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Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

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Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#151

Post by coolkewlcuil »

eddieroger wrote: post #9

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Coo…

It's just as easy to sit and glaze someone.

Stock buybacks simulating interest, inflation, and cutting corners on products, gouging devs that list on their app store, oh and they sell a lot of ear buds destined for the ewaste bin in 24-36 months.

Plus the stock market is like Whose Line Is It Anyway; made up points that don't matter to humanity long term while the ewaste and non repairable products do.

Stop carrying water for billionaires who do not care you exist. This is no different than fawning over a Kardashian. We have social systems to replace these people because as a species we're well aware of physics at this point.

If physics hasn't seen fit to spare their biology the effects of entropy (aging -> death) they're not that important.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#152

Post by MoonWalk »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #118
AstroBen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much of Apple's growth is anti-consumer. You can't repair your device. They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product. They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere. They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with…

Anything I missed? Under Jobs, UX was king. Devices had to be intuitive, and features discoverable. Today, all that user-friendliness is gone. The devices are no longer approachable for a newbie: you have to just know how to use them.

Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.

It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#153

Post by cindyllm »

coolkewlcuil wrote: post #151
eddieroger wrote: post #9

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Coo…

It's just as easy to sit and glaze someone. Stock buybacks simulating interest, inflation, and cutting corners on products, gouging devs that list on their app store, oh and they sell a lot of ear buds destined for the ewaste bin in 24-36 months. Plus the stock market is like Whose Line Is It Anyway; made up points that don't matter to humanity long term while the ewaste and non repairable products do. Stop carrying…

[dead]

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#154

Post by thinkingemote »

tonhe wrote: post #72
leoedin wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you do any kind of AI assisted proofreading or grammar? So much of the structure of the article screams AI. Stuff like this: > Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture. And the headings starting with "The" AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've…

I do usually do a pass through Grammarly, and there are some times when I ask AI for help getting my point across. But I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say. I'm the first to say I'm not the best writer...

> I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say.

Or is this also true: "I don't change what a LLM writes so long as it doesn't seem like something I would write"

It's just like vibe coding it's the new normal. We don't notice our own unique voices when writing. But as a collective we do notice LLM voices.

Submissions are different than comments in HN rules - don't worry about it.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#155

Post by infecto »

wesselbindt wrote: post #130
infecto wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might find that you are in the minority though. Nothing wrong with this at all but apple makes some of the best selling products in the market place and that has largely been because of Tim Cook.

Nothing you say is in disagreement with the comment you're responding to. And yeah, Apple is doing really well, in part because of their anti competitive practices. Good for them, bad for us. These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo: > Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them > Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?

How did we jump to cigarettes?

I don’t think any of the original articles complaints are wrong but I don’t agree with the thesis. They are one of the best selling device manufacturers because the product and ecosystem is so good. My point was that folks, maybe like yourself, who don’t find the ecosystem open enough or the devices repairable enough, are outliers compared to the average consumer.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#156

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sschueller wrote: post #63

Tim cook did his job well. He increase stock value over and over again for the delight of the shareholders. He also increased the moat as large as possible. If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company. Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.

No one can say if it was "as large as possible." It's at least plausible he left money on the table with some missed opportunities.

For example: handing over the semi-pro video creator space to YouTube. Apple already a thriving podcast ecosystem, but failed to capitalise on it. There was a real opportunity for vertical integration with Apple selling hardware, targeted content creation software (a CapCut-a-like version of FCP), and access to a distribution network.

Also, home automation and security. Cameras, switches, maybe even routers with local backup. Not sold as devices, but as high quality services with obvious benefits that happen to run on specific hardware.

AI: there was the opportunity to develop Siri into an agentic assistant well before anyone else got there.

Cook's slant was more towards chasing high-end Veblen lifestyle status - cars, watches, premium computers and phones - and less towards social marketing and less shiny but useful consumer devices.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#157

Post by MoonWalk »

FeloniousHam wrote: post #147
tempodox wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything I missed? The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.

Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago. Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that ac…

Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.

Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.

Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.

Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.

Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.

Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.

The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.

"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#158

Post by FireBeyond »

FeloniousHam wrote: post #147
tempodox wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything I missed? The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.

Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago. Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that ac…

Photos.

Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.

Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#159

Post by dd8601fn »

AstroBen wrote: post #89
eddieroger wrote: post #9

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Coo…

So much of Apple's growth is anti-consumer. You can't repair your device. They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product. They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere. They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with…

You might want to read up on what happened with the dumpster fire that’s vaguely called RCS before you go laying that at Apples feet.

Also Apples cut is 15% unless you’re doing millions in revenue. Same as Google.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#160

Post by JKCalhoun »

rayiner wrote: post #104
eddieroger wrote: post #9

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Coo…

> It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. Who cares that it's Tim Cook's "passion" unless you're an Apple investor?

Under Tim Cook's leadership Apple has clearly been leaning into services for some time now. (Whether you like that or not, it looks like Eddy Cue was the one who was tapped to push out in this direction.)

I imagine that was probably Cook recognizing that having your entire company propped up by a single hardware product line is a dangerous position to be in.

To that end it is not just Apple investors but Apple customers and Apple as a company that may well end up benefitting from Cook's cautionary strategy. We've seen tariffs threaten Apple's hardware. A future downturn in the economy that erodes a consumer's ability to spend could also wreak havoc on Apple.

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