8 ms·

Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own

89 points by kanamekun 12y ago

selmnoo 12y ago
I appreciate that Cook shares the personal story of encountering clansmen, challenging them (at such a young age), but man there are some serious stretches of truths in the rest of the video. At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Is he serious? Not even any sign of cognitive dissonance while he says it? He was the COO, he had to have known something about the terrible things that were going on. It wasn't over nothing that nytimes pondered the question that if Jobs were alive today, whether he would be in jail or not ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-genius-at-pushing-boundaries-too.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-geni... ). As a tech person I'm excited and impressed by Apple products, but let's not forget the serious wrongs they have done and continue to do. I personally choose to vote with my dollars and stay away from Apple for this and other reasons.
- josephlord 12y ago
  You can treat people equally without treating them well. Yes they may have been harmed by the no poaching agreements but if gay, straight, black, brown and white were otherwise treated well and equally that is something that I could easily imagine someone could feel proud of. The crimes in the listed article don't seem that terrible, the exceptional thing about them compared to other companies seems to be the direct CEO involvement and brazen lack of subtlety and subterfuge with which they were done. I'm not saying that these actions were right or that they shouldn't be punished but if you feel that way about Apple I wonder what your thoughts are about Samsung. Out of interest what tech companies do meet your ethical requirements?
  - simonh 12y ago
    The no poaching agreement went all the way up to the top at Google as well. In fact Google even fired a recruiter for trying to hire someone from Apple, yet they seem to get a free pass in these discussions for some reason. It's the same effect as the Chinese factory workers conditions all over again. Forget that workers at the Microsoft and Samsung factories have worse conditions and lower pay, the story is all about Apple, as always.
    - adamnemecek 12y ago
      I mean didn't the no poaching agreement come from Apple?
      - Alphasite_ 12y ago
        It came from multiple companies collaborating to create it.
      - throwaway1509 12y ago
        By definition, you need more than one entity to agree.
        adamnemecek 12y ago
        You need more than one entity to agree. You need one entity to suggest it.
        simonh 12y ago
        I'm sure you must have a really good reason for so heavily implying that it was apple. Go on. Enlighten us. What makes you so certain?
    - pyre 12y ago
      Apple paints itself in a different light than Microsoft or Samsung, which is one of the reasons that people focus on their flaws more than those of MS or Samsung...
      - tendom 12y ago
        Oh, of course. It's okay to kill migrant workers, as long as I don't create pretty products. Apple is like any other company, it doesn't matter how they paint themselves. What matters is the peoples lives that are being ruined.
        12y ago
- zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
  > At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Yes, it's clear revisionism. For example, Jobs didn't believe in donating to charities. The first thing he did when he rejoined Apple after the NeXt debacle is to cancel all charity donations. After his death, restoring charities was one of the first things that Tim Cook did. There's also ample evidence that Apple treated its employees very poorly, especially compared to the other Silicon Valley companies (for example, Jobs refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy complaints and internal petitions). There is a reason why Apple has never been even in the top 100 companies to work for.
  - goblin89 12y ago
    > At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Well, your comment doesn't seem to contradict that point, to be fair. - Donation policy doesn't relate to employee equality. - Shuttles: Jobs himself didn't use a shuttle. Employee equality checks out.
