> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
I just have to call out how much this impacted my mom’s life. She’s 100% blind and has access because of her iPhone and iPad. Yes she learned JAWSs and literally took classes to do it. Every single windows update has made it so she’d have to retake this class. The iOS updates a rocky but she isn’t literally hamstrung.
My dad, damn near 80, is still happily using his 2012 i7 Mac mini I set him up with before moving away.
Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?
Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.
Will drop this here in case you’re not aware of it (but I’m guessing you probably are), sorry if a bit off-topic.
I’m low-vision and made great use of Microsoft Soundscape until it got discontinued. I’d been waiting for an alternative for ages and didn’t realise one actually got released and is on the app store!
Excuse my language here but: I fucking love this! My mom pretty much mirrors your experience. I purposefully left out macOS and voiceover. I would almost call it unusable, sadly. The amount of key layering that voiceover and macOS in general has makes it very hard to use.
I’ve been hacking on a macOS app that leans on LLMs, vision use, and the AX macOS APIs to try and make voiceover less.. prickly haha. Hoping to visit in person soon to watch her use it :)
For what it's worth, text selection has been badly broken on iOS for at least a decade and autocorrect has been steadily getting worse for probably the same amount of time, and these are features that affect the mainstream segment of Apple users on a daily basis. Apple seems generally happy to let bugs go unaddressed for years and years regardless of how many people they affect or how often.
The first time I saw a blind person using an iPhone, I was blown away. I follow some Apple engineers who work on accessibility, and they all seem very passionate about their work. It’s an area where I truly believe Apple is doing it to help people, not just for profit.
I’m not blind, but I’m using accessibility features like Speak Screen, and the text-to-speech is pretty poor (mispronunciations abound, markup is ignored, punctuation is misinterpreted), usability is poor (can’t start at a user-selected location on a page for example), and it’s rather buggy, especially within Safari. It’s been that way for years, and it doesn’t seem like anyone at Apple is interested in making it a better experience.
Just an aside, it's a ton of work to make accessibility work on anything other than the most native looking apps, as different settings will move the UI unexpectedly and creates a lot of issues to be taken care of because of the screen size and different layouts.
The screen speak for example, sometimes you have to manually make sure they speak in the right order because of UI elements are placed non-standard way like if you have a label as name, and one as phone number side by side, the speak may start going down vertically, and you have to fix it by grouping it or force it speak it manually. Small example.
I struggle not to have a cynical take these days. Of course he cared about the ROI. The ROI is access to an underserved market, a halo effect, a new community of adherents, a new reason for customers to cross the moat into the ecosystem… a modest investment with a durable long term return in multiple categories.
I appreciate that it’s a win-win for Apple and for its customers, and I firmly believe that accessibility features serve everyone eventually. I’m glad that there are some billionaires who also see it that way.
I guess I just wish we didn’t have to rely on rare cases of billionaires finding it in their own best interest to happen to serve the rest of us. Especially when the actual accessibility work and everything else is actually done by a whole class of people that never make headlines just for leaving their jobs and being replaced.
I get what you’re saying but in my 15 year career the ONLY time I was allowed to meaningfully work on accessibility was when visa hired me to remediate visa checkout. And that was literally because a tier 1 bank was going to drop their contract over it.
The ROI Apple will get is when all of us turn 70 and need these features we’re ignoring now
It's obvious he has to be somewhat concerned about the ROI (or LOI) - if it cost ten times the value of the company to implement accessibility for the blind, it's not going to get implemented.
But the whole point of leadership should be to say "this doesn't bean count out perfectly, but we'll do it".
Cook was an able steward of Apple. Under his leadership the hardware side continued to iteratively improve nicely. Apple Silicon is good stuff. I am firmly embedded in the entire Apple ecosystem and have no reason to leave.
I do wish Apple used some of its massive cash hoard and market power to do better in software. The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it. Same with VisionPro although maybe that story is just early. The VisionPro store demo was the closest I felt to tech magic since I was a kid in the 80s. The price was high but not prohibitively so. Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.
I've lost track of the Apple Cash hoard which was insane some years ago but it would have been better for Apple to proactively invest in developing killer apps/uses for it's admirable hardware versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with.
