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Those who wonder why Steve chose Tim to run Apple, you really need to understand that it's not about the customer.

If you understand that Apple is ultimately a business, like any other business and that everything they do is about the STOCKHOLDER and PROFIT for the stockholder then it makes sense.

Stop being hung up on Apple being all about the customer. It's not about us. It's about making loads of money for people who are invested in the business. And Tim Cook is perfect for that.
 
Plus the original HomePod flopped, the Vision Pro flopped, and I worry this new home hub will flop too. The prices are so high that I worry it’s gonna make it hard for Apple to find a new product category they can win in. Thankfully AirPods, Apple Watch, and the HomePod mini seem to be doing well.
Huh?? I have two pairs of the original HomePods running and they are arguably amongst the best purchases I’ve ever made. Those speakers disrupted home audio for me and about a million other users — how is that a flop??

Similarly, VisionPro is a huge productivity boost for me personally and a great technology reference platform for me professionally. This past WWDC has already shown evidence of Vision DNA making its way into the entire Apple product line — similar to the diffusion of iPhone technology into virtually every Apple product line.

Calling VisionPro a flop is akin to calling low volume Sony ES Reference series audio products or Audi RS-Series automobiles flops. The purpose of these products — like VisionPro — is to introduce and refine cutting edge technology that will eventually make their way into all of the respective companies’ products.

This design pattern is successfully employed by the most technologically sophisticated product houses and often missed or misunderstood by most.
 
Tim Cook lacks the qualities that made Steve Jobs great, and while he compensates for some of Steve’s weaknesses, he doesn’t inspire the same spirit of innovation, quality and focus on user experience and satisfaction. Alone, Tim risks changing Apple’s motto from “Think Different” to “Rethink Nothing.”
Was the goal to find a clone of Jobs? Can Tim Cook be great but in different ways?

I don’t buy into the nostalgia of everything being great in the old days. I’m pretty excited about what was announced on Monday. My tech friends are too. I honestly don’t know what people expect. Should Apple radically change the iPhone so it can qualify as “thinking different “? Why would any company take such a huge risk?

We’ve all seen threads like this. It reminds me of Archie Bunker singing “Those Were the Days”.
 
Was the goal to find a clone of Jobs? Can Tim Cook be great but in different ways?

I don’t buy into the nostalgia of everything being great in the old days. I’m pretty excited about what was announced on Monday. My tech friends are too. I honestly don’t know what people expect. Should Apple radically change the iPhone so it can qualify as “thinking different “? Why would any company take such a huge risk?

We’ve all seen threads like this. It reminds me of Archie Bunker singing “Those Were the Days”.
I had an instructor in college once that was a classic car buff, primarily cars from the 1940s. But he had also been alive during that time period (and aware) and cars were always his thing. So, he knew what garbage looked like in the 1940s. It irritated him no end that in the early 1990s, when I was taking his class, that there were people promoting garbage simply because it had been produced in the 1940s.

He used to say that it was 'garbage then and it's garbage now'. But this was just because nostalgia got attached to it. I'm not saying that Apple or it's products are all garbage. But conversely, not everything Apple made was great.
 
Tim Cook isn't leaving until Tim Cook decides he wants to move on.. 98% of Apple customers are happy with the products and experience using the brand. It's the 2% on tech forums that are disappointed in Apple and seem to find reason after reason to complain about anything Apple releases or implements. All you have to do is visit our main page and read the articles. Doesn't matter what the thread is about, it's full of the same forum members with negative comments about the subject being discussed..
It isn’t black and white. Apple has issues. But we still use the products. No one 100% loves Apple unless they are delusional. No one 100% hates Apple unless they are delusional.

Tim Cook probably should move on at this point. He’s done a fine job, but their senior leadership needs some changes to be sure.

I don’t agree with the idea Cook only cares about profits. And Apple has introduced many new devices under Cook.
 