  - mandeepj 12y ago
    > Jobs refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy complaints and internal petitions What could be the reason behind Jobs refusal for this facility?
  - webwielder 12y ago
    Jobs didn't believe in coddling employees. For him, the chance to work on amazing products (or in support of those products) with amazing people was ample enough reward.
  - gress 12y ago
    Apple pays well. Shuttles on the other hand, are a controversial elitist perk.
    - pook1e 12y ago
      > Apple pays well. A company requires more than 'pays well' to be a great company to work for, if that's what you're suggesting.
leorocky 12y ago
Apple has a simple and transparent strategy that is good for its customers: pay a premium and get a premium product. They don't violate your privacy, they don't usually show you ads (although they do have an ad network, limited to mobile apps, iTunes and the Mac app store I'd think). They have a limited number of SKUs. Apple makes a few good products, each one representing the Apple brand in all its glory. The vertical integration from hardware, to software and cloud is something nobody else can do except maybe if Microsoft if it gets serious about the Surface (despite the poor sales). It might be true that we see less of the innovation that the Steve Jobs era was known for, but they haven't changed at the heart. They're keeping their design quality, their finish, and the vertical integration. Apple isn't making any junk and exploiting its brand and deceiving its customers with shitty products. Having said that, it doesn't mean that Apple's products are for everyone. I don't like iCloud and I don't particular like iOS, but even so I can see the value in what they're doing.
- XorNot 12y ago
  "Don't violate your privacy" --- what? As compared to...who, exactly? They have an ad network, and they have a cloud product - by definition they're holding onto as much of your data as any other company in those businesses.
  - leorocky 12y ago
    Sure, but it isn't in their interest to share that information, whereas with other companies that is their main business, to use your personal information to make money from you with advertisement. If you care about this sort of thing I'm not sure you have a better option than Apple except maybe to use linux and I don't know what you would do for a smartphone, maybe a Mozilla phone.
    - duncanawoods 12y ago
      >> except maybe to use linux Huh? Who are you comparing Apple against? It sounds like Google/Facebook/Twitter but they are advertising honey-pots rather than product companies. The more accurate competitor category includes Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, Sony, HTC etc. Like Apple, their first business is to sell product... but they will sell adverts too if they can.
owenwil 12y ago
I thought this piece was fabulous and a great insight to a man who is finally turning around the company from being completely oblivious to helping the world into a company that cares about the mark it leaves on the world and the actions it can choose to make with its money. Instead of sitting on its money, Cook is choosing to use some of Apple's cash stockpile for good such as by building 100% clean energy datacenters and beginning to open up to donation to charity/education as well as working to force its supply chain to be more fair on the humans it relies on. It's a great new direction for Apple; critics could say it's not enough, but it's better than the company was under Jobs in terms of philanthropy.
- robg 12y ago
  I thought the most interesting leak from the Apple-FDA meeting notes was the expression that Apple going into health is a "moral obligation".
  - wavefunction 12y ago
    Seems egotistical as well as self-serving. "Health" is one of the few industries that will continue to provide solid revenues until the penultimate human perishes from this earth. And I'm not sure what Apple will bring to the table that noone else on earth can bring, other than Apple-branded products. But that's just like my opinion, man.
    - notduncansmith 12y ago
      Have yourself a White Russian and an upvote, sir.
      - notduncansmith 12y ago