Cook did his job. Apple's supply chain didn't collapse and almost kill the company like in the 90s. But I hope we see some of the old innovative spirit come back. I want that "wow" moment again where I don't just get an iteratively improved version of what I already have but something new!
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
The TV shows and stuff were never in competition for their money, they spent over $700 billion on stock buybacks in the last decade that's where it went, and they certainly could have spent a miniscule portion of that to ignite the iPad and AVP software scene. It will be interesting to see if they change approach with the folding iPhone, the rumour mill says it won't support iPad apps so it is primed for the same problem.
You can't throw money at software and get better software on the other side, see Meta(verse). Better software requires focus, which may mean spending less money instead of more.
I snicker at it as well, but then I also get emotional when people mention SGI, Commodore, Nintendo, SEGA.. so, there's that. Key difference, from my angle, is mostly the lack of people idols in the latter vs the former. Yes, there _are_ key people, but emphasis is more on products they made. Who knows. Interesting phenomenon in any case.
> The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced.
I don't follow Apple very closely, but given this is coming right after the AI leadership shakeup and at a time where Apple's AI story is being debated, the thought did pop into my mind...
This reminds me of Ballmer leaving Microsoft. Strictly by the numbers, he was a very good steward of the company at the time, but for various reasons (in his case, at least partially related to optics) he was considered unsuitable to lead Microsoft in its cloud era, and so he left and cleaned up a lot of house in the process.
I honestly don't know what the best AI story is for Apple, but I appreciate that they are pushing the envelope on on-device inference, however under-utilizied it may be at the moment. I think this is going to be essential to keep AI widely accessible in the long term, because everyone else is incentivized to try to lock it up in their data centers.
> When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI
Tim Cook, 2023:
> Lawyers suggested Cook himself was involved with how the warning to App Store customers would appear, recommending an update to the text that appears when the external links were clicked. In one version, that link warned customers they were “no longer transacting with Apple.” Later, the link was updated to subtly suggest there could be privacy or security risks with purchases made on the web.
He micro-managed minimizing the cost of developers using third party payments in apps, so his nonchalance to ROI is likely overstated - or changed significantly since 2014.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
This made me sad. I moved out to Silicon Valley a few months after Jobs passed. I remember feeling so hopeful and inspired that technology could make the world a better place, and I saw the same in other founders. Today I look around and feel ashamed of the tech industry. The founders don’t talk about changing the world anymore, they just have dollar signs in their eyes. It’s been a long time since I saw any technology that felt inspiring the same way it used to feel.
But I’m afraid the initial phase of tolerated negativity is over for this thread. Now we ought to nurture some corporate positivity.
I’ve recently expanded my meditation routine to sending gratitude and love to investors. I call it Mutual Profit Meditation. I visualize myself in a state of lovingly implementing whatever I’m currently doing at work (currently this is internal surveillance software, but that’s just arbitrary). I visualize myself in a Flow State, implementing tickets with ease and grace; meanwhile my manager is also thriving with whatever he is doing (currently managing implementing internal surveillance software, but this is arbitrary—could be anything); and I imagine investors in a Flow State golfing while their personal assistant says their stocks just went up.
A better world is possible. You could also not have to work a single day in your life.
> I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.
Go read what Gruber says about Trump on his social media, or even on the very blog you were just on. Safe to say he isn’t a fan. I think what he’s saying is that Cook has been quite effective at stroking Trump’s ego enough that the admin leaves Apple alone, which is absolutely true in my opinion.
In a different world where Cook messed up, it might be Apple (a Big Tech company with uber-liberal employees, marketing, and vibes, and an openly gay CEO!) being designated a supply chain risk, not Anthropic.
FWIW, Gruber consistently condemns Trump, and portrayed Cook's obsequious sycophancy as lamentable and highly questionable "take one for the team" acts Cook chose to do for the sake of Apple.
I have to give props for him for keeping basically a simple blog with the same layout and still consistently pulling in over $40,000/month in weekly sponsorships after 20+ years.
No drama, never in the spotlight much nowadays, just posting on his blog and raking in insane money.
Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades. That's one human generation, and it is also the span of time between when something first hits and when it sees its first retro revival. That isn't a coincidence.
I'm starting to get a little excited! This is going to be quite a decade.
> Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades.
