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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#221

Post by vel0city »

pie_flavor wrote: post #216
vel0city wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#223

Post by pjc50 »

SecretDreams wrote: post #156
hattmall wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compa…

> In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters

You're almost certainly right, and this is a good way to show just how remarkably big the AI buildout is.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#225

Post by thih9 »

RulerOf wrote: post #153
nekooooo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Virtual function keys and virtual escape key in earlier models.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#226

Post by vel0city »

plomme wrote: post #192
csunbird wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.

Its interesting the touch bar was also hung up, as from what I recall the touchbar was actually driven by a separate processor (the T1/T2 chip) and had its own version of watchOS running. I would have thought it would have continued working, just unable to continue syncing with the rest of the Mac.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#227

Post by isatty »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #112

Impressive Tenue, IMO. Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services. A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins. Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy. Taking a fair lens to this…

I think a couple of failures are necessary for this kind of work.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#228

Post by heathrow83829 »

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,…

>> the next era looks bright.

but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.

are you imaging them creating whole new devices?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#229

Post by sowbug »

ryandrake wrote: post #105
JKCalhoun wrote: post #77

Cook Doctrine : "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution." And later: "I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run." Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim…

LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and enter…

An older Stratechery article discusses the black-box point: https://stratechery.com/2018/techs-two-philosophies/

Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#230

Post by pjc50 »

avidiax wrote: post #204
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.

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 hav…

> The west .. Boeing and Rolls Royce

Boeing is a US company. RR is, last time I looked, a UK company. "The West" isn't a coherent political unit.

Besides, this is the exact opposite of the FDI strategy of past decades. How far should the ban on overseas FDI go? Ban on investing in South America? Full capital controls? As you mention, passport confiscation (!) for key nationals? I don't think any of this would have worked for "the west" at any point past about 1970, or even post-WW2.

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