Tim Cook’s experience in logistics built Apple into the global hegemon it is today. I hope John Ternus’s experience with hardware can kick off a renaissance in both Apple hardware and software design. Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around. I’m also hoping, without any evidence, that maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics.
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
Their software is better than most (if not all) of closed-source universe. That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.
I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
Apple’s software has a kind of reliable predictability that many appreciate.
But “best” is far too strong a word.
For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.
And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.
With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.
Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.
Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.
I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.
Pro hardware. Toy software.
He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.
That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.
Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
It's worst in case of freedom, which is the most important aspect for me. Every release they are slowly turning in the screws and make it harder and harder to install apps from developers who haven't jumped through all the hoops that Apple forces them to. I hope this change in leadership will change this strategy.
Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
What do you mean? Most if not all Apple's software is not even the best in their own category, let alone "in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's". If we look at only these three and leave other competitors, you want to tell us that Safari is better than Chrome (Edge is the same now), Pages is better than Docs and Word, Numbers is better than Sheets and Excel, Keynote is better than Slides (arguably) or PowerPoint, Mail is better than Gmail or Outlook, iCloud better than Google Drive or OneDrive (ok lol), Facetime better than Meet or Teams, Apple Maps better than Google Maps or Bing Maps, Siri better than Google Assistant or Copilot... ?
Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..
Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.
Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.
I haven't really had to work with microsoft software but apple's software quality is abysmal beyond the OS (and even the OS has places that are a joke, like the bluetooth stack).
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
I still prefer macOS to desktop Linux or (yikes) Windows, but the margin has gotten smaller over the last several years. Unfortunately, that's less because Linux or Windows have gotten that much better, and more because macOS has stalled (and even gone backwards in some ways).
Maybe 20 years ago, today it's no better than anything else - well designed in some aspects, total trash in others. The stewards of xcode, spotlight and siri (among many other stinkers) are disqualified from the category of "best"
Android and Windows are better than iOS and macOS in many non-trivial ways. They have their own problems too, but as a user of all of them I don't prefer the Apple software. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, is clearly superior.
In my opinion Android (especially the Google Pixel flavour) is vastly more intuitive and logical than i(Pad)OS these days. I almost need to consult a manual to change my wallpaper on iOS. Anything to do with file management or notifications is also just plain bad on iOS. The keyboard is bad. Background downloads don't work reliably. If I want to transfer photos from a computer onto an iPhone I need special software and then cannot delete those pictures on the phone itself. I can choose between 3 multitasking paradigms on iPad – terrible!
I find it hard to believe this comment isn't sarcastic. Apple's software, atleast in particular macos, is horrendous - to the point I ditched my m2 macbook for a thinkpad because of how bad it was. It's like a toy OS.
I too deeply appreciate the commitment to user privacy they've demonstrated. Their head of user privacy is a man of integrity and commitment.
At the same time, privacy on internet-connected devices is like true liberty and justice -- rare, precious, fragile, and easily lost without active pursuit and sacrifice.
I hope Temus has the courage and principle to keep fighting the good fight.
Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).
The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
Depending on who you talk to, this could go either way. Some people want big companies to champion their own political ideals on a larger stage and think Apple should do more. Others would say Apple should stay out of it, after things like their gift to Trump[0], for example.
Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
For all the faults of these companies, their founders and CEOs, I genuinely believe the world would have been a bit of a sadder place without companies like Apple and Google. That’s not something I can say about most companies (Microsoft), and honestly, there are companies I think the world would be better off without entirely (Oracle).
My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.
Home button issues were one of the most common hardware problems on iPhones <7. The haptic button evaporated an entire class of critical failures, hardly a blunder.
Don't forget that to shut down an iPhone, you need to remember the secret button combination. Of course holding the power button down doesn't shut it off. Why would it? That's just a standard held by EVERY OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICE IN EXISTENCE.
Man, I love Apple, but their stupidity is beyond baffling sometimes. No Siri updates for 10 years, making the hardware harder to use, single-handed use is no longer as easy or comfortable, and they haven't done... anything(?) revolutionary in AGES. Their latest gaff was the Neo - a phone stretched out as much as possible to make a "laptop". They couldn't even bother to make the logo shiny on it, it was such a departure from true Apple style. Let's not forget the 92 lenses on the back of the phone that stick out a quarter inch, a screen that's nearly impossible to replace, and the hilariously pathetic "iphone repair kit" they lend you.
I have zero confidence in this guy. Nothing he had oversight over has gone well, as far as I'm concerned.
The problem with Apple software is they stop competition where it makes them money. Apple ARM CPUs are great, but the GPUs do leave things to be desired, and they stop competition there too on their platforms.
Siri was pretty bad, though it's noticeably better recently.
But MacOS is excellent IMO, and Apple's office suite is still my favorite (and I've worked extensively on Win/Lin/Mac for the past 25 years). I can't say I have any more gripes about their SW than most others.
Apple's hardware (at least when it comes to their best selling products) is behind the times though.
Relatively old and small camera sensors, no new battery tech and falling behind manufacturers using silicon-carbon (most evident on the mediocre iPhone Air battery runtime), no design innovation, no alternative form factors etc
>Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around.
It used to be the other way around, nice software and mediocre hardware.
I feel like Apple's biggest challenges these next 10 years will be logistics, being able to create or take advantage of additional redundancy in the supply chain for their major components.
With Ternus being the new CEO don’t be surprised if Apple takes a more active role in designing around the three Stooges of memory and bring it (the design and engineering) in house like the rest of the Apple Silicon chips.
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.
> I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
You're kidding right? News [1] just broke about how Apple's permanent notification storage (that they refuse to fix) undermines encryption and is being exploited by law enforcement. And they conveniently left out the fact that they were giving out push notification data to law enforcement without any warrants from their transparency reports [2]. And these are just from the top of my head.
Do we now presume all companies putting the word privacy on their ads are emphasizing privacy? Because Meta and Google does that too.
Wow, the worst example of violation of privacy is...(wait for it) local push notification storage being plaintext. We already bought it, no need to sell more Apple product to us!
Really what apple is doing is putting a spin on their core business model of selling users the technology rather than renting it to them by subsidizing its development through spying.
It's not so much that privacy is apple's goal, but rather privacy is inherent to apple's business model (unlike google, which has always been spyware).
Tapping a hardware guy as CEO sends a good signal, at least to me, looking in from the outside. The company is leading from its strength, and getting back to its roots. I wonder how Woz feels today, seeing this.
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.
re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.
Apple under Tim Cook stopped innovating, entirely. If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)
> If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)
I don't think your fantasy that Steve would have staunchly defended upgradable RAM in the past decade has much grounding in reality. It seems entirely likely that he would have supported the switch to LPDDR to enable better battery life, higher performance and thinner form factors at the cost of sacrificing that upgradability.
I admire how Tim Cook participates in US politics. He is doing the most while giving the least. I would do the same in his position, he is making the best of a difficult situation, and it is his duty to protect his company and employees.
Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.
I'd be careful normalizing bribery. It's very micro-efficient, almost definitionally, but the macro effects of normalized bribery are well known and not good.
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.
What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong).
He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.
It's all been downhill since snow leopard IMO. Maybe I've just become cynical and jaded over the years, but I don't remember the last time I was excited for a new OS feature. Meanwhile the UX gets worse and worse with every new release. e.g. Tahoes janky corners, the dumbed down System Preferences app, random bugs that apple hasn't fixed for years, etc
Because there are so many bugs that it makes me wonder if Apple Execs ever use their own software.
For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.
They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.
When was the last time you used the clusterf* that is iTunes on windows?
Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)
Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.
Saying Apple Software is 'terrible' is a blatant hyperbole. Has it degraded meaningfully over the last decade in terms of stability? Yes. Has it's capability increased though? Yes. Has it become more secure by design? Yes. Is the UX better than anything else in market? By a country mile.