Going back to 2008:
> But the most fun on the conference call came when he parried analysts’ questions about new product areas that Apple might or might not enter. A recurring question among Apple watchers for decades has been, “When is Apple going to introduce a low-cost computer?
> Mr. Jobs answered that decades-old complaint by stating, “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” He argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points.
There is more to it than just accounting for inflation. Apple has done a number of other things in the meantime, including designing and manufacturing their own chips, that have changed the economies of this. Until the very recent RAM price explosion, a sub $500 computer in 2008 was probably more like a sub $350 computer today.
> What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.
Wild take, indeed.
I seem to recall something about Apple releasing a sub-$600 laptop so popular that weeks after it was announced it's backordered for more than 30 days.
People want another "iphone"-level impact. I would bet there never will be. A device that does everything that we carry with us will also be like an evolution of the smart phone.
The only possibility I can imagine is a home robot that takes off.
The iPhone was basically the apotheosis of the Internet. I don’t think we will ever see another consumer product able to have an impact like that unless there is some other kind of “substructure” technology with a vast amount of untapped potential lying around.
Even other transformational technological advancements, like home robotics, I don’t think will be encompassed by a single device the way smartphones could. Home robots will be scattered across a bunch of different robotic devices doing independent activities. You’ll have purpose-built laundry robots, vacuum robots, cooking robots, driving robots, etc. but not a single company doing a single thing.
I never understood why daringfireball is such a famous blogger. They seem totally insane to me.
Claiming Steve Jobs was two steps ahead of cancer, the same guy who compared himself to Jesus and Gandi, the same guy who ate berries and nuts thinking he could flush the cancer out of his body, always two steps ahead huh?
> In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more.
I agree that I have no idea why people read this guy... Like in a "I must be genuinely out of the loop" type way. I feel like it's really romanticizing or fanboying.
Like I enjoy my apple products, and I'm sure glad Apple wasn't run by a psycho like Musk, and didn't put Ads in the OS like Microsoft. But I don't think any of this is heroic or anything. Like if anybody's a hero it's probably the open-source guys who do it for no money at all.
I was thinking about the upcoming regulation about replaceable batteries in the EU, and couldn't help but think that if I were Apple's CEO this would be a great time to make an orderly exit. Make no mistake, I'm not a fan of i-Devices' non-replaceable batteries, but I can't remember a single device with a lid for batteries on the back that was aesthetically in the same league as an iPhone.
As far as I know it should be pretty easy for Apple to comply with the regulation. The battery needs to be replaceable with standard or freely available tools and without adhesives. Many of Apple’s devices already meet this standard.
Edit: I'm not sure on the adhesives part. Apple uses an electrically-releasable adhesive in some of their newer products. The MacBook Neo doesn't use battery adhesive at all.
There are considerations in the law for water proofing, device safety, and battery durability (maintaining 80% capacity at 1000 cycles, which Apple already does). They do not require a pop open battery door on every device like it's 2005 again.
Apple already provides repair tools, guides, and replacement parts both to end users and third party technicians.
These regulations are complicated, but they aren't new and Apple isn't being blindsided with some catastrophe here.
I don't think any of the iPhone or iPads do. Their design is pretty tightly coupled to weird shaped, permanently attached batteries, from what I've heard.
To be clear, replaceable battery doesn't mean a lid like phones used to have. It means that you should be able to take the device apart with simple tools and remove the battery and pop in another one.
It actually probably affects other phone companies more than it affects Apple, as some of the others have very poor repairability
> The battery thing doesn’t apply to water resistant devices, so doesn’t matter for iPhone/Apple Watch.
I think that is not true. If you look at article 11.2 b it talks about
"appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is
regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are
intended to be washable or rinseable"
I don't think that applies to Apple devices. Also these special devices still need a battery replaceable by a professional.
The Microsoft Lumia 540 looks remarkably like a modern phone still and it had a fairly easily replaceable battery, because it allowed you to replace the back cover.
There's also the Lumia 920, which is arguably a nicer looking phone than anything Apple current have, also have a fairly easily replaceable battery, requiring you to remove just two screws.
Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of people in the more toxic parts of Apple's fanbase decrying USB-C for appearing too fragile, for being forced on them, for having a confusing set of standards (that last one is a fair point).