        Mm, delicious downvotes. You guys should really watch The Big Lebowski.
    - gress 12y ago
      You could say that about any company or person working in healthcare. This is just a generic attack.
webwielder 12y ago
>Last year, Apple for the first time introduced two new iPhones instead of just one: the high-end iPhone 5S, which sold like gangbusters, and the lower-cost, plastic-covered iPhone 5C, which disappointed. So disappointing it was the second best selling smartphone in the US! Is it a law that every article about Apple must adhere to a certain number of press-created fictions?
- jusben1369 12y ago
  I'm not sure about that law but it is a law that someone must always attack the press if they say something less than flowery about Apple somewhere. I don't think many people inside or outside of Apple are arguing that the 5C was a disappointment sales wise. This though was just one small point in a very lengthy, balanced article.
  - gress 12y ago
    It's not about a statement being less than flowery. It's about a statement that is misleading. You say the rest of the article is balanced, but how do you know that?
    - chimeracoder 12y ago
      > It's not about a statement being less than flowery. It's about a statement that is misleading. It is not misleading in the least to say that the 5C was a disappointment. It did not do a particularly good job of living up to its all-but-stated goal of penetrating the lower-income market in the developing world, namely China[0]. As GP said, you would be hard-pressed to find someone either inside Apple or outside who would seriously make the argument that the 5C was anything other than a disappointment. [0] Nor did it even do a particularly good job of selling to lower-income households in the US (which wasn't even the goal in the first place, but since OP mentioned the US, let's address that). It's hard to say, but inferring from the movements in market share, it seems the 5C ate into 5S sales more than it converted Android or Windows Phone users.
      - 12y ago
ser_ocelot 12y ago
I slogged through the article hoping to see mention of the no-poaching shenanigans. Disappointing.
Zigurd 12y ago
This is a great example of PR and "business journalism" playing out at the highest levels, and yet another example of why the NYT is the last of a dying breed, and not the future. Not one skeptical, much less difficult <cough>wage collusion</cough> question. You could do much much worse than to keep the distinctiveness and high standards of Jobs's Apple while weeding out the bad idiosyncrasies a tyrant can leave behind. And doing that while preventing the oversize egos of a bunch of 3/4-scale Jobs wannabes from exploding over each other. Tim Cook's Apple is less random, but otherwise much the same as Jobs's, and that's good. Isn't it enough to be the competent keeper of a visionary's flame without turning a business into a museum, or a self-parody? Eventually Apple will need to be really different from Jobs's Apple. But not for a while.
pistle 12y ago
Is this the final piece in the soft PR work rattling through "journalism" this week? Daring Fireball did a piece not wholly unlike this as well. The timing is a bit odd for there to be this meta discussion that is pivoting Cook and Apple from the post-Jobsian "rudderlessness" to a New-New-Apple Cookian era that is both highly positive and would have been, to paraphrase, impossible with Jobs at the helm. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.
- rimantas 12y ago
  And by coincidence WWDC just happened recently where many interesting things were announced.
yuhong 12y ago
I wish Tim would actually do things like reduce Apple's secrecy. For example, technically Mac OS X prerelease seeds are under NDA, but how often does this actually get enforced? And I have wished for a Mac version of http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing for a while now.
- goatforce5 12y ago
  Ask and ye shall receive: "Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don't have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with." http://nshipster.com/ios8/ http://nshipster.com/ios8/
  - yuhong 12y ago
    Thanks, didn't know they just did it recently.