The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.
Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.
I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.
I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter.
I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.
The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.
There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.
To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.
Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.
His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving:
https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/
I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
I really wish they did more for free software. I know they contribute heavily to LLVM and are still the main stewards of webkit, but they've very much ignored darwin as a free software operating system, to the point it feels like they only keep it free out of legal obligation
> I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple
While I agree with all these points, I'd still rather see a hardware guru leading Apple rather than a software-focused leader. The state of software zeitgeist has gotten fairly poor, and the types of formal and thorough "Acceptance Testing" that are common in hardware are more likely to produce great experiences for users than whatever most software leaders are doing today.
Before anyone mentions how all hardware groups seem to produce god-awful software (IoT, vehicles, etc)...I agree, though I have generally attributed this to a lack of budget and vision. I don't expect those two things to be an issue at Apple, but I could be surprised.
Ternus is not a hardware genius. He's a hardware engineer that rose through the ranks at Apple because, from what I've heard from Apple hardware engineers, Dan Riccio liked him "like a son."
I honestly don't know. tim@apple.com is unavailable for quite some time now (since I tried a few years ago), while lisasu@amd.com still works around that time frame.
For Apple nerds that pay close attention to company, this is no surprise. Third-party dev Marco Arment wrote a blog post speaking to Ternus earlier this month[0].
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
Gosh I just read a really hellish thread on what frontier LLMs will become as they're infected with advertising, I hope apple manages to break locsl LLMs (and training?) Into the public discourse
Strategic competence and playing to your strengths is ok to me. Avoiding lots of bad decisions can sometimes be just as good as making some really good decisions.
The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room.
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
> Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.
This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.
I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.
I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.
Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.
YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.
Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.
The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).
Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.
They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:
- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).
- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.
- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.
I believe these bribes/flatteries mostly confer a single-use benefit. Things like golden trophies seem to buy a victory in that moment, but they seem to have little relevance on decisions made even a month later, regardless of who gifted it and whether they're still at the helm.
It is a net positive to have a technologist and hardware leader at the helm. In this era, Apple can hire the right people to build software faster. but they need a strong hardware leader at the helm to differentiate themselves. In local AI, they have a unique opportunity, but limited window of time.
Apple silicon has been an unmitigated success so it makes sense they’d go with Ternus. On a related note Apple needs to add Ternus to their spell check dictionary
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
they made a bet on EUV on better commercial terms than samsung and intel could do for themselves. another point of view is that TSMC's cost structure, of having highly educated, overworked, and wildly underpaid Taiwanese employees, is the real unmitigated success.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
Every time I see this argument, it comes across as lazy. iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative. But you can't compare the camera from the first few iPhones to the latest ones. I certainly didn't expect, when the first iPhone launched, that the camera on an iPhone would replace my dedicated camera for 90% of my use cases.
> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
Don't forget about the Apple Car. 100% of that failed, and Tim spent a decade on it. Quite a bit of attention on here, but it seems we've quickly forgotten all about it since it was never seen.
yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.
> I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.
The m1 transition was clean, and the hardware is amazing, don't get me wrong (I just bought a neo and I'm very happy with it). But the transition did look even more amazing than it should have because of just how dogshit Intel macs had gotten, especially around thermal throttling. Apple could have built much nicer systems on Intel already had they just made them slightly thicker and used sensible heatsink and fan designs for the hardware they were putting in them.
(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)
To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)
John Ternus really did turn the Mac around. The last 5 or so years of the Intel era were a disaster. Hopefully he will be able to turn things around with software too.
I think it's interesting that the handoff will be complete on Sept 1. That would mean Ternus will helm his first iPhone launch that month. Auspicious timing. Curious the math they calculated when landing on this date. Certainly tees him up for an early win if the products are well-received.
My guess is that they'll release something impressive in September, and they want to give Ternus an early win as you said. Maybe a new completely product or Vision Air.
Big shoes to fill. Steve Jobs vouched for Tim Cook to be CEO…then Tim has been the CEO to see Apple become a global billion dollar company. This new CEO has been at apple for like 25 years (I think) so I’m sure he’ll do fine.
Steve Jobs was a top-tier product manager. Apple in the Jobs era gave us groundbreaking products — he was the cake maker.
Tim Cook is a top-tier supply chain master. Apple in the Cook era has moved forward steadily, making the cake bigger and bigger. Of course, criticism that it lacks innovation and has lost taste has never stopped; countless products like the iPhone SE and Mac Neo also reflect his "inventory management mastery." A lack of exploration has similarly led it, like Europe and Japan, to become increasingly isolated from new technologies.
In the radically changing next 15 years, I'm very curious where Apple will go now that an engineer-origin CEO has been elevated. The only thing that's certain is: the Apple of ten years from now will be very different from the Apple we know today.
Very glad to see this finally happen. It's been in the rumors for a while now that Ternus would be the next CEO but the timeline was uncertain.
I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.
He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.
> interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are
As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.
Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with. He has played a singular role in driving Apple's silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry. He has always led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and time and again, his team has delivered breakthrough innovations that have transformed our products. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as Apple's chief hardware officer.
While I don't agree with many things Cook has done during his tenure, like the Touch Bar and removing the SD card slot from MacBooks, I have to admit the man knows how to make money.
I don't like that Tim Cook added the touch bar and removed the SD card slot, but you have to give him credit for also removing the touch bar and adding the SD card slot ;)
Hah, had a funny moment along these lines. SD vs MicroSD came up as a topic. I glanced down at my M3 MBP and said, “looks like MacBook Pros use the regular SD slot.” The guy solemnly informed me that actually, Apple had removed the SD card slot from my laptop. His face turned red when I turned it to show him.
To be honest, a lot of industry analysts were skeptical of Jobs' second coming. And when he did a deal with Microsoft, most of them thought they were right in their initial pessimism.
Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.
Thank you Tim Cook, as I am writing this on an iPhone.
Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.
Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.
I appreciate what Cook did for the hardware, but he really failed on the software side. Too many little and annoying bugs. I look forward to Ternus improving that side while maintaining the same hardware quality.
Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.
when job of ceo is to make sure that policies around the globe don't interfere with business: "Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."
Whoa, didn't expect the announcement to come so soon. Of course, the sound bytes were everywhere, but even then, this was a surprise announcement.
So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.
Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]
Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it.
(and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
There’s a lot of commentary to the effect that the Mac hardware is good, but the software is somehow terrible.
Speaking as someone who first used a Mac Plus, graduated to an SE/30, and is now on a Mac mini m4 pro… I can remember when Macintosh was widely held to be an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. The software has always been terrible, until you try the other guys’ stuff. The hardware has often been good, and is in a purple period right now. Enjoy it while it lasts! (It won’t).
Some people might say Tim is leaving but he got himself promoted, just like Bezos. So, being an “Executive” chairman he’s going to be actively involved and be responsible, but not on daily basis and deep into each of verticals.
Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
> Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
I bet that was just good message management. The steadiest approach to a CEO transition is to make it seem a long way off until the moment it happens. Markets don’t like any wobbling at the top.
Sounds like a good choice. Glad to have an engineer in charge. Tim Cook is no spring chicken. I do hope Ternus maintains the focus on privacy.
That focus on privacy pisses off a lot of devs (Yours Truly, included), but I sincerely believe in it. I write apps that Serve a demographic that values privacy.
I don’t closely follow the news about Apple and now I’m wondering why they decided to go forward with this change at this moment.
As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?
Cook is also 65 and doubtless has more money than god. He's been a great success and it's not unreasonable to think he may have wanted to start riding into the sunset. Apple's wishes are irrelevant at some level.
I think supply chain optimization is untenable in a chaotic global trade environment. You don’t need to be an expert to buy from more suppliers and lay in a supply of stock. JIT falls apart when tariffs go from 20% to 120% to 15% based on whims and court cases.
