[havaloc]

Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role.

If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering.

Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).

I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.

I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.

[foobarian]

Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank

[a012]

And dont forget the scissor keyboard and the fucking touchbar

[pohl]

I suspect that the touch bar served its likely real purpose: to ship an ARM CPU with a secure enclave in the machines so that we could have Touch ID without needing to wait for Apple Silicon. Everything other than that was gravy, an interesting experiment.

[SSLy]

T2 or a successor could theoretically do all of that too.

[alex7o]

Fight me but I miss the touchbar, it was customizable to be super useful with better touch tool

[csunbird]

I think the problem with touch bar was that, it completely replaced the function keys, instead of complementing them. Other than that, I actually liked it.

[plomme]

Hah, that reminds me! My first work issued Mac didn't have the ESC key, just the touch bar. IIRC a program hung in fullscreen, freezing both the app and the touch bar. So I had to reboot to get out of it because the esc key didn't work.

[pants2]

Another issue with the touch bar is that part of the laptop gets quite hot (especially on Intel CPUs), and so did the touch bar. I recall a few times feeling like I burned my finger just pressing esc during video rendering.

[wtallis]

I think the lack of haptic feedback is what doomed the Touch Bar. If they'd been able to solve that problem, it could have been an acceptable replacement for the function keys.

[reddit_clone]

That.

And I had to look down every time I had use it. I am glad to see it go.

[vel0city]

I think the touch bar was a neat idea with a lot of potential but IMO they should have kept the row of physical function keys as well.

[Cockbrand]

Another thing was that not all Mac notebooks had a touch bar, so developers couldn't put any vital features onto it.

[alex7o]

The thing is I have never used the function keys on my laptop so that was not a problem form me, but also some of the custom functions I hard can just be mapped to fn keys so it is bit like it it us a huge loss

[dkga]

Same. I still have my intel Mac as a secondary, backup device and I still love using it, in part because of the touchbar.

[garbageman]

Interesting to hear a different perspective on the touchbar. I have yet to meet someone who liked it. Removes touch typing, requires you to refocus attention, etc. Changing the volume is easy, button same place always - but with touch bar I have to look down and do the slidey thing. If they implemented real keys with that display built in...now we're talking!

[dhosek]

Even without BTT, I liked the touchbar (especially on the Macbook “Esc” which restored the escape key). It was nice having keys that actually said what they did. Maybe someday, keycaps with an LCD-generated display will be feasible (or maybe e-paper for power consumption needs)

[sersi]

Yeah, I hated the keyboard but really did like the touchbar. Apple really dropped the ball there though. We shouldn't have needed Better Touch Tool to make it useful.

[s_dev]

Scissor keys are the good ones, you're thinking of Butterfly keys.

[bdcravens]

I didn't mind the touchbar, and enjoyed some of the added functionality. Would have been so much better if it had been an addition instead of a replacement for the top row of keys.

[epolanski]

My finger tips literally becoming purple colored due to the insane heat of that aluminum's thing in the i9 era. still hurts.

[nekooooo]

loved the touchbar for things like timeline scrubbers and quick shortcuts in my pro software

[RulerOf]

I thought it really excelled at displaying the timeline—it was quite novel to see a timeline for a video I was watching that didn't occlude any part of the screen—but quite annoyingly it would go black due to inactivity.

And of course the virtual function keys were awful.

[thih9]

Virtual function keys and virtual escape key in earlier models.

[varjag]

Have to say I really prefer butterfly keyboard (as long as it works).

[thih9]

Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was a great phone as long as it didn’t spontaneously combust.

[varjag]

These keyboards did not pose safety risk and were nicer to type than whatever the normal mushy Apple stuff is.

Mine lasted 6 years of daily use.

[WalterBright]

I dug out my old iPod from a drawer. Put the charger in - it took a couple days for it to charge. And then it was working just fine, except that the servers no longer supported the apps on it.

But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.

[ComputerGuru]

> but recovered nicely afterwards

After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.

[iwontberude]

I love that he instantly flopped repeatedly and showed it was actually Apple that was great all along.

[TheOtherHobbes]

He didn't flop. He's had a number of high-status bespoke projects, including the coronation logo for King Charles and a redesign of Christie's (auction house) podium.

He's not doing commoditised consumer design any more. He has enough money now, so he no longer needs to. The most consumer-oriented work recently has been an interior for the new Ferrari Luce EV.

I agree his post-Jobs years at Apple were somewhere between mediocre and hopeless (gradients...) and not many people seem to miss him.

Although to be fair, he wasn't responsible for Liquid Glass, which has set the bar for design failure at Apple to new depths.

