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How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/4PG7M https://archive.is/4PG7M
- underseacables 6y agoI think the biggest change Tim made from Steve is that Tim’s decision and management style seems more committee/group based, whereas Steve was much more autonomous; this is how it is now do it. I know he didn’t want everyone thinking what would Steve do, but I do often wonder what someone with Steve’s authority would do.
- duxup 6y agoThe impression I got was that Steve operated in a way that 'seemed' autonomous, but in terms of the results he was still letting folks around him do their thing, even if it went through him. Maybe it was the case of a strong personality / operational style that seemed more autonomous than it was? I find that people often seem to read strong personalities as sort of autocratic by default, even if they're not. Often when in those situations I've had to explain to coworkers that "No, he wasn't shooting you down, that was your chance to explain further / show him more."
- Applejinx 6y agoThat sounds about right. It was called 'management through walking around', and he got up in people's faces and demanded they perform better and compete with each other. He was the arbiter, and fickle, but he wasn't trying to get people to be subservient. Guy Kawasaki described it as, Jobs was so confident he brought a guy into Apple who took the company away from him. He was so full of himself it was impossible for him to be in any way threatened by capable subordinates no matter HOW good they were: he'd just bully them and be mercurial and try to get their maximum performance out of them. So in a sense, it was all the other people. Not him. And in another sense, it took a very unusual person to be able to do that, and be constantly outclassed, and not begin to act defensively. There's a cost to it: Apple was doing the Newton way way before there were cellphones and such. Jobs wasn't that wise, just impossibly audacious, and as such he did manage to operate a team of exceptional people. He wasn't the team, but as far as a leader being the leader, he was about as intense as Gordon Ramsay, and absolutely he let the people around him shine: to him, that WAS him looking good. And it wouldn't make you safe from criticism for even five minutes, but he did love it when people around him were great. Jobs was the 'A players hire A players. B players hire C players. You hired THAT GUY?' manager. He not only expected people around him to excel, he literally demanded it.
- desiarnezjr 6y agoNewton was all Scully as I recall. Not Jobs.
- drewda 6y ago"Management through walking around" comes from Hewlett-Packard. At least as practiced by at Packard and Hewlett, it was supposedly more about learning from individual contributors in labs and on factory floors -- without only getting information filtered through middle management -- not "getting up in people's faces and demanding they perform better."
- ValentineC 6y agoI really liked this interview and discussion from two weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26033689
- darkerside 6y agoThat seems like a failure to express intent properly. You can have a strong personality and powerfully seek feedback or clarification. Not mutually exclusive.
- duxup 6y agoI think it is different traditions and etc. I'm from the midwest. When I worked my first 'real job' I worked with some folks from the east coast. They could be very blunt and harsh to my Midwestern ears. Right until I realized that when they speak to you that way they're really engaging you and seeing if you'll respond in kind in order to demonstrate how certain you are about what you said. The right words with the right emphasis and it was all "Well Tom seems to think..." and they're on board with you. Took me like 12 months to figure that out, that and them kinda hassling me was a sign of respect ;)
- darkerside 6y agoThey put the onus on you to figure it out, and that's fine. I don't think it refutes what I said, which is that it is a failure to demonstrate what they are looking for. If they don't have the time or inclination to deal with people who don't "get it", that's up to them. They probably miss out on some opportunities because of it, but maybe avail themselves of others, or sidestep some distractions.
- ksec 6y agoSteve's advice was "Dont think what he would do, but do what you think is right." The problem is knowing what is right, and that is exactly the strength of Steve. Often by intuition, and some by experience where he made mistakes and he quickly correct. And right now the designed by committee seems to be lacking the latter attribute. Tim Cook is also much more focused on Revenue and Profits with their Strategy. Steve is much more product based.
- abraxas 6y agoI think the focus on privacy might be the new face of Apple that will redefine it for the post Jobs era
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoIt's a smart move, how can Google respond without undermining their whole business model. Microsoft struggles with it as well, it's not something their enterprise customers are asking for.
- icelancer 6y agoApple M1 is the kind of thing that truly impresses in the post-Jobs era, IMO.
