Discussion
CGMthrowaway: Add to Cook's impeccable timing, that he stepped out of CEO role and into Chairman on exactly his 65th birthday, the very day he became first eligible for his pension
lapcat: Cook was born in November 1, 1960, so he's already 65, and moreover, he's already a billionaire, so he doesn't need a pension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook
cmiles8: He had what many called at the time an impossible task of taking over from Jobs. There are areas where things could have gone better but overall he had a solid run and kept the company growing post Jobs.He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
2OEH8eoCRo0: > When Cook joined Apple in 1998 the company’s operations — centered on Apple’s own factories and warehouses — were a massive drag on the company; Cook methodically shut them down and shifted Apple’s manufacturing base to China
amazingamazing: It’s a joke, bro
ikidd: Humor seems difficult for people.Don't worry, I got it.
boringg: Hahahah yeah no I don't think he cares about a pension - I think you may be out of touch on this one friend. That is the funniest comment I have seen.edit: I can't stop laughing about this. Imagine one of the most powerful/wealthiest CEOs on the planet timing his exit to max out his pension plan/company perks. Thats comedy gold - Seinfeld or Larry David episode.
snowwrestler: Tim Cook refreshing his 401k page every day to see if he’s ready to FIRE.
retired: Being eligible for Medicare, Cook can finally afford to retire.
havaloc: Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role.If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
steveBK123: Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form.Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up)They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.
ricardobayes: Yes, let's hope. And also let's hope that innovation will be more "iPhone" and less "Apple Vision Pro".
ZiiS: It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.
trimbo: You can choose not to ship the 99.
steveBK123: Shipping is part of the process.Stated preferences vs revealed preferences.Polling / focus groups vs sales.You never really know what works until it works.
zenapollo: I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1])It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerbnYhhw7s
pjc50: When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.
heroicmailman: I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor.They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.
mingus88: Your points are why Apple isn’t entering that market.Mounts, cases, smart locks, thermostats, bulbs…where is the “iPhone moment” for this sector? It’s all small beans now. Why would Apple want to compete here?Personally I think any big moves in this area would be predicated on a next-level Siri companion. Stop futzing around with scenes, buttons, switches and pairing devices and just tell your house how it should work.
steveBK123: I often think the problem is Apple thinks too big. They are so big that for a product to move the needle it needs to be huge. Even the "failed" VisionPro was probably $2B of revenue. The "Home, Wearables and accessories" line is $40B of revenue.Is Apple willing to trade-off some of the steady reliability of their earnings stream for product lines that may be real contributors 5-10+ years out is the question? I think under Cook the answer to that was no.I think staying on this path will eventually lead diminishing returns and endanger them long term.
Aeroi: Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace.Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
ecshafer: I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 25 of the time.
icedchai: I'm one of those users! I make a trade at Vanguard maybe every other month! I have another brokerage account I use for more active trading. My Vanguard account isn't "for" that, and the UI is so bad it kind of discourages it.
edm0nd: This is the same way I treat my 401k platform too. I never touch it and only log in to check a balance a few times a year. I opened a RobinHood acct for my own lil side pot and projects that I actively buy/sell on.
gedy: I think it's more the taking (or at least not growing) skills, jobs, know-how from the US and giving to China, irrespective of if they would have developed on their own in any case. It's not about keeping China down, etc. People like to compare this with Japan in the 1980s, but Japan was indisputably an ally of the US, whereas China has never been.
JKCalhoun: Cook Doctrine: "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."And later:"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
pjc50: For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered.Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it.Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.
hattmall: An Apple car would be crazy expensive to develop and not really a guaranteed sell at all. There's millions of people that are very loyal to Apple of iPhone and wearable but going to an Apple car is a HUGE jump.
ghaff: Quantum leap CarPlay/Siri could be a big win but, even as an Apple fan in general, have no particular interest in an Apple Car absent things like self-driving that blow everyone else out of the water--which seems a pretty big ask.
doitLP: > Cook was, without question, an operational geniusI’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
alsetmusic: > Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.