But I think, among Apple fans, USB-C has generally been a point of 'pride' for the past decade. Designed by Apple, put in a laptop first by Apple, best $10 USB-C-to-3.5mm DAC by Apple, etc.
Whether correct or not, I think Apple fans anticipate more severe tradeoff ramifications with a replacable battery. I think they're different things. (I don't think it's impossible though- the Fairphone has IP 55, I bet Apple can improve on that).
I'm not sure how they are related. USB-C was not really a technical challenge or had trade-offs. I'm not a hardware engineer but from what I've read, having an easily replaceable battery would degrade the water resistance of the phone.
Lightning is a superior physical design to USB-C (can't speak to the electrical part). Much like every major tech battle in history, however [1], the worse solution won because of ubiquity. I'm not particularly thrilled because I've had a USB-C connector irretrievably break off in a port once on a laptop but I'll make that trade for being able to use a single cable for all of my devices.
- Not an "Apple Faithful"
[1] VHS vs Beta, Doom vs Marathon, Zergling vs human, etc
The iPhone 4 was not water resistant. I remember owning one and being absolutely freaked out about it getting wet. Talk about an expensive paperweight.
By "rebuke" do you mean the thing where they didn't send any of their execs to be a guest on his WWDC podcast episode, presumably in retribution for his "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" post?
I don't see how that makes him irrelevant - I think it strengthens his credibility as someone willing to hold Apple accountable when he disagrees with their direction.
> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
I just have to call out how much this impacted my mom’s life. She’s 100% blind and has access because of her iPhone and iPad. Yes she learned JAWSs and literally took classes to do it. Every single windows update has made it so she’d have to retake this class. The iOS updates a rocky but she isn’t literally hamstrung.
My dad, damn near 80, is still happily using his 2012 i7 Mac mini I set him up with before moving away.
Anyway, excited for the future of Apple under Ternus and a hardware guy at the helm. What kind of a11y does robotics have? https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/elegnt-expressive...
Blind person using Apple products here, and at least for phones, I agree. I wouldn't say it's exclusively because of iPhone, but a large part of my independence is definitely it. There have been problems, bugs that go unfixed for years, MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster even though I do still use and enjoy the platform overall, and anything worth using can be criticized I think. But iOS has so many features built in that help me every single day. VoiceOver, but also all of the features utilizing vision like door detection, OCR, etc. they're in the magnifier as well so you don't need VoiceOver enabled to play with them, and I think a number of them also require a lidar sensor?
Anyway, my phone is such an important companion wherever I go that I keep several magsafe batteries on me whenever I leave the house for a significant time. It has made an absolutely huge difference in confidence. It is definitely one of the single most important assistive tech devices I have together with my computer.
Will drop this here in case you’re not aware of it (but I’m guessing you probably are), sorry if a bit off-topic.
I’m low-vision and made great use of Microsoft Soundscape until it got discontinued. I’d been waiting for an alternative for ages and didn’t realise one actually got released and is on the app store!
VoiceVista:
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/voicevista/id6450388413
> MacOS VoiceOver is quite a disaster
I am curious as to why (definitely not arguing, but I’m not blind, and only use it for testing).
I write (Apple) apps to be accessible. I would be grateful for guidance in making them as useful as possible.
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Excuse my language here but: I fucking love this! My mom pretty much mirrors your experience. I purposefully left out macOS and voiceover. I would almost call it unusable, sadly. The amount of key layering that voiceover and macOS in general has makes it very hard to use.
I’ve been hacking on a macOS app that leans on LLMs, vision use, and the AX macOS APIs to try and make voiceover less.. prickly haha. Hoping to visit in person soon to watch her use it :)
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> bugs that go unfixed for years
For what it's worth, text selection has been badly broken on iOS for at least a decade and autocorrect has been steadily getting worse for probably the same amount of time, and these are features that affect the mainstream segment of Apple users on a daily basis. Apple seems generally happy to let bugs go unaddressed for years and years regardless of how many people they affect or how often.
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The first time I saw a blind person using an iPhone, I was blown away. I follow some Apple engineers who work on accessibility, and they all seem very passionate about their work. It’s an area where I truly believe Apple is doing it to help people, not just for profit.
