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>underscoring the narrative that the company’s biggest victories were initiated under his predecessor, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs What does the author conside

>underscoring the narrative that the company’s biggest victories were initiated under his predecessor, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs What does the author consider to be a victory? Tim Cook was elevated because he had the operational capability to grow Apple. Jobs did not consider Cook to be a product design person. But Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products. By any stretch of the imagination, the company's biggest victories have been in growing and holding together the vast ecosystem of HW / SW and services that continuously deliver the highest customer satisfaction ratings. The reward for that has been becoming the biggest company in the world. (Some might consider this a victory.) If introducing new hit products is the only kind of victory that can exist, then Apple Silicon and AirPods victories also go to Cook.

crooked-v 3y ago
> What does the author consider to be a victory? Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone... Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.
- kmonsen 3y ago
  Apple watch? Airpods maybe? Apple silicon for sure. Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not really been any other inventions in this time span like those you mention. The market is more mature.
  - Wazako 3y ago
    Isn't Time Cook ultimately like Steve Ballmer? He has continued and consolidated to build a golden prison with the construction of a monopoly and increase the money generated incredibly.
    - scarface74 3y ago
      A “monopoly” in what product category?
      - simonh 3y ago
        Monopoly (noun): Thing I hate that is incredibly popular, and I’ve got all bitter and twisted about it.
        sbuk 3y ago
        Ha! The “orange site” dictionary. There’s a parody site in that…
      - Wazako 3y ago
        In the sense that it has become hostile to use. I remember when iTune and safari were user friendly on Windows. Or the iphone wouldn't be limited to a usb 2.0 port.
        scarface74 3y ago
        That’s not what a “monopoly” means and Safari was never good on Windows.
  - dwaite 3y ago
    When the device has a user experience, it gradually turns into a convergence platform. This is what makes coming out with new products harder - Apple doesn't have a market for a mid-range camera, or a GPS, or a music player, or a PDA - because those are all things the iPhone does. They add capabilities to the phone to usurp other device markets (most recently, emergency satellite communicators and OnStar-style crash detection). Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone. Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone). The sad thing is that there are areas they could make a lot of innovations, such as smart home accessories. They killed off the AirPort line, and license out HomeKit with almost no first-party hardware, because those just don't move the needle for a company of Apple's size.
    - bredren 3y ago
      > Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone. Another example is Lidar 3d scanning in iPhone. >Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone). I suspect that annual upgrades to Watch, the maturation of Fitness and Music services and the mix of HW "devices" released in iPhone have strategic goal of supporting the new headset device. RE: HomeKit, even if it couldn't deliver the revenue opportunity of other businesses of the company, I think it had potential to be far more than it is now. The head of home services, Sam Jadallah left before his third year during a critical push into the home with Homepod and Homepod Mini. It could be his efforts were blocked--perhaps to starve advancement of Smarthome while Amazon was bleeding cash on Alexa. But regardless his team failed to push the category forward and Home languished. HomeKit and Siri are perhaps the most high profile weak products from Apple that, had they been handled differently, people would have greatly benefited from for several years now. That said, neither seemed to have that much revenue opportunity and it is clear looking backward that their weakness has not (yet) obviously held the company back in any way.
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tguedes 3y ago
Absolutely. Between Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, AirPods, and scaling operations to be able to sell the amount of products they do in a year, that is hard to argue against being an overwhelming success for Tim Cook as CEO. Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?
- bredren 3y ago
  It is hard to not compare the breakthrough product release count between Jobs and Cook. If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011. Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably the company should not have focused on releasing yet more revolutionary products. iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history, focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next big thing. One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH. However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
  - deet 3y ago
