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How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

fastcompany.com

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Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#11

Post by Animats »

There is technical debt associated with operating at a high level of secrecy. I used to work in a place that did classified work for the three-letter agencies. The teams working on the most classified projects tended to stagnate. They had advanced technology in narrow areas, but had fallen behind commercial technology across the board. They were still building minicomputer-based systems a decade later than they should have been. And they'd get stuck in dead-end niche technologies.

As a rule of thumb for bidding purposes, we assumed that classifying a project doubled the cost.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#12

Post by frutiger »

raverbashing wrote: post #10
88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

Exactly Most of the stuff is "officially leaked* to some places before the new releases anyway When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw? I think it was on the iphone unveiling.

> When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw?

The performance per watt and rollout schedule of Apple Silicon?

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#13

Post by lostlogin »

88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

> An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few times.

I agree, but the new MacBooks have had a fair bit of excitement around them. So maybe you just have to make several duds first?

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#14

Post by openknot »

infogulch wrote: post #9
88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

Imagine the counterfactual: an Apple engineering blog that routinely publishes in depth articles describing the awesome challenges that their engineering teams are overcoming in an org as vertically integrated as Apple. That would make me more hype about their products than anything.

I would personally be very interested in such a blog, but so would Apple's competitors. I've read that being too open about methods can let competitors catch up to once-unique advantages quickly, especially as it lets them design a roadmap of future features to work on.

Suppose Apple had an engineering blog that released a roadmap about the M1 chips before their release. Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today, as laptop manufacturers may have invested more in ARM processors by seeing them as viable due to Apple's work.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#15

Post by lajamerr »

lostlogin wrote: post #13
88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

> An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few times. I agree, but the new MacBooks have had a fair bit of excitement around them. So maybe you just have to make several duds first?

People have been calling for/or expected Apple to switch to ARM/make their own chip for years and years before they actually switched. At that point people were just surprised to see Apple actually do something.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#16

Post by openknot »

From Hacker News's guidelines, the preferred original source that the linked 9to5Mac quotes heavily from is from Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/90748492/apple-airpods-pro-creat...

However, I suspect that a submission with the original source's headline would have led to less engagement (as it is "How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro," as opposed to " Apple’s secrecy created engineer burnout").

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#18

Post by judge2020 »

wmf wrote: post #7
lelandfe wrote: post #3

Original article: https://www.fastcompany.com/90748492/apple-airpods-pro-creat... First half of the article: "Teams were innovating for months in silos only to finally converge in the eleventh hour before launch, ending up in five- or six-hour-long daily meetings, causing tremendous friction and burnout. People were frustrated." Second half of the article: "regular cross-staff sessions, transparency, and shared voice…

I wonder how much cross-team collaboration was required for AirPods Pro? Do they have some kind of iOS or hardware integration that regular AirPods don't?

I know there are sometimes developer betas that accidentally include pre-production hardware info and strings[0], or features that would have no use outside of rumored products, eg WebXR[1], so they exist in iOS. I imagine a bad merge can get internal features into public builds, but they seem to be incredibly rare.

0: https://www.idropnews.com/news/homepod-setup-process-leaked-...

1: https://igamesnews.com/mobile/ios-15-4-leaks-possible-apple-...

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#19

Post by [deleted] »

openknot wrote: post #16

From Hacker News's guidelines, the preferred original source that the linked 9to5Mac quotes heavily from is from Fast Company: https://www.fastcompany.com/90748492/apple-airpods-pro-creat... However, I suspect that a submission with the original source's headline would have led to less engagement (as it is "How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro," as opposed to " Apple’s secrecy created engin…

[deleted]

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#20

Post by alimov »

lajamerr wrote: post #15
lostlogin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few times. I agree, but the new MacBooks have had a fair bit of excitement around them. So maybe you just have to make several duds first?

People have been calling for/or expected Apple to switch to ARM/make their own chip for years and years before they actually switched. At that point people were just surprised to see Apple actually do something.

Maybe people in tech, but this doesn’t apply to (I’d like to say- Most of) their regular users
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