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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#291

Post by swiftcoder »

tsunamifury wrote: post #283
swiftcoder wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> I have worked at all top three firms

I've worked at 2/3, and sure, there are shit product teams all over FAANG, but you can always decide to go work on one of the ones that does proper engineering

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#292

Post by prewett »

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.

You should have been able to Cmd-Tab to a different app; if that wasn't working, something more serious was going on. Also, if you have Spaces enabled, you can three-finger swipe, since a full screen app gets its own Space.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#293

Post by BeetleB »

doitLP wrote: post #54
alsetmusic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally? Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and…

Thanks, but how did he do it? Actually what does he do than saying “ok guys tip priority is moving these units”? Like do he come up with the strategies? Or is he good at picking winners when he sees them from proposals of his underlings?

I believe the idea was either his or Steve Jobs's.

I don't know how much of the details were his, but taking the risk and seeing it through deserves a lot of credit.

For most companies (even now), the idea of JIT manufacturing is terrifying. How will they guarantee there isn't a slowdown and you'll have a shortage at Christmas (or in any random month)? Most CEOs like always having some inventory. They went in the opposite direction and decided the ideal case was not having any inventory.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#294

Post by michelb »

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,…

Yeah I think so too. I'm just wondering if the people on software are still the right people. Mac OS has quite a few regressions, and seems to just chug along instead of really using the power of the chips, or massively improving file i/o. Apple still has a chance to do some cool stuff with AI integrations, but they have had interesting local models 3 years ago and apparently nowhere, or no vision, to use it. We're all clapping for Craig Federighi's jokes but I have no idea if he is a great manager or a great presenter.

I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#295

Post by WalterBright »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #73
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,…

I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering. Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to). I think Apple took some missteps…

I bought a newer iPhone. My older one had the button to go to the home screen, the newer one replaced that with swipe up.

After a year, the swipe up is still a nuisance. It often doesn't work, and I have to swipe up several times.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#296

Post by dailen »

Ok, while an author's journey will inevitably influence their opinions, and I think Steve Jobs was a revolutionary visionary, the evidence of objective blinders is staggering.

I almost deferred to the classic jab about their being a member of the "cult of Steve Jobs" but then I read their comment about being an intern at Apple University and realized the author was simply institutionally indoctrinated. Clearly I jest but...

Apple did not invent the smartphone. It didn't invent the music player. It didn't invent the portable tablet. It didn't invent the personal information manager.

This was not a zero to one. To some extent you could say he even reused some of his own playbook from his attempt to make the iMac a cult hit. I do think he introduced the right product at the right time, but I think it was his strategy, or obsession, with perfecting the user experience that was definitely a zero to one.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#297

Post by bigyabai »

Aeroi wrote: post #49

Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace. Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet. Anyway you shake it str…

> the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.

Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012.

You could call them a "frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet" but we don't even say that about AMD or Intel despite supporting Linux and shipping GPGPU architectures already. Apple's position in the greater AI/GPGPU industry is widely accepted to be forfeit. Even Google's AI hardware strategy is closer to the frontier than Apple's.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#298

Post by wslh »

ecshafer wrote: post #48
snowwrestler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Cook refreshing his 401k page every day to see if he’s ready to FIRE.

I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 2% of the time.

Decades ago, I worked with my uncle in a family shop. Every single day, he sent me to the bank to ask for the balance. Then, they innovated: a person at the bank finally started giving him the balance over the phone.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#299

Post by WalterBright »

foobarian wrote: post #96
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering. Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to). I think Apple took some missteps…

Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank

I dug out my old iPod from a drawer. Put the charger in - it took a couple days for it to charge. And then it was working just fine, except that the servers no longer supported the apps on it.

But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#300

Post by EGG_CREAM »

jmyeet wrote: post #172
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,…

I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected: 1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected; 2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple…

3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.

Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.

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