    I strongly doubt that the campus is any more of a force multiplier than a collection of far cheaper class A office buildings of similar capacity, with similarly serene grass and vegetation connecting them.
    - zamnos 3y ago
      And that, dear reader, is how we ended up with hundreds of bland copy-cat Android phones to the iPhone. There's something to be said, mentally, for working somewhere that's inspiring. A shitty office in yet a clone of all the other office parks, buried in office-park-landia of San Jose, is not it. Even a stroll through the secret underground parking lot at Apple is inspiring with all the exotic cars that are owned by early Apple employees, instead of Honda Civics and Toyota Camrys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I drive a Honda, but they just don't have the same emotional pull.
NovaDudely 3y ago
I would argue that the move the Apple Silicon was in the pipeline long before Cook took over. I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out. But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.
- neural_thing 3y ago
  Are Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV actually VERY important? The whole Wearables, Home and Accessories category is 10% of Apple's revenue and that includes Beats and what not.
  - sbuk 3y ago
    In the last quarter, that equates to $9.48B, which by anyone’s standards is a pretty good business. The company I work for arguably makes more “important” products, but we’d be incredibly happy with that revenue!
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    While I wouldn't put so much weight on Apple TV+, air-pods and Apple watch do pretty much launch wireless headphones out of a niche into the mainstream and absolutely kick started the smart watch market across all vendors. I say this as someone that uses none of these type of devices from any vendor.
- dwaite 3y ago
  > I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out. Is this similar to how AMD's Bulldozer architecture back around that timeframe was the writing was on the wall for their current competitive dominance over Intel? PA Semi was a great talent accu-hire, but AFAIK at the time of acquisition they only had Power-based designs ready for market. > It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation. PT Barnum was a renowned showman as well, but that doesn't mean he trained all the elephants. For instance, I would hardly say the release of a market-dominating phone was a foregone conclusion based on the success of the iPod, and an Apple without the iPhone would look incredibly different. Sure, people wanted to take their music with them, but the nearly purely multitouch interface was a fresh invention - the iPod did not have a touch interface AFAIK until three years later. I just don't see something which was such a fresh take and new engineering - to the point that other smartphone vendors thought the original keynote demos were staged - was low-hanging fruit.
asdff 3y ago
Airpods were handed to Cook on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy earpod in bluetooth form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same earpod but with bluetooth it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
- d3nj4l 3y ago
  iPhone was handed to Jobs on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy iPod in touchscreen form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same iPod but with cellular it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    Yes, but would it have been done as well?
    - d3nj4l 3y ago
      Are the airpods not doing well?
      - addisonl 3y ago
        They said “done as well”, not “doing well”, two very different things.
        d3nj4l 3y ago
        Ok. Do you think airpods are not doing as well?
        fouc 3y ago
        "done as well" means "built as well", not the same as "doing well" or "doing as well"
krsdcbl 3y ago
AirPods where and are loathed by some, but ultimately they present a well designed product that made the underlying product category more seamless and consumer friendly and accessible. Their winning traits may seem banal, but in everyday carry objects small utility improvements play a huge role. Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough - what elevated AirPods though is that a visible, wearable product is an implicit fashion statement. Apples product designers succeeded in making st thing that is clearly recognisable and stands out against similar products already on the market, but is subtle enough not to disturb anything or polarise by totally overthrowing stylistic and societal convention. Perfect mix of identity and brand that is easy to integrate with your personal image. Apple silicon is another kind of thing: it's just the same thing as before but cheaper and more powerful, without compromising any trait that made the predecessor products appealing. Apple "reality" or whatever - I don't see carrying any of those same traits. It's much too visually disruptive to become an AirPod, it's much too close to similar products to be an M1, and on top of this it's success fully depends on expensive-to-produce software content within a technically complicated ecosystem, while Apple has long lost it's profile as a developer centric and welcoming brand and rather capitalized on it's ubiquity and alienated many developers who only still contribute to the platform it because they have too by sheer numbers. Apple might be able to not totally fail spinning up the platform, because of buying power, image and again numbers. But those just slightly more practical, still bulky and odd looking VR glasses are nowhere near replicating the seamless product fit of iPods, IPhones, AirPods or CPUs. It's Metaverse all over again.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  > Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    Yeah. They're not perfect, and I've had problems with them a couple times, but they mostly just work. The audio latency is also better than anything else I've used.
