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How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

fastcompany.com

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Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#61

Post by Gigachad »

raverbashing wrote: post #10
88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

Exactly Most of the stuff is "officially leaked* to some places before the new releases anyway When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw? I think it was on the iphone unveiling.

There is enough bullshit in the leaks to make it still a surprise on the day. Almost all of the truth gets leaked beforehand but it only makes up 40% of the leaks published.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#63

Post by zebnyc »

Animats wrote: post #11

There is technical debt associated with operating at a high level of secrecy. I used to work in a place that did classified work for the three-letter agencies. The teams working on the most classified projects tended to stagnate. They had advanced technology in narrow areas, but had fallen behind commercial technology across the board. They were still building minicomputer-based systems a decade later than they shoul…

Sounds like a nice retirement plan, if you can get it and can stand it

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#64

Post by visarga »

halotrope wrote: post #55

Lets take a moment to appreciate that obnoxious auto-playing video that covers half the screen on mobile. Bonus points for it staying there when scrolling. I am really wondering what it will take to make the web more like wikipedia and less like a casino.

> I am really wondering what it will take to make the web more like wikipedia and less like a casino.

Don't hold your breath for them to do anything, but a "reader mode" browser extension can help on your side.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#65

Post by Sirened »

infogulch wrote: post #9
88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

Imagine the counterfactual: an Apple engineering blog that routinely publishes in depth articles describing the awesome challenges that their engineering teams are overcoming in an org as vertically integrated as Apple. That would make me more hype about their products than anything.

Apple (at least their security org) has done this before with their talks at Blackhat [1] where they've detailed pieces of their boot chain and interesting challenges they solved while building Find My's offline location feature

[1]: https://youtu.be/3byNNUReyvE

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#66

Post by Dardania »

Fede_V wrote: post #32

I know that Apple is incredibly secretive about their launches, and I'm not surprised that carries over to their internal culture, but, I'm incredibly skeptical of stories told from the point of view of an HR person that has every single incentive to hype up their revolutionary new process that unleashed productivity and improved morale. Every single time I read a similar story and I had first or second hand knowledg…

Agreed. Also, to cite AirPods Pro as breaking the mould on a secrecy culture…it was pretty obvious that the airpod product would develop to have noise cancelling. The stakes for secrecy were much lower.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#67

Post by DoughnutHole »

kstenerud wrote: post #26
alimov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe people in tech, but this doesn’t apply to (I’d like to say- Most of) their regular users

Most of their regular users don't even know what Arm or Intel is, let alone cares about it. A macbook is a macbook. The fact that it's faster is lost on most people as well, since their daily use consists of opening the browser or video conferencing or (if they have a PC) gaming. Computers have plateaued for their current use case. The only innovation that will make a difference in the near future is AI.

The m1 gains are more impactful than just speed, namely battery life and thermals. The fact that I can get a full workday or more depending on load, all without a loud fan screaming at me all day honestly makes this the first laptop I've owned that works as a genuinely fully portable workstation. It's basically eliminated charge anxiety. It's not a complete game changer or anything like the original iPhone, but it's a pretty massive upgrade over the machines of 2 years ago.

And "regular people" definitely care about battery life in a laptop - it's probably the most important parameter for someone who genuinely needs a laptop over a desktop.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#69

Post by jdgoesmarching »

88913527 wrote: post #5

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers. I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few time…

“Surprise and delight” is just the PR line, the point is having more control over the marketing and positioning of a product on launch. We could debate whether that’s worth the R&D inefficiency, but Apple hasn’t exactly failed by deferring to their marketing folks over the years.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#70

Post by ikiris »

changoplatanero wrote: post #47
buildbot wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t most most big tech companies have these? At Microsoft it is pretty common for most people to be in a few “tents” (project specific NDAs). What is more rare are agreements _outside_ the in place system…

At fb/google the code for almost all projects is in one giant open repo that any engineer can browse.

almost all, and code isn't the only thing that exists.
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