Technology

Jobs definitely pushed engineers to work harder than they would have otherwise.

For example he complained the first prototype iPod was too bulky. And when they said it can't possibly be made any smaller he tossed it in a fish tank and pointed at the bubbles as proof that it could be made smaller - the prototype was full of empty space/air.

There have been some detailed stories from the engineer that invented the first small touch screen keyboard that actually worked well, as part of a larger team that worked their asses off repeatedly being told their keyboard wasn't good enough over and over. Steve was so unhappy with the early iterations that he was going to scrap the entire iPhone project unless they could fix it on a short deadline. From the stories it was clearly an extremely stressful project, with engineers pulled off other products to try to get the keyboard to work, but they cracked it - with a complex system that algorithmically (and invisibly) adjusted the size of each key based on english language patterns.

Even that wasn't good enough. Steve gave it the all clear to ship that keyboard but years after the release he sent them back to start over from scratch. iPhone keyboards didn't work like that for long. The latest version uses a scaled down version of a Large Language Model (Apple calls it a "Transformer-powered" that learns not just from english (or whatever language) but also your personal typing habits.