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.
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.
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
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 with 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 100.
If we’re were 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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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:
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).
Add to Cook's impeccable timing, that he stepped out of CEO role and into Chairman on exactly his 65th birthday, the very day he became first eligible for his pension
Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit...
+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.
> defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit
People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.
Hahahah yeah no I don't think he cares about a pension - I think you may be out of touch on this one friend. That is the funniest comment I have seen.
edit: I can't stop laughing about this. Imagine one of the most powerful/wealthiest CEOs on the planet timing his exit to max out his pension plan/company perks. Thats comedy gold - Seinfeld or Larry David episode.
I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 2% of the time.
I'm one of those users! I make a trade at Vanguard maybe every other month! I have another brokerage account I use for more active trading. My Vanguard account isn't "for" that, and the UI is so bad it kind of discourages it.
This is the same way I treat my 401k platform too. I never touch it and only log in to check a balance a few times a year. I opened a RobinHood acct for my own lil side pot and projects that I actively buy/sell on.
> But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else.
Most people just want to keep tabs on how that petulant orange manchild is wrecking their portfolio with his disgusting market manipulation antics.
"Should I use a 3.5% or a 4% safe withdrawal rate? My house is paid off and I got a company pension, two dogs and a partner. Cars are paid off but our iPhones are on a payment plan till 2028. Net worth around $2.5 billion but highly concentrated in one company"
That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.
The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.
when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.
It also had a large capacitive touchscreen rather than one with a stick and a keyboard underneath, impossibly smooth scroll inertia, a MEMS gyroscope for automatic landscape mode, etc. The GUI was also optimized for the capacitive touchscreen with large buttons everywhere. Android prior to the iPhone did look more like a BlackBerry.
(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)
The Treo was great and was definitely possible to read webpages on it. I thought it was the best smart phone at the time. The screen size web browsing and email were all better on the iPhone.
I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1])
It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.
Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.
When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.
> Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever?
its what the vice prez literally said in a speech; you can look it up on youtube...
fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y
I think it's more the taking (or at least not growing) skills, jobs, know-how from the US and giving to China, irrespective of if they would have developed on their own in any case. It's not about keeping China down, etc. People like to compare this with Japan in the 1980s, but Japan was indisputably an ally of the US, whereas China has never been.
There's an element of revisionism to this perspective. It used to be thought that integration with the global economy would gradually bring more alignment with Western values as well.
The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.
> Cook was, without question, an operational genius
I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:
I think you underestimate what he does. It seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but if it were so easy, others would not be so far behind. A difficult thing done well looks easy. Reminds me of when Toyota disrupted auto manufacturing.
Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.
I’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are!
This is how the electronics industry always worked. I times of yore it was IBM who bought up all the capacity in various fabs then defined later what devices would be manufactured on those wafers.
The biggest problem Apple had before Cook was inventory management. They would produce more Performas then they could sell which weighed their cash flow. The dead weight of inventory was a really big problem. Right sizing production to meet demand was what initially saved Apple.
> Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).
That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.
Thanks, but how did he do it? Actually what does he do than saying “ok guys tip priority is moving these units”? Like do he come up with the strategies? Or is he good at picking winners when he sees them from proposals of his underlings?
This is one of those things like becoming chess #1: all you have to do is make the optimal decision in a series of meetings, over and over again, for years.
Can't agree more with this recommendation. As a long time Apple user (Apple ][c back in 1984 started my journey), I thought I knew a lot about Apple. But how they actually made the iPhone work was just an amazing read.
Compared to game consoles, graphics cards, and all manner of other electronics things... have you ever seen Apple products on those stock tracker websites? Has there ever been an actual problem with scalpers? Ever had to sign up for a waiting list?
No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff.
I just bought an M5 Macbook from an electronics retailer because they actually stocked it, whereas ordering the same machine for the same price from Apple would have been a custom build delivered mid May.
I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then months after announcements their supplies are limited or geo locked. Samsung probably comes close, and it helps they're so vertically integrated.
Squeezing the suppliers in just the right way. When you squeeze them too hard and the pricing is too low, the suppliers stop making quality parts and Apple would have a reputation for hardware failures. Squeezing the suppliers not enough and the pricing is too high, then Apple suffers either from a reduced profit margin or a higher ASP. I find that negotiating with suppliers is an art. Cook is quite good at it.
> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?
I think people underestimate execution. When something is done well, it looks easy. But if it was so easy, why are other competitors struggling to execute the same thing?
Yes but those are outcomes — what did he do that got him there? Lots of people want preferential production and lower cost; Was it that he had the budget to pay more and dictate standards? If that’s the case that’s not genius as much as having the balls to make bets that paid off.
Honestly, Apple may very well be betting that AI in it's current form is transitional, and might be better off letting others duke it out for now.
We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace.
Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.
Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
Cook Doctrine: "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."
And later:
"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."
Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).
I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).
But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and entered into partnerships for content grudgingly and always with a plan to control the content vertically once they are able to. The big exception obviously is web search, but I can only imagine how much it pains them to not have an iron-fist control over the search results on Safari. They'll never embrace an AI content roulette wheel.
He had what many called at the time an impossible task of taking over from Jobs. There are areas where things could have gone better but overall he had a solid run and kept the company growing post Jobs.
He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.
Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
100% - if they switched their privacy stance they would lose their devoted crowd but probably keep the main street crowd. Its one of those things that makes me worried that at some point a new CEO or legal team will try to further monetize this and irreparably ruin what they built.
You mean its smart approach to PR about privacy. Actual privacy, especially if you are 95% of the mankind without US passport... thats a topic for long discussion, and not a very positive one.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
I appreciated Cook when I worked for Apple, but since, I've been disappointed with his lack of pushing the envelope like Jobs. He could have taken Apple to higher heights.
I used to really appreciate Ben Thompson's takes. He started losing me with his love of Meta's VR devices for meetings. Maybe I didn't get it, I thought. I don't agree with him on a lot of things these days.
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
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.
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.
The duality of Man
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."
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 with 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 100.
If we’re were 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.
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.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...
Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).
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.
They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.
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.
Stated preferences vs revealed preferences.
Polling / focus groups vs sales.
You never really know what works until it works.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
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.
Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.
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).
+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.
People repeat this but when I ran the math on earlier Social Security payments it seems like the accrued $, by the time you're eligible for the higher benefit, is plenty similar as bonus income.
Don't worry, I got it.
edit: I can't stop laughing about this. Imagine one of the most powerful/wealthiest CEOs on the planet timing his exit to max out his pension plan/company perks. Thats comedy gold - Seinfeld or Larry David episode.
Do they weigh themselves every day too?
Kidding, I’m sure I’m ignorant of the rationale. Thought weekly, monthly would be better to understand trends or not get unnecessarily worried.
Maybe I’m so wrong the opposite is true.
Most people just want to keep tabs on how that petulant orange manchild is wrecking their portfolio with his disgusting market manipulation antics.
I can't stop laughing about this hypothetical.
You say it's funny, but the rest of your comment makes me think you didn't realize it was a joke.
(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)
It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.
Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerbnYhhw7s
fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y
The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.
even still, China has westernized a lot over the last 20 years, both in quality of life and in social values
regardless of values, offshoring valuable skills is a way to bring about more equality, but not a way to ensure American dominance
I don't know that American dominance is a good thing
I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:
* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems
Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.
Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.
I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!
Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).
That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.
Some critique, but widely praised
No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff.
The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS
Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?
We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.
Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
And later:
"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."
Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).
I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).
But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.
Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
0. Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/20/palantir-goes-mask-off-f...
there it is.
counterfactuals are hard