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

281–290 of 327 posts

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#281

Post by tonyedgecombe »

abraxas wrote: post #61
ksec wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve's advice was "Dont think what he would do, but do what you think is right." The problem is knowing what is right, and that is exactly the strength of Steve. Often by intuition, and some by experience where he made mistakes and he quickly correct. And right now the designed by committee seems to be lacking the latter attribute. Tim Cook is also much more focused on Revenue and Profits with their Strategy. Steve…

I think the focus on privacy might be the new face of Apple that will redefine it for the post Jobs era

It's a smart move, how can Google respond without undermining their whole business model.

Microsoft struggles with it as well, it's not something their enterprise customers are asking for.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#282

Post by duxup »

baybal2 wrote: post #51
duxup wrote: post #8

The article seems to hinge around China and etc more than most things. I do wonder how capable any company is to move manufacturing out of China at any kind of large scale.

Boomberg was always very apologetic of China, if not to say bordering on lobbying for them. No wonder, Bloomber is one of very, very, very few Western media operating in China through a franchise agreement.

You mean the Bloomberg that published the Super Micro chip story?

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#283

Post by cwhiz »

duxup wrote: post #8

The article seems to hinge around China and etc more than most things. I do wonder how capable any company is to move manufacturing out of China at any kind of large scale.

Foxconn will just build a factory wherever Apple asks them to. Most recently, India. Next option, Vietnam.

It’s not hard to leave China. It’s hard to leave China for the US.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#284

Post by joshspankit »

CoryAlexMartin wrote: post #153
eigen wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the iPhone 12 mini is slightly smaller by volume than the iPhone 4. iPhone 4: 115.2 x 58.6 x 9.3 mm or 62.781 cm^3 iPhone SE: 138.4 x 67.3 x 7.3 mm or 67.994 cm^3 iPhone 12 mini: 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.4 mm or 62.473 cm^3 [1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP587?locale=en_US [2] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP820?locale=en_US [3] https://www.apple.com/iphone-12/specs/

The iPhone 12 mini is larger in height and width, which is what matters most for one-handed use.

Exactly. As well, the screen is a much larger percentage of the body which is also important for one-handed use.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#285

Post by joshspankit »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #139
joshspankit wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, I feel like Steve Jobs hated mice in general, or at least didn’t understand the use of them. Look at the “puck“ for example.

The puck-mouse was a good mouse if you're a person that moves the mouse by flicking fingers or with hand movements rather than with arm movements - and if you tuned the mouse speed and acceleration curve - but most people don't set their mouse speed to their liking though, hence the ergonomic issues.

How does that “flicking finger” style combat the issue of returning your hand to the mouse to find that it’s rotated a few degrees?

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#286

Post by simonh »

cageface wrote: post #263
simonh wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fe…

It doesn't prevent China from developing expertise. That's inevitable. It prevents the US from falling dramatically behind.

Falling behind on what? Low end assembly line work at the very bottom of the value chain just isn't worth fighting low skilled workers from rural China or Vietnam over. The chances are all of that will be done by robots soon anyway, which is a whole new ball game.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#287

Post by simonh »

jwr wrote: post #255
whoisjuan wrote: post #107

Apple is the best company in the world at operations. I don't know how they do it but: 1) Ever year they manage to diligently upgrade iphones/ipads, macbooks and watches. 2) Every year they make some progress in their quest of removing suppliers by becoming vertically integrated. They don't only remove the supplier. They beat their former suppliers specs. (e.g: M1 chip). 3) Every year they make some progress in their…

And yet they fail so spectacularly at software. All their devices are limited by software, they can't swing their weight to develop software across all platforms, and they can't deal with software bugs in a scalable way. It's intriguing: they managed to scale their hardware in an impressive way, but software lags so far behind it's not even funny.

I hesitated to reply because this is such a subjective issue. I look at the software on the Android and Windows side and just don't see much of interest to me. That's just me though.

I think one area that Apple clearly does excel at though is software features that take advantage of specific hardware features. The fact they design the whole product in sync on both the hardware and software side, without either taking priority by itself is truly unique in the industry. So for example the way the M1 has instructions that accelerate particular operations common on the OSX/iOS software stack, or the computational photography software that works hand in glove with the neural engine hardware.

The fact that apple develops their own developer tools, OS, application software, hardware and even CPUs now is unique in the industry and deep software skills are a really important differentiator. Maybe that side is slipping, but if so that will be a big problem for them down the line.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#288

Post by simonh »

rektide wrote: post #7
icelancer wrote: post #4

Apple M1 is the kind of thing that truly impresses in the post-Jobs era, IMO.

Years of snapping up brilliant companies/minds[1]! * PA Semi, 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi * Licensing then hiring most of the Imagination Technologies GPU engineers, including setting up an office down the street from them in St Albans, 2017-2020. * some of Dialog Semiconductor, 2018 * Intel's smartphone division, 2019 * Intrinsity, who had some cutting edge chip design, 2010 There's also an unbeliev…

On the other hand, how many of these companies would have faded away and never been heard of again if Apple hand't stepped in? Was Samsung or Huawei about to invest in these technologies? Even on this thread I see people saying phones are commoditised now and the new models aren't interesting.

Apple's competitors believe this, they aren't about to invest millions on these small technical innovations and improvements that by themselves are incredibly niche. Instead Apple brings these incremental innovations, which otherwise would be relegated to specialist parts if they survived at all, to hundreds of millions of customers all over the world. If Apple hadn't done this the chances these advanced technologies would be in so many people's hands right now would be close to nil.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#289

Post by 10000truths »

simonh wrote: post #286
cageface wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't prevent China from developing expertise. That's inevitable. It prevents the US from falling dramatically behind.

Falling behind on what? Low end assembly line work at the very bottom of the value chain just isn't worth fighting low skilled workers from rural China or Vietnam over. The chances are all of that will be done by robots soon anyway, which is a whole new ball game.

It’s “low end” right up until you have no access to it. When it comes to national security, you don’t want to be in a position where the majority of your manufacturing output is at the mercy of a foreign country’s blessing. Your R&D is worth nothing if you can’t actually build.

Re: How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs

#290

Post by axaxs »

simonh wrote: post #247
silisili wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in USA should really read about world war efforts. You had a typewriter company make the most iconic handgun of all time, and fledgling car companies building plane engines. It was a true feat of modern engineering, one I wonder if could ever happen again, given our lack of production prowess. The US now is full of product people who build overseas. While it's currently economically smart, it's a race to the b…

Surely it's a race out of the bottom (low value assembly) towards the top (high value design, prototyping, software and services). What's the value of racing back down to the bottom again? I don't know the current BOM, but for most of it's history more of the value in the components in an iPhone was actually manufactured in the US than in China. Gorilla Glass in New York state, flash memory in Kentucky, the CPUs used…

I don't really follow. Why in your example can a locale not have both jobs? Doing one doesn't prohibit the other.
Post reply on HN