Apple accidentally has a giant moat in having the only hardware that can run AI models locally on consumer products, plus not having thrown a huge pile of money into the tar pit of model training, which is ultimately becoming a race to the bottom with identical products, perfect competition, and razor thin (currently negative) margins.
They're gonna be fine in the AI age just like Costco was able to be a honey badger about e-commerce.
In retrospect, it seems Apple telegraphed Ternus well in advance - the NYT had an article well in January that clearly wasn't a source of friction with Apple Marketing.
For a long time I was hoping it would be Jeff Williams. For the brief moments these heads at Apple get the spotlight, I always felt he gave off a sense of humanity and sincerity.
I'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
Yes, a very successful CEO and he secured a great legacy. I was skeptical when Jobs stepped down, but under Cook innovation did continue, but primarily in hardware.
> Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
The M series transition was perfectly executed, but that trajectory was set up before Jobs left when they went all-in on in-house semiconductor design.
To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.
FaceID, AirPods, Apple Silicon, Vision Pro (though it was flop was a good try). Overall, I would actually place Tim above Steve in terms of business, although maybe not from a Human Computer Interaction design novelty perspective
Many of their acquired pro tools, and pretty much all of their server hardware and software, though much of that started before Cook took over. Plus the Mac Pro missteps were on his watch, as well as the current cancellation. Apple seems more and more unwilling to invest in niche hardware like the Mac Pro, except where they see it pushing the platform forward, like the Vision Pro.
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
Tim has done an amazing job in the post-Jobs era with his logistics. Brought Apple from $350B to $4T. This move makes perfect sense as Apple needs to start their next chapter with how rapid the world is changing at the moment. I do hope Apple's values don't change going into this new era.
I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.
they replacing person doing horizontal scalability with vertical.
do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?
Like Sam Altman, Tim Cook makes me think that what we fear in AI is already here. These two guys are corporate robots that act only in the service of the bottom line.
I'm really hopeful about John Ternus stepping into the CEO role. Pretty much everything he's done leading Apple's hardware engineering has been an enormous unqualified success, and for a company like Apple, having hardware lead the company seems like the right step.
Any chance of a future where hardware can be customized at the design stage, like 3D printing but taken to an even higher level, even for 1-off builds? So prompt-driven manufacturing? For example, a watch with a USB-C port?
One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.
It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.
Apple hardware has been a shining light for Apple for the past 5-10 years, even if a bit lucky. I’m curious how this effects the company as a whole going forward, hopefully positive
It's exciting to see that the new CEO of Apple is a hardware guy.
I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up.
All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill.
It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.
They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.
I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.
Well, if I was Apple, I would not put one of their software guys into the position since the software leadership team has been ineffective. So either hire externally (crapshoot) or promote internally. It makes sense. Hopefully the hardware guys will knock some sense into the software leadership and impose accountability in that arena.
Apple is currently lightyears ahead in privacy compared to any other major consumer tech company, is this going to still be the case with Mr. Ternus at the helm? That's not a question meant to be answered right away, but my current mindset evaluating the change in leadership as a consumer.
EDIT: Also, can Apple take over the data center already? I am sick of HP and Dell.
Consider that is mostly public headway. Behind the scenes the handover, mentorship, alignment I am sure was already happening for a while. E.g. you probably don't want the incoming CEO to have to immediately clean house or people might end up doubting their decisions, getting anxious or similar. The previous CEO can start retiring, moving people around to clear out possibly problematic leaders, break up internal "gangs" and ways of work - people will be more willing to accept their decision as they've been at the head for a while and have the trust. The new CEO comes in, group dynamics and rules are still fresh and building up between everyone, they don't have a black mark for firing anyone - to me it just feels like it would be a healthier and more mature transition.
To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.
So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.
Yup. The rumor mill was talking about a CEO change for a while, and around the time you saw the rumors building you saw the departures you mentioned. Ternus was being mentioned as the likely successor at least back to November last year. So internally the shifts have already been happening for some time, only observable on the outside via the high profile departures.
Given how quickly Cook had to step in for jobs, first in the interim role, four months seems like plenty of time (particularly given he's still executive chairman).
This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.
There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.
Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.
Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.
No issue performance-wise but I wish there was more innovation, especially with the iPhones. For example, I was really impressed with Samsung's privacy screen demo.
The iPhone is fine, but I find them to be... boring. The SoCs are very good, but they don't have the best cameras, the best batteries, the fastest charging, the most innovative displays, etc. Apple isn't pushing that hard there.
Yeah, I thought Cook would stay on until the end of the Trump-admin in order to keep ‘swallowing the dead rats’ so that the next CEO would have a clean plate.
Wonder how much of this decision has to do with the current climate and not wanting to deal with the current head. I was quite disappointed to see cook towing the line and bending the knee, let’s see what Ternus will do
Tim Cook will be one of the legendary CEOs in history.
he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.
qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.
all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.
Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.
You give a trinket to a near dictator in order to not have your company, which you're responsible for, dragged over the coals and attacked by a psychopathic goverment. In the grand scheme of things this was a completely genius play and did no harm to anyone.
That's a reasonable take - Apple had a gun to their head regarding tarriffs and exposure to China, but I'd still love to know how Steve would have played the same hand.
If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.
Yeah glad to see a hardware person take the helm and not a bean counter. The hardware is masterful now. Let’s keep it that way. Wonder if he kills the Vision Pro.
Sad to see Tim Cook leaving as I was enjoying this downtrend of Apple products that is driving users to more open (and better) solutions like Linux PCs.
I cross fingers for John Ternus to still be greedy and not being too competent.
I wish Apple would lean into gaming and create a competitive GPU system. Does not have to compete with a 5090, but 5070 level and game developers will come and port games. Huge untapped market. I still have to run a dedicated gaming PC just to play games (especially Flight Simulator).
Surprised that someone from Gen X is getting the opportunity to lead a company of this caliber. We've spent most of our adult lives getting smothered by Boomers and Millennials.
Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.
My personal hope for John Ternus is that he relaxes some of Apple's anti-competitive bullshit to the point where the company is willing to make iPads actually useful for anything other than 2D drawing apps. As someone who has been daily-driving an M1 iPad Pro for five years, the iPad is the most glaring hole in Apple's lineup in terms of usefulness.
Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.
Now that the Microsoft exclusive has ended for Qualcomm (ex-Apple) laptops, upcoming Arm laptops from Dell/HP/Lenovo should be well supported by Google's unified ChromeOS+Android desktop, which includes a full Debian Linux pKVM VM with vGPU accelerated graphics. Plus the Nvidia-Mediatek Arm gaming laptops.
These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.
I'd love the m5 ipad pro (with some more RAM please), and just use macos on it
I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad
I have to admit, regardless of whatever opinions you may have on Apple, Tim is/was probably the best bug tech CEO in the sea of evil ones out there, or evil and grifters, he remained focused on what’s the best might be for the users and also the company.
At least John has an engineering background, been with company for couple decades and not some private equity/hedge fund/wannabe Steve Jobs visionary douchebag.
Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.
If Apple really wants to keep their long term users in its ecosystem, it should really drop stupid Liquid glass design, stop making macOS look like its mobile OSs, and bring skeuomorphism back, which was removed by John Ive.
I disagree. They should bring quality back before reintroducing more changes. Okay, maybe that means dropping Liquid Glass. But also readopt the HIG. Increase stability and performance and reduce attack vector.
"The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe)."
It’s not novel to critique or idolize anyone, especially given the roll undergoing the changing of the guard. It’s not like hundreds of managers are changing.
They are all still there.
But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?
Many companies have quite a shakeup in management around big changes like this, though I’m not sure how Apple operates internally. Maybe they are an exception to the rule?
Tim Cook’s experience in logistics built Apple into the global hegemon it is today. I hope John Ternus’s experience with hardware can kick off a renaissance in both Apple hardware and software design. Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around. I’m also hoping, without any evidence, that maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics.
