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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#351

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

MaysonL wrote: post #184
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race. You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.

Apple _is_ a software company: everything it sells is based on a Mac OS X foundation.

I would buy Mac hardware running Windows long before I would buy x86 hardware running MacOS. In fact Mac OS on x86 was really nothing remarkable. Macs were objectively worse than most Windows PCs during the last few years on x86 at least the laptops were.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#352

Post by throwaway894345 »

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 generally agree, but I had the misfortune of having a tiny grain of something (it was truly microscopic) wedged between my screen and the tiny rubber gasket around the edge and that completely disabled my screen and cost $800 to repair. I'm glad they moved away from the thin obsession, and I generally agree that the new design gives the impression of robustness even if that wasn't my experience. :)

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#354

Post by aleksiy123 »

jrowen wrote: post #318
rbanffy wrote: post #210

On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps. At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps. Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with…

Google themselves also did this with Gemini, we saw how quickly OpenAI's lead was erased. It could make quite a bit of sense to use this as a crutch so they (Apple) can overhaul their own efforts free of production pressures. I'm not really seeing it though. Apple is more hardware and holistic experience, they aren't traditionally pushing the boundaries of "web-scale" nerd software. As long as they can keep on top of…

At the end of the day the only way to get competence and capability is by doing things even if you don’t know how.

And early failures is much more acceptable than I think most people expect.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#357

Post by dwaite »

rbanffy wrote: post #210

On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps. At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps. Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with…

My understanding was that Google was withholding access to features (vector tiles, turn by turn) to renegotiate maps usage. The two things I heard they wanted - features gated on Google login, and advertisements.

Apple had been developing their own maps solution already and accelerated it to land before the end of their existing agreement with Google, when Apple would have to accept Google's terms to continue usage. Google apparently had no idea negotiations had fallen through until the keynote.

It was going to ship as beta quality anyway (they were merging multiple sources of third party data), but the timeline meant it became a replacement in whatever form it was in.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#358

Post by kogold »

physicles wrote: post #315
kogold wrote: post #249

It may be unfair to Jobs, but I feel like the comparison of him as the genius vs. Cook the talented enabler is a bit flat. I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", bu…

This is in fact what happened with SpaceX. Musk had the vision to make first stage reusability a thing with the Falcon 9, and Gwynne Shotwell is the operational genius behind the juggernaut that it is today. Hilarious quote from her Wikipedia page: > Shotwell has received particular praise from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson for her "phenomenal" leadership of SpaceX as it developed the Falcon 9 into the "workhorse" o…

Well, there you go! Thanks for that piece of information :)

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#359

Post by geodel »

bigyabai wrote: post #287
Someone wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, courtesy of scale is because of 50 million customers were convinced that iPhone has quality enough to pay premium over 100s of other phone models. No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#360

Post by freediddy »

cathyreisenwitz wrote: post #356

[flagged]

If the pace of gains with AI levels out, which has been predicted, then the next target would be to lower the cost of power usage. All of the gains will have been paid for by the investors today, but all the benefits will be for the AI companies of the future.

So my prediction is that AI won't be profitable for a long time for the current batch of companies today, but will be extremely profitable for the new companies without the same debt and burdens and will come to birth in an era where AI computing is cheap to buy and run.

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