- rektide 6y agoYears of snapping up brilliant companies/minds[1]! * PA Semi, 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi * Licensing then hiring most of the Imagination Technologies GPU engineers, including setting up an office down the street from them in St Albans, 2017-2020. * some of Dialog Semiconductor, 2018 * Intel's smartphone division, 2019 * Intrinsity, who had some cutting edge chip design, 2010 There's also an unbelievable ton of photography, micro-display, motion capture, ar, computer vision companies they've acquired. They're plucking up 3-5 promising talented players a year in terms of microminiature sensors/displays/optics. Apple, the most exciting, gigantic, talent-acquiring behemoth that capital has ever given rise to. They do deserve accolades for doing great work, yes. But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. At least if these engineers were working at Qualcomm or MediaTek the fruits of the labor could be shared, but Apple has total iron claims on their chips. It's imbalanced as it is, & Apple seems to have all the money & all the power to keep tipping. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 908B64B197 6y ago> But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. All that talent was up for grab: What were the other players waiting for?
- vlovich123 6y agoExactly. Not just that, acquiring the talent is one thing. Providing the culture & resources for them to succeed over a long period of time? That's special & why most M&A activity results in a neutral or even negative result.
- airstrike 6y agoAll these great minds at work yet somehow clicking on this link in iOS with the Bloomberg app installed takes me to its homepage instead of the actual article I hope between Tim Cook's and Michael Bloomberg's successors we can finally invent the technology to make that work as expected
- hu3 6y agoBut it takes you to the wrong page faster than any Android!
- er4hn 6y agoNot really on topic, but hilariously on point with the tech industry.
- Jtsummers 6y agoAs another data point, the app on my iPhone takes me to the correct article.
- airstrike 6y agoSomehow, I am not at all surprised...
- jiqiren 6y agothat's Bloomberg when one hits the free article limit. open the URL in a private safari tab.
- duxup 6y agoThe article seems to hinge around China and etc more than most things. I do wonder how capable any company is to move manufacturing out of China at any kind of large scale.
- dba7dba 6y agoSamsung moved most or all of their factories from China recently.
- Ericson2314 6y agoBut Korea is more export oriented than China (proportionally) and actually has expertise in these matters.
- someperson 6y agoSamsung are vertically integrated, but Apple just outsource manufacturing to Foxconn, which has more expertise in the manufacturing of small electronics than Samsung. And Foxconn have been told to bring up Apple supply lines in India.
- baybal2 6y agoBoomberg was always very apologetic of China, if not to say bordering on lobbying for them. No wonder, Bloomber is one of very, very, very few Western media operating in China through a franchise agreement.
- BuyMyBitcoins 6y agoI’m in awe at how well China utilizes its soft power on the world stage.
- saagarjha 6y agoBloomberg also wrote the piece where they claimed China had infiltrated Apple, though.
- 6y ago
- elktea 6y ago"The 2014 iPhone 6 was “the poster child” of this transformation, according to a person involved in the product’s development. While the device had complex internal components and a larger screen, it dropped the diamond-polished edges and the precisely cut glass parts of the back of the iPhone 5 and 5s, which had been difficult to produce." well, that explains why the iPhone went from such a unique design to generic plastic android. Glad the 5-esque design is back for the 12 series at least.
- nextos 6y agoI don't buy Apple products and I don't use a smartphone. But in 2014 I borrowed an iPhone 5 from a friend and I found it truly well designed. Thickness and weight were very satisfying for 1-handed operation. I haven't found the successors to be anywhere close.
- ghaff 6y agoThe iPhone 5 was nice but I have to admit the screen seems tiny to me today. I do use phones one-handed a lot but I find I can still do that with an iPhone 12 Pro with my (admittedly large) right hand. Have never been really interested in the Plus models because IMO they don't really work one-handed.
- imron 6y agoThe 12 mini is comparable in size and weight.
- oblio 6y agoAnd its probably going to go away and future minis sidelined, as its sales are poor.
- joshspankit 6y agoI feel like the story would have been different if they made it the size of the 4... Right now the “mini” would have still been considered a large phone in the 3GS days.
- aborsy 6y agoAnyways, I doubt the management style of Mr. Jobs (that worked well in 80s and 90s with subsequent momentum) would work today.
- astrange 6y agoIt didn't work so well for him either, he got fired. When he came back, he was different, because he'd gotten married. The terrible official biography of him actually notices that he was better the second time around and totally ignores it, but this is the reason.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- MperorM 6y agoWhat other things were terrible about the biography? It's my favorite biography of all time. I'd love to know better what important parts were left out.
