Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing(stratechery.com) John Ternus to become Apple CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219 - April 2026 (1213 comments) |
Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing(stratechery.com) John Ternus to become Apple CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219 - April 2026 (1213 comments) |
counterfactuals are hard
If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).
I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.
I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.
As long as they can go back to simplicity in the process. Apple has been shoving functionality into iOS for a long time now, but it's a haphazard mess. The settings app is a disaster of clutter, and searching for settings doesn't work half the time. It needs a complete rearchitecting before they start shoving more functionality into the phone.
Did you know that iPhones have tap, double tap, and triple tap (on the back of the phone) functionality that can be set to custom actions? I didn't until recently, its buried deep in the Accessibility options for...reasons? This could be promoted to a core feature, with a dedicated space in settings instead of buried.
I'm sure there's other useful functionality hidden behind the settings mess too.
After a year, the swipe up is still a nuisance. It often doesn't work, and I have to swipe up several times.
IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."
Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.
I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.
Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.
Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.
As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.
Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.
I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.
Nahh, they're backing off liquid glass as fast as they can without just rolling back to macOS 15... Tons of people inside apple hate it, and have been very critical of the design leadership. Alan Dye was the design king behind liquid glass, and he was pushed out (or just left, stories vary). His replacement, Stephen Lemay, is widely praised by the folks who hate liquid glass.
iOS 27 and macOS 27 in June will probably have Liquid glass turned back down to 6 or 7, and will at least remove some of the most glaring usability issues.
Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.
I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)
1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;
2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and
3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.
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3. Agreed that Siri stagnated, was already surpassed by Alexa a decade ago, and even moreso by LLMs today. However, some advantages of Apple Silicon have panned out for AI—e.g., using unified memory to run ML models, instead of requiring dedicated VRAM for a separate GPU.
Its been trash since day 1.
Ive was the one behind the 15k watches. He wanted the in store experience to be like a jewelry store. They also brought in his friend that had been doing hi end watches and bands to help with the watch design. Beonce got an 18kt gold link band along with her watch. You can only imagine Ive’s glee at the watches being on the cover of Vogue.
Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.
Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?
Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up)
They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.
Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it.
Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.
They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.
They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house.
Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
are you imaging them creating whole new devices?
Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.
The biggest hurdle in the health hardware game is regulatory. If they can make a noninvasive blood sugar monitor and get it approved they will both print money and help a ton of people.
+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.
Don't worry, I got it.
At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.
Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.
As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.
Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.
Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012.
You could call them a "frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet" but we don't even say that about AMD or Intel despite supporting Linux and shipping GPGPU architectures already. Apple's position in the greater AI/GPGPU industry is widely accepted to be forfeit. Even Google's AI hardware strategy is closer to the frontier than Apple's.
Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.
I think Apple understands that the moat in AI is the UX, something that historically they've been very good at. The model is a commodity and I suspect they will quite happily go with another provider if Google doesn't work or buy a company in the inevitable AI fire sale if they can see a good fit.
And later:
"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."
Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).
I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).
But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
They already have very passionate users stringing together ultra high throughput inference systems, using highspeed thunderbolt mesh topologies, or just using single high memory ultra chips.
But Apple has some very interesting patents out there to keep scaling up! Holy cow! It's very exciting to think of a hardware guy getting to pioneer this company forward, that has the systems visioneering to navigate really wild systems building. https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mif...
This feels like such a tension though, of having these wildly bleeding edge systems, that you are trying to shoehorn in to your friendly Think Different consumer brand & product offerings. Meanwhile Apple is out of stock for their new iPhone chip powered laptop. And their high end Ultra. There's this bifurcation of the market. It feels weird imagining Apple trying to serve both sides well. How Ternus can navigate an age of brave mew hardware is exciting but also seems so high tension. An Apple that no longer serves the mass market, that starts doing more, is wild to consider.
He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.
Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
I'm not so sure it's smart to rely on others for such a major paradigm shift
I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
While it may not have sold millions of units and been a household staple.