usernew 3y ago
[flagged]
- white_dragon88 3y ago
  That’s a whole lot of salt for something that actually exists and wasn’t a load of hot air. AirPod max headphones are brilliant devices. M1 chips have made laptops fast, quiet and cool while maintaining a very impressive speed (there’s nothing gimped about the MacBook). Iphones continue to be market leaders for a reason, they unite classical consumers You can not like it, but you can’t deny it. Maybe part of the reason they did so well is that competition sucked. Windows is a blob of cruft on top of cruft, isolating Microsoft into its own developer bubble. Android OS has been a very mixed platter, known for relying on carriers and manufacturers to keep the phones up to date (which they provably suck at)
  - usernew 3y ago
    The M1 chip can't run most software w/o virtualizing x86. I can't run about 90% of my work apps on it. It can't run any games kids play. Even the major vendors that run on Apple now had to rewrite their apps. In what world is this any kind of brilliance or win? Here, I built you a car with TVs for bumpers. It's brilliant! No, you're supposed to only drive it on side streets so there's no traffic behind you. You're driving it wrong. If it rains, don't forget to tape an umbrella on your hood. Oh you can't see? You're supposed to see through the camera, not the window. There are many ARM CPUs out there, Apple made another one with some minor tweaks. For the home, I can get a 64 core Intel with a terabyte of RAM. For work, I get an 8-core xeon laptop w/ 128GB of ECC RAM, that runs cool, quiet, and just as fast as Apple. Difference is, when I want it to run much, much faster than Apple, I can plug in a 200W power brick, spin up the fans to max, and have my script done when I'm back from lunch. Iphones aren't market leaders, with 20% market share vs Android. They're overpriced toys to which you don't have full access and can't run your apps of your own choosing on. I'm browsing this site by chromecasting my phone screen to my 65" TV, and I've reprogrammed my buttons to pick up calls when the phone is locked if I press power+volDown. When I go to a customer site, I can plug in my phone into an ESX farm, copy a VMDK onto the host, and start the demo VM. All the guys with a terabyte of storage on their expensive iphones are searching for that USB stick in their bag. AirPod Max? Who cares. It's just a bluetooth headset the price of a laptop, and sounds like garbage compared to my $100 Sennheiser bluetooth. Apple products are toys. Android OS? The latest version of which one I'm running on the 12yo phone I'm using to browse this site on my TV, in firefox, which has no trace of google services and is lightning fast? The 'classical consumer' you're talking about here is my wife. I get her an iphone because if she had something better, she'd screw it up and waste my time. It's the same reason you get your kid a chevy cavalier instead of an audi S8. That doesn't make the chevy the better car. When she dropped it, because the back was slippery glass (brilliant, as you put it), the $1200 phone had to go to the trash. Because you know, let's make things people hold and drop a lot slippery and fragile. Fanboy comment? Why didn't she goop on a screen protector and a thick rubber case? Same reason I don't wrap my car in bubblewrap. Because not having your device destroyed when you drop it 4ft on wood floors is a basic function of the device, and Apple seems to be the only one struggling with basic functionality. Bad reception? You're holding it wrong. Destroyed by tiny falls? You should have wrapped it in bubblewrap. Keyboard breaks from typing? You shouldn't be typing on macs, that's what siri is for. Part of the reason they did so well, is because Apple products are shiny and cute, and they're dumbed-down forget-it devices for the lowest common denominator. I wouldn't necessarily call 20% market share well, but because they're all margin, Apple makes a lot. I'm here saying I'm absolutely willing to pay the iPhone price so I don't get bugged by my wife - my time is worth more. But that doesn't make the iPhone any more brilliant than a car that only goes 65 that you buy for your teen.
erichocean 3y ago
> Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products Tim Cook's first major executive move as CEO was to fire Scott Forstall.
- sbuk 3y ago
  Forstall’s first big unguided product delivery was Maps. He royally screwed the pooch with the release. By all accounts, he was fairly toxic in the executive group, he had to go.
  - erichocean 3y ago
    > By all accounts, he was fairly toxic in the executive group, he had to go. So was Steve Jobs—Tim Cook would have fired him, too, if he could.
seydor 3y ago
If you count victory by money, yes. But apple has not been able to surpass the iphone