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.
Their software is better than most (if not all) of closed-source universe. That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.
I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
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What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
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Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
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Apple’s software has a kind of reliable predictability that many appreciate.
But “best” is far too strong a word.
For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.
And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.
With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.
Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.
Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.
I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.
Pro hardware. Toy software.
He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.
That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.
Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
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As a cross platform developer, MacOS is far buggier than Linux or Windows in my experience.
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Safari is a shinning example of how wrong this is. Sorry.
The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.
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It's worst in case of freedom, which is the most important aspect for me. Every release they are slowly turning in the screws and make it harder and harder to install apps from developers who haven't jumped through all the hoops that Apple forces them to. I hope this change in leadership will change this strategy.
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Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."
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I have not found this to be true for the software side of things.
- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.
- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.
- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.
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> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's
You are comparing against the wrong thing.
Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:
https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0
NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
What do you mean? Most if not all Apple's software is not even the best in their own category, let alone "in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's". If we look at only these three and leave other competitors, you want to tell us that Safari is better than Chrome (Edge is the same now), Pages is better than Docs and Word, Numbers is better than Sheets and Excel, Keynote is better than Slides (arguably) or PowerPoint, Mail is better than Gmail or Outlook, iCloud better than Google Drive or OneDrive (ok lol), Facetime better than Meet or Teams, Apple Maps better than Google Maps or Bing Maps, Siri better than Google Assistant or Copilot... ?
Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..
Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.
Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.
I haven't really had to work with microsoft software but apple's software quality is abysmal beyond the OS (and even the OS has places that are a joke, like the bluetooth stack).
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
I still prefer macOS to desktop Linux or (yikes) Windows, but the margin has gotten smaller over the last several years. Unfortunately, that's less because Linux or Windows have gotten that much better, and more because macOS has stalled (and even gone backwards in some ways).
Maybe 20 years ago, today it's no better than anything else - well designed in some aspects, total trash in others. The stewards of xcode, spotlight and siri (among many other stinkers) are disqualified from the category of "best"
Google is much better at software than Apple...most in the Valley would agree with this.
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Android and Windows are better than iOS and macOS in many non-trivial ways. They have their own problems too, but as a user of all of them I don't prefer the Apple software. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, is clearly superior.
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oh the horror stories I've heard from friends at Apple. Don't think I've heard anyone who writes tests at Apple
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Best in terms of what? Quality Control? UI/UX?
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In my opinion Android (especially the Google Pixel flavour) is vastly more intuitive and logical than i(Pad)OS these days. I almost need to consult a manual to change my wallpaper on iOS. Anything to do with file management or notifications is also just plain bad on iOS. The keyboard is bad. Background downloads don't work reliably. If I want to transfer photos from a computer onto an iPhone I need special software and then cannot delete those pictures on the phone itself. I can choose between 3 multitasking paradigms on iPad – terrible!
Apple could use a fresh approach to their software release cycles. I wish i could talk to someone at apple on this.
It's really gone to shit in the last 2 years
Have you seen xcode? Have you seen Appstore connect in comparison to Google play console?
Have you tried Siri lately?
I'm not sure how you can think Finder is better than the alternatives. It's awful, and has always been awful, IMO.
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> Apple's software is the best in the [category of shit software]
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> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft
Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is
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> Apple’s software is the best [...] compared to Google's or Microsoft's
Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.
I find it hard to believe this comment isn't sarcastic. Apple's software, atleast in particular macos, is horrendous - to the point I ditched my m2 macbook for a thinkpad because of how bad it was. It's like a toy OS.
I too deeply appreciate the commitment to user privacy they've demonstrated. Their head of user privacy is a man of integrity and commitment.
At the same time, privacy on internet-connected devices is like true liberty and justice -- rare, precious, fragile, and easily lost without active pursuit and sacrifice.
I hope Temus has the courage and principle to keep fighting the good fight.
Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).
The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
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Start here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...
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Depending on who you talk to, this could go either way. Some people want big companies to champion their own political ideals on a larger stage and think Apple should do more. Others would say Apple should stay out of it, after things like their gift to Trump[0], for example.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
you mean offering gold bribes to the president along with $$$ to the prez inauguration to curry regulatory favor?
#appletoo
The shareholders expect more profits. So no, the only way is ads and fees on the best sellers.
If they can make 50B from ads in the iPhone in 12 months why invent a new device that will make pennies.
Sorry folks, the math is brutal for the big corps. They cannot pivot and make cool things, the market demands to be milked until they bleed.
Pennies? Their devices have famously high margins.
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Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
So you're looking forward to a $2000 iPhone 18e?
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My guess is that Cook will continue to handle some of the hairier political situations, letting Ternus focus on Apple itself.
The less companies “participate in US politics”, the better for all involved
For all the faults of these companies, their founders and CEOs, I genuinely believe the world would have been a bit of a sadder place without companies like Apple and Google. That’s not something I can say about most companies (Microsoft), and honestly, there are companies I think the world would be better off without entirely (Oracle).
> Apple hardware is already amazing
Apple also made some amazing hardware blunders.
My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.
Home button issues were one of the most common hardware problems on iPhones <7. The haptic button evaporated an entire class of critical failures, hardly a blunder.
Don't forget that to shut down an iPhone, you need to remember the secret button combination. Of course holding the power button down doesn't shut it off. Why would it? That's just a standard held by EVERY OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICE IN EXISTENCE.
Man, I love Apple, but their stupidity is beyond baffling sometimes. No Siri updates for 10 years, making the hardware harder to use, single-handed use is no longer as easy or comfortable, and they haven't done... anything(?) revolutionary in AGES. Their latest gaff was the Neo - a phone stretched out as much as possible to make a "laptop". They couldn't even bother to make the logo shiny on it, it was such a departure from true Apple style. Let's not forget the 92 lenses on the back of the phone that stick out a quarter inch, a screen that's nearly impossible to replace, and the hilariously pathetic "iphone repair kit" they lend you.
I have zero confidence in this guy. Nothing he had oversight over has gone well, as far as I'm concerned.
The problem with Apple software is they stop competition where it makes them money. Apple ARM CPUs are great, but the GPUs do leave things to be desired, and they stop competition there too on their platforms.
Siri was pretty bad, though it's noticeably better recently.
But MacOS is excellent IMO, and Apple's office suite is still my favorite (and I've worked extensively on Win/Lin/Mac for the past 25 years). I can't say I have any more gripes about their SW than most others.
Apple's hardware (at least when it comes to their best selling products) is behind the times though. Relatively old and small camera sensors, no new battery tech and falling behind manufacturers using silicon-carbon (most evident on the mediocre iPhone Air battery runtime), no design innovation, no alternative form factors etc
>Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around.
It used to be the other way around, nice software and mediocre hardware.
If he were going to do that he'd already have been doing it just like Tim locking down logistics long before he became CEO.
Don't count on it.
I feel like Apple's biggest challenges these next 10 years will be logistics, being able to create or take advantage of additional redundancy in the supply chain for their major components.
With Ternus being the new CEO don’t be surprised if Apple takes a more active role in designing around the three Stooges of memory and bring it (the design and engineering) in house like the rest of the Apple Silicon chips.
The user privacy can’t be overstressed. It and a sane release cycle are what keeps me on Apple.
it means nothing when the UX is hot garbage
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FTA:
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.
The big bucks are for simultaneously groveling to Trump and China’s leaders. China usually makes or breaks the quarterly numbers after all.
> a renaissance
How many renaissances does one company need? Apple hasn't had enough? lol
> I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
You're kidding right? News [1] just broke about how Apple's permanent notification storage (that they refuse to fix) undermines encryption and is being exploited by law enforcement. And they conveniently left out the fact that they were giving out push notification data to law enforcement without any warrants from their transparency reports [2]. And these are just from the top of my head.
