Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.
They shipped AirPods and the Apple Watch during his tenure. And the ahem, Vision Pro. The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everything.
In the startup and business world you reward execution not ideas. Ideas are easy.
I have an idea for a memristor based neural processor for low power on device AI, but its worthless because I dont have the 9 billion dollars to realize this idea...
Let's not get into absolutes. Ideas can be as hard or harder than execution. Not many will claim ideas like Special Relativity are easy to come by.
It really depends on the idea and what you're executing. Often in business both the idea and the execution have to work out to captialize. In this case Jobs might have set the direction and Cook capitalized. Both deserve a share of the credit.
Cook is definitely one of the world’s best operators (I think he was COO during Jobs’ tenure). But he is not a visionary by any stretch. Maybe Apple itself does not need a visionary, but I think tech needs one.
Before Cook, Apple’s supply chain and manufacturing was a mess—too many of some products and not enough of others.
Back in the day, it was a running joke trying to buy products as an organization—they would announce a new Mac but you couldn’t buy it for 4-6 weeks.
It was Tim Cook who implemented Apple’s build to order system after Dell demonstrated its success. We take it for granted now, but it was a huge development at the time.
> The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
Your point reads as pro Cook to me. We got hardware that decreased obsolescence.
If anything I’d be pissed if Cook was out and the new CEO’s strategy involved making chips that needed upgrades every other year again. Or if they were like, “Macs don’t sell well, let’s cancel the product line.”
I don't necessarily see any reason to attribute this specific outcome to Cook, though. But from a stockholder perspective this is a bit mixed.
Of course Macs are still very profitable compared to what PC makers are making. Now they share a lot of the hardware and software stack with iPad/iPhone. So it shouldn't be too costly to maintain. And well Apple's entire ecosystem is built on them anyway. It's not like anyone besides masochists would consider actually developing apps on iPads...
Yeah, I suppose there was a point he had to sign off on the decision so there is that. Hard to say if his role amounted to anything more than that (maybe it did).
> judged by outcomes
In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over what was probably the company's darkest period (remains to be seen of course) and the situation was reasonably stable when he took over. Is he the one to blame for all of it?
Brian Krzanich was the primary architect of Intel's demise. A huge amount of Intel's problems stem from opting to go with DUV rather than EUV light source for lithography, and this decision was made during Krzanich's tenure. This may have stemmed from Krzanich's lack of technical expertise. Gelsinger was brought in to fix things, but the board of directors got uncomfortable with the amount of money required to fix the problem.
It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.
I’m with you. I think Cook has done pretty well. A replacement is not automatically going to be better. I’d wager there’s a good chance we get someone who just wants to squeeze margins rather than invest in risky and logistically complex hardware like the M chips on the Macs.
We call it the Gonad Touch, and we think you’re going to love it.
Apparently the name iBalls was considered, but just well it was rejected. The Gonad Pocket accessory is on hold pending litigation by Borat over his Mankini patents.
Not as a shareholder, but as a customer and user I’m very ok if they just focus on making those rectangles.
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.
No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.
Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.
Sure fine by me, but the comment I am responding to seems to be longing for a new Jobs like figure that will prioritize “innovation” to take over. I don’t think the GP is talking about an iMessage export feature. We have no reason to believe Jobs himself would care about any of the points you have listed (all of which seem great to me).
For me, I’ve been fine with bean-counter Cook. MacBooks and iPhones are not perfect, but I strongly prefer them to the competition.
My mistake, I misremembered. s1mplicissimus makes a very good point. What I do remember is it's designed to capture telemetry opt-in of people who aren't savvy and just click next, next, next.
Usually, there's a default blue bordered button and a non-highlighted grey one.
Any chance the default blue button says "Share diagnostics"? Because that would still make it an opt-out
With Liquid glAss CarPlay on non touchscreen cars they changed the button colors so that gray is the selected item and blue/green are not selected. Also they changed the back on-screen button to be the default, or sometimes they select the item you want but then a second later change focus to the back button.
When you first use CarPlay there are consent screens so there are definitely people out there who have picked the wrong one.
Technically yes, but most would consider an opt-out some tiny little nearly illegible that confuses the user into allowing it without deselecting. This is a clear choice given to the user. No gimmicky opt-outs.
I've been talking about switching to iOS from Android for over a decade. When Google finally pissed me off enough to get serious last year I just happened to buy my mom an ipad and perform the setup. Bad experience. Then helping my wife with her iphone cemented it: no way. I thought apple would be perfectly polished albeit a little restricted vs android but it was just as janky except in different ways.
Does any CEO actually use their own company's products?
The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread..
And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app even though Notes could have done all that if they had improved it a bit.
Steve Jobs was probably one of the few people in charge who actually used his company's own products. You need someone who's annoyed with the status quo enough to make a company to solve it, not just someone elected by a board.
Hm I live and breathe our product portfolio. That is the entire reason for me waking up for work every day. I do consider myself a 'product' CEO though and passion for great products is what keeps me in tech.
Kudos to that! I kid you not: yesterday I used bing to search for “CRA my business account” (Canadian IRS equivalent) to set up some payments and the first result below copilot was a phishing site with a cloned UI! Makes me thankful for services like yours (and angry about the other things).
The opposite problem can happen- the CEO uses the product all the time and becomes blind to problems. “It has always worked that way”, or “who would want to do that!?”” are much more common than pure apathy.
> I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.
Because most products, including iOS/macOS now, have glaring annoyances or shortcomings that have gone unfixed for a long time.
If Tim Cook or even Craig Federighi etc. actually used iOS/macOS in their day to day lives, they would have run into those issues sooner or later and they'd be fixed in a day.
Plenty of CEOs do. The comment you replied to already questioned Tim Cook's usage of Apple products.
Most Apple executives are probably using a Mac. Most engineers at Apple probably code on a Mac. Most engineers in the Bay already use Macs and have been using them for many years.
Such a silly comment. Is your theory that everyone with any decision making authority at Apple doesn't actually use the product? Even when it comes to "glaring annoyances or shortcomings"?
So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage. Like I'm so annoyed by this "glaring issue" on my device clearly the people working on this don't even use it or "it would be fixed in a day". Lol. Maybe people who actually have to get things done at a trillion dollar company don't have the same constraints as you, or relatedly, the luxury to obsess over your so-called glaring issues.
It’s not a silly comment, both macOS and iOS have been decaying into dog shit over the years from obvious bugs that anyone who uses the apps and features being sold would run into very quickly.
Tim and other executives might be using their devices as email machines, but it’s not obvious they’re using everything they’re quite literally selling us.
2: The Music app is barely functional, and will regularly fail to play music. Here it is bugging out, and stacking multiple album covers https://imgur.com/a/Sg8oU1p
> So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage.
Hey you try waiting 5+ years on a bug report/feature request for a simple thing. Or things like a rendering bug that survives all year throughout beta into the X.1 release (see the Tahoe Contacts app)
You'd give up. This "outrage" is all the outlet we have left. Shame the system that lets such crap get through!
> If you think Tim Cook is pulling a Samsung Galaxy out of his pocket, I don't know what to tell you.
He should. He should literally be using competitors for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.
>He should. He should literally be using iPhones for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.
Is this some parody of bad social critique? You know not every trope applies in all cases, right? A greedy CEO not using his own product doesn't readily apply the higher in the value chain you get. You replied to a comment mentioning how it's obviously silly to think Tim Cook uses a Samsung Galaxy. Yet it seems like maybe you missed the point... or do you also think decision makers at Apple are using Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel phones? Or Windows surfaces or Dell laptops instead of MacBooks? Or maybe there is some designer bespoke OS or Ferrari level brand equivalent you are privy to that I'm missing? Or is your theory that he is so wealthy his use of personal butlers and subordinates ensures he never does any computing himself? He never sends a text or gets a personal phone call, or if he does some man-servant picks it up so he doesn't have to deal with the iOS interface that has been clearly designed for "poor people"?
Then the ending comment that again can't seem to distinguish a generalized slogan re a broad social grievance with a specific claim or discussion. And the sense of personal victimization. Because something is annoying you, well clearly you are being taken advantage of. You didn't even contribute anything pertinent to the discussion except to complain about a wholly unrelated UX experience, only to limply tie it together by doing nothing more than conclude that obviously both CEOs are richer than you are.
MacOs and iOs are going off the rails. It is clear the CEO is not providing a vision, not guiding the direction, and not assuring the quality of those products.
While not as bad as Windows, which has way too many chefs in the kitchen, it is getting there.
Sorry, are you suggesting that Cook doesn't use a computer in his day-to-day work, or has a Windows PC or Linux box in his office? Somehow I doubt that.
Cook is on record in 2012 as using an iPad for 80% of his work, which mostly involves communication activities such as making decisions, responding to emails, and viewing documents. With how Apple has since then differentiated iPadOS and released accessories to make the iPad more laptop like, I'd guess that percentage has only increased.
The iPad was launched in 2010 and seen as a device to play around with - a big ipod. Two years later they were in the midst of the big push for using iPads for business, in hospitals, in cafes to replace PoS, in factories, etc. So you say the CEO of Apple uses it for work, if it's good enough for him it's good enough for you. I highly doubt he doesn't use an actual computer.
> if it's good enough for him it's good enough for you
Strange argument. e.g. Warren Buffet allegedly doesn't even have a computer.
Most people don't really have a team of assistants and other subordinates extracting and processing all of the information they might need to make high level decisions. And I'm pretty sure the employees doing that are generally using actual computers rather than tablets for most stuff.
He’s a CEO with a strong C suite backing him. I doubt Tim Cook has a need for an actual computer. I struggle to think of why he’d need one to perform his job duties.
Jobs blasted folks for bad experiences, whereas I get tripped up by updates making me run through the OOBE, that doesn't contain anything, because its already set up.
The last update ran through the "connect to WiFi" process, and failed because it was already set up and connected to WiFi, but blocked everything until I managed to get through the pointless Next Next Next process. It felt like Windows in 2000.
It'd be interesting to get a new CEO that gets organically exposed to the same corner-cases roulette you play on a MBP with an actual second screen attached. After more than a decade of straying from the happy path I gave up and was bullied into clamshell mode for my own sanity.
The best Apple products that I have bought werde made in the Cook area. The M* MacBooks changed the game in terms of overall package. It's hard to overstate how much better I think they are than what was around during Jobs times and the gap has been closing only very slowly.
Whatever he facilitated, it worked for me. Execution matters.
I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustainability v's replace it every 12-24 months. I guess sustainability concerns at Apple ends at ensuring their stock price is sustainable.
What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months?
I've had only two iPhones for almost 11 years. An iphone 6s and currently an iPhone 13 mini there entire time.
They're solidly reliable
The camera iterates significantly every other year. My kid plays baseball, from little league to now high school ball. The pictures I can take on my iPhone are incredible. (I’d do the same thing with a Pixel or Samsung if I was a Android person)
My work phones are typically on a 4-5 year cycle. I’m currently carrying a 12 or 13 pro. I would have upgraded early for USB-C with that phone, but MagSafe is good enough.
Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade.
I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.
You have kids? I want pictures At random points throughout the day while doing random things, every day. I’m not a photographer that keeps a SLR camera on me at all times.
I don't see the need to photograph every second of their life, 50 years old over here, having gone through times when taking kids pictures were limited to 12, 24 and 36 attempts.
My only two iPhones have been the iPhone SE 2016, and the 13 mini.
I miss the SE but the 13 mini is really nice too. It's a shame because the SE is still perfectly capable of running most software I use on a phone, but that software has just gotten more inefficient over time.
Apple says they stopped producing minis because they didn't sell. It seems they sold relatively better than the Air, and pretty much everyone I know who still uses a device of "13" or earlier generation, is on a mini. That's about 5 people just in my social circle still on a 13 Mini, and 0 people on any other non-Mini 13th or older generation. I reckon that's the real reason they stopped making them, people who use them, are willing to stay with their phones for much longer periods. Could also be that they break less due to being smaller.
Yes. The kind of people who use iPhone minis are generally more reasonable and won't spent too much time doomscrolling on them or overusing them for random stuff (like pretending you are a good photographer).
In that sense they are very bad customers because they won't upgrade for social status reason or just novelty. They actually need to come up with something that is worthwhile, which is pretty hard.
That being said, I'm pretty sure many of those users would upgrade if they could keep the small format and make it more reasonably affordable by removing most of "useless" stuff. It seems like they tried that with the air (no multiple cameras, no multiple speakers) but they made it too big and went with thinness for feeling points. They could have just kept it reasonably sized (under 6") and designed the internals in the same way while keeping it flat but not too thick.
I think Apple is a bit lost because their design focus too much on looks/feelings and social status points. They lack the focus that Apple products used to have, this is what made them interesting: deceptively simple in presentation but actually providing everything that you need without going crazy on the gimmicks.
As it is, one wonders why he should go with an iPhone. They are just chasing specs sheet points, trying to maximise the amounts of stuff they can put on the phone in order to create the appearance of "value". At this game they get destroyed by competitors like Samsung and even more the Chinese. Before, one could argue for an iPhone because of the CPU lead or the software but nowadays none of those things really matters or can even be considered an advantage.
Apple will keep selling lot's of iPhone because they are still somewhat the "hip" brand and people really don't like to change habits. But they are going to need to provide more value in the long term. Since the high-end doesn't meaningfully evolve anymore, brands have started a price war and Apple will definitely need to adapt if it doesn't want to have its crown stollen. In the US they have some time, but I think they are already losing ground in the EU and China has clearly stopped caring about their devices.
I have the 22 SE and I suspect I’ll get 3 more years out of it before they EOL it. I would have bought the 16e if it wasn’t such a blatant money grab. Touch ID is going to be hard to give up
I'm kind of the opposite, I would never want to go back to Touch ID. It's so nice that you can set your notifications to be private by default, but the contents will be revealed when you glance at the phone.
I think it really matters how you store your phone as to the usefulness of Touch ID. Someone storing it in their front pocket will have it always available in an ideal position to unlock on grab, whereas someone storing it anywhere that doesn't lock it in a position like that is going to see less benefit of being able to unlock the thing as they grab it.
I just had to get a new phone old was a 2020 SE (Previous was a 6S plus) so 5 years.
The new phone is FaceId ioty is much less reliable than touch id. With touch it just fails if I have wet hands or in cold weather with gloves, faceId fails in many places.
Agreed, pulling the phone out of a pocket with my thumb on the home button and having it unlocked and ready to use by the time I look at it is is ideal.
Much better than having to pull it out, hold in in a way that it can see my face, then swipe up, then wait for the stupid animation at the top of the screen to finish and the actual unlock to occur and then finally be able to use the device.
Since 2010: 3GS, 6S and now an SE. All of them were dropped, submerged and generally knocked around. The SE fell off the top of a moving vehicle. I do use an Otter case.
Similar -- I'm currently nursing a 13 mini (the lightning port barely works, so I'm on magsafe). and before that I had an iPhone XS I think -- that one I managed to break the screen (the only time I've ever done that, I dropped it in a metal elevator). I replaced the screen but it was never the same.
So I didn't go 11 years on two models, more like 7 years or so. But I'm definitely not on the two-years-and-upgrade plan.
I had a 12 mini for 5 years, it was a really lucky year to buy one because of MagSafe. The lightning ports just don’t hold up as well as the rest of it.
Thanks, I did. Maybe I just have linty pockets? It can charge sometimes if I press the lightning cable end down or up just so. And that gets a little better maybe if I toothpick it, but only maybe and only for one or two times?
I’ve had a 6+ and a 12. I guess 18 should be coming along soon, maybe it will be with an upgrade. But the 12 still feels… I dunno, really quite good.
I’ve also had it in a case the whole time, if I opened a box and found this thing I don’t think I’d be unhappy. Other than the inevitable gunk that gets in the speakers and the charging hole, it could be new…
I guess it is a race between battery health (80%) and update incompatibility, to see what will kill the thing.
Its a threesome! (cringe) Yes, our iPhones really get pounded on and end up with so much street credibility as they look like they were shot with bullets but they keep working.
I think a more charitable reading is that OS upgrades left their devices barely usable to the point of having to be replaced. I'm not a big Apple person so don't have personal experience but have heard similar stories from multiple other people, that OS upgrades wrecked the old devices they were still using.
Two iPads, an iPod Touch and an iPhone of mine have been made unusable by OS updates. If Apple had made the cutoff just one OS version sooner, then they would still feel snappy to use. They’re not actually bricked, but completely unusable and essentially e-waste.
In the real world I don't know anyone replacing their phone every 24 months. Usually people keep a phone for 3-4 years and then it gets given to kids/someone else for another few years usage. I doubt any significant number of people are chucking their 1 year old iphone in a draw to sit unused after they get the next one.
What you describe as pro-consumer is only pro to some consumers, because they come with extra weight, size, and case compromises that every consumer would non-optionally be stuck with. I’d agree with you if we were in some no-compromise world or if there there was significant evidence that Apple wasn’t designing these phones within an inch of their pan-dimensional budget (size, weight, durability, hardware, battery life, etc) and leaving a bunch of room on the table, but that’s an unfounded and easily disproven theory.
I would be okay with being "stuck" with a replacement battery and a 3.5mm jack. That's a compromise I'd be wiling to take; but at the end of the day it's all about profit.
As PP noted, the tradeoff is vs. making things thinner and more waterproof.
I'm OK with wireless charging and using the USB port for audio or other purposes, though occasionally I want to use wired Ethernet or Thunderbolt displays at the same time as wired audio, and I also use a wired charge/audio dongle as a car adapter (though there are wireless chargers available.)
You might be willing to, but the product might be more attractive to millions out there if they didn’t have these items. You can say that is about profit but it is also about making a better product, weighed by what customers want in aggregate.
I know some people (me included) who get a new phone frequently, but it usually works by shifting down devices down the family. E.g. our daughter, my parents, and some of my in-laws all have devices shifted down from person to person.
I'm on my fourth iPhone in 13 years and have never replaced a phone because of anything related to physical damage. I'd still be on my third but T-Mobile offered such a large trade-in value for my 2020 SE that upgrading was the same price as replacing the battery.
The issue with batteries on older iPhones isn't even replacing the battery. Apple will do it for like $80 bucks or so out of warranty. That's WAY cheaper than a new phone.
But every new OS version manages to use more CPU and GPU and burn down that battery faster even if it's brand new, since the older chips have to work harder to run them than they had to work to run the older OSes.
I replaced my battery which was showing around 83% of original capacity last year, in a 3-4 year old phone. I was skeptical of the 83% reported number. Nope. The new battery didn't last much longer, nowhere close to how long it lasted on the OS it shipped with.
(This software-cpu-bloat is not unique to Apple. My Pixel, after 4 years or so, was practically unusable just from the amount of background shit the CPU was doing, compared to when it was new.)
Yes software bloat and lack of optimisation is the problem.
But this is exactly why Apple is full of shit. They pretend to do and know better by forcing updates and locking down your ability to install/manage software as you see fit; yet you do not get any meaningful value in exchange.
All the App Store discourse would be moot if they clearly enforced a minimum software quality but they are way too greedy to actually do that.
So in the end you are subjected to the same software bloat as Android but you just pay more for the device.
Pixels get slow because they have very weak CPUs to begin with. If you had gone with a Samsung the experience would be much better (not too different than that of an iPhone, even though the look is of a different taste).
You make a point, but it’s hard to square valuing sustainability with that kind of personal replacement rate when the supported life is several years. That said, your old phone is either being resold or parted, and and the valuable materials from unusable parts are recovered through disassembly.
If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change.
I think it also has to do with the shift in computing population. It was easy to convince tech people to buy a new OS based on a feature list. When computers became more widely used, it became harder and harder. E.g. when OS X still had paid upgrades, it was very hard to convince non-tech family to buy the update. Buying a new device is easier, because the features are immediately visible to people and carrying a newer devices is also a form of social signaling.
At the same time, the internet became far more hostile and running an OS that has all the security updates is important. So, it's easier to get people to update when the updates are free.
I feel like there are a lot of iPhone features being slept on. Pairing Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence lets a grandma do some powerful work that she could never have done five years ago.
This is absurd. I’ve kept an iPhone 12 for 4 years, only replacing it last month with a 17 Pro.
Throughout that time my 5 year old phone got every OS and security update. And it’ll get the OS update in 2026 as well. So the phone released in 2020 gets software updates till 2027 - 7 years. The main issue that makes people want to upgrade is battery life degrading. Good thing Apple offers cheap and quick battery replacements in store. I replaced my battery at the 2 year mark for a small amount of money and it felt like a new phone.
What more could Apple possibly do to make their devices more sustainable? The processors are insanely overpowered, so they don’t feel slow. The batteries are easy to replace. The software updates are there. Being a bit cynical, Apple only making small incremental changes each year reduces the need to upgrade even further.
If people want to replace their devices every year or two that’s on them, not Apple.
In a company founded by a visionary, it takes a surprisingly long time to squander all the internal culture after that person's departure. I would assume the larger the company was at that moment, the longer it takes.
We can't keep ignoring those Chinese tech companies. The ones that have pivoted into EVs, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robotics, amongst other things.
