Apple CEO Tim Cook Delivers Virtual Commencement Address to Ohio State University Graduates

[hdrummon]

In my opinion, I have found Tim Cook to be a great leader. My stock has appreciated greatly, they are highly profitable, their products are great and highly respected mostly. I know some people don't like Apple, and that is ok. Leave and go to Windows or Linux if you are unhappy or think the company is poorly run. The balance sheet, the stock price, the valuation, the product quality are all very good and market leading. Yeah, Apple does not lead with bleeding edge options, but they do offer quality when it does come out. I've been buying from Apple since 1983 and have never had any issue and I have bought a lot over the years. I applaud Tim Cook and his speech. He is a nice guy according to people I know that work there. It's sad to see the criticism of him and of Apple.

 

[return2sendai]

No bookcase behind Tim. ebooks rule!

 

[scoobydoo99]

I guess we will have to agree to disagree then.

Here I am at home, conducting HBL lessons with my students. Every weekday morning, I gather in front of my 5k iMac, with my iphone, iPad Pro (replete with Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil), AirPods, and Apple Watch, ready to start the day with my students.

During this time, my iMac is perhaps the most boring, yet the most functional device, because it allows me to conduct zoom sessions with my students with ease. That huge display is invaluable for managing multiple windows and apps.

Throughout the morning, my watch reminds me to stand, my iphone is buzzing with WhatsApp messages from my colleagues, and I teach with my ipad mirrored to my iMac via the air-server app. My AirPods are light and comfortable and I have no issues leaving them in my ears all day, which is crucial since I can literally be in front of the computer all morning and (sometimes) afternoons when there are meetings.

Then for the rest of the day, I am preparing screencasts from my ipad (using the screen recording function), and the ipad accessories (keyboard and pencil) really shine here.

Meanwhile, I am receiving reports of an alarming rise in the number of colleagues who had to send in their work-issued windows tablet laptops back to school for servicing due to screen issues (suspected heat-related failures) and motherboard failures.

Perhaps the Apple critics expect something a little more or different from Apple, but during this crucial period when I really need my devices to “just work”, that’s precisely what my apple products have done. “Just work” and get out of the way so I can focus on teaching the way I want to teach. Not saying I welcome this whole pandemic situation, but it has allowed me to use my apple hardware in ways I never had the opportunity to, and it’s been an amazing ride throughout.

And these products were all released under Tim Cook’s tenure. So yeah, here’s one very satisfied Apple customer who is fine with Apple’s current direction and focus.

I suppose I would ask (seriously) how long you have been an Apple customer? Having been with Apple for a couple of decades (since the original iMac), and having been an original iPhone customer (on launch night, the short-lived 4GB version) - I can say that I have witnessed a gradual but consistent decline in the quality of the user experience under Tim Cook's reign. Are Apple products still pretty good? yeah. Do I still use them? yep (at least until my iPhone SE dies). But the 1998-~2010 years were a period of incredible innovation and consistent improvement in materials, design, and user interface. The more recent decade has given us thinner, lighter, less intuitive devices with user interfaces (designed by committee) that show considerable degradation with each successive generation. In fact, the idea that Apple products "just work", as you mention, has become less true lately as Apple pursues interface "improvements" (e.g. 3D touch, disappearing scroll bars, etc) and hardware design (haptic feedback vs. mechanical home button, opposing volume and lock buttons, protruding camera lenses, etc) that make their products unnecessarily complex, inelegant, and frustrating to use.

I agree that they have some good products and they may even still offer the best user experience on the market. But they could be so much better with a visionary at the helm. I don't know who that is, but it's not Cook.
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I didn't say it's what Apple should do. I said they could, and I said it clearly isn't Tim Cook's strategy, which is why I brought it up. The quote was: "Corporations are valued on what Tim Cook has delivered - market share and profits." We can quibble over whether profits are a significant part of "what Tim Cook has delivered", but… market share? It's absolutely not at the core of what he's delivering.

