Joining Apple 40 years ago
mondaynote.comI'm a big fan of Jean-Louis Gassée and I wish there were more visionaries like him in the personal computing industry. He helped push the Mac further during his tenure at Apple, and his work at BeOS also pushed the state of the art of personal computing. There are two major standouts in his career that I greatly appreciate:
1. His transformation of the Mac from the non-expandable appliance it was in the original 1984 Macintosh to Macs that supported expansion slots, such as the Macintosh II and the Macintosh SE. The Macintosh II series led to other expandable Macs such as the Quadra, the Power Macintosh, and the Mac Pro. While the Mac Pro would lose its expansion slots when the 2013 Mac Pro was released, the latest Mac Pro has expansion slots again, and I hope Apple keeps them if it releases an ARM version of the Mac Pro.
2. His work at Be, Inc. after his departure from Apple. I never had the chance to use BeOS (I was in elementary school during the heyday of BeOS), but I've read a lot about it. In my opinion, one of BeOS's most interesting features is its searchable file system. Indeed, the creator of BeOS's file system, Dominic Giampaolo (who wrote a well-written, accessible introductory textbook on file system design), moved to Apple after Be's demise and worked on Spotlight, which is macOS's search tool.
Spent many hours on BeOS and visited their booth at PCexpo in NYC around 1999. The big draw was the multimedia centric OS where the GUI always remained responsive. It also did things like allow you to open up a dozen AVI files on a single core sub 1GHz Pentium 2/3 and not have the computer grind to a halt. Instead the videos skipped frames and you continue to work on other programs. It was a pleasant experience compared to the rough shape of early Linux/BSD and the obtuse horror show that was Windows 95/98. We even had a somewhat working port of Netscape and there was some momentum building behind it. But then came Windows 2000 and Be sorta lost steam on the desktop and then went in some bizarre internet appliance direction and it was over shortly after.
Don't quote me on this but the another powerful feature was the decoupling of media codecs from programs. Adding support for a new media codec was as simple as dropping a .so lib file into a /lib/codec directory and all your media programs now supported that codec. This applied to all media including audio, video and images. This was all part of the BeOS API.
It also had a decent c++ API and multithreading was a first class concept in the system allowing one to easily write programs to take advantage of multiple processors. That allowed the machine to easily scale as you added more processors, something Windows 98 couldn't do at the time. This was well before the concept of multi-core. Back then you needed more sockets to add more processors and it wasn't cheap.
Try out https://www.haiku-os.org it's the spiritual successor and binary compatible.
The BeOS is also featured in Neil Stephenson's "In the beginning there was the command line"
https://steve-parker.org/articles/others/stephenson/index.sh...
Can you imagine moving to the Bay Area in the 80s? To grow up when land was still cheap, before college competition was cutthroat and unaffordable, when relatively simple competence could get you a solid job and VC/PE firms weren't plundering and incentivizing the latest 30-second attention-span app to reach $1B?
It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.
Oh well.
You have a distorted picture. I moved to the bay area in 85, stayed 20 years, then left. If you moved there and were already well established, sure, real estate would have been more affordable then than now. But as a young engineer, things were still pretty expensive.
My starting salary as a BSEE working for a minicomputer company was $30,000. Two weeks after arriving they had layoffs. They were nice to the new hires and said we'll keep you on for a bit, but you should start looking for new jobs, plus there is a 10% pay cut, so $27K/year ($65.3K in 2020 dollars).
My shared apartment was off Maude and Mathilda was nothing special. It was 700 sq ft and was $750/month, which works out to $1800/month in 2020 dollars. Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, and Atherton were all expensive addresses, even then.
Now that is perspective I’d like to hear more about, considering how much my peers whine about how things would’ve been better if they moved to the bay area long ago and it’s all crappy nowadays. That’s not nearly as much change as I would’ve expected in inflation-adjusted dollars. I do wonder how typical your case is though. I would love to hear more data points from others in similar situations.
With all the old rent controlled apartment in San Francisco, it certainly feels like people who moved here a decade or two ago are locked into to paying basically nothing by modern standards. I personally know a couple people who still live with their exes because their rent-controlled apartment is too good a deal to give up.
San Francisco rent control is below inflation, so it gets cheaper every year you stay.
If you stay in downtown SF in a "YIMBY"/new construction building, there's no rent control and the prices are astronomical. $3900ish for the cheapest studio in some buildings.
What does the location or construction date have anything to do with YIMBYism? In fact, YIMBYs probably believe that San Francisco's least desirable neighborhoods shouldn't be where all housing growth occurs.
I started as a product manager (with engineering degrees and an MBA) for a minicomputer company at almost exactly the same time getting paid $42K as I recall. This was one of the Route 128 companies. But, based on some recruiting conversations I had over time, the Bay Area salaries weren't really a lot higher and housing was more expensive. That's one reason I never moved out West. I think I was paying similar in rent initially but it was a bigger 2BR townhouse.
Housing has gotten relatively more expensive but it hasn't been cheap in much of the Bay Area for a very long time and tech salaries didn't used to be anything special.