Steve wanted to become chairman of the board and teach at Stanford. Given how much he trusted Tim, I’m not so sure the company would have taken a dramatically different path had he been around longer.
But this sounds like an ideal setup, doesn't it? Tim is fantastic at execution, but he does need a shot of big-picture vision every now and then. Tim as CEO with Steve as Chairman, steering the broader direction, feels like it could have been a perfect pairing. The issue with how things actually turned out is that Tim ended up on his own - all execution, no vision.
How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.
Steve was so effective precisely because he was able to get deeply involved in the day to day details in ways no other CEO has (whether on product matters, or personnel matters). That's not what you do as chairman of the board.
> How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.
Jobs in that role would likely take a much more occasionally-active role w.r.t. future product direction since that was kind of his bread-and-butter and the company was his long-time passion project. Not because that's the regular purpose of that role, but because that's what he'd probably want to keep doing.
If he hadn't tried to self-treat his cancer with acupuncture, fruit juice and herbs, he'd probably be around now to do that. The man was clearly a lucky idiot, and shouldn't be revered, but used as a cautionary tale of unbridled arrogance.
He should perhaps be a cautionary tale against thinking that being really good at building consumer tech products makes you good at everything. But if this is your standard for "lucky idiot", I wonder who of note you wouldn't consider a lucky idiot. You can dig up something like this for everyone from Newton to Salk.
My go-to example for this is Turing. The genius of our field, and apparently duped into credulity about telepathy (probably based on faulty/fraudulent results by people at then-respected institutions)
To be fair, tons of scientists and technical people believed at that time that telepathy might be real. For example if you go back and read science fiction from the 40s, 50s, even 60s, there is a ton of telepathy and mental powers. This reflects both the authors’ efforts to predict future scientific advancement, and their audience’s willingness to believe it.
No it represents the editor's (John W. Campbell) passions - he would suggest using those ideas to authours and was more likely to accept stories with those ideas.
He had an overwhelming presence in SF until the New Wave of the 1960s
It’s more accurate to say that Campbell became a huge presence in science fiction by publishing the stories he did. Their popular success reflected a desire in the culture to read what was being published. Larry Niven is one example of an author who did not go through Campbell but yet had many mental powers in his stories and found huge success.
Many universities had depts to study “parapsychology.” The end of that era is the basis for the opening of Ghostbusters. I’m using popular media as shorthand for how wide-spread these ideas were, but military and intelligence operations seriously studied this stuff too, and in many countries, not just the U.S.
This is the way science goes; people can only work with what is known at the time. Newton was doing alchemy while inventing the basis for modern physics. It’s tempting to look back and condemn people by the standards of what we know today, which is based on additional evidence and theory developed over decades or centuries since. But I think it inhibits understanding of how such knowledge is created over time.
I'd consider myself a Steve Jobs hater (and I think his treatment choices were bad) but the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is in the 10-15% range.
"Probably", he'd not be around today. Even with his money, it'd be improbable.
He had a much more treatable and slowly growing variety of pancreatic cancer - it was a neuroendocrine cancer in his pancreas (an islet cell tumor). The 5-yr survival rate for stage 1/2 is something like 95%, and even stage 4 is still around a 25%. The more common and deadly pancreatic cancer you’re thinking of has a 5yr survival rate of under 15% and under 3% if it’s advanced to stage 4.
If he had received real care immediately after diagnosis, he’d almost certainly be alive and cancer free today.
Right - but he only lived 8 more years because by the time he’d had surgery, the cancer had metastasized to his liver which is much more difficult to treat.
Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthiest people on earth that he couldn’t have lived to old-age.
Think of cancer like trying to stop an exponential growth curve. Waiting months for treatment can mean billions or trillions of additional cancer cells you need to clear. And instead of being able to carve them out of one location, they’re now all over your body requiring systematic poisoning.
Especially when it comes to life threatening illnesses like cancer. I've seen more than one entirely normal, rational person start grasping at off the wall solutions when faced with the imminent end of their life.
People get sick and they die. Nobody should have to go through any treatments they dont want to. And to blame someone for that is like blaming them for the disease.
That lecture is by a doctor who had widely discredited views on cancer, often cited as an example of quack, pseudoscientific claims on the topic.
His claims, specifically on cancer, were widely and roundly rejected by the scientific and medical community. This is not a controversial statement, either - his supporters proudly proclaim that his views are rejected by the vast majority of experts which, in my opinion, pretty much sums it up.
I highly recommend people avoid falling into this dangerous rabbit hole.
No, Apple had been doing their own silicon (presumably you mean for their phones) while Jobs was still CEO, and he bought PA Semi in 2008 which put them on the path to do their own CPU cores (iPhone 5 with Swift CPU was released the year after he died so he'd obviously seen the core design process through from the beginning to likely initial tape-out or very close to).
Yes and even before that they had PowerPC.
The only reason that even stopped is because R&D was done by Motorola and IBM and they ended up going in other directions which made working for Apple has a sole client not much of good deal.
If Apple had enough money back then to bankroll full R&D on both the chip design and the foundry, they would have never gone with Intel in the first place.
Intel won because of massive volume PC sales got them with a similar amount of money thrown into PowerPC it would probably stayed competitive.
Apple Silicon share many similarities in design philosophy with PowerPC and Apple had invested in ARM way before Cook was even considered as a CEO replacement.
The best thing we can say about Cook is that he managed to not fuck it up. In practice he is just a greedy snake that is very good at sucking every last drop of profit of anything Apple manages to create. He has very little positive influence on the vision and roadmap side of things.
The fact that people keep praising Cook is just reflection of the times, where money in itself has become a goal and the sole worthwhile target.
Where do you draw the line? Apple Silicon as a high powered replacement for Intel as a concept was all under Cook's tenure, from initial investigations to product ship. By your logic where would we stop the attribution?
Draw the line for Apple silicon? With Jobs. I'm not sure what was unclear about my previous post. Jobs introduced Apple silicon. That's my logic. Jobs began the SoC design for iPhones and he began the high performance CPU initiative with the purchase of PA Semi. That's my logic.
Putting their CPUs in laptops wasn't an incredible initiative from Cook either, it was basically an inevitability that mobile class cores would eventually intercept high end CPUs for performance after Dennard scaling ended, and it was widely predicted by many Apple watchers even before their own core came out, but particularly after the first ones came out.
Some thought it would be sooner, some later. If Intel hadn't shat the bed for a decade, and/or if the PA Semi team and subsequent Apple CPU team turned out to be in the Samsung or Annapurna tier, then it might have taken many more years, or they might have switched over to an ARM Ltd core IP. But the trajectory for how things turned out was set in motion squarely by Jobs. Who brought up the CPU group and introduced the first high performance Apple CPU silicon.
"Put them on the path" is nothing compared to the plan and decision to switch CPUs. Any CPU family switch is a giant bet with massive implementations issues. Exactly like the other CPU family switches were massive bets (although they did prepare the following ones - for sure). PA Semi was only a tiny step in that direction. Credit to Cook then.
This is moving the goalposts to somewhere... which also appears to be not Cook. Apple came out with Apple silicon and switched to Apple CPU cores under Jobs.
Jobs oversaw Apple silicon, Jobs switched to using Apple CPU cores.
We're talking about two different things. OP was not talking about ARM ISA, but Apple silicon. Mobile switched to Apple silicon under Jobs with iPhone 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon. Apple designed cores were added later, also under Jobs. Apple silicon, Apple cores => Jobs.
Moving laptops to ARM ISA with Apple cores can be credited to Cook, but it was not a big move or a risky step like standing up their own CPU design team was. From the release of Swift and onwards, all the punters were speculating about when (not if) it would happen, and you could really plot a performance line for Apple vs Intel/AMD CPUs and make a pretty educated guess when it would happen.
And yes, the powerpc and x86 switches gave them a lot of experience doing the ARM switch, with fast emulation, fat binaries, etc., and others like IBM had implemented TSO modes in weakly ordered CPUs and others like Transmeta had special instructions for x86 flags emulation. It wasn't really a huge technical gamble beyond what Cook inherited to move to ARM.
Vision Pro is underrated. The issue is that it’s not at a stage where it can go mainstream but the tech is insane. Apple silicon is huge and the only reason I am considering a macbook pro and waiting for the M5 max/pro series.
I think people are underestimating cook because none of these replaced the iPhone and because of the significant degradation in Apple software.
Is it worth mentioning that there are almost countless Chinese EV brands nowadays? I wonder if Apple was really trying. I’m sure it’s difficult, of course, but it seems like every week there’s a new car manufacturer. To quote Clarkson ‘how hard could it be’ ;)
Maybe they tried and didn’t find that they could be competitive with the hundreds of Chinese EV producers. The market was crowded, and they didn’t see what special value they could add? I mean, it’s already cliche that xiaomi decides to release one, but they released a heat pump as well, their stores in the mall are pretty confusing.
Interestingly enough if apple really wanted they could acquihire one of the currrent EV brands and do a beats/siri on it.
Theres probably a lot of churn currently before the field stabilises , and probably the entry point for a new entrant would be currently closing.
Yeah, even the industrial design angle seems a bit on the wane.Most likely move to open a new product lineand integrate it into the apple ecosystem.
At this point they havent had any new product lines or innovations rather than thinner and custom chip designs , if they want to go that way.Although i think a better fit for them would be one of the humanoid robot firms and apply some of that industrial design they are(were) famous for.
I guess I could go with an apple bot...especially if they partner with someone that really does AI. The Chinese techs however are better positioned to do this, even if a trade war cuts off access to the USA, they still have the rest of the world. One wonders what could have happened if Google didn't get rid of Boston Robotics.
I think Apple has kind of a culture problem where the whole organization has to look-up way too much to its chief to make key decisions.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
Yeah. all you have to do is look at "Apple (lack of) Intelligence" to know that Steve's presence and taste is gone.
User: "Siri, <insert question>"
Siri: "I cannot answer that right now" <end conversation>
User: <follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, so they prefix again with Hey Siri> please ask chatgpt < insert question>
Siri: "Hello, sure I can ask ChatGPT · Check important info for mistakes"
ChatGPT: "Hello, how can i help you today"
User: <insert question>
ChatGPT: Answers question and siri terminates conversation
User: <asks follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, user then goes to settings and disables apple intelligence>
Huge corporations are in the business of manufacturing boring things at scale, throwing money into pits, and moving slowly, it's just what they do, at least after they're initial rise. It seems cynical, but I think only a rare person at a rare company might disagree. As soon as you have dominance, you want to protect that dominance rather try something categorically industry changing. Even if you did, it wouldn't be surprising enough to get much attention unless what it was completely upended your own product line.
I couldn't disagree more. Some of the worst Apple computers I've owned date to the Jobs era. All of the best have been from the Cook era. Apple Silicon has been an enormous success.
(My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.)
The TiBook was a milestone product and a great Jony Ive-led design. Apple has been making silver, thin, metal laptops ever since. Even a titanium iPhone for some reason. The last Titanium model with 1GHz, 1GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, DVI, Firewire, DVD/CD-RW, 64MB Radeon 9000, etc. seems pretty great and could run both Mac OS 9 and OS X. And that glowing Apple logo on the back of the display (which I miss in modern Mac laptops.) The main defects (apparently fixed in later models) seem to be the weak hinge and display cables.
I didn't say the TiBook was one of the worst Apple computers I've owned. But my 16" M3Max is so much better than it. And the construction of the modern Macbooks is not all that similar to that of the TiBook.
What a difference 20 years makes, I suppose. Apple laptops do seem to have solid hinges now. ;-)
Apple Silicon definitely transformed expectations for laptop performance and battery life, especially in a fanless design like the MacBook Air.
I do wish my M1 MacBook Pro weren't bulkier and heavier than my old intel model. I went all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt so I would have liked 4 ports (or more). But the battery life and performance are probably worth it. And the MacBook Air 15" is lighter and thinner than the 15" intel models, but still has good battery life.
It's simply amazing. I was looking for a ~$6000 USD 14in laptop with good specs. NOTHING compares to what Apple has right now. I looked at Framework, some gaming laptops, ThinkPads, Dells and most of them would require 16+ inches to get specs similar to a MBP 14 Ultra with 128GB unified ram and 8tb disk. ...
Apple has done an amazing job integrating all that hardware. And I say this as someone who was looking to buy a notebook to install Linux, as its my favorite OS.
So what im doing is put Ubuntu Server Arm + kde-desktop in VMware and use it as my main dev env.
Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases.
Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco!
But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal computing. From the iMac "make it simpler by going back to basics, but future-looking basics" to "easier to manage, funner to use music players" through showing how smartphones and then tablets could be far more functional and usable than MS', Palm's, or Nokia's visions. The watch is the next best category-definer since then, and the iCloud cross-device stuff generally feels better-done than competitors still, but otherwise... refine, refine, refine, and slowly add more ads and upsells. Microsoft or anyone else could run that playbook, in a way that they never could match the Apple playbook from 1997 to 2011.
(One side question here is "are there new segments out there waiting to be invented?" which I don't know the answer to. But even so, "becoming just another upsell-pushing, ad-driven, software-subscription-service provider" wasn't a necessary path.)
Snow Leopard eventually became a solid release. At launch it had many bugs, including some that lost customer data.
It’s tempting to compare one’s memory of an old late-cycle OS, after all the UI changes have been accepted and the bugs squashed, to the day-1 release of a new OS today, when UI changes seem new and weird and there are tons of bugs they knowingly shipped to hit the launch date (just like with Snow Leopard). But it’s not really a fair comparison.
iOS and ipadOS have gotten massively better over the years. The gap between them and macos has been slowly closing. Still a lot to go, but so much has improved.
Apple's classic Mac GUIs were beautiful and discoverable, with clear, visible controls/affordances.
Running Apple's "Macintosh" screen saver reminds me that Apple used to care about every pixel. Now even basic user interface elements like the menu bar are clunky, with things like the Window menu not aligning properly (even on a wide display where there is more than enough space.) Menus getting lost behind the notch is another annoying problem.
It seems like Microsoft learned from Apple's original approach somewhat, at least for Windows 95 through Windows 7 (though I think for a while there was a dead zone below the start menu, a fairly obvious mistake), but Apple seems to have strayed from the path with an invisible, gestural interface.
From a UI standpoint, I agree. There’s nothing like the classic Mac interface and its associated Apple Human Interface Guidelines for GUI software. I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, but the classic Mac and its ecosystem of applications were something special.
However, when it comes to UX, stability is a major component, and this is where Mac OS X is vastly superior to cooperative multitasking, lack-of-memory-protection Mac OS 9 and below. I prefer the classic Mac UI, but Mac OS X had a better UX.
Apple Silicon was started by/during the Steve Jobs era in 2010. You seeing the rewards now (well starting in 2019), because it takes so long to produce a chip.
Well Jobs obviously took risks, way more than Cook ever did. But Yes, Silicon was absolutely the right move, incredible performance leap, at an accessible price (but one could argue it's more of a failure from Intel). Now from a "culture re-definition" perspective, nothing is going to top what Apple did in the 80's and what they did again in the 2000's with the iPhone.
Arguably he overshot innovation, tried to kill the pocket bricks and failed (with a v1 that wasn’t meant to replace the rectangles but was supposed to be a first step toward that). Sounds like you’re ignoring Vision Pro.
Vision Pro is a perfect example of a greed-driven failure. Apple pissed off both devs and megacorps by keeping the ecosystem closed, fighting tooth and nail in courts such that every app needed to pay them 30% and couldn't be installed without their blessing, and unsurprisingly very few massive companies (or hackers) wanted to support Apple's fledgling closed garden. Without software, it's just a gadget.
Tesla announced they are adding it this week. Ford’s CEO expressed glee at GM removing it. There isn’t a CarPlay App Store nor downloads to get 30% from (or if there were, they’d appreciably be enabled by Apple’s platform as we aren’t in the habit of subscribing to or buying apps for our car today), and while we don’t know the licensing terms from the GM removal it sounded like privacy violations and extra subscription revenue are their motivations for dropping CarPlay. That doesn’t sound consumer friendly on the carmakers part at all. I think this field doesn’t line up with the overall thesis, squint as we might.
>Tesla Inc. is developing support for Apple Inc.’s CarPlay system in its vehicles, according to people with knowledge of the matter, working to add one of the most highly requested features by customers.
>The carmaker has started testing the capability internally, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort is still private.
Tesla's news is interesting. A good question to ask in this who's in control in Tesla x CarPlay relationship. The answer is obviously former (Apple can't dictate anything and Tesla gets to boss around).
That's very different from a Toyota x Apple partnership.
So no, those are two different scenarios. The era of Apple controlling the platform is gone. (Except for legacy ones)
People buy Tesla for Tesla and not because CarPlay. But CarPlay is a purchasing decision factor for other brands, which means a power imbalance exists.
So this is a classic game theory situation. You want all participants (Toyota, Honda, Ford) to cooperate (not have CarPlay) and not defect. So participants watch each others move.
If they stick together, all of them stand to win.
If one defect, in the short term they might win but in the long-term Apple will seek to commoditize the car maker.
> People buy Tesla for Tesla and not because CarPlay.
They increasingly just don't buy Tesla. Strong growth in that segment lately.
I recall though, back in 2021 we rented one as a test drive situation. The UX was so horrific I did an immediate 180 on that idea. Hard pass. Carplay might've saved that sale, their stock infotainment is trash.
I wouldn't be surprised if they go all on in Carplay Ultra near the end.
Oh, I'm aware. I have no love for Tesla. I was making an observation of what I see around me (plenty of new Teslas on the road even after Elons shenanigans)
Huh? Apple does not charge for CarPlay. Some automakers are trying to give them the boot, but that has nothing to do with Apple's greed and everything to do with the automakers' greed. They want their own ecosystem of apps.
I'll let you in on a secret. Ask yourself what the business case of CarPlay is. "Why" should Apple do CarPlay. Put yourself in the shoes of a VP at Apple pitching CarPlay. Are they saying "let's invest millions of dollars in inventing the UI for cars and give it away for free, for .. goodwill?"
Nope, the slide deck would say 'Cars are the next computing platform. That's where most people spend time. So imagine is we (Apple) were meaningful present there .. and that's why we need to invest in it'
So, yes CarPlay is a move to control another computing formfactor. One they do not manufacturer (like tv and Apple TV) ...and unfortunately for them, car makers are wiser this time around.
A simpler explanation is that all of these little conveniences add up to keeping customers firmly embedded in the ecosystem, repeatedly buying new iPhones. And sure, if we can offer another environment where an App Store purchase can be used, great.
> unfortunately for them, car makers are wiser this time around
Maybe. Ditching CarPlay does not currently seem like the wise decision, given how many of us have decided that omitting it is a deal killer. I love my Lightning, but I do not for one nanosecond trust that Ford would keep the app ecosystem on my truck running as long as Apple will keep iOS working on iPhones.
People blame Cook, and I do too. But for some reason Jony Ive never gets his discredit. He is the one who kicked off the boring rectangle, and it's clear he does not have the capacity to deviate from that. His industrial design was frankly terrible and people have lapped it up. Ever since the iPod, I can't think of an industrial design of Apple's or Ive's that was actually any good. Even today, compare an iPhone to an Xperia. The Xperia is bounds ahead of the iPhone.
I dunno, the stuff they have now doesn't really need a lot of innovation. Like, my MacBook isn't very different from the one I bought in 2013 (other than massive performance improvements of course), but I don't really need it to be anything other than what it is. Same with my iPhone. I'll probably only replace that when the battery life gets bad. Most of the "innovations" on those lines have been annoying (touch bar, apple AI, etc.)
In contrast, Microsoft has innovated a lot on the desktop since Windows 7 and I hate almost all of it. I'd happily go back to the old experiences.
What else could shareholders want? Employees, management, founders, customers, vendors could all have other goals, wants or desire but when you have a large number of shareholders that is what they want always.
Shareholders - a large majority of them are institutional with their own shareholders they are accountable to, always want more money - that is a core principle of capitalism.
Occasionally we can tie other objectives to financial gains to get a behave in a specific way, say a green initiative will improve the brand perception therefore brand value - because now they can charge more/ justify current pricing etc.
It can at times align the other way too for risk minimization - a founder wants a large budget for something - like say Zuckerberg with Metaverse[3], or Musk with $1T pay [2] firing the founder is more expensive[1] so shareholders sign off.
Fundamentally it always boils down to profit/value maximization for the shareholders.
---
[1] By no means unique, except for the scale of money spent on a vanity project.
[2] Firing is more expensive - Tesla trades at such crazy multiples those are arguably not viable without Musk. It is probably cheaper to give then $1T pay package or the similar $56b package from 2018 currently being disputed in court.
[3] Almost impossible in Meta's case. The board can fire the CEO in any company, but since Zuckerberg owns > 50% of the voting shares, he as the majority shareholder can also fire the board anytime and replace with a board who will sign off. It is not absolute power though, there are some protections for minority shareholders as Delaware court is showing with 2018 Musk package case.
If you check my comments Im a routine critic of Apple. Specifically its mis-management of Siri.
