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

Steve Jobs is famous for being the man behind one of the most iconic tech companies in the world, Apple. Of course, the individual is long gone, but the company has persevered. When the company was in its early days, the team still had some issues to resolve. In the early days of the Macintosh computer, users often complained about the boot time, the time it takes for the computer to start up. Jobs had a unique way of looking at work and was able to push one of his engineers to make a fix. According to Dane McFarlane, who recently shared this story on their website, Steve Jobs made it a matter of life and death.

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

Do you often wonder how much time you spend on certain tasks? How much of your life is spent commuting to work? How much of your life is spent asleep? Watching TV? How much time do you spend wondering about how much time you spend on things? There’s no real way to be exact, but you can make educated guesses. When Macintosh users complained about how long it took their computers to start, it bothered Jobs. How much time were people spending waiting for their computer to be ready to use? One minute on any given day doesn’t seem like much, but it all adds up.

Larry Kenyon was the engineer responsible for the disk driver and file system on a Macintosh. Jobs approached him about shaving some time off the boot speed. Jobs had the “big picture” in mind. He wasn’t just thinking about the individual user, but the collective impact that all that saved time would have. “Say you can shave ten seconds off the boot time. Multiply that by five million users, that’s 50 million seconds saved, every single day. Over a year, that’s probably dozens of lifetimes!”

While the comparison to “life and death” might be a bit dramatic, Jobs’ perspective was that collectively, the amount of time saved by all these people would equate to giving someone a life back. Maybe even several lifetimes. So, while it may seem insignificant on the individual level, Jobs was looking at the problem from a larger perspective.

Kenyon went on to cut a full twenty-eight seconds off the Macintosh boot time. Extrapolate that to the millions of users still using Apple computers today, and it’s a statistic that’s hard to imagine.

• Apple
• Steve Jobs
• tech