[iwontberude]

Liquid Glass is fine for me and the people I talk to, I didn't even notice it happened when the upgrade happened and so many people have been complaining.

[33MHz-i486]

OpenAI acquired his company for Billions. maybe the products flopped but he did fine for himself personally

[iwontberude]

Sure he made it into the Epstein class, whoopty fucking do

[tsunamifury]

This is, by far, the most insane take i've ever heard.

The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.

[jordanb]

Ive got way more credit than he deserved. And he had to run all his ideas by Jobs. Once Jobs was gone we got to see Ive's true colors (it was garish pastels and a butterfly keyboard).

https://jonyiveredesignsthings.tumblr.com/

[philistine]

People age and change; Jony Ive overstayed his tenure at Apple, through no fault of his own. Cook, not being a product guy, kept Ive with massive incentives. Build Apple Park, take care of software, here's a bunch more stock. That led to very misguided products. Laptops without MagSafe. Ever so thin phones for no benefit. A pen that charges in the most insane way.

Ive should have left shortly after the death of Steve. He was creatively spent at Apple.

[vishnugupta]

Apparently it required someone with the personality and product taste of Jobs to rein in Ivy. Cook on the other hand being a logistics/operations guy didn’t have the similar skills and we ended up getting absolute shitshow of hardware products from apple in late 2010s.

Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.

[iwontberude]

Absolute bullshit.

[chongli]

Yeah my only complaint with Apple hardware these days is all the sharp edges. I miss the soft, rounded sides of touchID based iPhones.

[bmitc]

Apple has had sharp edges for like 15 years now on their MacBooks.

[jmyeet]

This was the last gasp of Johnny Ive. And yes, it was terrible. It got us ending the incredibly successful Macbook Air for the too-compromised 12" Macbook (1 port, remember?), the pointless Touch Bar and the terrible butterly keyboard (remember how dust could kill it and I'm sure Apple spent a fortune on replacements?).

Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.

Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.

[wpm]

They did not take the MacBook Air off the market when the retina Macbook 12" was released. The MacBookAir7,1 was released a month before the MacBook8,1. The 7,2 came out 2 years later as a spec bump not because Apple abandoned the product, but because this was the same time Intel's tick-tock schedule went completely off the rails.

[jmyeet]

They pretty mcuh did in practice.

That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.

I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.

[wpm]

But they didn't. Just because they didn't update the screen for free doesn't mean the discontinued the Air. They sold likely millions of Airs from 2015 to 2018, likely in no small part due to the fact you could get a barebones 11" Air for $899, $799 if you were a school. When the Retina Air came out in 2018 the prices jumped to $1199.

[sneak]

I collect the 12" macbooks, even today. It really only needs one port; the vast majority of people never plug anything but power into their computer ever. I would pay huge sums for a modern Mx 11-12" ultralight macbook with a reliable keyboard.

[varjag]

Same. Using my MacBook 12" of Theseus still at home. It's a fantastic machine for travel or field work if configured to 16GB. That 1" down from Air makes a huge difference on a seat tray.

[repparw]

the engineering workarounds to give the Neo a second port probably says that their internal numbers differ, regarding the number of ports importance

[foldr]

The Neo's targetting a different market. The MacBook was a premium ultraportable product. If you were buying it, you were willing to make all kinds of sacrifices for a thin and light laptop. The Neo is a general purpose consumer laptop that just happens to be fairly small.

[wpm]

Any advice for finding them other than partaking in whatever premimum drugs eBay sellers smoke to make the prices they are charging for essentially e-waste make sense? God I want to pick up one so bad but $150, $200, $300, hell there's one out there asking $1200! For a computer that was pretty crap when it was new?

I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing.

The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS!

Honestly it was the last Mac I think I've used that physically delighted me. I usually cringe when I hear executives talking about wanting to "delight" customers, but that shitty little slow, overpriced Macbook with one USB-C port, absolutely delightful. Like sure, Apple Silicon was amazing but in a different sort of way, in a "wow that V12 engine sure is powerful" and not "this entire car is amazing" way. The Retina MacBook was delightful even though my nerd brain knew that as a computer, looking at raw specs, was a complete dud (though mine had 16GB of RAM, nyah nyah, take that Macbook Neo!)

And now that the vision Apple had for that device actually came true?? That we live in a mostly mobile, USB-C world where my company's conference rooms all have AirPlay and most monitors have built-in USB-C input/hubs? That they could put an ultra cut down iPhone chip in it and even if it was only as fast as a 5 year old Macbook that would still make it as fast as an M1? Oh well, now we don't get one! You will have a brutalist cold slab of a Macbook Air or a pathetically locked down iPad appliance and be happy!

