Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 438 posts

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#241

Post by dkga »

vishnugupta wrote: post #231
tsunamifury wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is, by far, the most insane take i've ever heard. The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.

Apparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s. Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1…

I have one such mac. Things I like: the keyboard feels smooth, the speakers are great and the touchbar (yes you read correctly). Things that make me partially agree with this post I am responding to: annoying overheating, including when I plug an external monitor (!); the camera was really subpar, it always seemed as if I was facetiming using a 2002 cybershot rather than a 2019 MacBook Pro; the screen has nice colours but very easily feels smudgy. Other than this, I love using that computer as a secondary device.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#242

Post by mft_ »

mezeek wrote: post #159
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 l…

There were plenty of phones with touchscreens before the iPhone. They were crap, with mostly resistive touchscreens, but they existed.

I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php

My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php

(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#243

Post by doitLP »

motoxpro wrote: post #169
doitLP wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are! I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!

I mean sounds like you are asking the question "What is the job of a CEO?"

Not really. I’m asking why he’s a genius. When I was told that WW2 wouldnt have gone the same without George C Marshall or how amazing Teddy Roosevelt was at getting stuff done, I went and read their bios and now I understand. Cook does things different than other CEOs apparently so what are those? Other have recommended Apple In China so I’ll start there!

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#244

Post by swiftcoder »

tsunamifury wrote: post #208
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship

You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#245

Post by pants2 »

csunbird wrote: post #168
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 problem with touch bar was that, it completely replaced the function keys, instead of complementing them. Other than that, I actually liked it.

Another issue with the touch bar is that part of the laptop gets quite hot (especially on Intel CPUs), and so did the touch bar. I recall a few times feeling like I burned my finger just pressing esc during video rendering.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#246

Post by dkga »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
steveBK123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but f…

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…

Yeah the car always seemed (to humble me) to be so… un-Apple. As in, the iphone was a success because of its aesthetics but also it solved a real problem, while creating a whole new market. But in the case of cars, cars are the problem.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#247

Post by Exoristos »

lateforwork wrote: post #89
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.

But is Medicare as good as the insurance you had before?

A lot depends one what you do for Part C (if you do).

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#248

Post by anonymars »

vel0city wrote: post #221
pie_flavor wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volume and brightness are exactly the place the touchbar shines: tap and start dragging and you're adjusting a slider, which is much better than mashing a button.

Sure, a slider can make sense there, I agree. But now I've got a part of the screen dedicated to be the spot to tap to start changing the volume and a part dedicated to it being the brightness taking away from the other useful parts of the screen, or its hidden under a sub menu making it more annoying to rapidly change. Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then…

Why not have the "buttons" change the touch bar itself into a slider when pressed?

If you locate them in the middle it could be a seamless "press, drag, release" action

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#249

Post by kogold »

It may be unfair to Jobs, but I feel like the comparison of him as the genius vs. Cook the talented enabler is a bit flat.

I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#250

Post by ghaff »

JustExAWS wrote: post #149
kilroy123 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AR glasses that eventually replace the iPhone.

From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.

Automagical AR glasses are also probably a couple decades out for various reasons. Maybe we'll see more weirdos wearing goggles around but I don't see useful mainstream fashionable classes around anytime soon. And, of course, lots of privacy implications, i.e. here's the profile of the person I'm looking aat.
Post reply on HN