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How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

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

#121

Post by lapcat »

urthor wrote: post #110
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

' I have a habit of thinking from the perspective of corporate titans.' Thats sounds a bit presumtious, have you ever validated how accurate that perspective is? Maybe the perspective you imagine is totally different from reality.

Well I don't think I'm right haha. I haven't met these people and asked them exactly what they were thinking. But I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided. Saying "assuming a corporation made a smart decision, why did xxx make that decision?" is usually a very fruitful line of thought.

> I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are gods and not fallible mortals.

All humans make mistakes. Very bad mistakes. Even very smart people. Depending on circumstances and level of power, some people suffer the consequences of their mistakes, and others don't.

One common mistake of leaders is to surround themselves with "yes men" who never criticize them or tell them the truth. Leaders can become very detached from reality, but their power allows them to survive and even thrive in a state of reality detachment. And these leaders always have people who will defend them no matter what and paint them as infallible geniuses because of their power, which is part of what contributes to never suffering the consequences of mistakes.

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

#122

Post by ip26 »

zebnyc wrote: post #62

My conversatons with my brother who works at Apple goes something like this. Me: "What are you working on?" Him: "All I can tell you is that I am working on a project which will launch later this year and you hear about it in the news."

Is that supposed to be surprising? I don’t tell people about unannounced projects I work on either.

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

#124

Post by otterley »

mwattsun wrote: post #57

It'd be interesting to see a comparison of Apple's "Strictly controlled interface between groups on a need to know basis" and Amazon's "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces." I'm guessing most companies have a more leaky abstraction approach https://gist.github.com/kislayverma/d48b84db1ac5d737715e8319.…

The two are orthogonal. Amazon’s culture of building and intercommunicating with service interfaces doesn’t mean there aren’t secret projects in the works. For example, new AWS services are often introduced at re:Invent to the surprise and delight of both customers and employees.

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

#125

Post by outside1234 »

buildbot wrote: post #36
skuhn wrote: post #21

I worked at Apple relatively briefly, in a lead role on an Important Project that required its own form to be disclosed on it (besides the general agreement you sign to begin employment). A truly toxic work environment that I couldn't get out of fast enough once I shipped the project. All kinds of projects at Apple have their own disclosure forms, and you are only given one to sign if it's deemed necessary to your wo…

Don’t most most big tech companies have these? At Microsoft it is pretty common for most people to be in a few “tents” (project specific NDAs). What is more rare are agreements _outside_ the in place system…

Microsoft is in the process of getting rid of tenting for the vast number of projects and making the bar very high to require it.

As the OP says, tenting / disclosure is often used as a weapon to avoid having to get feedback on projects etc.

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

#126

Post by outside1234 »

awestroke wrote: post #85
EdwardDiego wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped giving a shit about MacBooks when they started limiting RAM to 16G, and put in that stupid bar thing instead of function keys. If anyone was excited about the new MacBook, I'm guessing it's because they're already deep into Apple as a brand. Me, I just want a computer that works, has decent specs* and doesn't treat me like an imbecile, or refuse to ship Bash >3 because the legal team got antsy about GPLv3.…

Time to lift your head out of the sand then. Macbook Pro now comes in 32GB RAM flavors, with fn keys instead of the touch bar, and zsh by default

64GB even too

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

#127

Post by Applejinx »

mschuster91 wrote: post #84
jimnotgym wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except... Whilst I acknowledge that the M1 macs are pretty good, Intel power pcs on everyone else's desks that work just fine for the standard Microsoft Office workload. Intel are not miles behind, they are just not ahead. In the world of Enterprise Applications x86s compatibility with legacy code is going to be important to many large organisations. Meanwhile Apple with probably pull support for Rosetta2 in a couple…

> So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world. Not necessarily! A lot of office needs boil down to the Office 365 suite, Adobe and the SAP GUI - all of which now have native M1 variants. The only thing that's needed is someone other than Apple and Qualcomm actually putting out a desktop-worthy ARM CPU so that Microsoft can provide Windows-on-…

What if Apple ended up supplying older M1 designs, not cutting edge but efficient on batteries and forced down to a really low price… to Google, for making chromebooks with? Bottom end craptops not even being handled by Apple anymore but still running an older generation of M1 cpus, with the lesser but still substantial benefits and the battery life?

