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I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible vers

I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values. Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.

thenanyu 5mo ago
Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else
- ubercore 5mo ago
  I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.
  - cubefox 5mo ago
    Siri was GOFAI (handwritten software) rather than a model written by a machine learning algorithm.
  - uncivilized 5mo ago
    Calling the current state of art AI is also generous.
- ivanjermakov 5mo ago
  AI talks started before Jobs was born...
- throwawaymobule 5mo ago
  Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.
- eloisant 5mo ago
  The problem with the word "AI" is that it's a broad term with fuzzy borders depending on who you ask. But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product... If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess. If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.
  - russelldjimmy 5mo ago
    > It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product. This is a classic case of thinking that inventing something before others is all that matters, while ignoring that finding a mass market use-case for an existing technology is also important.
  - kergonath 5mo ago
    > But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product... That’s a point you are very unlikely to see being made. Apple famously bought the startup that was making Siri. They didn’t even change the name.
drob518 5mo ago
Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.
jayd16 5mo ago
Honestly, I think Jobs would hate the fuzzy, unpolished results that AI gives you.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
simplyluke 5mo ago
I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
- ebbi 5mo ago
  Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.
  - spacebanana7 5mo ago
    For example, Tim had the discipline to get out of the EV projects. Which was likely wise given the challenges the sector has faced in profitability, and Apple's long term outside option to accrue vehicular services revenue through CarPlay. Yet someone in his position could have burned $200B pretty easily to try and build a business there.
    - leetharris 5mo ago
      The only mistake he made was not buying Tesla around the M3 launch. Elon was desperate and would have sold it to him for cheap. He didn't take the meeting. Otherwise I completely agree, once Tesla reached takeoff, it's too hard for anyone else to do it without burning mountains worth of cash.
    - wayne 5mo ago
      Yet he did still launch Vision Pro.
      - jodrellblank 5mo ago
lukeify 5mo ago
Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.
- wvbdmp 5mo ago
  Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.
- makeitdouble 5mo ago
  To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone. The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
- jbmchuck 5mo ago
  Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.
- mancerayder 5mo ago
  There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.
  - iddan 5mo ago
    The fact they figured out how to transition all their laptops to ARM so it won’t be a stovetop on your lap is amazing
- raincole 5mo ago
  The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.
noahlt 5mo ago
Hacker News? More like MBA news. I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- mrits 5mo ago
  Profit maximizing often involves selling much cheaper and lower quality versions of your products. Often times this involves even getting other companies to mass produce it under your name. The cheapest Mac is arguably their best product. Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.
dvt 5mo ago
> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
- atonse 5mo ago
  Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.
- SkyPuncher 5mo ago
  I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter. I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
  - rolisz 5mo ago
    MacOS sucks. I can't wait for the day Asahi Linux is good enough so that I can bail on it. Safari, a web browser, randomly stops being able to connect to the Internet (other apps can).
    - richwater 5mo ago
      MacOS sucks but everything else sucks harder. Linux is still nowhere close to being good enough for the average consumer in regards to simplicity regardless of how much gaslighting the community pushes.
      - rrvsh 5mo ago
tguedes 5mo ago
I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.
jwr 5mo ago
> without losing its values I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so. Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse. Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.
sneak 5mo ago
> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values. I could not disagree more. Apple has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so. The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death. The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years. I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.
Aachen 5mo ago
> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values. Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things? From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement: > When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. > That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. (Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different) I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it
rdbl27 5mo ago
Cook has done more or less the opposite of what Jobs did. Jobs was all about bold innovation, hugely risky bets on gamechanging products. Cook is a timid logistics optimizer, and he's good at that. We reliably get an iPhone with slightly more RAM, slightly faster CPU on schedule every year. No category changing products. Innovation has stopped -- after Jobs, there is only minor incremental improvement
- walthamstow 5mo ago
  I don't own one, but the Apple Watch did very much change the category, defined it even. Vision Pro was a innovative bet, maybe not a great one. Apple Silicon completely changed the game.
  - rdbl27 5mo ago
    The Apple Watch is a niche product for a few tech nerds (at least outside of Silicon Valley tech circles), not an ubiquitous feature of everyday life for normal people the way the PC, the iPod, and the iPhone are. Vision Pro was a science experiment that few people have even heard of. Apple Silicon is a perfect example of a purely internal-facing logistics optimization: sure, it's fine in terms of saving money and boosting performance. 99% of end users do not know or care whether they have Apple Silicon or Intel chips.
    - walthamstow 5mo ago
      Just utter nonsense about the watch. They're very popular with normal British people like my mother. M1 was a performance per watt revolution. Sounds like you're either clueless, hate Apple or Tim Cook, or all of the above.
      - rdbl27 5mo ago
        No need for the personal attacks. Let's keep it quantitative rather than relying upon personal anecdotes: Apple does not break out unit sales for the Watch (which in itself is telling.) According to third party analyst estimates which are readily obtainable from search engines, the Apple Watch has shipped just over 100 million units worldwide since inception. Upgrade cycles are weak to nonexistent. Growth flatlined years ago -- even declining slightly in recent years. After the initial burst of interest from early adopters -- that is, tech nerds plus a few outliers here and there among normies -- demand fizzled. The iPhone has shipped 3 billion units. It is in an entirely different category. While demand has roughly plateaued, there is a strong upgrade / replacement cycle. Annual iPhone sales are in the ~250M range -- far more iPhones are sold every year than all Apple Watches that have ever been sold in history. The Apple Watch is firmly in the "niche product" category. It's not a "gamechanger for everyday life for normal people," notwithstanding the existence of a few normie outliers here and there.
bdelmas 5mo ago
> Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. He only carried what was left from Steve Jobs. But nothing special or groundbreaking came from him. Apple Vision failed, the transition to AI failed, many people still dislike what is done with the MacBook, he agreed to have the horrible glass UI design just like what Windows did a decade ago, and he failed to find the next Jony Ive, etc... Sure he was an awesome COO. But as a CEO, he was certainly way below Steve Jobs and even less taking his vision "to the moon".
arendtio 5mo ago
I am not a big Apple fan, but when I see what they did with the M-series MacBooks, it feels like they are from the future. And not just a year ahead or so, but more like a decade. This is something Tim and John both deserve credit for.

