6 ms·

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Cook that was grow the company. I'd love to see the critics do better.

pjmlp 6mo ago
When we pay premium, we expect premium.
- trimethylpurine 6mo ago
  Sadly, too many of us continue to go back for more after our expectations aren't met. This makes it an obvious decision to reduce quality below premium.
  - grishka 6mo ago
    There's nowhere to run, unfortunately. Windows and Linux are orders of magnitude worse than even macOS 26. To say that the whole software industry is a dumpster fire would be an understatement.
Noaidi 6mo ago
> and to Cook that was grow the company. If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.
- aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
  > I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes. Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.
- phkahler 6mo ago
  Yep, Cooks new role is essentially lobbyist.
- M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
  Yes, the reason Apple was so successful at Cook's helm is because he gifted Trump a plaque.
  - free_bip 6mo ago
    Why do you think they got most of their components exempted from tarrifs?
    - M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
      I'm aware of the open bribery by the administration. That has nothing to do with my comment.
      - free_bip 6mo ago
        Right, and without that open bribery they would have had 100% tarrifs on all of their iphones, macbooks and semiconductors, which is an overwhelming portion of their revenue. Now obviously, this only covers a small portion of Tim's reign over apple, but is it not fair to say you'd have a different overall view of his tenure if he was an honest businessman and ate the tarrifs like he was supposed to, probably tanking the stock in the process?
        M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
        I would probably have a stronger gripe with the ridiculousness of the tariffs than Tim Cook's refusal to bribe the president. Also, to say that not bribing would make him an "honest businessman" is slightly unfair. He has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, and if he is aware that lobbying to the president personally to avoid tariffs is what it takes to avoid tanking Apple's profit and share price, he is required to do that.
- eddieroger 6mo ago
  I'm not going to argue your wants with you because they are your own. Don't buy Apple products if you don't like the way they operate as a company. I don't particularly care for appeasing the administration, either, but it's not like Cook broke the system, so I'm not going to dance on his retirement over it. Where can I get my gold bar, please?
  - Noaidi 6mo ago
    I like Apple's products. I just purchased an iPhone 17 Pro. It does not mean I cannot still criticize them because of their monopolistic practices. I was doing Apple support since 1995, I saw how they changed. I mean, they certainly would never have given Trump a gold bar to forgive this case now, would they? https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj...
- LtWorf 6mo ago
  > I want ethical companies This will never exist. We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.
- throwaway_fjmr 6mo ago
  [dead]
- thevillagechief 6mo ago
  And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because... he pushed people to produce sleek devices? Which is fine, but then I'd propose that growing the company was ethical because it helped retirement portfolios and employed lots of people. The only Apple product I own is a prime-day deal Beats Pill, but I'm not going to claim that Apple grew because of bribes. People do seem to love their products, in ways I find irrational sometimes.
  - Noaidi 6mo ago
    > And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because... Did I say that?
embedding-shape 6mo ago
Sounds to me like Tim Cook was the wrong choice from the beginning then? Or should all the people who came to love the company because of great products just adapt to the company shifting the core focus to "basically a country's GDP" and be fine with that? I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.
- ap99 6mo ago
  100% agree. I want to buy from a company whose goal is to make the best products, not make the most money. You optimize differently for each.
MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago
> Apple's income now rival some GDPs But so has the rest of FAANG. Did Tim Cook really overperform? Growth compared to 2011: Apple ~8× Microsoft ~13–14× Google ~10× Facebook* ~10–15×
- namdnay 6mo ago
  the very fact that we're comparing apple, a (mainly) hardware company, to a bunch of software companies is in itself a measure of incredible success for Apple.
  - two_cents 6mo ago
    Microsoft is hardware company too. Surface, Xbox, computer peripherals, etc.
    - namdnay 6mo ago
      they're clearly not the main revenue drivers, contrary to Apple
      - DrScientist 6mo ago
        If you look at Apple's profits - it's about evenly split between 'Services' ( like music and app sales etc ) and hardware. Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services. Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
        namdnay 6mo ago
        yeah I think the key point is in your last sentence - maybe some people would buy Apple Music/TV without an iphone or an AppleTV? I don't think anyone would buy icloud without the hardware though. And presumably they're bundling applecare in the "services" as well :)
miltonlost 6mo ago
You didn’t address any of the criticism towards Cook and the decline of the product under him. All that matters seems to be “did the line go up?”
- nsxwolf 6mo ago
  Apple's current products make everything Jobs released at the end look like primitive tech demos. A couple annoying macOS quirks or controversial UI design decisions don't equal a decline in my view.
- eddieroger 6mo ago
  You're right, I didn't, because that isn't the measure of his leadership, which was my whole point. > All that matters seems to be "did the line go up?" Exactly.
  - redsocksfan45 6mo ago
    [dead]
DrewADesign 6mo ago
They made some of my favorite products. Their having GDP-level revenue doesn’t benefit me… at all. Their putting less effort into those products negatively affects me. There are more losers than beneficiaries, here. I couldn’t care less how many billions investors got. Monetarily, it’s a net gain. Societally, it’s a net loss.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
AstroBen 6mo ago
So much of Apple's growth is anti-consumer. You can't repair your device. They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product. They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere. They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android. They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store. Anything I missed? They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.
- tempodox 6mo ago
  > Anything I missed? The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.
  - FeloniousHam 6mo ago
    Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago. Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`. And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything. Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
    - MoonWalk 6mo ago
      Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything. Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions. Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive. Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser. Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here. Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location. The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications. "Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
rayiner 6mo ago
> It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. Who cares that it's Tim Cook's "passion" unless you're an Apple investor?
- JKCalhoun 6mo ago
  Under Tim Cook's leadership Apple has clearly been leaning into services for some time now. (Whether you like that or not, it looks like Eddy Cue was the one who was tapped to push out in this direction.) I imagine that was probably Cook recognizing that having your entire company propped up by a single hardware product line is a dangerous position to be in. To that end it is not just Apple investors but Apple customers and Apple as a company that may well end up benefitting from Cook's cautionary strategy. We've seen tariffs threaten Apple's hardware. A future downturn in the economy that erodes a consumer's ability to spend could also wreak havoc on Apple.
tempodox 6mo ago
> I'd love to see the critics do better. That’s underspecified. Part of the problem is that there are multiple incompatible definitions of “better”.
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
Have you considered that critics might not care about Apple investors?
coolkewlcuil 6mo ago
It's just as easy to sit and glaze someone. Stock buybacks simulating interest, inflation, and cutting corners on products, gouging devs that list on their app store, oh and they sell a lot of ear buds destined for the ewaste bin in 24-36 months. Plus the stock market is like Whose Line Is It Anyway; made up points that don't matter to humanity long term while the ewaste and non repairable products do. Stop carrying water for billionaires who do not care you exist. This is no different than fawning over a Kardashian. We have social systems to replace these people because as a species we're well aware of physics at this point. If physics hasn't seen fit to spare their biology the effects of entropy (aging -> death) they're not that important.
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]
duxup 6mo ago
In the age of the internet we’ve got endless people who think they’ve got something or someone all figured out, but no real evidence that anyone really does.