It certainly focused the entire org on manufacturing a suite of chips and hardware that are on a completely different level than their competitors. Apple's now has a clear advantage in all dimensions that matter: compute, power consumption, size, capabilities, etc.
Apple Vision helped created a moat that will be hard for anyone else to cross for at least a decade.
The flops include the mid-to-late 2010s thinness era of Macbooks. Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air. At least this got corrected but it was a flop era.
I think AI is Tim Apple's biggest flop. Apple can make their own hardware. Apple could've invested in their own hardware like Google's TPUs. Siri has really stagnated. If anybody should be doubling down on an AI assistant, it's Apple.
It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.
Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerbnYhhw7s
This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.
I'll take both of their opinions with a grain of salt, thank you. Have fun fighting Gog and Magog!
While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.
Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.
Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.
Here's another quote for you from Graham Greene:
"Sooner or later," Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, "one has to take sides - if one is to remain human."
We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
Every time that i watch that keynote i think that Jobs should have started that list with the internet communication device thing, then the touch ipod and mobile phone last. The audicience responded to the internet device with a "meh" after the mobile phone announcement.
e.g. Apple buys moonshot or z.ai
I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).
Hilarious quote from her Wikipedia page:
> Shotwell has received particular praise from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson for her "phenomenal" leadership of SpaceX as it developed the Falcon 9 into the "workhorse" of the space launch sector.[19] Nelson had reportedly been concerned in 2022, after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, that it would be a distraction at SpaceX, but became more comfortable after meetings with Shotwell left him feeling reassured that she was in charge of day-to-day operations.
I almost deferred to the classic jab about their being a member of the "cult of Steve Jobs" but then I read their comment about being an intern at Apple University and realized the author was simply institutionally indoctrinated. Clearly I jest but...
Apple did not invent the smartphone. It didn't invent the music player. It didn't invent the portable tablet. It didn't invent the personal information manager.
This was not a zero to one. To some extent you could say he even reused some of his own playbook from his attempt to make the iMac a cult hit. I do think he introduced the right product at the right time, but I think it was his strategy, or obsession, with perfecting the user experience that was definitely a zero to one.
They take great ideas, cut half the functionality out, put it in a shiny white and aluminium case and make it fashionable.
That this is a foundational idea for anything is nauseating...
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
0. Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/20/palantir-goes-mask-off-f...
Apple had been developing their own maps solution already and accelerated it to land before the end of their existing agreement with Google, when Apple would have to accept Google's terms to continue usage. Google apparently had no idea negotiations had fallen through until the keynote.
It was going to ship as beta quality anyway (they were merging multiple sources of third party data), but the timeline meant it became a replacement in whatever form it was in.
I'm not really seeing it though. Apple is more hardware and holistic experience, they aren't traditionally pushing the boundaries of "web-scale" nerd software. As long as they can keep on top of the devices that end up in people's hands they will have a place and don't need to be an AI powerhouse. They're doing just fine using Google Search.
And early failures is much more acceptable than I think most people expect.
Maybe in the US and a handful of other countries. See the replies on this thread talking about various issues with using Apple Maps elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219#47840616.
This must be a hallucination because it's still a wasteland here.
The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.
Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.
Aren't the notification summaries just that? When they came out there were lots of examples of their horrifying results (summarizing Messages threads to sound like family members died etc)
Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.
Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.
Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:
* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems
Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.
Ha, we keep on asking that at my current company, and they keep on doing it anyway. What is it they say the definition of insanity is, again?
Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.
I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!
Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.
As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.
So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.
So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.
Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.
Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).
That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.
No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff.
The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS
Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?
An argument can be made that Apple nearly singlehandedly advanced China's consumer electronics manufacturing by 20 years, and hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing while doing it.
China doesn't allow key AI engineers and scientists to go overseas. They literally have exit bans and confiscated passports. The west could have ordered companies like Apple to stop sending engineers, banned companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce from building factories in China, and retained massive wealth, expertise, and national strategic advantage, but allowed it to be pissed away for quarterly profits.
> Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever?
fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y
The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.
even still, China has westernized a lot over the last 20 years, both in quality of life and in social values
regardless of values, offshoring valuable skills is a way to bring about more equality, but not a way to ensure American dominance
I don't know that American dominance is a good thing
What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?
In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques that would justify not doing the Green Revolution).
In the case of Apple in China, this was not a one-sided transaction, both sides benefited massively.
Now I do think we should be encouraging the US to compete more, which was what the Biden administration was really good at getting going. But mere ban of commerce, and not providing the industrial policy for US industry to catch up China's excellence, leave us in a world where we are all poorer, both the US and China.
The world is not a zero-sum place, capitalism and technological change are in fact quite positive sum, and when we act like everything is zero-sum we are all worse off.
Actually, this is fairly standard via export control laws. When a certain technology is deemed critical, it can be put under export control. When I worked in the semiconductor space, some of the advanced tech we had was subject to these laws. Countries came under different tiers - we could freely discuss the tech with most European countries, but had to be a lot more careful with China and Russia. We couldn't/wouldn't hire Chinese/Russian nationals unless they already had a green card (the legal process was too challenging).
Of course, not saying electronics manufacturing should have been in that bucket. But there is plenty of precedence.
The reality is PRC already had magnitude more high end manufacturing talent by the time Apple entered PRC already and they're the ones that made Apple scribbles at scale possible. The stories of PRC manufacturers having stupendously fast line turn arounds, making changes in hours should disabuse the notion they needed learning, when they already knew how to execute at scale. Apple's derisked manufacturing in other countries still can't do this, PRC was doing this on day one - see overnight turnaround to retool iPhone line from plastic to glass screen 20 years ago. Apple went to PRC because PRC already had competently trained manufacturing workforce, and only one that can operate at speed + scale. Apple buying a few 1000 CNC machines doesn't tip the balance remotely in Apple's favour - if sector moved towards CNC and tighter tolerances, PRC industry would have simply followed, Apple $$$ is nice, but PRC doesn't need Apple $$$ - capex is not a bottleneck for their system. And Apple would have never push enough goods and make $$$ without PRC.
(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)
The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.
"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".
You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.
I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php
My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php
(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)
You can wait until improving hardware eventually solves the local LLM problem but imho that’s too passive.
What if someone cracks the problem of splitting LLM inference effectively between local device and server? Think about it. ChatGPT can do calculus. Is that useful to most people? No. Can you currently effectively modularize an LLM and load knowledge on demand? No.
I’m fairly bearish on the use cases for current AI. The biggest is actually just firing people and suppressing labor costs.
But a personas assistant, at least in theory, is something people want, even if it’s just to effectively obey voice commands. If Apple loses to Google here it’s going to be bad for Apple. I think they have to do more than they’re seemingly doing.
llms will be the new search and you'll delegate to them a lot, because it's so convenient (not saying it will be great!).
Precisely, because we should be thinking about why he's saying and doing it. It's not just because he likes the sound of his own voice.
There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:
* https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye...
AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).
- apple public cloud
Lets go!
Apple Silicon is not used for inference in the majority of OpenClaw setups. macOS is popular for OpenClaw, but you can get the same results on a Linux, Windows or even ChromeOS client. There are OpenClaw desktops that run on a Raspberry Pi.
In the broader inference/training market, Apple Silicon is a non-entity compared to systems like the GB100.
It just happens to be popular among openclaw users who don't understand how it works. Which is the perfect target audience.
Supposedly, the reason there weren't more iPod competitors back in the day was that Apple already had negotiated exclusive rights at pre-negotiated prices to buy a big chunk of the flash memory that otherwise would have been on the market.
I'd argue that it was from 2018, and it's a different world today. Since then, Microsoft has made a pretty extreme pivot towards the "do things for you" camp and they seem to have become absolutely convinced that "AI" was vaguely the thing they wanted to do for you.