Do we now presume all companies putting the word privacy on their ads are emphasizing privacy? Because Meta and Google does that too.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-push-notification-s...
Wow, the worst example of violation of privacy is...(wait for it) local push notification storage being plaintext. We already bought it, no need to sell more Apple product to us!
I mean...
Really what apple is doing is putting a spin on their core business model of selling users the technology rather than renting it to them by subsidizing its development through spying.
It's not so much that privacy is apple's goal, but rather privacy is inherent to apple's business model (unlike google, which has always been spyware).
Tapping a hardware guy as CEO sends a good signal, at least to me, looking in from the outside. The company is leading from its strength, and getting back to its roots. I wonder how Woz feels today, seeing this.
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
Chairman Cook was a hardware guy, and is why apple's hardware is excellent.
This just suggests him holding on to more influence. What apple needs, badly, is a software and tech guy (Cook is not a tech guy).
If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.
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re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
Disagree. Cook shows up to dinner parties with Trump all the time. I think he genuinely feels solidarity with the Epstein class.
> Apple software is terrible
I killed a Finder process that was at 1.2 G ram consumed today...
I wish I could get my Chrome memory footprint so low
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I'll forever associate Tim Cook with Zuck
And his "kind of glib"
No, Zuck, you're just mad Apple introduced fine grained control so you can't constantly scrape people's credentials
by apple software, you mean ios or macos?
> Apple software is terrible
When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.
> this spoiled cheese tastes terrible
> when’s the last time you tried spoiled milk then?
There are still levels below “terrible”
> Apple software is terrible
The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.
Did Vision Pro leadership subsequently take over Apple Intelligence?
Did they? Why don’t I see people using this product while driving, or even walking down the street?
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Apple under Tim Cook stopped innovating, entirely. If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)
> If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)
The MacBook Pro started using non-removable batteries in 2009. Also: https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html
I don't think your fantasy that Steve would have staunchly defended upgradable RAM in the past decade has much grounding in reality. It seems entirely likely that he would have supported the switch to LPDDR to enable better battery life, higher performance and thinner form factors at the cost of sacrificing that upgradability.
I admire how Tim Cook participates in US politics. He is doing the most while giving the least. I would do the same in his position, he is making the best of a difficult situation, and it is his duty to protect his company and employees.
Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.
I'd be careful normalizing bribery. It's very micro-efficient, almost definitionally, but the macro effects of normalized bribery are well known and not good.
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> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.
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> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.
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> He is doing the most while giving the least.
> Contrast with every other tech executive
What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.
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> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong).
He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.
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I'm genuinely curious why you think Apple software is terrible?
It's all been downhill since snow leopard IMO. Maybe I've just become cynical and jaded over the years, but I don't remember the last time I was excited for a new OS feature. Meanwhile the UX gets worse and worse with every new release. e.g. Tahoes janky corners, the dumbed down System Preferences app, random bugs that apple hasn't fixed for years, etc
Because there are so many bugs that it makes me wonder if Apple Execs ever use their own software.
For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.
There are PLENTY of examples just like that.
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They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.
You've not read about or had the Calculator memory leaks on macOS Tahoe, have you?
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Their presumed lack of regression testing.
When was the last time you used the clusterf* that is iTunes on windows?
Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)
Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.
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I can name some terrible software, but it wouldn't be Apple's.
macOS and iOS 26 are quite bad.
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XCode, Apple Music, Siri, Apple Maps, The App Store, Finder, Safari, Spotlight, iCloud...
I'd need another hand to fully count all the Apple apps that have burned me in the past.
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>Apple software is terrible
That's a wild claim.
The software is what kept me away from iphones even though I hate android hardware
Have you used an iPhone recently?
Saying Apple Software is 'terrible' is a blatant hyperbole. Has it degraded meaningfully over the last decade in terms of stability? Yes. Has it's capability increased though? Yes. Has it become more secure by design? Yes. Is the UX better than anything else in market? By a country mile.
The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
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Let's hope John takes his job Siriously
> maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics
I think you're attributing a lot more agency to a CEO role (for a publicly listed company, at the least) than they actually have.
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
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I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
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Apple Maps is pretty fantastic
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What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
Hardware people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at software. But we can hope.
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
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It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.
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I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.
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In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
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I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.
That guy left to join Meta I believe.
Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
The Apple Vision Pro hardware is remarkable.
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
Granted I have a big ol' head, but I like the metal frame in all its heft - they feel ultra durable and I don't worry about throwing them in a bag.
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
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They are leaps and bounds above any other laptop on the market. Who wants a plastic chasis and nub in 2026 over a modern Macbook Air.
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> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
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How do you feel about their trackpad? I think they’re the best on the market.
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I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.
> a reputation for a strong engineering culture
We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?
> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.
I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.
I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter.
I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?
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Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.
Hacker News? More like MBA news.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.
The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.
There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.
Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.
Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.
To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.
Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else
I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.
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AI talks started before Jobs was born...
Honestly, I think Jobs would hate the fuzzy, unpolished results that AI gives you.
I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.
Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.
His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving:
I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
Thank you for sharing the link, it's a good read.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/
Why share it as a quote rather than a link I can click?
I really wish they did more for free software. I know they contribute heavily to LLVM and are still the main stewards of webkit, but they've very much ignored darwin as a free software operating system, to the point it feels like they only keep it free out of legal obligation
> I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple
While I agree with all these points, I'd still rather see a hardware guru leading Apple rather than a software-focused leader. The state of software zeitgeist has gotten fairly poor, and the types of formal and thorough "Acceptance Testing" that are common in hardware are more likely to produce great experiences for users than whatever most software leaders are doing today.
Before anyone mentions how all hardware groups seem to produce god-awful software (IoT, vehicles, etc)...I agree, though I have generally attributed this to a lack of budget and vision. I don't expect those two things to be an issue at Apple, but I could be surprised.
Ternus is not a hardware genius. He's a hardware engineer that rose through the ranks at Apple because, from what I've heard from Apple hardware engineers, Dan Riccio liked him "like a son."
I honestly don't know. tim@apple.com is unavailable for quite some time now (since I tried a few years ago), while lisasu@amd.com still works around that time frame.
It's always been tcook@ - and it will get looked at by someone at least
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I'm really curious how he manages to read through so many emails every day.
>but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head
Wonder if he'll be as good as Cook was at kissing Trump's ass. Half serious, half /s.
For Apple nerds that pay close attention to company, this is no surprise. Third-party dev Marco Arment wrote a blog post speaking to Ternus earlier this month[0].
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
0. https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus
I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
>massive interest in local AI
Gosh I just read a really hellish thread on what frontier LLMs will become as they're infected with advertising, I hope apple manages to break locsl LLMs (and training?) Into the public discourse
Strategic competence and playing to your strengths is ok to me. Avoiding lots of bad decisions can sometimes be just as good as making some really good decisions.
The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room.
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
Bold futurism can work very well when you're the (relative) scrappy underdog. So long as you're too smart or lucky to make any huge mistakes.
Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.
> Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Quite successful.
I also liked the part about growing the company while reducing its carbon footprint by more than 60%.
Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.
[dead]
It's probably an even bigger reduction considering their growth.
But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...
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This is what’s all bad with us stocks and completely disconnected with market value: Revenue jumped 4x but market capitalization got inflated to 12x.
Investors are forward-looking, though, so it just means that they think the future looks brighter than the immediate past.
The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.
The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.
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Yep. QE was a monumental mistake that killed economic mobility. Asset owners vs wage earners.
Some of that is debasement, but some of that is that there is no other brand like Apple.
Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?
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For the same period:
AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%
This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.
Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.
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I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.
I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.
Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.
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Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
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They should charge for it.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.
YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.
Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.
The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).
Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.
They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:
- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).
- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.
- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.
Is the loyalty represented by the golden trophy transferrable? Or is it tied to each CEO, like Applecare+?
As long as he goes by "John Apple" he should be ok - usually the bribe gets credited to the surname.
