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.
I don't know anything about Ternus 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.
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
I suspect that the touch bar served its likely real purpose: to ship an ARM CPU with a secure enclave in the machines so that we could have Touch ID without needing to wait for Apple Silicon. Everything other than that was gravy, an interesting experiment.
I think the problem with touch bar was that, it completely replaced the function keys, instead of complementing them. Other than that, I actually liked it.
Hah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.
Its interesting the touch bar was also hung up, as from what I recall the touchbar was actually driven by a separate processor (the T1/T2 chip) and had its own version of watchOS running. I would have thought it would have continued working, just unable to continue syncing with the rest of the Mac.
I think the lack of haptic feedback is what doomed the Touch Bar. If they'd been able to solve that problem, it could have been an acceptable replacement for the function keys.
The thing is I have never used the function keys on my laptop so that was not a problem form me, but also some of the custom functions I hard can just be mapped to fn keys so it is bit like it it us a huge loss
I don't necessarily use the numbered function keys all the time (as in F1-F12), but I use those physical buttons constantly. Brightness, volume, play/pause, mic mute, are all buttons I press a good bit. Many of those I'd rather just have be a single quick button, especially things like speaker or mic mute.
Volume and brightness are exactly the place the touchbar shines: tap and start dragging and you're adjusting a slider, which is much better than mashing a button.
Sure, a slider can make sense there, I agree. But now I've got a part of the screen dedicated to be the spot to tap to start changing the volume and a part dedicated to it being the brightness taking away from the other useful parts of the screen, or its hidden under a sub menu making it more annoying to rapidly change.
Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.
I thought it really excelled at displaying the timeline—it was quite novel to see a timeline for a video I was watching that didn't occlude any part of the screen—but quite annoyingly it would go black due to inactivity.
And of course the virtual function keys were awful.
Apparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
I have one such mac. Things I like: the keyboard feels smooth, the speakers are great and the touchbar (yes you read correctly). Things that make me partially agree with this post I am responding to: annoying overheating, including when I plug an external monitor (!); the camera was really subpar, it always seemed as if I was facetiming using a 2002 cybershot rather than a 2019 MacBook Pro; the screen has nice colours but very easily feels smudgy. Other than this, I love using that computer as a secondary device.
For what it's worth, the Intel MacBook Pro Espresso Machine and Milk Foamer Expansion Dock that water cooled the CPU while making you a hot fresh latte was pretty useful. The M4 just isn't capable of working up a proper head of steam.
This was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?).
Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.
Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.
That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.
I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.
I collect the 12" macbooks, even today. It really only needs one port; the vast majority of people never plug anything but power into their computer ever. I would pay huge sums for a modern Mx 11-12" ultralight macbook with a reliable keyboard.
Same. Using my MacBook 12" of Theseus still at home. It's a fantastic machine for travel or field work if configured to 16GB. That 1" down from Air makes a huge difference on a seat tray.
MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.
I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken.
It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.
I think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.
It's not exactly a decade-old issue when the problem started a decade ago and persisted for half a decade. The MacBook Pros from the tail end of that era are only just now starting to reach an age where they can reasonably be considered obsolete and due for replacement, because that kind of machine absolutely should be usable for 5+ years. From the perspective of Apple's current product offerings those laptops are many generations back, but from the perspective of the actual user base they're still recent history.
Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.
> 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."
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.
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.
I don't see selling local LLM servers/software, as such, being something that makes sense for Apple, but selling an "Apple Intelligence" appliance that works with your Apple devices and/or provides home automation might do.
> 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 both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?
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.
Only on hacker news would someone believe engineers would focus on the customer function.
Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.
> Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship
You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts
> Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China )
Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.
I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
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.
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.
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.
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 and had 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 sub 100.
If we had 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.
Except the iteration on it. And people we aghast at the cost.
But one product. I don't know man, I think they became chicken of anything grand. It is not like it was a $35000 product.
If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?
They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.
They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.
Almost all their sales are $800-$4000 items. Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa? Too chickenshit these days. Good reason to be, of course. It is just not in their DNA anymore.
