The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).
That was always the strategy, the whole apple ecosystem was always obtuse and closed off from compatibility with the rest of the computing world just to maximize rents. If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.
As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support.
Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift.
Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt).
There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.
That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.
That is how Compaq managed to avoid the copyright lawsuit, afterwards there were enough options, besides the failed PS/2 attempt, OS/2, or even forcing a new hardware stack.
This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy.
The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate.
But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients.
Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default.
Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default.
They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess.
Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS.
Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like.
Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
The default the GP is probably referencing is the early days all hardware vendors produced their own OS. Apple maintained the status quo as MS changed the status quo. The innovation MS really developed was the software license for OS's.
Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
It's downvoted because it reads as though IBM made a mistake the commenter thinks they should've never made, as opposed to a mistake from IBMs perspective given their business strategy at the time.
That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.
That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.
It was certainly a mistake to base the original IBM PC hardware design in easily obtained electronics, and hope the BIOS copyright would be enough to hold out clones, unlike previous IBM hardware.
But it's not their mistake at all there is nothing they could do, companies went out there and reversed engineered BIOS. They couldn't possibly stop them.
I'm kind of struck my this because it reminds me of the some contrast between the two platforms during the mid-90s.
While no PC manufacturer controlled their HW stack like Apple did, making Macs more expensive than PCs by almost double, Windows was the only viable OS option as Linux distros had trouble supporting print functionality. Windows was never not hot garbage.
What Mac users got for their money in 1996 was out-of-the-box media production capacity in the form of CD quality (if not DAT on some models) audio and video (though not full-size broadcast quality yet), TTS and -- I _believe_ -- voice rec and of course a superior UX that turned mere users into babbling near-cultish apostles. PCs had superiority in 3D modeling and animation as well as gaming likely helped along by industry adoption (even Steve Jobs' Pixar went PC) but I don't remember any independent PC-based 3D animation folks like I recall independent Mac based visual designers, sound designers/musicians and video producers.
Mac users got their money's worth especially if they were creatives IMHO
If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.
Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.
That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.
I am not even talking about the apple store, i am talking about printers, cables and file systems in the 90s. Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
Apple chose SCSI as its connector of choice in the 90s. It was a standard, it was faster and better than Serial, and PC manufacturers never bothered to offer it.
Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently.
Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that.
Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack.
From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
> Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.
I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better.
There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds.
The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS.
The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products.
And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count.
PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. Even the visit to the WH dinner - it is the company, Apple, via various structures committed to doing those things with various VPs and staff onboard brainstorming and supporting along the way.
So "John" may bring some nuances but let's not be under the illusion that a huge corporation like Apple would suddenly bounce off to a different track.
> I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual.
No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens.
If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour.
As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.
> blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options
Yes, I do agree that extreme forms of capitalism are responsible for ruining practically every aspect of modern tech.
> Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products
Indeed. It wasn't obvious at the time, but with hindsight we can see that the push for privacy was only in areas where Apple wanted to counter Meta/competitors or gain advantage in specific verticals. It was never "user focused".
Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.
What Apple is doing is really just a symptom of a malaise with the economy in general, that in the last 25 years the business model of everything that possibly can be pushed that way has changed to: Rent Seeking.
In the economics textbook sense of the word. You will own nothing and rent forever. You will not have control over your own data or devices. Having that control is a threat to someone's revenue model for getting you to pay for monthly subscriptions to things and services.
Microsoft's new user out of box experience for Windows 11 is also a fine example of this.
Imagine where we would be at right now if the Windows Phone had been a wild success and the Microsoft App Store on the Windows Phone was also a wild success. You think the fees and commissions charged and terms/conditions for app publishers would be much different?
That is not the economics textbook sense of the phrase.
The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."
Running an app store that takes some huge % off the top just for distributing a piece of software would meet this definition:
"Rent-seeking middlemen: These actors insert themselves into a transaction by force, law, or monopoly control. They do not make the trade easier or better. They just demand a toll or fee because they control access."