Sure 280 was known as the Billionaire's Highway and 101 was the Millionaire's Highway even back in the late 80's but there were still lots of affordable tract homes in the south bay. Nobody knew the industrial park across from Vallco Fashion Park would become the mothership for the world's most valuable company.
> $27K/year ($65.3K in 2020 dollars)
Side bar: that is a breathtaking amount of inflation in just 35 years.
Even if wages kept up with inflation, the impact this would have on cash savings is just devastating.
> that is a breathtaking amount of inflation in just 35 years.
That's under 3% inflation which is a not breathtaking. The Fed targets 2%, which helps avoid deflationary spirals and helps both stability and lowers unemployment, two of their mandates.
>Even if wages kept up with inflation,
Wages have surpassed inflation in just about every income bracket for the past 100 years. And when you factor in total remuneration, returns to workers are even higher. Here's 50+ years of data [1]
>the impact this would have on cash savings is just devastating.
No one in their right mind holds cash savings for 35 years. It's a ludicrously long time to simply hold your savings in a cash pile.
> That's under 3% inflation which is a not breathtaking.
Perhaps it is better to say that I am caught off-guard by the power of compound interest.
> The Fed targets 2%, which helps avoid deflationary spirals and helps both stability and lowers unemployment, two of their mandates.
I am generally skeptical of the Fed, but that's an entirely different discussion, so I'll just nod my head and move along.
> Wages have surpassed inflation in just about every income bracket for the past 100 years. And when you factor in total remuneration, returns to workers are even higher. Here's 50+ years of data [1]
That is good to see, thanks!
> No one in their right mind holds cash savings for 35 years. It's a ludicrously long time to simply hold your savings in a cash pile.
True, but people do usually place their money in a savings account. And while in theory the interest from the savings account should exceed inflation, it seems to me the mere fact of inflation means that people who have primarily cash savings are needlessly penalized.
But while it is absurd to store you money in a coffee can in the shed for 30+ years, I'm not sure it should be.
>but people do usually place their money in a savings account.
No, they don't. Some people have some money in saving accounts, but the VAST majority of people's savings are in houses and in retirement plans, which are not cash holdings. Only a very small amount of people have the majority of their savings only in cash for periods long enough that compound inflation kills the savings.
As to things like the Fed, and inflation:
Every single country in the world has chosen to use central banking due to the lessons learned over the past few hundred years, and especially during the Great Depression, that having a politically independent central bank target low inflation results in the most stable, predicable economy. It gives decent ability to balance shocks, lower unemployment, make business smooth and predictable, and avoid deflationary spirals, which are devastating. Compared the period right before the world started understanding how this can work, there is no question that volatility and destructive cycles are now vastly better.
I get the idea that you have not ever studied economics, especially monetary policy, but just like you probably have not studied quantum physics or brain surgery or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, just know that mankind has put tremendous effort into all of these and has learned some very useful things.
So - given that centuries of good thinkers following centuries and hundreds of countries of evidence have come to the conclusion that low inflation and central banking are wise, and not the product of conspiracy Illuminati nonsense, then you should adjust your beliefs that this is wise, in the same way you'd understand medicine, physics, math, etc., are all studied and the experts do indeed understand them vastly better than the general populace.
Thus, since there will be targeted inflation of around 2%, it is dumb to assume one should simply save all their money as cash. Invest it in broad index funds, or something similar.
>I am caught off-guard by the power of compound interest.
All the more reason to not hold cash, which has zero reason to grow, and has a very solid reason to shrink in buying power, and invest in productive assets with savings. The compound growth of productive assets then works for you, not against you.
>But while it is absurd to store you money in a coffee can in the shed for 30+ years, I'm not sure it should be.
It is absurd given the rest of the evidence around us.
> I get the idea that you have not ever studied economics, especially monetary policy
That is one hell of a presumption. Did I offend you?
> but just like you probably have not studied quantum physics or brain surgery or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, just know that mankind has put tremendous effort into all of these and has learned some very useful things.
This is a complete non-sequitor. It's physics envy and posturing nonsense. The successes of physics and medicine have no bearing on whether mainstream economics is a complete crock. In the soft sciences like economics, the expert doesn't necessarily bring more to the table than the reasonably well-read layman. I'm not saying there is no value in studying these subjects, but the collective "expert opinion" is not in anyway "science".
Maybe you should study some philosophy?
>That is one hell of a presumption. Did I offend you?
I'm not offended. You've stated how surprised you are about several thing that someone having studied such things would have seen. I didn't mean to offend - but to point out that if you have not studied them, it's not unreasonable to assume those who have worked on them for a lifetime have some knowledge about them you may not.
Did you study them?
>This is a complete non-sequitor. It's physics envy and posturing nonsense.
No, it's putting some context. If you've studied some complex field in depth, you know how detailed and useful the knowledge is, and that it's generally opaque to those who have not put the time in.
>The successes of physics and medicine have no bearing on whether mainstream economics is a complete crock.