Yeah the car always seemed (to humble me) to be so… un-Apple. As in, the iphone was a success because of its aesthetics but also it solved a real problem, while creating a whole new market. But in the case of cars, cars are the problem.
The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods.
There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely.
As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.
I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.
Right, but clearly the tech & regulatory environment was such that the use of a general purpose computer beyond the infotainment screens wasn’t going to add enough value.
If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.
“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”
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.
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.
They could probably do full development from scratch for under $10 bil if they were frugal and patient, or more if they want to go fast, and farm first product out to a manufacturing house like magna. This is their MO already (they don't want to own a plant).
In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.
> 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.
> as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.
Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.
Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.
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.
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.
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).
Making cars is just a low margin business with a huge manufacturing footprint. They'd have been competing directly with Chinese EV makers. Dodged a bullet IMO
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.
I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.
You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space.
The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of plug-ins to make this stuff easy for the end-user, but that's where we are (and that's decades after the first gen stuff rolled out). I'd think it was an easy sell to have lights, doorbell, security cameras, and smart speakers all connected easily.
Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.
What I mean by average normie doesn't care is that - no one is actually excited about the space.
There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household).
I have had since the early days of IoT/homekit, various security cameras, doorbell, HomePod, thermostats, lights, switches, all that stuff. Honestly setting it up and maintaining it is more of a chore than an excitement. I upgrade when something breaks, begrudgingly. I do not breathlessly follow new releases ready to pre-order the new iteration. No one in the house really uses it except me, unless I happen to get up late / go to bed early and the lights need to be told to turn on/off.
In some ways it's not even that new technology wise. My dad had various light control panel via X10 and similar protocols going back to the early 90s if not sooner. Similarly was a sort of set-it-and-forget-it situation
Yeah, I have a couple Alexas. One dating back to when it was a special thing for Prime customers. If they were to vanish tomorrow I wouldn't care. I had X10 as well. Once I got house properly rewired I didn't need them and last electrical rework I just told electrician no smart anything which he was perfectly cool with.
And yet the divisions that built those smart speakers have been reduced to almost nothing, because the monetization capabilities were minimal, as their common use cases are rather low value. The devices were priced quite low to try to gain marketshare, but it was a share to a market with minimal value.
The value of IoT that has been unlocked is, at best, minimal convenience. It's not unlike the metaverse: Large investment has been made, but there's no killer apps. I cannot even begin to imagine anything I'd consider high value all that home automation could do for me. The best case is like power windows in cars: Better than having to turn the handle like back in the days, and nowadays cheap enough to have 100% of the market, but, at best, a commodity, as nobody cares about which power window mechanism is being used.
Given how low the ceiling is, and how annoying an IoT's ecosystem's technical problems are, Apple shouldn't touch the market with a ten foot pole.
It’s not hard to look at sales volumes of any of those to know that they don’t have mass market appeal - except maybe the Amazon devices and even Amazon cut jobs in that department and the managers there had to fuzz the numbers to get downstream revenue attributed to them.
> I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.
I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...
The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.
The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.
Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.
Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.
Mostly because it's fragmented and Apple was nowhere to be found with their initially quite good and promising but then completely abandoned HomeKit.
In 2026 I still can't have my always-on supercomputer in the form of AppleTV to do anything with any of the devices at home. And Home app is extremely stupid, extremely limited, and requires a PhD in rocket science to figure out how to do anything with it (espceially since they just bolted on Shortcuts totally on the side).
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.
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.
Siri first needs to fulfill the promise from the Apple Intelligence keynote. In this context, the small beans are things like setting timers and playing music reliably. AI was pitched as a true assistant who understood your whole digital life.
Nobody is going to hand control of their home to a system that was the dumbest smart assistant 14 years ago and is still behind everyone else.
It’s amazing to me that Apple announced vaporware that they didn’t know how to build yet. Nobody did, but Apple usually bides their time making it work before the reveal.
Exactly - Apple needs to be making MORE bets, not LESS.
Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc.
Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc.
I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade.
The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore.
Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
You choose not to ship maybe 90 of those 99, because it's obvious before shipping that they won't work. The rest you have to ship before it becomes obvious they're not that last blessed one.
I'm all aboard the "Apple is simply waiting for the models to get dense enough to run on their hardware" hype train.