colechristensen: Compared to game consoles, graphics cards, and all manner of other electronics things... have you ever seen Apple products on those stock tracker websites? Has there ever been an actual problem with scalpers? Ever had to sign up for a waiting list?No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff.The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS
gordonhart: I just bought an M5 Macbook from an electronics retailer because they actually stocked it, whereas ordering the same machine for the same price from Apple would have been a custom build delivered mid May.
david_draco: That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
HarHarVeryFunny: I don't know anything about Termus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering.Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.
ryandrake: > I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI.IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."
samsolomon: Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.
aworks: Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit...+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.
reducesuffering: > defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefitPeople repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.
simonh: Nobody "uses" rack mount servers as artefacts, the way people use other Apple hardware products. Not in the same sense, so I don't think Apple can really bring much of the kind of value they usually do. In practice Apple data centres are Linux facilities, and that's fine. Maybe if they could come up with a really compelling reason to put Apple silicon in a data centre, but we can do that now with racked Minis or Studios.https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...
hattmall: Yeah IOT / connected home seems like the most reasonable area but they are probably waiting for the market to mature a bit.
foobarian: Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank
doitLP: Thanks, but how did he do it? Actually what does he do than saying “ok guys tip priority is moving these units”? Like do he come up with the strategies? Or is he good at picking winners when he sees them from proposals of his underlings?
raw_anon_1111: Read the “Apple in China” book.
greedo: Can't agree more with this recommendation. As a long time Apple user (Apple ][c back in 1984 started my journey), I thought I knew a lot about Apple. But how they actually made the iPhone work was just an amazing read.
Barbing: The book’s Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_ChinaSome critique, but widely praised
__alexs: I miss my Treo :(
redorb: You only think you miss your Treo, our minds really put a glow on memories.
ang_cire: Honestly, Apple may very well be betting that AI in it's current form is transitional, and might be better off letting others duke it out for now.We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
a012: And dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar
wan23: The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.
keeganpoppen: when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.
nicbou: I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.
peterlada: 100%
ryandrake: I just think the concept of an LLM is counter to how Apple treats content on their products. See [1] for more of my thoughts here. I think the only chance Apple embraces AI is if they manage to research a 1. local model that 2. is purely deterministic, whose output can be reliably constrained and controlled by Apple.1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737
steveBK123: The other thing that always got me about the car was.. I wondered if the executives at Apple had all become too rich? Apple sells premium hardware but generally sells products in the 10s or 100s of millions of volume, so pretty mass market consumer good.The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.
sroussey: The Apple Lisa was the first GUI computer Apple made. Starting price $9995 (or $35,000 in today’s dollars).Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa with no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were 100.If we’re were the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.Apple today is just too risk adverse.
nekooooo: loved the touchbar for things like timeline scrubbers and quick shortcuts in my pro software
jnwatson: Apple is letting the market "commoditize its complements" without lifting a finger.
Nesco: I had this opinion until I actually had a new model and felt the weight difference.The duality of Man
jnwatson: That's a really good point to remember and counters the article's claim that there were no major recalls.Still, the M series laptops are so much better than offerings from competitors I am hesitant to even put them in the same product category.
geerlingguy: Apple's Private Cloud Compute is hundreds (probably thousands) of M3+ Ultra rack mount servers; they highlighted them in the Texas manufacturing plant video.Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).
alex7o: Fight me but I miss the touchbar, it was customizable to be super useful with better touch tool
MisterTea: > Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.They tried. But the irony is MS is more deeply ingrained. I worked a short stint in a shop that no joke ran Windows server to manage a whole floor of Macs using Active Directory. The only other Windows PC was a machine hooked to a large format printer. I spoke to the admin (dyed in the wool Apple user) who stated that as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.
cmiles74: I setup an XServe for a mid-sized office, Open Directory was Apple's solution at the time. It worked but my recollection was that they did it by emulating a lot of Active Directory by layering code over OpenLDAP. When it worked it was nice, when it didn't work it was a headache to figure out where the problem might be. The management tools really couldn't compete with Active Directory, it was a mix of incomplete UI and command line tools.
raw_anon_1111: You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