I’m not blind, but I’m using accessibility features like Speak Screen, and the text-to-speech is pretty poor (mispronunciations abound, markup is ignored, punctuation is misinterpreted), usability is poor (can’t start at a user-selected location on a page for example), and it’s rather buggy, especially within Safari. It’s been that way for years, and it doesn’t seem like anyone at Apple is interested in making it a better experience.
Just an aside, it's a ton of work to make accessibility work on anything other than the most native looking apps, as different settings will move the UI unexpectedly and creates a lot of issues to be taken care of because of the screen size and different layouts.
The screen speak for example, sometimes you have to manually make sure they speak in the right order because of UI elements are placed non-standard way like if you have a label as name, and one as phone number side by side, the speak may start going down vertically, and you have to fix it by grouping it or force it speak it manually. Small example.
I struggle not to have a cynical take these days. Of course he cared about the ROI. The ROI is access to an underserved market, a halo effect, a new community of adherents, a new reason for customers to cross the moat into the ecosystem… a modest investment with a durable long term return in multiple categories.
I appreciate that it’s a win-win for Apple and for its customers, and I firmly believe that accessibility features serve everyone eventually. I’m glad that there are some billionaires who also see it that way.
I guess I just wish we didn’t have to rely on rare cases of billionaires finding it in their own best interest to happen to serve the rest of us. Especially when the actual accessibility work and everything else is actually done by a whole class of people that never make headlines just for leaving their jobs and being replaced.
I get what you’re saying but in my 15 year career the ONLY time I was allowed to meaningfully work on accessibility was when visa hired me to remediate visa checkout. And that was literally because a tier 1 bank was going to drop their contract over it.
The ROI Apple will get is when all of us turn 70 and need these features we’re ignoring now
It's obvious he has to be somewhat concerned about the ROI (or LOI) - if it cost ten times the value of the company to implement accessibility for the blind, it's not going to get implemented.
But the whole point of leadership should be to say "this doesn't bean count out perfectly, but we'll do it".
Cook was an able steward of Apple. Under his leadership the hardware side continued to iteratively improve nicely. Apple Silicon is good stuff. I am firmly embedded in the entire Apple ecosystem and have no reason to leave.
I do wish Apple used some of its massive cash hoard and market power to do better in software. The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it. Same with VisionPro although maybe that story is just early. The VisionPro store demo was the closest I felt to tech magic since I was a kid in the 80s. The price was high but not prohibitively so. Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.
I've lost track of the Apple Cash hoard which was insane some years ago but it would have been better for Apple to proactively invest in developing killer apps/uses for it's admirable hardware versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with.
Cook did his job. Apple's supply chain didn't collapse and almost kill the company like in the 90s. But I hope we see some of the old innovative spirit come back. I want that "wow" moment again where I don't just get an iteratively improved version of what I already have but something new!
> versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with
I disagree with this take quite a bit. Yes, software could be better, but Apple TV+ has given dozens of shows the budget and freedom to produce some truly generation-defining art. Ted Lasso, Severance, and For All Mankind are huge stand-outs in their scope, depth, and ambition. For instance, the latter is produced by Sony, yet you see nearly zero product placement, which has been a hallmark of the studio for over a decade now. Putting gobs of money into storytelling yields purer, and therefore more compelling, narratives that will hold up well over time and represent the best of what we are capable of. At the same time, Apple TV+ as a subscription service is also a very convenient way for Apple to weather any ups and downs in the physical product categories.
The TV shows and stuff were never in competition for their money, they spent over $700 billion on stock buybacks in the last decade that's where it went, and they certainly could have spent a miniscule portion of that to ignite the iPad and AVP software scene. It will be interesting to see if they change approach with the folding iPhone, the rumour mill says it won't support iPad apps so it is primed for the same problem.
You can't throw money at software and get better software on the other side, see Meta(verse). Better software requires focus, which may mean spending less money instead of more.
As an outsider I still can't believe anybody gets this emotional about Apple.
I snicker at it as well, but then I also get emotional when people mention SGI, Commodore, Nintendo, SEGA.. so, there's that. Key difference, from my angle, is mostly the lack of people idols in the latter vs the former. Yes, there _are_ key people, but emphasis is more on products they made. Who knows. Interesting phenomenon in any case.
I can understand a "deeper bond with the product."
This is just blandly glazing a CEO.