Siri is STILL utter garbage. It's like a POC so many times. Its accent recognition for me is horrible, and it feels like so many of its interaction types are hardcoded, like "Do X at this time" "Sure". "Do Y (very similar thing) at this time" "I can't do that".
And while I get (but don't necessarily always agree with) per-app isolation, it leads to absolutely comical things. My fiance has Siri turned off. Uses CarPlay. Can text me with voice commands. But she can be navigating somewhere, and say "Hey, find me the nearest Starbucks" and Siri will say, with a straight face, while the phone is navigating her somewhere, "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".
Always was. If Apple had an easy trick to make it any good or useful, they would have already. LLMs aren't that, so Siri remains what it is.
I am doing the only thing I can: to vote with my wallet.
My current phone is a Sony Xperia and it has the headphone jack. I am listening to Hi-Fi music from Tidal right now, using the jack, and wired Crinacle earbuds.
How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.
As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc.
Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc.
I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade.
The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore.
Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
To get that 90s, early 2000's innovation, Apple needs to somehow think like a small company (this is near impossible) or actually be multiple smaller companies.
If the new CEO is smart, he could start in-house startups with Apple funding and infrastructure.
Stated preferences vs revealed preferences.
Polling / focus groups vs sales.
You never really know what works until it works.
If that doesn't help, there are some settings you can try:
1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Under Custom Actions, set Single-Tap to Home. Now you have a home button. You can move this button anywhere on your screen and adjust its "Idle Opacity" so it's less distracting when not in use.
2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose Double Tap or Triple Tap. Select Home from the list of actions. Now you can tap on the back side of your phone to go home.
There's also Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch Accommodations, but that's more about preventing accidental touches and swipes, so that would probably make the situation worse for you.
This new direction didn’t become clear to both sides of the aisle in the US until a year or two into Xi’s tenure. If someone else other than Xi had been chosen, we would likely have a very different China today.
We could perhaps outsource mass precision manufacturing of aluminum iphone and macbook cases to Germany, or try to build up the industry over time in the US that would enable such manufacturing. But such multi-year delays that are kinda-sorta in the interest of a nation but not at all in the immediate interest of a private company and US consumers, imposed by politicians that have not bothered to dive deep into the issue but are instead responding to half-informed populist revolt, seem like a dangerous path.
If something like that were to be done, a carrot approach is far more likely to yield better outcomes than the stick approach of export controls, IMHO.
You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts
I have worked at all top three firms, and never had engineers come close to being customer oriented.
I've worked at 2/3, and sure, there are shit product teams all over FAANG, but you can always decide to go work on one of the ones that does proper engineering
Except for the time we were indisputably not allies with Japan and were with China.
Boeing is a US company. RR is, last time I looked, a UK company. "The West" isn't a coherent political unit.
Besides, this is the exact opposite of the FDI strategy of past decades. How far should the ban on overseas FDI go? Ban on investing in South America? Full capital controls? As you mention, passport confiscation (!) for key nationals? I don't think any of this would have worked for "the west" at any point past about 1970, or even post-WW2.
Corporations operate at the discretion of the local government. Corporate charters could be revoked or threatened to be revoked to preserve national interests.
I'm not saying that I agree with or recommend the mechanisms that China uses. I'm saying that the West actually does have alternative mechanisms if it wanted to try.
As it stands, we are now under a ticking clock before China creates competitive, commercial and military airplane industry and begins to massively undercut Airbus and Boeing, and it was our own companies that wound the clock.
I think you're overstating your point a bit; I'm not convinced that the tens of millions are that much worse off than their counterparts in poorer parts of China. Was there ever a massive assembly plant for iPhones in the US?
(also, everyone in this subthread seems to be arguing that the US should be at least in part a planned economy with state-directed industry?)
One thing you can always count on about HN are extremely out of touched tech workers that ignore poverty in their country that they helped propagate because "fuck you, I've got mine."
Hopefully it doesn't come back to bite you in the next decade.
Creating some sort of internal incubator that encourages experimentation enough to innovate but with enough accountability to not be a purely academic R&D lab is difficult I'm sure.
