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Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

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431–440 of 446 posts

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#431
post #348

I think Cook left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA. They could've tested the waters by loading up Apple Silicon on PCIe riser cards, maturing the toolkit for AI workloads, and selling them at competitive prices. Yes I know they're in the business of making entire widgets, but it would've been easy money. The hardware and software stacks are there. Unlimited upside with nearly zero downside risk…

Apple seems to be avoiding building server hardware for some reason. It seems like a big opportunity, besides AI, the power efficiency of their chips would surely be attractive for datacentres. I think momentum is building for moving away from x86.

They’re building servers now in Houston for their private cloud compute environments, but it’s just for them.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#432

Apple gets a lot of shade, but… I used Linux for about 25 years. With the rising cost of hardware, I bought an M4 Max MacStudio earlier this year as it was the best bang for the buck on CPU/GPU and the savings on those offset the extortionate pricing on RAM/SSD. You know what? Despite Liquid Glass being a bit of a downgrade recently, macOS is still good. Do I enjoy it as much as the old lampshade iMac or even 68030 M…

> macOS is still good. > yet, I think Cook did okay. Kindly, I think your reality is being distorted. macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8. It's got live tiles, radical acrylic accents, constant cloud service nags, and preinstalled advertisements everywhere across the system. OCSP won't let you launch certain apps unless your DRM API is online, for crying o…

macOS isn't without its sins, but I feel like "ad-ridden” is a stretch compared to the baseline of Windows 11 injecting promotions into the Start menu, OEM Android flavors full of carrier crap, etc. There's iCloud+ nags here and there, but it’s still by far the least noisy consumer OS right now aside from Linux.

Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.

(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#433
post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a SLR for that.

You have kids? I want pictures At random points throughout the day while doing random things, every day. I’m not a photographer that keeps a SLR camera on me at all times.

I don't see the need to photograph every second of their life, 50 years old over here, having gone through times when taking kids pictures were limited to 12, 24 and 36 attempts.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stand corrected! Not moving goalposts, but on another note: He refused regular treatment for 9 months, for an allegedly slow-growing type of cancer? That still doesn't sound that crazy, especially given he lived another 8 years.

Right - but he only lived 8 more years because by the time he’d had surgery, the cancer had metastasized to his liver which is much more difficult to treat. Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthies…

All good points. :) I can't stand more corrected than I already do, yet here I am!

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly $20-30B in investment by Apple to build the Apple Vision Pro over roughly the course of half a decade is disagreeing with you. That's an insane investment into a product category with "no public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset." I didn't bring up makeup, btw. I just thought it was an absurd argument. It has nothing to do with whether the product succeeds or fails in the long run, which is precise…

Billions and billions have been invested in failures. What kind of argument is this? Is Horizon Worlds by Meta a resounding success? It cost billions to make as well. You can do anything you want. The average consumer is not going to flock in droves to the AVP which cannot do anything special its cheaper competition cannot do, and which cannot replace TVs (because those can be used by more than one person at a time a…

> Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset

> those all have an audience

So which is it

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#436
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ballmer doesn't strike me as an idiot and definitely not bland. He's one of the more colorful tech personalities. MS's almost unassailable lead in enterprise could be attributed to him and the pivot to cloud could not have happened without this. But he definitely fumbled hard on mobile (Windows Phone), Surface (IIRC the initial ARM laptop was a major flop and had a close to 1B+ writeoff) and the disaster that was the…

That's a pretty massive fumble. He was effectively trying to convert Microsoft into a hardware company; Satya marked the return to pure software, and Microsoft is now the biggest SaaS company in the world.

Rather than think of it as a pivot to hardware, I looked at it as MS trying to corner their share in the consumer market. Mobile and Social were the hot things back then and mobile threatened MS's dominance of the OS market. MS ultimately failed but they still owned the enterprise market and continue to keep their lead in desktop market share.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#437
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"vision" would be to do things for the customer - actually allow privacy, even from apple itself. Like turn off telemetry, not just anonymize it. and opt-in, not opt-out. - install apps without asking permission - allow access to your data, for example to export your imessages Just in general be respectful and polite

Telemetry is opt-in. It asks you during setup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39927657

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#438
post #380
post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't necessarily see any reason to attribute this specific outcome to Cook I do: he was CEO when the outcome was realized. Shouldn’t CEO performance be judged by outcomes the company realizes during their tenure?

Yeah, I suppose there was a point he had to sign off on the decision so there is that. Hard to say if his role amounted to anything more than that (maybe it did). > judged by outcomes In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over…

Brian Krzanich was the primary architect of Intel's demise. A huge amount of Intel's problems stem from opting to go with DUV rather than EUV light source for lithography, and this decision was made during Krzanich's tenure. This may have stemmed from Krzanich's lack of technical expertise. Gelsinger was brought in to fix things, but the board of directors got uncomfortable with the amount of money required to fix the problem.

It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#439
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Jobs used the bicycle metaphor extensively in this advert-interview thing: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1050/0*SgDLtymZpgcXEA7... Which (squinting) was printed in the WSJ in 1980: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1148/1*wXZ9t85eJnREeDw... But "bicycle for the mind" might be John Sculley, 1986: https://archive.org/details/apple-retro-books-collection/App... Unless of course Jobs said it earlier.

It's from a video interview with him in 1980: “I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species… The condor came in at the top. Humans came in about a third of the way down. But when a human rides a bicycle, we blow the condor away. That’s what a computer is for me: a bicycle for the mind.”

Sure that wasn't 1990?

Re: Report: Tim Cook could step down as Apple CEO 'as soon as next year'

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shipped AirPods and the Apple Watch during his tenure. And the ahem, Vision Pro. The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years. There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer. Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everyth…

Yeah, but a $250 sock though

You don't make a trillion dollar company by selling $2 socks...
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