- someperson 6y agoIt's been a few years but I also found Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography to be terrible. I was looking for deeper analysis of what made Steve Jobs' tick, and how he approached building products. Walter Isaacson didn't have a technological understanding of Apple's products of the time, so I found his history pretty superficial. I learned much more about Steve Jobs approach from listening to the interviews he did over the years.
- astrange 6y agoIt doesn't enquire into anything technically, directly misquotes people (Bill Gates at one point says a disk drive has "too low latency"), ignores his wife, and seems to be really invested in embarrassing his kids. One of his sons Reed is quoted like three times and every time he's making a dick joke.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
- thebrain 6y agoFor what it's worth, I don't think Steve Jobs would have ever allowed the charging port for the Magic Mouse to ever be on the bottom and forced the user to have to leave the mouse on it's side to charge.
- neximo64 6y agoMaybe you don't know Steve Jobs but it is exactly the thing he would do without even a shred of doubt. He's using the design to make you use it wirelessly (the way he wants). You're not supposed to use it like a normal mouse. The fact people moan about this would even make him more sure about it.. Also it came out back when and he probably saw it and approved it
- adrr 6y agoOriginal Magic Mouse used regular batteries that you could change out. Magic mouse 2 has to worst design apple has come up for a mouse except for puck mouse. Flip it upside down every month to charge it. I am sure Jobs would cringe if he walked through the office at night saw people's mice upside down charging.
- joshspankit 6y agoI don’t know, I feel like Steve Jobs hated mice in general, or at least didn’t understand the use of them. Look at the “puck“ for example.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoThe puck-mouse was a good mouse if you're a person that moves the mouse by flicking fingers or with hand movements rather than with arm movements - and if you tuned the mouse speed and acceleration curve - but most people don't set their mouse speed to their liking though, hence the ergonomic issues.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoSharp learning curves aren't a feature of good, mainstream UX.
- airhead969 6y agoBy "transformed," they meant "over-monetized" and "ruined." TC snatched uncool, buggy, and wonky products from the jaws of material success.
- hyperluz 6y agoI love my Apple pencil in combination with the iPad
- yazaddaruvala 6y agoSteve Jobs built consumer products that he wanted for himself, his family and friends. He would push for out of the box ideas while scrutinizing every detail of the product, optimized and repeated. Tim Cook builds the supply chain that he wants for himself, his shareholders and coworkers. He pushes for out of the box ideas while scrutinizing every detail of the supply chain, optimizes and repeats. Tim Cook builds supply chain the way Jobs built for consumers. Jobs needed customer insight, creativity and societal foresight. Instead to make product decisions Cook has a giant user base to "A/B test" (between different phone models/features every quarter), he can afford to wait/purchase/curate good ideas rather than use foresight, and purchase creativity and ingenuity. Apple no longer needs another Steve Jobs at the throne, they have access to hire two generations of the global population "raised by" and trying to emulate Steve Jobs while having the skills and 90% the talent of Woz. Apple today needs a master of execution that has a willingness to find the right new talent and give them a supply chain platform like never before seen. e.g. If you're talented in CPU and GPU development, where do you want to work in 2021/2022? Cook's supply chain optimization for A1 and M1 has made Apple one of the top three players in the industry. If as a developer, you want to re-think the need for a motherboard, or how to best integrate a Modem with the CPU (maybe a GPU/Neural Net enhanced storage/network card?), there is only one company you can go to right now to build that creative dream. Cook can leverage that creativity and ingenuity to delight customers while pushing like crazy on the supply chain. Recent quote from Elon Musk: "Every company will soon have EVs. Every company will also have Autonomous driving. But no other company will be able to out compete Tesla at manufacturing." Similarly, Amazon Retails' newest CEO Dave Clark used to head the supply chain logistics. Clearly Apple's board, Amazon's board and Tesla's board all focused on the same thing, supply chain and logistics, imply there is some clear long term customer and shareholder value about it.
- syshum 6y agoI think that is fantasy land thinking on the part of all 3, and I am sure past companies all thought the same thing until someone did out compete them... Telsa is even more fantasy to believe Ford, VW, or Toyota will never be able to out compete them in manufacturing. Ohh sweet child.....
- smm11 6y agoI might be wrong, but what, a watch, and different size iPhones and iPads?
