12 ms·

How Apple Is Working From Home

238 points by aaronbrethorst 7y ago

deedubaya 7y ago
When was the last time an Apple product launch wasn't leaked? I feel like we've known what was coming ever since the infamous lost iPhone prototype (iPhone 6 maybe?). It has been a while.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > I feel like we've known what was coming ever since the infamous lost iPhone prototype (iPhone 6 maybe?). iPhone 4.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  We usually have some idea of what's coming, but with varying degrees of accuracy. Apple presumably wants the public to know as few details as possible, and that's a sliding spectrum, not a binary.
- kylec 7y ago
  AFAICT the new Magic Keyboard for iPad didn't leak. There were rumors about a keyboard with a trackpad, sure, but I think everyone was surprised about the design.
  - nnx 7y ago
    Note it won't be released before May though. It helps against leaking to announce things before mass production even begins.
- plorkyeran 7y ago
  Not really a "product", but Swift was so successfully kept secret that we were still arguing over what the big announcement was going to be during the keynote where they revealed it.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    SwiftUI was also fairly novel.
    - ericlewis 7y ago
      this was reported on by Gurman and Guber. But both had it slightly wrong, codename was right tho
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
For reference, the original story is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-apple-is-working-from-home https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-apple-is-working..., but it's hard-paywalled.
- dang 7y ago
  The Information has unlocked it for HN readers now (thanks!), so we've changed the URL from https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/30/apple-work-from-home-challenges/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/30/apple-work-from-home-ch.... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22the%20information%22%20unlock&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
castillar76 7y ago
Over the years I've had a few conversations with Apple recruiters about job opportunities at Apple. Every time, they've tried to persuade me to move to Cupertino, because Apple doesn't do remote work. I've had to start prefacing the conversations with "I'm not moving to Cupertino. Do you still want to talk?" I get why Jobs wanted it that way: the value of hallway conversations and the ability to bounce things off other engineers is invaluable, and until recently it was difficult to make that viable with people flung off in different locations. Moreover, it's really difficult to have most of your team in one location and a few scattered people elsewhere: the people elsewhere just aren't part of the loop in the same way, and it makes things really hard for them. That said, I'd be surprised if Apple continues with a hard-line stance on that after all of this: I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. EDIT: Having read the thread on this one, I apologize for my over-generalization based on anecdote. I work for a company that pushes the ability to remote-work, and the folks I've talked with about working at Apple were all very "yeah, they don't do work-from-home". However, the plural of anecdote is not data. :)
- uwuhn 7y ago
  They're opening Seattle offices this year. Or at least that's the plan? It might be affected by the epidemic.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Don't they already have offices there?
  - tjr225 7y ago
    Apple already has an office in downtown Seattle. I know because I've talked to a recruiter about a job there twice.
- wuunderbar 7y ago
  > I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Particularly for companies where they primarily sell hardware products such as Apple?
sxcurry 7y ago
"leaving them to rely on grainy photographs to make hardware decisions" - why would the photos be grainy? I would think that the Chinese hardware folks would have decent cameras?
- hbosch 7y ago
  iPhones, at least.
- ISL 7y ago
  At full zoom, every image is grainy. The part of an image you want to look at, unless you've asked for a specific image to be made, is usually in shadow and in the corner -- Murphy's Law of documentation.
  - djrogers 7y ago
    And if you have asked for a specific image to be made, you will invariably find something shadowed in the corner you need to also see.
  - MengerSponge 7y ago
    The equivalent of the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  Maybe the only way employees got pics is from one of the leak sites? :D
chadlavi 7y ago
Would be cool if this resulted in some nice enterprise-focused improvements/advanced user features in apple's native apps
archeantus 7y ago
It’s amazing to me that Apple’s refusal to support remote work has caused them to be caught flat-footed here. I doubt they considered the need to be remote friendly as a contingency plan in case of a disaster, but here we are. Hopefully more companies can be more open-minded in the future; to avoid doing so could be very risky to their business.
- marcinzm 7y ago
  Which is rather short sighted of them or at least whomever came up with their business continuity plans. Pandemic and other regional disasters should be at least covered.
- hinkley 7y ago
  They just built a giant spaceship to try to get everybody in the same building, didn't they?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Not everyone; there's still a couple dozen other offices scattered around the Bay Area.
  - Redoubts 7y ago
    Honestly that building was oversubscribed the year they broke ground. Apple probably has half the office space in Cupertino.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > Apple probably has half the office space in Cupertino. Almost three quarters, as of a couple years ago.
      - Bahamut 7y ago
        85% as of a couple of years ago.
  - 7y ago
jedberg 7y ago
> Most employees aren’t accustomed to holding meetings with colleagues via videoconference and some have found it difficult to use Apple’s own offerings such as FaceTime, iCloud and iMessage, as they weren’t designed for enterprise users, according to current and former employees. Hopefully this motivates them to make these products better! Although I'm not super hopeful. I once asked a friend (and Apple employee) why Keynote doesn't have any collaboration function. I said, "Don't you guys every collaborate on presentations?" He said, "No, not really, and if you do, you're all in one room and one person is driving the computer". So their culture is very much engrained with in person collaboration. Edit: I should clarify that I asked him this a few years ago, before they added the "collaborate through iCloud" functionality. The point still stands though, that while everyone else had collaboration in their presentation apps, Apple didn't, because they didn't see the need for it.
- vitiell0 7y ago
  Just discovered recently that keynote does have a collaboration function through iCloud. Was a little clunky to get going but is working great now. Not quite google docs but it does instantly sync across devices when you save
  - minimaxir 7y ago