89 points by kanamekun 12y ago

I appreciate that Cook shares the personal story of encountering clansmen, challenging them (at such a young age), but man there are some serious stretches of truths in the rest of the video. At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Is he serious? Not even any sign of cognitive dissonance while he says it? He was the COO, he had to have known something about the terrible things that were going on. It wasn't over nothing that nytimes pondered the question that if Jobs were alive today, whether he would be in jail or not ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-genius-at-pushing-boundaries-too.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-geni... ). As a tech person I'm excited and impressed by Apple products, but let's not forget the serious wrongs they have done and continue to do. I personally choose to vote with my dollars and stay away from Apple for this and other reasons.

josephlord 12y ago
You can treat people equally without treating them well. Yes they may have been harmed by the no poaching agreements but if gay, straight, black, brown and white were otherwise treated well and equally that is something that I could easily imagine someone could feel proud of. The crimes in the listed article don't seem that terrible, the exceptional thing about them compared to other companies seems to be the direct CEO involvement and brazen lack of subtlety and subterfuge with which they were done. I'm not saying that these actions were right or that they shouldn't be punished but if you feel that way about Apple I wonder what your thoughts are about Samsung. Out of interest what tech companies do meet your ethical requirements?
- simonh 12y ago
  The no poaching agreement went all the way up to the top at Google as well. In fact Google even fired a recruiter for trying to hire someone from Apple, yet they seem to get a free pass in these discussions for some reason. It's the same effect as the Chinese factory workers conditions all over again. Forget that workers at the Microsoft and Samsung factories have worse conditions and lower pay, the story is all about Apple, as always.
  - adamnemecek 12y ago
    I mean didn't the no poaching agreement come from Apple?
    - Alphasite_ 12y ago
      It came from multiple companies collaborating to create it.
    - throwaway1509 12y ago
      By definition, you need more than one entity to agree.
      - adamnemecek 12y ago
        You need more than one entity to agree. You need one entity to suggest it.
        simonh 12y ago
        I'm sure you must have a really good reason for so heavily implying that it was apple. Go on. Enlighten us. What makes you so certain?
  - pyre 12y ago
    Apple paints itself in a different light than Microsoft or Samsung, which is one of the reasons that people focus on their flaws more than those of MS or Samsung...
    - tendom 12y ago
      Oh, of course. It's okay to kill migrant workers, as long as I don't create pretty products. Apple is like any other company, it doesn't matter how they paint themselves. What matters is the peoples lives that are being ruined.
      - 12y ago
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
> At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Yes, it's clear revisionism. For example, Jobs didn't believe in donating to charities. The first thing he did when he rejoined Apple after the NeXt debacle is to cancel all charity donations. After his death, restoring charities was one of the first things that Tim Cook did. There's also ample evidence that Apple treated its employees very poorly, especially compared to the other Silicon Valley companies (for example, Jobs refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy complaints and internal petitions). There is a reason why Apple has never been even in the top 100 companies to work for.
- goblin89 12y ago
  > At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its employees. Well, your comment doesn't seem to contradict that point, to be fair. - Donation policy doesn't relate to employee equality. - Shuttles: Jobs himself didn't use a shuttle. Employee equality checks out.
- mandeepj 12y ago
  > Jobs refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy complaints and internal petitions What could be the reason behind Jobs refusal for this facility?
- webwielder 12y ago
  Jobs didn't believe in coddling employees. For him, the chance to work on amazing products (or in support of those products) with amazing people was ample enough reward.
- gress 12y ago
  Apple pays well. Shuttles on the other hand, are a controversial elitist perk.
  - pook1e 12y ago
    > Apple pays well. A company requires more than 'pays well' to be a great company to work for, if that's what you're suggesting.

leorocky 12y ago

Apple has a simple and transparent strategy that is good for its customers: pay a premium and get a premium product. They don't violate your privacy, they don't usually show you ads (although they do have an ad network, limited to mobile apps, iTunes and the Mac app store I'd think). They have a limited number of SKUs. Apple makes a few good products, each one representing the Apple brand in all its glory. The vertical integration from hardware, to software and cloud is something nobody else can do except maybe if Microsoft if it gets serious about the Surface (despite the poor sales). It might be true that we see less of the innovation that the Steve Jobs era was known for, but they haven't changed at the heart. They're keeping their design quality, their finish, and the vertical integration. Apple isn't making any junk and exploiting its brand and deceiving its customers with shitty products. Having said that, it doesn't mean that Apple's products are for everyone. I don't like iCloud and I don't particular like iOS, but even so I can see the value in what they're doing.

XorNot 12y ago
"Don't violate your privacy" --- what? As compared to...who, exactly? They have an ad network, and they have a cloud product - by definition they're holding onto as much of your data as any other company in those businesses.
- leorocky 12y ago
  Sure, but it isn't in their interest to share that information, whereas with other companies that is their main business, to use your personal information to make money from you with advertisement. If you care about this sort of thing I'm not sure you have a better option than Apple except maybe to use linux and I don't know what you would do for a smartphone, maybe a Mozilla phone.
  - duncanawoods 12y ago
    >> except maybe to use linux Huh? Who are you comparing Apple against? It sounds like Google/Facebook/Twitter but they are advertising honey-pots rather than product companies. The more accurate competitor category includes Microsoft, Samsung, Dell, Sony, HTC etc. Like Apple, their first business is to sell product... but they will sell adverts too if they can.

owenwil 12y ago

I thought this piece was fabulous and a great insight to a man who is finally turning around the company from being completely oblivious to helping the world into a company that cares about the mark it leaves on the world and the actions it can choose to make with its money. Instead of sitting on its money, Cook is choosing to use some of Apple's cash stockpile for good such as by building 100% clean energy datacenters and beginning to open up to donation to charity/education as well as working to force its supply chain to be more fair on the humans it relies on. It's a great new direction for Apple; critics could say it's not enough, but it's better than the company was under Jobs in terms of philanthropy.