Perhaps it was a great product because of those flaws, those horrible compromises they had to make to get it that small. All I can hope is that there is some skunkworks project somewhere in Cupertino, maybe even unsanctioned, of hardware designers asking themselves "what would we have to figure out if we made it 0.25 inches thick?" or "Could we get a Macbook down to 1 pound?". I want a product whose development team were told "Make a Macbook. Priority 1. light, priority 2. thin, priority 3. there is no priority 3"

Joz, Ternus, if you're reading this, I would also pay huge sums of money for a modern 11-12" ultralight Macbook. I would write Apple a blank check for one, name your price.

[sneak]

The Macbook equivalent of the iPhone Air. They’re already using the “air” moniker for a mac that won’t fit into a manila envelope, so they’d need a new name.

I’ve just been buying expensive parts on eBay. I have two 16GB motherboards now and a few bottom cases and screens. Shoot me an email.

Same deal with the blank check. I carry a $7k MBP, I would have paid that for a much lower spec machine if it were stupid tiny.

[jnwatson]

That's a really good point to remember and counters the article's claim that there were no major recalls.

Still, the M series laptops are so much better than offerings from competitors I am hesitant to even put them in the same product category.

[YmiYugy]

The missteps of those intel MacBooks are undeniable, but I also feel like the new design feels very safe and unambitious. There is the huge notch. The 16" model is (given screen and battery size) 35% heavier than competitors and not exactly a joy to lug around. The keycaps continue to be made of subpar ABS getting a oily look within mere month of usage. The use of space inside is not very efficient compared to previous models.

[fooker]

That's exactly why I love it.

Happy to have an unambitious reliable workhorse where the battery lasts two days.

I'd actually be happier if it was even less ambitious, and made the graphics bits less powerful. But that would likely be a bad business move.

[throwaway894345]

I generally agree, but I had the misfortune of having a tiny grain of something (it was truly microscopic) wedged between my screen and the tiny rubber gasket around the edge and that completely disabled my screen and cost $800 to repair. I'm glad they moved away from the thin obsession, and I generally agree that the new design gives the impression of robustness even if that wasn't my experience. :)

[Nesco]

I had this opinion until I actually had a new model and felt the weight difference.

The duality of Man

[highfrequency]

Why do you prefer the laptop to be thicker and heavier?

[petu]

Nobody said that.

MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.

[hombre_fatal]

I don't want to think about how long I used that macbook where the keycaps would come off with my fingers as I typed, the switches were that broken.

It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.

[saghm]

That's a false dichotomy; there are plenty of keyboards that don't require recalls due to issues like the butterfly ones but also don't have the issues you're describing.

[et-al]

Luckily there are two lines: the Air and the Pro.

The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.

[eloisant]

I'd be fine with a thinner and lighter laptop if it was without compromises.

But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.

[anonymars]

Right? What was the point of a laptop with no "ugly ports" if everyone instead needed to carry around a stupid dongle to hang off it?

[jonhohle]

I think the preference is to have a battery that can run a CPU that's compiling, AI-ing, or rendering for an entire day (16+ hours) without having to worry about where an outlet is or being tethered to a wall or be thermal throttled. Right now that's a volume tradeoff. If there was something that ran as fast for as long and was MacBook Air (or the last Intel generation) thin, I don't think anyone would complain.

[soperj]

My old thinkpad was thicker but not heavier. Way more ports, didn't need dongles.

[reaperducer]

Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish

It wouldn't be HN if someone didn't dredge up a decade-old axe to grind.

[wtallis]

It's not exactly a decade-old issue when the problem started a decade ago and persisted for half a decade. The MacBook Pros from the tail end of that era are only just now starting to reach an age where they can reasonably be considered obsolete and due for replacement, because that kind of machine absolutely should be usable for 5+ years. From the perspective of Apple's current product offerings those laptops are many generations back, but from the perspective of the actual user base they're still recent history.

Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.

[triceratops]

MacBooks can last almost that long. People still own and use them.

[thewebguyd]

> It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.

As long as they can go back to simplicity in the process. Apple has been shoving functionality into iOS for a long time now, but it's a haphazard mess. The settings app is a disaster of clutter, and searching for settings doesn't work half the time. It needs a complete rearchitecting before they start shoving more functionality into the phone.

Did you know that iPhones have tap, double tap, and triple tap (on the back of the phone) functionality that can be set to custom actions? I didn't until recently, its buried deep in the Accessibility options for...reasons? This could be promoted to a core feature, with a dedicated space in settings instead of buried.