They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house.
Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.
Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good.
As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
Apparently Apple invested ~ $50B to advance China's manufacturing capabilities.
As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.
Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.
It doesn't even have to be hardware.
Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.
Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.
> It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.
There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:
AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).
That’s not going to happen. Most people don’t like having to speak out loud in order to message, AI-chat, or use voice commands in public, and many not even in private.
From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.
Automagical AR glasses are also probably a couple decades out for various reasons. Maybe we'll see more weirdos wearing goggles around but I don't see useful mainstream fashionable classes around anytime soon. And, of course, lots of privacy implications, i.e. here's the profile of the person I'm looking aat.
I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected:
1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;
2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and
3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps.
At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.
Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.
As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.
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
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.
> the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.
Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.
> defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit
People 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.
It also helps to spread your lifetime Soc Sec benefits over more tax years, thereby lowering the total tax you pay (because pushing higher payouts into fewer tax years by delayed filing will typically increase your marginal tax bracket).
Yeah it's definitely not one-size-fits-all advice. Depending on what your IRA/401k situation looks like, taking SS right at 62 may be the financially superior choice as it reduces your early draw down on the investments.
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.
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 2% of the time.
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.
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.
I do weigh myself every day. But I only check Vanguard every week or so. I alkmost never actually do anything other than look, my investment style for my IRAs & 401k is "invest like a dead man" aka no touch.
> 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.
Most people just want to keep tabs on how that petulant orange manchild is wrecking their portfolio with his disgusting market manipulation antics.
"Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate? My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner. Cars are paid off but our iPhones are on a payment plan till 2028. Net worth around $2.5 billion but highly concentrated in one company"
> Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate?
Well...
> My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner.
Kids? What are you planning for your estate after you croak? You can do a little better than 4% with an lifetime joint annuity for you and your partner, so long as you don't care about leaving anything to family...
I read an article speculating that Ternus was up next in I think wsj and it sounds like a good decision but obviously time will tell. I've been super disillusioned with Cook for years now, I just hope Ternus's approach isn't just more of the same, and that he actually works to innovate/improve the apple ecosystem.
Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.
> Cook was, without question, an operational genius
I’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?
> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:
I think you underestimate what he does. It seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but if it were so easy, others would not be so far behind. A difficult thing done well looks easy. Reminds me of when Toyota disrupted auto manufacturing.
Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.
I’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are!
I think a major difference is that Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores where you buy the stuff they advertise they can make; it cooperates with manufacturers to get them to build things that they couldn’t make before.
They are willing to pay billions up front to get production lines built to their specifications and guarantee that they will buy X products over Y time, in exchange for exclusivity.
For example, when Apple decided they wanted to use CNC aluminum milling to build laptop frames, no factory could do that at their scale and desired precision.
And yes, you can only do that if you have lots of cash flowing around, but that’s not sufficient. You also need a process that gives you a very good chance that such investments pay out.
I bet it's more about what he didn't do. Like how a stable marriage seems boring but is the accumulation of many many right (by necessarily genius) decisions.
Not really. I’m asking why he’s a genius. When I was told that WW2 wouldnt have gone the same without George C Marshall or how amazing Teddy Roosevelt was at getting stuff done, I went and read their bios and now I understand. Cook does things different than other CEOs apparently so what are those? Other have recommended Apple In China so I’ll start there!
I think this is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory fallacy. There is a correlation to Cook and the performance, but the idea that this was all because of one single guy at the top is survivor bias. For example, other companies didn't fail at outsourcing to China because their CEOs weren't as personally involved as Cook, it was because the team as a whole didn't perform.
Looking today, Trump is as much a symptom as the problem. He didn't get there just because of who he is, he rode on the backs of all the people who voted for him, the state legislators who gerrymandered for him, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, etc...
This is how the electronics industry always worked. I times of yore it was IBM who bought up all the capacity in various fabs then defined later what devices would be manufactured on those wafers.
> 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.
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?
This is one of those things like becoming chess #1: all you have to do is make the optimal decision in a series of meetings, over and over again, for years.
I don't know, but he was Chief Operations Officer when all of this happened, so whatever happened in those regards happened on his watch and should be credited to him (as well as those reporting to him).
