That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
101–110 of 438 posts
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally? Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and…
Compared to game consoles, graphics cards, and all manner of other electronics things... have you ever seen Apple products on those stock tracker websites? Has there ever been an actual problem with scalpers? Ever had to sign up for a waiting list? No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff. The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEAR…
I just bought an M5 Macbook from an electronics retailer because they actually stocked it, whereas ordering the same machine for the same price from Apple would have been a custom build delivered mid May.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel ga…
An Apple car would be crazy expensive to develop and not really a guaranteed sell at all. There's millions of people that are very loyal to Apple of iPhone and wearable but going to an Apple car is a HUGE jump.
Quantum leap CarPlay/Siri could be a big win but, even as an Apple fan in general, have no particular interest in an Apple Car absent things like self-driving that blow everyone else out of the water--which seems a pretty big ask.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tim Cook refreshing his 401k page every day to see if he’s ready to FIRE.
I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 2% of the time.
>A decent percentage of the user base does that every day.
Do they weigh themselves every day too?
Kidding, I’m sure I’m ignorant of the rationale. Thought weekly, monthly would be better to understand trends or not get unnecessarily worried.
Maybe I’m so wrong the opposite is true.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#105Cook Doctrine : "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution." And later: "I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run." Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim…
LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and entered into partnerships for content grudgingly and always with a plan to control the content vertically once they are able to. The big exception obviously is web search, but I can only imagine how much it pains them to not have an iron-fist control over the search results on Safari. They'll never embrace an AI content roulette wheel.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hope that Apple doesn’t follow Google’s lead. Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and struggles to make great products
Gemini is a great product
Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good.
As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#107Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role. If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit,…
Apparently Apple invested ~ $50B to advance China's manufacturing capabilities.
As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.
Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#108That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
What were they?
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#109That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.
Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of p…
What I mean by average normie doesn't care is that - no one is actually excited about the space. There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household). I have had since the early days of IoT/ho…
Yeah, I have a couple Alexas. One dating back to when it was a special thing for Prime customers. If they were to vanish tomorrow I wouldn't care. I had X10 as well. Once I got house properly rewired I didn't need them and last electrical rework I just told electrician no smart anything which he was perfectly cool with.