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From “think different “ to “Rethink nothing!”. It’s time for Tim to go!
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Not really.
I have zero interest in yet another repeat of this tired argument, from people who do not have any innovative suggestions on what Apple should be doing instead. At best, what we usually get is a list of products from competitors.
The most innovative product Apple has brought recently is Vision OS. Unfortunately no one cares. I fail to see how Apple is improving my user experience by coming out with “innovative” products that I have no use for.
As long as Apple brings out products that provide me with a good user experience doing things that matter to me, I am a happy customer.
This being said, the thing that should put a spotlight on the CEO is specific things like the failure to keep up with AI, and the political debacles. Those are CEO-killing problems, not churning out great but boring products.
The vision became cluttered by all the "amazing features". Can't see the forest for the trees, you know?
Actually, I'm grateful Apple under Tim Cook leadership delayed changing the designs as long as they could. Thanks to them I got classic refined design Macbook Pro with M1 processor instead of notched stuff they released next year. Thanks to them not touching great designs of Steve's era (which lasted after Steve's passing due to inertia) - Apple iMac survived until 2020 only to be butchered and transformed into iMac they sell today. So, yeah, if you can't improve it - don't touch it. Sadly, they did eventually touch it.
P.S: I hope, the latest release of "Aqua 2.0" OS hints at Apple trying to go back to it's roots.
Actually, I'm grateful Apple under Tim Cook leadership delayed changing the designs as long as they could. Thanks to them I got classic refined design Macbook Pro with M1 processor instead of notched stuff they released next year. Thanks to them not touching great designs of Steve's era (which lasted after Steve's passing due to inertia) - Apple iMac survived until 2020 only to be butchered and transformed into iMac they sell today. So, yeah, if you can't improve it - don't touch it. Sadly, they did eventually touch it.
P.S: I hope, the latest release of "Aqua 2.0" OS hints at Apple trying to go back to it's roots.
My thought exactly - regarding Aqua 2.0. Although I don't think it's Apple trying to go back to its roots. This is merely change for the sake of change. It will yet again irritate people who are not power users and have to re-learn how to use their device.
This is my thoughts exactly. Unfortunately I am due for a phone replacement and I'm a bit anxious of the supposed redesign for the next iPhone 17, which will likely follow a "design by committee" approach
Of course you are forced to upgrade! If you don’t then you won’t receive security fixes anymore. Needless to say that going out naked is quite risky..
Totally agree. Great tech is the tech you don't even notice is there, it just work and make your life easier.
Faster, thinner, lighter is good, but that's just tech evolving naturally. The formula: "add a new camera lens, increase screen size, make it thinner" doesn't work forever.
What about enhancing the user experience? Truth is we haven't changed the way we interact with our tech for decades, and Vision Pro, was a huge jump, but too far (or on the wrong direction depending on the view).
We live on a capitalist society, as long as the shares keep rising, where all happy. Forget the dreamers, forget the innovators, forget does how dare.
I’m always amused at this crazy idea some people have that Steve Jobs sat in his chair all day and came up with all the product ideas and the product roadmap and that now Tim Cook is the one who does this. That’s not what CEOs do. Not even the most product-focused ones.
The iPhone is the perfect example. Lots of people cite it as some Jobs innovation. It was not. Was he a huge internal proponent? Yeah. Were his standards and input on design important to its success? Probably. But let’s not exaggerate reality by suggesting that the anecdotes we hear about Jobs’ heavy involvement somehow meant he was playing CPO like some full time evil genius.
If you think otherwise, you’ve been watching too much Pirates of Silicon Valley and are ignoring the fact that there were hundreds of people even in the mid 2000s working on product at Apple.
The iPhone is the perfect example. Lots of people cite it as some Jobs innovation. It was not. Was he a huge internal proponent? Yeah. Were his standards and input on design important to its success? Probably. But let’s not exaggerate reality by suggesting that the anecdotes we hear about Jobs’ heavy involvement somehow meant he was playing CPO like some full time evil genius.
If you think otherwise, you’ve been watching too much Pirates of Silicon Valley and are ignoring the fact that there were hundreds of people even in the mid 2000s working on product at Apple.
Yeah, it shocked me too, but the iPod CPU was a Samsung something or other, with was then used in the iPhone 1. It wasn't until the A4 CPU (iPhone 4 maybe?) that Apple finally started designing their own CPUs, and even then it was still just design changes based off of the Samsung CPU.