But, in my mind, Tim Cook is also responsible for the only exceptional qualities of Apple. Namely its production of the M series chips and the Vision Pro (yes really).
They better have someone outstanding in mind as a replacement.
Otherwise I could easily see the successor mildly improve Siri/AI functions, while continuing Apples new disastrous design language and drop the ball on the supply chain and vertical integration that makes their hardware products second to none.
Ternus is the leading candidate; VP of Hardware Engineering. He was very likely more directly responsible than Cook for all the things you liked about Cook's Apple.
My fear for Apple right now is how most decisions they make appear to incentivize them toward becoming a perpetual middle-man in all aspects of your interactions with their products. They don't manufacture much of anything anymore; its on-contract. They design the M-Series chips, but don't make them. Their software sucks; they'd rather just take 30% of your interaction with actually-good software. Their AI and search sucks; they just pay Google $30B a year for theirs. Etc and etc.
Very few tech companies make the whole stack. Making chips requires specialization and is required for high end chips. Samsung is probably the only company that makes chips for their own phones.
No, but Apple is likely to be paying Google for access to Gemini in the upcoming Siri revamp, and relies on Google's technology for the default safari search experience, which is what I was referencing.
$2k phones has been a thing for a while now, with the folding phones. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold currently starts at $1700 and Google Pixel Pro Fold starts at $1800, and both are over $2100 for the 1TB models.
Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.
It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.
But sure..."unimpressive."
This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.
> This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
I thought we were supposed to find less abrasive ways to engage each other, around these parts.
In any case, I admit that I could have phrased it better.
What I meant, was that “professionals” laughed at it (and there were a lot of them), but “customers,” did not.
I worked for a company, where they literally laughed in my face, when I told them “This thing will be trouble for us.” A few years later, their own product line was a smoking crater in the ground.
> Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced
We have very different recollections, then. People audibly gasped when Steve demoed slide-to-unlock on stage. The first generation was sold out for a long time despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.
The VP is cool, but it's still hard to see a future where everyone has one. As soon as I got my original iPhone it was clear that it changed everything going forward. The entire market changed on the spot. The VP has not done that, even if it may ultimately be successful.
Given the VP price, it’s clear that it’s aimed at high-end “fancy toy” buyers; not mainstream users.
I have not used one, but everyone I know, that did test one (and I don’t know anyone that actually brought one), has that “Moses coming off Mount Sinai” look [0]. It’s clear that Apple has done a great job of implementing an AR platform, but the price is far too high to fairly compare to the iPhone I, which was pricey, but not inaccessibly so.
If they are effective in reducing the cost, and improving the comfort, we may see some real success.
Listen, I don't really like the direction Apple has taken either, but since Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in August 2011 the company's stock went from like $15 to like $275; it had a value of $400 billion and now it's worth $4 trillion, ten times as much. Any characterization of him as some kind of failure who killed Apple ("once the biggest tech company on the planet", "isn't growing", "only saved"...) is completely out-of-touch.
It sailed on Jobs‘ monumental accomplishments, and still does. Including AirPods and Vision Pro, much of what fell into Cook‘s era was already well underway when Jobs died. Cook is a fantastic executor, fulfilling Jobs‘ legacy. But the tank is empty now, has been for a while.
I love how people say 'execution' like it's an insult. Execution on the scale of Apple is an incredible challenge. Apple sells something like 425 iPhones per minute. It could be argued that execution is the biggest Apple innovation ever.
"…and it's only saved by the positive offset coming from advertisement and app store growth"
That has been part of the plan for a decade now since Eddy Cue was tasked with boosting Apple's income from "services". (It's worked pretty well for Microsoft.)
It’s not the only thing. The scale up of Apple is massive and so is the supply chain. Those are not really things consumers don’t see directly (just indirectly)
I often wonder why Satya Nadella is so venerated on HN compared to say, Cook or Pichai. As innovators, MS lags way behind both Google and Apple. I can't think of one bleeding edge product released during Satya's tenure. Say what you will about Apple and Google, they still consistently put out products that make you sit up and pay attention. What has MS been doing other than squeezing the MS Office and Azure cash cows?
Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.
However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.
Ballmer doesn't strike me as an idiot and definitely not bland. He's one of the more colorful tech personalities. MS's almost unassailable lead in enterprise could be attributed to him and the pivot to cloud could not have happened without this. But he definitely fumbled hard on mobile (Windows Phone), Surface (IIRC the initial ARM laptop was a major flop and had a close to 1B+ writeoff) and the disaster that was the Nokia acquisition. I'd say he left at the right time, just as it was becoming clear that MS's bets on Windows Phone and hardware in general weren't paying off.
That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.
Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.
I assumed he was a product guy until I heard him on Dwarkesh's podcast. He does seem to really only get fired up about numbers going up, and customers are a vehicle for that.
For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
> I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
Well he did change Google fundamentally. Imagine being so dense you're fumbling to a competitor built on a technology that you innovated .
That being said, I'm still long Google because they're the tortoise. And this is one of those races where slow and steady might actually win. And while I was a strong critic of Pichai on a lot of fronts (just check my past comments!), he still must be given due credit for his measured approach and for navigating Google through some of the roughest regulatory environments, and for leaving Google relatively unscathed.
My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.
Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.
Other commenters are raking Apple over the coals for bad experiences with MacOS. By the same token, Windows 11 is beyond awful. It's a complete buggy mess, never mind the secure boot restrictions.
Is it not rather the opposite? His striving for unconventional "taste" (as opposed to boring convention) was probably a factor in him seeking "alternative" medicine.
in some sense i think it shows having taste. sometimes taste can be dangerous. you can only have a taste for say rock climbing equipment, by rock climbing, which exposes you to danger.
“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species… The condor came in at the top. Humans came in about a third of the way down. But when a human rides a bicycle, we blow the condor away. That’s what a computer is for me: a bicycle for the mind.”
> Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.
The funniest part to me: I can't imagine Jobs on a bicycle. Perhaps when he was a small kid, but as far as I know he was notoriously on the jerky side of strongly motorized vehicles.
Which could perfectly align with his vision of the iPod and iPhone as powerful, but closed and restrictive and expensive ecosystems, replacing computers.
> no matter who leads
Then only the next CEO will have a chance to reinject taste into Apple, so it needs to happen at the same time.
I used Linux for about 25 years. With the rising cost of hardware, I bought an M4 Max MacStudio earlier this year as it was the best bang for the buck on CPU/GPU and the savings on those offset the extortionate pricing on RAM/SSD.
You know what? Despite Liquid Glass being a bit of a downgrade recently, macOS is still good. Do I enjoy it as much as the old lampshade iMac or even 68030 Macintosh? No. Is it absolutely astounding compared to anything else available? Yes. It is. The ecosystem effects with my phone and AirPods is nice, but the computer alone is phenomenal.
I completely understand why people get upset about certain things, but the Macintosh, the iPhone, and even the watch and headset are solid products. Not everyone is going to like them, and I’d be worried if everyone did; yet, I think Cook did okay. No one was ever going to be Steve Jobs, and given Steve’s failings, we should not want anyone to be Steve Jobs. His genius came at a severe cost to his family and to him personally.
Apple is still producing solid products. They have warts, but that was true of every single product that Apple ever released. Nostalgia plays a huge part in making us think things have gotten worse. I have a Mac Classic II, a Performa, a PowerMac G3, an XT clone, and a Pentium machine that I use often… things are so much better now than before.
Even as a diehard Linux user, I totally agree. If you can look past macOS's weak support for gaming, mediocre window management, and hostility towards unsigned binaries, the stability and experience it provides is second to none.
... Even then, you can still get around many pain points with third-party tools. AltTab + Raycast covers window management well enough for me and compatibility layers like Crossover/Wine are already great for gaming (which is hopefully only going to get better with Valve now working on x86 -> ARM translation layers)
Kindly, I think your reality is being distorted. macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8. It's got live tiles, radical acrylic accents, constant cloud service nags, and preinstalled advertisements everywhere across the system. OCSP won't let you launch certain apps unless your DRM API is online, for crying out loud!
It is insulting.
Tim Cook, in his wisdom, pivoted Apple harder into services. AppleTV, App Store, all the kinds of meaningless high-margin slop that can be created without direct competition. This has damaged macOS and iOS perennially, they are feature-poor operating systems when compared with desktop Windows and Android today. Can you imagine how much Apple would be worth if they didn't refuse to sign Nvidia compute drivers right now? Or how iOS would look with Vulkan 1.2 compliance and the Steam Deck's Proton stack? Apple is the #1 party holding Apple back, here!
I daily drive Linux now, but the state of macOS is so ad-ridden and walled-off that I would rather do Linux development with WSL than bother setting up a Mac. It's that bad.
macOS isn't without its sins, but I feel like "ad-ridden” is a stretch compared to the baseline of Windows 11 injecting promotions into the Start menu, OEM Android flavors full of carrier crap, etc. There's iCloud+ nags here and there, but it’s still by far the least noisy consumer OS right now aside from Linux.
Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.
(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)
I believe that Apple is planning for succession, which of course they should, as an obvious responsibility to shareholders, especially given the health issues of the previous CEO Steve Jobs. However, I don't believe that Tim Cook is on his way out. I certainly don't believe that Cook wants to retire. It's not like he has a family to spend time with. Apple is his family.
The final but crucial paragraph in the Financial Times story is a quote from Tim Cook talking about Apple: “I love it there and I can’t envision my life without being there so I’ll be there a while,” he told singer Dua Lipa on her podcast in November 2023.
The story appears to have a lot of hedge words and mere speculation: "as soon as next year" (so how late could it be?), "no final decisions have been made" about Cook's successor, "The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report", "An annoucement early in the year would...", "the timing of any announcement could change" (not that there is any specific timing!).
My impression is that the reporters don't have the faintest clue when or if Cook is leaving.
Word is the next CEO is going to be picked ala Charlie and the chocolate factory. I hope that when you bought your Miyake iPhone sock you kept the bone-white ticket naming you the next CEO.
Oh dear here comes lazy barnacle man Grandpa Joe. Watch them ignore rules of the EULA agreement and they are sucked into the factory ventilation shaft holding the new iPhone Lighter-than-Air.
I think Cook left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA. They could've tested the waters by loading up Apple Silicon on PCIe riser cards, maturing the toolkit for AI workloads, and selling them at competitive prices. Yes I know they're in the business of making entire widgets, but it would've been easy money. The hardware and software stacks are there. Unlimited upside with nearly zero downside risk.
Apple seems to be avoiding building server hardware for some reason. It seems like a big opportunity, besides AI, the power efficiency of their chips would surely be attractive for datacentres. I think momentum is building for moving away from x86.
Most Macs (both Intel and Apple Silicon) refuse to thermal-throttle until they reach the junction temp.
Both you and the parent can be correct, here; many Macs are quite cool at idle, but also throttle much slower than equivalent Intel or AMD chips under load.
> left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA
What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Apple for sure could make very capable hardware/software for cloud AI workloads - directly taking on NVIDIA.
Cook’s greatest achievement - Apple’s supply chain - has, as set out in the ‘Apple in China’ book [1], turned into Apple’s biggest risk and weakness. The next CEO won’t be worrying about Siri or Vision Pro; they’ll be trying to deal with Apple’s reliance on China.
I sure hope Cook and teams have been actively working on this for a decade already.
The book is interesting in showing both a lack of early awareness of this weakness, AND some people clearly noticing, AND Apple being very powerful and resourceful when it notices a problem.
He did good, but he’s never really had a clear vision for the ecosystem. Lots of little projects that claim to change the world, but never see momentum behind them to execute properly (Vision Pro, their Gaming push, Fitness+, expanding the iPhone lineup, etc), and has failed similarly on business execution (failing to buy or pay Masimo, half-hearted pivots to smart speakers and AI to appease shareholders). Liquid Glass is really the canary in the coal mine that he needs to hand the reins off to someone else.
Here’s hoping whoever the new executives at Apple bring a clearer vision of what the future of computing should look like in an era where so many of its biggest proponents are so dissatisfied with the subscription and cloud-based hell of today. A return to control over your devices and software, built atop best-in-class hardware platforms. Spending more time uplifting developers and addressing grievances (like how everyone loathes Xcode), actually supporting initiatives with capital and talent alike (such as improving their gaming capabilities - like how the Gabe Cube aims to do), and disrupt the wider industry trends of needless changes for promotions (like UI shakeups for no real reason).
I think Cook did an awesome job taking the reins at Apple. I can understand Cook not being a 'product visionary' as Jobs was (although Jobs also delivered some real stinkers), don't forget some of the people below Cook are still fossils from the Jobs era. I have no insight in the Apple of today, but they seem spread incredibly thin and all products and services are suffering from it.
They don't seem to have an overarching product strategy that will benefit users (does benefit shareholders though), but they're also not nimble to quickly shift gears to trends.
Oh, don't mistake my "time for him to go" opinion with my opinion of his tenure as a whole. By the major measures, Cook has done a phenomenal job steering the company through its post-Jobs era, creating a lot of growth in the organization and making immensely successful pivots ahead of the market attitude (like its pivot to in-house hardware and away from Intel/Qualcomm). I have a myriad of critiques, sure, but even a layman like me acknowledges that he's done an A-level job running this juggernaut to its current peaks.
I just think he can't steer/lead it through the tumultuous next decade, is all, and that a newer leader with a clearer vision is needed to run the show at this juncture.
Appointing John Ternus is going to be a pretty clear indicator to investors that Apple plans on continuing its iterative hardware, supply chain and operations focus and isn't looking to shake things up from a product or vision standpoint. Which may be the best move for the company (this strategy has definitely worked wonders for the last decade and a half), but I can't help feel that among all the large tech companies Apple is the one most at risk of a major disruption. It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.
> It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.
I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.
The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.
The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.
I dunno, have you tried an Apple Vision Pro? It's actually a pretty phenomenal product for V1. I think really all they need to do is: (1) hit retina-tier PPD (pixels-per-degree) and (2) manage the weight, (3) do everything they're already doing, and I'm sold as a replacement for TVs & Desktop monitors.
None of that will help, it has to be able to do something people want to do. Only us on tech forums care about the actual specs and how cool the tech is.
What can a person do in a Vision Pro that they're willing to spend $1000+ on that they can't do in a $300-$500 Quest?
It can't replace TVs and monitors because only one person can use it at a time
Maybe stop wearing makeup, it's bad for your skin and doesn't make you better at your job unless your job is BS anyway. Legacy product of a chauvinist era.
Furthermore, your argument means all VR headsets are inherently anti-female, which is the craziest take I've ever heard.
If your product needs people to stop wearing makeup and agreeing that it's chauvinistic, it's dead in the water.
Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset, esp. the Apple Vision Pro which has pretty much nothing to do on it but watch movies and TV and use the laptop / desktop you already own
Roughly $20-30B in investment by Apple to build the Apple Vision Pro over roughly the course of half a decade is disagreeing with you. That's an insane investment into a product category with "no public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset."
I didn't bring up makeup, btw. I just thought it was an absurd argument. It has nothing to do with whether the product succeeds or fails in the long run, which is precisely what I'm talking about.
Yes, the AVP store is pretty scant at the present moment. But regardless, I would absolutely explore the feasibility of replacing my TV, my desktop monitors with an AR/VR headset if it met the tech specs I listed above. I'd much rather have a 70' screen viewing experience for movies, or gaming.
Btw, why did Valve announce the Steam Frame this last week if the AR/VR market is dead? Why are companies like Virtuix, Disney developing omnidirectional treadmills for more physical VR exploration? Why are companies like Meta working to develop surface electromyography tech, electro-tactile solutions to simulate the sensation of touching physical objects in VR?
Maybe all this money being spent on a non-existent market segment is a product of a fucked economic hierarchy where the rich have so much money they can blow it all on projects that will never reach massive scale, which is an argument I'd actually listen to.
Billions and billions have been invested in failures. What kind of argument is this? Is Horizon Worlds by Meta a resounding success? It cost billions to make as well.
You can do anything you want. The average consumer is not going to flock in droves to the AVP which cannot do anything special its cheaper competition cannot do, and which cannot replace TVs (because those can be used by more than one person at a time as I said already and you didn't reply to).
Metas Display Ray Bans and Quest. Maybe even Steam Frame, those all have an audience: regular people or gamers. Who is the audience for AVP? Pretty much only tech spec nerds on these forums like you and I. That's a dead product, imo
The big banks (unless they do fraud again), health insurance companies in the US, the major telecoms, Airbus, Bayer, Tyson, JBS SA, Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Cargill
No company is immune to disruption, but plenty of them have innovation and adaptation in their DNA. IMO over the years Apple has lost that. Look at Google, or Meta, or even Microsoft. Diversified income streams. Clutch acquisitions. Massive capital investments. Data centers. Nuclear power plants. Moonshot factories. Self driving cars. AR glasses. Robots. Venture investing and dealmaking. Massive AI ambitions. Stuff they try might not always work, and sometimes fail spectacularly, but they still do it. Apple meanwhile has been perfectly content depending on a single product and the monopolistic hold on the ecosystem of that product for basically 100% of its revenue for the past two decades.
I don’t think Google is a great example to hold up here. They throw so much random crap at a wall hoping for another golden goose. Then kill anything that isn’t after a few years. If you can’t tell, I’m still salty about Google domains.
Many of the things you listed need time to bake and Google never cooks anything more than a quick sear in the pan.
The company is among the leaders in the AI race and doing a quarter million self driving taxi rides a week but sure they aren't innovative because they shut down a domain name website..
You're saying as if it's a bad thing. We need new blood. Thank god IBM Failed and we got microsoft /hp/apple. Now it's time for the next wave to make the current Dinos go extinct
Tim Cook will be remembered as much for competently maintaining Apple’s course after Jobs’ passing as for flagrantly dismissing democratic regulation while cozying up to (and dining with; and giving golden statues to) authoritarian regimes.
I think Tim Cook deserves some praises from everything that's happened on the hardware side of things, even regarding the Vision pro.
On the other hand I feel like the software side has been completely forgotten.
Numerous bugs, weird crashes, and the infamous Liquid Glass update are really worrying signs. The fact that Siri is completely useless after 10+ years and can barely be trusted to set a timer correctly is completely unacceptable.
I wish they would take a beat on the software and stop releasing new major OS updates every year but take their time to get things right even if that means that some years go without major updates.
This is the first time since I bought my first MacBook Pro and Iphone that I am planning on holding off on installing the updates and I am even considering skipping MacOS Tahoe entirely.
I just want things to be stable. A phone that works without major bugs, a MacBook that works without having to fiddle the dials or worry about some hidden incompatibilities.
That is what Apple used to stand for. Nowadays not so much.
The real question we should all be worried about is what will happen to their promises of privacy?
Does the public have any recourse if the post-Cook CEO wants to sell all our data to ads/spy companies? You know all the Apple Watches over the world must be a biometrics gold mine that any Dr. Frankenstein would be salivating over…
Cook saved Job's Apple? Hardly. Every aspect of today's iPhone violates what Job's stood for. Craig Federighi began his tenure by advertising 200 new features for the new version of iOS. Shortly later he did the same for the Mac. Feature bloat has been Federighi's prime focus. My iPhone is so packed with irrelevancies that is hard to use.
Then switch devices. Oh but you might need to find an alternate solution for your iMessage groups. And your apple watch. And your family icloud plan. And the apple ebooks you bought. And your airpod maxes. And your protection plan. And the airtags you own.
The apple of Steve Jobs is gone, but the apple of today is as sticky as ever.
Tim Cook at Apple was like Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. They scaled the company and made stock owners happy, but weren't true visionaries. I suppose there's a need for both types of leaders.
Microsoft's stock was flat for Ballmer's entire tenure. Investors were most definitely not happy, and that was the very reason he was forced out. Tim Cook meanwhile has grown the company 10x. It's an idiotic comparison.
Somewhat unfair. Ballmer took over at the dotcom peak. They were trading at ~70x earnings on his first day as CEO. That's the only reason MSFT stock performance under his leadership was (from start day to retire day) flat. There is no CEO who would have been able to flout the dotcom bust and maintain a 70x PE ratio for 13 years. But under his tenure, he grew revenue at one of the worlds biggest companies by almost 4x, a 10% CAGR, and EPS also increased considerably.
Also, he wasn't forced out, and the reason ValuAct was pushing for a board seat at the time was because Microsoft was falling behind in mobile and tablets. Around that time, Microsoft had taken a $900m writedown related to Surface RT.
Meanwhile, Tim Cook took over in 2011 when Apple's P/E ratio was only 13 (today it's 36). He has also obviously been a skilled operator, but stock charts by themselves don't provide all context or tell the whole story.
Longhorn, Zune, phone, Skype, bungie , among many other failures. I was there, as a kid of the 80s, Microsoft, Windows, Visual Basic, VStudio were EVERYTHING up until around 2003, they just dropped too many balls.
It was botching Mobile that really did Balmer in and possibly not reacting quite quickly enough to the need for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing while Amazon was bootstrapping AWS right in Microsoft's back yard.
They got the cloud situation under control but losing Mobile to Apple and Google was a disaster and they're paying for it still.