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Keynote after keynote, they get less and less exciting. Apple no longer dares.

I started using a Mac back in 1993 — I loved it. But by 1995, everyone was declaring Apple dead.
Back then, Apple was run by financial managers with no vision, no creativity, and no interest in pushing boundaries. They focused solely on revenues — and nearly killed the company before Jobs got back.

But now, I feel Apple is heading down a similar path under Tim Cook. He lacks vision. The only boundaries he seems interested in pushing are how much revenue he can squeeze from a product. The number of products that haven’t significantly evolved in the last decade is astonishing.
Even the successful ones, like the Mac Mini, feel like an update from the 25-year-old G4 Cube. iOS 26? another back to the past.

I remember a bold Apple — the one that killed off legacy ports in favor of USB, that declared “we’re going wireless” long before anyone else. The Apple that looked at MP3 players and thought, “We can do better.” The Apple that dared to take on giants like Nokia and BlackBerry and annihilate them.

Tim Cook lacks the qualities that made Steve Jobs great, and while he compensates for some of Steve’s weaknesses, he doesn’t inspire the same spirit of innovation, quality and focus on user experience and satisfaction. Alone, Tim risks changing Apple’s motto from “Think Different” to “Rethink Nothing.”

Thoughts?
Absolute BS, Tim Cook made Apple into the biggest, richest, most successful company in the world.
The products are amazing, everybody loves it.
AirPods, the M-Processors and the Apple Watch are without competition.
Stop being so passive-aggressive about things in your head from the past.
What do you wish for?
 
The last 5 years, by and large, most, if not all, of our problems have largely been solved.
Completely and fully disagree. There’s no such a thing as a perfect product that solves every problem. There’s always room for improvement. Always.
We’d be riding horses and using trains if we thought they’d solved all our problems.
 
Going to go on a bit of a rant here. Apologies.

Everyone is going on about the CEO here and innovation being dead. You know why innovation is dead? Because stuff is done. Yeah sorry but that's it. All we have left is gradual improvement but everyone expects more after we had such a period of accelerated progress. This isn't the difference between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. Jobs was merely an ******* who happened to be an ******* at the right place and time. Tim's reign literally transitioned the entire damn platform to a whole new in house CPU architecture but you know it wasn't paradigm shifting because the tech press didn't fall to their knees and make gargling noises of appreciation.

But screw it. Here's the post 1997 truth:

Everything Apple has done has been done by someone else before, especially during the Steve Jobs reign. There is not a single unique innovation since the 1990s. Some facts:

1. I had an ARM based desktop (Acorn A420) in 1989. Most people outside the UK don't even know these existed. 31 years before Apple.

2. I had my first smartphone in 2002. 5 years before Apple.

3. I had my first portable music player in 1998. 3 years before Apple.

4. Again Acorn did the NewsPAD in 1996. 14 years before Apple kicked an iPad out of the door.

All Jobs and Cook have done is take technology, package it nicely, apply quality control which is unsurpassed everywhere and get people to want it.

But really we haven't come that far. If we took ideas from today back to 1999 we could reproduce what we have now without too much effort. The storage would be smaller, the screens worse and the battery life worse, but it wouldn't be a whole lot different.

So please stop crowing about Apple innovation being dead. It has been dead for getting on for 25 years as has everything else everywhere. The same ideas have been rehashed over and over again and refined but there isn't some massive amount of innovation going on anywhere. Things are just getting faster and more complicated.

AI is a fine symptom of this. Companies are so desperate for a paradigm shift they jumped on it faster than a seagull on chips. Except they mostly sold a bunch of hope and tried to keep the snowball rolling until they can fill the gaps. It is now becoming apparent that they can't. Oh crap, better change the furniture quick to keep the users interested!

----

Footnote: if you give me a 15 year old computer, I will sit down and use it with minimal loss of productivity. Ask yourself if you can do the same. You might be surprised.