pjmlp 6mo ago

When we pay premium, we expect premium.

trimethylpurine 6mo ago
Sadly, too many of us continue to go back for more after our expectations aren't met. This makes it an obvious decision to reduce quality below premium.
- grishka 6mo ago
  There's nowhere to run, unfortunately. Windows and Linux are orders of magnitude worse than even macOS 26. To say that the whole software industry is a dumpster fire would be an understatement.

Noaidi 6mo ago

> and to Cook that was grow the company. If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.

aleph_minus_one 6mo ago
> I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes. Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.
phkahler 6mo ago
Yep, Cooks new role is essentially lobbyist.
M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
Yes, the reason Apple was so successful at Cook's helm is because he gifted Trump a plaque.
- free_bip 6mo ago
  Why do you think they got most of their components exempted from tarrifs?
  - M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
    I'm aware of the open bribery by the administration. That has nothing to do with my comment.
    - free_bip 6mo ago
      Right, and without that open bribery they would have had 100% tarrifs on all of their iphones, macbooks and semiconductors, which is an overwhelming portion of their revenue. Now obviously, this only covers a small portion of Tim's reign over apple, but is it not fair to say you'd have a different overall view of his tenure if he was an honest businessman and ate the tarrifs like he was supposed to, probably tanking the stock in the process?
      - M3L0NM4N 6mo ago
        I would probably have a stronger gripe with the ridiculousness of the tariffs than Tim Cook's refusal to bribe the president. Also, to say that not bribing would make him an "honest businessman" is slightly unfair. He has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, and if he is aware that lobbying to the president personally to avoid tariffs is what it takes to avoid tanking Apple's profit and share price, he is required to do that.
eddieroger 6mo ago
I'm not going to argue your wants with you because they are your own. Don't buy Apple products if you don't like the way they operate as a company. I don't particularly care for appeasing the administration, either, but it's not like Cook broke the system, so I'm not going to dance on his retirement over it. Where can I get my gold bar, please?
- Noaidi 6mo ago
  I like Apple's products. I just purchased an iPhone 17 Pro. It does not mean I cannot still criticize them because of their monopolistic practices. I was doing Apple support since 1995, I saw how they changed. I mean, they certainly would never have given Trump a gold bar to forgive this case now, would they? https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj/ https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj...
LtWorf 6mo ago
> I want ethical companies This will never exist. We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.
throwaway_fjmr 6mo ago
[dead]
thevillagechief 6mo ago
And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because... he pushed people to produce sleek devices? Which is fine, but then I'd propose that growing the company was ethical because it helped retirement portfolios and employed lots of people. The only Apple product I own is a prime-day deal Beats Pill, but I'm not going to claim that Apple grew because of bribes. People do seem to love their products, in ways I find irrational sometimes.
- Noaidi 6mo ago
  > And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because... Did I say that?