Granted, of course, there's far more than goes into an M4 Pro or M4 Max than an iPod, but I don't think you should include incremental improvements in this sort of discussion.
Honestly, far more important than Apple Silicon is the fact that Apple took macOS from PPC to Intel, and to ARM, and there were no hiccups in the app ecosystem. That is something that Tim Cook should get praised for, especially when you compare it to how botched Microsoft's Windows on ARM transition has been.
But no, I don't see the Apple Silicon processors as being something done under Tim, that's a progression that started under Jobs.
It is important to note that Steve Jobs came back when the modern day internet was in its infancy. I used Apple products since 00's and I remember how year after year, companies would announce things that were thought to be literally impossible to achieve. Nowadays, computational technology reached its adulthood. Performance-wise, we now live in a world where you wear pretty much the first-generation Mac Pro on your wrist. We peaked and there's no more room to climb when it comes to current form factors.
The boldest thing Apple could do in 2020's, is to break the annual hardware refresh cycle, because the differences are becoming very subtle. If you bought the iPhone 3G, you had plenty reasons to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS. Now you have little to no reason to switch from an iPhone 14 Pro to anything newer except the USB-C. In the case of Apple Watch, Series 6 is not only still supported, but offers the same chip as its two successors, so that will probably help extend their support significantly.
"They get less and less exciting". As someone who wrote well over 10,000 articles about Apple for the past 12-ish years, I find it next to impossible to write news anymore. I was there when Ming-Chi Kuo wrote his first notes and he was thought to be very questionable. I was there when no-one believed Apple would not only release a 4.7-inch phone, but also a 5.5-inch one alongside it. I was there when Bluetooth earphones were so awful we thought AirPods would be as bad. I still use my 1st generation ones.
We had reasons to be excited because Apple managed to keep its secrecy and sometime even intentionally tricked some suspects to release fake rumors. In 2025, we're in a state where you get your daily vomit of repeated rumors by either Jeff Pu, Mark Gurman or Ming-Chi Kuo. I intentionally used that word, because these three guys not only release news so often you'll lose all the excitement, but you actually lose yourself in what's now being said by whom. And you get the same message by all three of them during a single week.
I wouldn't want to be a child of neither Pu, Gurman or Kuo, because they would spill out details on every gift I'll receive in the lifetime.
I don't think lack of innovation is an Apple only issue. I have the feeling that we are reaching the peak of technology in in devices that are there for a while like smartphones, tablets and laptops
Steve was always hated. When he died there were people talking about "relieving" themselves on his grave amongst other vile things.
This both a technically inaccurate and exceedingly cynical take on the extraordinary innovation that the M1 represented.
Calling the M1 a derivative of the iPod CPU is completely wrong both technically and historically.
Characterizing the Apple Silicon chips as "based off the ARM chip" show a misunderstanding of what Apple Silicon actually is. Apple Silicon is not "based on" or "based off" any ARM chip. Apple Silicon is Apple's custom SoC design based on the ARM Instruction Set -- not any off-the-shelf ARM chip design.
Further, Apple’s in-house chip design started with the A4 chip in 2010, which powered the original iPad and iPhone 4, and later appeared in the iPod Touch. So the insinuation that M series chips are somehow derived from a "tweaked iPod CPU" is just fake news.
Also, as someone who went from a very capable 2019, 32GB, 1TB, 2.4GHz 8-core Intel Core i9 Intel MacBook Pro to a seemingly, lesser-specced 16GB, M1 Mac mini with external Dell 4K display, the difference in performance and UX was night and day. The mini was faster, cooler and quiter -- not incrementally but decisively.
The motivation for making the change was COVID. Working from home all day with an attached 4K monitor caused the the Intel MacBook Pro to choke. It throttled constantly, filled my home office with distracting fan noise and severely constrained my productivity.
That little M1 Mac mini -- despite being connected to a display that was inferior to the excellent MBPro Retina display -- not only exceeded the performance of the Intel MBP and eliminated the productivity hit, the whisper quiet operation unexpectedly reduced stress and made working from home a joy. The performance and quiet operation made all the difference and I never thought about the fact that I was using a sub-par external display.
For me the overall UX improvement was 10X all things considered -- so I'm perplexed to see comments like the above marginalizing Apple's achievement with M1, which is almost univerally accepted and being copied by competitors.
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Thank you!
It’s honestly shocking that we have people downplaying Apple Silicon here.
