It’s 9am Wednesday in the mid-1980s. You turn on your computer, ready to start your day. But instead of being greeted by a familiar desktop, you’re forced to wait… minutes. As the seconds tick by, your frustration grows.
This was a common experience for early Macintosh users, and it became a personal crusade for Steve Jobs.
In the early days of Apple, the company faced a double-edged sword. Their new powerful Macintosh boasted a processor ten times faster than the widely used Apple II. But its weak spot was the floppy disk.
With limited RAM, data had to be transferred a lot, and the floppy disk’s slow speed became a major bottleneck. This erased much of the Macintosh’s processing power advantage.
And it wasn’t just data transfers that were slow—booting up the Macintosh took an agonising amount of minutes.
The slow boot time bothered Steve Jobs deeply. So he set out to shake things up.
One day, Steve marched into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, the engineer responsible for the disk driver and file system.
“The Macintosh boots too slowly. You’ve got to make it faster!”
Larry, like any good engineer, offered technical explanations of how he could make improvements. But Steve wasn’t interested in the details. He had a bigger picture in mind.
“How many people will be using the Macintosh?” he asked. “A million? No, even more! In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macs every day.
“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!”
Steve always knew the importance of the bigger picture. When every second of boot time is multiplied by millions of users: that’s a lot of time saved!
It was never just about making the Macintosh faster for one person—it was about the collective impact. Every second meant more time users could spend being creative, productive, or simply enjoying the device.
The story was always a favourite of mine, and you can read the original here. But, with this in mind, there’s one more addendum to the story I’d like to recount.
How Apple found you can do even more…
While users might complain about specific issues like boot time, there’s one more important thing you can do.
You need to dig deeper to find the real cause of frustration. The real solution may not be fixing boot time at all.
Years later, when working on MacOS 8.x, Apple’s engineers ran across a similar situation. After running customers surveys, they were told that boot time was the number one pain point.
But why do people care about boot time? How often do you really need to boot up your computer?
When they followed this path, they found the answer: the computer was unstable and would frequently crash.
Focusing on faster boot times wouldn’t solve the root cause of user frustration. Instead, the team fixed the underlying bugs that caused the crashes, cutting the need for reboots in the first place.
When the new release arrived, users reported less frustration. Not because boot times were drastically faster, but because they happened far less often.
Final thoughts
If you want to build something people love, you can’t just fix the symptoms—you have to go after the root cause.
Solving surface-level problems might make things look better for a while, but it doesn’t last. Real progress comes from figuring out what’s actually wrong.
The next time a customer complains, don’t just patch the obvious issue. Think about how widespread the problem is and what’s really driving it.
Customers don’t always know how to explain what’s frustrating them, but if you can understand the deeper problem, you’ll build something that not only works better but feels better to use.
That’s what leads to loyalty and satisfaction that lasts.