Yes, they do, since all rely on the same processes to weed out error over time.
>In the soft sciences like economics, the expert doesn't necessarily bring more to the table than the reasonably well-read layman.
Wow. Ok, now I am sure you have not studied them at any academic or professional level, and I see why you're so mad and believe such fringe things about money. Having met enough people like you that are sure you or people like you bring as much to an econ discussion as experts despite what you've written here is the epitome of Dunning Krueger. And that I did mean directly. I never understand why people that know a lot about some area of knowledge assume they are expert level proficient in others without putting equivalent time in.
Have a nice day.
> Wages have surpassed inflation in just about every income bracket for the past 100 years. And when you factor in total remuneration, returns to workers are even higher. Here's 50+ years of data [1]
> [1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44705.pdf
This document is 47 pages long. Can you cite the page or section you're referring to?
Lots of pages show the data in various ways. The chart Fig 5 on page 7 is pretty clear for household income. Table 2 page 34 shows every quintile becoming richer over time. Lots of the content also explains forces affecting this.
There's plenty of such studies from the Fed and from CBO, among others.
Would you be open to doing an interview? If yes, how do I reach out?
California in the early 80s wasn’t fun. We left SF in ‘83. Interest rates around 15%. Minimum wage around $2.50/hr. Gas rationing. you could only buy gas on certain days based on your license plate. There was an apartment above a garage in SF that sold for $200,000 that was fixup and the garage wasn’t part of the deal.
My parents moved us to they east coast where they did finally purchase their own home.
Gas rationing in the 80s? I think you're off a decade. I lived in SoCal in the 80s and there was no rationing. During the Oil embargo in 73 there was the odd/even rationing, but that didn't continue into the 80s.
California (and several other states) also implemented even/odd rationing in response to the 1979 oil crisis.
My parents almost had to leave in the late 70s. They moved to San Jose to work in tech. Bought a house in 72 or so. Their home value tripled in around 6 years and so did their property taxes.
Which is why Prop 13 got passed. It may have bad features and bad side effects but IMO you really don't want to force people to sell their homes because their property taxes have rapidly gone up.
One way that other states have done it more intelligently is to allow people to stay in their homes as long as they want, and not paying the proper tax bill. When they die/sell, that $ liability gets deducted from their house sale price.
The bad features and bad side effects are the point, avoiding forcing people on limited incomes out of their homes was a convenient leverage point that could be much better served by more targeted policy.
Like, for one, if that was actually your policy goal, the policy would only apply to primary residences, not all real property.
Totally agree. I have no personal stake in it but Prop 13 certainly seems to be overly broad for its goal as I understand it of not forcing people out of their homes and neighborhood if they gentrify or otherwise shoot up in value. (Mind you, you can also make points about a long-time neighborhood restaurant that's forced to close because of taxes.)
> The bad features and bad side effects are the point
Agreed, especially with how good Prop 13 is at baking existing segregation in forever, since then nothing else makes economic sense on the individual level except to stay put.
>It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.
Yeah, you would then be the "rich [person] who others curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family"
Thats the joke
Is that not their implication?
whoosh
I moved to the Bay Area in '84, bought a house in ~89 - house prices had just run up to what people considered then as high levels - Real Estate then leveled out and stopped rising for half a decade - it's done that on and off for 40 years - it was never 'cheap' at the time.
Prop 13 was already in place in '84 - the only way to get rid of it is to vote it out, it's long past time
I had a couple companies interested in recruiting me to the Valley in the mid 90s or so. One of the reasons I decided not to pursue was cost of living relative to the not inexpensive Boston area. And the companies even acknowledged that was the case.
Yep, I also had a job offer in the bay area in either '99 or 00' (time flies!) I was seriously considering. After doing the math, I'd have had to make almost triple my flyover state job at the time so I didn't pull the trigger.
That was probably an accidentally smart decision since months later the world imploded, and the company giving the offer went up in even more spectacular fashion that most.
Prop 13 was passed in 1978.
Given the time that's passed since then, you'd be one of the old rich person.
Austin sounds like an up-and-coming Valley, as do a few other really gorgeous locations around the US. The trick is to pick one and settle in early.
I think Shenzhen is the new valley of 1980. (Though to the GP you’re probably already priced out of the housing market there too )
But China is still rotten to its core. Eventually that'll backfire heavily on both Shenzhen and entrepreneurs trying their luck there.
Being rotten, never stopped anyone.
The biggest problem is that money can get easily into China, but not so easily out of it.
They love to export goods, so it's still easy enough.
That will have complications in the future, but that's the next generations issue, not the person making the decision today that wants a nice bonus.
When they export, money gets in. But they don't import much , if you look at china's trade balance, it's at + 421 billion dollars [1] (money going in) while USA is at -616 B [2].
So it's in fact hard to get money out of china.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263632/trade-balance-of-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/220041/total-value-of-us...
But the total import of China in 2019 is $2.09 trillion. Which is 5 times the surplus you mentioned.
