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3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even ha

by skeeter2020 11mo ago

3 retirements and a VP taking an obvious promotion at Meta: not really the "sky is falling" event they try to paint. Tim Cook stepping down would (if it even happens) be a big deal, but he's not the heart of the company. He's been an extremely compentent accountant; enjoy your retirement party and gold watch. And to suggest they are falling behind because they're not investing hundreds of billions in an AI "strategy" that shows no pay-off - while the other tech companies start to scale back their capital investments? I've never been a huge Apple fan as a company but their current situation makes me more bullish than ever.

an0malous 11mo ago
Yeah it seems pretty obvious that we’re in the mainframe era of transformer models and we’ll soon transition to the personal computer era where these all run on your device, which Apple stands to benefit from the most. Their FoundationModels are actually pretty good at certain tasks
- Hammershaft 11mo ago
  I don't think that's obvious. The marginal return on additional units of compute seems to fall pretty quickly for the vast majority of applications, which increases the benefit of decentralization over the cost of reduced compute. It isn't clear the same is true of intelligence.
tptacek 11mo ago
There also seems to be a general vibe of cheerfulness among Apple fans about Dye's departure.
- trueno 11mo ago
  i don't really care about dye (or liquid glass) but i do feel like it's an alarm of sorts that Srouji stated he'd probably take off without tim cook at the helm. I dunno what that signals, i'm less inclined to think it's a "i just really like tim, man" and more of a "this incoming leadership can get bent". Apple also just picked up the meta lady that helped draft the patriot act. i dunno. What remains to be seen is whether or not Apple maintains its core tenets or if they start slipping on things like privacy, ads, and forcing AI in everyone's face. They undoubtedly leave a buttload of money on the table never pursuing these things. whole shakeup feels like it was driven by wall street earlier in the year, there were headlines about apple being in serious trouble for missing out on AI. I dunno feels like some game of thrones opportunism within apple leadership just played out. apple fans are dorks in that they think such a shakeup is in response to liquid glass and the iphone air being a boring phone. i like apple devices, this is kinda freaky i can't lie. it would actually suck if their chip division started stalling if srouji bounces, it would suck infinitely more if a new leadership was here to redefine apple values and suddenly we have a proverbial apple version of satya nadella at the helm who's here to blast you with ads and subscriptions and forced AI.
NBJack 11mo ago
Perhaps the sky already fell a while back? I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path. The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  Yes Siri has stagnated. But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports. Siri could be better if Apple just threw 10000 monkeys at it and configure it more phrases (utterances) to match on.
  - aydyn 11mo ago
    > But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports. Link to reports? As far as I understand, google assistant is being deprecated in favor of gemini.
    - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/gemini-is-an-increasingly-good-chatbot-but-its-still-a-bad-assistant/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/gemini-is-an-increas... This is a little older. I know things improve a lot quickly. https://www.slashgear.com/1521993/google-gemini-ai-replace-smart-assistant/ https://www.slashgear.com/1521993/google-gemini-ai-replace-s...
- keyle 11mo ago
  Personally I prefer a useless Siri that I can turn off, rather than a copilot into everything I cannot turn off. I am perfectly fine with Apple lagging behind in "AI".
tebnaklop 11mo ago
> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer. If this person had any role to play in the user interface decisions of macos Tahoe, then good riddance.
- acdha 11mo ago
  He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”. There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someone-alan-dye-leaves-apple/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someo... https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.
  - hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
    The more worrying aspect is that the Apple leadership continued with Dye even as he kept pushing terrible interfaces. In fact, according to all reports, they seem distraught by this move which indicates they aren’t really in alignment with the broader ecosystem that didn’t like Dye’s output at all.
    - acdha 11mo ago
      Agreed. It suggests they were swayed by demos more than using their own products, which is scary. Using iOS 26 makes me wonder if Cook even uses an iPhone or has an assistant do everything - it’s not unusable but there are so many little glitches which would’ve had Steve Jobs chewing out an entire room full of managers.
jimbokun 11mo ago
Calling Tim Cook an extremely competent accountant is an extreme understatement. He’s maybe the most competent accountant of all time, given how far he’s brought Apple.
- nutjob2 11mo ago
  You make it sound like Cook does everything at Apple. His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that. Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.
  - jasomill 11mo ago
    While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today. To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time. Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
  - jimbokun 11mo ago
    Part of the reason Apple was doing great before he became CEO is because Tim Cook was the COO. A huge part of their success was getting good deals on the non standard parts they needed at massive scale. Not sure there was a clear better candidate for CEO after Jobs died.
SwtCyber 11mo ago
I think people are reacting less to who left and more to when
QuantumGood 11mo ago
He's also a very competant politician vis-a-vis governments, according to Warren Buffet many years ago
giancarlostoro 11mo ago
Tim Cook is a safe CEO who should have stayed a COO. I like Tim but I think what Apple needs is someone like Tim as COO and a visionary the way Steve Jobs was a visionary. For all his flaws he paved the way to where Apple is today.

an0malous 11mo ago

Yeah it seems pretty obvious that we’re in the mainframe era of transformer models and we’ll soon transition to the personal computer era where these all run on your device, which Apple stands to benefit from the most. Their FoundationModels are actually pretty good at certain tasks

Hammershaft 11mo ago
I don't think that's obvious. The marginal return on additional units of compute seems to fall pretty quickly for the vast majority of applications, which increases the benefit of decentralization over the cost of reduced compute. It isn't clear the same is true of intelligence.

tptacek 11mo ago

There also seems to be a general vibe of cheerfulness among Apple fans about Dye's departure.

