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Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

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Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#231

Post by jen729w »

rkomorn wrote: post #57
grumblingdev wrote: post #21

Yes!!! Such great news. Apple has really gone to shit. I am confronted by Apple performance and bug pain every hour of my life. I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t. Everything is such trash I could go on for hours. I realized a long time ago that if the person at the top doesn’t care then no one will. It seems hard to believe but it makes sense when you consider individual in…

> I always think: how can someone think this is acceptable? Steve Jobs wouldn’t. The same Steve Jobs that was at Apple when it made the puck mouse? The overheating Intel laptops of the mid 2000s? The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone? The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA? The Cube? He wouldn't what, exactly?

> the puck mouse?

My mate Tim, professional graphic designer, used it for years. Loved it. He might still have it for all I know.

> The "you're holding it wrong" iPhone?

Was always nonsense. None of the Apple team used 'the bumper' and neither did I.

> The "unusably slow after two years" 11in MBA?

Are you seriously here criticising one of the most revolutionary hardware products of the last 20 years?

FWIW I used mine for years and had a corporate Windows image running under Parallels. Everyone was massively envious. (I was a Domain Admin, I could add my own machine to the network.)

> The Cube?

I'll give you that one.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#232

Post by tptacek »

musicale wrote: post #197
tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree more. Some of the worst Apple computers I've owned date to the Jobs era. All of the best have been from the Cook era. Apple Silicon has been an enormous success. (My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.)

The TiBook was a milestone product and a great Jony Ive-led design. Apple has been making silver, thin, metal laptops ever since. Even a titanium iPhone for some reason. The last Titanium model with 1GHz, 1GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, DVI, Firewire, DVD/CD-RW, 64MB Radeon 9000, etc. seems pretty great and could run both Mac OS 9 and OS X. And that glowing Apple logo on the back of the display (which I miss in modern Mac…

I didn't say the TiBook was one of the worst Apple computers I've owned. But my 16" M3Max is so much better than it. And the construction of the modern Macbooks is not all that similar to that of the TiBook.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#233

Post by voidfunc »

xtracto wrote: post #207
missedthecue wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat unfair. Ballmer took over at the dotcom peak. They were trading at ~70x earnings on his first day as CEO. That's the only reason MSFT stock performance under his leadership was (from start day to retire day) flat. There is no CEO who would have been able to flout the dotcom bust and maintain a 70x PE ratio for 13 years. But under his tenure, he grew revenue at one of the worlds biggest companies by almost 4x…

Mhmm Longhorn, Zune, phone, Skype, bungie , among many other failures. I was there, as a kid of the 80s, Microsoft, Windows, Visual Basic, VStudio were EVERYTHING up until around 2003, they just dropped too many balls.

It was botching Mobile that really did Balmer in and possibly not reacting quite quickly enough to the need for Enterprise-grade Cloud Computing while Amazon was bootstrapping AWS right in Microsoft's back yard.

They got the cloud situation under control but losing Mobile to Apple and Google was a disaster and they're paying for it still.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#234

Post by grishka »

caycep wrote: post #119
ryandrake wrote: post #13

Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.

it's saying a lot about the industry in that even given the above, Apple still has way more art/vision/soul than any other tech company out there...

In a company founded by a visionary, it takes a surprisingly long time to squander all the internal culture after that person's departure. I would assume the larger the company was at that moment, the longer it takes.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#235

Post by agumonkey »

FabHK wrote: post #218
jwr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most importantly, it seems Cook doesn't love computers and doesn't use many (most?) of Apple products. It shows. Especially with Mac OS.

Sorry, are you suggesting that Cook doesn't use a computer in his day-to-day work, or has a Windows PC or Linux box in his office? Somehow I doubt that. (It's "macOS", BTW.)

I read it as "macOS is so full of issues that there's no way the CEO uses computers at all or he would have done something about it"

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#236

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

linkage wrote: post #209
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more, from Vision. The Liquid GlArse thing is because they want to make every app a Vision app. Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced. It has probably become the most successful product in history.

> Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced We have very different recollections, then. People audibly gasped when Steve demoed slide-to-unlock on stage. The first generation was sold out for a long time despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.

> despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.

That’s sort of what I meant.

The people who poo-poohed it, were marketing folks at more traditional companies (like the one I worked for, at the time).

They literally laughed themselves into the poorhouse. I watched that happen, right in front of my eyes.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#237

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #70
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade …what company do you think is immune from disruption beyond the foreseeable future?

No company is immune to disruption, but plenty of them have innovation and adaptation in their DNA. IMO over the years Apple has lost that. Look at Google, or Meta, or even Microsoft. Diversified income streams. Clutch acquisitions. Massive capital investments. Data centers. Nuclear power plants. Moonshot factories. Self driving cars. AR glasses. Robots. Venture investing and dealmaking. Massive AI ambitions. Stuff t…

[deleted]

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#238

Post by Razengan »

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #188
Razengan wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any CEO actually use their own company's products? The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread.. And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app ev…

That's literally not true though??? I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.

> I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.

Because most products, including iOS/macOS now, have glaring annoyances or shortcomings that have gone unfixed for a long time.

If Tim Cook or even Craig Federighi etc. actually used iOS/macOS in their day to day lives, they would have run into those issues sooner or later and they'd be fixed in a day.

(Hyperbole is a thing but the point stands)

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#239

Post by rakejake »

mvkel wrote: post #123

Be careful what you wish for. Satya Nadella is by most accounts the best person to lead Microsoft, currently the largest software company in the world. "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste," said Steve Jobs. That largely remains true. Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun. Satya Nadella calls AI "a cognitive amplifier," which…

I often wonder why Satya Nadella is so venerated on HN compared to say, Cook or Pichai. As innovators, MS lags way behind both Google and Apple. I can't think of one bleeding edge product released during Satya's tenure. Say what you will about Apple and Google, they still consistently put out products that make you sit up and pay attention. What has MS been doing other than squeezing the MS Office and Azure cash cows?

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#240

Post by akmarinov »

gjvc wrote: post #189
bitpush wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One should not forget that Mr Cook was handpicked by Jobs himself. So if Apple is lacking taste or leadership, it is partly Jobs' own making

yes but he was desperate (dying) when he made the choice

His dying was also part of his lack of taste, since he went with alternative medicine rather than actual medicine
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