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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#301

Post by Keyframe »

JustExAWS wrote: post #151
Keyframe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then m…

The Pixel only sales 5 million a year…

google says 3x more, but it's still nothingburger. galaxy is the one on parity with it. I have a pixel and I had to go through hoops in order to buy one in another country and have it brought in and I'm in EU. Samsung doesn't have those issues, but it lags between announcing and shipping. Apple is the only one I know that announces something and it's available either today or within days. Lenovo announces and then nothing - they have announced x1 carbon gen 14 in january.. still can't buy it. It's laughable. This is Tim Cook's value and it can't be denied.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#302

Post by wwweston »

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.

No. So much no.

It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons.

This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function.

Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#303

Post by prewett »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
steveBK123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but f…

For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel ga…

A car is a terrible idea for Apple. Apple doesn't make mechanical things, and it's a business with high capital costs and low margins.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#304

Post by saghm »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #155
petu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said that. MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.

I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken. It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.

That's a false dichotomy; there are plenty of keyboards that don't require recalls due to issues like the butterfly ones but also don't have the issues you're describing.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#305

Post by jarjoura »

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 always understood, going to China, as what the industry was already doing, and Apple was in the middle of coming out of bankruptcy, so pressured to get their costs down. Tim Cook, the process guy, would have been given the task to do just that in an industry that was already consolidating in China.

I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.

Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.

Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#306

Post by BeetleB »

epistasis wrote: post #211
zenapollo wrote: post #47

I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1]) It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy. Frankly, he shouldn't l…

> he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries? In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques tha…

> What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?

Actually, this is fairly standard via export control laws. When a certain technology is deemed critical, it can be put under export control. When I worked in the semiconductor space, some of the advanced tech we had was subject to these laws. Countries came under different tiers - we could freely discuss the tech with most European countries, but had to be a lot more careful with China and Russia. We couldn't/wouldn't hire Chinese/Russian nationals unless they already had a green card (the legal process was too challenging).

Of course, not saying electronics manufacturing should have been in that bucket. But there is plenty of precedence.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#307

Post by bigyabai »

judah wrote: post #274
spectraldrift wrote: post #205

The author lost me when they quoted Thiel.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said, "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes." This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.

Maimonides and Thiel both used eschatology as a tool to bypass material truth.

I'll take both of their opinions with a grain of salt, thank you. Have fun fighting Gog and Magog!

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#308

Post by tpmoney »

garbageman wrote: post #260
dkga wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. I still have my intel Mac as a secondary, backup device and I still love using it, in part because of the touchbar.

Interesting to hear a different perspective on the touchbar. I have yet to meet someone who liked it. Removes touch typing, requires you to refocus attention, etc. Changing the volume is easy, button same place always - but with touch bar I have to look down and do the slidey thing. If they implemented real keys with that display built in...now we're talking!

The touchbar was great when apps used it for useful things. It’s main sin was replacing the physical escape key and I suspect if even just that key had remained physical most people would have been fine with the touchbar because most people don’t really use the f-keys by touch. Most of the time when I’m using the f-keys, it’s to use the debugger for an IDE. And that’s where the touchbar really shined because instead of remembering whether f6 or f5 was step over, the touchbar could just display the expected symbol.

Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#309

Post by ErneX »

WalterBright wrote: post #295
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…

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.

You are probably not swiping up from down enough.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#310

Post by munificent »

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…

I suspect that long-term, 3 might not be the wrong choice.

Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.

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