"Cook has transformed Apple in his own image. The company is much more predictable now than it ever was, or could have been, under Jobs."
Not precisely what I would call "praise."
That is a generous assessment of Tim Cook’s reign at Apple and especially of his character. I found it a real pleasure to read.
> The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced.
I don't follow Apple very closely, but given this is coming right after the AI leadership shakeup and at a time where Apple's AI story is being debated, the thought did pop into my mind...
This reminds me of Ballmer leaving Microsoft. Strictly by the numbers, he was a very good steward of the company at the time, but for various reasons (in his case, at least partially related to optics) he was considered unsuitable to lead Microsoft in its cloud era, and so he left and cleaned up a lot of house in the process.
I honestly don't know what the best AI story is for Apple, but I appreciate that they are pushing the envelope on on-device inference, however under-utilizied it may be at the moment. I think this is going to be essential to keep AI widely accessible in the long term, because everyone else is incentivized to try to lock it up in their data centers.
Tim Cook, 2014:
> When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI
Tim Cook, 2023:
> Lawyers suggested Cook himself was involved with how the warning to App Store customers would appear, recommending an update to the text that appears when the external links were clicked. In one version, that link warned customers they were “no longer transacting with Apple.” Later, the link was updated to subtly suggest there could be privacy or security risks with purchases made on the web.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/apple-exec-phil-schiller-t...
Could you clarify your intended meaning in placing these quotes side by side?
Seems like they're just mentioning one action from Tim Cook take they personally didn't approve of.
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He micro-managed minimizing the cost of developers using third party payments in apps, so his nonchalance to ROI is likely overstated - or changed significantly since 2014.
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People want peaceful transfer of power :)
Nah the execs want feudalism, they should get all the things that come with feudalism.
Feudalism includes heirs and successors. Sometimes the transition is peaceful, sometimes not.
So long Tim Apple
Hello John Apple.
Hello John Appleseed.
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> “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
This made me sad. I moved out to Silicon Valley a few months after Jobs passed. I remember feeling so hopeful and inspired that technology could make the world a better place, and I saw the same in other founders. Today I look around and feel ashamed of the tech industry. The founders don’t talk about changing the world anymore, they just have dollar signs in their eyes. It’s been a long time since I saw any technology that felt inspiring the same way it used to feel.
This reads like he had a gun pointed to his head.
I don’t know what I would be need to be paid (via ad income or whatever means) to be a life and times of Big Tech X chronicler.
[flagged]
Very true. :)
But I’m afraid the initial phase of tolerated negativity is over for this thread. Now we ought to nurture some corporate positivity.
I’ve recently expanded my meditation routine to sending gratitude and love to investors. I call it Mutual Profit Meditation. I visualize myself in a state of lovingly implementing whatever I’m currently doing at work (currently this is internal surveillance software, but that’s just arbitrary). I visualize myself in a Flow State, implementing tickets with ease and grace; meanwhile my manager is also thriving with whatever he is doing (currently managing implementing internal surveillance software, but this is arbitrary—could be anything); and I imagine investors in a Flow State golfing while their personal assistant says their stocks just went up.
A better world is possible. You could also not have to work a single day in your life.
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> I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.
Right: https://www.axios.com/2025/01/03/tim-cook-apple-donate-1-mil...
Gruber is a joke
How does that link discredit what Gruber said there? It seems to me to back it up.
Go read what Gruber says about Trump on his social media, or even on the very blog you were just on. Safe to say he isn’t a fan. I think what he’s saying is that Cook has been quite effective at stroking Trump’s ego enough that the admin leaves Apple alone, which is absolutely true in my opinion.
In a different world where Cook messed up, it might be Apple (a Big Tech company with uber-liberal employees, marketing, and vibes, and an openly gay CEO!) being designated a supply chain risk, not Anthropic.
FWIW, Gruber consistently condemns Trump, and portrayed Cook's obsequious sycophancy as lamentable and highly questionable "take one for the team" acts Cook chose to do for the sake of Apple.
It strikes me as a fairly plausible analysis.
Regardless of whether you agree with his opinions, Gruber invented Markdown. The world would be a very different place today without it.
I have to give props for him for keeping basically a simple blog with the same layout and still consistently pulling in over $40,000/month in weekly sponsorships after 20+ years.
