301–310 of 581 posts
I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…
I've heard this story about Steve Jobs and both his communication style and attention to detail (it may be apocryphal): "Steve was in a meeting with several senior engineers at Apple and asked: 'Can we make the phone smaller?' The engineers responded 'No, it's as small as we can make it' Steve then picked up the phone and threw it into a fish tank. As everyone watched the phone sink into the tank, Steve turned and sa…
What’s most improbable about this anecdote is there happening to be an open fish tank in the meeting room. ;)
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Plenty of examples. The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character. And I have been saying this for 10+ years. John Browett, CEO of Dixons. Anyone from UK have said WTF at the time. Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, the two together Apple has literally stopped expanding their Retail store despite having 10x as much customers. Rolled out many "changes" to Apple store when nearly ev…
To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the tra…
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They aren't even doing hardware well in some cases, their bread and butter. Bluetooth has been broken on both editions of their Pro Max Phone (15 & 16). It cuts out and has all kinds of weird issues, but no fix has come for years now. This was why I always paid a premium for their phones, they did hardware and software well. Not anymore, their so focus has been on their processors.
Are you using any Bluetooth headsets designed for their special sync protocol? I noticed no issues with any certified headsets but any of my nice Bluetooth headsets from a few years ago that don’t leverage the newer protocol instead only standard Bluetooth have issues syncing and such. This tends to be an Apple issue. They introduce proprietary thing and eventually unless your hardware supports said thing it will hav…
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Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer? The en…
>> "can't be made smaller without time and money we don't have to do it." If the CEO is telling you it is important to him, then he's telling you he'll give you the resources. Telling him it "can't be made smaller" when you admit it can is silly.
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Do people really think stuff like this makes you look cool? It's super cringe. The only way you get away with being that stupid and that much of an asshole to a room of adults is by being the CEO. This isn't some insightful observation, if the phone was waterproof the demo would have just looked silly as it sank despite having available room. Why did you even ask the question if you already decided the answer? The en…
Not sure if he did it, but from what I heard from friends who worked with him, wouldn't be surprised if he did. Really love the guy as someone who combined creativity and tech, but these kind of things is one of least things I liked about him. It is one these Trumpisuqe quality playing hard ball, etc. Very US business like tend to be very off putting.
It's tragic that so many business leaders in the US see this kind of bloviating as something to emulate. Reminds me of Altman telling TSMC to gear up to spend $7tn on fabs and them just snickering about his cluelessness [0].
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...
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Because there was no competition. Alexa similarly gave up trying to improve theirs after it launched. I've never tried Google's voice assistant but I assume it wasn't very interesting before GPT either. I'm not convinced it was a technical limitation, even stuff like voice parsing was not improved or basic functionality expanded horizontally.
Alexa sold 500 million devices. Before layoffs, they had 10K staff doing something. Their LLM product recently launched and is rolling out soon, lead by former head of MS Surface.
Plenty of companies have thousands of employees working on stuff that never gets better and at best efficiently maintains status quo, until some competition eats their lunch.
Looking forward to seeing who wins Alexa+ w/ Claude vs Google's Gemini devices, or whoever does ChatGPT voice assistant
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Alexa sold 500 million devices. Before layoffs, they had 10K staff doing something. Their LLM product recently launched and is rolling out soon, lead by former head of MS Surface.
Yes I own 3 Alexas and still like them. But it's the same device it was when I bought them a decade ago, just occasional new hardware with nicer speakers + more TV/3rd party device integrations. Just like Siri it's software entered total technical stagnation post-launch. Not even the incredibly confusing Alexa settings/management app has improved nor the 3rd party extension marketplace. There's been no strong competi…
The failed Alexa software ecosystem was such a lost opportunity, as the device even ran Android. Their hardware ecosystem was more successful, e.g. voice-controlled microwave sold many units with happy customers who still complain about discontinuation of the affordable device. They experimented with niche devices, e.g. make or answer calls on an existing landline, using any Alexa device. Also sadly deprecated, for much weaker VOIP limited to 10 correspondents and random outbound caller ID.
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There’s no easy answer here, starting from scratch and rethinking everything carries a very high risk of disaster. They just need to start giving a shit. Care about bugs for once. The whole software org needs to take the time to go through their (clearly) enormous backlog of bugs, and shore up what they have. The problem isn’t the architecture or vision or rethinking their stack, it’s that what they have is barely ho…
People keep talking in this thread about iOS / macOS being bug-ridden messes. I have to wonder if this is from users still on Intel chips. My work MacBook with a now 3+ year old M1 Max? Rock solid. Rarely run into any problems at all. My iPhone? Also rock solid. Rarely run into any problems. My Intel-based MacBook? Buggy mess. Like Apple has left the Intel side of the house to die on the roadside. As someone who stil…
Other bugs are very generic. I get focus bugs, password input box broken on lockscreen, search just not working in settings app, xcode crashing if I even look at it wrong, and lots more...
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> They addressed this once with a huge “0 new features” iteration with Snow Leopard to catch up on the worst of it This is a myth, though a myth created by Apple itself and Bertrand Serlet's tongue-in-cheek keynote slide. Snow Leopard actually had a number of new features: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard#New_or_c... Moreover, Mac OS X 10.6.0 was much buggier than its immediately predecessor Mac OS…
> It's constant change for the sake of change. This is far from isolated to Apple, too. It's a cancer that's infested virtually every single software company in the entire world at this point, and it's endlessly frustrating. If they don't have some New Shiny Version to show off to the tech media and blogosphere everyone starts acting like the software itself is a dead man walking. I also think it's partially down to…
With further progression on integration/miniaturization and lower power consumption/heat output for general computing, the devices have shrunk to their bare minimum as slabs, there's very little physical to display so the fashion needed to move to software (and what online services it can be a client for). Stasis is death when you rely on selling, and maintenance is a constant cost which no one really wants to pay for.
As a side note, it's interesting to compare attitudes to the physical side to PC, where for years there was almost a pride that PC was a minimalist functional box (besides the occasional fun/weird exception), but that contrasts against now where it's hard not to get components with windows or embellished with LEDs and logos on display (and there's another weird contrast, where on one hand you have internals on display, on the other trying to minimize or hiding away the cables as though the inner workings were ugly)