Agree, margins are more important than market share, which is not Apple's (nor Cooks) main focus. According to IDC, iPhone share went from 12.1% in 2018Q2 to 19.9% in 2019Q4, so there is some market share growth. I do think under Jobs there was even less interest in market share tho.

 

[Abazigal]

I suppose I would ask (seriously) how long you have been an Apple customer? Having been with Apple for a couple of decades (since the original iMac), and having been an original iPhone customer (on launch night, the short-lived 4GB version) - I can say that I have witnessed a gradual but consistent decline in the quality of the user experience under Tim Cook's reign. Are Apple products still pretty good? yeah. Do I still use them? yep (at least until my iPhone SE dies). But the 1998-~2010 years were a period of incredible innovation and consistent improvement in materials, design, and user interface. The more recent decade has given us thinner, lighter, less intuitive devices with user interfaces (designed by committee) that show considerable degradation with each successive generation. In fact, the idea that Apple products "just work", as you mention, has become less true lately as Apple pursues interface "improvements" (e.g. 3D touch, disappearing scroll bars, etc) and hardware design (haptic feedback vs. mechanical home button, opposing volume and lock buttons, protruding camera lenses, etc) that make their products unnecessarily complex, inelegant, and frustrating to use.

I agree that they have some good products and they may even still offer the best user experience on the market. But they could be so much better with a visionary at the helm. I don't know who that is, but it's not Cook.
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Agree, margins are more important than market share, which is not Apple's (nor Cooks) main focus. According to IDC, iPhone share went from 12.1% in 2018Q2 to 19.9% in 2019Q4, so there is some market share growth. I do think under Jobs there was even less interest in market share tho.

This would mark my 9th year of being an Apple customer?

I got my first Apple device, a 27” iMac, in 2011. I would then go on to get the iPhone 4s later that year, followed by an ipad 3 and 11” MBA in 2012.

That would mark the start of my experimentation with the use of the ipad in teaching, partly fuelled by my frustration with my work-issued windows touchscreen laptop. Those were primitive times, since the ipad was really just an enlarged iPod touch, but it managed to get the experience right where it mattered. We can talk about the many advancements made by subsequent ipad models and iPadOS, and while they have certainly made working on an ipad more efficient, I find it hasn’t really changed the essence of what an ipad is for me - a giant touchscreen which becomes whatever app it is running at that any one time.

Along the way, I would discover a blog run by a writer crazy enough to run his blogging career entirely from his ipad (Macstories), and would go on to learn a great deal about ipad productivity in general. This is perhaps what spurred my proclivity towards getting stuff done on the ipad, because it really is the ideal blend of simplicity, battery life and portability for me.

I would also get an Apple TV in 2013 to mirror my ipad in the classroom. Ah the days of setting up a router in my classroom or even running air-server on my MBA before Apple would bring peer-to-peer airplay mode to the ATV in 2015.

Subsequent updates would trickle in, but I am grateful that they even came at all. Better late than never and all. I upgraded to the iPad mini 2 (seeing a faster and more portable form factor), followed by the 2016 9.7” ipad (for the Apple Pencil), and then the 2018 11” iPad Pro (which I am using now, replete with the Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil).

In the meantime, I would also get the AirPods and series 2 Apple Watch in 2016, and am now on my 2nd pair of AirPods and the series 5 watch. I have also upgraded to the 2017 5k iMac (which with 40gb ram, more than suffices as a workhorse computer). My house is littered with Apple TV’s, and the older 3rd generation ones are now housed in the 2 classrooms I am teaching, with 1 spare for when I need to move around).

iPhone journey is pretty standard as well. 4s->5s->6S+->8+ (and currently still using it).

Looking at my own Apple device history, and cross-referencing it with the many complaints I see here, it seems that I have largely been able to avoid the more problematic product releases by Apple (eg: Mac Pro, 2016+ MBPs), while their product direction seems to be in line with that I want out of them. I don’t really need a laptop these days; my iMac+iPad Pro combo suffices for the work I do. iCloud keeps my files synced across my devices, airdrop is amazing for slinging files around, heck, I even love the tv remote.