John Apple, great guy people say he's the best at computers, business I don't know.
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
It sounds like Cook will continue to get the dirty work of pleasing world leaders while Ternus can focus on actually running the company.
Depends if you want a FIFA Peace Prize or not.
I believe these bribes/flatteries mostly confer a single-use benefit. Things like golden trophies seem to buy a victory in that moment, but they seem to have little relevance on decisions made even a month later, regardless of who gifted it and whether they're still at the helm.
I think you will have your answer if you consider which approach nets the recipient the larger number of golden tributes.
I'm glad someone mentioned this.
It is a net positive to have a technologist and hardware leader at the helm. In this era, Apple can hire the right people to build software faster. but they need a strong hardware leader at the helm to differentiate themselves. In local AI, they have a unique opportunity, but limited window of time.
Apple silicon has been an unmitigated success so it makes sense they’d go with Ternus. On a related note Apple needs to add Ternus to their spell check dictionary
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
He also got promoted
Ternus had essentially nothing to do with Apple silicon. That's all Srouji and his team.
they made a bet on EUV on better commercial terms than samsung and intel could do for themselves. another point of view is that TSMC's cost structure, of having highly educated, overworked, and wildly underpaid Taiwanese employees, is the real unmitigated success.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
> I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.
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So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...
I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
Every time I see this argument, it comes across as lazy. iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative. But you can't compare the camera from the first few iPhones to the latest ones. I certainly didn't expect, when the first iPhone launched, that the camera on an iPhone would replace my dedicated camera for 90% of my use cases.
You make a good point, but at the same time, things are a bit stale if you look outside the Apple and Samsung bubbles.
For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.
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> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
Don't forget about the Apple Car. 100% of that failed, and Tim spent a decade on it. Quite a bit of attention on here, but it seems we've quickly forgotten all about it since it was never seen.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apple+car
I forgot all about the Apple car when assessing Tim's legacy, too.
I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P
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What about Apple Silicon?
yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.
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Its been more than 5 years since the M1 came out in Nov 2020
Believe it or not, more than five years ago.
> I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
I think the satellite connectivity is a pretty big deal and iPhone led with that. Also camera control literally changed how I use the phone.
The Vision Pro was a big bet that failed. But they tried.
The satellite message thing?
Off topic, but it’s amusing to see that 3/8 Apple CEOs were Mike, 2/8 were John, and the rest are Steve, Tim, and Gil.
Apple is obsessed with minimalism so much that they refuse to hire any CEOs with first names longer than a single syllable.
Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
>Cook is known to be monk-like
How so? Genuinely curious, I've got no idea what he's like as a person.
>"I've got no idea what he's like as a person"
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
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I don’t know if I would go so far as to say “monk-like”. He’s a college football die-hard. But he is a very chill dude.
I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.
> no overt politics
Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?
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linux and windows are older.
and mac has ios, which with ipads goes desktopy. (capability based security)
Right. We're not still running Windows Vista, or RedHat. Time for a rethink.
Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.
The m1 transition was clean, and the hardware is amazing, don't get me wrong (I just bought a neo and I'm very happy with it). But the transition did look even more amazing than it should have because of just how dogshit Intel macs had gotten, especially around thermal throttling. Apple could have built much nicer systems on Intel already had they just made them slightly thicker and used sensible heatsink and fan designs for the hardware they were putting in them.
(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)
To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)
John Ternus really did turn the Mac around. The last 5 or so years of the Intel era were a disaster. Hopefully he will be able to turn things around with software too.
Yeah and with long development, lead and change horizons that come with hardware, that's a super hard thing to do.
Software is easier given the shorter cycles. Caveat is, the shorter cycles also benefit competitors.
I think it's interesting that the handoff will be complete on Sept 1. That would mean Ternus will helm his first iPhone launch that month. Auspicious timing. Curious the math they calculated when landing on this date. Certainly tees him up for an early win if the products are well-received.
Tim's departure announcement is timed between product announcements. Although, not a surprise to anyone
As for Ternus' timing:
A)Not very Apple to have the CEO do one last launch while on the way out the door (want the full throated, 1000% commitment in execs)
B)Gives John stage for first time as CEO at September Keynote (historically a BFD)
C)It felt right, among all the other time-slots and factors to consider
D)John gets to announce the next One More Thing, and own it. Would be odd for Tim to announce the One More Thing and then resign.
One more thing: See ya suckers! I'm outta here.
My guess is that they'll release something impressive in September, and they want to give Ternus an early win as you said. Maybe a new completely product or Vision Air.
iPhone Ultra.
Apples first foldable phone. It will be a huge success.
Oh finally! Ternus is at least fun to look at during keynotes so we have that to look forward to.
Big shoes to fill. Steve Jobs vouched for Tim Cook to be CEO…then Tim has been the CEO to see Apple become a global billion dollar company. This new CEO has been at apple for like 25 years (I think) so I’m sure he’ll do fine.
Steve Jobs was a top-tier product manager. Apple in the Jobs era gave us groundbreaking products — he was the cake maker. Tim Cook is a top-tier supply chain master. Apple in the Cook era has moved forward steadily, making the cake bigger and bigger. Of course, criticism that it lacks innovation and has lost taste has never stopped; countless products like the iPhone SE and Mac Neo also reflect his "inventory management mastery." A lack of exploration has similarly led it, like Europe and Japan, to become increasingly isolated from new technologies. In the radically changing next 15 years, I'm very curious where Apple will go now that an engineer-origin CEO has been elevated. The only thing that's certain is: the Apple of ten years from now will be very different from the Apple we know today.
Very glad to see this finally happen. It's been in the rumors for a while now that Ternus would be the next CEO but the timeline was uncertain.
I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.
He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.
> interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are
As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.
There were several exec departures in 2025, https://archive.is/JcYOY
Srouji stays to lead hardware, https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/20/srouji-chief-hardware-o...
Someone archive the leadership page :) to be referenced 12 months from when John takes over
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While I don't agree with many things Cook has done during his tenure, like the Touch Bar and removing the SD card slot from MacBooks, I have to admit the man knows how to make money.
I don't like that Tim Cook added the touch bar and removed the SD card slot, but you have to give him credit for also removing the touch bar and adding the SD card slot ;)
Hah, had a funny moment along these lines. SD vs MicroSD came up as a topic. I glanced down at my M3 MBP and said, “looks like MacBook Pros use the regular SD slot.” The guy solemnly informed me that actually, Apple had removed the SD card slot from my laptop. His face turned red when I turned it to show him.
Prediction: Sundar will step aside and Demis will replace him.
(actually I doubt this- Demis does not want to run a big company whose main business is Ads)
Tim Cook stepped down when he hit 65. Sundar has 12 years to go to hit that milestone.
The problem is that neither Sundar nor Demis are remotely as focused and competitive as Sam and Dario.
They need to move all of the iOS boatware apps bundled with macOS to the app store so people can choose to uninstall then reinstall them later.
When Cook took over, people expected him to fail.
I don't think even Steve Jobs would've been able to imagine that Apple can get this big.
To be honest, a lot of industry analysts were skeptical of Jobs' second coming. And when he did a deal with Microsoft, most of them thought they were right in their initial pessimism.
Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.
Thank you Tim Cook, as I am writing this on an iPhone.
Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.
Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.
Big day!
Least understood yet most influential company in the history, present and future of the venture capital backed tech world.
I appreciate what Cook did for the hardware, but he really failed on the software side. Too many little and annoying bugs. I look forward to Ternus improving that side while maintaining the same hardware quality.
Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.
when job of ceo is to make sure that policies around the globe don't interfere with business: "Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."
Tim did cook well!!
Whoa, didn't expect the announcement to come so soon. Of course, the sound bytes were everywhere, but even then, this was a surprise announcement.
So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.
Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]
Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it. (and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Granted, 65 is probably a milestone for anyone. I think BMW has a hard stop for its execs at that age
Agreed... EU (and most countries, afaik) have age limits for CEOs, which I do support.
Though US famously does not, which is a curse in itself, IMHO.
Though tbh, it's worth wondering if Berkshire Hathaway without the Sage is still the same...
There’s a lot of commentary to the effect that the Mac hardware is good, but the software is somehow terrible. Speaking as someone who first used a Mac Plus, graduated to an SE/30, and is now on a Mac mini m4 pro… I can remember when Macintosh was widely held to be an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. The software has always been terrible, until you try the other guys’ stuff. The hardware has often been good, and is in a purple period right now. Enjoy it while it lasts! (It won’t).
I just hope they can bring back the live events for the product releases.
Some people might say Tim is leaving but he got himself promoted, just like Bezos. So, being an “Executive” chairman he’s going to be actively involved and be responsible, but not on daily basis and deep into each of verticals.
Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
> Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
I bet that was just good message management. The steadiest approach to a CEO transition is to make it seem a long way off until the moment it happens. Markets don’t like any wobbling at the top.
Good luck to him. If he was behind the Neo, then he deserves the post. That's the perfect new product in the mac world.
Sounds like a good choice. Glad to have an engineer in charge. Tim Cook is no spring chicken. I do hope Ternus maintains the focus on privacy.
That focus on privacy pisses off a lot of devs (Yours Truly, included), but I sincerely believe in it. I write apps that Serve a demographic that values privacy.
I don’t closely follow the news about Apple and now I’m wondering why they decided to go forward with this change at this moment.
As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?
Cook is also 65 and doubtless has more money than god. He's been a great success and it's not unreasonable to think he may have wanted to start riding into the sunset. Apple's wishes are irrelevant at some level.
I think supply chain optimization is untenable in a chaotic global trade environment. You don’t need to be an expert to buy from more suppliers and lay in a supply of stock. JIT falls apart when tariffs go from 20% to 120% to 15% based on whims and court cases.
Tim must have wanted to enjoy 4/20 without worrying about company drug testing.
He already had the trail of his retirement mapped out, and picked the perfect moment to blaze it.
Probably didn't want to sit through any more executive kowtow meetings with the Orange Man
Apple needed a "AI CEO". Hopefully John Ternus is Apple's "AI CEO". That is the win-vs-lose.
Apple included.
Apple accidentally has a giant moat in having the only hardware that can run AI models locally on consumer products, plus not having thrown a huge pile of money into the tar pit of model training, which is ultimately becoming a race to the bottom with identical products, perfect competition, and razor thin (currently negative) margins.
They're gonna be fine in the AI age just like Costco was able to be a honey badger about e-commerce.
In retrospect, it seems Apple telegraphed Ternus well in advance - the NYT had an article well in January that clearly wasn't a source of friction with Apple Marketing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
Cook will handle the politics and optics, he will remain like a king representing Apple without any true power.
Ternus will be the soldier in the trenches.
I feel excitement for the future of Apple.
For a long time I was hoping it would be Jeff Williams. For the brief moments these heads at Apple get the spotlight, I always felt he gave off a sense of humanity and sincerity.
I'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
Things he effectively presided over:
* Apple Silicon, the most far-reaching technical transformation in the company's history (probably a bigger deal than macOS itself)
* Apple Pay
* The Watch and Airpods product categories, both of which Apple now dominates.
All while holding on to its position in phones and improving (drastically) its computers.
It feels like a pretty successful term.
Tim was a great CEO.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
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Yes, a very successful CEO and he secured a great legacy. I was skeptical when Jobs stepped down, but under Cook innovation did continue, but primarily in hardware.
Also the discipline in not blowing massive R&D chasing AI; but having the machines/architecture best suited to said AI...
> Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
The M series transition was perfectly executed, but that trajectory was set up before Jobs left when they went all-in on in-house semiconductor design.
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His legacy is he used Apple to help build China into a technological powerhouse at the expense of American workers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/06/17/g-s1-72...
Can you say the same for tesla or cisco?
That's a pretty reductive take.
To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.
We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.
FaceID, AirPods, Apple Silicon, Vision Pro (though it was flop was a good try). Overall, I would actually place Tim above Steve in terms of business, although maybe not from a Human Computer Interaction design novelty perspective
What did they shut down? Aperture comes to mind, anything else?
Many of their acquired pro tools, and pretty much all of their server hardware and software, though much of that started before Cook took over. Plus the Mac Pro missteps were on his watch, as well as the current cancellation. Apple seems more and more unwilling to invest in niche hardware like the Mac Pro, except where they see it pushing the platform forward, like the Vision Pro.
>> Few new products were launched
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
Tim has done an amazing job in the post-Jobs era with his logistics. Brought Apple from $350B to $4T. This move makes perfect sense as Apple needs to start their next chapter with how rapid the world is changing at the moment. I do hope Apple's values don't change going into this new era.
And John Ternus will be CEO
I appreciated John Gruber's piece on this: https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/another_day_has_come
What if, right after Tim is gone, all the leaks of iPhone designs and colors stopped?
I'm just askin' questions.
I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.
they replacing person doing horizontal scalability with vertical.
do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?
Like Sam Altman, Tim Cook makes me think that what we fear in AI is already here. These two guys are corporate robots that act only in the service of the bottom line.
Wonder to what extent Craig Federighi was considered and what the decision-making factors were there.
Age, possibly. Ternus has 6 more years until retirement than Federighi.
To what extent do you think Apple software has done well under Craig's leadership?
He could have not wanted the job to begin with. CEO is no joke, and for him would mean to say goodbye to software forever.
I'm really hopeful about John Ternus stepping into the CEO role. Pretty much everything he's done leading Apple's hardware engineering has been an enormous unqualified success, and for a company like Apple, having hardware lead the company seems like the right step.
China is effectively run by engineers, so that is a good hedge for Apple.
situations like this should allow for relaxing the title rules to "unbury" the lede.
How long to the next ATP podcast?
I think they usually record on Tuesdays, so not long
“We broadcast most episodes live on Wednesday nights at 8 PM US Eastern time.”
https://atp.fm/live
I think this is also why they release so late in the week. News usually happens before they record.
Any chance of a future where hardware can be customized at the design stage, like 3D printing but taken to an even higher level, even for 1-off builds? So prompt-driven manufacturing? For example, a watch with a USB-C port?
One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.
So John gets to announce the Fold comes september
He is proof that LinkedIn doesn't matter.
Mister Ternus, please create an Apple TV.
It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.
My credit card is ready...
John Ternus is the perfect choice. I expected Craig, and that would've been great, but Ternus is going to really be something special in that role!
Why would Craig have been great? macOS usability and quality has suffered greatly under Craig.
Apple hardware has been a shining light for Apple for the past 5-10 years, even if a bit lucky. I’m curious how this effects the company as a whole going forward, hopefully positive
It's exciting to see that the new CEO of Apple is a hardware guy.
I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up. All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill. It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.
They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.
I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.
Apple is good at hardware, they need help with software. I hope putting a hardware guy in charge can still improve this situation.
Well, if I was Apple, I would not put one of their software guys into the position since the software leadership team has been ineffective. So either hire externally (crapshoot) or promote internally. It makes sense. Hopefully the hardware guys will knock some sense into the software leadership and impose accountability in that arena.
Apple is currently lightyears ahead in privacy compared to any other major consumer tech company, is this going to still be the case with Mr. Ternus at the helm? That's not a question meant to be answered right away, but my current mindset evaluating the change in leadership as a consumer.
EDIT: Also, can Apple take over the data center already? I am sick of HP and Dell.
RIP apple
I know the rumors were swirling for the past few months, but just 4 more months of Cook seems like pretty short notice, no?
