Comment by dangus
1 day ago
Apple may be greedy but they can’t be accused of bungling long term strategy.
While OpenAI sells $2 bills for $1, Tim Cook was out there increasing service revenue and profitability so that it was larger than Macs and iPads combined.
Tim Cook presided over some incredibly lucrative product launches like AirPods, TV+, Apple Music, moved chip design in house which doubled Mac market share and has made the iPhone continually dominant, they’ll even drop third party 5G models soon. These are all incredibly shrewd long term strategy moves.
Lucrative but not cool. There's no long term strategy if there's no new, category-defining, cool products. People will eventually sour on the same-old, same-old and expensive, fragile, unrepairable products.
Excessive greed obliterates goodwill.
You don't seem to understand sj placed cool first, while TC was the bean counter and continues to optimize this while jumping the shark.
Current Apple has a deep, systemic lack of cool and lack of entrepreneurial leadership with good taste that will ultimately lose the crown.
Misinformed take IMO.
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over.
Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.
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You talk like a nerd.
Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura.
Apple is not cool.
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Teen iPhone ownership is up to 88% (!) in the US.
I generally agree with what you're saying, and unlike Cook I don't find it "hard to imagine" life without iPhones (an augmented reality future isn't that far out to consider), but they have a long runway. Gen Z and Gen Alpha define "cool", and they are committed to the ecosystem.
Except the little issue teens don't appear on the same rate as iPhones hit the store shelves.
“sj placed cool first” … in what universe?
Steve placed “Steve likes it” first. Many of the things he liked were terrible.
Cool things happen(ed) at Apple in spite of executive leadership, not because of it. The better E-team players know to stand back and not get in the way.
I'm on a M4 with nano texture display. It's IMO the pinnacle of what a computer should be. I hate apple and their anti repair practices but wanted to chime in about how good the hardware has become.
If they push forward with local AI that can be somewhat trusted, it would be a huge win.
What I’m saying is that these are all garbage opinions backed by nothing. “Cool” is “just your opinion, man.”
They layperson thinks of Apple quite positively. Nobody cares what us nerds here think is cool. The bazillion people who happily bought AirPods don’t care that a tiny group of nerds are still mad that Apple took away their dork expansion slot and dweeb ports.
Apple is more trusted than any other tech company with privacy in consumer surveys.
Apple is the smartphone company with the highest customer satisfaction ratings (over 80%).
Consumer reports ranks Apple first in computer support customer service.
These are quantitative measures.
Apple very clearly has command of their messaging and there really aren’t any cracks in their strategy.