So yeah, here’s one happy and satisfied Apple customer who sees himself continuing to buy and use apple products for a good many more years to come.

 

[chucker23n1]

I suppose I would ask (seriously) how long you have been an Apple customer? Having been with Apple for a couple of decades (since the original iMac), and having been an original iPhone customer (on launch night, the short-lived 4GB version) - I can say that I have witnessed a gradual but consistent decline in the quality of the user experience under Tim Cook's reign.

I've had Apple products since 1992. I would say the 90s weren't great in terms of software quality, and recent years haven't been either. It shouldn't be the status quo that each recent macOS release only becomes high-quality during its later point releases. The time in between is trickier.

Hardware quality seems above what most of the competition delivers, but Macs weren't exactly free of issues under Jobs either. Fan problems, GPU/logic board problems, etc. I've had them all, despite the MacBook Pro premium. And what I presume was a faulty I/O controller on my iBook.

I'm not sure if software quality was actually better in the 2000s. The pretty picture we paint is affected in part by just how rapidly Mac OS X evolved. And that, in turn, is in part the result of how incomplete Mac OS X 10.0 was. It couldn't burn CDs (that may seem silly today, but it mattered in 2001) or play DVDs. It didn't have Bonjour (née Rendezvous), Spotlight, Time Machine, Mission Control (née Exposé). It had awful performance (it didn't even have techniques like Quartz Extreme*). In the coming years, much of that was rectified, so I think our perception of the quality of those releases is colored inaccurately by how many great features they had.

*) remember when everything Apple was… Extreme?

As an example, it's not like Finder being unreliable at mounting/unmounting network volumes is a recent phenomenon. I've been fighting with that since 10.1.x (I never had 10.0.x beyond superficial testing). But because Leopard and Panther and Tiger and all the great cats added so much, we're more forgiving of it.

I think there were about four different SVPs of software engineering (in some cases, the role was split): Avie Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet, Scott Forstall, Craig Federighi. It's hard for me to say if one was particularly good or bad. Tevanian arguably was dogmatic in ways that weren't friendly to the classic Mac (but had a deep background on how to make a robust OS); Serlet seemed better at reconciling those two worlds of the Mac and Unix; Forstall seemed to be quite inventive, but IMO went over the top around the times of iOS 6; Craig has been unifying the worlds of the Mac and iOS, with perhaps mixed success — see, for example, how the iPad still doesn't seem to have nailed its multitasking UI concepts. (I would love to see Gruber do similar roasts for the other three!)

I'm hesitant to say "Tevanian, Serlet, Forstall: quality good; Federighi: quality bad", but I would say quality isn't good enough.

 

[Winni]

What would the point of that be, if that increased market share doesn’t translate into more profits?

Just ask android how that strategy is working out?

Yeah. Ask the market leader how their strategy is working out. You know, the product that even the third world - the largest part of our world - can afford?

Android connects the planet. iOS only connects the financially better situated people. Guess which product has more relevance.

 

[chucker23n1]

But the 1998-~2010 years were a period of incredible innovation and consistent improvement in materials, design, and user interface.

I think you're ignoring a few things here. Those years also brought us various inexplicable choices like brushed metal in some apps (with a post-facto justification in the HIG), then in more apps (clashing with the former HIG justification), then eventually in a lessened form everywhere. They brought us a fun but ultimately stupid UI for Time Machine. They changed iTunes from a simple, integrated, great way to Rip. Mix. Burn. to a behemoth that updates iPod firmware, backs up iPhones, syncs contacts (???) and plays video. They were the time when the Finder changed from a simple app with a clear concept to a complex and unreliable yet somehow worse than Windows File Explorer app.