It's not like Microsoft's head of gaming has no bearing on their horrible mismanagement of the studios they bought and shuttered. That person was responsible. Do I know what they did day to day? No. But there's someone new in that position and I think that tells us something.
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.
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.
I was overly sleepy due to prescribed sleeping pills when I woke up at 6am to preorder my M5 MacBook Pro. I got stuck on the order page for five minutes because I didn't notice that I had to pick the color and hadn't done so. I checked out ten minutes after preorders went live and that cost me a week on delivery whereas I normally complete preorders fast enough to have my product arrive on the day of release.
We ordered a MacBook Neo for my partner and she had to wait three weeks for it despite the company obviously expecting strong interest in the product at launch.
> The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS
Pandemic and supply chain issues surely contributed to that. It can't be cited without context.
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.
I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then months after announcements their supplies are limited or geo locked. Samsung probably comes close, and it helps they're so vertically integrated.
> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?
I think people underestimate execution. When something is done well, it looks easy. But if it was so easy, why are other competitors struggling to execute the same thing?
Yes but those are outcomes — what did he do that got him there? Lots of people want preferential production and lower cost; Was it that he had the budget to pay more and dictate standards? If that’s the case that’s not genius as much as having the balls to make bets that paid off.
Squeezing the suppliers in just the right way. When you squeeze them too hard and the pricing is too low, the suppliers stop making quality parts and Apple would have a reputation for hardware failures. Squeezing the suppliers not enough and the pricing is too high, then Apple suffers either from a reduced profit margin or a higher ASP. I find that negotiating with suppliers is an art. Cook is quite good at it.
The biggest problem Apple had before Cook was inventory management. They would produce more Performas then they could sell which weighed their cash flow. The dead weight of inventory was a really big problem. Right sizing production to meet demand was what initially saved Apple.
I haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing.
Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.
As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.
So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.
So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.
Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.
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.
While agreeing with the consensus that Thiel is an absolute tool; pieces of wisdom can still be extracted from those that you do not like and a critical reader should be able to evaluate any piece of written text for new understandings.
While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.
This is such a tiresome perspective. The value of the quote from Thiel should be based on how true/predictive/helpful the quote is. Not the political leanings of the person who said it.
Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.
Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.
It may be unfair to Jobs, but I feel like the comparison of him as the genius vs. Cook the talented enabler is a bit flat.
I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).
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.
I dont see it as a contradiction. Apple knows its core competencies and has the cash to back to any initiative worth pursuing through acquisition and/or hiring. Cook was a savant at vertically integrating supply the supply chain and horizontally integrating the entire ecosystem. This led to multiple innovations where Apple is the de facto standard for quality.
The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.
Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.
LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and entered into partnerships for content grudgingly and always with a plan to control the content vertically once they are able to. The big exception obviously is web search, but I can only imagine how much it pains them to not have an iron-fist control over the search results on Safari. They'll never embrace an AI content roulette wheel.
Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.
> I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user
Aren't the notification summaries just that? When they came out there were lots of examples of their horrifying results (summarizing Messages threads to sound like family members died etc)
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.
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.
According to the book, Apple had a special team to prevent divorces among the engineers sent to Asia. That's how long they were over there training.
An argument can be made that Apple nearly singlehandedly advanced China's consumer electronics manufacturing by 20 years, and hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing while doing it.
China doesn't allow key AI engineers and scientists to go overseas. They literally have exit bans and confiscated passports. The west could have ordered companies like Apple to stop sending engineers, banned companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce from building factories in China, and retained massive wealth, expertise, and national strategic advantage, but allowed it to be pissed away for quarterly profits.
Boeing is a US company. RR is, last time I looked, a UK company. "The West" isn't a coherent political unit.
Besides, this is the exact opposite of the FDI strategy of past decades. How far should the ban on overseas FDI go? Ban on investing in South America? Full capital controls? As you mention, passport confiscation (!) for key nationals? I don't think any of this would have worked for "the west" at any point past about 1970, or even post-WW2.
Airplane and jet engine manufacturing are literally defense industries.
