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Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

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Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#171

Post by bombcar »

Schiendelman wrote: post #106
drcongo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirPods and iMessage, agreed, never had a problem. The Home app though remains Apple's unloved ginger stepchild - every major OS release I'm hopeful that they've done something about it, but they never do. I'm starting to think Apple's internal view of Home / HomeKit is that they wish they'd never built it in the first place.

This is tough. Most home devices are built to be absolute bottom of the barrel. Notice that almost every HomeKit device says it only uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi? Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped. Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.

Matter (and thread) is supposed to fix this, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#172

Post by emo_engine »

“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”

Tim Cook has always been a John Sculley, not a Steve Jobs.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#173

Post by emo_engine »

kneel wrote: post #135

You think this company would have gone bankrupt by now 2012 — [Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949 ) 2013 — [Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491 ) 2014 — [Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?]( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546 ) 2015 — [Apple h…

it probably would've if not for the iPhone

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#175

Post by buttocks »

rglullis wrote: post #46
buttocks wrote: post #20

This author misses the point because he is a geek. Ordinary users love Apple and do not care about these issues. Ordinary users throw money at Apple. Apple has some bugs to fix but overall the product is good, and that’s why they keep raking in cash. Saying good riddance to Tim Cook because of the system preference pane, among other trivial things (to most people), is simply misunderstanding business.

Or maybe you don't understand that for some people there are more important things than "how much money will I make from this?"...

I understand it, but I am not the majority Apple user.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#176

Post by dd8601fn »

jshier wrote: post #165
dd8601fn wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unlike Google, Apple makes you jump through the hoops of their small business program, if it's available, before they'll drop it to 15%, otherwise you're stuck at 30.

It’s like “fill out your name and tell them you made less than a million dollars last year.”

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#177

Post by DrScientist »

DrScientist wrote: post #163
montgomery_r wrote: post #3

I think the criticisms of the current software stack are well founded. There is friction there, stuff doesnt work that should. OP even neglected to mention the glaring Finder column view bugs or the Taboe corner radius window selection issues. But as a user since System 6.x, including A/UX and MacOS X since public beta - it was ever thus. Macintosh pre OSX was well known as an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If…

Why oh why for example can't you resize the System Settings window? If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ). I don't expect these kind of UI issues on MacOS.

On the other hand - the transition from Intel to ARM, which has totally transformed their hardware offering, was pretty seamless and is down to large part good software.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#178

Post by maxsilver »

sgt wrote: post #2

> Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. > iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate…

> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.

The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).

The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).

The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.

(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)

(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)

---

The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#179

Post by vlovich123 »

epolanski wrote: post #103
vlovich123 wrote: post #19

Oof. This article gets so much wrong… > The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company. > Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO. Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA. > Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dra…

> Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. At that level and scale it's merely politics.

It’s clearly both technical and political. But what you think Tim did nothing technical in his time at Apple and built up technical teams to make it into the powerhouse through luck? Tactics are fine but strategy is everything and Cook clearly is both tactically and strategically excellent.

Source: worked at Apple and at Google and we struggled at Google to build supply chains and get the same cost effectiveness. People talk about how Apple is overpriced and then ignore that the feature set/cost tradeoff is matched by only Samsung on mobile and even then they make a fraction of the money that Apple does.

Re: Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

#180

Post by cholantesh »

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…

Not as weird as this really persistent delusion that Linux is anywhere as user-hostile in 2026 as it was in the early noughts.
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