    All the iWork apps have collaboration functionality (with mostly full feature parity), and it works on macOS/iOS/web too. Disclosure: Was a QA Engineer at Apple on those apps/that functionality.
    - walterbell 7y ago
      If you have two iOS iWork apps, can each one sign into a separate iCloud account? Or are all iWork apps forced to use a device-wide iCloud login?
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        I think each just pulls from the system account.
_ph_ 7y ago
I had to smile a bit when reading about the technical problems they were facing with working from home, especially the software stack. This is something, that Apple has the power to address. I am using Webex myself on the Mac. With the last big update, it has become much better, but there is certainly room for improvement. The performance with video conferencing doesn't seem to be great though. By investing into the relevant software features required for working from home, Apple could not only solve their own problems but also make the platform more attractive for business users outside of Apple. Great screensharing, with voice and video would be a start. Perhaps a native Webex client. Or, make their own client work with Webex. P.S.: maybe they also should consider offering a new iSight. A physically separate webcam that improves the video conferencing experience. If it is separate, it can be moved to show documents or other things people are working on, like their hardware prototype. It could also offer improved quality in comparison to the builtin cameras.
- intopieces 7y ago
  > maybe they also should consider offering a new iSight. Logitech makes a 4K camera for the XDR. It’s fantastic and available in the Apple Store.
saagarjha 7y ago
> It encourages employees to use the company’s own communications and file-sharing services for security and reliability reasons, though it has begun allowing them to use some third-party tools like Slack and Box. As mentioned later in the article, the use of these third-party tools isn't new.
SeanFerree 7y ago
Awesome article!
georgespencer 7y ago
For hardware companies there is a _vast_ amount of work which cannot be done under these circumstances. A lot of people here are sounding off on Apple's reluctance to enable remote working (reasonably enough), but the fact is that a large amount of the work Apple does is reliant on 1) sophisticated engineering and manufacturing processes which are not possible in-home/remote, and 2) a pantheon of national and international ISO requirements for safety and other compliance areas which are not possible in-home/remote. Final, mass, production happens in China, but it's a useful generalisation to think of most hardware products as being prototyped to a high polished standard within a hardware company's internal supply chain prior to testing and mass manufacture. Testing is also a process which is made extremely difficult with an entirely remote workforce. A good example, from a decade ago: Apple deployed $100m USD into building its own anechoic chambers and radio testing facilities.[1] These things are closer to science experiments than the CNC milling machines the article mentions: multiple persons operating them in-person, etc. The challenges are not unique to Apple, but they are significantly deeper than the article suggests. There are also some affordances which Apple has made in the last 6-7 years which lend themselves to remote working. For example, their own team of secure couriers who ferry prototypes around various sites in CA. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/chambers-super-silence-whats-inside-apples-100-million-iphone-radio-test-facility https://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/chambers-super-silence-w...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Apple is not exclusively a hardware company.
  - georgespencer 7y ago
    This seems inane. Did anyone claim they are?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      You started off with "for hardware companies"; so I assumed you put Apple in this bucket.
pentae 7y ago
I'm always amused at the lengths we, as a western society, must now go to because everyone refuses to wear a mask. A lot of the problems described in this article would not be problems with some simple tweaks. Sick? Stay the fuck at home! Not symptomatic? Wear a mask and carry on. Surely Fortune 500 companies that require in person collaborations are able to produce some company issued N95's and hand sanitizer and get on with it.
- ddrt 7y ago
  Just because you don’t have symptoms doesn’t mean you can’t spread it. What you outlined, wear a mask and carry on, that’s exactly the mentality that IS spreading it right now.
  - pentae 7y ago
    That'd be a great point if it wasn't for the fact that all the asian countries enforcing mask use are actually flattening the curve.
    - dabraham1248 7y ago
      There is no place on earth that has said "Not symptomatic? Wear a mask and carry on." and seen the curve flatten. As you say, a lot of asian countries _are_ enforcing mask usage. But none of them are just "carrying on". IIRC China is enforcing a "1 person per household is allowed outside once every three days for supplies" policy in the most affected areas, has built multiple new hospitals, has implemented multiple cordon sanitaires, locked down millions, has _free_ testing, and is enforcing that testing. South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were among the first to ban flights from China (and given where they are that's MUCH bigger than the US doing so, both politically, and in percentage of flights). They are testing people constantly before they're allowed out of or in to places. They are _enforcing_ quarantines of people with fevers, they are interrogating people that might have been exposed to the disease, and are quarantining based on that, even without symptoms. They have a _lot_ more people staying home than usual. They are accessing people's financial data in real time without warrants. No one's saying masks make things worse. Given how many masks we have, there's an open question as to whether we should reserve them for medical care providers or not. What people are saying is that masks are not enough. And they're right.
dzhiurgis 7y ago
Lack of screenshare on macos/ios is big one. It would be so nice to help parents to setup certain things. Weird enough Apple support has that access tho. Just let me them know your Apple Id and pop-up appears...
- Qerub 7y ago
  macOS has great support for screen sharing: https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/screen-sharing-icht11883/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/screen-sharing-icht...
huffmsa 7y ago
Now would be a great time to engender some global good will by putting some of that $250b in cash to work. Tim Apple is starting to look a bit like Smaug atop his literal pile of money.
gorkish 7y ago
I love that they hate eating their own dog food. Remember when FaceTime was promised to be open because it was just SIP? Remember when iMessage let you connect to every service under the sun? Remember when MacOS had awesome remote access built in? Remember when the mail client didn’t wait an hour to tell you that a new email arrived? Remember when they built a server? They deserve to suffer a little here.