> As I wrote a month ago, Apple is due for a major management shake-up and the spotlight is squarely on John Ternus as Tim Cook’s successor as CEO. But I don’t get the sense anything is imminent as the FT is claiming.
How serious is this comment? As a thought experiment, this intrigues me. Imagine Steve Wozniak suddenly pops in as CEO. What might happen to the company in the following years?
I doubt Woz would want the job. He's an engineer, not a corporate strategist, and he seems happy that way.
The ideal CEO would be a business strategist, innovator and thought-leader, and world-class marketer, but with enough of an engineering background to chase hard problems.
There aren't many of those around.
Jobs did okay at all four, mostly. Cook gets the first, mostly, and has adequate delegation skills for engineering and marketing. This works superbly when the engineering is world-leading (the M chips) and badly when the engineering is mediocre (the software.) The marketing has drifted towards attempts at luxury-consumer branding, which is an off-the-shelf pitch. It hasn't been a failure. But it has lost some of its distinctiveness, and it's a little incoherent at times.
Cook's still been hugely more successful than Sculley or Amelio. Sculley was a bland corporatist, and Amelio was very, very smart, but too much of an engineer to be good at the rest. He did really well elsewhere, but Apple just wasn't a good fit.
The job is a poisoned chalice. It's going to be extremely difficult for the new CEO to assert their authority over the established fiefdoms, keep the plates spinning, deal with a weird political and economic environment, and still create Apple-styled innovation.
The problem of running a $4 Trillion consumer hardware company, with incredibly optimized supply chain operations, is that it heavily constrains the directions a new CEO would take the company, and by extension, the set of plausible people who could take the helm. I think even if the next CEO has a new or different product vision, they'd need deep knowledge on the hardware side of the house just to steer in any different direction.
I don't know if OP is serious, but more than once, his name has come up on this topic in discussions in the past that I've had with people in my social circle who work at Apple. He obviously gets much respect and is considered an engineer's engineer.
I don't think anyone would be against Woz stepping into to revitalize Apple. The real question is whether Woz would do it.
Everybody loves Woz, for good reasons, but (a) he’s not a manager (b) he’s not executive material (c) he’s notoriously unmotivated (d) he hasn’t engineered anything significant since what, the mid-1980’s?
Valve is privately-owned with its BDFL owning over half of it. It has never gone through a leadership transition. It could relatively quickly go entirely bad after Gabe Newell is gone.
Shit, I'd take it. Sideloading, custom OSes, less-wimpy legal chops against hackers... Valve could turn Apple around.
A 5 year release cadence would incentivize the iPhone to change something more significant than just the price tag. And Proton would give me my first justification for a owning a powerful phone.
To be fair, the iPhone, Mac, Airpods, M-series Chips, and Vision Pro are all the best products in their class. There's plenty of room for AI innovation, but Apple has never been a 'first entry' company, when they enter, it's with high quality.
Good. I like Cook but he’s not what Apple needs, at least not now. Time to go back to somebody closer to Steve in terms of artistic vision and obsessive commitment to the customer experience.
Federighi is in charge of software which is Apple’s weak spot right now; hardware has been firing on all cylinders for years now while software gets buggier and more confusing. I'm not sure how he could turn the ship around as CEO if he couldn't as head of software.
He was very much a businessman- not a visionary- running on the fumes of the Steves success. As a company they leant way too far into status and luxury in recent times and neglected the human centric/humanist design that made them successful in the first place. Genuinely and in the politest way possible good riddance I am not fond of his leadership-
except for the enviornmental initiatives which have been more successful in their impact than many nation states.
1. Bring back Time Capsule and re-enter the Router market.
2. Work with American Express for Apple Card. There are plenty of Visa and Mastercard for every day common market. Go and dominate the premium section.
3. Apple Pay NFC using Felica offline payment and optimise the heck out of it for all transport, the fight back against QR Code as payment.
4. Bi-Yearly release on macOS. There is no need to have an OS release every year. Nor do I need an OS with so many feature. Last time I checked I could barely count 5 useful features on macOS in the past 10 years.
5. We need more optimisation on all OS, macOS, iOS etc. Computer doesn't feel snappier despite we have 10 - 100x more computer resources. I was hoping Vision OS, the need for VR and AR being latency sensitive would have helped but it doesn't seems that way.
6. 10 years later Safari is still the worst browser of all three, even Chrome haven managed to be memory efficiency and works in heavy tabs environment. I have less rendering problem with Firefox than Safari. It has been getting better especially with Safari 26 but it is still a long road to grind. The Safari team needs more resources.
7. Mac needs to grow its market share. Lower Upgrade pricing for Mac memory and NAND storage, and introduce Mac starting at $799 with edu price at $699. The Mac is making higher margin with Apple Silicon, and will do so even more when WiFi is made by Apple as well. Apple continue to be so focusing on higher margin they forgot about Market Share.
8. Separate the App Store into App and Game Store. Continue to charge your 30% on Games. And start freeing up your App Store Apps to lower percentage. I have been saying this for 12 years and counting.
9. Guarantee Loot box. As much as I want to get rid of this gambling loot box gaming. I dont think it is a realistic option. But Apple should enforce all percentage are guaranteed, i.e 0.01% of item will make its appearance in worst case at the 100th draw. I remember this was suggested a few years ago I am not sure if it is enforced.
10. Stop the whole UI Androidfication of iOS. If I want Android I would have brought one. Start making the iOS simpler. The Home Screen and searching for Apps after 20 years is a bag of hurt.
11. Swift, Swift UI, XCode. It seems doesn't matter whether you are a 300B company or 3 Trillion company they are still the same.
12. Can we bring back Key Travel. Before butterfly, which were great for key stability and less wobble, but key travel were too short along with reliability. Current scissors is only at 1mm while previous scissors were at 1.5mm.
13. Current track pad is way too large and bring false positive. We could either somehow make it zero false positive or we make the track pad a little smaller just like MacBook Pro Pre 2015.
14. If Apple Health connect all the data into one place, surely there could be Apple Finance where all my spending of Apple Pay Credit card can be grouped together for easier tracking?
This is such a stupid and meaningless thing to discuss (whatever Cook's plans are), as he has no personality and no vision, and yet tons of reflective and philosophical comments in here.
The type of guy Cook is, was the “best” and safe choice for a company like Apple on the trajectory it was. Now everyone is a multimillionaire on the bank but the culture inside is quite hollowed out. Good luck for the next guy, he’ll need all of it.
Almost every top comment is negative. This negativity about apple has existed since the 90s.
Apple has been the most profitable example of betting against the herd for the last 20 years. And possibly the easiest if you’re willing to look at the world plainly. I’m glad to see the herd hasn’t changed and I have plenty of gains left.
Apple has really gone to shit. I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life. I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
Everything is such trash I could go on for hours.
I realized a long time ago that if the person at the top doesn’t care then no one will. It seems hard to believe but it makes sense when you consider individual incentives, politics, and the complexity of software. Everyone wants a safe promotion and doesn’t want to take the risk to push things forwards.
Apple Silicon seems great but the Intel MacBook was the worst piece of shit ever so they kind of had to. I have a 2019 that was the top of the line but can’t do anything without overheating. It’s barely usable for any second laptop tasks.
> I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
The same Steve Jobs that was at Apple when it made the puck mouse? The overheating Intel laptops of the mid 2000s? The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone? The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA? The Cube?
My mate Tim, professional graphic designer, used it for years. Loved it. He might still have it for all I know.
> The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone?
Was always nonsense. None of the Apple team used 'the bumper' and neither did I.
> The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA?
Are you seriously here criticising one of the most revolutionary hardware products of the last 20 years?
FWIW I used mine for years and had a corporate Windows image running under Parallels. Everyone was massively envious. (I was a Domain Admin, I could add my own machine to the network.)
Also good to know the iPhone 4 thing was people lying instead of holding it wrong, I guess.
What exactly was revolutionary about the 11" MBA? Looking better than an equally performant netbook?
The notion that things were so much better under Jobs is just revisionist history.
Saying "Steve Jobs wouldn't have let today's Apple be this way" while ignoring what Apple was like in his day is just rose tinted glasses (or worse, cult of personality nonsense).
Steve Jobs shipped a cordless mouse with a charger port on the bottom, the infamous hockey puck mouse, and a laptop that visibly discolored in the shape of handprints where your wrist rests. iTunes happened under Jobs watch and was unwound in the Cook era.
I'm a huge critic of the mouse with the charger port on bottom, but that was the 2nd gen magic mouse released in 2015. Is there another mouse that had charger port on bottom?
They just released the Magic Mouse (USB-C) with the port on the bottom.
It is weird that stuck with bottom port for so long. It would be smarter to put it on the front then it could be used as wired mouse, but I guess that wrecks the design.
I don’t know man. I got an Intel 7700K when it first came out, and six years later it was struggling with modern day workloads. I didn’t blame Intel or Microsoft, I just upgraded and my performance problems went away. Not sure why Apple is held to different standards.
I had a 13 Pro and I thought it was too out-dated which was why my Safari was ridiculously slow, so I bought the 16 Pro...noticed literally zero improvement. Overheats, bugs galore, search for apps is slow and still doesn't work.
I am seriously looking at Android now, first time in my life.
Person probably issued Apple laptops from work, which, funny enough is probably why they get performance issues, as work is going to drop in the usual CPU killing anti-virus and other corporate tooling.
Even without buying Apple, many jobs issue mandatory MacBooks. I can understand the frustration of having to deal with these. In my case, it's mostly the window management aspect of MacOS that infuriates me. I even spent $30 of my own money to buy uBar to make it a bit more usable. But uBar itself is buggy so it's not a perfect solution.
their software is not great but they literally make the best hardware on the planet right now. you don't get to being a 4 trillion dollar market cap by being trash. they must be doing something right.
It's not great, just everything else is worse. Windows is unbearably broken and loaded with adverts. Linux has been fairly neglected for desktops with few corporate sponsors.
Second-best, according to the stock market. They must be getting something wrong if 4.5 trillion in market cap is sitting around waiting to be eaten. By Apple's arch-enemy, no less.
There is no light at the end of the tunnel, Apple's shareholders are using this process to manipulate the stock price. If the next quarter performs poorly then the move up the timeline, if they do well then Cook's leash gets longer. Tim needs to be gone yesterday, not in a few months.
Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.
They shipped AirPods and the Apple Watch during his tenure. And the ahem, Vision Pro. The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everything.
The M-series chips are a continuation of the in-house chip design strategy that Steve Jobs initiated in 2008 when Apple acquired P.A.Semi.
So while Cook deserves credit for execution, the roadmap was laid in place by his predecessor.
In the startup and business world you reward execution not ideas. Ideas are easy.
I have an idea for a memristor based neural processor for low power on device AI, but its worthless because I dont have the 9 billion dollars to realize this idea...
> Ideas are easy.
Let's not get into absolutes. Ideas can be as hard or harder than execution. Not many will claim ideas like Special Relativity are easy to come by.
It really depends on the idea and what you're executing. Often in business both the idea and the execution have to work out to captialize. In this case Jobs might have set the direction and Cook capitalized. Both deserve a share of the credit.
Cook is definitely one of the world’s best operators (I think he was COO during Jobs’ tenure). But he is not a visionary by any stretch. Maybe Apple itself does not need a visionary, but I think tech needs one.
Yes, Cook was the COO during Jobs’ tenure.
Before Cook, Apple’s supply chain and manufacturing was a mess—too many of some products and not enough of others.
Back in the day, it was a running joke trying to buy products as an organization—they would announce a new Mac but you couldn’t buy it for 4-6 weeks.
It was Tim Cook who implemented Apple’s build to order system after Dell demonstrated its success. We take it for granted now, but it was a huge development at the time.
The P.A. Semi acquisition was huge of course but we shouldn’t forget during Steve’s absence, Apple used ARM processors in the Newton in the’90s.
> … cramming ads into everything
We don’t even have to wait for a new CEO for that! https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/26/ads-might-be-coming-to-app...
> The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
Your point reads as pro Cook to me. We got hardware that decreased obsolescence.
If anything I’d be pissed if Cook was out and the new CEO’s strategy involved making chips that needed upgrades every other year again. Or if they were like, “Macs don’t sell well, let’s cancel the product line.”
I don't necessarily see any reason to attribute this specific outcome to Cook, though. But from a stockholder perspective this is a bit mixed.
Of course Macs are still very profitable compared to what PC makers are making. Now they share a lot of the hardware and software stack with iPad/iPhone. So it shouldn't be too costly to maintain. And well Apple's entire ecosystem is built on them anyway. It's not like anyone besides masochists would consider actually developing apps on iPads...
> I don't necessarily see any reason to attribute this specific outcome to Cook
I do: he was CEO when the outcome was realized. Shouldn’t CEO performance be judged by outcomes the company realizes during their tenure?
Yeah, I suppose there was a point he had to sign off on the decision so there is that. Hard to say if his role amounted to anything more than that (maybe it did).
> judged by outcomes
In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over what was probably the company's darkest period (remains to be seen of course) and the situation was reasonably stable when he took over. Is he the one to blame for all of it?
Brian Krzanich was the primary architect of Intel's demise. A huge amount of Intel's problems stem from opting to go with DUV rather than EUV light source for lithography, and this decision was made during Krzanich's tenure. This may have stemmed from Krzanich's lack of technical expertise. Gelsinger was brought in to fix things, but the board of directors got uncomfortable with the amount of money required to fix the problem.
It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.
I’m with you. I think Cook has done pretty well. A replacement is not automatically going to be better. I’d wager there’s a good chance we get someone who just wants to squeeze margins rather than invest in risky and logistically complex hardware like the M chips on the Macs.
The AirPods have been my biggest source of tech wonder in recent years.
The noise cancelation features, and now the live translation function? So cool.
> If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Well when the exterior is full, it's time to look inside!
We call it the Gonad Touch, and we think you’re going to love it.
Apparently the name iBalls was considered, but just well it was rejected. The Gonad Pocket accessory is on hold pending litigation by Borat over his Mankini patents.
The M silicon is the best thing that happened to computing in this millennium, in my opinion. And it will change the future of other OSs.
Yeah, but a $250 sock though
You don't make a trillion dollar company by selling $2 socks...
Not as a shareholder, but as a customer and user I’m very ok if they just focus on making those rectangles.
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.
No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
How is doomscrolling profitable for Apple?
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
Happy to be corrected though, of course :)
40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.
Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.
"vision" would be to do things for the customer
- actually allow privacy, even from apple itself. Like turn off telemetry, not just anonymize it. and opt-in, not opt-out.
- install apps without asking permission
- allow access to your data, for example to export your imessages
Just in general be respectful and polite
Sure fine by me, but the comment I am responding to seems to be longing for a new Jobs like figure that will prioritize “innovation” to take over. I don’t think the GP is talking about an iMessage export feature. We have no reason to believe Jobs himself would care about any of the points you have listed (all of which seem great to me).
For me, I’ve been fine with bean-counter Cook. MacBooks and iPhones are not perfect, but I strongly prefer them to the competition.
Telemetry is opt-in. It asks you during setup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657
not all telemetry
some cannot be disabled ("anonymized")
some is still opt-out
just off the top of my head on iphone: settings -> search -> help apple improve search
Isn't the checkbox already ticked though? I'd say that's opt-out. The user must take direct action to avoid telemetry.
It's not a check box, its a button choice ("Share diagnostics" "Don't Share")
It's pretty explicit in intent.
My mistake, I misremembered. s1mplicissimus makes a very good point. What I do remember is it's designed to capture telemetry opt-in of people who aren't savvy and just click next, next, next.
Usually, there's a default blue bordered button and a non-highlighted grey one. Any chance the default blue button says "Share diagnostics"? Because that would still make it an opt-out
With Liquid glAss CarPlay on non touchscreen cars they changed the button colors so that gray is the selected item and blue/green are not selected. Also they changed the back on-screen button to be the default, or sometimes they select the item you want but then a second later change focus to the back button.
When you first use CarPlay there are consent screens so there are definitely people out there who have picked the wrong one.
Technically yes, but most would consider an opt-out some tiny little nearly illegible that confuses the user into allowing it without deselecting. This is a clear choice given to the user. No gimmicky opt-outs.
The problem is Apple’s software quality is the worst it’s ever been while the hardware is the best it’s ever been.
> software quality is the worst it’s ever been
I feel like this is a recency bias. Snow Leopard famously had 'zero new features' so they could focus on cleaning things up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard
Yeah, if they did something like that now it might help the software quality.
I've been talking about switching to iOS from Android for over a decade. When Google finally pissed me off enough to get serious last year I just happened to buy my mom an ipad and perform the setup. Bad experience. Then helping my wife with her iphone cemented it: no way. I thought apple would be perfectly polished albeit a little restricted vs android but it was just as janky except in different ways.
> But if Apple starts getting “visions” [...]
I fear it is going to start getting visions of monetization and injecting advertisement and tracking into everything.
I don't see where the growth is coming from unless they start trying to squeeze what they've got entirely dry.
whew that visions is a triple entedre, way to go
> but as a customer and user I’m very ok if they just focus on making those rectangles.
You can get almost the same rectangles at half the price. /s
Most importantly, it seems Cook doesn't love computers and doesn't use many (most?) of Apple products. It shows. Especially with Mac OS.
Does any CEO actually use their own company's products?
The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread..
And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app even though Notes could have done all that if they had improved it a bit.
Steve Jobs was probably one of the few people in charge who actually used his company's own products. You need someone who's annoyed with the status quo enough to make a company to solve it, not just someone elected by a board.
Hm I live and breathe our product portfolio. That is the entire reason for me waking up for work every day. I do consider myself a 'product' CEO though and passion for great products is what keeps me in tech.
Kudos to that! I kid you not: yesterday I used bing to search for “CRA my business account” (Canadian IRS equivalent) to set up some payments and the first result below copilot was a phishing site with a cloned UI! Makes me thankful for services like yours (and angry about the other things).
I also use your product. Pretty good!
The opposite problem can happen- the CEO uses the product all the time and becomes blind to problems. “It has always worked that way”, or “who would want to do that!?”” are much more common than pure apathy.
Example: Bill Gates and the weird keyboard shortcuts that Exchange had.
The "C:/Users" folder on Windows used to be "C:/Documents and Settings"
I remember Bill Gates got that to be changed after an e-mail rant he wrote about how bad Windows had become. This was 2002 or so.
That's literally not true though???
I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.
> I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.
Because most products, including iOS/macOS now, have glaring annoyances or shortcomings that have gone unfixed for a long time.
If Tim Cook or even Craig Federighi etc. actually used iOS/macOS in their day to day lives, they would have run into those issues sooner or later and they'd be fixed in a day.
(Hyperbole is a thing but the point stands)
> Does any CEO
Plenty of CEOs do. The comment you replied to already questioned Tim Cook's usage of Apple products.
Most Apple executives are probably using a Mac. Most engineers at Apple probably code on a Mac. Most engineers in the Bay already use Macs and have been using them for many years.
Such a silly comment. Is your theory that everyone with any decision making authority at Apple doesn't actually use the product? Even when it comes to "glaring annoyances or shortcomings"?
So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage. Like I'm so annoyed by this "glaring issue" on my device clearly the people working on this don't even use it or "it would be fixed in a day". Lol. Maybe people who actually have to get things done at a trillion dollar company don't have the same constraints as you, or relatedly, the luxury to obsess over your so-called glaring issues.
It’s not a silly comment, both macOS and iOS have been decaying into dog shit over the years from obvious bugs that anyone who uses the apps and features being sold would run into very quickly.
Tim and other executives might be using their devices as email machines, but it’s not obvious they’re using everything they’re quite literally selling us.
A few random examples:
1: The iOS keyboard is literally broken https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo&pp=ygUQaW9zIGtleWJ...
2: The Music app is barely functional, and will regularly fail to play music. Here it is bugging out, and stacking multiple album covers https://imgur.com/a/Sg8oU1p
3: Offloading an app does not actually save any space https://imgur.com/a/l9vxnhO
There’s so many more, and none of these examples are edge cases.
> So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage.
Hey you try waiting 5+ years on a bug report/feature request for a simple thing. Or things like a rendering bug that survives all year throughout beta into the X.1 release (see the Tahoe Contacts app)
You'd give up. This "outrage" is all the outlet we have left. Shame the system that lets such crap get through!
Elon Musk uses X every other minutes and everybody wants him to stop.
> Does any CEO actually use their own company's products?
...yes? Quite often?
I'm all for ragging on CEOs but this seems misguided. The CEO has been a user of the core product at every company I've ever worked for.
If you think Tim Cook is pulling a Samsung Galaxy out of his pocket, I don't know what to tell you.
> If you think Tim Cook is pulling a Samsung Galaxy out of his pocket, I don't know what to tell you.
He should. He should literally be using competitors for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.
Same can be said about using iPhone, look:
"Should Tim Cook use iPhone?"
>He should. He should literally be using iPhones for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.
I see no contradictions here. Half of the time + half of the time = total time he has at his disposal to be using devices.
What's funny is I was doing online shopping from a national chain and got so frustrated by the UX that I gave up.
