What if Steve Jobs built an oscilloscope?

This aritlce is a home run, pure and simple!

There has already been a scope that may have well been designed by Steve Jobs. It was those old HP scopes that only had one knob. That was in days when software people thought the world wanted no buttons. It is the same driver as Steve Jobs had, a total contempt for the customer. Steve and HP thought we were too stupid to have three buttons on our mouse and a vertical and horizontal knob on the scope. Jobs will always be hailed since trendy phony poseurs will suffer with button-less crap to try and look edgy and cool. Engineers need to get some work done, so we insist on enough buttons and knobs to get the job done. Touch screens were tried by HP too, 16500 mainframe. It sucked, every time you pointed to something the analyzer went off to a menu. We asked to get a mouse so we could turn off the touchscreens. My machinist buddies refuse to use touchscreens too. They are huddled over a spinning spindle, and need to feel real knobs and switches as they set up the tools. No, Steve was a viscous phony that abused engineers and conned customers. Thank heaven Agilent abandoned those goof-ball scopes and put the horizontal and vertical knobs back on front panel. I hear they even trigger OK these days.

If he built it the way he built his computers, the probe connections would not be compatible with other test probe manufacturers, it would only test/display signals you had to buy from Apple.

On the down side, the iScope would be a closed system, kind of mechanically fragile, and barely configurable at the UI.
On the plus side, the one good thing would be that it would be running Unix instead of some bastard Windows rubbish. Jobs had the guts to dump a crappy old OS instead of putting a new bow on an old OS and incrementing its number.
So the iScope would work for most things, and the rest you would have to drop down to the shell prompt. Oh, and you could run it for 6 months without rebooting.

Apple builds products that are VERY appropriate to the user, whoever that may be, and whatever their needs may be. Their reputation for customer service is and has been at the top for most of the history of the company. If Apple built a scope, I would expect it to perform functions in ways that would be intuitive and labor-saving, and have engineers saying "why didn't we do things this way all along?".

Holy cow, what a bunch of geeks we are! The best part of Apple stuff is that it doesn’t have all the knobs and switches, configuration, and so forth and we like to tinker. It is a different market but it is a big market. Just because it is not for us doesn’t mean a lot of people don’t want it that way. It is hard to argue with his success.

If Jobs built a scope...
It would be built in slave labor markets abroad!

iScope-4 released last month, with a month long battery life, automatic setup, pinch and zoom capability it is very portable and good looking instrument.
But,due to company policy;
Does not have any ports to connect probes.
It can only display the waveforms you sould buy from Apple Store.
If you want to display your own waveforms, you should send the waveforms and the related circuit diagram to Apple and wait for an answer.
Additionaly, the current iScope-4 can only display sine & square waves not to load the processor. But rumors are that, iScope-5 due next year will have the capability to measure triangular waves.

???

Jobs wasn't so swift, he thought he could cure cancer by wishing it away, what a TOOL. He took someone Else's stuff and re packaged it in a Chinese box. Whoopie. Invented nothing, musta been quite dumb, I'll eat fruit, and do chants, now that will take care of the cancer. Moron

>>>>scopes today have a mouse
Wow there, a mouse on a crouded bench top is crazy and I dislike those Infinnium scopes so much for requiring a mouse. If Apple did a O-Scope it would have a cool iPad Gesture interface that worked great. Unfortunately it would also have a non user replacable battery so that every three years you would have to replace your $50k scope! But ase for me, I like my old Tek scopes just fine, lots of easy to use knobs and buttons.

It would have one large, white, knob in the centre of a white front panel. You would select the function of the knob by cycling through a series of 784 different states. Engineers would hate it. It would receive a design award and be featured in the Museum of Modern Art.

It would look like how we plan to build, check it out on www.macxmum.com
Thanks for a very interesting conversation!

I have a new Tek DSO with knobs and buttons. It does tricks my old Tek scope could never do. I'm quite happy with it. I don't need flashy apps and styling. I need accurate measurements, triggering that captures the waveform, and a decent method of downloading captured waveforms. Touch screens are no good, we're in a diry shop. How about a built in Go-Jo dispenser? Ha. Let Mr. Jobs RIP.

Bubba got it right, Mr.Jobs was modern time Phoenician, he sold the dumbed-down mass market the modern days of the shiny marbles, and generated result on the stock market, unfortunately he was not alone.

The tone of responses so far conjures up a mental image of Michael Douglas in "Falling Down." Terminal technosis. Exult in your engineering abilities, open your mind and contribute of your talent. Growling about the purity of your niche is, well, watch the movie.

It is fascinating thought; there is tons of efficiency that Scopes have yet to achieve. I observed one of my Engineers the other day using his iPhone to take a picture of the scope display on the newest model of Tek Scope, when asked why, he said network security.

Should I spend time here asking about Apple's 4G phone (oops, I better buy a droid)? Should I complain about the corporate structure of Tek? How about Agilent's inability to design a scope that actually measures , what with only a few warrantied specs (almost all of their published specs are "typical".... look in their brochures)? What may really need addressing is that a whole new generation of engineers is entering the market and they don't want to interface with knobs, they want to write their own apps or acquire them cheaply, and they want the ability to quickly communicate via the web. Scopes are not the only instruments that don't readily meet their way of thinking.

I wouldn't want an iScope. I'd want a moderately priced but fully programmable scope module that connected to my computer (laptop, tablet etc.) via USB, with -open source- core software and an active software exchange forum where I could share programming tips, apps. and experience with other engineers. A lot of this capability is already available -- but sadly not the support forum (that I know of).