Consider that is mostly public headway. Behind the scenes the handover, mentorship, alignment I am sure was already happening for a while. E.g. you probably don't want the incoming CEO to have to immediately clean house or people might end up doubting their decisions, getting anxious or similar. The previous CEO can start retiring, moving people around to clear out possibly problematic leaders, break up internal "gangs" and ways of work - people will be more willing to accept their decision as they've been at the head for a while and have the trust. The new CEO comes in, group dynamics and rules are still fresh and building up between everyone, they don't have a black mark for firing anyone - to me it just feels like it would be a healthier and more mature transition.
To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.
So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.
Yup. The rumor mill was talking about a CEO change for a while, and around the time you saw the rumors building you saw the departures you mentioned. Ternus was being mentioned as the likely successor at least back to November last year. So internally the shifts have already been happening for some time, only observable on the outside via the high profile departures.
In 2021 the average time from announcement to new CEO for S&P 500 companies was 3.5 months, so this seems reasonably normal.
[0] https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/2021-ceo-...
4 months in his _current_ role, but he’s not going anywhere—he’s remaining on as Chairman, which is still very much involved day-to-day.
Given how quickly Cook had to step in for jobs, first in the interim role, four months seems like plenty of time (particularly given he's still executive chairman).
Not really. Anyone and everyone is replaceable. Even Steve Jobs.
Anyone else notice the header text gets cut off on mobile? On an iPhone 17 no less...
Can't reproduce on an OPPO, funnily enough.
Pretty simple hot take:
This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.
There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.
Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.
Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.
Can not believe no one has asked the obvious question - is his nickname Tina ?
If Johny Ive stayed, he could have become CEO... Now he has to design Ferrari dashboards and AI Pins
What an absolute tragedy that would be for the world
"Designing AI Pin has been the greatest privilege of my life. I'd rank it higher than anything I did before"
You buy that? If he really did say that, it's just a mixture of cope and a passive aggressive attempt at a jab.
Please, do not make the products any thicker!
This would not be on The Successor
About time. Hopefully we can see some meaningful hardware improvements in the coming years.
What is wrong with the hardware now? iPhone 17 series is great, Macs have no competition, Apple Watches lead in accuracy.
Me thinks Apple software is the problem—I put Asahi Linux on my Mac.
No issue performance-wise but I wish there was more innovation, especially with the iPhones. For example, I was really impressed with Samsung's privacy screen demo.
The iPhone is fine, but I find them to be... boring. The SoCs are very good, but they don't have the best cameras, the best batteries, the fastest charging, the most innovative displays, etc. Apple isn't pushing that hard there.
I believe his name is Tim Apple
And his successor John Turnip.
wow… I didn’t expect this. My guess would have been after the current administration.
Why so soon?
Yeah, I thought Cook would stay on until the end of the Trump-admin in order to keep ‘swallowing the dead rats’ so that the next CEO would have a clean plate.
Maybe Mac Mini M5 this year?
Wonder how much of this decision has to do with the current climate and not wanting to deal with the current head. I was quite disappointed to see cook towing the line and bending the knee, let’s see what Ternus will do
Tim Cook will be one of the legendary CEOs in history.
he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.
qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.
all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.
I hope they will turn Siri around with these changes.
Anyone know why?
Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.
Or something is about to happen.
Committing $100M to U.S. manufacturing is pretty good for one's legacy, I'd say.
You give a trinket to a near dictator in order to not have your company, which you're responsible for, dragged over the coals and attacked by a psychopathic goverment. In the grand scheme of things this was a completely genius play and did no harm to anyone.
That's a reasonable take - Apple had a gun to their head regarding tarriffs and exposure to China, but I'd still love to know how Steve would have played the same hand.
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Will this change their AI strategy (or lack of)
Like blowing hundred billion dollars for undifferentiated technology?
Do.you.think.he’ll.fix.the.usability.issues?
I always thought Craig would become CEO.
If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.
Will it change Apple's extreme bend into lock-in for the better?
Yeah glad to see a hardware person take the helm and not a bean counter. The hardware is masterful now. Let’s keep it that way. Wonder if he kills the Vision Pro.
Why is the photo so blurry?
Maybe it was edited by Apple Intelligence.
RIP Tim, the best derivative by the book uninspired machine to ever do it.
Suggest changing the title to include both parts, if they fit: "Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman, John Ternus to become Apple CEO"
I'd go with "John Ternus to become Apple CEO[, replacing Tim Cook]"
the bit in brackets ain't even necessary since we all know Tim is the CEO
Sad to see Tim Cook leaving as I was enjoying this downtrend of Apple products that is driving users to more open (and better) solutions like Linux PCs. I cross fingers for John Ternus to still be greedy and not being too competent.
can't believe craige is not the ceo
So, John Apple?
Johnny Apple Seed references incoming…
Good riddance to an effective CEO whose entire legacy will be tarnished by a giant, gold-plated asterisk.
I wish Apple would lean into gaming and create a competitive GPU system. Does not have to compete with a 5090, but 5070 level and game developers will come and port games. Huge untapped market. I still have to run a dedicated gaming PC just to play games (especially Flight Simulator).
The NYT was right: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
Tim saw the ram shortage and said, "WTF am I suppose to do with this? I'm out of here!" Better leave a hero ...
Maybe MAC mini M5
Surprised that someone from Gen X is getting the opportunity to lead a company of this caliber. We've spent most of our adult lives getting smothered by Boomers and Millennials.
Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.
Google is gen x.
And Microsoft. And Netflix. And Uber.
I'm perplexed by the assertion, unless it was some joke that went over my head.
@dang can we fix this to mention John Ternus becoming CEO
My personal hope for John Ternus is that he relaxes some of Apple's anti-competitive bullshit to the point where the company is willing to make iPads actually useful for anything other than 2D drawing apps. As someone who has been daily-driving an M1 iPad Pro for five years, the iPad is the most glaring hole in Apple's lineup in terms of usefulness.
Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.
Now that the Microsoft exclusive has ended for Qualcomm (ex-Apple) laptops, upcoming Arm laptops from Dell/HP/Lenovo should be well supported by Google's unified ChromeOS+Android desktop, which includes a full Debian Linux pKVM VM with vGPU accelerated graphics. Plus the Nvidia-Mediatek Arm gaming laptops.
These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.
MacOS already runs on iPhone SoC in Macbook Neo.
I'd love the m5 ipad pro (with some more RAM please), and just use macos on it
I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad
I have to admit, regardless of whatever opinions you may have on Apple, Tim is/was probably the best bug tech CEO in the sea of evil ones out there, or evil and grifters, he remained focused on what’s the best might be for the users and also the company.
At least John has an engineering background, been with company for couple decades and not some private equity/hedge fund/wannabe Steve Jobs visionary douchebag.
Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.
"Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman"
*John Ternus to become Apple CEO*
Talk about burying the lede, lmao.
Yeah. Can we get a title change please?
Among the dup stories submitted, this one has the best content but the worst title.
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Apple's headquarters The Ring made under Tim Cook represents what Apple today is . Kissing the Ring of Trump
If Apple really wants to keep their long term users in its ecosystem, it should really drop stupid Liquid glass design, stop making macOS look like its mobile OSs, and bring skeuomorphism back, which was removed by John Ive.
I disagree. They should bring quality back before reintroducing more changes. Okay, maybe that means dropping Liquid Glass. But also readopt the HIG. Increase stability and performance and reduce attack vector.
$AAPL down almost 1% after-market on this news
which news? this one or the daily middle east blunder.
Look like it briefly went down to above what it started today at.
that's a rounding error
That is not terribly significant at all.
"it's priced in" - lol
"The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe)."
It’s not novel to critique or idolize anyone, especially given the roll undergoing the changing of the guard. It’s not like hundreds of managers are changing.
They are all still there.
But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?
Many companies have quite a shakeup in management around big changes like this, though I’m not sure how Apple operates internally. Maybe they are an exception to the rule?
> Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring
“Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art” — Andy Warhol