I thought : If only the CEO would dogfood this instead of farming it out to their lackeys/gofers/personal assistants, etc...
Instead these poor people deal with stuff like that (if they're doing online shit).
"Privatize the profit, socialize the (pain in the ass enshittification, or whatever)."
Is this some parody of bad social critique? You know not every trope applies in all cases, right? A greedy CEO not using his own product doesn't readily apply the higher in the value chain you get. You replied to a comment mentioning how it's obviously silly to think Tim Cook uses a Samsung Galaxy. Yet it seems like maybe you missed the point... or do you also think decision makers at Apple are using Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel phones? Or Windows surfaces or Dell laptops instead of MacBooks? Or maybe there is some designer bespoke OS or Ferrari level brand equivalent you are privy to that I'm missing? Or is your theory that he is so wealthy his use of personal butlers and subordinates ensures he never does any computing himself? He never sends a text or gets a personal phone call, or if he does some man-servant picks it up so he doesn't have to deal with the iOS interface that has been clearly designed for "poor people"?
Then the ending comment that again can't seem to distinguish a generalized slogan re a broad social grievance with a specific claim or discussion. And the sense of personal victimization. Because something is annoying you, well clearly you are being taken advantage of. You didn't even contribute anything pertinent to the discussion except to complain about a wholly unrelated UX experience, only to limply tie it together by doing nothing more than conclude that obviously both CEOs are richer than you are.
MacOs and iOs are going off the rails. It is clear the CEO is not providing a vision, not guiding the direction, and not assuring the quality of those products.
While not as bad as Windows, which has way too many chefs in the kitchen, it is getting there.
Cook reportedly uses all of Apple’s products, including the Mac: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/22/24276142/tim-cook-wsj-in...
Never seen him wear the sock yet. Perhaps too soon.
Well he’s not going to wake up in the mornings and do his emails on a Thinkpad is he?
Sorry, are you suggesting that Cook doesn't use a computer in his day-to-day work, or has a Windows PC or Linux box in his office? Somehow I doubt that.
(It's "macOS", BTW.)
Cook is on record in 2012 as using an iPad for 80% of his work, which mostly involves communication activities such as making decisions, responding to emails, and viewing documents. With how Apple has since then differentiated iPadOS and released accessories to make the iPad more laptop like, I'd guess that percentage has only increased.
The iPad was launched in 2010 and seen as a device to play around with - a big ipod. Two years later they were in the midst of the big push for using iPads for business, in hospitals, in cafes to replace PoS, in factories, etc. So you say the CEO of Apple uses it for work, if it's good enough for him it's good enough for you. I highly doubt he doesn't use an actual computer.
> if it's good enough for him it's good enough for you
Strange argument. e.g. Warren Buffet allegedly doesn't even have a computer.
Most people don't really have a team of assistants and other subordinates extracting and processing all of the information they might need to make high level decisions. And I'm pretty sure the employees doing that are generally using actual computers rather than tablets for most stuff.
He’s a CEO with a strong C suite backing him. I doubt Tim Cook has a need for an actual computer. I struggle to think of why he’d need one to perform his job duties.
It’s called eating your own dogfood
I read it as "macOS is so full of issues that there's no way the CEO uses computers at all or he would have done something about it"
I would agree with this.
Jobs blasted folks for bad experiences, whereas I get tripped up by updates making me run through the OOBE, that doesn't contain anything, because its already set up.
The last update ran through the "connect to WiFi" process, and failed because it was already set up and connected to WiFi, but blocked everything until I managed to get through the pointless Next Next Next process. It felt like Windows in 2000.
It'd be interesting to get a new CEO that gets organically exposed to the same corner-cases roulette you play on a MBP with an actual second screen attached. After more than a decade of straying from the happy path I gave up and was bullied into clamshell mode for my own sanity.
Somehow I doubt he has is emails printed out and response by dictations ;)
The best Apple products that I have bought werde made in the Cook area. The M* MacBooks changed the game in terms of overall package. It's hard to overstate how much better I think they are than what was around during Jobs times and the gap has been closing only very slowly.
Whatever he facilitated, it worked for me. Execution matters.
You forget, the camera gets better every year!
I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustainability v's replace it every 12-24 months. I guess sustainability concerns at Apple ends at ensuring their stock price is sustainable.
What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months? I've had only two iPhones for almost 11 years. An iphone 6s and currently an iPhone 13 mini there entire time. They're solidly reliable
The camera iterates significantly every other year. My kid plays baseball, from little league to now high school ball. The pictures I can take on my iPhone are incredible. (I’d do the same thing with a Pixel or Samsung if I was a Android person)
My work phones are typically on a 4-5 year cycle. I’m currently carrying a 12 or 13 pro. I would have upgraded early for USB-C with that phone, but MagSafe is good enough.
Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade.
I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.
The difference was “hang on let me pull over” to “just do it live!”.
With 4G, you could actually do something quickly.
24 months is on the low end. But I definitely feel the need to replace every 3-ish years, solely for the camera. I have kids and I want better photos.
“feeling the need to replace it because a better one is available” is not a product reliability or longevity issue!
I have a SLR for that.
You have kids? I want pictures At random points throughout the day while doing random things, every day. I’m not a photographer that keeps a SLR camera on me at all times.
I don't see the need to photograph every second of their life, 50 years old over here, having gone through times when taking kids pictures were limited to 12, 24 and 36 attempts.
My only two iPhones have been the iPhone SE 2016, and the 13 mini.
I miss the SE but the 13 mini is really nice too. It's a shame because the SE is still perfectly capable of running most software I use on a phone, but that software has just gotten more inefficient over time.
Apple says they stopped producing minis because they didn't sell. It seems they sold relatively better than the Air, and pretty much everyone I know who still uses a device of "13" or earlier generation, is on a mini. That's about 5 people just in my social circle still on a 13 Mini, and 0 people on any other non-Mini 13th or older generation. I reckon that's the real reason they stopped making them, people who use them, are willing to stay with their phones for much longer periods. Could also be that they break less due to being smaller.
Yes. The kind of people who use iPhone minis are generally more reasonable and won't spent too much time doomscrolling on them or overusing them for random stuff (like pretending you are a good photographer).
In that sense they are very bad customers because they won't upgrade for social status reason or just novelty. They actually need to come up with something that is worthwhile, which is pretty hard. That being said, I'm pretty sure many of those users would upgrade if they could keep the small format and make it more reasonably affordable by removing most of "useless" stuff. It seems like they tried that with the air (no multiple cameras, no multiple speakers) but they made it too big and went with thinness for feeling points. They could have just kept it reasonably sized (under 6") and designed the internals in the same way while keeping it flat but not too thick.
I think Apple is a bit lost because their design focus too much on looks/feelings and social status points. They lack the focus that Apple products used to have, this is what made them interesting: deceptively simple in presentation but actually providing everything that you need without going crazy on the gimmicks.
As it is, one wonders why he should go with an iPhone. They are just chasing specs sheet points, trying to maximise the amounts of stuff they can put on the phone in order to create the appearance of "value". At this game they get destroyed by competitors like Samsung and even more the Chinese. Before, one could argue for an iPhone because of the CPU lead or the software but nowadays none of those things really matters or can even be considered an advantage.
Apple will keep selling lot's of iPhone because they are still somewhat the "hip" brand and people really don't like to change habits. But they are going to need to provide more value in the long term. Since the high-end doesn't meaningfully evolve anymore, brands have started a price war and Apple will definitely need to adapt if it doesn't want to have its crown stollen. In the US they have some time, but I think they are already losing ground in the EU and China has clearly stopped caring about their devices.
I have the 22 SE and I suspect I’ll get 3 more years out of it before they EOL it. I would have bought the 16e if it wasn’t such a blatant money grab. Touch ID is going to be hard to give up
Touch ID is going to be hard to give up
I'm kind of the opposite, I would never want to go back to Touch ID. It's so nice that you can set your notifications to be private by default, but the contents will be revealed when you glance at the phone.
I think it really matters how you store your phone as to the usefulness of Touch ID. Someone storing it in their front pocket will have it always available in an ideal position to unlock on grab, whereas someone storing it anywhere that doesn't lock it in a position like that is going to see less benefit of being able to unlock the thing as they grab it.
I just had to get a new phone old was a 2020 SE (Previous was a 6S plus) so 5 years.
The new phone is FaceId ioty is much less reliable than touch id. With touch it just fails if I have wet hands or in cold weather with gloves, faceId fails in many places.
Agreed, pulling the phone out of a pocket with my thumb on the home button and having it unlocked and ready to use by the time I look at it is is ideal.
Much better than having to pull it out, hold in in a way that it can see my face, then swipe up, then wait for the stupid animation at the top of the screen to finish and the actual unlock to occur and then finally be able to use the device.
Since 2010: 3GS, 6S and now an SE. All of them were dropped, submerged and generally knocked around. The SE fell off the top of a moving vehicle. I do use an Otter case.
Similar -- I'm currently nursing a 13 mini (the lightning port barely works, so I'm on magsafe). and before that I had an iPhone XS I think -- that one I managed to break the screen (the only time I've ever done that, I dropped it in a metal elevator). I replaced the screen but it was never the same.
So I didn't go 11 years on two models, more like 7 years or so. But I'm definitely not on the two-years-and-upgrade plan.
I had a 12 mini for 5 years, it was a really lucky year to buy one because of MagSafe. The lightning ports just don’t hold up as well as the rest of it.
Did you try cleaning the lightning port out with a toothpick or something? Mine was full of lint and now it works like new.
Thanks, I did. Maybe I just have linty pockets? It can charge sometimes if I press the lightning cable end down or up just so. And that gets a little better maybe if I toothpick it, but only maybe and only for one or two times?
I’ve had a 6+ and a 12. I guess 18 should be coming along soon, maybe it will be with an upgrade. But the 12 still feels… I dunno, really quite good.
I’ve also had it in a case the whole time, if I opened a box and found this thing I don’t think I’d be unhappy. Other than the inevitable gunk that gets in the speakers and the charging hole, it could be new…
I guess it is a race between battery health (80%) and update incompatibility, to see what will kill the thing.
I was using an iPhone 7 up to this year when I got a new 17. The 7 just kept on trucking for a long time, even if the battery did suffer near the end.
Oh my, I have found my soulmate on hacker news <3
Its a threesome! (cringe) Yes, our iPhones really get pounded on and end up with so much street credibility as they look like they were shot with bullets but they keep working.
>> What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months?
Not an Apple product user, but my wife and kids are, and... install the OS upgrade? That pretty much bricked 2 of our phones and a friend's as well.
“Pretty much bricked” sounds a lot like “didn’t brick”
I think a more charitable reading is that OS upgrades left their devices barely usable to the point of having to be replaced. I'm not a big Apple person so don't have personal experience but have heard similar stories from multiple other people, that OS upgrades wrecked the old devices they were still using.
Two iPads, an iPod Touch and an iPhone of mine have been made unusable by OS updates. If Apple had made the cutoff just one OS version sooner, then they would still feel snappy to use. They’re not actually bricked, but completely unusable and essentially e-waste.
In the real world I don't know anyone replacing their phone every 24 months. Usually people keep a phone for 3-4 years and then it gets given to kids/someone else for another few years usage. I doubt any significant number of people are chucking their 1 year old iphone in a draw to sit unused after they get the next one.
With easier to replace batteries and 3.5mm headphone jacks, I'd wager the secondary market service life would be 2-3 times longer.
Not to mention the e-waste from non-repairable battery-based devices like air-pods.
Corporation make planned obsolescence decisions that happen to benefit themselves, then can dress it up as "water resistance".
Wouldn't be so bad but Apple's anti-consumer decisions are unfortunately imitated.
What you describe as pro-consumer is only pro to some consumers, because they come with extra weight, size, and case compromises that every consumer would non-optionally be stuck with. I’d agree with you if we were in some no-compromise world or if there there was significant evidence that Apple wasn’t designing these phones within an inch of their pan-dimensional budget (size, weight, durability, hardware, battery life, etc) and leaving a bunch of room on the table, but that’s an unfounded and easily disproven theory.
I would be okay with being "stuck" with a replacement battery and a 3.5mm jack. That's a compromise I'd be wiling to take; but at the end of the day it's all about profit.
As PP noted, the tradeoff is vs. making things thinner and more waterproof.
I'm OK with wireless charging and using the USB port for audio or other purposes, though occasionally I want to use wired Ethernet or Thunderbolt displays at the same time as wired audio, and I also use a wired charge/audio dongle as a car adapter (though there are wireless chargers available.)
You might be willing to, but the product might be more attractive to millions out there if they didn’t have these items. You can say that is about profit but it is also about making a better product, weighed by what customers want in aggregate.
It's easy to replace the battery once every three years at a repair shop.
And the 3.5mm<->USB-C dongle works perfectly and is tiny.
I know some people (me included) who get a new phone frequently, but it usually works by shifting down devices down the family. E.g. our daughter, my parents, and some of my in-laws all have devices shifted down from person to person.
I'm on my fourth iPhone in 13 years and have never replaced a phone because of anything related to physical damage. I'd still be on my third but T-Mobile offered such a large trade-in value for my 2020 SE that upgrading was the same price as replacing the battery.
So you replaced your perfectly functional phone because they made the battery (a consumable) too expensive to replace?
The issue with batteries on older iPhones isn't even replacing the battery. Apple will do it for like $80 bucks or so out of warranty. That's WAY cheaper than a new phone.
But every new OS version manages to use more CPU and GPU and burn down that battery faster even if it's brand new, since the older chips have to work harder to run them than they had to work to run the older OSes.
I replaced my battery which was showing around 83% of original capacity last year, in a 3-4 year old phone. I was skeptical of the 83% reported number. Nope. The new battery didn't last much longer, nowhere close to how long it lasted on the OS it shipped with.
(This software-cpu-bloat is not unique to Apple. My Pixel, after 4 years or so, was practically unusable just from the amount of background shit the CPU was doing, compared to when it was new.)
Yes software bloat and lack of optimisation is the problem. But this is exactly why Apple is full of shit. They pretend to do and know better by forcing updates and locking down your ability to install/manage software as you see fit; yet you do not get any meaningful value in exchange.
All the App Store discourse would be moot if they clearly enforced a minimum software quality but they are way too greedy to actually do that. So in the end you are subjected to the same software bloat as Android but you just pay more for the device.
Pixels get slow because they have very weak CPUs to begin with. If you had gone with a Samsung the experience would be much better (not too different than that of an iPhone, even though the look is of a different taste).
You make a point, but it’s hard to square valuing sustainability with that kind of personal replacement rate when the supported life is several years. That said, your old phone is either being resold or parted, and and the valuable materials from unusable parts are recovered through disassembly.
Years ago the wisdom was that money was in software instead of hardware but for some reasons OSes and their updates became free.
If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change.
If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change.
I think it also has to do with the shift in computing population. It was easy to convince tech people to buy a new OS based on a feature list. When computers became more widely used, it became harder and harder. E.g. when OS X still had paid upgrades, it was very hard to convince non-tech family to buy the update. Buying a new device is easier, because the features are immediately visible to people and carrying a newer devices is also a form of social signaling.
At the same time, the internet became far more hostile and running an OS that has all the security updates is important. So, it's easier to get people to update when the updates are free.
I feel like there are a lot of iPhone features being slept on. Pairing Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence lets a grandma do some powerful work that she could never have done five years ago.
I use my iPhones for five years minimum, same goes for laptops. I’m unsure what your issue is here.
I’m on my 13 pro max now and will be at least for another year or two.
This is absurd. I’ve kept an iPhone 12 for 4 years, only replacing it last month with a 17 Pro.
Throughout that time my 5 year old phone got every OS and security update. And it’ll get the OS update in 2026 as well. So the phone released in 2020 gets software updates till 2027 - 7 years. The main issue that makes people want to upgrade is battery life degrading. Good thing Apple offers cheap and quick battery replacements in store. I replaced my battery at the 2 year mark for a small amount of money and it felt like a new phone.
What more could Apple possibly do to make their devices more sustainable? The processors are insanely overpowered, so they don’t feel slow. The batteries are easy to replace. The software updates are there. Being a bit cynical, Apple only making small incremental changes each year reduces the need to upgrade even further.
If people want to replace their devices every year or two that’s on them, not Apple.
they also added a filesystem to the phone.
My iPhones last at least 3-4 years.
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it's saying a lot about the industry in that even given the above, Apple still has way more art/vision/soul than any other tech company out there...
In a company founded by a visionary, it takes a surprisingly long time to squander all the internal culture after that person's departure. I would assume the larger the company was at that moment, the longer it takes.
We can't keep ignoring those Chinese tech companies. The ones that have pivoted into EVs, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robotics, amongst other things.
Steve wanted to become chairman of the board and teach at Stanford. Given how much he trusted Tim, I’m not so sure the company would have taken a dramatically different path had he been around longer.
But this sounds like an ideal setup, doesn't it? Tim is fantastic at execution, but he does need a shot of big-picture vision every now and then. Tim as CEO with Steve as Chairman, steering the broader direction, feels like it could have been a perfect pairing. The issue with how things actually turned out is that Tim ended up on his own - all execution, no vision.
How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.
Steve was so effective precisely because he was able to get deeply involved in the day to day details in ways no other CEO has (whether on product matters, or personnel matters). That's not what you do as chairman of the board.
> How many people can name the chairman of the board at Apple today off the top of their head (Arthur Levinson)? And how much does Arthur Levinson steer the broader direction of the company? That's just not what the role is about.
Jobs in that role would likely take a much more occasionally-active role w.r.t. future product direction since that was kind of his bread-and-butter and the company was his long-time passion project. Not because that's the regular purpose of that role, but because that's what he'd probably want to keep doing.
Steve Jobs would not have been defined by or limited by his title.
Steve Jobs was a dick and a monster and his product vision did not make him a good person or better for Apple over the long run.
If he hadn't tried to self-treat his cancer with acupuncture, fruit juice and herbs, he'd probably be around now to do that. The man was clearly a lucky idiot, and shouldn't be revered, but used as a cautionary tale of unbridled arrogance.
He should perhaps be a cautionary tale against thinking that being really good at building consumer tech products makes you good at everything. But if this is your standard for "lucky idiot", I wonder who of note you wouldn't consider a lucky idiot. You can dig up something like this for everyone from Newton to Salk.
My go-to example for this is Turing. The genius of our field, and apparently duped into credulity about telepathy (probably based on faulty/fraudulent results by people at then-respected institutions)
To be fair, tons of scientists and technical people believed at that time that telepathy might be real. For example if you go back and read science fiction from the 40s, 50s, even 60s, there is a ton of telepathy and mental powers. This reflects both the authors’ efforts to predict future scientific advancement, and their audience’s willingness to believe it.
No it represents the editor's (John W. Campbell) passions - he would suggest using those ideas to authours and was more likely to accept stories with those ideas.
He had an overwhelming presence in SF until the New Wave of the 1960s
It’s more accurate to say that Campbell became a huge presence in science fiction by publishing the stories he did. Their popular success reflected a desire in the culture to read what was being published. Larry Niven is one example of an author who did not go through Campbell but yet had many mental powers in his stories and found huge success.
Many universities had depts to study “parapsychology.” The end of that era is the basis for the opening of Ghostbusters. I’m using popular media as shorthand for how wide-spread these ideas were, but military and intelligence operations seriously studied this stuff too, and in many countries, not just the U.S.
This is the way science goes; people can only work with what is known at the time. Newton was doing alchemy while inventing the basis for modern physics. It’s tempting to look back and condemn people by the standards of what we know today, which is based on additional evidence and theory developed over decades or centuries since. But I think it inhibits understanding of how such knowledge is created over time.
I'd consider myself a Steve Jobs hater (and I think his treatment choices were bad) but the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is in the 10-15% range.
"Probably", he'd not be around today. Even with his money, it'd be improbable.
He had a much more treatable and slowly growing variety of pancreatic cancer - it was a neuroendocrine cancer in his pancreas (an islet cell tumor). The 5-yr survival rate for stage 1/2 is something like 95%, and even stage 4 is still around a 25%. The more common and deadly pancreatic cancer you’re thinking of has a 5yr survival rate of under 15% and under 3% if it’s advanced to stage 4.
If he had received real care immediately after diagnosis, he’d almost certainly be alive and cancer free today.
I stand corrected!
Not moving goalposts, but on another note:
He refused regular treatment for 9 months, for an allegedly slow-growing type of cancer?
That still doesn't sound that crazy, especially given he lived another 8 years.
Right - but he only lived 8 more years because by the time he’d had surgery, the cancer had metastasized to his liver which is much more difficult to treat.
Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthiest people on earth that he couldn’t have lived to old-age.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinre.2018.08....
Think of cancer like trying to stop an exponential growth curve. Waiting months for treatment can mean billions or trillions of additional cancer cells you need to clear. And instead of being able to carve them out of one location, they’re now all over your body requiring systematic poisoning.
All good points. :) I can't stand more corrected than I already do, yet here I am!
A person should be judged by a stupid decision they made? I hope you never did anything that wasn't rational.