This is why I mentioned elsewhere in thread - Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?
Not sure if people with closer experience has an opinion on if that model actually works our not. I suppose we have gotten some real world output from it right?
You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space.
The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.
There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household).
I have had since the early days of IoT/homekit, various security cameras, doorbell, HomePod, thermostats, lights, switches, all that stuff. Honestly setting it up and maintaining it is more of a chore than an excitement. I upgrade when something breaks, begrudgingly. I do not breathlessly follow new releases ready to pre-order the new iteration. No one in the house really uses it except me, unless I happen to get up late / go to bed early and the lights need to be told to turn on/off.
In some ways it's not even that new technology wise. My dad had various light control panel via X10 and similar protocols going back to the early 90s if not sooner. Similarly was a sort of set-it-and-forget-it situation
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hey-alexa-why-costing-amazon-...
I can’t find a publicly attributable source now.
The value of IoT that has been unlocked is, at best, minimal convenience. It's not unlike the metaverse: Large investment has been made, but there's no killer apps. I cannot even begin to imagine anything I'd consider high value all that home automation could do for me. The best case is like power windows in cars: Better than having to turn the handle like back in the days, and nowadays cheap enough to have 100% of the market, but, at best, a commodity, as nobody cares about which power window mechanism is being used.
Given how low the ceiling is, and how annoying an IoT's ecosystem's technical problems are, Apple shouldn't touch the market with a ten foot pole.
I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...
The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.
The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.
Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.
Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.
Mostly because it's fragmented and Apple was nowhere to be found with their initially quite good and promising but then completely abandoned HomeKit.
In 2026 I still can't have my always-on supercomputer in the form of AppleTV to do anything with any of the devices at home. And Home app is extremely stupid, extremely limited, and requires a PhD in rocket science to figure out how to do anything with it (espceially since they just bolted on Shortcuts totally on the side).
Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.
The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.
In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.
Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.
If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.
Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.
Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?
Mounts, cases, smart locks, thermostats, bulbs…where is the “iPhone moment” for this sector? It’s all small beans now. Why would Apple want to compete here?
Personally I think any big moves in this area would be predicated on a next-level Siri companion. Stop futzing around with scenes, buttons, switches and pairing devices and just tell your house how it should work.
Is Apple willing to trade-off some of the steady reliability of their earnings stream for product lines that may be real contributors 5-10+ years out is the question? I think under Cook the answer to that was no.
I think staying on this path will eventually lead diminishing returns and endanger them long term.
Nobody is going to hand control of their home to a system that was the dumbest smart assistant 14 years ago and is still behind everyone else.
It’s amazing to me that Apple announced vaporware that they didn’t know how to build yet. Nobody did, but Apple usually bides their time making it work before the reveal.
They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
We ordered a MacBook Neo for my partner and she had to wait three weeks for it despite the company obviously expecting strong interest in the product at launch.
> The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS
Pandemic and supply chain issues surely contributed to that. It can't be cited without context.
The Mac M1 came out on practically the same day as the PS5, so I think it is a great example. The M1 was available in volume when they said it was going to be. What did Tim Cook do? That. Millions of products available when they said it was going to be, during pandemic-disrupted shipping.
It's not like Microsoft's head of gaming has no bearing on their horrible mismanagement of the studios they bought and shuttered. That person was responsible. Do I know what they did day to day? No. But there's someone new in that position and I think that tells us something.
The easiest example I've found is comparing a manager to a conductor in an orchestra.
Most people will only see a conductor on the night of the performance, and they don't look like they do much, but a lot of the work is actually done before the night.
The main issue is that because there are so many musicians in an orchestra, it's hard to have an overall view of what everyone's doing and if a piece sounds good.
The main job of the conductor is to be the person who has that big picture. They make sure everyone is playing in time and in key. And if they're tricky parts of the piece - they make sure it's played properly. If it isn't, they hold individual practice sessions to make those parts smoother. If some musicians aren't performing well, they have conversations with them and maybe let them go. If there aren't enough musicians they hire more. And if the pieces aren't working they change them from the millions of pieces available to play. And they have to do it in a way so as not to make the orchestra angry and all quit!
