[danielrhodes]

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.

[simplyluke]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Yet he did still launch Vision Pro.

[jodrellblank]

How much did that burn compared to the Metaverse?

[spacedcowboy]

yep, I worked there for 20+ years, only retired due to health. I was about middle of the park in my group’s tenure there…

[sizzle]

How do you see AI playing out there? Are you glad you got out before AI coding became a thing? What are you up to in your retirement years, anything fun? Thanks.

[lurk2]

> a reputation for a strong engineering culture

We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?

[simplyluke]

Every software team ships bugs. That is not exclusive with a strong engineering culture.

[dvt]

> 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).

[SkyPuncher]

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]

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]

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.

[rolisz]

Linux sucks in a way that is more controllable by me. I have run Arch Linux as my daily driver for 4-5 years. But I can't on a MacBook, which has the nicest hardware

[rrvsh]

It's not gaslighting; you're not the average consumer by the simple fact that you know what HN is. My 12 year old cousins havE daily driven ElementaryOS for a year

[thenakulchawla]

In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.

I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.

[VirusNewbie]

Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?

[steve_taylor]

It's a stealth subscription product. People are losing those things all the time.

[suprfnk]

And if not losing, the battery dies in 2-3 years, so you'll have to buy new anyway.

[aqme28]

Eh, mine are four years old and still going strong. Battery still lasts longer than I need it to.

[carlosjobim]

Like all other bluetooth in-ear phones.

[OJFord]

Successful for the business no doubt, but they are an example of 'par with the rest of the industry' aren't they? Nothing market leading about them (except perhaps the price, heh) and not the first in the category, just one of a bunch of good options.

[audunw]

Nothing market leading about AirPods? I find it telling that it’s one of the only Apple products that LTT Linus is using, despite not working as well with Android as with iOS. And they have around 30% market share in their product category

[OJFord]

You find it telling that some YouTube 'influencer' uses Airpods? You only noticed because of Apple's distinctive white branding, they have market leading marketing, I'll give you that!

[joseda-hg]

Not GP, but I also find it telling that Influencer with a free pick at any sound equipment at any price point, famously not super onboard with the ecosystem (Bar recently with the Neo) still does pick them

Linus is not an audiophile by any means, but he's also exposed to more and better equipment than even most of the already significant outliers in HN

[basisword]

Their ability to connect and move between devices is 100x better than any competitor. They were also the first to make truly wireless earphones that didn't suck. Judging it now, when the market has finally caught up in most areas doesn't make sense.

[dahauns]

>Their ability to connect and move between devices is 100x better than any competitor.

This statement only has any merit if your usage pattern is 100% limited to Apple devices, otherwise it falls apart.

It would be fine if they fell back to "at least as good as the competition" in a mixed use case, but in the mixed case they are worse than what even low-budget BT buds often offer (no BT Multipoint, no ear recognition, etc., hell, not even a battery level over BT...and even pairing/reconnect is often a crapshoot reminiscent of the state of BT Audio 10-15 years ago). It was honestly a really disappointing realization.

[abujazar]

I have no problems using my AirPods across two Macs, an iPhone and Windows. I have to manually reconnect on Windows if I have an active Apple device nearby which I recently used the AirPods with, but apart from that it's quite seamless. This worked fine in 2020 already.

[joseda-hg]

> Judging it now, when the market has finally caught up in most areas doesn't make sense.

Why? Why should we consider an advantage that doesn't exist anymore?

[basisword]

Because we're judging innovation. At the time it was innovative.

[Kon5ole]

Less space than a nomad? ;-)

IMO the airpods vs the rest of the industry is kinda like the iphone vs blackberry.

[ezst]

Yes, what about airpods? Little reason to buy them if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, and if you are, and you are a careful buyer, you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither). I'm not dismissing the marketing forces behind airpods selling by the millions as a "status symbol", but that's very much a "high cost of living country" thing, Apple is inexistent elsewhere, which is most places.