I'm sure there's other useful functionality hidden behind the settings mess too.

[WalterBright]

I bought a newer iPhone. My older one had the button to go to the home screen, the newer one replaced that with swipe up.

After a year, the swipe up is still a nuisance. It often doesn't work, and I have to swipe up several times.

[sholladay]

Do you use a case? My guess would be that when you swipe up, you're not quite starting low enough, perhaps unconsciously, because of the case being in the way. See if a case with a thinner front or smaller bezels helps. Using your index finger also works better than the thumb.

If that doesn't help, there are some settings you can try:

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Under Custom Actions, set Single-Tap to Home. Now you have a home button. You can move this button anywhere on your screen and adjust its "Idle Opacity" so it's less distracting when not in use.

2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose Double Tap or Triple Tap. Select Home from the list of actions. Now you can tap on the back side of your phone to go home.

There's also Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch Accommodations, but that's more about preventing accidental touches and swipes, so that would probably make the situation worse for you.

[WalterBright]

I had no idea. Thanks for the tips!

[locao]

It took me forever to upgrade because I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. Luckily it didn't, but I can imagine the frustration.

[ErneX]

You are probably not swiping up from down enough.

[ryandrake]

> I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI.

IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."

[troupo]

> IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it.

They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?

[samsolomon]

Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.

[jnwatson]

Apple is letting the market "commoditize its complements" without lifting a finger.

[ryandrake]

I just think the concept of an LLM is counter to how Apple treats content on their products. See [1] for more of my thoughts here. I think the only chance Apple embraces AI is if they manage to research a 1. local model that 2. is purely deterministic, whose output can be reliably constrained and controlled by Apple.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737

[HarHarVeryFunny]

I don't see selling local LLM servers/software, as such, being something that makes sense for Apple, but selling an "Apple Intelligence" appliance that works with your Apple devices and/or provides home automation might do.

[raw_anon_1111]

You can’t compare Apple to any other company. Apple is the only successful consumer hardware company (with Samsung being a distant second). They can afford to sit out the AI arms race.

You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.

[layer8]

That must be a very restrictive definition of “successful consumer hardware company”.

[raw_anon_1111]

Name one other successfully computer hardware company? PC makers are barely profitable commodities, other phone companies aside from Samsung are making pennies, the Microsoft XBox division is on life support, Sony sold off its TV division. The PS5 is going okay but doesn’t sell in near the numbers of iPhones. Who is left?

[layer8]

You didn’t say “computer”. And I would count the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Acer, Asus as successful. Without “computer”, Nintendo, Sony, LG, and so on.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to restrict “successful” to iPhone-level unit sales and Apple profit margins.

[MaysonL]

Apple _is_ a software company: everything it sells is based on a Mac OS X foundation.

[raw_anon_1111]

I would buy Mac hardware running Windows long before I would buy x86 hardware running MacOS. In fact Mac OS on x86 was really nothing remarkable. Macs were objectively worse than most Windows PCs during the last few years on x86 at least the laptops were.

[icedchai]

Walk in to any Best Buy and look around. There are many. Apple is in a league of its own, however.

[raw_anon_1111]

Successful == decently profitable with decent profit margins. Someone else mentioned LG with an annual profit of $2.4 billion as a “successful” company.

[icedchai]

Consumer electronics is a low margin business. Since low to mid single digit margin is typical and not every brand can be premium, like Apple, I'd say Sony and Samsung do pretty well, all things considered. "Success" is relative to the industry average.

[tsunamifury]

Only on hacker news would someone believe engineers would focus on the customer function.

Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.

[swiftcoder]

> Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship

You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts

[tsunamifury]

classic engineering delusion -- often hold the line on technical items that are irrelevant or simply not important to the consumer.

I have worked at all top three firms, and never had engineers come close to being customer oriented.

[troad]

I enjoy your contrarianism, tsunamifury, but I'd enjoy it more (and I think you'd get more thoughtful engagement) if you weren't quite so spiky about it. (This goes for a couple of your recent posts.)

[swiftcoder]

> I have worked at all top three firms

I've worked at 2/3, and sure, there are shit product teams all over FAANG, but you can always decide to go work on one of the ones that does proper engineering

[jarjoura]

I always understood, going to China, as what the industry was already doing, and Apple was in the middle of coming out of bankruptcy, so pressured to get their costs down. Tim Cook, the process guy, would have been given the task to do just that in an industry that was already consolidating in China.

I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.

Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.

Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.

[macintux]

Technically Apple was never bankrupt. It certainly came within a few months, but never reached that point.

