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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#151

Post by JustExAWS »

Keyframe wrote: post #24
doitLP wrote: post #18

> Cook was, without question, an operational genius I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else? Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? H…

I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then m…

The Pixel only sales 5 million a year…

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#152

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

samsolomon wrote: post #100
ryandrake wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to dra…

Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.

I don't see selling local LLM servers/software, as such, being something that makes sense for Apple, but selling an "Apple Intelligence" appliance that works with your Apple devices and/or provides home automation might do.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#153

Post by RulerOf »

nekooooo wrote: post #134
a012 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar

loved the touchbar for things like timeline scrubbers and quick shortcuts in my pro software

I thought it really excelled at displaying the timeline—it was quite novel to see a timeline for a video I was watching that didn't occlude any part of the screen—but quite annoyingly it would go black due to inactivity.

And of course the virtual function keys were awful.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#154

Post by jmyeet »

doitLP wrote: post #18

> Cook was, without question, an operational genius I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else? Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? H…

I haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing.

Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.

As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.

So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.

So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.

Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#155

Post by hombre_fatal »

petu wrote: post #148
highfrequency wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you prefer the laptop to be thicker and heavier?

Nobody said that. MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.

I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken.

It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#156

Post by SecretDreams »

hattmall wrote: post #95
pjc50 wrote: post #59

Earlier 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.

They could probably do full development from scratch for under $10 bil if they were frugal and patient, or more if they want to go fast, and farm first product out to a manufacturing house like magna. This is their MO already (they don't want to own a plant).

In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#157

Post by vel0city »

alex7o wrote: post #129
a012 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar

Fight me but I miss the touchbar, it was customizable to be super useful with better touch tool

I think the touch bar was a neat idea with a lot of potential but IMO they should have kept the row of physical function keys as well.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#158

Post by zenapollo »

barrkel wrote: post #85
zenapollo wrote: post #47

I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1]) It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy. Frankly, he shouldn't l…

There's an element of revisionism to this perspective. It used to be thought that integration with the global economy would gradually bring more alignment with Western values as well. The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.

That idea was minorly present during Clinton and Bush, by the time Obama was in office I think it was clear that was never going to happen. The book covers the period from 2016 on, so long after that neocon dream.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#159

Post by mezeek »

david_draco wrote: post #101

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.

It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.

The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.

"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".

You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#160

Post by dsalzman »

alsetmusic wrote: post #28

I used to really appreciate Ben Thompson's takes. He started losing me with his love of Meta's VR devices for meetings. Maybe I didn't get it, I thought. I don't agree with him on a lot of things these days. > There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall. The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a…

Design flaw vs manufacturing/logistics problem
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