Especially when it comes to life threatening illnesses like cancer. I've seen more than one entirely normal, rational person start grasping at off the wall solutions when faced with the imminent end of their life.
Stupid decisions that result in fatalities deserve extra judgement.
People get sick and they die. Nobody should have to go through any treatments they dont want to. And to blame someone for that is like blaming them for the disease.
Maybe watch this lecture by a medical professional https://youtu.be/81xnvgOlHaY before repeating a commonly-believed myth.
That lecture is by a doctor who had widely discredited views on cancer, often cited as an example of quack, pseudoscientific claims on the topic.
His claims, specifically on cancer, were widely and roundly rejected by the scientific and medical community. This is not a controversial statement, either - his supporters proudly proclaim that his views are rejected by the vast majority of experts which, in my opinion, pretty much sums it up.
I highly recommend people avoid falling into this dangerous rabbit hole.
Few people should be revered, but calling him a lucky idiot is just blatant revisionism.
> Steve wanted to become chairman of the board and teach at Stanford.
Do you have a source for this?
I've heard it from Laurene on several occasions, she alludes to it in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdvzYtgmIjs&t=2825s
(in case the link goes down: Tim Cook, Sir Jony Ive KBE, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Code 2022 Interview with Kara Swisher)
Wonderful, thanks so much for taking time to link to this.
Cook's Apple got you:
- Apple Watch
- Airpods (& Pro) & Beats
- Apple Silicon
- Vision Pro
No, Apple had been doing their own silicon (presumably you mean for their phones) while Jobs was still CEO, and he bought PA Semi in 2008 which put them on the path to do their own CPU cores (iPhone 5 with Swift CPU was released the year after he died so he'd obviously seen the core design process through from the beginning to likely initial tape-out or very close to).
Yes and even before that they had PowerPC. The only reason that even stopped is because R&D was done by Motorola and IBM and they ended up going in other directions which made working for Apple has a sole client not much of good deal.
If Apple had enough money back then to bankroll full R&D on both the chip design and the foundry, they would have never gone with Intel in the first place. Intel won because of massive volume PC sales got them with a similar amount of money thrown into PowerPC it would probably stayed competitive.
Apple Silicon share many similarities in design philosophy with PowerPC and Apple had invested in ARM way before Cook was even considered as a CEO replacement.
The best thing we can say about Cook is that he managed to not fuck it up. In practice he is just a greedy snake that is very good at sucking every last drop of profit of anything Apple manages to create. He has very little positive influence on the vision and roadmap side of things.
The fact that people keep praising Cook is just reflection of the times, where money in itself has become a goal and the sole worthwhile target.
Where do you draw the line? Apple Silicon as a high powered replacement for Intel as a concept was all under Cook's tenure, from initial investigations to product ship. By your logic where would we stop the attribution?
Draw the line for Apple silicon? With Jobs. I'm not sure what was unclear about my previous post. Jobs introduced Apple silicon. That's my logic. Jobs began the SoC design for iPhones and he began the high performance CPU initiative with the purchase of PA Semi. That's my logic.
Putting their CPUs in laptops wasn't an incredible initiative from Cook either, it was basically an inevitability that mobile class cores would eventually intercept high end CPUs for performance after Dennard scaling ended, and it was widely predicted by many Apple watchers even before their own core came out, but particularly after the first ones came out.
Some thought it would be sooner, some later. If Intel hadn't shat the bed for a decade, and/or if the PA Semi team and subsequent Apple CPU team turned out to be in the Samsung or Annapurna tier, then it might have taken many more years, or they might have switched over to an ARM Ltd core IP. But the trajectory for how things turned out was set in motion squarely by Jobs. Who brought up the CPU group and introduced the first high performance Apple CPU silicon.
Cook was COO through all of that too. He’s been at Apple since 1998.
Okay but the context was about things that were done under each CEO. Apple's Cook did a bunch of things, and he had other COO under him too.
"Put them on the path" is nothing compared to the plan and decision to switch CPUs. Any CPU family switch is a giant bet with massive implementations issues. Exactly like the other CPU family switches were massive bets (although they did prepare the following ones - for sure). PA Semi was only a tiny step in that direction. Credit to Cook then.
This is moving the goalposts to somewhere... which also appears to be not Cook. Apple came out with Apple silicon and switched to Apple CPU cores under Jobs.
Jobs oversaw Apple silicon, Jobs switched to using Apple CPU cores.
Laptop and desktops switch to ARM CPUs in 2020 (Cook)?
Previous switches were to Intel around 2006 (Jobs), with last one in 2023 (Cook). And to PowerPC around 1994 to 2006 (Jobs)?
Seems to me the 2020 switch went mostly seamlessly thanks to the work done with the earlier switch to Intel.
Phones and iPads started with ARM and are still ARM to this day.
We're talking about two different things. OP was not talking about ARM ISA, but Apple silicon. Mobile switched to Apple silicon under Jobs with iPhone 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_silicon. Apple designed cores were added later, also under Jobs. Apple silicon, Apple cores => Jobs.
Moving laptops to ARM ISA with Apple cores can be credited to Cook, but it was not a big move or a risky step like standing up their own CPU design team was. From the release of Swift and onwards, all the punters were speculating about when (not if) it would happen, and you could really plot a performance line for Apple vs Intel/AMD CPUs and make a pretty educated guess when it would happen.
And yes, the powerpc and x86 switches gave them a lot of experience doing the ARM switch, with fast emulation, fat binaries, etc., and others like IBM had implemented TSO modes in weakly ordered CPUs and others like Transmeta had special instructions for x86 flags emulation. It wasn't really a huge technical gamble beyond what Cook inherited to move to ARM.
If the Vision Pro were $1000 I'd buy it without hesitation.
At $1500 I'd eventually talk myself into it.
At $3500 I'm just waiting.
It's a product category that will be really interesting in ten years (no sarcasm), when the hardware actually catches up in usability to the concept.
Vision Pro is underrated. The issue is that it’s not at a stage where it can go mainstream but the tech is insane. Apple silicon is huge and the only reason I am considering a macbook pro and waiting for the M5 max/pro series.
I think people are underestimating cook because none of these replaced the iPhone and because of the significant degradation in Apple software.
Apple also invested heavily into EV. Though not succeeded, they at least put money into new areas.
Is it worth mentioning that there are almost countless Chinese EV brands nowadays? I wonder if Apple was really trying. I’m sure it’s difficult, of course, but it seems like every week there’s a new car manufacturer. To quote Clarkson ‘how hard could it be’ ;)
Maybe they tried and didn’t find that they could be competitive with the hundreds of Chinese EV producers. The market was crowded, and they didn’t see what special value they could add? I mean, it’s already cliche that xiaomi decides to release one, but they released a heat pump as well, their stores in the mall are pretty confusing.
Interestingly enough if apple really wanted they could acquihire one of the currrent EV brands and do a beats/siri on it. Theres probably a lot of churn currently before the field stabilises , and probably the entry point for a new entrant would be currently closing.
What value could apple add though? They would just be diluting their brand. Even the beats acquisition is confusing.
Yeah, even the industrial design angle seems a bit on the wane.Most likely move to open a new product lineand integrate it into the apple ecosystem. At this point they havent had any new product lines or innovations rather than thinner and custom chip designs , if they want to go that way.Although i think a better fit for them would be one of the humanoid robot firms and apply some of that industrial design they are(were) famous for.
I guess I could go with an apple bot...especially if they partner with someone that really does AI. The Chinese techs however are better positioned to do this, even if a trade war cuts off access to the USA, they still have the rest of the world. One wonders what could have happened if Google didn't get rid of Boston Robotics.
Beats started without Apple. They bought the existing brand.
I read the comment as Cook acquired Beats which, in addition to the hardware, became the basis for Apple Music streaming and growing service revenue.
And it perfected iPad.
I think Apple has kind of a culture problem where the whole organization has to look-up way too much to its chief to make key decisions.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
Yeah. all you have to do is look at "Apple (lack of) Intelligence" to know that Steve's presence and taste is gone.
User: "Siri, <insert question>"
Siri: "I cannot answer that right now" <end conversation>
User: <follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, so they prefix again with Hey Siri> please ask chatgpt < insert question>
Siri: "Hello, sure I can ask ChatGPT · Check important info for mistakes"
ChatGPT: "Hello, how can i help you today"
User: <insert question>
ChatGPT: Answers question and siri terminates conversation
User: <asks follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, user then goes to settings and disables apple intelligence>
Egregious...
Huge corporations are in the business of manufacturing boring things at scale, throwing money into pits, and moving slowly, it's just what they do, at least after they're initial rise. It seems cynical, but I think only a rare person at a rare company might disagree. As soon as you have dominance, you want to protect that dominance rather try something categorically industry changing. Even if you did, it wouldn't be surprising enough to get much attention unless what it was completely upended your own product line.
Mostly fair, but I can’t express how much I love the M series and where it’s heading. I’m biased as an MLE but this is the greatest thing ever to me
I couldn't disagree more. Some of the worst Apple computers I've owned date to the Jobs era. All of the best have been from the Cook era. Apple Silicon has been an enormous success.
(My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.)
The TiBook was a milestone product and a great Jony Ive-led design. Apple has been making silver, thin, metal laptops ever since. Even a titanium iPhone for some reason. The last Titanium model with 1GHz, 1GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, DVI, Firewire, DVD/CD-RW, 64MB Radeon 9000, etc. seems pretty great and could run both Mac OS 9 and OS X. And that glowing Apple logo on the back of the display (which I miss in modern Mac laptops.) The main defects (apparently fixed in later models) seem to be the weak hinge and display cables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4
I didn't say the TiBook was one of the worst Apple computers I've owned. But my 16" M3Max is so much better than it. And the construction of the modern Macbooks is not all that similar to that of the TiBook.
What a difference 20 years makes, I suppose. Apple laptops do seem to have solid hinges now. ;-)
Apple Silicon definitely transformed expectations for laptop performance and battery life, especially in a fanless design like the MacBook Air.
I do wish my M1 MacBook Pro weren't bulkier and heavier than my old intel model. I went all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt so I would have liked 4 ports (or more). But the battery life and performance are probably worth it. And the MacBook Air 15" is lighter and thinner than the 15" intel models, but still has good battery life.
Well, the current hardware is solid - great build quality, powerful, insane battery life.
However, software-wise, the peak was 10.6. There hasn't been the same level of quality ever since.
It's simply amazing. I was looking for a ~$6000 USD 14in laptop with good specs. NOTHING compares to what Apple has right now. I looked at Framework, some gaming laptops, ThinkPads, Dells and most of them would require 16+ inches to get specs similar to a MBP 14 Ultra with 128GB unified ram and 8tb disk. ...
Apple has done an amazing job integrating all that hardware. And I say this as someone who was looking to buy a notebook to install Linux, as its my favorite OS.
So what im doing is put Ubuntu Server Arm + kde-desktop in VMware and use it as my main dev env.
I would not want to be running Snow Leopard. And remember, that's a release they had to do because 10.5 was so rough!
Why not? Other than "because they're old"?
Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases.
Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco!
But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal computing. From the iMac "make it simpler by going back to basics, but future-looking basics" to "easier to manage, funner to use music players" through showing how smartphones and then tablets could be far more functional and usable than MS', Palm's, or Nokia's visions. The watch is the next best category-definer since then, and the iCloud cross-device stuff generally feels better-done than competitors still, but otherwise... refine, refine, refine, and slowly add more ads and upsells. Microsoft or anyone else could run that playbook, in a way that they never could match the Apple playbook from 1997 to 2011.
(One side question here is "are there new segments out there waiting to be invented?" which I don't know the answer to. But even so, "becoming just another upsell-pushing, ad-driven, software-subscription-service provider" wasn't a necessary path.)
Snow Leopard eventually became a solid release. At launch it had many bugs, including some that lost customer data.
It’s tempting to compare one’s memory of an old late-cycle OS, after all the UI changes have been accepted and the bugs squashed, to the day-1 release of a new OS today, when UI changes seem new and weird and there are tons of bugs they knowingly shipped to hit the launch date (just like with Snow Leopard). But it’s not really a fair comparison.
iOS and ipadOS have gotten massively better over the years. The gap between them and macos has been slowly closing. Still a lot to go, but so much has improved.
Peak was System 7!
Apple's classic Mac GUIs were beautiful and discoverable, with clear, visible controls/affordances.
Running Apple's "Macintosh" screen saver reminds me that Apple used to care about every pixel. Now even basic user interface elements like the menu bar are clunky, with things like the Window menu not aligning properly (even on a wide display where there is more than enough space.) Menus getting lost behind the notch is another annoying problem.
It seems like Microsoft learned from Apple's original approach somewhat, at least for Windows 95 through Windows 7 (though I think for a while there was a dead zone below the start menu, a fairly obvious mistake), but Apple seems to have strayed from the path with an invisible, gestural interface.
From a UI standpoint, I agree. There’s nothing like the classic Mac interface and its associated Apple Human Interface Guidelines for GUI software. I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, but the classic Mac and its ecosystem of applications were something special.
However, when it comes to UX, stability is a major component, and this is where Mac OS X is vastly superior to cooperative multitasking, lack-of-memory-protection Mac OS 9 and below. I prefer the classic Mac UI, but Mac OS X had a better UX.
On the other hand, the low-point was MacOS 7.6.1 Update 2 or whatever.
Apple Silicon was started by/during the Steve Jobs era in 2010. You seeing the rewards now (well starting in 2019), because it takes so long to produce a chip.
Apple Watch was also started under Jobs
Well Jobs obviously took risks, way more than Cook ever did. But Yes, Silicon was absolutely the right move, incredible performance leap, at an accessible price (but one could argue it's more of a failure from Intel). Now from a "culture re-definition" perspective, nothing is going to top what Apple did in the 80's and what they did again in the 2000's with the iPhone.
What was different in the jobs era were the goals and trajectory toward achieving them. The tibook was just a first step.
Seems like a just-so story. They shipped some rough computers over the course of that trajectory.
It used to be a case of, always avoid the first generation of a product as they would only get it right the second time around.
They were brilliant at pushing for new stuff but it came with the issues of pushing a little to fast at times.
Sorry, Touch Bar MacBook Pros were the pits.
They were not great.
The guy who oversaw the silicon change is the one who's likely going to be the next CEO
Arguably he overshot innovation, tried to kill the pocket bricks and failed (with a v1 that wasn’t meant to replace the rectangles but was supposed to be a first step toward that). Sounds like you’re ignoring Vision Pro.
Vision Pro is a perfect example of a greed-driven failure. Apple pissed off both devs and megacorps by keeping the ecosystem closed, fighting tooth and nail in courts such that every app needed to pay them 30% and couldn't be installed without their blessing, and unsurprisingly very few massive companies (or hackers) wanted to support Apple's fledgling closed garden. Without software, it's just a gadget.
> Apple pissed off both devs and megacorps by keeping the ecosystem closed
This was so incredible to see play out in real time.
You know where else this is happening now? Car makers and CarPlay.
CarPlay might be objectively better but car makers are giving them the boot, for very good reason.
Apple overplayed their hand (or as you say, was incredibly greedy) and now they get to live with the consequences.
Tesla announced they are adding it this week. Ford’s CEO expressed glee at GM removing it. There isn’t a CarPlay App Store nor downloads to get 30% from (or if there were, they’d appreciably be enabled by Apple’s platform as we aren’t in the habit of subscribing to or buying apps for our car today), and while we don’t know the licensing terms from the GM removal it sounded like privacy violations and extra subscription revenue are their motivations for dropping CarPlay. That doesn’t sound consumer friendly on the carmakers part at all. I think this field doesn’t line up with the overall thesis, squint as we might.
Tesla did not announce it. Bloomberg published an article speculating it. And Bloomberg has been wrong before.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-13/tesla-is-...
>Tesla Inc. is developing support for Apple Inc.’s CarPlay system in its vehicles, according to people with knowledge of the matter, working to add one of the most highly requested features by customers.
>The carmaker has started testing the capability internally, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort is still private.
Tesla's news is interesting. A good question to ask in this who's in control in Tesla x CarPlay relationship. The answer is obviously former (Apple can't dictate anything and Tesla gets to boss around).
That's very different from a Toyota x Apple partnership.
So no, those are two different scenarios. The era of Apple controlling the platform is gone. (Except for legacy ones)
How is the Tesla relationship with CarPlay different than the Toyota one? You didn’t make that clear at all.
People buy Tesla for Tesla and not because CarPlay. But CarPlay is a purchasing decision factor for other brands, which means a power imbalance exists.
So this is a classic game theory situation. You want all participants (Toyota, Honda, Ford) to cooperate (not have CarPlay) and not defect. So participants watch each others move.
If they stick together, all of them stand to win.
If one defect, in the short term they might win but in the long-term Apple will seek to commoditize the car maker.
> People buy Tesla for Tesla and not because CarPlay.
They increasingly just don't buy Tesla. Strong growth in that segment lately.
I recall though, back in 2021 we rented one as a test drive situation. The UX was so horrific I did an immediate 180 on that idea. Hard pass. Carplay might've saved that sale, their stock infotainment is trash.
I wouldn't be surprised if they go all on in Carplay Ultra near the end.
Oh, I'm aware. I have no love for Tesla. I was making an observation of what I see around me (plenty of new Teslas on the road even after Elons shenanigans)
> for very good reason.
The reasons are subscription revenue and user data. Not sure which of those you consider very good.
Huh? Apple does not charge for CarPlay. Some automakers are trying to give them the boot, but that has nothing to do with Apple's greed and everything to do with the automakers' greed. They want their own ecosystem of apps.
> Huh? Apple does not charge for CarPlay.
I'll let you in on a secret. Ask yourself what the business case of CarPlay is. "Why" should Apple do CarPlay. Put yourself in the shoes of a VP at Apple pitching CarPlay. Are they saying "let's invest millions of dollars in inventing the UI for cars and give it away for free, for .. goodwill?"
Nope, the slide deck would say 'Cars are the next computing platform. That's where most people spend time. So imagine is we (Apple) were meaningful present there .. and that's why we need to invest in it'
So, yes CarPlay is a move to control another computing formfactor. One they do not manufacturer (like tv and Apple TV) ...and unfortunately for them, car makers are wiser this time around.
A simpler explanation is that all of these little conveniences add up to keeping customers firmly embedded in the ecosystem, repeatedly buying new iPhones. And sure, if we can offer another environment where an App Store purchase can be used, great.
> unfortunately for them, car makers are wiser this time around
Maybe. Ditching CarPlay does not currently seem like the wise decision, given how many of us have decided that omitting it is a deal killer. I love my Lightning, but I do not for one nanosecond trust that Ford would keep the app ecosystem on my truck running as long as Apple will keep iOS working on iPhones.
AVP is a great example of Tim's ability to execute the logistics despite lacking the user story driven sensibilities of Jobs.
They’re still not quite as bad as most alternatives but yeah, most of the principles that made them stand out are falling away.
People blame Cook, and I do too. But for some reason Jony Ive never gets his discredit. He is the one who kicked off the boring rectangle, and it's clear he does not have the capacity to deviate from that. His industrial design was frankly terrible and people have lapped it up. Ever since the iPod, I can't think of an industrial design of Apple's or Ive's that was actually any good. Even today, compare an iPhone to an Xperia. The Xperia is bounds ahead of the iPhone.
I dunno, the stuff they have now doesn't really need a lot of innovation. Like, my MacBook isn't very different from the one I bought in 2013 (other than massive performance improvements of course), but I don't really need it to be anything other than what it is. Same with my iPhone. I'll probably only replace that when the battery life gets bad. Most of the "innovations" on those lines have been annoying (touch bar, apple AI, etc.)
In contrast, Microsoft has innovated a lot on the desktop since Windows 7 and I hate almost all of it. I'd happily go back to the old experiences.
> that's what shareholders want
What else could shareholders want? Employees, management, founders, customers, vendors could all have other goals, wants or desire but when you have a large number of shareholders that is what they want always.
Shareholders - a large majority of them are institutional with their own shareholders they are accountable to, always want more money - that is a core principle of capitalism.
Occasionally we can tie other objectives to financial gains to get a behave in a specific way, say a green initiative will improve the brand perception therefore brand value - because now they can charge more/ justify current pricing etc.
It can at times align the other way too for risk minimization - a founder wants a large budget for something - like say Zuckerberg with Metaverse[3], or Musk with $1T pay [2] firing the founder is more expensive[1] so shareholders sign off.
Fundamentally it always boils down to profit/value maximization for the shareholders.
---
[1] By no means unique, except for the scale of money spent on a vanity project.
[2] Firing is more expensive - Tesla trades at such crazy multiples those are arguably not viable without Musk. It is probably cheaper to give then $1T pay package or the similar $56b package from 2018 currently being disputed in court.
[3] Almost impossible in Meta's case. The board can fire the CEO in any company, but since Zuckerberg owns > 50% of the voting shares, he as the majority shareholder can also fire the board anytime and replace with a board who will sign off. It is not absolute power though, there are some protections for minority shareholders as Delaware court is showing with 2018 Musk package case.