I actually set up a windows 2000 VM and used Word 2000 to write a document a few weeks back just to see and you know what, it's no worse than Pages today or Word from Office 365. This says where we really went.
 
Those who wonder why Steve chose Tim to run Apple, you really need to understand that it's not about the customer.

If you understand that Apple is ultimately a business, like any other business and that everything they do is about the STOCKHOLDER and PROFIT for the stockholder then it makes sense.

Stop being hung up on Apple being all about the customer. It's not about us. It's about making loads of money for people who are invested in the business. And Tim Cook is perfect for that.
Peter drucker 101, a business provides a service (?or many services). Apple provides services that Apple customer like and they buy products and services to the tune of billions a quarter.
 
Going to go on a bit of a rant here. Apologies.

Everyone is going on about the CEO here and innovation being dead. You know why innovation is dead? Because stuff is done. Yeah sorry but that's it. All we have left is gradual improvement but everyone expects more after we had such a period of accelerated progress. This isn't the difference between Tim Cook and Steve Jobs. Jobs was merely an ******* who happened to be an ******* at the right place and time. Tim's reign literally transitioned the entire damn platform to a whole new in house CPU architecture but you know it wasn't paradigm shifting because the tech press didn't fall to their knees and make gargling noises of appreciation.

But screw it. Here's the post 1997 truth:

Everything Apple has done has been done by someone else before, especially during the Steve Jobs reign. There is not a single unique innovation since the 1990s. Some facts:

1. I had an ARM based desktop (Acorn A420) in 1989. Most people outside the UK don't even know these existed. 31 years before Apple.

2. I had my first smartphone in 2002. 5 years before Apple.

3. I had my first portable music player in 1998. 3 years before Apple.

4. Again Acorn did the NewsPAD in 1996. 14 years before Apple kicked an iPad out of the door.

All Jobs and Cook have done is take technology, package it nicely, apply quality control which is unsurpassed everywhere and get people to want it.

But really we haven't come that far. If we took ideas from today back to 1999 we could reproduce what we have now without too much effort. The storage would be smaller, the screens worse and the battery life worse, but it wouldn't be a whole lot different.

So please stop crowing about Apple innovation being dead. It has been dead for getting on for 25 years as has everything else everywhere. The same ideas have been rehashed over and over again and refined but there isn't some massive amount of innovation going on anywhere. Things are just getting faster and more complicated.

AI is a fine symptom of this. Companies are so desperate for a paradigm shift they jumped on it faster than a seagull on chips. Except they mostly sold a bunch of hope and tried to keep the snowball rolling until they can fill the gaps. It is now becoming apparent that they can't. Oh crap, better change the furniture quick to keep the users interested!

----

Footnote: if you give me a 15 year old computer, I will sit down and use it with minimal loss of productivity. Ask yourself if you can do the same. You might be surprised.

I actually set up a windows 2000 VM and used Word 2000 to write a document a few weeks back just to see and you know what, it's no worse than Pages today or Word from Office 365. This says where we really went.
I think this stance greatly undervalues what Apple brings to the table.

I had smartphones and PDAs before the iPhone. I had a Sony Clie device running Palm OS that I totally adored. I used to download games from a proto-AppStore (a website run by Handspring IIRC?). It had a MemoryStick full of MP3s. It could just about handle heavily compressed video. It was effectively a web-less iPod touch but 3 years earlier.

As the iPhone took off and Apple was getting credit for the revolution, I thought it was a little unfair to the platforms that came before. My Clie did similar stuff years before, right? What about Palm, and BlackBerry, and Nokia (Symbian etc.), and Windows Mobile? etc. Apple is just doing the same thing! I found myself pushing back on that narrative at the time.