thenanyu 5mo ago

Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else

ubercore 5mo ago
I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.
- cubefox 5mo ago
  Siri was GOFAI (handwritten software) rather than a model written by a machine learning algorithm.
- uncivilized 5mo ago
  Calling the current state of art AI is also generous.
ivanjermakov 5mo ago
AI talks started before Jobs was born...
throwawaymobule 5mo ago
Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.
eloisant 5mo ago
The problem with the word "AI" is that it's a broad term with fuzzy borders depending on who you ask. But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product... If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess. If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.
- russelldjimmy 5mo ago
  > It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product. This is a classic case of thinking that inventing something before others is all that matters, while ignoring that finding a mass market use-case for an existing technology is also important.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  > But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product... That’s a point you are very unlikely to see being made. Apple famously bought the startup that was making Siri. They didn’t even change the name.

drob518 5mo ago

Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.

jayd16 5mo ago

Honestly, I think Jobs would hate the fuzzy, unpolished results that AI gives you.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

simplyluke 5mo ago

I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.

ebbi 5mo ago
Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.
- spacebanana7 5mo ago
  For example, Tim had the discipline to get out of the EV projects. Which was likely wise given the challenges the sector has faced in profitability, and Apple's long term outside option to accrue vehicular services revenue through CarPlay. Yet someone in his position could have burned $200B pretty easily to try and build a business there.
  - leetharris 5mo ago
    The only mistake he made was not buying Tesla around the M3 launch. Elon was desperate and would have sold it to him for cheap. He didn't take the meeting. Otherwise I completely agree, once Tesla reached takeoff, it's too hard for anyone else to do it without burning mountains worth of cash.
  - wayne 5mo ago
    Yet he did still launch Vision Pro.
    - jodrellblank 5mo ago

lukeify 5mo ago

Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.

wvbdmp 5mo ago
Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.
makeitdouble 5mo ago
To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone. The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
jbmchuck 5mo ago
Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.
mancerayder 5mo ago
There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.
- iddan 5mo ago
  The fact they figured out how to transition all their laptops to ARM so it won’t be a stovetop on your lap is amazing
raincole 5mo ago
The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.