So to answer your question what does Tim Cook actually do? Does he tell his staff the priority is moving xyz units, does he come up with the core strategy, does he pick up good ideas from his staff. The answer is most likely yes to all the above - but that's such a small part of it.
The big thing he needs to do is have a vision for how he wants the business to be, and then do those parts you mentioned, plus the hundreds of other tasks and decisions to get it there.
Some critique, but widely praised
I don't know how much of the details were his, but taking the risk and seeing it through deserves a lot of credit.
For most companies (even now), the idea of JIT manufacturing is terrifying. How will they guarantee there isn't a slowdown and you'll have a shortage at Christmas (or in any random month)? Most CEOs like always having some inventory. They went in the opposite direction and decided the ideal case was not having any inventory.
They are willing to pay billions up front to get production lines built to their specifications and guarantee that they will buy X products over Y time, in exchange for exclusivity.
For example, when Apple decided they wanted to use CNC aluminum milling to build laptop frames, no factory could do that at their scale and desired precision.
And yes, you can only do that if you have lots of cash flowing around, but that’s not sufficient. You also need a process that gives you a very good chance that such investments pay out.
At Apple's scale, you basically can't operate like this. Placing an order for 50 million iPhone screens is not a consumer-grade request, you have to customize and coordinate your orders to get all 50 million delivered. It's hard to see the genius in this, the advantages you've listed are all courtesy of scale and liquidity.
https://www.amazon.com/Apple-China-Capture-Greatest-Company/...
It both captures Tim's genius and the genius of the person much geniuser than him: Xi Jinping.
Looking today, Trump is as much a symptom as the problem. He didn't get there just because of who he is, he rode on the backs of all the people who voted for him, the state legislators who gerrymandered for him, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, etc...
People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.
https://nesteggcare.com/why-would-you-delay-the-start-of-soc...
Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.
That’s why I argue that’s something Apple does different. Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung go to a manufacturer and ask them to make what they know they can make, preferably at cut throat price, while Apple goes there and says “we think you can make this, too; let’s discuss how we can get there, and how much money you’ll need for it”.
Of course, reality is more nuanced. Samsung, for instance, experiments a lot with folding displays (I expect Apple does, too, but is not satisfied with them yet), but I think it is correct in the large picture. Other manufacturers would say “we need a laptop body; let’s see who can build them, and what quality they have, Apple says “we want a laptop body made of one piece of aluminum; let’s see who we can work with to make that possible”.
And yes, having loads of money and high-margin products helps in that regard, but as I said and the post I reply to seems to acknowledge, that’s not sufficient.
> No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.
I don't think you are familiar with Samsung's ball game, including them in a list like this.
Every single low margin PC company that exists now like Dell, HP etc were much more profitable than an almost bankrupt Apple in 1997. They had no vision and decided to compete on price. It doesn’t matter why they are barely profitable low margin businesses.
Seeing there revenue vs profits, they should take Michael Dell’s (bad) advice to Jobs when he came back - “shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders” who could make more money in treasury bonds.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to restrict “successful” to iPhone-level unit sales and Apple profit margins.
But Dell’s profits cratered so bad that they took the company private and profits are still nothingburgers.
Sony just sold off controlling interest of its TV division.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/son...
Have you checked the profits of the other PC sellers?
A quick Google search shows that LG profits were $2.4 billion dollar (converted) and down its last fiscal year.
So yes, dental/vision was a wash versus private medical insurance. There are some other therapies I no longer have any coverage for under Medicare.
The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?
At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.
I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.
Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.
Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.
Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).
And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa and had no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).
The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were sub 100.
If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.
Apple today is just too risk adverse.
Vision Pro sells for >3 grand. Their strategy still seems consistent with exactly what you describe.
There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.
I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
Recalls, warranty items, maintenance, accident repairs, etc.