If your think that surplus is a lot, then 5 times that is definitely not "they don't import much"
Regardless of your opinion on Chinese politics (or your opinion on California politics for that matter), Shenzhen is absolutely blowing up. Just talking with random tech and startup people there, you feel an energy and optimism that is hard to find in the bay area these days. As a non-Chinese citizen, investing in property there feels a bit too risky for my appetite, but I certainly would not bet against it.
And the states are not?
The US is a stable and functioning democracy. This is not to say it is perfect.
>The US is a stable and functioning democracy.
Our current president and almost half of the country explicitly doesn't think so.
This is hogwash, and a lie mostly propagated by blue check journo twitter. Remember, twitter is not representative of anything even close to consensus political opinion. It's mostly an echo chamber for elites patting themselves on the back for their "correct" opinions https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/04/twitt...
It doesn’t matter if it’s false or where people got the information, what matters is a surprisingly large amount of people honestly do believe it. Including most of my extended family, various friends in Georgia and Michigan, and even several friends in the bay area who should know better. If enough people believe a lie, they can force action based on that lie. We feel so safe saying “that’s hogwash”, but we should take it more seriously.
GP said nothing about Twitter.
Excellent observation. Correct you are GP said nothing of twitter. I did.
If you start with the beginning of my comment "this is a lie" and follow along to the end of the sentence, I begin to extrapolate where I believe to be the primary source of this lie, twitter, and make an indirect reference to the perpetuators of the lie, the media.
so the recently elected AG of Utah took a leave of absence immediately after taking office to fight voter fraud is just lies made up by lefties on twitter?
Unlike other places, people don't own land in China right? You can only lease it for x number of years. That changes the dynamics of the real estate market.
Pollution is also terrible with no end in sight.
Minneapolis is also gorgeous, and relatively cheap. There's a "greenway" for bikes and pedestrians that's a converted railway. It has a huge music and art scene. There are tons of local breweries and more than a handful of startups and big name companies with a presence there.
As a former resident, you're not mentioning the elephant in the room -- October - May. I grew up in the Midwest, so I get it, it doesn't seem that bad. But after moving away, it's hard to imagine going back, or convincing others to overlook it.
Minneapolis is a glorified suburb unfortunately. I grew up in North Minneapolis without a car and know very well first hand how the no-car lifestyle works even in the most well-serviced and dense areas on offer. That's ignoring the weather.
However, if you enjoy that style of living I do agree it might be one of the best places in the nation. If I ever get tired of urban living I plan on moving back.
Basically all of that applies to Atlanta as well, if you prefer weather that’s too hot and humid over whether that’s too cold and snowy.
Good luck keeping it somewhere those musicians and artists can afford to live.
It's lovely, true. But! Get some warm clothes!
there's always an untapped place somewhere. in the 80s people were saying this about someplace else probably.
New York city probably. That place has been huge and expensive for like 100 years now. The new untapped places to look at might be Austin TX and Boise ID
Austin, definitely yes. Boise? No way. There's much more chatter about Miami.
Isn’t Miami literally sinking into the ocean (unlike Silicon Valley which is figuratively gone Atlantis) ?
Boise is booming but more focused toward retirees than young families. Miami and Austin seem to have a larger influx of all types.
I remember a lot of griping in the 70s about the boom in housing prices in Hawaii and California.
I'm curious about the untapped potential of other parts of California. Now that the pandemic has made remote work a necessity, I'm wondering if regions of California outside Silicon Valley will benefit from remote tech workers having more options in terms of residences. For example, Sacramento is a very popular destination for ex-Bay Area residents, and it appears to be a good location for people working remotely for Silicon Valley companies who (post-pandemic) may need to make occasional trips to the office. Sacramento is still affordable, though it's becoming more expensive each year.
Other areas that are intriguing to me include San Luis Obispo County and some of Southern California's exurbs like the Antelope Valley area and Lake Elsinore, where it's possible to buy a nice single-family house in a safe neighborhood for less than $500,000.
California gets a bad rap in some circles due to its high cost of living and its taxes, but not everywhere in California has the Bay Area's high housing costs. There are many other areas of the state where people can still reasonably make a day trip to the Bay Area to enjoy its amenities while living in a place that is affordable on an average engineer's salary.
I grew up in Sacramento and now live near Palo Alto. Sacramento has great public schools. I went to a public IB high school, whose science teams regularly placed in the top 3 in the US for Science Bowl/ Science Olympiad. In many parts of CA, the best schools are private (LA), or you have to pay millions of dollars for a house in the good districts (Palo Alto).
In Sacramento, they have what is called 'open enrollment', which allows people to send their kids to school outside of their district, if there is a program there that isn't available locally. I had many classmates from across town, and one who lived halfway to Tahoe.
I personally think that areas like Half Moon Bay and Scott's Valley will benefit from remote work. It's close enough to go into SV when needed, but farther than many people would have wanted to commute daily. And they're beautiful, with good weather. SLO will probably benefit also, and I imagine that schools will change in these areas, to become more like SV/LA. That's probably good for SF/LA families, though locals might not like the changes.