Corporations operate at the discretion of the local government. Corporate charters could be revoked or threatened to be revoked to preserve national interests.
I'm not saying that I agree with or recommend the mechanisms that China uses. I'm saying that the West actually does have alternative mechanisms if it wanted to try.
As it stands, we are now under a ticking clock before China creates competitive, commercial and military airplane industry and begins to massively undercut Airbus and Boeing, and it was our own companies that wound the clock.
No, but it's kind of pathetic that the elites in America hallowed out our manufacturing capabilities and condemning tens of millions to abject poverty so their shares can be worth slightly more as a sign of societal sickness.
I think you're overstating your point a bit; I'm not convinced that the tens of millions are that much worse off than their counterparts in poorer parts of China. Was there ever a massive assembly plant for iPhones in the US?
(also, everyone in this subthread seems to be arguing that the US should be at least in part a planned economy with state-directed industry?)
> Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever?
its what the vice prez literally said in a speech; you can look it up on youtube...
fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y
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.
There's an element of revisionism to this perspective. It used to be thought that integration with the global economy would gradually bring more alignment with Western values as well.
The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.
That idea was minorly present during Clinton and Bush, by the time Obama was in office I think it was clear that was never going to happen. The book covers the period from 2016 on, so long after that neocon dream.
> he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this
What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?
In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques that would justify not doing the Green Revolution).
In the case of Apple in China, this was not a one-sided transaction, both sides benefited massively.
Now I do think we should be encouraging the US to compete more, which was what the Biden administration was really good at getting going. But mere ban of commerce, and not providing the industrial policy for US industry to catch up China's excellence, leave us in a world where we are all poorer, both the US and China.
The world is not a zero-sum place, capitalism and technological change are in fact quite positive sum, and when we act like everything is zero-sum we are all worse off.
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.
100% - if they switched their privacy stance they would lose their devoted crowd but probably keep the main street crowd. Its one of those things that makes me worried that at some point a new CEO or legal team will try to further monetize this and irreparably ruin what they built.
You mean its smart approach to PR about privacy. Actual privacy, especially if you are 95% of the mankind without US passport... thats a topic for long discussion, and not a very positive one.
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.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
I'm not sure it's fair to call the Apple Vision Pro a flop in the traditional sense.
While it may not have sold millions of units and been a household staple.
It certainly focused the entire org on manufacturing a suite of chips and hardware that are on a completely different level than their competitors. Apple's now has a clear advantage in all dimensions that matter: compute, power consumption, size, capabilities, etc.
Apple Vision helped created a moat that will be hard for anyone else to cross for at least a decade.
At least the Vision Pro wasn't a $70 billion boondoggle like the Metaverse was.
The flops include the mid-to-late 2010s thinness era of Macbooks. Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air. At least this got corrected but it was a flop era.
I think AI is Tim Apple's biggest flop. Apple can make their own hardware. Apple could've invested in their own hardware like Google's TPUs. Siri has really stagnated. If anybody should be doubling down on an AI assistant, it's Apple.
I used to really appreciate Ben Thompson's takes. He started losing me with his love of Meta's VR devices for meetings. Maybe I didn't get it, I thought. I don't agree with him on a lot of things these days.
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
I appreciated Cook when I worked for Apple, but since, I've been disappointed with his lack of pushing the envelope like Jobs. He could have taken Apple to higher heights.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It also had a large capacitive touchscreen rather than one with a stick and a keyboard underneath, impossibly smooth scroll inertia, a MEMS gyroscope for automatic landscape mode, etc. The GUI was also optimized for the capacitive touchscreen with large buttons everywhere. Android prior to the iPhone did look more like a BlackBerry.
(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)
It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.
The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.
"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".
You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.
(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)
The Treo was great and was definitely possible to read webpages on it. I thought it was the best smart phone at the time. The screen size web browsing and email were all better on the iPhone.
If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
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.
Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.
If you locate them in the middle it could be a seamless "press, drag, release" action
And of course the virtual function keys were awful.
After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.
The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
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.
The duality of Man
Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.
Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.
I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.
MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.
It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.
The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.
But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.
It wouldn't be HN if someone didn't dredge up a decade-old axe to grind.
Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.