No drama, never in the spotlight much nowadays, just posting on his blog and raking in insane money.
> Regardless of whether you agree with his opinions, Gruber invented Markdown. The world would be a very different place today without it.
So?
And also...with substantial contributions from Aaron Swartz.
Not solely Gruber.
Gruber is only known for his Daring Fireball blog amongst everyone important, only techies care about his Markdown 'invention'.
Markdown is just a side project for him.
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Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades. That's one human generation, and it is also the span of time between when something first hits and when it sees its first retro revival. That isn't a coincidence.
I'm starting to get a little excited! This is going to be quite a decade.
> Until now Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades.
Going back to 2008:
> But the most fun on the conference call came when he parried analysts’ questions about new product areas that Apple might or might not enter. A recurring question among Apple watchers for decades has been, “When is Apple going to introduce a low-cost computer?
> Mr. Jobs answered that decades-old complaint by stating, “We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” He argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points.
* https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/2...
USD(2008) 500 = USD(2026) 760:
* https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
which is about what the Neo costs.
There is more to it than just accounting for inflation. Apple has done a number of other things in the meantime, including designing and manufacturing their own chips, that have changed the economies of this. Until the very recent RAM price explosion, a sub $500 computer in 2008 was probably more like a sub $350 computer today.
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> Apple hasn't addressed the mass market in nearly two decades
What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.
> What a wild take. I guess that explains the massive and growing popularity of iOS over that same time period.
Wild take, indeed.
I seem to recall something about Apple releasing a sub-$600 laptop so popular that weeks after it was announced it's backordered for more than 30 days.
Something something MacBook Neue or other…
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People want another "iphone"-level impact. I would bet there never will be. A device that does everything that we carry with us will also be like an evolution of the smart phone.
The only possibility I can imagine is a home robot that takes off.
The iPhone was basically the apotheosis of the Internet. I don’t think we will ever see another consumer product able to have an impact like that unless there is some other kind of “substructure” technology with a vast amount of untapped potential lying around.
Even other transformational technological advancements, like home robotics, I don’t think will be encompassed by a single device the way smartphones could. Home robots will be scattered across a bunch of different robotic devices doing independent activities. You’ll have purpose-built laundry robots, vacuum robots, cooking robots, driving robots, etc. but not a single company doing a single thing.
They're now building the best cheap laptop ever made. That feels mass market to me.
2.5 bn iOS installed base, clearly a niche market.
I never understood why daringfireball is such a famous blogger. They seem totally insane to me.
Claiming Steve Jobs was two steps ahead of cancer, the same guy who compared himself to Jesus and Gandi, the same guy who ate berries and nuts thinking he could flush the cancer out of his body, always two steps ahead huh?
Here's the full context of that quote:
> In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more.
I read two steps as a physical metaphor—i.e., it was following him closely—and not like a chess metaphor—I.e., two moves ahead.
Ignoring the Stever Jobs quip, I agree - I really don't think we should care of his opinions on Apple (or on most things).
I agree that I have no idea why people read this guy... Like in a "I must be genuinely out of the loop" type way. I feel like it's really romanticizing or fanboying.
Like I enjoy my apple products, and I'm sure glad Apple wasn't run by a psycho like Musk, and didn't put Ads in the OS like Microsoft. But I don't think any of this is heroic or anything. Like if anybody's a hero it's probably the open-source guys who do it for no money at all.
I read him because I frequently learn useful things from him that I didn't learn about anywhere else, and I enjoy his writing style.
I was thinking about the upcoming regulation about replaceable batteries in the EU, and couldn't help but think that if I were Apple's CEO this would be a great time to make an orderly exit. Make no mistake, I'm not a fan of i-Devices' non-replaceable batteries, but I can't remember a single device with a lid for batteries on the back that was aesthetically in the same league as an iPhone.
As far as I know it should be pretty easy for Apple to comply with the regulation. The battery needs to be replaceable with standard or freely available tools and without adhesives. Many of Apple’s devices already meet this standard.
Edit: I'm not sure on the adhesives part. Apple uses an electrically-releasable adhesive in some of their newer products. The MacBook Neo doesn't use battery adhesive at all.
There are considerations in the law for water proofing, device safety, and battery durability (maintaining 80% capacity at 1000 cycles, which Apple already does). They do not require a pop open battery door on every device like it's 2005 again.