There are so many nice little towns in northern California. Any of them would be a fine place to live.
If I wanted to stay in generic american suburbia while my location doesn't matter for my job, it's hard to justify staying in california.
Wtf. Why do you curse old people for not dying? What is wrong with you? Do you feel the same about your parents? In 30 years when you are old, are you gonna move to Kansas and sell your property under market value to some younger people?
My parents purchased a house in Milpitas in the 80s. Inexpensive, yes, and they told me that Palo Alto was still considered expensive and out of reach for them at the time.
My father worked at HP for 25 years. Solid middle class lifestyle, no complaints.
My extended family moved to the Bay Area in the early to mid 80s (some a little earlier). No one ever thought it cheap, and what they said then about cost of living is not that different from what everyone says now.
> To grow up when land was still cheap
People didn't think it was cheap at the time. The 70's had seen a boom in real estate prices, especially in California, due to the boomers moving into their home buying years. (And that was before Prop 13, which was a response to high home prices.)
> the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.
Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.
> Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.
Depends. If building housing were legal it would. Tokyo’s population has increased 50% over the last twenty years and property prices have been flat. If supply is allowed to rise to reach demand property prices don’t go up on a never ending spiral.
The housing market seems like one that is fucked up, especially here in the UK, because the government consists of and is run for homeowners, who have come to expect a continuous growth in their investment or freak the hell out, regardless of the actual value of housing on the market. So it's an artificially inflated market because they are incentivised to keep houses continuously more expensive or their base loses out.
>Tokyo’s population has increased 50% over the last twenty years and property prices have been flat
That's because most live in glorified living room space, and many in "comfortable elevator" size houses...
That may contribute to affordability but if supply was constrained to stop it reaching demand prices would have risen, tiny apartments or no. See San Francisco where glorified closets are a lot more expensive than in Tokyo. Prices haven’t risen in Tokyo because supply has risen. They have in many, many cities all over the Anglosphere. That’s a policy choice. Not a law of nature.
That's the compromise you have to make to live in the biggest city in the world (metro population: 37 million people).
Is it? Sounds orthogonal to the population, as the city could just expand vertically (more highrises/scyscrapers) or horizontally (more land).
Na issue is that with expansion distances increase. Thus you lose the benefit of being in the city (close to work, close to friends, close to cultural offerings, close to shops, close to ...) While Japan did a few things to help, like reliably working high speed railway, which allows commute over wide distance, while central places are crowded during rush hour and can't take much more.
Shinkansen (bullet train) commuting is a marginal phenomenon, with a few thousands doing it in a metropolis of 20M+. Highly reliable commuter railways with cheap express services are the backbone (and genesis) of Tokyo's sprawl.
> Thus you lose the benefit of being in the city (close to work, close to friends, close to cultural offerings, close to shops, close to ...)
This is the “Brooklyn is boring” problem. It’s temporary. The old city centre (Manhattan) is unlikely to decline rapidly in relative importance but cultural and economic life will happily extend itself from central areas to less central ones given the population and the money to make it worthwhile. Good transport links help enormously too.
Tokyo doesn't really radiate from a single center anyway. It's really an agglomeration of centers of activity. This is also true of NYC to some degree (but in a different way). "Downtown," i.e. Wall Street, isn't the cultural and social center.
Haven't Tokio already done both?
Yes, though there is still room in the Tokyo metro area for even more growth, both vertically and horizontally. Even though Japan's population is declining, Tokyo Prefecture and its neighboring prefectures were still growing pre-pandemic (although I remember reading that since the COVID-19 pandemic struck there's a growing interest in living in more rural parts of Japan.) Regarding horizontal growth, there is still plenty of agricultural land in the Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures east of Tokyo that can be developed. In fact, when I take the Narita Express from the Narita International Airport to Tokyo, I pass by plenty of agricultural areas before reaching the easternmost fringes of the Tokyo metro area's urban sprawl. Another area where urban sprawl could occur is the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture just south of Mt. Fuji, where the beach resort town of Atami is located.
Regarding horizontal growth, there are plenty of places in the Tokyo metro area being redeveloped horizontally, such as the Musashi-Kosugi area of Kawasaki, which is just a 20 minute train ride on regular commuter trains like the Tokyu Toyoko Line and the JR Shonan-Shinjuku Line to Shibuya, a major hub in Tokyo. Over the past 15 years there has been a lot of development of high-rise residences in the area. Futako-tamagawa is another area of Tokyo that has seen much horizontal growth, starting with the Rise shopping center and nearby high-rise residences that opened around 2011. Rakuten moved its headquarters from Shinagawa to Futako-tamagawa sometime in the late 2010s, which has further boosted the desirability of Futako-tamagawa and neighboring areas such as Mizonokuchi just across the river in Kawasaki.
Disclaimer: I live near Silicon Valley but I travel to Japan roughly once every other year.
It's nice that those are legal, yes, but the price per square foot is a good deal cheaper than SF too.