I would expect to have a voice enabled user interface. How awesome would it be to just say "trigger" or "arm" while you are holding probes with two hands with your head inside a chassis finding probe points.

The iScope is only supported with approved iParts electronic parts. They are just fine and you should be happy to design with them. We expect to add iInductors and iCapacitors in V2.0.

I can't believe all the whining on this page. You completely missed his question. He asked what cool features you would love in an o'scope. I have yet to see one answer to that. That includes from me. I am not up to date enough in that department to comment. I probably want something that has been on the market for five years.

A scope with excellent build quality, flashy touch screen interface and a significant price premium?
Sounds like Rohde&Schwarz.

90% of Tektronix (actually Danaher - Tektronix exists in name only now) hiring is in Shenzhen CHINA, not Oregon. Tektronix scopes have a touch screen.Tektronix s/w is closed and only available from Tektronix. About the only thing left off is white probe wires and case color.
Sounds like Jobs has been working at Tek all along to vet his ideas for consumer devices, he recently quit Apple in his usual hissy fit, but to preserve his Apple stock price he's as dead as Elvis.
Your cover story for Jobs' next Danaher creation is one I don't buy, Jit - we'll wait for sightings of Jobs in Vegas to prove my point.

If Steve Jobs built an oscilloscope it would have white probes, mediocre performance, and crappy batteries that needed replaced in less than one year, but Job's wouldn't care because he'd expect you to want and buy the latest and greatest iScope 2 for Christmas. Steve Jobs didn't make great products, he convinced idiots that they wanted/needed his proprietary products and the pattern continues.

So you don't currently buy all your calibration and expansion software through Agilent or Tek for the corresponding machine, like they want you to? Cause if you don't, you must be "jailbreaking" your test equipment, (which you can also do with the iXxx devices...) And all those "non-standard proprietary undocumented connectors" - you mean like like USB and Firewire and Ethernet and ExpressCard? And "other manufacturers caught up and then surpassed" - what, like the Zune did, or Winphone 7 (or whatever they now call it)? Or are you referring instead to Android, a pretty good mobile OS that the phone carriers then do a pretty good job of kludging up and/or not rolling out security patches for, while allowing malware into the only avenue for adding apps (one of the App stores / Market)? You mean like that? Good one!

The "Apple" company of test instruments was never Tektronix, but the old Hewlett-Packard. Indeed freshly graduated engineers were clamoring to work for H-P, including Steve Wozniak (who did work there before Apple had a payroll). That company still exists, now called Agilent, but its products all seem to be in the very high end of the market, too expensive for most engineers outside of the defense supply chain to get our hands on.

One thing Jobs did best is to design for his users; PCs and most software is "designed" to add as many features as the designers can conceive, without any consideration of what user's need or convenience (i.e., Human Factors Design). This may appeal to those who love technological puzzles and custom adaptations, but it is a nuisance to those who are buying a product to get a job done. For example, Microsoft still does not have uniform user interfaces among their several office programs, and PCs have a battery of special function keys, but Apple has pull-down menus with uniform commands (except for Microsoft, which made their own bastard format for their Macintosh software.

Get real, Jobs wasn't even an engineer. I don't think he would know how to use an oscope. And if Apple sold oscopes, they would infuriate real engineers who want tools and not straightjackets.
Keep your Apple crap, it was all downhill since the Apple II.

It takes a great leader and a great team to put together such an instrument for engineers to design, debug and develop....on the lines of the iPod, iPad and iPhone. Don't think Tektronix has the passion for it, the way it is run today. Agilent can probably do it, given their Infiniium background, but only if they really want to revolutionize. So it is unlikely a Steve Jobs' kind of iScope will ever be there.

It would be nightmare for all engineers as there would no way to customize the scope to ones applications or requirements.

The best things that the extrapolator at Apple did (probably not Jobs, but he recognized good engineers), was to make an OS and hardware (the current Mac laptops) with no 'coffee heater' fan, instant on from sleep mode (my PC laptop takes a minute or so), and 8-10 hours battery life... I always wondered why college students with Macs didn't have their AC adapters. Mac OS could use much improvement, but it doesn't struggle to breathe.

Check out Oscium on iPad. It's not a "pro level" scope but it allows me to show product concepts on the road without the need for a bulky display.

Typical engineer responses. But, as Bubba astutely observed, Apple's i-Devices were for the masses. That's why it's so easy for a 3-year old to use one (without even know who Jobs is), while the majority of the population can barely operate the new 3DTVs let alone a scope.

1. I don’t believe that Steve Jobs did anything particularly clever with the I Pod, it was a creation of his legal department
2. The apple computer brought capabilities to compute to those that maybe shouldn’t, what with its closed architecture.
3. I have a droid.
4. I use a Tektronix scope. It is simple and integrates well with the rest on the world.

Can't agree more with Budda. The iXxxx is for dummies. Are iXxxxs really easy to use? yes, if you only do what Jobs want you to do. NOOOO, if you want a little bit further, and has a little computer knowledge, then it's the most stupid device you have ever used.

You would have to buy all your calibration and expansiohn software theougth the iTest App Store, you could not add peripherals unless they were approved and licensed, and every connector would be proprietary and undocumented. It would look attractive, and fanboys would fawn over it, but every year they would buy the latest just-a-little-better version, while other manufacturers caught up, and then surpassed the iScope.

I simply don't think that Mr. Jobs would design a piece of test equipment. He sold to the mass market with dumbed-down UI, and liked to remove expansion capability. Engineers need the down and dirty access as well as expansion capability.
Also, I can't see anyone scrambling to work for Tektronix (or Fluke) since their acquisition by the mega-corp....