The more recent decade has given us thinner, lighter, less intuitive devices with user interfaces (designed by committee) that show considerable degradation with each successive generation. In fact, the idea that Apple products "just work", as you mention, has become less true lately as Apple pursues interface "improvements" (e.g. 3D touch, disappearing scroll bars, etc) and hardware design (haptic feedback vs. mechanical home button, opposing volume and lock buttons, protruding camera lenses, etc) that make their products unnecessarily complex, inelegant, and frustrating to use.

I actually think haptic feedback, when implemented well, is really good. I'm puzzled they still haven't added it to the Touch Bar.

As for 3D Touch, they really missed the boat there. They shipped a hardware feature before they had figured out the software for it. They never quite got that part right (ironically, they may have now that iOS 13 is out, but now it's basically dead), and they also never scaled it up to the iPad. I guess they thought they would eventually succeed in shipping an iPad with 3D Touch, and once it became clear that that wasn't gonna happen, they had to start making weird fallback UI. So they scrapped it all.

Disappearing scrollbars, I'm torn on. It's particularly bad when it's unclear that there is more content in a view, and that you need to scroll. But when that is clear (which is most of the time), simplifying the UI chrome does have benefits. I do, however, see Apple (and others) overshooting in removing affordances. This is part of the issue in iPadOS multitasking, I think. I think it'd be a big win if you could bring the iPad into a mode where it shows macOS-style traffic lights on the "window", which then gives you clear options of how you can add more windows, and it seems a bit stupid that Apple had this figured out in the early 1980s with the Lisa, but forgot at some point. I don't think the answer is to go back to System 7-style fat window chrome, though.

Protruding camera lenses: I'm occasionally annoyed by how wobbly the iPhone 11 is on a table. I'm also consistently impressed as hell by its camera. It's a trade-off.
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Yeah. Ask the market leader how their strategy is working out. You know, the product that even the third world - the largest part of our world - can afford?

Android connects the planet. iOS only connects the financially better situated people. Guess which product has more relevance.

That's a simplistic view. How are HTC and Blackberry feeling about that "market leader" now? How happy is Samsung by being clobbered on the low end by cheaper competitors? Android is successful, but it's also a race to the bottom.

Also, "financially better situated"? It's not like only the top 1% use iPhones.

 

[Abazigal]

Yeah. Ask the market leader how their strategy is working out. You know, the product that even the third world - the largest part of our world - can afford?

Android connects the planet. iOS only connects the financially better situated people. Guess which product has more relevance.

No question for me.

Google to Pay Apple $12B to Remain Safari's Default Search: Report

The report also said it's likely a fraction of what Google gets out of the deal.

fortune.com

Google is a services company focused on accessing the data of as many people as possible, and Apple is increasingly gaining power as a gatekeeper between Google and the most valuable customers that Google needs for its services - Apple users. I can’t think of any reason why Google would even agree to paying so much money every year, except for the simple fact that vis-a-vis, iOS users are worth more than android users.

Google is not a charity, and Android is just a means to an end. Google doesn’t make its services freely accessible for the whole world to use out of the kindness of their hearts. They do so because it suits their business model to do so, and because the cost of doing so is nearly zero. Just like how Apple can talk big about not caring to mine your user data, because that’s not where they earn their money from.

So if I were make a judgment call, I am observing a new world order emerge where Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are in the top tier while Google and Facebook are relegated to the second (or bottom, whatever you call it). Apple and Amazon are considerations power within their own territories at a terrifying pace, while Google is gradually losing power in mobile (between more users evidently switching from android to iOS than the other way around, and amazon gaining more presence in the home via their smart devices). Facebook is just drawing fire from every side.

Meanwhile, even as Google slowly but sure moves its users off google services, I wager that Google will find that it has little choice but to continue paying Apple ever-increasing sums of money every year to access what is probably a declining portion of Apple’s installed base, because again, that’s where the money is. Even as Apple doubles down on privacy controls within their own ecosystem.

I think you will find that Google has very little show for their high android market share.