I was missing the woods for the trees, though. Yes, what the predecessors offered was functionally similar, but the implementation was so much different. Prior smartphones and PDAs were nerdy fiddly things with cumbersome interfaces, small and low resolution displays, limited software capabilities (remember J2ME games?), slow processors, limited connectivity and crappy WAP browsers, a heavy dependence on a PC for syncing software and content etc. I loved all of that because I’m a techie, but I would’ve never recommended a normie splurge on one. Like “oh hey, don’t let the battery run out or it’ll factory reset itself” is not something a general consumer should have to deal with 😅 (my Sony Clie stored everything but media in volatile memory, I know this wasn’t the case for all)

iPhone wasn’t so much an evolution of what came before but a total fresh start. They didn’t try to replicate what was on the market and develop from there, it was clean sheet. New “desktop class” operating system built on OS X, a full-fat SDK (e.g. far more capable for things like gaming), a proper “desktop class” web browser, complete media (music, video, photos) capabilities, large (for the time) flash storage, standard WiFi connectivity, an intuitive new touch-first interface etc. No one had done it like this before. The functionality was similar but the implementation was so much different - call it packaging if you want, it was innovative regardless. Remember the Android guys were working on BlackBerry-esque devices before iPhone dropped - they had to drop everything and pivot. It shouldn’t be trivialized.

Apple’s achievements with silicon are huge too. It’s easy to forget how bold the investments into silicon were because we’re so used to it, but going in-house was a huge and risky bet. Naysayers thought they would fail (no one can compete with mighty Intel, right?), but the team has been delivering industry leading silicon for well over a decade by this point. Think back to Apple A7 - the first ArmV8 architecture and the first time an Arm chip was truly competitive with x86 on performance - it was huge and, in retrospect, marked a turning point. Apple’s designs are the blueprint the competition follow now - Qualcomm/Nuvia Oryon would not exist without Apple Silicon, Arm Cortex-X architectures wouldn’t exist, Lunar Lake and Strix Halo copy Apple’s SoC formula etc.
 
Apple is doing what Steve Jobs intended it to do after he died - surviving in a world of mature technology. Until there are tech breakthroughs that push the boundaries of known physics or open some new frontier, there are no more 'bold' companies. Because there's nothing left to be 'bold' about.

The frontier of technology has been conquered, occupied and paved over with a parking lot.
This is the answer right here

Tech is all a mature market now. You can't compare it to the computer growth of the early 2000s
 
apple silicon has been the most innovative hardware advancement in computing in my lifetime. We've baaaarely started to scratch their potential. 3nm and smaller chips at incredibly low power that will enable full AI in real time in my hands and wearables and enable the transistion to robotics at a sci-fi level.

People who say everything has been done are fools. We're just getting started.
 
I think people really underestimate this - if they even think of it to begin with. I really hope something is done internally to suppress the likes of Gurman.
At the same time there would always be lots of people hungry of every bit of “insider knowledge” “breaking news” from within Apple, a company that has unshakable track record of being extensively secretive. Apple has already done a lot to remove sources of those rumours, including legal action with heavy penalties, but clearly it is not enough to stop the rumour mill.

Besides, if you want rumour-free experience, check out iOS related rumours. Far and few between. Then? It won’t stop lots of people from feeling disappointed after WWDC. What really matters is the quality of the product itself. The time where we could wow at every year has since long gone, the so-called “secret sauce of apple”.
 
Really? Here's a list of products under Tim Cook's watch.

2014 iPad Mini (retina)
2015 Apple Watch (Series 1)
2016 AirPods (1st gen)
2018 HomePod
2020 Apple Silicon Macs (M1)
2022 Mac Studio (M1 Ultra)
2023 Vision Pro – Unveiled June 5, 2023 at WWDC;

Not a comprehensive list but impressive nonetheless.

A non-comprehensive list of mostly hardware by Steve Jobs,
1998 iMac G3
1999 iBook
2001 Mac OS X
iPod/iTunes
2006 MacBook / MacBook Pro
2007 iPhone
Apple TV
2008 MacBook Air
2010 iPad

While Steve Job/s list is more revolutionary, its mostly due to the timing of his tenure at Apple, where technology was changing, both in music, and phones. I'm also in no way taking away his insight, or dedication but lets not say Tim Cook lacks vision
Right but look at how many of Tim's were flops compared to Jobs.