When was the last time an Apple product launch wasn't leaked? I feel like we've known what was coming ever since the infamous lost iPhone prototype (iPhone 6 maybe?). It has been a while.

saagarjha 7y ago
> I feel like we've known what was coming ever since the infamous lost iPhone prototype (iPhone 6 maybe?). iPhone 4.
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
We usually have some idea of what's coming, but with varying degrees of accuracy. Apple presumably wants the public to know as few details as possible, and that's a sliding spectrum, not a binary.
kylec 7y ago
AFAICT the new Magic Keyboard for iPad didn't leak. There were rumors about a keyboard with a trackpad, sure, but I think everyone was surprised about the design.
- nnx 7y ago
  Note it won't be released before May though. It helps against leaking to announce things before mass production even begins.
plorkyeran 7y ago
Not really a "product", but Swift was so successfully kept secret that we were still arguing over what the big announcement was going to be during the keynote where they revealed it.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  SwiftUI was also fairly novel.
  - ericlewis 7y ago
    this was reported on by Gurman and Guber. But both had it slightly wrong, codename was right tho

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

For reference, the original story is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-apple-is-working-from-home https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-apple-is-working..., but it's hard-paywalled.

dang 7y ago
The Information has unlocked it for HN readers now (thanks!), so we've changed the URL from https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/30/apple-work-from-home-challenges/ https://www.macrumors.com/2020/03/30/apple-work-from-home-ch.... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22the%20information%22%20unlock&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

castillar76 7y ago

Over the years I've had a few conversations with Apple recruiters about job opportunities at Apple. Every time, they've tried to persuade me to move to Cupertino, because Apple doesn't do remote work. I've had to start prefacing the conversations with "I'm not moving to Cupertino. Do you still want to talk?" I get why Jobs wanted it that way: the value of hallway conversations and the ability to bounce things off other engineers is invaluable, and until recently it was difficult to make that viable with people flung off in different locations. Moreover, it's really difficult to have most of your team in one location and a few scattered people elsewhere: the people elsewhere just aren't part of the loop in the same way, and it makes things really hard for them. That said, I'd be surprised if Apple continues with a hard-line stance on that after all of this: I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. EDIT: Having read the thread on this one, I apologize for my over-generalization based on anecdote. I work for a company that pushes the ability to remote-work, and the folks I've talked with about working at Apple were all very "yeah, they don't do work-from-home". However, the plural of anecdote is not data. :)

uwuhn 7y ago
They're opening Seattle offices this year. Or at least that's the plan? It might be affected by the epidemic.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Don't they already have offices there?
- tjr225 7y ago
  Apple already has an office in downtown Seattle. I know because I've talked to a recruiter about a job there twice.
wuunderbar 7y ago
> I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Particularly for companies where they primarily sell hardware products such as Apple?

