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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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) seems 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.
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.
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.
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[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.
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'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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
"…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)
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.
> 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.
$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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
whew that visions is a triple entedre, way to go
Most importantly, it seems Cook doesn't love computers and doesn't use many (most?) of Apple products. It shows. Especially with Mac OS.
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.)
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"
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.
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.
I also use your product. Pretty good!
> 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.
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)."
That's literally not true though???
I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.
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.
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
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
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.)
they also added a filesystem to the phone.
My iPhones last at least 3-4 years.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Cook was COO through all of that too. He’s been at Apple since 1998.
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.
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.
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.
Beats started without Apple. They bought the existing brand.
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.
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) seems 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.
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
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.
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.
The guy who oversaw the silicon change is the one who's likely going to be the next CEO
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
> for very good reason.
The reasons are subscription revenue and user data. Not sure which of those you consider very good.
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.
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.
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.
Their Siri sucks so they just borrowed Google Gemini.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
> 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.
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 it should be Sabih. Having worked with him he has a great head on his shoulders.
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 thought that quote came from Bill Atkinson.
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
> 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.
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).
the $1000 monitor stand was the canary for me
Apple aquires OpenAI, Sam Altman takes over for Tim Cook and brings Jony Ive back.
the most entertaining outcome is the most likely..
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
What are you talking about they just released a $300 sock for your iPhone.
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.
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.
Apple sock and intelligence wasn't good enough?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
this is a disaster. who else will bring the vision for $1000 monitor stands?
Long over due, he's done great but Apple needs fresh eyes. Apple's Ballmer era is over.
He's cooked
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.
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?
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
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.