Monopoly app store enforced on devices by firmware/operating system lockout inserting yourself as the only middleman to distribute things meets the definition.
I think the iconic rent seeking is the distributors of goods and services in Japan. They don’t add value but you cannot buy directly from the mfg. Same could be said of resellers in the US when they have exclusive distribution rights to another company’s products and services.
> For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into millions of people’s pockets.
If the linux community could focus and organize its efforts it could actually offer an alternative that would reapply pressure that the tech industry has been working hard to lift from itself through creeping encirclement and enclosure, i.e., the Enclosure Acts. People sometimes lament things like how the Europeans stole the land of the indigenous tribes in what would become America or throughout he colonialism in Europe, but what is often overlooked is that this process of taking public lands and giving them to private people was done to the indigenous Europeans long before America was even discovered and colonialism was even engaged in, starting in the 12th century in the UK for example.
What the tech companies have been doing to the internet since about the early aughts has been no different, they've been using the same kind of enclosure strategy to limit and parcel out and divide up the internet among the ruling psychopaths.
> by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general
I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.
> I’m not an uncritical Steve Jobs fan. I know, from having worked closely with people who worked directly for Jobs for many years, that he could be a mercurial, and brutish, boss.
That's a pretty big euphemism for Steve Jobs being a piece of shit. What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
I've repeatedly said here on HN that Steve Jobs was king of the assholes and a huge piece of shit, and been soundly flamed for it. A vast amount of first hand anecdotes of him being an asshole exist and are likely not fabrications by the people reporting them. And yet people think he's some sort of god like figure because apple made cool products.
As a counter point some very boring individuals who are not jerks nor capable of forming a cult of personality have invented singularly iconic and widespread products which achieved great market share. One example would be Eugene Stoner and his design for the AR-15/M16.
Yeah but I would not say the products Stone invented are the same kind of, and I quote, “iconic”, as the products that Jobs invented. They’re just in totally different universes.
The AR-15 pattern rifle is certainly iconic; on its own probably more so (i. e. more recognizable) than almost all of Jobs's products. When allowing for the typical collective amnesia, the only two products that match, or manage to exceed, its iconographic status are the iPhone and the iPad; when bringing in historical expertise you can probably add the Apple II.
Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that if you asked people in the US or around the world to pick the most iconic products that they would rank the AR-15 in particular above the top Apple products.
I guess it is possible, but I would be very surprised.
I might even think that the AK-47 or the Glock have more name recognition. But what do I know?
> I might even think that the AK-47 or the Glock have more name recognition.
A "yes" on the AK, and a "no" on the Glock.
The AR-15, incl. its variants, isn't called "America's Rifle" for nothing; it's the West's (tm) (cultural) analogon to the AK. Make the test and ask some "normies" to pick out an AR-15. Then do the same for the Apple products. I doubt many will be able to pick out an Apple II.
I'm just casually familiar with guns, if I saw an AR-15, I'd call it an AK-47. Or a machine gun. Every single human walking the earth has an iPhone or its replicant.
> I'm just casually familiar with guns, if I saw an AR-15, I'd call it an AK-47. Or a machine gun.
Okay. Sure. Just as there are people who call(ed) every video game console, or even home computer, under the sun "a Nintendo". I wouldn't call that casual familiarity... but I'm not here to argue about it.
> It's good to have a fandom.
I s'pose. If you've thought that's me you're sordidly mistaken; I'm not a gun afficionado but just somebody who's got to shoot short- and long-barreled guns to keep my weapon's permits, which I need if I ever have to carry one on the job. I would describe myself as casually familiar with guns, not more.
Stoner is more of a Wozniak. You’re comparing a guy who patented part of a rifle that later got used in another company’s DOD bid (and keep in mind militaries are strongly incentivized to standardize on platforms for basic logistics reasons), to a narcissistic asshole who sold something to a mass consumer market. Just different skillsets.
