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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

#171

Post by ClumsyPilot »

urthor wrote: post #158
lapcat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Everyone makes mistakes. But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23771902/ Diagnostic errors by Doctors are probably the gold standard of being error free. My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were. What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the d…

> But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time

I never met a person who commited to a mistake, and thought they were wrong at the time. Have you?

> My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

How do you arrive at this number? For a doctor there is a clear correct and wrong diagnosis. For a corporate CEO, who decided against doing a merger, how do you even know that decision was taken at all? How do you known if it was right or wrong? You can't simulate an alternative business.

Suppose you could simulate it accurately, and the revenue were up, profit margin is down, and stock price is up - is that good or bad? You can't even determine, non subjectively, which option is better

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

#172

Post by lapcat »

urthor wrote: post #158
lapcat wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Everyone makes mistakes. But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23771902/ Diagnostic errors by Doctors are probably the gold standard of being error free. My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were. What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the d…

> What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

This may be important to determine liability in a malpractice lawsuit, but otherwise I'm not sure why we should care much why someone was mistaken if we're all agreed that the decision was mistaken.

The difference here is that we're not even agreed that Apple's culture of secrecy is wrong. It's a controversy. If we're talking about a diagnostic error by a doctor, we're assuming there's no controversy over whether it was actually wrong.

Two vastly different scenarios:

1) Tim Cook made a mistake but made the best decision he could given the information at the time.

2) Tim Cook didn't make a mistake.

If you're willing to agree on 1, and that Apple's culture should change, then I'm happy to grant you "made the best decision he could given the information at the time", or at least not argue it too much, because the culture is the important matter, and not the thoughts inside Tim Cook's brain.

"Assume he's smart" is vastly different than "Assume he's right".

There are many times in my career when I look at code that I'd previously written and wonder "What the heck was I thinking???" It's an interesting question psychologically, but still, I fully recognize that the code I wrote was bad. And regardless of how much time I spend on post-mortem analysis, the crucial thing is to fix the code.

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

#173

Post by aconst »

imwillofficial wrote: post #170
kstenerud wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thoug…

WebKit which was forked from KHTML. Apple did work, of course, but they did not make that from scratch.

I love Apple, been a user since we had a MacPlus at home (then a Mac 2Vi, then a LC3, then PPC7600, then...) but let's not be overzealous.

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

#174

Post by dangus »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #152
dangus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your bash scripts won't work on Windows, either. If we are here talking about bash being a "common default" maybe we shouldn't leave out the operating system that has about a 90% global marketshare. If your development team doesn't have the time and resources to support a multi-platform development environment, they shouldn't do so. Apple didn't change their business model, the GPL changed their license, and it's a l…

> Your bash scripts won't work on Windows Well neither would the code we're developing either so, not really a problem. > Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products? Oh, most definitely. But then none of our products are closed-source, so we're an outlier, admittedly.

And I’m going to guess that your apps run on Linux systems in production.

So, I don’t think it makes sense to criticize macOS for being different than Linux. I can’t run my systemd units in macOS, either.

We might as well raise hell about Apple not pre-installing Firefox for us.

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

#175

Post by robertlagrant »

jrockway wrote: post #169
robertlagrant wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 docum…

This is why I like Flask+Connexion or FastAPI - endpoints are generated from Swagger docs or vice versa.

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

#176

Post by imwillofficial »

aconst wrote: post #173
imwillofficial wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thoug…

WebKit which was forked from KHTML. Apple did work, of course, but they did not make that from scratch. I love Apple, been a user since we had a MacPlus at home (then a Mac 2Vi, then a LC3, then PPC7600, then...) but let's not be overzealous.

Have you actually looked at the deltas between KHTML and WebKit? There is a reason WebKit was chosen.

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

#177

Post by asdff »

hammock wrote: post #142
asdff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of an advantage are you really getting here? The first day they are sold samsung has the airpod torn apart and rendered on a computer screen with all specs known. There are no big secrets here, these aren't warheads. It didn't take long for the gas stations around me to start selling knock off airpods along side the knock off lightning cables. If you get it early vs not, its not going to make a big differenc…

It’s not about preventing knockoffs, apple is not built on first mover advantage. It’s about protecting price on contracts for supplies that are locked in well before launch. When AirPods launch apple has contracts lined up already for production of many thousands of them if not millions.

So if samsung knows apple wants to use some part from some vendor they will actually go to that vendor and attempt to buy out their stock? Seems like there is a market for unscummy vendors who won't do that to you then.
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