[pstuart]

Apparently Apple invested ~ $50B to advance China's manufacturing capabilities.

As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.

Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.

[michelb]

Yeah I think so too. I'm just wondering if the people on software are still the right people. Mac OS has quite a few regressions, and seems to just chug along instead of really using the power of the chips, or massively improving file i/o. Apple still has a chance to do some cool stuff with AI integrations, but they have had interesting local models 3 years ago and apparently nowhere, or no vision, to use it. We're all clapping for Craig Federighi's jokes but I have no idea if he is a great manager or a great presenter.

I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.

[happyopossum]

> but they're doubling down on it now

Nahh, they're backing off liquid glass as fast as they can without just rolling back to macOS 15... Tons of people inside apple hate it, and have been very critical of the design leadership. Alan Dye was the design king behind liquid glass, and he was pushed out (or just left, stories vary). His replacement, Stephen Lemay, is widely praised by the folks who hate liquid glass.

iOS 27 and macOS 27 in June will probably have Liquid glass turned back down to 6 or 7, and will at least remove some of the most glaring usability issues.

[YmiYugy]

I think it's fair to say there are plenty of people in Apple's leadership that would have had the authority to tell Alan Dye "no". They didn't. I think it's fair to say that the company leadership likes liquid glass. The reaction to it was about as divided when they presented it as it is now. If they thought the backlash warranted a change in direction they could have pulled it before it ever made it to users in the fall, like they did with numerous attempts at shipping AI features. A major reversal in the next version would make a lot of people look really really bad.

[ValentineC]

> Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China )

Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.

I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)

[jmyeet]

I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected:

1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;

2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and

3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.

[EGG_CREAM]

3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.

Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.

[jmyeet]

I think there’s a happy medium between doing nothing and burning cash faster than the US military like OpenAI. If I had to pick one company who walking that line the best, it’s Google.

You can wait until improving hardware eventually solves the local LLM problem but imho that’s too passive.

What if someone cracks the problem of splitting LLM inference effectively between local device and server? Think about it. ChatGPT can do calculus. Is that useful to most people? No. Can you currently effectively modularize an LLM and load knowledge on demand? No.

I’m fairly bearish on the use cases for current AI. The biggest is actually just firing people and suppressing labor costs.

But a personas assistant, at least in theory, is something people want, even if it’s just to effectively obey voice commands. If Apple loses to Google here it’s going to be bad for Apple. I think they have to do more than they’re seemingly doing.

[ezst]

3. Is what I call a smart move. Sometimes the game is won by not playing, and it's increasingly obvious that the LLM race leads to nowhere (there is no moat, there is nothing unique or clever that Apple can build out of it that can't be mimicked by others, made better, with Apple looking bad as a result, the tech is flawed, with clear diminishing returns, ...). If anything worth of the Apple logo comes out of this, it will be bought for scraps after the unsustainable race has run its course.

[FireBeyond]

Okay, so assume that's the hypothesis...

Siri is STILL utter garbage. It's like a POC so many times. Its accent recognition for me is horrible, and it feels like so many of its interaction types are hardcoded, like "Do X at this time" "Sure". "Do Y (very similar thing) at this time" "I can't do that".

And while I get (but don't necessarily always agree with) per-app isolation, it leads to absolutely comical things. My fiance has Siri turned off. Uses CarPlay. Can text me with voice commands. But she can be navigating somewhere, and say "Hey, find me the nearest Starbucks" and Siri will say, with a straight face, while the phone is navigating her somewhere, "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".

[ezst]

> Siri is STILL utter garbage.

Always was. If Apple had an easy trick to make it any good or useful, they would have already. LLMs aren't that, so Siri remains what it is.

[divbzero]

1. Flat UI is the other side of Johnny Ive’s legacy—arguably an error as well, never corrected.

…

3. Agreed that Siri stagnated, was already surpassed by Alexa a decade ago, and even moreso by LLMs today. However, some advantages of Apple Silicon have panned out for AI—e.g., using unified memory to run ML models, instead of requiring dedicated VRAM for a separate GPU.

[tacker2000]

Agree with you, but when was Siri ever “well-regarded”?

Its been trash since day 1.

[divbzero]

Siri was the first of its kind on Day 1. Alexa wasn’t announced for another three years.

[musictubes]

Aerenhart’s biggest task was combining the online store with the physical. That was my understanding of why she was hired. Before that there were many walls between the two retail arms of online and physical.

Ive was the one behind the 15k watches. He wanted the in store experience to be like a jewelry store. They also brought in his friend that had been doing hi end watches and bands to help with the watch design. Beonce got an 18kt gold link band along with her watch. You can only imagine Ive’s glee at the watches being on the cover of Vogue.