crooked-v 3y ago

> What does the author consider to be a victory? Well, there's the Apple II, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone... Apple has had a long history of products that redefined the future of entire categories, and almost all of them up to this point except the Apple Watch included deep involvement by Jobs.

kmonsen 3y ago
Apple watch? Airpods maybe? Apple silicon for sure. Other than that not much, but to be clear there has not really been any other inventions in this time span like those you mention. The market is more mature.
- Wazako 3y ago
  Isn't Time Cook ultimately like Steve Ballmer? He has continued and consolidated to build a golden prison with the construction of a monopoly and increase the money generated incredibly.
  - scarface74 3y ago
    A “monopoly” in what product category?
    - simonh 3y ago
      Monopoly (noun): Thing I hate that is incredibly popular, and I’ve got all bitter and twisted about it.
      - sbuk 3y ago
        Ha! The “orange site” dictionary. There’s a parody site in that…
    - Wazako 3y ago
      In the sense that it has become hostile to use. I remember when iTune and safari were user friendly on Windows. Or the iphone wouldn't be limited to a usb 2.0 port.
      - scarface74 3y ago
        That’s not what a “monopoly” means and Safari was never good on Windows.
- dwaite 3y ago
  When the device has a user experience, it gradually turns into a convergence platform. This is what makes coming out with new products harder - Apple doesn't have a market for a mid-range camera, or a GPS, or a music player, or a PDA - because those are all things the iPhone does. They add capabilities to the phone to usurp other device markets (most recently, emergency satellite communicators and OnStar-style crash detection). Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone. Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone). The sad thing is that there are areas they could make a lot of innovations, such as smart home accessories. They killed off the AirPort line, and license out HomeKit with almost no first-party hardware, because those just don't move the needle for a company of Apple's size.
  - bredren 3y ago
    > Apple releases new devices most often by releasing them inside the iPhone. Another example is Lidar 3d scanning in iPhone. >Which is why now, with a saturated cellphone market which is slowing down the upgrade frequency, they are so interested in wearables (separate hardware that augments your phone) and services (software that augments your phone). I suspect that annual upgrades to Watch, the maturation of Fitness and Music services and the mix of HW "devices" released in iPhone have strategic goal of supporting the new headset device. RE: HomeKit, even if it couldn't deliver the revenue opportunity of other businesses of the company, I think it had potential to be far more than it is now. The head of home services, Sam Jadallah left before his third year during a critical push into the home with Homepod and Homepod Mini. It could be his efforts were blocked--perhaps to starve advancement of Smarthome while Amazon was bleeding cash on Alexa. But regardless his team failed to push the category forward and Home languished. HomeKit and Siri are perhaps the most high profile weak products from Apple that, had they been handled differently, people would have greatly benefited from for several years now. That said, neither seemed to have that much revenue opportunity and it is clear looking backward that their weakness has not (yet) obviously held the company back in any way.
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tguedes 3y ago

Absolutely. Between Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, AirPods, and scaling operations to be able to sell the amount of products they do in a year, that is hard to argue against being an overwhelming success for Tim Cook as CEO. Is it equal to the legacy of Apple under Jobs? Definitely not. But how many other companies/people released 3 revolutionary products?

bredren 3y ago
It is hard to not compare the breakthrough product release count between Jobs and Cook. If that is the measure, then we have to bring in Jobs' tenure as not only CEO but company founder that stretched 25 years as CEO, 1976 to 1985 and 1997 to 2011. Cook only took the reins in 2011, and at that time arguably the company should not have focused on releasing yet more revolutionary products. iPhone is the most successful consumer product in history, focus was correctly placed in supporting that, building moats around it and positioning the ecosystem to support the next big thing. One product often left out, which may have started with Jobs, but delivery should be attributed to Cook is the new Apple HQ. The initial impact has crumbled due to Covid WFH. However, this campus may turn out to be a force multiplier going forward. If so, it is a victory, but not in the minds of consumers.
- deet 3y ago
  I strongly doubt that the campus is any more of a force multiplier than a collection of far cheaper class A office buildings of similar capacity, with similarly serene grass and vegetation connecting them.
  - zamnos 3y ago
    And that, dear reader, is how we ended up with hundreds of bland copy-cat Android phones to the iPhone. There's something to be said, mentally, for working somewhere that's inspiring. A shitty office in yet a clone of all the other office parks, buried in office-park-landia of San Jose, is not it. Even a stroll through the secret underground parking lot at Apple is inspiring with all the exotic cars that are owned by early Apple employees, instead of Honda Civics and Toyota Camrys. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I drive a Honda, but they just don't have the same emotional pull.

