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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

#161

Post by scarface74 »

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…

At Amazon, at least AWS, I as a consultant can ask any service team about features coming down the pike and the expected timeline. We can even share with customers with permission if they sign the appropriate NDA. As far as I know, MS is the same way. Enterprise customers want to be kept in the loop and we need to validate an offering and get customer feedback. AWS often makes changes to products before they are released publicly. That’s why you already have customer testimonials before a product is released.

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

#162

Post by scarface74 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #71
dylan604 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today That's giving Intel a heck of a lot of credit. Intel is a massive ship moving along at full speed. They aren't the most agile of companies to say the least. Intel's x86 giant hammer convinces themselves that everything is an x86 nail. How else do you explain the fact that they are so woefully behind in the times? Apple and Intel w…

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…

That’s a very Pyrrhic victory for Intel to be dominant in the personal computer space. Apple alone sells more ARM based devices than the total non server market and it only has a 15% market share in phones worldwide. Even in the server space, the cloud providers are moving toward ARM where it can.

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

#163

Post by scarface74 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #151
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-…

Office 365 for mac is not the same as office for Windows though. If you are a power user that might matter to you. Then there are the applications not available on mac...Project, Power BI... I know because amongst my estate is an rdp server for mac users to use some niche excel features and to use PowerBI desktop.

And MS is also trying to get parity between Office for Windows for ARM.

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

#164

Post by scarface74 »

kstenerud wrote: post #26
alimov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Maybe. But the fact that a computer gets 20 hours of battery life and doesn’t sound like an airplane under load is important to people.

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

#165

Post by scarface74 »

otterley wrote: post #124
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.

I work in the consulting department at AWS. I touch a lot of different services. The service team will often tell me about upcoming features and tell me not to tell my customers without signing an NDA.

I’ll be thinking about a solution to work around a limitation of an AWS service, reach out to the service team to get their thoughts and they will tell me, they are working on something similar. They will either tell me they are working on it or for me to go for it. I’ve never had an instance where I found out six months later that I wasted my time because they wouldn’t share their roadmap with me.

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

#166

Post by marcins »

ant6n wrote: post #73
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."

Won’t he tell u what projects he did in the past?

Heh.. "I worked on macOS 10.14, 10.15, 11, 12, but I can't tell you what I'm working on now, it'll launch later this year"

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

#167

Post by dang »

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…

Looks like a mod changed the URL to that from https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/06/apples-secrecy-created-engine....

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

#168

Post by kstenerud »

imwillofficial wrote: post #76
kstenerud wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who besides industry geeks actually cared about that? ipod was innovative for the common man. iphone was innovative for the common man. ipad was innovative for the common man. The rest? Meh. Nowadays it's just an upgrade treadmill, consisting of "To re-pair my old watch I first need to update to the latest watch software (even though it worked fine before I unpaired it). But to update the watch software I need to upd…

You list off 3 products that changed the world. And then say “meh” I just don’t understand some people. Apple’s contributions to modern computing, from GUI work, to WebKit, to AirPods is game changing.

Yes I forgot airpods, mostly because I don't use headphones, sorry.

Webkit is nice but not groundbreaking. Their GUI work isn't much better than the competition, although I do hope SwiftUI goes somewhere...

So I listed 3 products (should have been 4 products) that changed the world, but the meh is not for those (they were quite good!). The meh is for a return to 1990s Apple. Most of the existing technologies have largely plateaued and are being pushed ever higher in diminishing return increments (battery life being the final frontier). Without a product visionary, this is where we'll be for awhile.

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

#169

Post by jrockway »

robertlagrant wrote: post #103
jrockway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best skill I learned at Google was figuring out how other people's code works. You read the documentation, and then you make some RPC. It doesn't work as documented. You go read the other service's logs and see an error message, but it doesn't make any sense. You search the codebase for that error message. You find that the super deprecated do not include field is mandatory; it's sent to some other servic…

People do do this. The problem is the docs never get fixed and everyone needs to do what you just did. Great if you have essentially infinite money; otherwise bad.

To me documentation is largely a lost cause, it starts out behind the code and stays that way forever, because the machine can't execute the documentation. Yes, the human maintaining the code is more important than the computer running the code, but when you have an infinite number of tasks to get done, what the computer accepts is a pretty good stopping point for most people.

Personally I see a lot of value in documentation (that's how I learned the basics of programming and the systems I use), but since it's always out of date and wrong, I tend to undervalue it. Maybe that's a mistake.

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

#170

Post by imwillofficial »

kstenerud wrote: post #168
imwillofficial wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You list off 3 products that changed the world. And then say “meh” I just don’t understand some people. Apple’s contributions to modern computing, from GUI work, to WebKit, to AirPods is game changing.

Yes I forgot airpods, mostly because I don't use headphones, sorry. Webkit is nice but not groundbreaking. Their GUI work isn't much better than the competition, although I do hope SwiftUI goes somewhere... So I listed 3 products (should have been 4 products) that changed the world, but the meh is not for those (they were quite good!). The meh is for a return to 1990s Apple. Most of the existing technologies have lar…

It is absolutely groundbreaking, so much so that every major browser that the entire population of the planet use, sans Firefox, is based on technology that was born in WebKit.

As for the “apple can’t innovate”, I don’t buy it. Apple of the 90s was full of poorly conceived ideas. I see little difference in the “world changing product development velocity” of Apple then and now.

I do miss the flavor of old apple though, grey has somehow replaced beige as the “boring color every computer uses”

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