sxcurry 7y ago

"leaving them to rely on grainy photographs to make hardware decisions" - why would the photos be grainy? I would think that the Chinese hardware folks would have decent cameras?

hbosch 7y ago
iPhones, at least.
ISL 7y ago
At full zoom, every image is grainy. The part of an image you want to look at, unless you've asked for a specific image to be made, is usually in shadow and in the corner -- Murphy's Law of documentation.
- djrogers 7y ago
  And if you have asked for a specific image to be made, you will invariably find something shadowed in the corner you need to also see.
- MengerSponge 7y ago
  The equivalent of the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'
dzhiurgis 7y ago
Maybe the only way employees got pics is from one of the leak sites? :D

chadlavi 7y ago

Would be cool if this resulted in some nice enterprise-focused improvements/advanced user features in apple's native apps

archeantus 7y ago

It’s amazing to me that Apple’s refusal to support remote work has caused them to be caught flat-footed here. I doubt they considered the need to be remote friendly as a contingency plan in case of a disaster, but here we are. Hopefully more companies can be more open-minded in the future; to avoid doing so could be very risky to their business.

marcinzm 7y ago
Which is rather short sighted of them or at least whomever came up with their business continuity plans. Pandemic and other regional disasters should be at least covered.
hinkley 7y ago
They just built a giant spaceship to try to get everybody in the same building, didn't they?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Not everyone; there's still a couple dozen other offices scattered around the Bay Area.
- Redoubts 7y ago
  Honestly that building was oversubscribed the year they broke ground. Apple probably has half the office space in Cupertino.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > Apple probably has half the office space in Cupertino. Almost three quarters, as of a couple years ago.
    - Bahamut 7y ago
      85% as of a couple of years ago.
- 7y ago

jedberg 7y ago

> Most employees aren’t accustomed to holding meetings with colleagues via videoconference and some have found it difficult to use Apple’s own offerings such as FaceTime, iCloud and iMessage, as they weren’t designed for enterprise users, according to current and former employees. Hopefully this motivates them to make these products better! Although I'm not super hopeful. I once asked a friend (and Apple employee) why Keynote doesn't have any collaboration function. I said, "Don't you guys every collaborate on presentations?" He said, "No, not really, and if you do, you're all in one room and one person is driving the computer". So their culture is very much engrained with in person collaboration. Edit: I should clarify that I asked him this a few years ago, before they added the "collaborate through iCloud" functionality. The point still stands though, that while everyone else had collaboration in their presentation apps, Apple didn't, because they didn't see the need for it.

vitiell0 7y ago
Just discovered recently that keynote does have a collaboration function through iCloud. Was a little clunky to get going but is working great now. Not quite google docs but it does instantly sync across devices when you save
- minimaxir 7y ago
  All the iWork apps have collaboration functionality (with mostly full feature parity), and it works on macOS/iOS/web too. Disclosure: Was a QA Engineer at Apple on those apps/that functionality.
  - walterbell 7y ago
    If you have two iOS iWork apps, can each one sign into a separate iCloud account? Or are all iWork apps forced to use a device-wide iCloud login?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I think each just pulls from the system account.

_ph_ 7y ago

I had to smile a bit when reading about the technical problems they were facing with working from home, especially the software stack. This is something, that Apple has the power to address. I am using Webex myself on the Mac. With the last big update, it has become much better, but there is certainly room for improvement. The performance with video conferencing doesn't seem to be great though. By investing into the relevant software features required for working from home, Apple could not only solve their own problems but also make the platform more attractive for business users outside of Apple. Great screensharing, with voice and video would be a start. Perhaps a native Webex client. Or, make their own client work with Webex. P.S.: maybe they also should consider offering a new iSight. A physically separate webcam that improves the video conferencing experience. If it is separate, it can be moved to show documents or other things people are working on, like their hardware prototype. It could also offer improved quality in comparison to the builtin cameras.

intopieces 7y ago
> maybe they also should consider offering a new iSight. Logitech makes a 4K camera for the XDR. It’s fantastic and available in the Apple Store.

saagarjha 7y ago

> It encourages employees to use the company’s own communications and file-sharing services for security and reliability reasons, though it has begun allowing them to use some third-party tools like Slack and Box. As mentioned later in the article, the use of these third-party tools isn't new.