NovaDudely 3y ago

I would argue that the move the Apple Silicon was in the pipeline long before Cook took over. I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out. But Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV streaming were all under cooks watch. Maybe not as ground breaking but still very important. Mind you, who else has been doing ground breaking stuff like under Steve? I cannot think of anything other than the recent AI stuff. It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation.

neural_thing 3y ago
Are Air-pods, Apple Watch and Apple TV actually VERY important? The whole Wearables, Home and Accessories category is 10% of Apple's revenue and that includes Beats and what not.
- sbuk 3y ago
  In the last quarter, that equates to $9.48B, which by anyone’s standards is a pretty good business. The company I work for arguably makes more “important” products, but we’d be incredibly happy with that revenue!
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  While I wouldn't put so much weight on Apple TV+, air-pods and Apple watch do pretty much launch wireless headphones out of a niche into the mainstream and absolutely kick started the smart watch market across all vendors. I say this as someone that uses none of these type of devices from any vendor.
dwaite 3y ago
> I mean PA semi was purchased in 2008 and the first A4 processor was 2010, the writing was already on the wall a good decade out. Is this similar to how AMD's Bulldozer architecture back around that timeframe was the writing was on the wall for their current competitive dominance over Intel? PA Semi was a great talent accu-hire, but AFAIK at the time of acquisition they only had Power-based designs ready for market. > It kind of feels like Steve picked the last of the low hanging fruit and then bowed out before it came to stagnation. PT Barnum was a renowned showman as well, but that doesn't mean he trained all the elephants. For instance, I would hardly say the release of a market-dominating phone was a foregone conclusion based on the success of the iPod, and an Apple without the iPhone would look incredibly different. Sure, people wanted to take their music with them, but the nearly purely multitouch interface was a fresh invention - the iPod did not have a touch interface AFAIK until three years later. I just don't see something which was such a fresh take and new engineering - to the point that other smartphone vendors thought the original keynote demos were staged - was low-hanging fruit.

asdff 3y ago

Airpods were handed to Cook on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy earpod in bluetooth form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same earpod but with bluetooth it would have been made no matter who was CEO.

d3nj4l 3y ago
iPhone was handed to Jobs on a platter, honestly. It doesn't take a market savant to realize apple can make a killing selling the ever popular and sexy iPod in touchscreen form. Once the battery technology was available to resell the same iPod but with cellular it would have been made no matter who was CEO.
- zamnos 3y ago
  Yes, but would it have been done as well?
  - d3nj4l 3y ago
    Are the airpods not doing well?
    - addisonl 3y ago
      They said “done as well”, not “doing well”, two very different things.
      - d3nj4l 3y ago
        Ok. Do you think airpods are not doing as well?
        fouc 3y ago
        "done as well" means "built as well", not the same as "doing well" or "doing as well"

krsdcbl 3y ago

AirPods where and are loathed by some, but ultimately they present a well designed product that made the underlying product category more seamless and consumer friendly and accessible. Their winning traits may seem banal, but in everyday carry objects small utility improvements play a huge role. Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough - what elevated AirPods though is that a visible, wearable product is an implicit fashion statement. Apples product designers succeeded in making st thing that is clearly recognisable and stands out against similar products already on the market, but is subtle enough not to disturb anything or polarise by totally overthrowing stylistic and societal convention. Perfect mix of identity and brand that is easy to integrate with your personal image. Apple silicon is another kind of thing: it's just the same thing as before but cheaper and more powerful, without compromising any trait that made the predecessor products appealing. Apple "reality" or whatever - I don't see carrying any of those same traits. It's much too visually disruptive to become an AirPod, it's much too close to similar products to be an M1, and on top of this it's success fully depends on expensive-to-produce software content within a technically complicated ecosystem, while Apple has long lost it's profile as a developer centric and welcoming brand and rather capitalized on it's ubiquity and alienated many developers who only still contribute to the platform it because they have too by sheer numbers. Apple might be able to not totally fail spinning up the platform, because of buying power, image and again numbers. But those just slightly more practical, still bulky and odd looking VR glasses are nowhere near replicating the seamless product fit of iPods, IPhones, AirPods or CPUs. It's Metaverse all over again.

hamandcheese 3y ago
> Not having to deal with cables and increased range of movement are enough I don't think that's enough. AirPods "just work" in a way that no prior Bluetooth headset ever did. Everything else was a kludge, particularly when it came to switching between multiple devices.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Yeah. They're not perfect, and I've had problems with them a couple times, but they mostly just work. The audio latency is also better than anything else I've used.

