Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 327 posts

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#231

Post by spoonjim »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #228
spoonjim wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung literally sold an exploding phone.

Note 7 did explode. But that wasn't due to them cutting corners and they took it quickly off the market and it never happened to another model after they learned the design lesson where you need to give the battery cell space inside the phone to expand. And how does one battery incident from one brand prove that Apple is the best at making chargers? We're talking about different things here. "iPhones don't explode so…

An exploding phone is not a straw man argument. It’s an extremely valuable data point.

Who is more likely to commit murder, a randomly selected person or a randomly selected person from those with an existing murder conviction?

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#232

Post by x3iv130f »

zorked wrote: post #229
spoonjim wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use Apple chargers in my house, even for non Apple devices. I’m not saying Apple is the only quality charger, but I have no real methodology to assess the quality of any other brand.

There was one person who wrote deep reviews of things like chargers and battery packs (I think) on Amazon, checking for standards compliance and design safety. Does anyone remember who?

Benson Leung? He was famous for his reviews of USB-C products.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#233

Post by prox »

whoisjuan wrote: post #164
novok wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's mobile devices haven't been that interesting since the iPhone X / Watch Series 3. Nothing really has felt like a 'must have' upgrade. iPhone 12 & series 4 watch was definitely an improvement stylistically, but that's about it. And apple only really cares about privacy from 3rd parties, not privacy from apple for their customers. They don't E2E encrypt their backups, and many other services, which makes their…

Upgrades are hard even when they subtle. Iterating hardware is extremely complex. The internal layout of the phones changes every year and all the supply chain needs to get instructions to get the exact adjustments. New parts need to be procured. New software needs to be integrated and tested. Every year there are major software updates that launch new stable OS versions. Every year your ecosystem evolvez and you hav…

The parent comment makes it sound like a bad thing, but I kind of enjoy the current way of not feeling the need to buy the latest and greatest every year.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#234

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

spoonjim wrote: post #231
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note 7 did explode. But that wasn't due to them cutting corners and they took it quickly off the market and it never happened to another model after they learned the design lesson where you need to give the battery cell space inside the phone to expand. And how does one battery incident from one brand prove that Apple is the best at making chargers? We're talking about different things here. "iPhones don't explode so…

An exploding phone is not a straw man argument. It’s an extremely valuable data point. Who is more likely to commit murder, a randomly selected person or a randomly selected person from those with an existing murder conviction?

Sony, LG and many other devices didn't explode, so why aren't their chargers as safe as Apple's by the logic of your arguments so far?

How does one negative battery incident from Samsung prove that Apple makes the safest chargers of ALL the major electronics manufacturers?

Because so far you provided no proof or arguments to support this other than "murderer" metaphors and opinionated brand loyalty wrapped in whataboutism focused towards one particular incident, then move the goalpost from safety to quality instead and I showed you proof that quality does not equal safety or vice versa.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#235

Post by zpeti »

hackissimo123 wrote: post #223
innagadadavida wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also partly marketing. Apple has a lot of other pieces of the puzzle like privacy and racial equality and other socio-political issues well rounded up. Loyal Apple fans and customers really like to identify with these principles. Apple does this really well and most Chinese companies are transactional in nature and have been adversely affected by many political and humanitarian issues that are part of their eth…

I find it hard to believe that people are choosing Apple products over competitors because of anything to do with "racial equality". Especially since most of the components are manufactured in China, therefore by buying an Apple product (or basically any other piece of modern consumer electronics), you're helping to fund a racist ethnostate that's currently committing genocide. What has Apple done to promote racial e…

Seems like to many people making nice statements about racial equality and donating money to black only initiatives is enough.

Working with actual genocidal governments is fine though, I mean it's what you say that matters, not what you do.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#236

Post by HappyDreamer »

ido wrote: post #169
HappyDreamer wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [If you don't know yourself] if you are asking a for something stupid, who will know? No one will. Makes me think I could intentionally ask for 1 or 2 stupid things, and see if the supplier tells me about it?

