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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#201

Post by vel0city »

alex7o wrote: post #183
vel0city wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is I have never used the function keys on my laptop so that was not a problem form me, but also some of the custom functions I hard can just be mapped to fn keys so it is bit like it it us a huge loss

I don't necessarily use the numbered function keys all the time (as in F1-F12), but I use those physical buttons constantly. Brightness, volume, play/pause, mic mute, are all buttons I press a good bit. Many of those I'd rather just have be a single quick button, especially things like speaker or mic mute.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#202

Post by thih9 »

varjag wrote: post #187
a012 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar

Have to say I really prefer butterfly keyboard (as long as it works).

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was a great phone as long as it didn’t spontaneously combust.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#203

Post by jmyeet »

wpm wrote: post #186
jmyeet wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?). Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price…

They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.

They pretty mcuh did in practice.

That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.

I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#204

Post by avidiax »

pjc50 wrote: post #51
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…

When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.

According to the book, Apple had a special team to prevent divorces among the engineers sent to Asia. That's how long they were over there training.

An argument can be made that Apple nearly singlehandedly advanced China's consumer electronics manufacturing by 20 years, and hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing while doing it.

China doesn't allow key AI engineers and scientists to go overseas. They literally have exit bans and confiscated passports. The west could have ordered companies like Apple to stop sending engineers, banned companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce from building factories in China, and retained massive wealth, expertise, and national strategic advantage, but allowed it to be pissed away for quarterly profits.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#206

Post by pjc50 »

shimman wrote: post #185
pjc50 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.

No, but it's kind of pathetic that the elites in America hallowed out our manufacturing capabilities and condemning tens of millions to abject poverty so their shares can be worth slightly more as a sign of societal sickness.

> condemning tens of millions to abject poverty

I think you're overstating your point a bit; I'm not convinced that the tens of millions are that much worse off than their counterparts in poorer parts of China. Was there ever a massive assembly plant for iPhones in the US?

(also, everyone in this subthread seems to be arguing that the US should be at least in part a planned economy with state-directed industry?)

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#207

Post by PopAlongKid »

reducesuffering wrote: post #99
aworks wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit... +1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

> defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.

It also helps to spread your lifetime Soc Sec benefits over more tax years, thereby lowering the total tax you pay (because pushing higher payouts into fewer tax years by delayed filing will typically increase your marginal tax bracket).

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#208

Post by tsunamifury »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #73
havaloc wrote: post #9

Cook 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,…

I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering. Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to). I think Apple took some missteps…

Only on hacker news would someone believe engineers would focus on the customer function.

Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#209

Post by Cockbrand »

vel0city wrote: post #157
alex7o wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another thing was that not all Mac notebooks had a touch bar, so developers couldn't put any vital features onto it.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#210

Post by rbanffy »

On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps.

At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.

Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.

As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.

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