robg 12y ago
I thought the most interesting leak from the Apple-FDA meeting notes was the expression that Apple going into health is a "moral obligation".
- wavefunction 12y ago
  Seems egotistical as well as self-serving. "Health" is one of the few industries that will continue to provide solid revenues until the penultimate human perishes from this earth. And I'm not sure what Apple will bring to the table that noone else on earth can bring, other than Apple-branded products. But that's just like my opinion, man.
  - notduncansmith 12y ago
    Have yourself a White Russian and an upvote, sir.
    - notduncansmith 12y ago
      Mm, delicious downvotes. You guys should really watch The Big Lebowski.
  - gress 12y ago
    You could say that about any company or person working in healthcare. This is just a generic attack.

webwielder 12y ago

>Last year, Apple for the first time introduced two new iPhones instead of just one: the high-end iPhone 5S, which sold like gangbusters, and the lower-cost, plastic-covered iPhone 5C, which disappointed. So disappointing it was the second best selling smartphone in the US! Is it a law that every article about Apple must adhere to a certain number of press-created fictions?

jusben1369 12y ago
I'm not sure about that law but it is a law that someone must always attack the press if they say something less than flowery about Apple somewhere. I don't think many people inside or outside of Apple are arguing that the 5C was a disappointment sales wise. This though was just one small point in a very lengthy, balanced article.
- gress 12y ago
  It's not about a statement being less than flowery. It's about a statement that is misleading. You say the rest of the article is balanced, but how do you know that?
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    > It's not about a statement being less than flowery. It's about a statement that is misleading. It is not misleading in the least to say that the 5C was a disappointment. It did not do a particularly good job of living up to its all-but-stated goal of penetrating the lower-income market in the developing world, namely China[0]. As GP said, you would be hard-pressed to find someone either inside Apple or outside who would seriously make the argument that the 5C was anything other than a disappointment. [0] Nor did it even do a particularly good job of selling to lower-income households in the US (which wasn't even the goal in the first place, but since OP mentioned the US, let's address that). It's hard to say, but inferring from the movements in market share, it seems the 5C ate into 5S sales more than it converted Android or Windows Phone users.
    - 12y ago

ser_ocelot 12y ago

I slogged through the article hoping to see mention of the no-poaching shenanigans. Disappointing.

Zigurd 12y ago

This is a great example of PR and "business journalism" playing out at the highest levels, and yet another example of why the NYT is the last of a dying breed, and not the future. Not one skeptical, much less difficult <cough>wage collusion</cough> question. You could do much much worse than to keep the distinctiveness and high standards of Jobs's Apple while weeding out the bad idiosyncrasies a tyrant can leave behind. And doing that while preventing the oversize egos of a bunch of 3/4-scale Jobs wannabes from exploding over each other. Tim Cook's Apple is less random, but otherwise much the same as Jobs's, and that's good. Isn't it enough to be the competent keeper of a visionary's flame without turning a business into a museum, or a self-parody? Eventually Apple will need to be really different from Jobs's Apple. But not for a while.

pistle 12y ago

Is this the final piece in the soft PR work rattling through "journalism" this week? Daring Fireball did a piece not wholly unlike this as well. The timing is a bit odd for there to be this meta discussion that is pivoting Cook and Apple from the post-Jobsian "rudderlessness" to a New-New-Apple Cookian era that is both highly positive and would have been, to paraphrase, impossible with Jobs at the helm. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

rimantas 12y ago
And by coincidence WWDC just happened recently where many interesting things were announced.

yuhong 12y ago

I wish Tim would actually do things like reduce Apple's secrecy. For example, technically Mac OS X prerelease seeds are under NDA, but how often does this actually get enforced? And I have wished for a Mac version of http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing for a while now.

goatforce5 12y ago
Ask and ye shall receive: "Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we don't have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play with." http://nshipster.com/ios8/ http://nshipster.com/ios8/
- yuhong 12y ago
  Thanks, didn't know they just did it recently.