[GeekyBear]

Apple is way ahead in AI, since they are unique in offering a single switch that turns it off if you don't care for it.

[bigyabai]

It's so good, you won't even want to use it!

[munificent]

I suspect that long-term, 3 might not be the wrong choice.

Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.

[steveBK123]

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form.

Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?

Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up)

They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.

[pjc50]

For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered.

Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it.

Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

[steveBK123]

The other thing that always got me about the car was.. I wondered if the executives at Apple had all become too rich? Apple sells premium hardware but generally sells products in the 10s or 100s of millions of volume, so pretty mass market consumer good.

The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?

At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.

I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.

Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.

[sroussey]

The Apple Lisa was the first GUI computer Apple made. Starting price $9995 (or $35,000 in today’s dollars).

Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.

Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).

And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa and had no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).

The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were sub 100.

If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.

Apple today is just too risk adverse.

[dpark]

> If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate

Vision Pro sells for >3 grand. Their strategy still seems consistent with exactly what you describe.

[sroussey]

Except the iteration on it. And people we aghast at the cost.

But one product. I don't know man, I think they became chicken of anything grand. It is not like it was a $35000 product.

If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?

They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.

They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.

Almost all their sales are $800-$4000 items. Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa? Too chickenshit these days. Good reason to be, of course. It is just not in their DNA anymore.

[steveBK123]

The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods.

There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.

[twoodfin]

If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely.

As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.

I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.

[steveBK123]

Maybe, but Hyundai would be antithesis of the Apple experience. Cars, even EVs.. and especially new products from new brands require a lot of after care.

Recalls, warranty items, maintenance, accident repairs, etc.

Hyundai still can't sort out a decent experience for their in-house luxury brand Genesis all these years later.

[121789]

> Apple makes computers

there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.

[twoodfin]

Right, but clearly the tech & regulatory environment was such that the use of a general purpose computer beyond the infotainment screens wasn’t going to add enough value.

If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.

“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”

[greedo]

The way Apple funded hardware purchases for their "OEM" manufacturers makes it hard to really say they were "capital-light."

[hattmall]

An Apple car would be crazy expensive to develop and not really a guaranteed sell at all. There's millions of people that are very loyal to Apple of iPhone and wearable but going to an Apple car is a HUGE jump.

[SecretDreams]

They could probably do full development from scratch for under $10 bil if they were frugal and patient, or more if they want to go fast, and farm first product out to a manufacturing house like magna. This is their MO already (they don't want to own a plant).

In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.

[pjc50]

> In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters

You're almost certainly right, and this is a good way to show just how remarkably big the AI buildout is.

[ghaff]

Quantum leap CarPlay/Siri could be a big win but, even as an Apple fan in general, have no particular interest in an Apple Car absent things like self-driving that blow everyone else out of the water--which seems a pretty big ask.

[dgellow]

Also, what would the margin be?

[MisterTea]

> Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

They tried. But the irony is MS is more deeply ingrained. I worked a short stint in a shop that no joke ran Windows server to manage a whole floor of Macs using Active Directory. The only other Windows PC was a machine hooked to a large format printer. I spoke to the admin (dyed in the wool Apple user) who stated that as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.

[pjc50]

> as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.

Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.

Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.

[cmiles74]

I setup an XServe for a mid-sized office, Open Directory was Apple's solution at the time. It worked but my recollection was that they did it by emulating a lot of Active Directory by layering code over OpenLDAP. When it worked it was nice, when it didn't work it was a headache to figure out where the problem might be. The management tools really couldn't compete with Active Directory, it was a mix of incomplete UI and command line tools.

[simonh]

Nobody "uses" rack mount servers as artefacts, the way people use other Apple hardware products. Not in the same sense, so I don't think Apple can really bring much of the kind of value they usually do. In practice Apple data centres are Linux facilities, and that's fine. Maybe if they could come up with a really compelling reason to put Apple silicon in a data centre, but we can do that now with racked Minis or Studios.

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...

[geerlingguy]

Apple's Private Cloud Compute is hundreds (probably thousands) of M3+ Ultra rack mount servers; they highlighted them in the Texas manufacturing plant video.

Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).

[pjc50]

The Apple silicon is really good! That would be the #1 reason to put it in a data centre, if it wasn't such a pain to manage a rack full of Minis.

