Steve Jobs on Silicon Graphics Workstations
What Jobs talks about
Jobs says Apple doesn't have time to use “toys instead of tools” and needs to buy the best available tools for its engineers. In this recording, that means Silicon Graphics workstations, especially the Octane.
He praises the Octane as easy to use, years ahead of the competition, and uniquely capable for the work Apple is doing. He ties the choice directly to engineering productivity and faster design iteration.
The main point is practical: better tools let engineers run more analysis, test larger models, and optimize designs faster. Jobs quantifies the gain by saying certain models that took an hour and a half on an Indigo II Impact now take about half an hour on Octane.
Jobs speaks throughout.
In his words
“We don't have time to horse around.”
“We don't have time to use toys instead of tools.”
“We love Octane.”
“It's very easy to use, and it's doing a lot to change the way we do business here”
“I can run about twice as many iterations in the same amount of time.”
Key points
- Apple needs the best available tools, not toys.
- SGI Octane is the workstation Jobs and his team prefer.
- He calls Octane easy to use and years ahead of the competition.
- High-performance workstations let engineers run more iterations and larger models.
- Faster computing directly improves design optimization and productivity.
- Octane cuts one of his Mechanica runs from about an hour and a half to half an hour.
Full transcript
We don't have time to horse around. We don't have time to use toys instead of tools. We have to buy the best available tools for these people. And every time we look, it comes out SGI, and we love Octane. It's very easy to use, and it's doing a lot to change the way we do business here, and it is years ahead of the competition. There's nobody else out there that has this tool available. As an engineer, we need a high-performance workstation so we can run more iterations of analysis on larger models, so we can optimize our design faster. I've been running many Mechanica models on the new Octane workstation, and models that took me about an hour and a half to run on my Indigo II Impact, I can now complete in a half hour.
I can run about twice as many iterations in the same amount of time.
Transcribed from the audio with OpenAI Whisper. Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.