Hyundai still can't sort out a decent experience for their in-house luxury brand Genesis all these years later.
there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.
In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.
You're almost certainly right, and this is a good way to show just how remarkably big the AI buildout is.
They tried. But the irony is MS is more deeply ingrained. I worked a short stint in a shop that no joke ran Windows server to manage a whole floor of Macs using Active Directory. The only other Windows PC was a machine hooked to a large format printer. I spoke to the admin (dyed in the wool Apple user) who stated that as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.
Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.
Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...
Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).
They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.
But one product. I don't know man, I think they became chicken of anything grand. It is not like it was a $35000 product.
If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?
They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.
They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.
Almost all their sales are $800-$4000 items. Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa? Too chickenshit these days. Good reason to be, of course. It is just not in their DNA anymore.
> Except the iteration on it.
It’s only 2 years old and they’ve released version 2. I’m not sure the Vision Pro has enough market to keep making it, but it was a big new bet.
> And people we aghast at the cost.
Didn’t you say they should be releasing crazy expensive stuff?
> If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?
This isn’t really what happened with Lisa and Mac. Mac wasn’t the cheap Lisa. It was a totally different product addressing a different market and initially incompatible. The fact that Mac looked a lot like Lisa was driven by the fact that Jobs was yanked off the Lisa project by the board so he hijacked the Mac project and made it a similar looking system. This was internal politics, not a consistent strategy.
> They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.
Why? So they could be burning billions in capital on trying to break into a highly competitive, low margin market? This isn’t really Apple’s DNA.
> They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.
Again, why? What’s the market for this? This seems like a low value market segment. They don’t even make servers anymore because the market wasn’t profitable.
> Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa?
Lisa was a product of a different time. Computers cost way more in general. (The Macintosh was nearly $8k in today’s dollars.) It was also not commercially successful.
If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.
“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”
Outside of the premium brand/build quality, I think Tesla was actually a successful proof of concept of what they could have done or could do. Computer/software-powered, battery-charged, integrated hardware/software, principled product tradeoffs, new retail model, advances in charging technology. Big parallels to the first iPhone. You even heard the same complaints from consumers when the first iphone came out ("I want my buttons/physical controls back", "The battery/range dies too quickly"). Apple may not want to be in the car business, but I think Tesla showed that cars could just be computers now
But I think Tesla shows the limits of Apple’s approach in the car market: Imagine a Model S that is maybe 50% better across design, materials, features, UX. That’s still not a “leapfrog” product the way the iPhone was years ahead of the smartphone competition when it was launched. It couldn’t justify also being 50% more expensive.
And of course the virtual function keys were awful.
But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.
After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.
He's not doing commoditised consumer design any more. He has enough money now, so he no longer needs to. The most consumer-oriented work recently has been an interior for the new Ferrari Luce EV.
I agree his post-Jobs years at Apple were somewhere between mediocre and hopeless (gradients...) and not many people seem to miss him.
Although to be fair, he wasn't responsible for Liquid Glass, which has set the bar for design failure at Apple to new depths.
The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.
Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.
Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
Still, the M series laptops are so much better than offerings from competitors I am hesitant to even put them in the same product category.
Happy to have an unambitious reliable workhorse where the battery lasts two days.
I'd actually be happier if it was even less ambitious, and made the graphics bits less powerful. But that would likely be a bad business move.
The duality of Man
MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.
It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.
The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.
But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.
It wouldn't be HN if someone didn't dredge up a decade-old axe to grind.
Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.
That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.
I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.
I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing.
The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS!
Honestly it was the last Mac I think I've used that physically delighted me. I usually cringe when I hear executives talking about wanting to "delight" customers, but that shitty little slow, overpriced Macbook with one USB-C port, absolutely delightful. Like sure, Apple Silicon was amazing but in a different sort of way, in a "wow that V12 engine sure is powerful" and not "this entire car is amazing" way. The Retina MacBook was delightful even though my nerd brain knew that as a computer, looking at raw specs, was a complete dud (though mine had 16GB of RAM, nyah nyah, take that Macbook Neo!)