The airpods and watch are legitimately the only things that are exciting. The ipad mini is iterative, while the vision pro is a underwhelming at best, and the homepod is basically despised by 1/2 of the internet due to how bad Siri is.
 
I just wish he would fix Siri. My products, once excellent, are now merely very good. I hate Alexa too, but tend to get better results. For the first time in decades I'm feeling a little deflated about my Apple ecosystem. I want a new style phone, a working voice assistant and the ability to use my products without constantly needing to update, reset, repair and "hope" find my will do what it says it will do when I lose my keys. Just a rant - feel free to ignore. Die hard apple lover that's struggling to keep the spark alive.
 
But really we haven't come that far. If we took ideas from today back to 1999 we could reproduce what we have now without too much effort. The storage would be smaller, the screens worse and the battery life worse, but it wouldn't be a whole lot different.
This is an interesting and provocative take and really got me thinking about the changes I've seen in 30 years of programming. I'll offer up some thoughts, though more in the spirit of discussion than argument.

In addition to what you listed above, networks have gotten so much faster, ubiquitous, and reliable. This has enabled so much. And computational horsepower has incrementally inched up as costs (and power) per unit have trended down. It's wild that I can do what I do on relatively cheap commodity hardware. 25 years ago I had an expensive Sparc 20 (or RS6000 ... this really is memory lane) on my desk and a frame relay drop. Now it's a three year old entry level MBA literally wherever I happen to be. I think we might be blasé about writing and testing SQL stored procs against a million row table while flying 38,000' over the Pacific ... and then pushing the code to Github.

I also think that Apple was pretty forward thinking with the early OSX. The framework approach doesn't seem revolutionary today and there was never (for me anyway) one big moment but little by little frameworks like CoreData came into play and really changed how devs wrote code. Apple did a lot to get the abstractions correct and was able to sell it to developers. Functionality like what CoreData provides used to be developed ad hoc per application. What we have now requires a ton less churn and has provided many folks with the ability to develop and sell excellent apps. This sort of thing is largely invisible but matters a great deal.

Both of these things are a natural progression and were probably inevitable but a point in time snapshot 25 years apart does seem to show that we've made incredible progress. (And that really doesn't take into account how cheap it all is. That sparcstation I mentioned was at minimum a $12k purchase in 1995 dollars.)

All that said, I still use a terminal emulator with the same commands that I typed into the VT100 in my dorm room. (I had two of them -- and a blazingly fast 2400 baud modem -- because they'd overheat and I'd have to switch them out every so often.) And I still sling Erlang, C, and SQL in Emacs; all this has changed remarkably little. Though I do think it's interesting that literally anyone with a laptop can do the same. This really wasn't the case when I started.

I spent some time this year half way around the world and had a couple of experiences with Apple gear that really wowed me. (I'm not claiming these things are Apple only, I don't have experience with Windows or Android.)

First, I was able to take a picture of a Thai word I didn't know, highlight it, and have it translated, instantly and on my phone. It seems commonplace now but consider how many cumulative hours went into making this possible: academic research, programing, hardware development, network infrastructure build out, and so on. There's a reductionist view that says there's nothing particularly groundbreaking here but consider that we actually spent all those hours (and money) and didn't stop when it got hard (or expensive).

The second moment when I was struck by how far we've come was watching a TV show over FaceTime with a friend back in the US. It's not only pretty wild that this is possible but that resources were dedicated to making this possible. To be sure, there was videoconferencing back in the 90s but it was with expensive specialized gear in the hard to book conference room and kind of didn't work very well. Now we can do this from pretty much whatever device is at hand with no incremental cost. And this isn't so that we can work harder or make more money (though that too) it's so we can watch TV with friends 12k miles away. This, to me anyway, is astounding.

