognizable tech giants, Apple. Although he is no longer with us, the company continues to thrive. In its early stages, the team encountered challenges, such as complaints about the boot time of the Macintosh computer from users. Jobs, with his unique approach to work, managed to motivate one of his engineers to find a solution. As recounted by Dane McFarlane on their website, Jobs made this issue seem like a matter of life or death.

What did Steve Jobs say to convince his employee to fix the Macintosh’s boot time?

Are you frequently curious about the amount of time you devote to particular activities? What proportion of your life is spent commuting to work or asleep, or watching TV? How many hours do you lose pondering over how long you spend on various tasks? Although it’s difficult to quantify precisely, you can make informed approximations. When Macintosh users complained about the lengthy boot times of their computers, Steve Jobs took notice. How much time were people wasting waiting for their computer to become operational? A single minute may not seem significant, but those minutes quickly accumulate.

Larry Kenyon was in charge of designing the disk driver and file system for a Macintosh. Jobs asked him to find ways to reduce the boot-up time. Jobs had a broad perspective; he wasn’t only considering the experience of an individual user, but also the cumulative effect of saving all that time across millions of users. “Imagine if you could save ten seconds on each boot. That translates to 50 million seconds saved daily for five million users. Over a year, it would be equivalent to dozens of lifetimes!

To put it simply, Jobs saw that by combining small time savings across many people, it would be equivalent to granting someone an entire life, or even multiple lifetimes. Although each instance may appear minor, Jobs considered the issue from a broader point of view.

Back then, when I was part of the team at Kenyon, I managed to shave an incredible twenty-eight seconds off the Macintosh boot time. If you think about all those millions of Apple users out there, this tiny improvement in boot time might not seem significant at first glance. But when you consider that these small efficiencies are repeated countless times every single day, it’s awe-inspiring to realize just how much impact one person can have on the user experience for so many!

Read More

2025-06-17 23:32