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."
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737
They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.
You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts
Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.
I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
are you imaging them creating whole new devices?
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.
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.
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.
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 and had 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 sub 100.
If we had 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.
Vision Pro sells for >3 grand. Their strategy still seems consistent with exactly what you describe.
But one product. I don't know man, I think they became chicken of anything grand. It is not like it was a $35000 product.
If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?
They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.
They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.
Almost all their sales are $800-$4000 items. Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa? Too chickenshit these days. Good reason to be, of course. It is just not in their DNA anymore.
There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.
I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.
If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.
“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”
In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.
You're almost certainly right, and this is a good way to show just how remarkably big the AI buildout is.
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.
Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.
Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...
Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).
They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.
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.
You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space.
The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.
There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household).
I have had since the early days of IoT/homekit, various security cameras, doorbell, HomePod, thermostats, lights, switches, all that stuff. Honestly setting it up and maintaining it is more of a chore than an excitement. I upgrade when something breaks, begrudgingly. I do not breathlessly follow new releases ready to pre-order the new iteration. No one in the house really uses it except me, unless I happen to get up late / go to bed early and the lights need to be told to turn on/off.
In some ways it's not even that new technology wise. My dad had various light control panel via X10 and similar protocols going back to the early 90s if not sooner. Similarly was a sort of set-it-and-forget-it situation
The value of IoT that has been unlocked is, at best, minimal convenience. It's not unlike the metaverse: Large investment has been made, but there's no killer apps. I cannot even begin to imagine anything I'd consider high value all that home automation could do for me. The best case is like power windows in cars: Better than having to turn the handle like back in the days, and nowadays cheap enough to have 100% of the market, but, at best, a commodity, as nobody cares about which power window mechanism is being used.
Given how low the ceiling is, and how annoying an IoT's ecosystem's technical problems are, Apple shouldn't touch the market with a ten foot pole.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hey-alexa-why-costing-amazon-...
I can’t find a publicly attributable source now.
I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...
The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.
The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.
Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.
Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.
Mostly because it's fragmented and Apple was nowhere to be found with their initially quite good and promising but then completely abandoned HomeKit.
In 2026 I still can't have my always-on supercomputer in the form of AppleTV to do anything with any of the devices at home. And Home app is extremely stupid, extremely limited, and requires a PhD in rocket science to figure out how to do anything with it (espceially since they just bolted on Shortcuts totally on the side).
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.
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.
Nobody is going to hand control of their home to a system that was the dumbest smart assistant 14 years ago and is still behind everyone else.
It’s amazing to me that Apple announced vaporware that they didn’t know how to build yet. Nobody did, but Apple usually bides their time making it work before the reveal.
Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc.
Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc.
I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade.
The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore.
Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
Stated preferences vs revealed preferences.
Polling / focus groups vs sales.
You never really know what works until it works.
They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house.
Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.
How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.
Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.
Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.
There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:
* https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye...
AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).
- apple public cloud
Lets go!
1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;
2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and
3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.
Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.
As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.
+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.
Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.
People 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.
Don't worry, I got it.
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.
Do they weigh themselves every day too?
Kidding, I’m sure I’m ignorant of the rationale. Thought weekly, monthly would be better to understand trends or not get unnecessarily worried.
Maybe I’m so wrong the opposite is true.
Most people just want to keep tabs on how that petulant orange manchild is wrecking their portfolio with his disgusting market manipulation antics.
Well...
> My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner.
Kids? What are you planning for your estate after you croak? You can do a little better than 4% with an lifetime joint annuity for you and your partner, so long as you don't care about leaving anything to family...
I can't stop laughing about this hypothetical.
You say it's funny, but the rest of your comment makes me think you didn't realize it was a joke.
Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.
I’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?
Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:
* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems
Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.
Ha, we keep on asking that at my current company, and they keep on doing it anyway. What is it they say the definition of insanity is, again?
Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.
I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!
They are willing to pay billions up front to get production lines built to their specifications and guarantee that they will buy X products over Y time, in exchange for exclusivity.
For example, when Apple decided they wanted to use CNC aluminum milling to build laptop frames, no factory could do that at their scale and desired precision.
