oh great, the head of homepod overseeing airpods. this doesn’t bode well since homepod is essentially a paperweight.
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Apple Acoustics VP Leaves Role, AirPods and HomePod Audio Team Gets New Leadership
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Hopefully the acoustics team can figure out how to introduce a parametric EQ to these products.
Don't want to ge all Mark Gurman here, but Apple is WAY more fluid than it used to be. At one point, working at Apple was as near as Silicon Valley got to a job for life.
Difficult to work out why. Could be that Apple's compensation isn't as good as it used to be, especially around stock dividends. Could be that there's simply some exciting startups doing things ahead of Apple, especially in the AI space. Could be a change in culture at Apple, with the operationally-focussed era of Tim Cook now concrete and all traces of Steve Jobs' culture eradicated. Could be that with several senior managers gone, people just don't feel as close to their projects as they used to be. Could be that the majority of Apple's products are very, very mature right now, and the only new product – Vision Pro – is years away from being commercially viable, relying on tech that's yet to even be invented.
Could be a mixture all of these! For example, Apple only adopts tech when it's mature and ready, but until now that hasn't stopped it researching and investing in the tech years ahead of time. I wouldn't be surprised if the Tim Cook operational approach is now to jump in head first to new tech once it's matured, recruiting and building out teams, rather than having the "old Apple" culture of having a team ready and waiting with years of experience. Generative AI is probably a great example. Apple was caught on the back foot with that, and has probably built out a massive team. But there was no team at Apple already working in that area. And a decade or two ago, there would've been.
Difficult to work out why. Could be that Apple's compensation isn't as good as it used to be, especially around stock dividends. Could be that there's simply some exciting startups doing things ahead of Apple, especially in the AI space. Could be a change in culture at Apple, with the operationally-focussed era of Tim Cook now concrete and all traces of Steve Jobs' culture eradicated. Could be that with several senior managers gone, people just don't feel as close to their projects as they used to be. Could be that the majority of Apple's products are very, very mature right now, and the only new product – Vision Pro – is years away from being commercially viable, relying on tech that's yet to even be invented.
Could be a mixture all of these! For example, Apple only adopts tech when it's mature and ready, but until now that hasn't stopped it researching and investing in the tech years ahead of time. I wouldn't be surprised if the Tim Cook operational approach is now to jump in head first to new tech once it's matured, recruiting and building out teams, rather than having the "old Apple" culture of having a team ready and waiting with years of experience. Generative AI is probably a great example. Apple was caught on the back foot with that, and has probably built out a massive team. But there was no team at Apple already working in that area. And a decade or two ago, there would've been.
Some smart folks in b-schools determined that it's better for organizations to be dynamic and in order to be dynamic, the talent needs to cycle. So if you look around, we find the same thing happening in all companies, and the more successful the company the more weird their policies tend to be. There isn't such a thing as a job for life. Too much experience is viewed as a liability.
This process (where you break things that aren't broken in the name of innovation) worked well for a couple of decades of free money because literally it was all about financial engineering (issuing debt and buying back stock) and it didn't matter what you built. Now with free money gone, there may be a return to sanity, but before that we may have to experience a complete destruction of everything because most execs don't get that things have changed, and they are waiting for a return back to free money. Execs that knew how to operate before easy money are all gone.
What I find ironic with many members in this forum is that when there is a post highlighting that an Apple employee of senior standing (VP or assistant VP or some other top senior position) is leaving, the same argument is used upon their leaving which is that the product(s) they were involved in have become stale, boring and uninventive and it is good that they are leaving.
Can't we just enjoy the fact that they all made good products?
Can't we just enjoy the fact that they all made good products?
Which of Apple's products are good right now? The last ones that were exciting were from during Ive's tenure.
Your misconception here is to think we're only interested in the here and now. Yes, Apple make good products right now. But we're looking at both the present time and the future.
As I mentioned in my post above, most of Apple's products (including services) are very, very mature now. There is generally a curve for technology. It's nascent, then it's mature, then it's in decline. "Nascent" is where everybody wants to be, because it's cool and interesting. VisionOS is nascent, for example. I can guarantee that within Apple, that's the team where people want to be.
But Apple is the master of stretching out the mature phase of a product's life cycle, and have created their own rules here. Even so, it's entirely possible to make a strong argument that the iPhone, the MacBook, the Watch, the iPad, iCloud and more are all teetering on the brink of the decline phase of the technology cycle. There's not really much scope left to innovate. You merely iteratively improve. Why's this important? Well, you can't recruit the best talent for a declining technology where there is little if any innovation happening.
All Apple has in market right now in terms of truly new product is the Vision Pro/VisionOS. They're betting the house on visually-oriented AR. There are those who argue that generative AI is the way forward, deploying AR when needed... But that AR isn't the focus. It's just a tangential technology. But that's another argument for another day.
Last week, I took out my 15” PowerBook G4 (2004) to play with. That’s when I realized that my regular iPhone 12 has better/louder sound. The evolution of small speaker tech is something I hadn’t been paying attention to.
Well you should listen to the six speakers in todays 14”/16” AS MBP’s next time you come across them.
Interesting article here that indicates there might simply be a change of culture amongst tech workers, where they've realised that loyalty counts for nothing: https://www.geekwire.com/2024/im-pr...ineers-post-about-company-loyalty-goes-viral/
They were part of a group of companies (Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Lucasfilm, Pixar and Intuit at least) that colluded to not recruit/poach employees from each other:
Apple, Google and Other Tech Giants Settle Anti-Poaching Lawsuit
A class-action lawsuit alleging that Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies colluded not to recruit each other's employees has come to an end.
www.nbcnews.com