- baybal2 6y agoI worked in, and around OEM electronics since 2007. I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones. He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing. Others squeeze suppliers, and don't know what they are doing. On one of my first jobs, I've been witness to one such negotiations down to single cents, and microns of plastic for a few million units customized charger order. The order was such a whopper for a small sourcing agency, that higher ups were willing to do just anything to not to spook the client. Our guys quickly understood that the consultant guy doing negotiations on behalf of the client was a round idiot with a level of engineering knowledge of a first year dropout. He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run. We managed to at least push back on safety critical parts, on a point that it will fail the certification. Many years later I found out that the design of the first Kindle charger exactly matched the one we did in everything, but having an extra label. And 5 years ago I learned that Kindles had multiple issues with melting chargers, and safety recalls. 9 out of 10 companies in the supply chain will just shoot themselves in the foot if they go on doing it like that. Nobody will point how unreasonable your demands are if you are a giant multinational corporation, moreover so in China. If you do this, and don't know yourself if you are asking a for something stupid, who will know? No one will.
- sharkweek 6y agoHe made you redo the molds 720 times? That’s insanity!
- baybal2 6y agoI recalled that when in 2015, working for another sourcing shop working for likes of BestBuy/Futureshop/Target/London Drugs I was asked to tear down few chargers for them. I found that diodes in parallel are surprisingly common around the industry. This is such a thing which you are pretty much told on day 1 of any electronics course that it is impossible to not to know. My only thinkable conclusion was that people keep doing it on purpose. Other extreme cost cutting measures I saw were things like LEDs being used in double role as a diode. Wire wound around PCB used as inductor. Plug pegs being directly soldered to the PCB. Near paper thin plastic with holes from molding defects. Through hole components being soldered to each other. Flybacks without feedback. A 555 coaxed into use in a charger circuit. You cannot come with any of that unknowingly, nor will you find any of that crap on the open market easily even in China. It's pretty much an engineering equivalent of a "controlled flight into terrain," a direct result of suppliers being consciously directed into "stripping to the last cent" of the products by such unwitting buyers.
- cageface 6y agoI think it’s naive to expect that American companies like Apple that outsource everything but design and software and reap enormous profits are going to be able to do this indefinitely. China is getting better fast at doing these things too and will have tremendous advantages when it owns the entire stack. If American companies want to stay competitive in the long run they’re going to have to break their addiction to the easy profits they’re enjoying now and do the hard work of bringing this manufacturing back on-shore.
- zepto 6y agoIt’s going to be a while before China can own either the top (the OS) or the bottom (the silicon) of the stack, but ultimately you are right.
- pixelatedindex 6y agoGenuinely curious - why do you say that? It might not be something they can export to other countries, but that’s mostly because of the rap that they have for surveillance and data collection and not because of a lack of resources. For the domestic market I don’t see why they can’t make their own silicon or software. I’d love to hear thoughts on the matter.
- zepto 6y agoIt’s not that they can’t. I’m sure they will eventually. It’s that they are very complex iterative processes that take time to organize and are hard to get right. You can’t just quickly ‘own’ either one. Consider how long the iOS and Android of today took to build, or how long it took Apple to get from the A4 to the M1.
- bryananderson 6y agoWhy wouldn't they just move production to another, cheaper country besides China? I think you are underestimating how much more expensive an iPhone would be if it was made entirely in the United States: https://fee.org/articles/a-made-in-america-iphone-would-cost-2-000-studies-show/ https://fee.org/articles/a-made-in-america-iphone-would-cost...
- ambicapter 6y agoI, for one, hate the expanded product lineup. I'm looking to buy an iPad and I have no idea which one is best suited for my case. Air? Pro? Mini?
- brantonb 6y agoHave you seen Apple's comparison page? It's useful for this sort of decision making: https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/ https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/
- trilinearnz 6y agoWhile I don't think it's quite that bad, it does remind me of how Steve slimlined the Mac product line almost immediately upon his return.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI know buying a Lenovo is an infuriating experience. So many models with tiny differences in specification.
- 1123581321 6y agoAny of them are going to be better for you than when there was only one option. Just get the cheap one to start.