If you check my comments Im a routine critic of Apple. Specifically its mis-management of Siri.
But, in my mind, Tim Cook is also responsible for the only exceptional qualities of Apple. Namely its production of the M series chips and the Vision Pro (yes really).
They better have someone outstanding in mind as a replacement.
Otherwise I could easily see the successor mildly improve Siri/AI functions, while continuing Apples new disastrous design language and drop the ball on the supply chain and vertical integration that makes their hardware products second to none.
Ternus is the leading candidate; VP of Hardware Engineering. He was very likely more directly responsible than Cook for all the things you liked about Cook's Apple.
My fear for Apple right now is how most decisions they make appear to incentivize them toward becoming a perpetual middle-man in all aspects of your interactions with their products. They don't manufacture much of anything anymore; its on-contract. They design the M-Series chips, but don't make them. Their software sucks; they'd rather just take 30% of your interaction with actually-good software. Their AI and search sucks; they just pay Google $30B a year for theirs. Etc and etc.
Ternus team didn’t create M-series.
Johny Srouji team did instead.
https://www.apple.com/leadership/johny-srouji/
https://www.apple.com/leadership/john-ternus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johny_Srouji
Very few tech companies make the whole stack. Making chips requires specialization and is required for high end chips. Samsung is probably the only company that makes chips for their own phones.
Their Siri sucks so they just borrowed Google Gemini.
What incentive do they have otherwise?
Wait, Apple Pay Google for search?
No, but Apple is likely to be paying Google for access to Gemini in the upcoming Siri revamp, and relies on Google's technology for the default safari search experience, which is what I was referencing.
I thought they're buying a custom model they can run (likely for privacy reasons)
No, it’s the other way around. Comment above is confused about the relationship.
Reports say that Apple will be paying Google a billion a year for a Gemini‘d Siri
He's referring to the AI part of his sentence.
As to succession, Cook is an operations maniac. Hopefully that carries to preparing and planning potential successors.
I think it should be Sabih. Having worked with him he has a great head on his shoulders.
With the right visionary, $2k phones and $500 textile cases will not be impossible...
$2k phones has been a thing for a while now, with the folding phones. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold currently starts at $1700 and Google Pixel Pro Fold starts at $1800, and both are over $2100 for the 1TB models.
I think we’ll be seeing a lot more, from Vision. The Liquid GlArse thing is because they want to make every app a Vision app.
Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced. It has probably become the most successful product in history.
How unimpressive the first iPhone was??
Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.
It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.
But sure..."unimpressive."
This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.
> This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
I thought we were supposed to find less abrasive ways to engage each other, around these parts.
In any case, I admit that I could have phrased it better.
What I meant, was that “professionals” laughed at it (and there were a lot of them), but “customers,” did not.
I worked for a company, where they literally laughed in my face, when I told them “This thing will be trouble for us.” A few years later, their own product line was a smoking crater in the ground.
> Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced
We have very different recollections, then. People audibly gasped when Steve demoed slide-to-unlock on stage. The first generation was sold out for a long time despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.
> despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.
That’s sort of what I meant.
The people who poo-poohed it, were marketing folks at more traditional companies (like the one I worked for, at the time).
They literally laughed themselves into the poorhouse. I watched that happen, right in front of my eyes.
The VP is cool, but it's still hard to see a future where everyone has one. As soon as I got my original iPhone it was clear that it changed everything going forward. The entire market changed on the spot. The VP has not done that, even if it may ultimately be successful.
Good point.
Given the VP price, it’s clear that it’s aimed at high-end “fancy toy” buyers; not mainstream users.
I have not used one, but everyone I know, that did test one (and I don’t know anyone that actually brought one), has that “Moses coming off Mount Sinai” look [0]. It’s clear that Apple has done a great job of implementing an AR platform, but the price is far too high to fairly compare to the iPhone I, which was pricey, but not inaccessibly so.
If they are effective in reducing the cost, and improving the comfort, we may see some real success.
[0] https://www.ocregister.com/wp-content/uploads/migration/kzw/...
Comparing the Vision Pro customer response and iPhone customer response is laughable, imo
Changing chip is way too little of an accomplishment in 10+ years of leadership of what was once the biggest tech company on the planet.
The company isn't growing from years, and it's only saved by the positive offset coming from advertisement and app store growth.
Listen, I don't really like the direction Apple has taken either, but since Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in August 2011 the company's stock went from like $15 to like $275; it had a value of $400 billion and now it's worth $4 trillion, ten times as much. Any characterization of him as some kind of failure who killed Apple ("once the biggest tech company on the planet", "isn't growing", "only saved"...) is completely out-of-touch.
As a customer and tech enthusiasts I couldn't care less about the stock performance of Apple, truly.
It's a tech company, I'm interested in the tech they produce. On that front, the company hasn't been innovative for ages.
This is one of the least reality-based statements ever.
Just take AirPods Pro at a minimum. Apple is doing thing with AirPods that other brands can’t even dream of, and it’s all technical engineering.
APP and my AW are instant-replace products if I lose/damage them. The M-series chips have made my MBP the same.
It's hard to say Apple hasn't innovated for both regular consumer and tech enthusiasts.
MBP = Macbook Pro AW = Apple Watch? What is APP?
AirPods Pro.
Apple Silicon and everything related to it is deeply innovative, it's just not at all flashy.
in house chips are pretty cool. Shared memory is a really nice architectural advancement.
What is your specific definition of "in house" chips ?
Usually we'd apply that to Samsung's exynos or Sony's image sensors for their DSLRs. Would Google's Tensor for instance fit in that definition ?
It sailed on Jobs‘ monumental accomplishments, and still does. Including AirPods and Vision Pro, much of what fell into Cook‘s era was already well underway when Jobs died. Cook is a fantastic executor, fulfilling Jobs‘ legacy. But the tank is empty now, has been for a while.
Every bit of your second sentence is wrong. None of that was even on the drawing boards when Steve passed away.
Look it up. Both have been prototyped for more than a decade before being released. Like most recent Apple products.
How can we be sure this is specifically due to Cook and not the ecosystem overall?
A lot has changed since 2011. Some was likely Cook continuing execution of things lined up by Jobs. Some could just be tech sector in general, etc.
> likely Cook continuing execution of things
I love how people say 'execution' like it's an insult. Execution on the scale of Apple is an incredible challenge. Apple sells something like 425 iPhones per minute. It could be argued that execution is the biggest Apple innovation ever.
In some ways it doesn't matter. A bad CEO would have fucked up the ecosystem.
10x over 15 years is not really impressive for a tech company
Show me the other tech companies that have done anywhere near as good as
MacBooks outclass any other laptop in the market thanks to those chips.
"…and it's only saved by the positive offset coming from advertisement and app store growth"
That has been part of the plan for a decade now since Eddy Cue was tasked with boosting Apple's income from "services". (It's worked pretty well for Microsoft.)
It’s not the only thing. The scale up of Apple is massive and so is the supply chain. Those are not really things consumers don’t see directly (just indirectly)
Be careful what you wish for.
Satya Nadella is by most accounts the best person to lead Microsoft, currently the largest software company in the world.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste," said Steve Jobs. That largely remains true.
Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.
Satya Nadella calls AI "a cognitive amplifier," which sounds like some kind of cool Excel formula.
Without taste being reinjected into Apple, it will remain uninspired and uninspiring, no matter who leads.
I often wonder why Satya Nadella is so venerated on HN compared to say, Cook or Pichai. As innovators, MS lags way behind both Google and Apple. I can't think of one bleeding edge product released during Satya's tenure. Say what you will about Apple and Google, they still consistently put out products that make you sit up and pay attention. What has MS been doing other than squeezing the MS Office and Azure cash cows?
Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.
However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.
Ballmer doesn't strike me as an idiot and definitely not bland. He's one of the more colorful tech personalities. MS's almost unassailable lead in enterprise could be attributed to him and the pivot to cloud could not have happened without this. But he definitely fumbled hard on mobile (Windows Phone), Surface (IIRC the initial ARM laptop was a major flop and had a close to 1B+ writeoff) and the disaster that was the Nokia acquisition. I'd say he left at the right time, just as it was becoming clear that MS's bets on Windows Phone and hardware in general weren't paying off.
That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.
Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.
Nadella plays on level easy.
Too many companies are dependent on MS products so it doesn’t matter how bad it gets.
MS rather disables features instead of fixing security issues and now puts AI in everything in a desperate attempt to force the users to use it.
I assumed he was a product guy until I heard him on Dwarkesh's podcast. He does seem to really only get fired up about numbers going up, and customers are a vehicle for that.
For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
> I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
Well he did change Google fundamentally. Imagine being so dense you're fumbling to a competitor built on a technology that you innovated .
That being said, I'm still long Google because they're the tortoise. And this is one of those races where slow and steady might actually win. And while I was a strong critic of Pichai on a lot of fronts (just check my past comments!), he still must be given due credit for his measured approach and for navigating Google through some of the roughest regulatory environments, and for leaving Google relatively unscathed.
My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.
Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.
Other commenters are raking Apple over the coals for bad experiences with MacOS. By the same token, Windows 11 is beyond awful. It's a complete buggy mess, never mind the secure boot restrictions.
VSCode revolutionized the IDE
I'm just incredibly disappointed with how Windows has ended up
As the CEO of Microsoft, he must use Windows, right? Unless he has a Mac
Like how can he use that ad-riddled mess every day and think it's fine, knowing he could make it so much better?
One should not forget that Mr Cook was handpicked by Jobs himself. So if Apple is lacking taste or leadership, it is partly Jobs' own making
yes but he was desperate (dying) when he made the choice
His dying was also part of his lack of taste, since he went with alternative medicine rather than actual medicine
Is it not rather the opposite? His striving for unconventional "taste" (as opposed to boring convention) was probably a factor in him seeking "alternative" medicine.
in some sense i think it shows having taste. sometimes taste can be dangerous. you can only have a taste for say rock climbing equipment, by rock climbing, which exposes you to danger.
I thought that quote came from Bill Atkinson.
Hmm. Jobs used the bicycle metaphor extensively in this advert-interview thing: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1050/0*SgDLtymZpgcXEA7...
Which (squinting) was printed in the WSJ in 1980: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1148/1*wXZ9t85eJnREeDw...
But "bicycle for the mind" might be John Sculley, 1986: https://archive.org/details/apple-retro-books-collection/App...
Unless of course Jobs said it earlier.
It's from a video interview with him in 1980:
“I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species… The condor came in at the top. Humans came in about a third of the way down. But when a human rides a bicycle, we blow the condor away. That’s what a computer is for me: a bicycle for the mind.”
Sure that wasn't 1990?
> Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.
The funniest part to me: I can't imagine Jobs on a bicycle. Perhaps when he was a small kid, but as far as I know he was notoriously on the jerky side of strongly motorized vehicles.
Which could perfectly align with his vision of the iPod and iPhone as powerful, but closed and restrictive and expensive ecosystems, replacing computers.
> no matter who leads
Then only the next CEO will have a chance to reinject taste into Apple, so it needs to happen at the same time.
Apple gets a lot of shade, but…
I used Linux for about 25 years. With the rising cost of hardware, I bought an M4 Max MacStudio earlier this year as it was the best bang for the buck on CPU/GPU and the savings on those offset the extortionate pricing on RAM/SSD.
You know what? Despite Liquid Glass being a bit of a downgrade recently, macOS is still good. Do I enjoy it as much as the old lampshade iMac or even 68030 Macintosh? No. Is it absolutely astounding compared to anything else available? Yes. It is. The ecosystem effects with my phone and AirPods is nice, but the computer alone is phenomenal.
I completely understand why people get upset about certain things, but the Macintosh, the iPhone, and even the watch and headset are solid products. Not everyone is going to like them, and I’d be worried if everyone did; yet, I think Cook did okay. No one was ever going to be Steve Jobs, and given Steve’s failings, we should not want anyone to be Steve Jobs. His genius came at a severe cost to his family and to him personally.
Apple is still producing solid products. They have warts, but that was true of every single product that Apple ever released. Nostalgia plays a huge part in making us think things have gotten worse. I have a Mac Classic II, a Performa, a PowerMac G3, an XT clone, and a Pentium machine that I use often… things are so much better now than before.
MacOS is the best desktop operating system by far. If they focused on gaming for a few cycles they'd put windows out of business.
Would like better window management though. Just copy Omarchy.
Even as a diehard Linux user, I totally agree. If you can look past macOS's weak support for gaming, mediocre window management, and hostility towards unsigned binaries, the stability and experience it provides is second to none.
... Even then, you can still get around many pain points with third-party tools. AltTab + Raycast covers window management well enough for me and compatibility layers like Crossover/Wine are already great for gaming (which is hopefully only going to get better with Valve now working on x86 -> ARM translation layers)
> macOS is still good.
> yet, I think Cook did okay.
Kindly, I think your reality is being distorted. macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8. It's got live tiles, radical acrylic accents, constant cloud service nags, and preinstalled advertisements everywhere across the system. OCSP won't let you launch certain apps unless your DRM API is online, for crying out loud!
It is insulting.
Tim Cook, in his wisdom, pivoted Apple harder into services. AppleTV, App Store, all the kinds of meaningless high-margin slop that can be created without direct competition. This has damaged macOS and iOS perennially, they are feature-poor operating systems when compared with desktop Windows and Android today. Can you imagine how much Apple would be worth if they didn't refuse to sign Nvidia compute drivers right now? Or how iOS would look with Vulkan 1.2 compliance and the Steam Deck's Proton stack? Apple is the #1 party holding Apple back, here!
I daily drive Linux now, but the state of macOS is so ad-ridden and walled-off that I would rather do Linux development with WSL than bother setting up a Mac. It's that bad.
macOS isn't without its sins, but I feel like "ad-ridden” is a stretch compared to the baseline of Windows 11 injecting promotions into the Start menu, OEM Android flavors full of carrier crap, etc. There's iCloud+ nags here and there, but it’s still by far the least noisy consumer OS right now aside from Linux.
Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.
(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)
>> macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8
Or it could have gotten a full imitation of Windows 11.
I believe that Apple is planning for succession, which of course they should, as an obvious responsibility to shareholders, especially given the health issues of the previous CEO Steve Jobs. However, I don't believe that Tim Cook is on his way out. I certainly don't believe that Cook wants to retire. It's not like he has a family to spend time with. Apple is his family.
The final but crucial paragraph in the Financial Times story is a quote from Tim Cook talking about Apple: “I love it there and I can’t envision my life without being there so I’ll be there a while,” he told singer Dua Lipa on her podcast in November 2023.
The story appears to have a lot of hedge words and mere speculation: "as soon as next year" (so how late could it be?), "no final decisions have been made" about Cook's successor, "The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report", "An annoucement early in the year would...", "the timing of any announcement could change" (not that there is any specific timing!).
My impression is that the reporters don't have the faintest clue when or if Cook is leaving.
He was realistic in that he thought he'd prob retire before hitting 70...
Word is the next CEO is going to be picked ala Charlie and the chocolate factory. I hope that when you bought your Miyake iPhone sock you kept the bone-white ticket naming you the next CEO.
Oh dear here comes lazy barnacle man Grandpa Joe. Watch them ignore rules of the EULA agreement and they are sucked into the factory ventilation shaft holding the new iPhone Lighter-than-Air.
I think Cook left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA. They could've tested the waters by loading up Apple Silicon on PCIe riser cards, maturing the toolkit for AI workloads, and selling them at competitive prices. Yes I know they're in the business of making entire widgets, but it would've been easy money. The hardware and software stacks are there. Unlimited upside with nearly zero downside risk.
Apple seems to be avoiding building server hardware for some reason. It seems like a big opportunity, besides AI, the power efficiency of their chips would surely be attractive for datacentres. I think momentum is building for moving away from x86.
They’re building servers now in Houston for their private cloud compute environments, but it’s just for them.
Given how hot my Mac is when I do anything they’d need Pacific Ocean to cool that data center :)
My Apple Sillicon macbooks are the coolest running computers I've had in decades. Something might be wrong with your cooling system.
Most Macs (both Intel and Apple Silicon) refuse to thermal-throttle until they reach the junction temp.
Both you and the parent can be correct, here; many Macs are quite cool at idle, but also throttle much slower than equivalent Intel or AMD chips under load.
> left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA
What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.
It sure as hell would have been better than wasting time with touch bars and vision pros.
Edit: dare I add apple watches
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Apple for sure could make very capable hardware/software for cloud AI workloads - directly taking on NVIDIA.
Cook’s greatest achievement - Apple’s supply chain - has, as set out in the ‘Apple in China’ book [1], turned into Apple’s biggest risk and weakness. The next CEO won’t be worrying about Siri or Vision Pro; they’ll be trying to deal with Apple’s reliance on China.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/thechipletter/p/apple-in-china
I sure hope Cook and teams have been actively working on this for a decade already.
The book is interesting in showing both a lack of early awareness of this weakness, AND some people clearly noticing, AND Apple being very powerful and resourceful when it notices a problem.
He did good, but he’s never really had a clear vision for the ecosystem. Lots of little projects that claim to change the world, but never see momentum behind them to execute properly (Vision Pro, their Gaming push, Fitness+, expanding the iPhone lineup, etc), and has failed similarly on business execution (failing to buy or pay Masimo, half-hearted pivots to smart speakers and AI to appease shareholders). Liquid Glass is really the canary in the coal mine that he needs to hand the reins off to someone else.
Here’s hoping whoever the new executives at Apple bring a clearer vision of what the future of computing should look like in an era where so many of its biggest proponents are so dissatisfied with the subscription and cloud-based hell of today. A return to control over your devices and software, built atop best-in-class hardware platforms. Spending more time uplifting developers and addressing grievances (like how everyone loathes Xcode), actually supporting initiatives with capital and talent alike (such as improving their gaming capabilities - like how the Gabe Cube aims to do), and disrupt the wider industry trends of needless changes for promotions (like UI shakeups for no real reason).
I think Cook did an awesome job taking the reins at Apple. I can understand Cook not being a 'product visionary' as Jobs was (although Jobs also delivered some real stinkers), don't forget some of the people below Cook are still fossils from the Jobs era. I have no insight in the Apple of today, but they seem spread incredibly thin and all products and services are suffering from it.
They don't seem to have an overarching product strategy that will benefit users (does benefit shareholders though), but they're also not nimble to quickly shift gears to trends.
Oh, don't mistake my "time for him to go" opinion with my opinion of his tenure as a whole. By the major measures, Cook has done a phenomenal job steering the company through its post-Jobs era, creating a lot of growth in the organization and making immensely successful pivots ahead of the market attitude (like its pivot to in-house hardware and away from Intel/Qualcomm). I have a myriad of critiques, sure, but even a layman like me acknowledges that he's done an A-level job running this juggernaut to its current peaks.
I just think he can't steer/lead it through the tumultuous next decade, is all, and that a newer leader with a clearer vision is needed to run the show at this juncture.
It's telling that you completely forgot HomePod.
Arguably their most AI-centric product line to date, and also their largest flop in recent history.
the $1000 monitor stand was the canary for me
Appointing John Ternus is going to be a pretty clear indicator to investors that Apple plans on continuing its iterative hardware, supply chain and operations focus and isn't looking to shake things up from a product or vision standpoint. Which may be the best move for the company (this strategy has definitely worked wonders for the last decade and a half), but I can't help feel that among all the large tech companies Apple is the one most at risk of a major disruption. It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.
> It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.
I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.
The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.
The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.
> maybe AR/VR
I dunno, have you tried an Apple Vision Pro? It's actually a pretty phenomenal product for V1. I think really all they need to do is: (1) hit retina-tier PPD (pixels-per-degree) and (2) manage the weight, (3) do everything they're already doing, and I'm sold as a replacement for TVs & Desktop monitors.
None of that will help, it has to be able to do something people want to do. Only us on tech forums care about the actual specs and how cool the tech is.
What can a person do in a Vision Pro that they're willing to spend $1000+ on that they can't do in a $300-$500 Quest?
It can't replace TVs and monitors because only one person can use it at a time
Also it's incompatible with makeup and messes up your hair. So it's a dead product for like 60% of the working age population.
Maybe stop wearing makeup, it's bad for your skin and doesn't make you better at your job unless your job is BS anyway. Legacy product of a chauvinist era.
Furthermore, your argument means all VR headsets are inherently anti-female, which is the craziest take I've ever heard.
If your product needs people to stop wearing makeup and agreeing that it's chauvinistic, it's dead in the water.
Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset, esp. the Apple Vision Pro which has pretty much nothing to do on it but watch movies and TV and use the laptop / desktop you already own
Roughly $20-30B in investment by Apple to build the Apple Vision Pro over roughly the course of half a decade is disagreeing with you. That's an insane investment into a product category with "no public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset."
I didn't bring up makeup, btw. I just thought it was an absurd argument. It has nothing to do with whether the product succeeds or fails in the long run, which is precisely what I'm talking about.
Yes, the AVP store is pretty scant at the present moment. But regardless, I would absolutely explore the feasibility of replacing my TV, my desktop monitors with an AR/VR headset if it met the tech specs I listed above. I'd much rather have a 70' screen viewing experience for movies, or gaming.