[davedx]

Making cars is just a low margin business with a huge manufacturing footprint. They'd have been competing directly with Chinese EV makers. Dodged a bullet IMO

[dkga]

Yeah the car always seemed (to humble me) to be so… un-Apple. As in, the iphone was a success because of its aesthetics but also it solved a real problem, while creating a whole new market. But in the case of cars, cars are the problem.

[arcatech]

You're asking why they wouldn't pivot to making a regular EV, but I think the Apple way is to ask why they SHOULD make a regular EV.

They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.

[SecretDreams]

Apple public transit?

[prewett]

A car is a terrible idea for Apple. Apple doesn't make mechanical things, and it's a business with high capital costs and low margins.

[heroicmailman]

I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor.

They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.

[steveBK123]

I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.

You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space.

The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.

[alistairSH]

I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of plug-ins to make this stuff easy for the end-user, but that's where we are (and that's decades after the first gen stuff rolled out). I'd think it was an easy sell to have lights, doorbell, security cameras, and smart speakers all connected easily.

Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.

[steveBK123]

What I mean by average normie doesn't care is that - no one is actually excited about the space.

There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household).

I have had since the early days of IoT/homekit, various security cameras, doorbell, HomePod, thermostats, lights, switches, all that stuff. Honestly setting it up and maintaining it is more of a chore than an excitement. I upgrade when something breaks, begrudgingly. I do not breathlessly follow new releases ready to pre-order the new iteration. No one in the house really uses it except me, unless I happen to get up late / go to bed early and the lights need to be told to turn on/off.

In some ways it's not even that new technology wise. My dad had various light control panel via X10 and similar protocols going back to the early 90s if not sooner. Similarly was a sort of set-it-and-forget-it situation

[ghaff]

Yeah, I have a couple Alexas. One dating back to when it was a special thing for Prime customers. If they were to vanish tomorrow I wouldn't care. I had X10 as well. Once I got house properly rewired I didn't need them and last electrical rework I just told electrician no smart anything which he was perfectly cool with.

[JustExAWS]

It’s not hard to look at sales volumes of any of those to know that they don’t have mass market appeal - except maybe the Amazon devices and even Amazon cut jobs in that department and the managers there had to fuzz the numbers to get downstream revenue attributed to them.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hey-alexa-why-costing-amazon-...

I can’t find a publicly attributable source now.

[hibikir]

And yet the divisions that built those smart speakers have been reduced to almost nothing, because the monetization capabilities were minimal, as their common use cases are rather low value. The devices were priced quite low to try to gain marketshare, but it was a share to a market with minimal value.

The value of IoT that has been unlocked is, at best, minimal convenience. It's not unlike the metaverse: Large investment has been made, but there's no killer apps. I cannot even begin to imagine anything I'd consider high value all that home automation could do for me. The best case is like power windows in cars: Better than having to turn the handle like back in the days, and nowadays cheap enough to have 100% of the market, but, at best, a commodity, as nobody cares about which power window mechanism is being used.

Given how low the ceiling is, and how annoying an IoT's ecosystem's technical problems are, Apple shouldn't touch the market with a ten foot pole.

[toast0]

> I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.

I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...

The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.

The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.

Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.

Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.

[troupo]

> IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing.

Mostly because it's fragmented and Apple was nowhere to be found with their initially quite good and promising but then completely abandoned HomeKit.

In 2026 I still can't have my always-on supercomputer in the form of AppleTV to do anything with any of the devices at home. And Home app is extremely stupid, extremely limited, and requires a PhD in rocket science to figure out how to do anything with it (espceially since they just bolted on Shortcuts totally on the side).

[daotoad]

I think the home automation market is waiting on things that most people really want and a lower barrier to entry.

Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.

The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.

In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.

Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.

If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.

Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.

Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?

[mingus88]

Your points are why Apple isn’t entering that market.

Mounts, cases, smart locks, thermostats, bulbs…where is the “iPhone moment” for this sector? It’s all small beans now. Why would Apple want to compete here?

Personally I think any big moves in this area would be predicated on a next-level Siri companion. Stop futzing around with scenes, buttons, switches and pairing devices and just tell your house how it should work.

[steveBK123]

I often think the problem is Apple thinks too big. They are so big that for a product to move the needle it needs to be huge. Even the "failed" VisionPro was probably $2B of revenue. The "Home, Wearables and accessories" line is $40B of revenue.

Is Apple willing to trade-off some of the steady reliability of their earnings stream for product lines that may be real contributors 5-10+ years out is the question? I think under Cook the answer to that was no.

I think staying on this path will eventually lead diminishing returns and endanger them long term.

[losvedir]

Well Siri can't do all the cool home automation stuff if the "small beans" aren't already there.