usernew 3y ago

[flagged]

white_dragon88 3y ago
That’s a whole lot of salt for something that actually exists and wasn’t a load of hot air. AirPod max headphones are brilliant devices. M1 chips have made laptops fast, quiet and cool while maintaining a very impressive speed (there’s nothing gimped about the MacBook). Iphones continue to be market leaders for a reason, they unite classical consumers You can not like it, but you can’t deny it. Maybe part of the reason they did so well is that competition sucked. Windows is a blob of cruft on top of cruft, isolating Microsoft into its own developer bubble. Android OS has been a very mixed platter, known for relying on carriers and manufacturers to keep the phones up to date (which they provably suck at)
- usernew 3y ago
  The M1 chip can't run most software w/o virtualizing x86. I can't run about 90% of my work apps on it. It can't run any games kids play. Even the major vendors that run on Apple now had to rewrite their apps. In what world is this any kind of brilliance or win? Here, I built you a car with TVs for bumpers. It's brilliant! No, you're supposed to only drive it on side streets so there's no traffic behind you. You're driving it wrong. If it rains, don't forget to tape an umbrella on your hood. Oh you can't see? You're supposed to see through the camera, not the window. There are many ARM CPUs out there, Apple made another one with some minor tweaks. For the home, I can get a 64 core Intel with a terabyte of RAM. For work, I get an 8-core xeon laptop w/ 128GB of ECC RAM, that runs cool, quiet, and just as fast as Apple. Difference is, when I want it to run much, much faster than Apple, I can plug in a 200W power brick, spin up the fans to max, and have my script done when I'm back from lunch. Iphones aren't market leaders, with 20% market share vs Android. They're overpriced toys to which you don't have full access and can't run your apps of your own choosing on. I'm browsing this site by chromecasting my phone screen to my 65" TV, and I've reprogrammed my buttons to pick up calls when the phone is locked if I press power+volDown. When I go to a customer site, I can plug in my phone into an ESX farm, copy a VMDK onto the host, and start the demo VM. All the guys with a terabyte of storage on their expensive iphones are searching for that USB stick in their bag. AirPod Max? Who cares. It's just a bluetooth headset the price of a laptop, and sounds like garbage compared to my $100 Sennheiser bluetooth. Apple products are toys. Android OS? The latest version of which one I'm running on the 12yo phone I'm using to browse this site on my TV, in firefox, which has no trace of google services and is lightning fast? The 'classical consumer' you're talking about here is my wife. I get her an iphone because if she had something better, she'd screw it up and waste my time. It's the same reason you get your kid a chevy cavalier instead of an audi S8. That doesn't make the chevy the better car. When she dropped it, because the back was slippery glass (brilliant, as you put it), the $1200 phone had to go to the trash. Because you know, let's make things people hold and drop a lot slippery and fragile. Fanboy comment? Why didn't she goop on a screen protector and a thick rubber case? Same reason I don't wrap my car in bubblewrap. Because not having your device destroyed when you drop it 4ft on wood floors is a basic function of the device, and Apple seems to be the only one struggling with basic functionality. Bad reception? You're holding it wrong. Destroyed by tiny falls? You should have wrapped it in bubblewrap. Keyboard breaks from typing? You shouldn't be typing on macs, that's what siri is for. Part of the reason they did so well, is because Apple products are shiny and cute, and they're dumbed-down forget-it devices for the lowest common denominator. I wouldn't necessarily call 20% market share well, but because they're all margin, Apple makes a lot. I'm here saying I'm absolutely willing to pay the iPhone price so I don't get bugged by my wife - my time is worth more. But that doesn't make the iPhone any more brilliant than a car that only goes 65 that you buy for your teen.

erichocean 3y ago

> Jobs trusted Cook to find and keep people who could design products Tim Cook's first major executive move as CEO was to fire Scott Forstall.

sbuk 3y ago
Forstall’s first big unguided product delivery was Maps. He royally screwed the pooch with the release. By all accounts, he was fairly toxic in the executive group, he had to go.
- erichocean 3y ago
  > By all accounts, he was fairly toxic in the executive group, he had to go. So was Steve Jobs—Tim Cook would have fired him, too, if he could.

seydor 3y ago

If you count victory by money, yes. But apple has not been able to surpass the iphone