And now that the vision Apple had for that device actually came true?? That we live in a mostly mobile, USB-C world where my company's conference rooms all have AirPlay and most monitors have built-in USB-C input/hubs? That they could put an ultra cut down iPhone chip in it and even if it was only as fast as a 5 year old Macbook that would still make it as fast as an M1? Oh well, now we don't get one! You will have a brutalist cold slab of a Macbook Air or a pathetically locked down iPad appliance and be happy!
Perhaps it was a great product because of those flaws, those horrible compromises they had to make to get it that small. All I can hope is that there is some skunkworks project somewhere in Cupertino, maybe even unsanctioned, of hardware designers asking themselves "what would we have to figure out if we made it 0.25 inches thick?" or "Could we get a Macbook down to 1 pound?". I want a product whose development team were told "Make a Macbook. Priority 1. light, priority 2. thin, priority 3. there is no priority 3"
Joz, Ternus, if you're reading this, I would also pay huge sums of money for a modern 11-12" ultralight Macbook. I would write Apple a blank check for one, name your price.
I’ve just been buying expensive parts on eBay. I have two 16GB motherboards now and a few bottom cases and screens. Shoot me an email.
Same deal with the blank check. I carry a $7k MBP, I would have paid that for a much lower spec machine if it were stupid tiny.
Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.
It also could get mad hot on my 2016 MBpro when video editing. Still love(d) that computer though…
And I had to look down every time I had use it. I am glad to see it go.
The arrogance on hacker news is insane, or the self agrandizement and misunderstanding of how rare that is.
You have likely never done 1/1,000,000,000th of the scale or impact of this designer and then make flippant remarks that belay your ignorance of the matter.
I really would like to understand what your thought process is here. This is quite litterally like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty poor Basketball player and claiming Jerry Reinsdorf was somehow the real reason he succeeded.
In case Jony Ive or others like him, we simply do not know how many dozens or hundreds of very talented engineers and designers worked relentlessly under him so he can do beautiful presentations in British English.
Another person comes to my mind is Marissa Meyers. "Brilliant Executive" known for keeping Google Home page clean that's visited by billion people. But we all know how great she was when ended up at Yahoo.
Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?
It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.
Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.
While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.
For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.
To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.
Ive should have left shortly after the death of Steve. He was creatively spent at Apple.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
How do you justify such a take?
Its all also well published and covered fact. I am genuinely shocked someone could have such a insistantly foolish take.
It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons.
This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function.
Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.
Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.
If you locate them in the middle it could be a seamless "press, drag, release" action
I also would not mind it in addition to regular keys, there are some great interactions in there. But it's an extremely poor keyboard-emulator. Splitting off the escape key made a huge improvement, but it's nowhere near enough.
What a nightmare. ‘Mad hot’ even on… just being alive.
Asside from your complete ignorance of the history at play, (Ive refounded Apple with Jobs) you seem to not understand what a 'mediocre' designer is capable of and how mind-bendinly hard it was to design the imac, ipad, iphone and apple watch
I genuinely can't believe you could be so wild to beleive such a thing. It becomes frankly stupid to the point of disrespectful of the work individuals put into their craft and the success they can find.
There is no person in the world outside of someone in this forum who would claim that somehow this was 'luck'.
HN has truly become one of the most toxically stupid places on the web.
Your take on crediting Ive with the success of Apple's product line would be exactly like crediting some designer at Nike with the success of their never ending line of sneakers.
If your theory of Ive's design genius being such a game changer was true, then why has Apple continued to flourish since he left 7 years ago? It seems pretty apparent that it's the brand/image established by Jobs that is successful, just as it's the Nike brand (bootstrapped by MJ & Nike Air) that propels Nike, not the magic of their designs.
Stupid and uninformed are different things. The constant stream of personal attacks and handwaving about abstract difficulty is not compelling.
Someone raised the idea of flagging new accounts. That would make it easier to simply ignore them.