trueno 11mo ago
i don't really care about dye (or liquid glass) but i do feel like it's an alarm of sorts that Srouji stated he'd probably take off without tim cook at the helm. I dunno what that signals, i'm less inclined to think it's a "i just really like tim, man" and more of a "this incoming leadership can get bent". Apple also just picked up the meta lady that helped draft the patriot act. i dunno. What remains to be seen is whether or not Apple maintains its core tenets or if they start slipping on things like privacy, ads, and forcing AI in everyone's face. They undoubtedly leave a buttload of money on the table never pursuing these things. whole shakeup feels like it was driven by wall street earlier in the year, there were headlines about apple being in serious trouble for missing out on AI. I dunno feels like some game of thrones opportunism within apple leadership just played out. apple fans are dorks in that they think such a shakeup is in response to liquid glass and the iphone air being a boring phone. i like apple devices, this is kinda freaky i can't lie. it would actually suck if their chip division started stalling if srouji bounces, it would suck infinitely more if a new leadership was here to redefine apple values and suddenly we have a proverbial apple version of satya nadella at the helm who's here to blast you with ads and subscriptions and forced AI.

NBJack 11mo ago

Perhaps the sky already fell a while back? I don't really mind that they aren't on the LLM bandwagon, but Siri seems to have stagnated. The big "Apple Intelligence" capabilities of the iPhone 16 haven't exactly landed. The Vision Pro seems to be on at least a partial depreciation path. The only real innovation I've seen in the last decade has been the M line of chips. Mind you, these are undeniably really good; but even that hasn't changed the market share that much (though it is going up and trending well).

raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
Yes Siri has stagnated. But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports. Siri could be better if Apple just threw 10000 monkeys at it and configure it more phrases (utterances) to match on.
- aydyn 11mo ago
  > But both Google and Amazon tried to add LLMs to their assistants and they are both worse now than they were before according to reports. Link to reports? As far as I understand, google assistant is being deprecated in favor of gemini.
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/gemini-is-an-increasingly-good-chatbot-but-its-still-a-bad-assistant/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/gemini-is-an-increas... This is a little older. I know things improve a lot quickly. https://www.slashgear.com/1521993/google-gemini-ai-replace-smart-assistant/ https://www.slashgear.com/1521993/google-gemini-ai-replace-s...
keyle 11mo ago
Personally I prefer a useless Siri that I can turn off, rather than a copilot into everything I cannot turn off. I am perfectly fine with Apple lagging behind in "AI".

tebnaklop 11mo ago

> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer. If this person had any role to play in the user interface decisions of macos Tahoe, then good riddance.

acdha 11mo ago
He did, along with a lot of earlier decisions. The underlying problem is that neither he nor Jony Ive had experience doing user interface design—Ive was a hardware designer, and Dye was the packaging guy—so they kept making things which looked good in demos and the screenshots on boxes, but aren’t usable and flagrantly violated Apple own Human Interface Guidelines in ways which weren’t just “we tried to do something innovative” but more like “I never knew this concept in someone else’s field existed”. There’s a bit more here but I think this opens the possibility of actual UX professionals fixing decisions without the problem of having to avoid saying their boss made a mistake. https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someone-alan-dye-leaves-apple/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/12/in-a-major-coup-for-someo... https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job I would worry if I worked at Facebook since their VR work is likely to get the same “looked awesome in the demo” demands which will push the hardware budget and lower usability.
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  The more worrying aspect is that the Apple leadership continued with Dye even as he kept pushing terrible interfaces. In fact, according to all reports, they seem distraught by this move which indicates they aren’t really in alignment with the broader ecosystem that didn’t like Dye’s output at all.
  - acdha 11mo ago
    Agreed. It suggests they were swayed by demos more than using their own products, which is scary. Using iOS 26 makes me wonder if Cook even uses an iPhone or has an assistant do everything - it’s not unusable but there are so many little glitches which would’ve had Steve Jobs chewing out an entire room full of managers.

jimbokun 11mo ago

Calling Tim Cook an extremely competent accountant is an extreme understatement. He’s maybe the most competent accountant of all time, given how far he’s brought Apple.

nutjob2 11mo ago
You make it sound like Cook does everything at Apple. His job has been to keep the train rolling and on the tracks. He's very competent at that but the slow atrophy of Apple shows he's not doing anything more than that. Apple was doing great before he became CEO and it'll do great after he leaves.
- jasomill 11mo ago
  While Cook isn't a product visionary, and never pretended to be, he's also not a mere caretaker: before he was CEO, he was responsible for the design and implementation of Apple's global supply chain and manufacturing operations as they exist today. To torture your analogy, he designed and built the tracks and related infrastructure that kept Jobs' trains running on time. Delivering products to customers, as you may recall, was always as important to Jobs as the design of the products themselves.
- jimbokun 11mo ago
  Part of the reason Apple was doing great before he became CEO is because Tim Cook was the COO. A huge part of their success was getting good deals on the non standard parts they needed at massive scale. Not sure there was a clear better candidate for CEO after Jobs died.

SwtCyber 11mo ago

I think people are reacting less to who left and more to when

QuantumGood 11mo ago

He's also a very competant politician vis-a-vis governments, according to Warren Buffet many years ago

giancarlostoro 11mo ago

Tim Cook is a safe CEO who should have stayed a COO. I like Tim but I think what Apple needs is someone like Tim as COO and a visionary the way Steve Jobs was a visionary. For all his flaws he paved the way to where Apple is today.