Btw, why did Valve announce the Steam Frame this last week if the AR/VR market is dead? Why are companies like Virtuix, Disney developing omnidirectional treadmills for more physical VR exploration? Why are companies like Meta working to develop surface electromyography tech, electro-tactile solutions to simulate the sensation of touching physical objects in VR?
Maybe all this money being spent on a non-existent market segment is a product of a fucked economic hierarchy where the rich have so much money they can blow it all on projects that will never reach massive scale, which is an argument I'd actually listen to.
Billions and billions have been invested in failures. What kind of argument is this? Is Horizon Worlds by Meta a resounding success? It cost billions to make as well.
You can do anything you want. The average consumer is not going to flock in droves to the AVP which cannot do anything special its cheaper competition cannot do, and which cannot replace TVs (because those can be used by more than one person at a time as I said already and you didn't reply to).
Metas Display Ray Bans and Quest. Maybe even Steam Frame, those all have an audience: regular people or gamers. Who is the audience for AVP? Pretty much only tech spec nerds on these forums like you and I. That's a dead product, imo
> Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset
> those all have an audience
So which is it
> might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade
…what company do you think is immune from disruption beyond the foreseeable future?
The big banks (unless they do fraud again), health insurance companies in the US, the major telecoms, Airbus, Bayer, Tyson, JBS SA, Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Cargill
No company is immune to disruption, but plenty of them have innovation and adaptation in their DNA. IMO over the years Apple has lost that. Look at Google, or Meta, or even Microsoft. Diversified income streams. Clutch acquisitions. Massive capital investments. Data centers. Nuclear power plants. Moonshot factories. Self driving cars. AR glasses. Robots. Venture investing and dealmaking. Massive AI ambitions. Stuff they try might not always work, and sometimes fail spectacularly, but they still do it. Apple meanwhile has been perfectly content depending on a single product and the monopolistic hold on the ecosystem of that product for basically 100% of its revenue for the past two decades.
I don’t think Google is a great example to hold up here. They throw so much random crap at a wall hoping for another golden goose. Then kill anything that isn’t after a few years. If you can’t tell, I’m still salty about Google domains.
Many of the things you listed need time to bake and Google never cooks anything more than a quick sear in the pan.
The company is among the leaders in the AI race and doing a quarter million self driving taxi rides a week but sure they aren't innovative because they shut down a domain name website..
Tbh, Apple has a lot of future products under R&D. No one hears about it because they're very secretive.
> Look at Google or Meta...
Yeah, look at them: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/big-tech-companies-billions... Diverse they aren't. Alphabet is broken down in to segments but several segments including the largest one all boil down to online advertising revenue.
And Microsoft was already well diversified back in 2000.
You're saying as if it's a bad thing. We need new blood. Thank god IBM Failed and we got microsoft /hp/apple. Now it's time for the next wave to make the current Dinos go extinct
Apple aquires OpenAI, Sam Altman takes over for Tim Cook and brings Jony Ive back.
Then appoints the new SteveGPT model as Apple CEO?
And we can again enjoy horrible keyboards and gold watches.
Are you saying this like it's a good thing? Cause Altman is representative of everything wrong with SV.
and they make the iOrb
the most entertaining outcome is the most likely..
Tim Cook will be remembered as much for competently maintaining Apple’s course after Jobs’ passing as for flagrantly dismissing democratic regulation while cozying up to (and dining with; and giving golden statues to) authoritarian regimes.
Thanks and good riddance.
Symbolized by his flaccid flag-waving at the Miami F1 race.
I worked with John in the 2010s, brilliant guy, very human too. Couldn’t think of a single better person at the company.
Would love to hear more about that beyond NDAs.
I think Tim Cook deserves some praises from everything that's happened on the hardware side of things, even regarding the Vision pro.
On the other hand I feel like the software side has been completely forgotten.
Numerous bugs, weird crashes, and the infamous Liquid Glass update are really worrying signs. The fact that Siri is completely useless after 10+ years and can barely be trusted to set a timer correctly is completely unacceptable.
I wish they would take a beat on the software and stop releasing new major OS updates every year but take their time to get things right even if that means that some years go without major updates.
This is the first time since I bought my first MacBook Pro and Iphone that I am planning on holding off on installing the updates and I am even considering skipping MacOS Tahoe entirely.
I just want things to be stable. A phone that works without major bugs, a MacBook that works without having to fiddle the dials or worry about some hidden incompatibilities.
That is what Apple used to stand for. Nowadays not so much.
The real question we should all be worried about is what will happen to their promises of privacy?
Does the public have any recourse if the post-Cook CEO wants to sell all our data to ads/spy companies? You know all the Apple Watches over the world must be a biometrics gold mine that any Dr. Frankenstein would be salivating over…
Cook saved Job's Apple? Hardly. Every aspect of today's iPhone violates what Job's stood for. Craig Federighi began his tenure by advertising 200 new features for the new version of iOS. Shortly later he did the same for the Mac. Feature bloat has been Federighi's prime focus. My iPhone is so packed with irrelevancies that is hard to use.
Then switch devices. Oh but you might need to find an alternate solution for your iMessage groups. And your apple watch. And your family icloud plan. And the apple ebooks you bought. And your airpod maxes. And your protection plan. And the airtags you own.
The apple of Steve Jobs is gone, but the apple of today is as sticky as ever.
I switched four years ago.
Those proprietary periphery devices you mentioned? Lesson learned. There are more expensive life lessons than owning a useless Apple Watch.
Tim Cook at Apple was like Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. They scaled the company and made stock owners happy, but weren't true visionaries. I suppose there's a need for both types of leaders.
Microsoft's stock was flat for Ballmer's entire tenure. Investors were most definitely not happy, and that was the very reason he was forced out. Tim Cook meanwhile has grown the company 10x. It's an idiotic comparison.
Somewhat unfair. Ballmer took over at the dotcom peak. They were trading at ~70x earnings on his first day as CEO. That's the only reason MSFT stock performance under his leadership was (from start day to retire day) flat. There is no CEO who would have been able to flout the dotcom bust and maintain a 70x PE ratio for 13 years. But under his tenure, he grew revenue at one of the worlds biggest companies by almost 4x, a 10% CAGR, and EPS also increased considerably.
Also, he wasn't forced out, and the reason ValuAct was pushing for a board seat at the time was because Microsoft was falling behind in mobile and tablets. Around that time, Microsoft had taken a $900m writedown related to Surface RT.
Meanwhile, Tim Cook took over in 2011 when Apple's P/E ratio was only 13 (today it's 36). He has also obviously been a skilled operator, but stock charts by themselves don't provide all context or tell the whole story.
Mhmm
Longhorn, Zune, phone, Skype, bungie , among many other failures. I was there, as a kid of the 80s, Microsoft, Windows, Visual Basic, VStudio were EVERYTHING up until around 2003, they just dropped too many balls.
It was botching Mobile that really did Balmer in and possibly not reacting quite quickly enough to the need for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing while Amazon was bootstrapping AWS right in Microsoft's back yard.
They got the cloud situation under control but losing Mobile to Apple and Google was a disaster and they're paying for it still.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman:
> As I wrote a month ago, Apple is due for a major management shake-up and the spotlight is squarely on John Ternus as Tim Cook’s successor as CEO. But I don’t get the sense anything is imminent as the FT is claiming.
https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/1989764365705515220
Bring back Woz.
How serious is this comment? As a thought experiment, this intrigues me. Imagine Steve Wozniak suddenly pops in as CEO. What might happen to the company in the following years?
With Woz:
- Apple M-series CPUs become fully documented
- iOS is ditched. iPhones and MacBooks now run the same OS
- no developer fees
- fixed price to have an app in the App store
- App store and content filters become orthogonal. Anyone can start an app store. Anyone can make content filters.
- Apple starts releasing stuff for the maker-community such as Apple 3D printers
I'm looking forward to the 64-bit Apple IIgs.
And he's out in a moment as profits go down almost overnight.
I doubt Woz would want the job. He's an engineer, not a corporate strategist, and he seems happy that way.
The ideal CEO would be a business strategist, innovator and thought-leader, and world-class marketer, but with enough of an engineering background to chase hard problems.
There aren't many of those around.
Jobs did okay at all four, mostly. Cook gets the first, mostly, and has adequate delegation skills for engineering and marketing. This works superbly when the engineering is world-leading (the M chips) and badly when the engineering is mediocre (the software.) The marketing has drifted towards attempts at luxury-consumer branding, which is an off-the-shelf pitch. It hasn't been a failure. But it has lost some of its distinctiveness, and it's a little incoherent at times.
Cook's still been hugely more successful than Sculley or Amelio. Sculley was a bland corporatist, and Amelio was very, very smart, but too much of an engineer to be good at the rest. He did really well elsewhere, but Apple just wasn't a good fit.
The job is a poisoned chalice. It's going to be extremely difficult for the new CEO to assert their authority over the established fiefdoms, keep the plates spinning, deal with a weird political and economic environment, and still create Apple-styled innovation.
The problem of running a $4 Trillion consumer hardware company, with incredibly optimized supply chain operations, is that it heavily constrains the directions a new CEO would take the company, and by extension, the set of plausible people who could take the helm. I think even if the next CEO has a new or different product vision, they'd need deep knowledge on the hardware side of the house just to steer in any different direction.
I don't know if OP is serious, but more than once, his name has come up on this topic in discussions in the past that I've had with people in my social circle who work at Apple. He obviously gets much respect and is considered an engineer's engineer.
I don't think anyone would be against Woz stepping into to revitalize Apple. The real question is whether Woz would do it.
Everybody loves Woz, for good reasons, but (a) he’s not a manager (b) he’s not executive material (c) he’s notoriously unmotivated (d) he hasn’t engineered anything significant since what, the mid-1980’s?
I would like to think it turns into VALVe
Valve is privately-owned with its BDFL owning over half of it. It has never gone through a leadership transition. It could relatively quickly go entirely bad after Gabe Newell is gone.
So more lootboxes and illegal underage gambling everywhere? Cool bring it on!
Also I'd imagine a Valve like Apple would only release a new phone or laptop every 5 years or so lol
Shit, I'd take it. Sideloading, custom OSes, less-wimpy legal chops against hackers... Valve could turn Apple around.
A 5 year release cadence would incentivize the iPhone to change something more significant than just the price tag. And Proton would give me my first justification for a owning a powerful phone.
Brace yourself for Wozstock 26
I fear he lost that extreme edge in that plane crash.
Apple sock and intelligence wasn't good enough?
To be fair, the iPhone, Mac, Airpods, M-series Chips, and Vision Pro are all the best products in their class. There's plenty of room for AI innovation, but Apple has never been a 'first entry' company, when they enter, it's with high quality.
Good. I like Cook but he’s not what Apple needs, at least not now. Time to go back to somebody closer to Steve in terms of artistic vision and obsessive commitment to the customer experience.
Only Craig Federighi can turn the ship around.
Federighi is in charge of software which is Apple’s weak spot right now; hardware has been firing on all cylinders for years now while software gets buggier and more confusing. I'm not sure how he could turn the ship around as CEO if he couldn't as head of software.
Maybe. But Craig is the software guy, their tapping John Ternus suggests Apple knows their hardware is still what pays the bills.
Does this mean finally that the next iPhone will not have that ugly notch at the top of its screen?
He was very much a businessman- not a visionary- running on the fumes of the Steves success. As a company they leant way too far into status and luxury in recent times and neglected the human centric/humanist design that made them successful in the first place. Genuinely and in the politest way possible good riddance I am not fond of his leadership-
except for the enviornmental initiatives which have been more successful in their impact than many nation states.
this is a disaster. who else will bring the vision for $1000 monitor stands?
My Apple Wishlist.
1. Bring back Time Capsule and re-enter the Router market.
2. Work with American Express for Apple Card. There are plenty of Visa and Mastercard for every day common market. Go and dominate the premium section.
3. Apple Pay NFC using Felica offline payment and optimise the heck out of it for all transport, the fight back against QR Code as payment.
4. Bi-Yearly release on macOS. There is no need to have an OS release every year. Nor do I need an OS with so many feature. Last time I checked I could barely count 5 useful features on macOS in the past 10 years.
5. We need more optimisation on all OS, macOS, iOS etc. Computer doesn't feel snappier despite we have 10 - 100x more computer resources. I was hoping Vision OS, the need for VR and AR being latency sensitive would have helped but it doesn't seems that way.
6. 10 years later Safari is still the worst browser of all three, even Chrome haven managed to be memory efficiency and works in heavy tabs environment. I have less rendering problem with Firefox than Safari. It has been getting better especially with Safari 26 but it is still a long road to grind. The Safari team needs more resources.
7. Mac needs to grow its market share. Lower Upgrade pricing for Mac memory and NAND storage, and introduce Mac starting at $799 with edu price at $699. The Mac is making higher margin with Apple Silicon, and will do so even more when WiFi is made by Apple as well. Apple continue to be so focusing on higher margin they forgot about Market Share.
8. Separate the App Store into App and Game Store. Continue to charge your 30% on Games. And start freeing up your App Store Apps to lower percentage. I have been saying this for 12 years and counting.
9. Guarantee Loot box. As much as I want to get rid of this gambling loot box gaming. I dont think it is a realistic option. But Apple should enforce all percentage are guaranteed, i.e 0.01% of item will make its appearance in worst case at the 100th draw. I remember this was suggested a few years ago I am not sure if it is enforced.
10. Stop the whole UI Androidfication of iOS. If I want Android I would have brought one. Start making the iOS simpler. The Home Screen and searching for Apps after 20 years is a bag of hurt.
11. Swift, Swift UI, XCode. It seems doesn't matter whether you are a 300B company or 3 Trillion company they are still the same.
12. Can we bring back Key Travel. Before butterfly, which were great for key stability and less wobble, but key travel were too short along with reliability. Current scissors is only at 1mm while previous scissors were at 1.5mm.
13. Current track pad is way too large and bring false positive. We could either somehow make it zero false positive or we make the track pad a little smaller just like MacBook Pro Pre 2015.
14. If Apple Health connect all the data into one place, surely there could be Apple Finance where all my spending of Apple Pay Credit card can be grouped together for easier tracking?
> 5. We need more optimisation on all OS, macOS, iOS etc. Computer doesn't feel snappier despite we have 10 - 100x more computer resources
Not intentionally slowing down MacOS would go a long way to helping!
Tim Cook was the right guy to run Apple after the death of Jobs. He is entirely the wrong guy to run Apple in the era of AI.
The board must be wondering what Apple's AI strategy is and why they aren't pushing M-chips into the data center.
The sooner, the better!
God that iPocket backfired quickly
Long over due, he's done great but Apple needs fresh eyes. Apple's Ballmer era is over.
The perfect down-vote attractor:
This is such a stupid and meaningless thing to discuss (whatever Cook's plans are), as he has no personality and no vision, and yet tons of reflective and philosophical comments in here.
It would be fantastic if Apple were to give Woz and Ive a mea culpa, bring them in again, and teach the next generations of engineers and designers.
I mean for what Apple spent to license the third-party AI patchover.
The type of guy Cook is, was the “best” and safe choice for a company like Apple on the trajectory it was. Now everyone is a multimillionaire on the bank but the culture inside is quite hollowed out. Good luck for the next guy, he’ll need all of it.
Why do you say the culture is hollowed out?
weird
He's cooked
I presume he's moving on to some Trump appointed position.
[dead]
Almost every top comment is negative. This negativity about apple has existed since the 90s.
Apple has been the most profitable example of betting against the herd for the last 20 years. And possibly the easiest if you’re willing to look at the world plainly. I’m glad to see the herd hasn’t changed and I have plenty of gains left.
betting against the nerd
Yes!!! Such great news.
Apple has really gone to shit. I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life. I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
Everything is such trash I could go on for hours.
I realized a long time ago that if the person at the top doesn’t care then no one will. It seems hard to believe but it makes sense when you consider individual incentives, politics, and the complexity of software. Everyone wants a safe promotion and doesn’t want to take the risk to push things forwards.
Apple Silicon seems great but the Intel MacBook was the worst piece of shit ever so they kind of had to. I have a 2019 that was the top of the line but can’t do anything without overheating. It’s barely usable for any second laptop tasks.
> I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
The same Steve Jobs that was at Apple when it made the puck mouse? The overheating Intel laptops of the mid 2000s? The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone? The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA? The Cube?
He wouldn't what, exactly?
> the puck mouse?
My mate Tim, professional graphic designer, used it for years. Loved it. He might still have it for all I know.
> The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone?
Was always nonsense. None of the Apple team used 'the bumper' and neither did I.
> The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA?
Are you seriously here criticising one of the most revolutionary hardware products of the last 20 years?
FWIW I used mine for years and had a corporate Windows image running under Parallels. Everyone was massively envious. (I was a Domain Admin, I could add my own machine to the network.)
> The Cube?
I'll give you that one.
Calling the 11" MBA "the most revolutionary hardware" of anything is one for the books.
Say hi to your friend Tim Theoutlier for me.
Also good to know the iPhone 4 thing was people lying instead of holding it wrong, I guess.
What exactly was revolutionary about the 11" MBA? Looking better than an equally performant netbook?
The notion that things were so much better under Jobs is just revisionist history.
Saying "Steve Jobs wouldn't have let today's Apple be this way" while ignoring what Apple was like in his day is just rose tinted glasses (or worse, cult of personality nonsense).
Steve Jobs shipped a cordless mouse with a charger port on the bottom, the infamous hockey puck mouse, and a laptop that visibly discolored in the shape of handprints where your wrist rests. iTunes happened under Jobs watch and was unwound in the Cook era.
I'm a huge critic of the mouse with the charger port on bottom, but that was the 2nd gen magic mouse released in 2015. Is there another mouse that had charger port on bottom?
The 1st gen from 2009 used AA batteries.
They just released the Magic Mouse (USB-C) with the port on the bottom.
It is weird that stuck with bottom port for so long. It would be smarter to put it on the front then it could be used as wired mouse, but I guess that wrecks the design.
I’d like it and the TV remote to use an Apple Watch MagSafe charger like the AirPods Pro case.
I don’t know man. I got an Intel 7700K when it first came out, and six years later it was struggling with modern day workloads. I didn’t blame Intel or Microsoft, I just upgraded and my performance problems went away. Not sure why Apple is held to different standards.
Wow such anger.
> I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life.
Why do you keep buying Apple then?
Everything else is even worse
I had a 13 Pro and I thought it was too out-dated which was why my Safari was ridiculously slow, so I bought the 16 Pro...noticed literally zero improvement. Overheats, bugs galore, search for apps is slow and still doesn't work.
I am seriously looking at Android now, first time in my life.
Is it at all possible he has an Intel Mac from 2018 that he hasn't been able to upgrade yet, likely due to insane cost?
Because that's my thing
I have an Intel MBP from that era. It’s showing its age, but still works well enough.
If I was going to complain about the performance of an 7-8 year old laptop, I wouldn’t do it on a tech site for sure.
The modern MacBook Air is the best deal in laptops today and will outperform your 2018 MB.
It's also not insanely expensive.
This Intel is my secondary laptop - but give it any kind of non-cricial task and the fan is on max and its practically unusable. I have M3 Max now.
Person probably issued Apple laptops from work, which, funny enough is probably why they get performance issues, as work is going to drop in the usual CPU killing anti-virus and other corporate tooling.
Even without buying Apple, many jobs issue mandatory MacBooks. I can understand the frustration of having to deal with these. In my case, it's mostly the window management aspect of MacOS that infuriates me. I even spent $30 of my own money to buy uBar to make it a bit more usable. But uBar itself is buggy so it's not a perfect solution.
I'm using Aerospace right now, and really liking it. It's FOSS too.
their software is not great but they literally make the best hardware on the planet right now. you don't get to being a 4 trillion dollar market cap by being trash. they must be doing something right.
It's not great, just everything else is worse. Windows is unbearably broken and loaded with adverts. Linux has been fairly neglected for desktops with few corporate sponsors.
> right now
Yes I admit the Silicon MacBooks are pretty good - albeit losing external GPU support and max 4 external monitors.
The Intel MacBooks were unusable though.
There is such a lack of competition. We really some new polished Linux variant.
Second-best, according to the stock market. They must be getting something wrong if 4.5 trillion in market cap is sitting around waiting to be eaten. By Apple's arch-enemy, no less.
Nvidia is more an industrial B2B business now.
So is Microsoft, arguably. They're valued at $3.5 trillion right now.
It just feels like all of them are over valued but then we are in a TINA market nowadays. Where else is the money going to go?
There is no light at the end of the tunnel, Apple's shareholders are using this process to manipulate the stock price. If the next quarter performs poorly then the move up the timeline, if they do well then Cook's leash gets longer. Tim needs to be gone yesterday, not in a few months.
Yep, if letting the stock market determine how the business is run, eventually it will be run in a way that will blow out the bottom of the bucket.
There is a fine line that needs to be walked between innovation and appeasing share holders. Cook is mostly just doing the latter.
What are you talking about they just released a $300 sock for your iPhone.