[npunt]

Apple plays the 'it's the best for most people' game, not the 'technically ahead in [one or a few feature categories]' game. They make the lion's share of profit in the categories they compete in because they sell to the mass market; there's 2.5 billion active iOS devices!

Every time I see someone here dismiss this success as status symbol-oriented marketing, I just shake my head at how much that signals a deep misunderstanding of how the world works or what most of the human race wants in a product. Nobody wants the Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds because Sony doesn't even give a shit enough to give them a name people can remember. Nobody wants Bose earbuds because nobody wants to open a buggy spyware-laden app to turn on/off noise cancelling. These products are destined to fail because they make simple things complicated, untrustworthy, bothersome.

People are whole-experience buyers, not single-feature buyers, and the experience nearly every person on earth wants is the magical 'I put it in and it works' experience. What people want is all the upside of the magic of technology and none of the cognitive overhead associated with it. The specific choices that make up a product offering - aka the product marketing - reflect the inherent desire of the customer. Any luxury / status symbol aspects come AFTER that.

[deltarholamda]

>Nobody wants the Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds

You fool! The WF-1000XM5 is the worst model of the line! You should buy the WF-1010XN5, it is far superior!

Apple tends to name things in an odd way, e.g. sometimes you need to remember whether your laptop came out in "early" 2014 or "late" 2014, but they have a remarkably flat, but consistent, product line.

I mean, honestly, if somebody just tossed you a random Macbook from the Apple store, it may not be the exact model you want but you wouldn't complain. All of them are pretty good, even down to the bargain basement Neo.

[npunt]

Yeah tho most customers never even encounter that level of detail. Most people just know there’s a ‘new one’ and an ‘old one’. If they have an old one, they come in and get a new one. Everyone replaces on their own replacement schedule, and every year there’s a new one, so it kinda just works for everyone.

Apple at its best makes its product like so legible people only need dim awareness of what they’re buying. That’s only possible if you build a ton of trust with consumers, which is why Apple is so so focused on their brand value.

[cjpearson]

This comes off as a quite dismissive and incurious take. Are you quite sure that of the ~500 million consumers who bought a pair, nobody considered utility and it was simply a fashion choice? Or is it more likely that some consumers judge the utility differently from you?

[ezst]

I happen to have a pair of airpod pro 2 and some Sony's (the airpods being a gift). Nothing about the airpods strikes me as being clearly superior, which is surprisingly rare for Apple products: they tend to all stand out in one way or another, whether that's essential to the experience or not (I have no use for an iPad, but I can tell a good display when I see one, I wouldn't keep a MacBook if one was gifted to me, but I can appreciate a good trackpad, …).

Airpods? I have nothing bad to say about them, but nothing good either (I rather take the Sony's with better NC and battery life on a flight, better audio quality and painless equalizer).

> Or is it more likely that some consumers judge the utility differently from you?

That's possibly the case, so help me, what I am missing?

[carefree-bob]

Apple didn't use to be a status symbol. I think they earned it. And the fact that they are going all in on Neo tells me they don't care about the status symbol part as much as the profit maximizing. Let me know when Ferrari sells an affordable car.

[finghin]

Yep - Apple have worked through to becoming a luxury, upscale brand and there is no reason for them right now to change from that perception with their current market upper hand

[alt227]

Im not sure how you think Apple is an upscale luxury brand. Every teenager in America owns an iphone with airpods.

Thats the power of marketing, making you think you are exclusive and treating yourself to luxury when you buy their product, instead of the reality that is everybody on the planet owns the same device as you.

[alt227]

Staus symbol is defined as "a visible, external marker—such as luxury goods, exclusive memberships, or specific lifestyles—used to indicate an individual's high social, economic, or professional standing."

Does owning the same phone as every 16 year old in America really fit that description?

[windward]

1967, the Dino 206 GT

[carefree-bob]

People forget that you could buy Ferrari's in the 60s for 7-18K. 7K was the entry Ferrari. Average new car price in 1967 was $3000, so the entry Ferrari was 2.3 times the average new car price.

Today the average new car price in the US is 50K. That would make an entry Ferrari 115K, but the cheapest new Ferrari is the Roma at 225K, or double that.