- whoisjuan 6y agoApple is the best company in the world at operations. I don't know how they do it but: 1) Ever year they manage to diligently upgrade iphones/ipads, macbooks and watches. 2) Every year they make some progress in their quest of removing suppliers by becoming vertically integrated. They don't only remove the supplier. They beat their former suppliers specs. (e.g: M1 chip). 3) Every year they make some progress in their quest of generating more revenue from services. They are managing to launch one or two services a year or create a new program that integrates services into attractive bundles. All those things are incredibly hard operational challenges. Nothing there seems to be easy and some how they manage to always come ahead in delivering that operational excellence.
- DRW_ 6y agoYep, Apple's operations and logistics are second to none in this industry. Watching AMD, NVIDIA, Sony, Microsoft and others struggling so much manufacturing their products, and then having Apple launch: - 2 new Apple Watches - 4 new iPhones - 3 new Macs - Airpods Max - Homepod Mini All with Apple's own custom designed chips, even relying on the same chip fabs as those other companies, and still managing to mostly avoid the huge shortages that those others have faced is impressive. It's probably a combination of their operations, logistics, supply networks - their predictable yearly cycles that allows them to plan out further in advance, having higher margin products that allows them to outbid the competition for capacity, etc, etc... But as someone who did the fight for the new AMD CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, been on the look out for the new Sony console, and bought a new iPhone, Apple Watch & Homepod mini on release - the Apple experience was such a breeze in comparison. It may seem like an odd thing to be impressed by, but with how much everyone else has been struggling - for it to appear to relatively easy for Apple is notable.
- GloriousKoji 6y ago> All with Apple's own custom designed chips, even relying on the same chip fabs as those other companies, and still managing to mostly avoid the huge shortages that those others have faced is impressive. I would not be surprised if the other companies are having shortages because of Apple taking up most of the fab capacity and support engineers.
- dehrmann 6y agoDongles.
- mandeepj 6y agoWarren Buffet - “Tim may not have Steve Jobs’ design chops but he understands the world to a degree that very, very few CEOs I've met over the past 60 years could match"
- noipv4 6y agoTim Cook just tortures us with port changes and overpriced dongles
- nbzso 6y agoFrom product innovation and design focused company into shareholders and politics first driven company. Closing the product ecosystem further, ignoring pro user needs, giving priority for dark pattern designs - dongle nightmare, giving access to user data to governments, censoring and creating barriers for OSS. I fully expect Apple to be the front-line operator in the new world envisioned by The Dirty Bunch Planners in Davos. And yes, Apple apologists like their toys and will love to be controlled in the name of ........insert politically correct, billionaire driven, tech-fetishist, pseudo-leftist, lgbt, blm, “woke”...agenda. And I don’t give a flying F. We, humanity as a whole, deserve what we get, and the psychopaths are here only because we are weak, lazy, naive and stupid.
- smcl 6y agoThe first half of your comment contained pretty legit complaints about Apples anti-consumer choices and genera direction. You completely lost me in the second where you just lost your temper and griped about things that bothered you personally about the world like BLM movement and (something about?) LGBT.
- nbzso 6y agoI respectfully disagree. You are missing the part “in the name of”. I will refine further: corporations don’t care for anything than profit and power. Period. Corporations use genuine societal processes for marketing and political purposes, government contracts, lobbying etc. There is a ton of data in support of my point of view. And please, there is nothing “personal”, I just genuinely hate hypocrisy.
- ManuelKiessling 6y agoWell that went south fast.
- cycrutchfield 6y agoSir, this is a Wendy's
- pertymcpert 6y agoYou need to get some therapy.
- scns 6y agoSteve Blank compared Cook to Ballmer and analyzed the situation pretty well IMHO: https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ballmer-and-why-he-still-has-his-job-at-apple/ https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball... TLDR: When the visionary CEO (Gates, Jobs) leaves, a guy from operations (Ballmer, Cook) gets promoted to CEO, and keeps doing what he does best, operate and keep profits climbing. When the next CEO (Nadella, ?) comes, there can be focus on innovation again.
- peanutcracker 6y agoIsn't it a bit silly to wonder why Apple did well under Trump? Didn't Trump cripple Huawei, presumably one of Apple's biggest competitor in the phone space? Stopped reading after that...
- sidcool 6y agoSteve Jobs and Tim Cook both have their strengths that they play to. Steve was a master marketeer and Tim is a great operational guy. I don't feel one skill is greater than the other.