noahlt 5mo ago

Hacker News? More like MBA news. I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
mrits 5mo ago
Profit maximizing often involves selling much cheaper and lower quality versions of your products. Often times this involves even getting other companies to mass produce it under your name. The cheapest Mac is arguably their best product. Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.

dvt 5mo ago

> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).

atonse 5mo ago
Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.
SkyPuncher 5mo ago
I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter. I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
- rolisz 5mo ago
  MacOS sucks. I can't wait for the day Asahi Linux is good enough so that I can bail on it. Safari, a web browser, randomly stops being able to connect to the Internet (other apps can).
  - richwater 5mo ago
    MacOS sucks but everything else sucks harder. Linux is still nowhere close to being good enough for the average consumer in regards to simplicity regardless of how much gaslighting the community pushes.
    - rrvsh 5mo ago

tguedes 5mo ago

I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.

jwr 5mo ago

> without losing its values I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so. Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse. Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.

sneak 5mo ago

> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values. I could not disagree more. Apple has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so. The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death. The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years. I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.

Aachen 5mo ago

> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values. Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things? From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement: > When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. > That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. (Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different) I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it

rdbl27 5mo ago

Cook has done more or less the opposite of what Jobs did. Jobs was all about bold innovation, hugely risky bets on gamechanging products. Cook is a timid logistics optimizer, and he's good at that. We reliably get an iPhone with slightly more RAM, slightly faster CPU on schedule every year. No category changing products. Innovation has stopped -- after Jobs, there is only minor incremental improvement

walthamstow 5mo ago
I don't own one, but the Apple Watch did very much change the category, defined it even. Vision Pro was a innovative bet, maybe not a great one. Apple Silicon completely changed the game.
- rdbl27 5mo ago
  The Apple Watch is a niche product for a few tech nerds (at least outside of Silicon Valley tech circles), not an ubiquitous feature of everyday life for normal people the way the PC, the iPod, and the iPhone are. Vision Pro was a science experiment that few people have even heard of. Apple Silicon is a perfect example of a purely internal-facing logistics optimization: sure, it's fine in terms of saving money and boosting performance. 99% of end users do not know or care whether they have Apple Silicon or Intel chips.
  - walthamstow 5mo ago
    Just utter nonsense about the watch. They're very popular with normal British people like my mother. M1 was a performance per watt revolution. Sounds like you're either clueless, hate Apple or Tim Cook, or all of the above.
    - rdbl27 5mo ago
      No need for the personal attacks. Let's keep it quantitative rather than relying upon personal anecdotes: Apple does not break out unit sales for the Watch (which in itself is telling.) According to third party analyst estimates which are readily obtainable from search engines, the Apple Watch has shipped just over 100 million units worldwide since inception. Upgrade cycles are weak to nonexistent. Growth flatlined years ago -- even declining slightly in recent years. After the initial burst of interest from early adopters -- that is, tech nerds plus a few outliers here and there among normies -- demand fizzled. The iPhone has shipped 3 billion units. It is in an entirely different category. While demand has roughly plateaued, there is a strong upgrade / replacement cycle. Annual iPhone sales are in the ~250M range -- far more iPhones are sold every year than all Apple Watches that have ever been sold in history. The Apple Watch is firmly in the "niche product" category. It's not a "gamechanger for everyday life for normal people," notwithstanding the existence of a few normie outliers here and there.

bdelmas 5mo ago

> Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. He only carried what was left from Steve Jobs. But nothing special or groundbreaking came from him. Apple Vision failed, the transition to AI failed, many people still dislike what is done with the MacBook, he agreed to have the horrible glass UI design just like what Windows did a decade ago, and he failed to find the next Jony Ive, etc... Sure he was an awesome COO. But as a CEO, he was certainly way below Steve Jobs and even less taking his vision "to the moon".

arendtio 5mo ago

I am not a big Apple fan, but when I see what they did with the M-series MacBooks, it feels like they are from the future. And not just a year ahead or so, but more like a decade. This is something Tim and John both deserve credit for.