First of all, in case anyone's reading this in the future: Steve Jobs died in 2011, and both my posts and the posts I was responding to were written in 2025. Also, as far as I know, time travel hasn't been invented yet, and I'm assuming my readers also believe that it hasn't been invented, so I'm expecting it to be clear that isn't an actual call to action.
One of my first thoughts was responding with something like "What did he do that was so bad that a time traveller needed to kill him when they did?" but I decided it would be more interesting to make up some dystopian alternate timeline and pretend I was posting from that.
I thought about suggesting that the time traveller kill him by convincing him to be into alternative medicine (due to how he actually died), but I was thinking if this whole thing were actually true, I would have had a bigger part in it than just suggesting the date… don't want to risk some time police taking my post too seriously. (Someone else in the notes did suggest that.)
Okay, so then what did Apple make that was so bad in this timeline? I looked up which year he died, and what Apple had come out with that year, and found Siri. Apparently it was announced after he died, but not that long after, so he probably was involved. Hmm… wearable Siri, so that it's always listening to you… wait, no, that already exists. Maybe if I were more confident in being able to convey my posting-from-alternate-timeline idea I could have pulled it off, the joke being that we do have the Apple Watch in this timeline, but I decided to go with something worse instead.
I did use the idea of putting something in the dystopian timeline that already exists, in suggesting that he came up with the idea of microtransactions ("minisales")… I didn't remember when those became popular, though I seem to remember them being common in smartphone games, so I figured it was probably after the iPhone. (Looking it up, looks like it was earlier than that, though given the means of killing him, the actual point of divergence is early enough that maybe some butterfly effect delayed the introduction of microtransactions in the timeline with Siri Inside.)
After posting my first reply, I thought of a different idea. One of my issues with Apple products is certain design decisions that feel a bit hostile to people who want to listen to their own music rather than commercial music (notably the inability to copy music from an iPod, presumably from the assumption that you'll only ever listen to music that you don't own the copyright to, and the fact that it's more difficult than it should be to just get an audio file into the built-in Music application or set it as a ringtone (it's not impossible, though, so it could be much worse than it is)), and of course, they have the iTunes Music Store, and therefore have an incentive to get you to use that.
Hence, my idea was, what if they also had a photo store, and expected you to only buy professionally-taken photos through that instead of taking your own photos? Wait, but people often want pictures of people they know... Oh, I could make this way more dystopian, having everyone's phone have a camera that's constantly looking for good photo opportunities, which will then be professionally selected and edited and sold back to the users and their friends and family (at least, they claim they'll only sell them to friends and family). And of course, they'd want to get rid of the regular Camera application so people don't just use that instead (and given the actual point of divergence is far enough back, this could end up with the iPhone never having a Camera application in the first place).
I also thought about suggesting that Steve Jobs had become president of the US in 2016, and saying that whoever became president in this timeline can't have been worse than Steve Jobs and his disasterous Jobs jobs policy. But I felt less comfortable actually attributing things in this fictional timeline to a specific person… I think maybe I felt differently about the rest of it because I didn't directly say what part Steve Jobs had in any of this. It's even possible that he wasn't the CEO of Apple at the time, and all this happened through a bunch of butterfly effect-y stuff.
…and now this commentary is way longer than the original story.