[mingus88]

Siri first needs to fulfill the promise from the Apple Intelligence keynote. In this context, the small beans are things like setting timers and playing music reliably. AI was pitched as a true assistant who understood your whole digital life.

Nobody is going to hand control of their home to a system that was the dumbest smart assistant 14 years ago and is still behind everyone else.

It’s amazing to me that Apple announced vaporware that they didn’t know how to build yet. Nobody did, but Apple usually bides their time making it work before the reveal.

[hattmall]

Yeah IOT / connected home seems like the most reasonable area but they are probably waiting for the market to mature a bit.

[ricardobayes]

Yes, let's hope. And also let's hope that innovation will be more "iPhone" and less "Apple Vision Pro".

[ZiiS]

It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.

[steveBK123]

Exactly - Apple needs to be making MORE bets, not LESS.

Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc.

Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc.

I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade.

The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore.

Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.

[esafak]

I don't. That's how you get Google's graveyard. I want them to make a bet and nurture it, like they already do.

[ricardobayes]

The current mature tech company scene doesn't nurture this. If you're worried about performance reviews, layoffs and a 5k mortgage bill each month, that doesn't exactly put you in an innovative mood.

To get that 90s, early 2000's innovation, Apple needs to somehow think like a small company (this is near impossible) or actually be multiple smaller companies.

If the new CEO is smart, he could start in-house startups with Apple funding and infrastructure.

[steveBK123]

Having worked at companies with 200 to 100,000 employees.. I agree some of it must be organizational big-co thinking/kpis/perf/politics.

Creating some sort of internal incubator that encourages experimentation enough to innovate but with enough accountability to not be a purely academic R&D lab is difficult I'm sure.

This is why I mentioned elsewhere in thread - Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?

Not sure if people with closer experience has an opinion on if that model actually works our not. I suppose we have gotten some real world output from it right?

[trimbo]

You can choose not to ship the 99.

[steveBK123]

Shipping is part of the process.

Stated preferences vs revealed preferences.

Polling / focus groups vs sales.

You never really know what works until it works.

[pdpi]

You choose not to ship maybe 90 of those 99, because it's obvious before shipping that they won't work. The rest you have to ship before it becomes obvious they're not that last blessed one.

[momojo]

I'm all aboard the "Apple is simply waiting for the models to get dense enough to run on their hardware" hype train.

They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house.

Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.

[raw_anon_1111]

I would hope that Apple doesn’t follow Google’s lead. Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and struggles to make great products

[mring33621]

Gemini is a great product

[raw_anon_1111]

I have used Gemini, I have a personal subscription to ChatGPT and a corporate $5000/month allowance to Claude.

How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?

[butlike]

I don't like the name. Makes it sound two faced.

Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.

[kristofferR]

Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good.

As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.

[heathrow83829]

>> the next era looks bright.

but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.

are you imaging them creating whole new devices?

[poncho_romero]

They could make the software good again.

[Shorel]

They could bring the wired headphone jack back.

[abdusco]

That would require a lot of courage

[Shorel]

That would require them to accept it was the wrong decision.

I am doing the only thing I can: to vote with my wallet.

My current phone is a Sony Xperia and it has the headphone jack. I am listening to Hi-Fi music from Tidal right now, using the jack, and wired Crinacle earbuds.

[divbzero]

I know what you mean by stronger product focus, but phrasing it as “more like Jobs” makes it sound daunting.

[monkeydust]

What big hardware bets are people expecting him to take?

[steveBK123]

It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.

Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.

[throw0101d]

> It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.

There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:

* https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye...

AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).

[davedx]

- go head to head against google workspace

- apple public cloud

Lets go!

[kilroy123]

AR glasses that eventually replace the iPhone.

[JustExAWS]

From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.

[ghaff]

Automagical AR glasses are also probably a couple decades out for various reasons. Maybe we'll see more weirdos wearing goggles around but I don't see useful mainstream fashionable classes around anytime soon. And, of course, lots of privacy implications, i.e. here's the profile of the person I'm looking aat.

[intrasight]

They will be talking but not speaking

[layer8]

That’s not going to happen. Most people don’t like having to speak out loud in order to message, AI-chat, or use voice commands in public, and many not even in private.

[intrasight]

Why do you think you'd have to speak out loud?

[germinalphrase]

Yes - there’s interesting research on subvocalization.

[Rapzid]

People don't understand what a CEO does.

[musictubes]

Medical and health. Cook has said multiple times that he thinks that Apple’s greatest legacy will be “health.”

The biggest hurdle in the health hardware game is regulatory. If they can make a noninvasive blood sugar monitor and get it approved they will both print money and help a ton of people.