Comment by danielrhodes
14 hours ago
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.
For example, Tim had the discipline to get out of the EV projects. Which was likely wise given the challenges the sector has faced in profitability, and Apple's long term outside option to accrue vehicular services revenue through CarPlay. Yet someone in his position could have burned $200B pretty easily to try and build a business there.
yep, I worked there for 20+ years, only retired due to health. I was about middle of the park in my group’s tenure there…
> 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).
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.
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.
Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?
Successful for the business no doubt, but they are an example of 'par with the rest of the industry' aren't they? Nothing market leading about them (except perhaps the price, heh) and not the first in the category, just one of a bunch of good options.
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It's a stealth subscription product. People are losing those things all the time.
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Yes, what about airpods? Little reason to buy them if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, and if you are, and you are a careful buyer, you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither). I'm not dismissing the marketing forces behind airpods selling by the millions as a "status symbol", but that's very much a "high cost of living country" thing, Apple is inexistent elsewhere, which is most places.
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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.
Profit maximizing often involves selling much cheaper and lower quality versions of your products. Often times this involves even getting other companies to mass produce it under your name. The cheapest Mac is arguably their best product.
Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.
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.
The fact they figured out how to transition all their laptops to ARM so it won’t be a stovetop on your lap is amazing
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.
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.
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.
> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things?
From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement:
> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
> That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
(Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different)
I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products
Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it
Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else
The problem with the word "AI" is that it's a broad term with fuzzy borders depending on who you ask.
But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product...
If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess.
If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.
> It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product.
This is a classic case of thinking that inventing something before others is all that matters, while ignoring that finding a mass market use-case for an existing technology is also important.
I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.
Siri was GOFAI (handwritten software) rather than a model written by a machine learning algorithm.
Calling the current state of art AI is also generous.
Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.
AI talks started before Jobs was born...
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.
> without losing its values
I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so.
Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse.
Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.
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.
> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
I could not disagree more. Apple has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so.
The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death.
The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years.
I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.