Even hotel rooms are in Tokyo are tiny compared with US hotel rooms.
On the other hand, roughly $50-100/night gets you a clean, though tiny, place to stay at a business hotel in the Tokyo metro area. (For those of you unfamiliar with Japan, a business hotel is a type of hotel that offers rooms primarily for people on domestic business trips. The rooms are tiny [think the size of a college dorm room, sometimes even smaller], but at the hotels I've stayed at, the service is friendly and the staff does a great job with cleanliness.) By comparison, there are parts of the United States where you have to pay more than $100 per night for a dodgy motel in an unsafe area. I generally stay at business hotels whenever I take a trip to Japan, whether it is for business or for vacation.
Talking about the size of living space in a discussion of free marking housing costs is irrelevant. The only fact that matters is cost per unit area, the free market will decide how much area people are willing to pay for (assuming, of course, that there is a free market that is able to construct smaller or larger living spaces. Japan has one of these, whereas the United States typically does not thanks to most municipalities' zoning law)
In Tokyo, land is extraordinarily expensive but living space is only ordinarily expensive (and not nearly as expensive as many US cities). As a consequence, a quick google search[0] suggests that a new single family home in Tokyo's 23 wards will cost you $600,000 with about 1051 square feet of living space, or roughly $600 per square foot, and in the distant suburbs (with long train commutes, an hour minimum but maybe 90 minutes or more to shinjuku. would be fine for a remote worker though) you can get a house for around $400,000 although this article regrettably does not mention if these houses are the same size on average or not (so $400 per square foot or less, not quite sure).
In terms of the urban form of the streetscape, expensive land coupled with the fact that you can legally subdivide your land, means that houses are very crammed together with almost no space in between in major cities, and especially in Tokyo. That said it's a free market - there are larger lots you can buy, and if you really want a big property I'm sure you could buy neighboring lots and combine them somehow (demolition of existing properties is normal anyways - if you really want a buffer from your neighbors, build a house that's smaller than your lot size!). In contrast, most municipalities in the US mandate a certain space between houses and/or require getting special zoning board approval to subdivide your lot, which means that there's essentially a "minimum" lot size, which turns into a minimum house cost of (minimum lot size * land price).
Additionally there will always be concerns about standard of living. IMO Japanese homes are, in some ways better, but in many ways worse, standard of living than American homes. For example, my impression is that the HVAC situation is typically much worse than the standard american home (although where I live in boston the "AC" is usually nonexistant since most homes are 100+ years old, but atleast the heating is good). On the other hand, Japanese bathrooms are a godsend, if you haven't experienced it you don't know. The biggest concern to me is the sound insulation, which can be poor in many cheap wood-framed Japanese homes (true in many cheap new construction American homes too, as well as some older American constructions. It always depends I suppose! But atleast in sprawling american suburbs you don't hear your neighbor as often through those walls because houses are spread out enough.)
Finally, as a note, while all the above is talking about Tokyo and it's suburbs, there are other big booming cities in Japan (Osaka is popular) which are often 30% or more cheaper but with many of the same big-city amenities like transit, walkability, restaurants and culture, and so on. In terms of price, Tokyo really is like the NYC of Japan, but it's actually affordable for the average family, albeit with either a small home or a long commute.
TL;DR : in Tokyo, land is really expensive, living space is moderately expensive, the free market has converged to fairly small living spaces relative to the US. In the rest of Japan (and distant suburbs to Tokyo), land is moderately expensive and living space is fairly cheap.
[0] https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/how-much-does-it-cost...
Addendum: to someone interested in suburban/rural housing in Japan, there's a youtube channel TokyoLlama with a series on his purchasing one of those abandoned houses in a distant tokyo suburb, about 50 minutes out of the city by train. It's an old, beautiful, artisan wood house. At some point in the series he covers all the costs associated with buying the house, as well as various costs and effort to renovate it and make it livable.[1]
mandate a certain space between houses
Just want to note that this is in part for fire reasons...
require getting special zoning board approval to subdivide your lot
...and this is for traffic and services management.
Absolutely, public policy is nothing if not the art of tradeoffs
> If building housing were legal it would.
That's a quite different scenario.
You could confiscate the homes of everyone over 60, distribute them for free to young people, and the market prices of the homes would remain the same.
Quite. So increase supply. Build, build, build.
Or reduce demand. Move move move
And watch as the tax base to fund your pension plans and retirement evaporates away. This shit is eating your seed crop levels of stupid.
On the other hand, if building were entirely unregulated, I'm not sure how long it would remain a desirable place to live.
Building is very much regulated in Tokyo and throughout Japan. Just pointing out that unaffordable housing is a policy choice, not a law of nature.
It really isn’t. There is a hierarchy of desirability which will always create price competition.
Nobody would be complaining about prop 13 or California housing prices if they didn’t desire to live in California more than somewhere else.
I sometimes feel we're not living in the fully realized cyberpunk dystopia we were promised without a bunch of ramshackle buildings piled on top of each other and stolen data flowing through it all.