SeanFerree 7y ago

Awesome article!

georgespencer 7y ago

For hardware companies there is a _vast_ amount of work which cannot be done under these circumstances. A lot of people here are sounding off on Apple's reluctance to enable remote working (reasonably enough), but the fact is that a large amount of the work Apple does is reliant on 1) sophisticated engineering and manufacturing processes which are not possible in-home/remote, and 2) a pantheon of national and international ISO requirements for safety and other compliance areas which are not possible in-home/remote. Final, mass, production happens in China, but it's a useful generalisation to think of most hardware products as being prototyped to a high polished standard within a hardware company's internal supply chain prior to testing and mass manufacture. Testing is also a process which is made extremely difficult with an entirely remote workforce. A good example, from a decade ago: Apple deployed $100m USD into building its own anechoic chambers and radio testing facilities.[1] These things are closer to science experiments than the CNC milling machines the article mentions: multiple persons operating them in-person, etc. The challenges are not unique to Apple, but they are significantly deeper than the article suggests. There are also some affordances which Apple has made in the last 6-7 years which lend themselves to remote working. For example, their own team of secure couriers who ferry prototypes around various sites in CA. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/chambers-super-silence-whats-inside-apples-100-million-iphone-radio-test-facility https://www.fastcompany.com/1671022/chambers-super-silence-w...

saagarjha 7y ago
Apple is not exclusively a hardware company.
- georgespencer 7y ago
  This seems inane. Did anyone claim they are?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    You started off with "for hardware companies"; so I assumed you put Apple in this bucket.

pentae 7y ago

I'm always amused at the lengths we, as a western society, must now go to because everyone refuses to wear a mask. A lot of the problems described in this article would not be problems with some simple tweaks. Sick? Stay the fuck at home! Not symptomatic? Wear a mask and carry on. Surely Fortune 500 companies that require in person collaborations are able to produce some company issued N95's and hand sanitizer and get on with it.

ddrt 7y ago
Just because you don’t have symptoms doesn’t mean you can’t spread it. What you outlined, wear a mask and carry on, that’s exactly the mentality that IS spreading it right now.
- pentae 7y ago
  That'd be a great point if it wasn't for the fact that all the asian countries enforcing mask use are actually flattening the curve.
  - dabraham1248 7y ago
    There is no place on earth that has said "Not symptomatic? Wear a mask and carry on." and seen the curve flatten. As you say, a lot of asian countries _are_ enforcing mask usage. But none of them are just "carrying on". IIRC China is enforcing a "1 person per household is allowed outside once every three days for supplies" policy in the most affected areas, has built multiple new hospitals, has implemented multiple cordon sanitaires, locked down millions, has _free_ testing, and is enforcing that testing. South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan were among the first to ban flights from China (and given where they are that's MUCH bigger than the US doing so, both politically, and in percentage of flights). They are testing people constantly before they're allowed out of or in to places. They are _enforcing_ quarantines of people with fevers, they are interrogating people that might have been exposed to the disease, and are quarantining based on that, even without symptoms. They have a _lot_ more people staying home than usual. They are accessing people's financial data in real time without warrants. No one's saying masks make things worse. Given how many masks we have, there's an open question as to whether we should reserve them for medical care providers or not. What people are saying is that masks are not enough. And they're right.

dzhiurgis 7y ago

Lack of screenshare on macos/ios is big one. It would be so nice to help parents to setup certain things. Weird enough Apple support has that access tho. Just let me them know your Apple Id and pop-up appears...

Qerub 7y ago
macOS has great support for screen sharing: https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/screen-sharing-icht11883/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/messages/screen-sharing-icht...

huffmsa 7y ago

Now would be a great time to engender some global good will by putting some of that $250b in cash to work. Tim Apple is starting to look a bit like Smaug atop his literal pile of money.

gorkish 7y ago

I love that they hate eating their own dog food. Remember when FaceTime was promised to be open because it was just SIP? Remember when iMessage let you connect to every service under the sun? Remember when MacOS had awesome remote access built in? Remember when the mail client didn’t wait an hour to tell you that a new email arrived? Remember when they built a server? They deserve to suffer a little here.