I can't help but feel that it takes one type of person to build something (and Jobs was certainly that) and another, like Cook, to iterate over that and maintain a vision, even if this lacks the big paradigm shifting moments.
 
I loved the attention to detail in the Jobs era. Both software and the hardware.

But lately iOS has been crappy. For example, there are dark mode icons in the iCloud settings with light mode icons everywhere else, “one” is spelled out while everything else is a number in storage settings for Music app. All this is 18.5.
Parts of iOS 26 still show up as iOS 19.0. The dev team has been so lazy. At a company like Apple, these should’ve never been possible. And the most frustrating of all is the autocorrect changing words 2-3 words into a sentence. Jobs would’ve gone berserk till that was fixed.

While Cook isn’t bad per se, the attention to detail and the simplicity that everyone came to love and expect from Apple isn’t there anymore. Just building a product half-assed and getting it out there. And with the keynotes being recorded, they’re not even building the product before announcing it out loud.

The first time I used the iPod shuffle and a MacBook Pro (~2007) are the magical experiences I’ll never forget and haven’t seen in a very long time. Cook is more about churning out the revenue while Jobs was directly about Apple as an experience and didn’t give a damn about money.

Recent products have been good especially the M-series chips and the AirPods Pro but the UI mishaps are what frustrates me most about Cook.
 
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People who say everything has been done are fools. We're just getting started.
Correct.

People are constantly saying "this is it ... we've plateaued ... the tech is mature"

It basically is never true.
I'd like a little of that you speak of (a lot of it actually) to go to eliminating the fugly camera boil on the back of the device and making it flush with the housing again. Like with the iPhone 5.

Thanks for restoring my hope!!!!!
 
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there is already a revolution in software happening, and one that will evolve exponentially, while where still stuck with Siri 😅
Does the motivation of the original post boil down to "AI amazing everywhere but Apple, Siri and AI at Apple sucks under Tim Cook"?

I don't necessarily disagree, but I prefer to fully understand any agendas (hidden or otherwise) of starting a thread.
 
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Completely and fully disagree. There’s no such a thing as a perfect product that solves every problem. There’s always room for improvement. Always.
We’d be riding horses and using trains if we thought they’d solved all our problems.
I guess the question becomes:

What problems have you got that you’re keen for someone to invent a new product for?

All of my hobbies, past times and social interactions are enhanced by tech already. I simply can’t imagine needing a new exciting thing to solve a problem I don’t really have.
 
Keynote after keynote, they get less and less exciting. Apple no longer dares.

I started using a Mac back in 1993 — I loved it. But by 1995, everyone was declaring Apple dead.
Back then, Apple was run by financial managers with no vision, no creativity, and no interest in pushing boundaries. They focused solely on revenues — and nearly killed the company before Jobs got back.

But now, I feel Apple is heading down a similar path under Tim Cook. He lacks vision. The only boundaries he seems interested in pushing are how much revenue he can squeeze from a product. The number of products that haven’t significantly evolved in the last decade is astonishing.
Even the successful ones, like the Mac Mini, feel like an update from the 25-year-old G4 Cube. iOS 26? another back to the past.

I remember a bold Apple — the one that killed off legacy ports in favor of USB, that declared “we’re going wireless” long before anyone else. The Apple that looked at MP3 players and thought, “We can do better.” The Apple that dared to take on giants like Nokia and BlackBerry and annihilate them.

Tim Cook lacks the qualities that made Steve Jobs great, and while he compensates for some of Steve’s weaknesses, he doesn’t inspire the same spirit of innovation, quality and focus on user experience and satisfaction. Alone, Tim risks changing Apple’s motto from “Think Different” to “Rethink Nothing.”

Thoughts?
We disagree strongly. IMO Apple and Cook are doing great, and I started with Macs well before 1993.
 
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