embedding-shape 6mo ago

Sounds to me like Tim Cook was the wrong choice from the beginning then? Or should all the people who came to love the company because of great products just adapt to the company shifting the core focus to "basically a country's GDP" and be fine with that? I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.

ap99 6mo ago
100% agree. I want to buy from a company whose goal is to make the best products, not make the most money. You optimize differently for each.

MrBuddyCasino 6mo ago

> Apple's income now rival some GDPs But so has the rest of FAANG. Did Tim Cook really overperform? Growth compared to 2011: Apple ~8× Microsoft ~13–14× Google ~10× Facebook* ~10–15×

namdnay 6mo ago
the very fact that we're comparing apple, a (mainly) hardware company, to a bunch of software companies is in itself a measure of incredible success for Apple.
- two_cents 6mo ago
  Microsoft is hardware company too. Surface, Xbox, computer peripherals, etc.
  - namdnay 6mo ago
    they're clearly not the main revenue drivers, contrary to Apple
    - DrScientist 6mo ago
      If you look at Apple's profits - it's about evenly split between 'Services' ( like music and app sales etc ) and hardware. Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services. Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
      - namdnay 6mo ago
        yeah I think the key point is in your last sentence - maybe some people would buy Apple Music/TV without an iphone or an AppleTV? I don't think anyone would buy icloud without the hardware though. And presumably they're bundling applecare in the "services" as well :)

miltonlost 6mo ago

You didn’t address any of the criticism towards Cook and the decline of the product under him. All that matters seems to be “did the line go up?”

nsxwolf 6mo ago
Apple's current products make everything Jobs released at the end look like primitive tech demos. A couple annoying macOS quirks or controversial UI design decisions don't equal a decline in my view.
eddieroger 6mo ago
You're right, I didn't, because that isn't the measure of his leadership, which was my whole point. > All that matters seems to be "did the line go up?" Exactly.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  [dead]

DrewADesign 6mo ago

They made some of my favorite products. Their having GDP-level revenue doesn’t benefit me… at all. Their putting less effort into those products negatively affects me. There are more losers than beneficiaries, here. I couldn’t care less how many billions investors got. Monetarily, it’s a net gain. Societally, it’s a net loss.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

AstroBen 6mo ago

So much of Apple's growth is anti-consumer. You can't repair your device. They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product. They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere. They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android. They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store. Anything I missed? They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.

tempodox 6mo ago
> Anything I missed? The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.
- FeloniousHam 6mo ago
  Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago. Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`. And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything. Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
  - MoonWalk 6mo ago
    Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything. Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions. Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive. Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser. Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here. Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location. The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications. "Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.

rayiner 6mo ago

> It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. Who cares that it's Tim Cook's "passion" unless you're an Apple investor?

JKCalhoun 6mo ago
Under Tim Cook's leadership Apple has clearly been leaning into services for some time now. (Whether you like that or not, it looks like Eddy Cue was the one who was tapped to push out in this direction.) I imagine that was probably Cook recognizing that having your entire company propped up by a single hardware product line is a dangerous position to be in. To that end it is not just Apple investors but Apple customers and Apple as a company that may well end up benefitting from Cook's cautionary strategy. We've seen tariffs threaten Apple's hardware. A future downturn in the economy that erodes a consumer's ability to spend could also wreak havoc on Apple.

tempodox 6mo ago

> I'd love to see the critics do better. That’s underspecified. Part of the problem is that there are multiple incompatible definitions of “better”.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

Have you considered that critics might not care about Apple investors?

coolkewlcuil 6mo ago

It's just as easy to sit and glaze someone. Stock buybacks simulating interest, inflation, and cutting corners on products, gouging devs that list on their app store, oh and they sell a lot of ear buds destined for the ewaste bin in 24-36 months. Plus the stock market is like Whose Line Is It Anyway; made up points that don't matter to humanity long term while the ewaste and non repairable products do. Stop carrying water for billionaires who do not care you exist. This is no different than fawning over a Kardashian. We have social systems to replace these people because as a species we're well aware of physics at this point. If physics hasn't seen fit to spare their biology the effects of entropy (aging -> death) they're not that important.

cindyllm 6mo ago
[dead]

duxup 6mo ago

In the age of the internet we’ve got endless people who think they’ve got something or someone all figured out, but no real evidence that anyone really does.