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Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

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221–230 of 446 posts

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#221

Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.

Not as a shareholder, but as a customer and user I’m very ok if they just focus on making those rectangles. Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t sc…

whew that visions is a triple entedre, way to go

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#222

Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.

Mostly fair, but I can’t express how much I love the M series and where it’s heading. I’m biased as an MLE but this is the greatest thing ever to me

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#223
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He should perhaps be a cautionary tale against thinking that being really good at building consumer tech products makes you good at everything. But if this is your standard for "lucky idiot", I wonder who of note you wouldn't consider a lucky idiot. You can dig up something like this for everyone from Newton to Salk.

My go-to example for this is Turing. The genius of our field, and apparently duped into credulity about telepathy (probably based on faulty/fraudulent results by people at then-respected institutions)

To be fair, tons of scientists and technical people believed at that time that telepathy might be real. For example if you go back and read science fiction from the 40s, 50s, even 60s, there is a ton of telepathy and mental powers. This reflects both the authors’ efforts to predict future scientific advancement, and their audience’s willingness to believe it.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any CEO actually use their own company's products? The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread.. And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app ev…

> Does any CEO actually use their own company's products? ...yes? Quite often? I'm all for ragging on CEOs but this seems misguided. The CEO has been a user of the core product at every company I've ever worked for. If you think Tim Cook is pulling a Samsung Galaxy out of his pocket, I don't know what to tell you.

What's funny is I was doing online shopping from a national chain and got so frustrated by the UX that I gave up.

I thought : If only the CEO would dogfood this instead of farming it out to their lackeys/gofers/personal assistants, etc...

Instead these poor people deal with stuff like that (if they're doing online shit).

"Privatize the profit, socialize the (pain in the ass enshittification, or whatever)."

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#225
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen, I don't really like the direction Apple has taken either, but since Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in August 2011 the company's stock went from like $15 to like $275; it had a value of $400 billion and now it's worth $4 trillion, ten times as much. Any characterization of him as some kind of failure who killed Apple ("once the biggest tech company on the planet", "isn't growing", "only saved"...) is completely…

As a customer and tech enthusiasts I couldn't care less about the stock performance of Apple, truly. It's a tech company, I'm interested in the tech they produce. On that front, the company hasn't been innovative for ages.

Apple Silicon and everything related to it is deeply innovative, it's just not at all flashy.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months? Not an Apple product user, but my wife and kids are, and... install the OS upgrade? That pretty much bricked 2 of our phones and a friend's as well.

“Pretty much bricked” sounds a lot like “didn’t brick”

I think a more charitable reading is that OS upgrades left their devices barely usable to the point of having to be replaced. I'm not a big Apple person so don't have personal experience but have heard similar stories from multiple other people, that OS upgrades wrecked the old devices they were still using.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#228
post #2

If you check my comments Im a routine critic of Apple. Specifically its mis-management of Siri. But, in my mind, Tim Cook is also responsible for the only exceptional qualities of Apple. Namely its production of the M series chips and the Vision Pro (yes really). They better have someone outstanding in mind as a replacement. Otherwise I could easily see the successor mildly improve Siri/AI functions, while continuing…

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more, from Vision. The Liquid GlArse thing is because they want to make every app a Vision app. Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced. It has probably become the most successful product in history.

How unimpressive the first iPhone was??

Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.

It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.

But sure..."unimpressive."

This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.

If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any CEO actually use their own company's products? The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread.. And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app ev…

Hm I live and breathe our product portfolio. That is the entire reason for me waking up for work every day. I do consider myself a 'product' CEO though and passion for great products is what keeps me in tech.

I also use your product. Pretty good!

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#230
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not want to be running Snow Leopard. And remember, that's a release they had to do because 10.5 was so rough!

Why not? Other than "because they're old"? Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases. Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco! But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal com…

Snow Leopard eventually became a solid release. At launch it had many bugs, including some that lost customer data.

It’s tempting to compare one’s memory of an old late-cycle OS, after all the UI changes have been accepted and the bugs squashed, to the day-1 release of a new OS today, when UI changes seem new and weird and there are tons of bugs they knowingly shipped to hit the launch date (just like with Snow Leopard). But it’s not really a fair comparison.

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