I urge those people to learn a little about the history of CPU/GPUs, the competitive landscape, the challenges faced when competing in this area etc. It’s necessary to truly appreciate the scale of what Apple’s silicon team has achieved.
Designing a competitive CPU micro architecture alone (just focusing on CPU, not a full SoC) is a monumental task and most fail. Nvidia’s multiple attempts at in-house designs were not competitive, neither were Samsung’s, or Qualcomm’s (the earlier attempts at least!). We’ve seen Arm server startups with in-house designs come and go (Cavium, Calxeda, Applied Micro etc.) but they all struggled and failed. Some of these failed products were good by some metrics, some of them had world-class teams behind them, some had enormous funding… but they still failed. We’ve also seen how quickly a company can go from great success to fighting for survival (e.g. AMD with Bulldozer).
Point is, competing in this area is really freakin hard! The chances of success are slim, no amount of money can buy success. It requires long-term commitment, reliable execution, a great team… and luck.
With that in mind, I urge the doubters to really consider what Apple has done since the A4. Apple has been reliably cranking out competitive (mostly industry-leading!) silicon for about 15 years without any significant missteps. To execute so reliably over such a long period of time is practically unheard of.
They went from a chip like the A6 (a promising in-house CPU micro architecture complimented with 3rd party IP, e.g. PowerVR GPU) to a beast like the M4 Max (world’s fastest CPU micro architecture, the fastest SoC graphics on the market, in-house NPU, ISP, media encoders/decoders, NAND controllers, display engines, security processors etc.) in just 13 years! That’s absolutely nuts.
OH, and now they’re competing in modems 🤯
Apple’s silicon team deserves a whooooole lot of praise. It’s the key factor that makes Apple’s whole stack of hardware (iPhone, iPad, Mac, TV, Vision, Watch, AirPods etc.) so great.
Apple’s leadership deserves praise, too - betting on in-house silicon was very risky and no other tech company (like Microsoft or Google) would’ve dreamed of doing it. There’s nothing more “think different” than taking on a challenge like this.
Just because Apple Silicon doesn’t come with a Jobs era RDF hype-train induced dopamine hit doesn’t mean it isn’t significant ☺️
One of the key markers of innovation is failure. Few people seem to acknowledge that innovation is risky and frequently ends badly. We only think of innovation as safe and glorious because of survivorship bias. You don't hear about or remember all the countless also-rans (that are sometimes superior to the ultimate winner).
I'm pretty sure I'm muted by a good chunk of this site for pointing out that the willingness to try a totally different switch stabilizer in the butterfly keyboards is actually a sign of a company that hasn't lost a desire to break established molds (innovate).
Many innovations will be bad ideas and will remain so, but some will be bad ideas until they aren't. The irony of hearing people cheer innovation in this lopsided way is that nobody likes change, but everyone wants to reap its benefits.
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Thank you! 🙏🏽 If this post doesn't cause some of the Apple Silicon / M1 naysayers to pause and reconsider, I think it's clear that the opposition is not based on a reasonable interpretation of facts.
You get iOS and security updates for 5 years post initial release, and in practice, for a number of years after!
You want to be unhappy with Apple, you want to find a scapegoat. You would be unhappy with Apple and would find a scapegoat no matter what the situation. Just like your predecessors did during the "glory days" of Steve Jobs.
“Saboteur” is right. This is just nihilistic drivel to be honest. Also very badly written … “another back to past” - what kind of England is that?
Sigh.
Well, you have made a number of statements but how do you back those up. We need to see the evidence - otherwise you have just shared an opinion.
Apple has indeed grown a lot since the passing of Steve Jobs. The company is still a good investment. I think you make a good point with regards to the ‚era‘.
I suggest that the underlying issue might be consumerism rather than nihilism. I think there's a contingent that gets a kick out of buying new toys and, let's be honest, it's easy to skip a few generations of new products. The advances between (for instance) the M1 and M4 chips are pretty negligible for most people in most circumstances. The periodic releases are necessary to keep the market in general happy but have the effect of disappointing the individual consumer.
Although given the state of the world, I'm not ruling nihilism out.
To the other responses to the OP’s comments: Bravo! Excellently stated on many fronts. However, this particular sentiment, regarding too many rumors, really strikes at the heart of why there are no surprises. I follow rumors as much as any, but I’m always, always, always disappointed when I see a big reveal before the big reveal. I seek out rumors for the speculation over threads of clues, NOT insider information. These are shameful.