Ferrari used to be more accessible, but we had compressed incomes then, the rich weren't so far from the middle as they are now. Similarly in 1967 a bottle of Channel no 5 cost $15, but today it is $200. According to inflation, it should be $140, so again roughly double the spread.

[didibus]

I use AirPods and I have a Google Pixel, Windows laptop, and so on.

[eloisant]

That's a very weird choice. I can understand people buying them for the integration with the Apple ecosystem, but outside of it they're just dumb bluetooth earphones. There are better alternatives.

[russelldjimmy]

Instead of being curious why someone would make a choice you didn't, you chose to attack the choice! You might as well stick your fingers in your ears and go "na na na I can't hear you!" until you find a tribe of fellow haters.

[didibus]

In my experience, they work much better, their bluetooth connectivity and the way both of them are in sync is top notch. I also find their ergonomics the best for comfort, battery, how the case works, etc. And they have one of the best microphone for calls and how audible you are to the other person while not picking up too much noise.

[thenakulchawla]

This is tangential but somehow fits here. I tried multiple wired and bluetooth earphones/headphones with my switch 2. And the only ones that gave the sound that was acceptable to me, were the airpods. I had the Sony WHX… headphones, I also tried them using an aux cable, I had a few aux wired earphones (skullcandy and some others), all of their output was weak. I am not even sure how that’s possible, I don’t understand sound/music quality as much, but I was genuinely surprised by this.

[kergonath]

It’s a logical choice. They are good and not that expensive. The whole "they only fit with other Apple devices" is misleading. They work better with a Mac than a Windows PC, sure, but on that Windows PC they work as well as the really good alternatives. None of the supposedly better alternatives are better in every aspect. It’s a tradeoff.

[Kirby64]

> you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither)

Like what? In the true wireless camp, the Sony's are much less comfortable (and more expensive), the Bose are not as good (and more expensive)...

There's cheaper options, sure, but you're sacrificing build, ANC, battery life, etc.

[atonse]

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.

[noahlt]

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.

[mrits]

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.

[lukeify]

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.

[raincole]

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.

[mancerayder]

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]

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

[jbmchuck]

Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.

[Mistletoe]

Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.

[makeitdouble]

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.

[wvbdmp]

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.

[drob518]

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.

[thenanyu]

Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else

[ubercore]

I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.

[cubefox]

Siri was GOFAI (handwritten software) rather than a model written by a machine learning algorithm.

[uncivilized]

Calling the current state of art AI is also generous.

[eloisant]

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.

[kergonath]

> 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.

[russelldjimmy]

> 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.

[throwawaymobule]

Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.

[ivanjermakov]

AI talks started before Jobs was born...

[arendtio]

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.

[rdbl27]

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

[racl101]

Reminds me of the Godfather and how they called Tom Hagen not a "wartime consigliere". This was at a time when conflicts were starting up again and Vito had just been gunned down. Tim is Tom. Steve was Vito.

When Steve Jobs came back in 1997 Apple was against the ropes and they needed some radical change lest they sink.

But after they stabilized around 2010s then they didn't need radical shakeups but to maintain the good thing they got going. Tim was the man for that. And he did it well.

And yes I get that in this case one is a consigliere and one is the Don but there's similarity here.

[walthamstow]

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.

[seabrookmx]

And the highest profit product you left out that was also category defining: Airpods.

[walthamstow]

Good point, thanks!

[rdbl27]

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]

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]

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.

[walthamstow]

> No category changing products

That's the bar you set. So you're saying the Apple Watch did not change the watch category? And likewise Airpods, or Apple Silicon laptops?

I don't know where the comparisons to iPhone have come from. No, it's not comparable to iPhone. Nobody said it was. That would be crazy.

You call Vision Pro a science experiment and dismiss Apple Silicon as irrelevant to users, but also say there's been no innovation. How do you square that?

[bdelmas]

> 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".

[jwr]

> 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.

[jayd16]

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

[tguedes]

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.

[sneak]

> 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]

> 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)

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