Don't worry in 25 years the next generation will be cursing your generation for having all the advantages.
Ha ha. So many BBS's a local-call away....
I moved to the Bay Area in the 90's and Fry's was still a destination for the hardware hacker — selling wire-wrapping sockets and Playboy magazine. (I know - wut?) Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, Weirdstuff Warehouse, HSC.... I would do the electronics-surplus run on Saturday morning and see the same HAM's and "home brewers" picking through old alphanumeric LED displays, etc....
It's definitely a different place now. Sigh.
Combination of high income and low cost of living is ever elusive. We saw the dream get a glimmer of hope with remote work, only to be soon crushed by CoL adjustment announcements. You would be hard-pressed to find, anytime in history and anywhere on planet earth, a time and place where salaries are really high and CoL is really low.
>You would be hard-pressed to find, anytime in history and anywhere on planet earth, a time and place where salaries are really high and CoL is really low.
US, Germany and most of western europe in the post war boom till the late 80's.
A factory assembly worker at VW could buy an apartment and feed his family on a single income back then. Fat chance of doing anything like that now.
> when land was still cheap
Twenty years from now, you will be able to tell the same story about wherever high-earning, highly educated young people settle in the meantime. All you have to do is predict and buy in.
Land was cheap in the Santa Clara valley in the past. Huge portions were still orchards and farms that were selling out for new subdivisions. The issue is it's a valley. There's no more open land unless you move impractically far away.
Growth in any area will raise prices but here the issue was compounded by a lack of extra land available after the cheap land was sold.
Maybe you should just be thankful for the benefits you have. Most of the world is not lucky enough to be capable of working in tech in the Bay area.
I don't think people should be happy to be fleeced by wealthy landowners, at least because if they were fleeced slightly less then they could give the difference to people living in poverty.
Telling someone to always accept and be thankful for injustice and exploitation because someone somewhere else is experiencing worse injustice and exploitation is not as noble as you may think.
Quote: "I watched forklifts move palettes of software in Apple warehouses"
Must've been nice to physically see the fruits of your labor :)
Nice pun :)
I don’t know if Chris Espinosa still works for Apple, but I think he might have been around a couple of years before Gassé. He started as a teenager.
I’ve been writing Apple software since 1986. Lots of changes, since then.
I remember it as being a fairly “scruffy” little company; especially if you went to MacHack. I worked for GE, at the time, and the corporate culture differences were quite stark. GE was a “shirt and tie” operation, and I was part of a team that had maybe 400 people.
I was constantly being sneered at (literally) for sticking with a “dead” company. It was pretty annoying, and a lot of people did give up on them.
> I don’t know if Chris Espinosa still works for Apple but I think he might have been around a couple of years before Gassé. He started as a teenager.
He's still at Apple, and was actually employee #8, making him its longest-serving employee according to his Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Espinosa
Wow, that's amazing... Starting at 14 years old! And a few years from retirement age now.
I started to work at a minicomputer company in the mid-80s. Product managers and the like still wore suits. Many older engineers still wore ties but engineering in general was shifting towards what we call business casual today.
I joined a Mac software startup in 1986. The two founders told me about going to the first Mac developers conference, they claimed it was them, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and a dozen or so other people from other companies.
MacHack was like that, into the early nineties.
You had close, personal contact with top Apple engineers, for three days. They were quite unpolished. Very different from Apple's presentation, these days.
Quite small; maybe only a couple hundred folks.
Lot of fun.
Did this change as Apple got bigger and then fell on hard times?
Also are you adding those proper quotation marks by hand?
I made the post from my iPad. I suspect it did the quotes. Let's "try" it from my computer...
Nowadays, people sneer at me for "working for The Man."
Being an Apple programmer has meant many years of being sneered at. No way to win...
I think you can toggle the smart quotes. I don't like them either. And if they happen to end up in code, it's insanely irritating.
I work with high-profile editorial and art staff. They need those quotes! They're often great at knowing how to insert them themselves, but others need that short cut. As it is, the quotes are hidden at `Opt + [` and `Opt + Shift + [` on my machine (Canadian English layout). [Oh, the war stories I have trying to sanitize text for moving from platform to platform...]
We're not the only ones using keyboards anymore, and we're in the minority of those who do!
Oh God yes! You get an obscure syntax error and it really isn't obvious what the problem is. It would be useful if syntax highlighting marked smart quotes (outside of strings) with a bright red background or something.
Jean-Louis wrote imho a pretty good book on his time at Apple. In fact I think it was better than Bill Gates book at the time.
https://www.amazon.com/Third-Apple-Personal-Computers-Revolu...
>> the benefit of a benign neglect
I love this phrase and looking back on my career see that I too have received this treasure. If you're a self-starter but work inside an established company there's no better situation than having lots of ideas, lots of blank space on the map and very little oversight.
Has he written about his experience starting and running Be, Inc? That should have more valuable insights for us.
See parts 15 - 18 here:
https://medium.com/@marie.gassee/jean-louis-gass%C3%A9es-50-...