Sounds like a variation of that rock band asking for a bowl of only brown m&m from the venue - at risk of voiding the contract if not provided - in the middle of their safety requirements document (if they didn't give them brown m&ms they know they didn't read the document throughout).

Yes! That rock band came to my mind, having read about them here at HN. But I couldn't remember the name (Van Halen, see below) or "brown m&m".

Now, because of your reply, I found this old HN post:

"Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754334

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#237

Post by simonh »

cageface wrote: post #81

I think it’s naive to expect that American companies like Apple that outsource everything but design and software and reap enormous profits are going to be able to do this indefinitely. China is getting better fast at doing these things too and will have tremendous advantages when it owns the entire stack. If American companies want to stay competitive in the long run they’re going to have to break their addiction to…

How is moving manufacturing to the USA going to protect against China developing expertise in design and software?

Also the whole made in China panic is overblown. Most of the value in the parts in an iPhone is sourced outside China. CPUs in Taiwan (used to be Texas), flash memory in Korea, Japan and the US, camera module in Japan, Gorilla Glass in Kentucky, Japan and Korea etc, etc. Final assembly is only worth a few bucks per phone. It's fighting over scraps.

I just don't see how reversing the relationship - design and software in China, final assembly in the US, is going to benefit the US all that much.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#238

Post by tallanvor »

vlovich123 wrote: post #224
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their size How do you judge the quality and safety of charger purely by size? Is bigger safer, or is smaller safer? And if so, why don't other brands of the same size meet your quality standard based on that yardstick. >and demonstrated product quality in other areas Like their multi-year run of defective butterfly keyboards or hinge design that would cut through the MacBooks display cable over time causing the famo…

Safety != product quality like the examples you gave. Charger blocks is the one spot Apple doesn’t seem to fuck around because of the outsized brand impact it would have (see Samsung’s exploding batteries).

Cables, on the other hand... I honestly can't remember seeing any other cable casings disintegrate like Apple's.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#239

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

tallanvor wrote: post #238
vlovich123 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safety != product quality like the examples you gave. Charger blocks is the one spot Apple doesn’t seem to fuck around because of the outsized brand impact it would have (see Samsung’s exploding batteries).

Cables, on the other hand... I honestly can't remember seeing any other cable casings disintegrate like Apple's.

Funny thing is Apple internally use Anker cables as they're much more resistent than their own.

It's well known that Apple prioritizes thinness, aesthetics and industrial design over function and reliability which is ironic given how stupid the magic mouse looks when it's charging.[1] How Jonny Ive green-lit that is beyond me.

[1]https://i.stack.imgur.com/WxNgu.jpg

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#240

Post by alxlaz »

kens wrote: post #216
baybal2 wrote: post #79

I worked in, and around OEM electronics since 2007. I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones. He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing. Others squeeze suppliers, and don't know what they are doing. On one of my first jobs, I've been witness to one such negotiations down to single cents, and microns of plastic for a few million units customized charger order. The order was such a whopper for a sm…

Dispensing with "unnecessary" components is called Muntzing, after Muntz, a TV salesman in the 1940s and 50s. He reduced costs by cutting out components from a TV until it stopped working, to find the minimum number of components required. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing

Yeah, what parent is describing isn't muntzing, but the simple act of being dense in a setting where nobody can say it:

> He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run.

I've seen this happening plenty of times, too. The higher-ups in many consumer (and even non-consumer!) companies are 100% clueless about these things, but they "know" that Chinese OEMs try to "rip you off" on designs, so they will demand their staff to squeeze them (and will promptly fire or replace anyone who dares tell them that a design is actually okay).

So every once in a while one of these smart guys will show up and make completely stupid demands. And explaining someone who doesn't understand basic electrical engineering concepts just why these demands are stupid is completely unproductive -- they don't just lack an understanding of the jargon, they lack an understanding of the most basic concepts. It's akin to trying to explain someone who doesn't know what a for loop is why you're using a hash table in a place where "a simple array would suffice".

Post reply on HN