Apple already provides repair tools, guides, and replacement parts both to end users and third party technicians.
These regulations are complicated, but they aren't new and Apple isn't being blindsided with some catastrophe here.
I don't think any of the iPhone or iPads do. Their design is pretty tightly coupled to weird shaped, permanently attached batteries, from what I've heard.
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And what, exactly, is your knowledge based on? I take it you've designed and shipped a working phone that meets IP68 standards for water intrusion?
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What? Which? Huh? Absolutely not. So many of them have adhesives I dont think almost any of them meet your criteria.
To be clear, replaceable battery doesn't mean a lid like phones used to have. It means that you should be able to take the device apart with simple tools and remove the battery and pop in another one.
It actually probably affects other phone companies more than it affects Apple, as some of the others have very poor repairability
The battery thing doesn’t apply to water resistant devices, so doesn’t matter for iPhone/Apple Watch.
There’s rumors that upcoming iPad models are water resistant, I suspect that’s the motivation for it.
> The battery thing doesn’t apply to water resistant devices, so doesn’t matter for iPhone/Apple Watch.
I think that is not true. If you look at article 11.2 b it talks about
"appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable"
I don't think that applies to Apple devices. Also these special devices still need a battery replaceable by a professional.
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/PE-2-2023-INIT...
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It’s no secret that Apple has for decades wanted a device with no ports at all.
I does apply.
Battery should be sold for 5 years+ after EoS and it still must be replaceable without proprietary tools, nor proprietary parts.
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The Microsoft Lumia 540 looks remarkably like a modern phone still and it had a fairly easily replaceable battery, because it allowed you to replace the back cover.
There's also the Lumia 920, which is arguably a nicer looking phone than anything Apple current have, also have a fairly easily replaceable battery, requiring you to remove just two screws.
Didn't the Apple Faithful say the same for usb-c?
Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of people in the more toxic parts of Apple's fanbase decrying USB-C for appearing too fragile, for being forced on them, for having a confusing set of standards (that last one is a fair point).
But I think, among Apple fans, USB-C has generally been a point of 'pride' for the past decade. Designed by Apple, put in a laptop first by Apple, best $10 USB-C-to-3.5mm DAC by Apple, etc.
Whether correct or not, I think Apple fans anticipate more severe tradeoff ramifications with a replacable battery. I think they're different things. (I don't think it's impossible though- the Fairphone has IP 55, I bet Apple can improve on that).
I'm not sure how they are related. USB-C was not really a technical challenge or had trade-offs. I'm not a hardware engineer but from what I've read, having an easily replaceable battery would degrade the water resistance of the phone.
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The Apple Faithful will always defend whatever Apple does, it's not terribly useful to listen to them.
It's the Apple Faithful who criticize Apple that are worth listening to.
Lightning is a superior physical design to USB-C (can't speak to the electrical part). Much like every major tech battle in history, however [1], the worse solution won because of ubiquity. I'm not particularly thrilled because I've had a USB-C connector irretrievably break off in a port once on a laptop but I'll make that trade for being able to use a single cable for all of my devices.
- Not an "Apple Faithful"
[1] VHS vs Beta, Doom vs Marathon, Zergling vs human, etc
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The iPhone 4 was easily disassembled with screwdrivers...
The iPhone 4 was not water resistant. I remember owning one and being absolutely freaked out about it getting wet. Talk about an expensive paperweight.
> "easily"
Yoikes!
Yea, the dog shit pentalobe screwdrivers.
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I was not surprised at all that he's working with that fash Ben Thompson
you met john gruber at apple?
Many times, yes. He's on campus a few times a year and almost always attends WWDC, the private parties, etc.
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He has always been a washed up irrelevant grifter.
The only thing he is known for is critiquing about Apple and harping on about Trump when it is a slow news day.
The day that Apple rebuked him last year sent his “blog” into the down path of irrelevancy.
I am sure there are more people in Apple who dislike this guy.
What's the grift?
By "rebuke" do you mean the thing where they didn't send any of their execs to be a guest on his WWDC podcast episode, presumably in retribution for his "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" post?
I don't see how that makes him irrelevant - I think it strengthens his credibility as someone willing to hold Apple accountable when he disagrees with their direction.
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