Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing • Hacker News Board

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#281

Post by wpm » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #203

wpm wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.

They pretty mcuh did in practice. That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along. I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new o…

But they didn't. Just because they didn't update the screen for free doesn't mean the discontinued the Air. They sold likely millions of Airs from 2015 to 2018, likely in no small part due to the fact you could get a barebones 11" Air for $899, $799 if you were a school. When the Retina Air came out in 2018 the prices jumped to $1199.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#282

Post by Forgeties79 » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #226

plomme wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s rare but I’ve definitely seen my touchbar lock up or go dark and require a restart.

It also could get mad hot on my 2016 MBpro when video editing. Still love(d) that computer though…

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#283

Post by tsunamifury » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #244

tsunamifury wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

classic engineering delusion -- often hold the line on technical items that are irrelevant or simply not important to the consumer.

I have worked at all top three firms, and never had engineers come close to being customer oriented.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#284

Post by intrasight » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #219

kilroy123 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AR glasses that eventually replace the iPhone.

That’s not going to happen. Most people don’t like having to speak out loud in order to message, AI-chat, or use voice commands in public, and many not even in private.

Why do you think you'd have to speak out loud?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#285

Post by tsunamifury » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

jordanb wrote: post #267

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.

Ive got way more credit than he deserved. And he had to run all his ideas by Jobs. Once Jobs was gone we got to see Ive's true colors (it was garish pastels and a butterfly keyboard). https://jonyiveredesignsthings.tumblr.com/

He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day. By every measure he is the most successful product creator in the history of humanity, no single other product comes close to impact and quality. (Believe it or not the Dorritos Locos Taco is likely the closest 5th place product)

The arrogance on hacker news is insane, or the self agrandizement and misunderstanding of how rare that is.

You have likely never done 1/1,000,000,000th of the scale or impact of this designer and then make flippant remarks that belay your ignorance of the matter.

I really would like to understand what your thought process is here. This is quite litterally like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty poor Basketball player and claiming Jerry Reinsdorf was somehow the real reason he succeeded.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#286

Post by intrasight » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

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.

They will be talking but not speaking

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#287

Post by bigyabai » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #173

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 think a major difference is that Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores where you buy the stuff they advertise they can make; it cooperates with manufacturers to get them to build things that they couldn’t make before. They are willing to pay billions up front to get production lines built to their specifications and guarantee that they will buy X products over Y time, in exchange for exclusivity. For example…

> Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores

At Apple's scale, you basically can't operate like this. Placing an order for 50 million iPhone screens is not a consumer-grade request, you have to customize and coordinate your orders to get all 50 million delivered. It's hard to see the genius in this, the advantages you've listed are all courtesy of scale and liquidity.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#288

Post by breakfastduck » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

Microslop produces terrible stuff, as bad as they ever have. How on earth can you put mr copilot 365 windows 10 is the last edition above Tim Cook!?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#289

Post by tsunamifury » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

Apple grew into the best selling laptop in the world in this era.

How do you justify such a take?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#290

Post by nkohari » Tue, Apr 21, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

I would bet large sums of money that Apple is waiting to make a hardware play. When there's a sufficiently capable and intelligence-dense LLM, they will bake it into custom silicon and ship "the first MacBook with on-device AI, powered by our new I1 chip". Imagine Siri being powered by an LLM running entirely on-device at 10,000+ tokens/sec.

Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.