And yes, you can only do that if you have lots of cash flowing around, but that’s not sufficient. You also need a process that gives you a very good chance that such investments pay out.
Looking today, Trump is as much a symptom as the problem. He didn't get there just because of who he is, he rode on the backs of all the people who voted for him, the state legislators who gerrymandered for him, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, etc...
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.
It's not like Microsoft's head of gaming has no bearing on their horrible mismanagement of the studios they bought and shuttered. That person was responsible. Do I know what they did day to day? No. But there's someone new in that position and I think that tells us something.
Some critique, but widely praised
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
We ordered a MacBook Neo for my partner and she had to wait three weeks for it despite the company obviously expecting strong interest in the product at launch.
> The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS
Pandemic and supply chain issues surely contributed to that. It can't be cited without context.
Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?
Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.
As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.
So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.
So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.
Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.
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.
While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.
Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.
Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.
I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).
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.
The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.
Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.
Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.
Aren't the notification summaries just that? When they came out there were lots of examples of their horrifying results (summarizing Messages threads to sound like family members died etc)
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
An argument can be made that Apple nearly singlehandedly advanced China's consumer electronics manufacturing by 20 years, and hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing while doing it.
China doesn't allow key AI engineers and scientists to go overseas. They literally have exit bans and confiscated passports. The west could have ordered companies like Apple to stop sending engineers, banned companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce from building factories in China, and retained massive wealth, expertise, and national strategic advantage, but allowed it to be pissed away for quarterly profits.
Boeing is a US company. RR is, last time I looked, a UK company. "The West" isn't a coherent political unit.
Besides, this is the exact opposite of the FDI strategy of past decades. How far should the ban on overseas FDI go? Ban on investing in South America? Full capital controls? As you mention, passport confiscation (!) for key nationals? I don't think any of this would have worked for "the west" at any point past about 1970, or even post-WW2.
Corporations operate at the discretion of the local government. Corporate charters could be revoked or threatened to be revoked to preserve national interests.
I'm not saying that I agree with or recommend the mechanisms that China uses. I'm saying that the West actually does have alternative mechanisms if it wanted to try.
As it stands, we are now under a ticking clock before China creates competitive, commercial and military airplane industry and begins to massively undercut Airbus and Boeing, and it was our own companies that wound the clock.
I think you're overstating your point a bit; I'm not convinced that the tens of millions are that much worse off than their counterparts in poorer parts of China. Was there ever a massive assembly plant for iPhones in the US?
(also, everyone in this subthread seems to be arguing that the US should be at least in part a planned economy with state-directed industry?)
fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y
The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.
even still, China has westernized a lot over the last 20 years, both in quality of life and in social values
regardless of values, offshoring valuable skills is a way to bring about more equality, but not a way to ensure American dominance
I don't know that American dominance is a good thing
What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?
In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques that would justify not doing the Green Revolution).
In the case of Apple in China, this was not a one-sided transaction, both sides benefited massively.
Now I do think we should be encouraging the US to compete more, which was what the Biden administration was really good at getting going. But mere ban of commerce, and not providing the industrial policy for US industry to catch up China's excellence, leave us in a world where we are all poorer, both the US and China.
The world is not a zero-sum place, capitalism and technological change are in fact quite positive sum, and when we act like everything is zero-sum we are all worse off.
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.
e.g. Apple buys moonshot or z.ai
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.
Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
While it may not have sold millions of units and been a household staple.
It certainly focused the entire org on manufacturing a suite of chips and hardware that are on a completely different level than their competitors. Apple's now has a clear advantage in all dimensions that matter: compute, power consumption, size, capabilities, etc.
Apple Vision helped created a moat that will be hard for anyone else to cross for at least a decade.
The flops include the mid-to-late 2010s thinness era of Macbooks. Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air. At least this got corrected but it was a flop era.
I think AI is Tim Apple's biggest flop. Apple can make their own hardware. Apple could've invested in their own hardware like Google's TPUs. Siri has really stagnated. If anybody should be doubling down on an AI assistant, it's Apple.
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
0. Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/20/palantir-goes-mask-off-f...
counterfactuals are hard
(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)
The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.
"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".
You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.
I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php
My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php
(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)