Quote: "Perhaps a monkish geek with a taste for satire will build a “Woe-is-Apple” museum on the web."
Is that not daringfireball? I kid, John.
> Microsoft will be designing its own processors for its Surface laptop line and its cloud servers.
I love Satya’s Microsoft. But every time Microsoft tries to copy Apple they have failed miserably. I wish they don’t and instead focus on their strengths. But you never know, Satya’s proven us wrong on several occasions. So maybe this time is different?
While I generally agree, I think MS has to copy Apple here, but not because they need to make the same products. The M1 chip was Apple planting the flag for consumer-level ARM performance, and every indication is that they'll be able to scale that performance up to more demanding use-cases. MS's fortunes are tied to Intel and Qualcomm for the time being, both of whom are falling behind on performance and performance/watt, so they need to do something to remain competitive.
What would throw the world for a loop would be if MS secured an x86 license from Intel and developed their own chip with the performance/watt of the M1.
I wish there was a third entity in addition to Intel and Qualcomm that produced computer processing units that Windows would run on. Some kind of advanced micro devices that outperformed both Intel and Qualcomm would be really interesting to watch.
AMD has been doing great work over the past few years, but they've traditionally been a much smaller outfit (market cap for Intel is about 50% larger than AMD), and their work over the years has been off and on (they frequently compete more on price than anything else, although they did win the race to 1GHz two decades ago). I doubt it'd ever pass legal muster, but if Microsoft were to buy them (and their x86 license), I think they'd be able to do some very good work.
> AMD has been doing great work over the past few years
Yes - thus "MS's fortunes" is also tied to AMD.
> but they've traditionally been a much smaller outfit
Tradition isn't really the key here. Intel does explore more markets and holds much more market share (specifically desktop and laptop PCs) right now. AMD has been steadily growing in the desktop/laptop space, aside from their semi-custom (console) business, and they have made meaningful strides in performance and efficiency that at least keep Windows (and thus Microsoft) in the game now that Apple Silicon M1 has brought Macs to the table as competitive performers.
But - I'm less convinced Microsoft has to copy Apple and design efficient ARM chips in-house in order to remain competitive, at least in the PC business. I think we'll see some shifts in market share from Windows to MacOS, initially in laptops, and the rest will remain to be seen, but Apple should certainly become competitive in other PC areas as they roll out their new lines of CPUs. There are plenty of areas where AMD's performance CPUs remain very competitive, and Windows is still the preferred "mainstream" and "gamer" platform.
AMD?
Yep, that's the punch line
Copying is in Microsoft's DNA. I can barely think of a successful product they have made that wasn't a knock off of something else (lotus 123, azure, .NET, etc)
This, and the linked 50-year history, reminds me of “Computer: Bit Slices From a Life” by Herb Grosch [1]. What a journey!
[1]: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/computer.html
Btw, the article made me curious about the prospectus of Apple's IPO some 40 years ago. Here's a link for your archive. :)
https://www.sec.gov/apple-computer-inc-ipo-prospectus-form-s...
I am pleased at his positive attitude. There are many events that could have embittered him, but he writes them off as life lessons.
Sadly, he then was at the center of a non competitive fight between Apple and Google. After he left Apple, Google tried to hire him but was forced not to do it by Steve Jobs
https://pando.com/2014/03/27/how-steve-jobs-forced-google-to...
Interesting story but Jean-louis gassee is not the same person as Jean-marie hullot
Ops...my bad. I was wondering this morning why there seams to be a tradition at Apple to hire French engineers and executives.
The whole valley has been filled with top french engineers for 40 years. This brain drain is actually one of the reason france is in such a miserable state relative to IT economy. The only ones left are the ones prefering a cosy seat at a large established company. All the entrepreneurs have been leaving, and it’s a misery (another example under the spotlight now, although in a different field, is the head of moderna).
I have a friend from France who has a successful career in software (making good money in the United States).
His parents are kind of disappointed in my friend, though, because they don't believe his career is a "real job" (like a lawyer, doctor, financier etc.).
I think this is a contributing factor to why people leave. "Software Engineer", for all our quibbles over what it means, is comparatively well-respected and well-compensated job in the US. People want to live and work where their skills are valued.
Also the co-founder of Docker (lots of French people at Docker too, from what I know).
Same reason as for the UK. The money is better here.
It's something I never understood.
Worked along folks from EPFL, the X and Poly. What they told me about their startup ecosystem back home was unbelievable. And compensation was a joke too.
Are French folks... aware their smartest are in California?
If I may speculate wildly:
* France (and other French speaking countries) produce well qualified engineers.
* As others have pointed out, France can be perceived as a rather inhospitable place for entrepreneurial people.
* On the other hand, Apple may be a little bit more aligned with French values than other Silicon Valley companies: Pride of auteurship, opinionated design, and occasional stubbornness in the face of customer complaints. I think a French engineer will recognize a certain je ne sais quoi in "you're holding it wrong" ;-)