On the extreme low end it's not only about Windows. Chromebooks are a thing. Eventually M1 chromebooks and Apple leveraging the fact that now they're a CPU designer? After they do some more upgrades to their own tech for their own purposes?

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

#128

Post by Applejinx »

wincy wrote: post #48
kstenerud wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of their regular users don't even know what Arm or Intel is, let alone cares about it. A macbook is a macbook. The fact that it's faster is lost on most people as well, since their daily use consists of opening the browser or video conferencing or (if they have a PC) gaming. Computers have plateaued for their current use case. The only innovation that will make a difference in the near future is AI.

I was a PC gamer but primarily use Macs for work. But I bought the MacBook Air and aside from one game (Elden Ring) every game I usually play works on the MacBook Air, some with Rosetta and some with native ARM support.

Heh. "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the game selection?"

I'm an Apple guy, I just thought it was funny. And my Airpod Pro observation isn't on how great they were at creating it, rather 'can you please help me get mine to switch back out of mono mode, after I put them in my ears one at a time and inadvertently convinced 'em that life is mono now?' (mind you, I kind of know: they freak out if asked to play 96k content and you get a mono low-res version)

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

#129

Post by skuhn »

ianai wrote: post #120
skuhn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're exactly right that companies don't want pure efficiency, and they shouldn't -- there will always be competing priorities to be weighed. Here's the rub for me, in this particular role at this particular time in this particular company: the workload was extremely heavy, the deadlines were extremely unrealistic, the threat of failure was extreme (up to and including terminating the entire org for failure to meet…

Have you expanded on the toxicity somewhere? I’m tying to understand how an organization like apple can be so toxic and successful. Makes a really bad impression to me.

Besides my comments here, I haven't spoken about it before.

For what it's worth, Apple is hugely siloed and also just plain huge. It's entirely possible that the culture in other orgs was completely different from what I experienced, because it was very hard to interact with anyone outside of your org or the current project scope.

How are they so successful despite this culture? In the case of the project I worked on, I saw a few reasons for success:

1. Management expressed that failure was not an option, so a few people (myself included) out of hundreds pushed ourselves beyond the limit to deliver.

2. Spending a TON of money. I had a different approach to Apple's way of controlling costs (they were very much in the "buying DRAM for iPhones" mindset), and easily shaved millions off of the project. But the inefficiencies inherent to the project's timeline and secrecy and other stakeholders meant the project came in probably 2-3x more expensive than I would have otherwise spent.

3. Leveraging existing institutional resources. Already having a global network and datacenter footprint helped immensely on the time to ship, but it also came with a ton of bureaucratic baggage.

4. Being so large that it ultimately didn't matter. While the project was essential for a key initiative to succeed, and many people (perhaps the entire org) would have been let go if it had failed, ultimately the company would have been fine if it didn't happen. They probably would have just postponed the launch by a year or two and had another org handle the project. It's very hard for a company Apple's size to have anything be an existential threat, so you get a lot of chances.

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

#130

Post by dylan604 »

Applejinx wrote: post #127
mschuster91 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world. Not necessarily! A lot of office needs boil down to the Office 365 suite, Adobe and the SAP GUI - all of which now have native M1 variants. The only thing that's needed is someone other than Apple and Qualcomm actually putting out a desktop-worthy ARM CPU so that Microsoft can provide Windows-on-…

What if Apple ended up supplying older M1 designs, not cutting edge but efficient on batteries and forced down to a really low price… to Google, for making chromebooks with? Bottom end craptops not even being handled by Apple anymore but still running an older generation of M1 cpus, with the lesser but still substantial benefits and the battery life? On the extreme low end it's not only about Windows. Chromebooks are…

Who would be manufacturing these older M1 chips after Apple is currently having the later generations? Apple's current needs would mean TSMC capacity will be focused on these newer chips. It's not like there's a new fab with each generation of chips.
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