It's the implication that success excuses it that sucks. The fans don't care how their status symbols came about - only that they have them. The illusion is presented that without him we'd all be using MS-DOS to this day.
He was, objectively, a huge POS. Ask anyone who worked with him. He ruined people for capital gain. He failed to acknowledge his first child. He time and again made people miserable.
That phrase gets bandied about quite casually in my experience. Usually is an ironic light joke about somebody in your peer group on talking to other people or near your peer group.
As such, it's been sort of semantically watered down quite a lot in our popular cult.
He was a huge piece of shit. Yet, when I lived in Silicon Valley, I saw parents scrambing to get a house in the right district so their kid could go to Homestead High and have a shot of "being like Steve Jobs." They want their kids to be deadbeat dads who die in their 50s?
> No one has been remembered for being extra nice alone.
That might depend on how strict "alone" is. (Perhaps by definition, only having a singular exceptional trait makes it challenging to be renown.) For example, might Fred Rogers count? Or Dolly Parton who, though remembered for many things, has kindness as a core part of her legacy.
I think many people are remembered for being kind, but only by those who knew them very well, such as family and friends.
Well, depending on how you define success, I'd say Trump is successful getting elected as POTUS twice. He sure is a brilliant man to be revered, and the people complaining about his allegations are surely losers... (sarcasm to be certain)
I spent 11 years at Apple and attended many meetings with SJ. It was amazing to see how quickly he could understand a problem while, at the same time, being brutally harsh about why it hadn't already been solved. No one but Steve would have been allowed to consistently act that way towards coworkers.
Steve showed a generation of CEOs that being an asshole was a viable strategy.
I grew up in a one-highschool Texas town, a notorious football powerhouse. The brainwashing we received as players was incredible, and we were definitely respected members of our community (e.g. newspaper would interview us; girls; getting away with murder).
The football t-shirts we were given for dailywear said something to the effect of "loved by few, feared by some, respected by ALL" – and I just can't help but feel this message was terrible advice for [our] young impressionable minds.
We probably deserved it, when playing more-modest football programs, when the opposing team changed their objective from scoring points to breaking our ankles (literally).
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All to say, I have several brothers, two of whom are experts in their respective fields (engineering and law), with decades (each) of practice and expertise:
they come off immediately as know-it-all assholes (to most people; to me, occassionally) simply because their levels of expertise come with the sacrifice of social niceties (not always, but often).
[within their circles, however, they are respected as gods]
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But to offer from their perspective (as a stupider brother of these two): most people my two "asshole" brothers deal with actually are quite stupid [relatively]; they are having to deal with us "morons" on an hourly basis [†]
Once you get past the outer asshole wrapper, these are the people that are driving our societies (for better or worse) "forwards" – do not forget this – they are assholes because they care so much about their work/goals [∑]
[†] remember the Carlin joke: think of the average person, and realize that half of people are dumber that that || to true geniuses (which I am not, but two brothers are) we are all "fucking idiots, most of the time" (to paraphrase their amalgamation)
I don't think intelligence entitles anyone to being an arsehole thought it might sometimes be frustrating. Lets say we make AIs that are more intelligent than us in the end - do we want them being arseholes to us just to achieve some new technology or dream that they have? Perhaps we would be just as happy without scalable fonts on our computers or phones that we can doom-scroll on and don't need to be whipped into achieving them?
My hypothetical argument (based on forty years with these two humans) is: the opposite would be worse (for these rare mental powerhouses "to not care," to not produce).
The bigger concern I have in a world of genAI-overlords is that too many competing AIgoalsetters will result in us humancattle becoming "tragedied in the commons," where too many competing goals overwhelm the limits of actual humanity's desire "to care" [i.e. most people do NOT want to work all the time; these two brothers do, as I presume hyperintelligent genAIs will, as well].
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights #Inexhaustable
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I am an identical twin with one of these entities, yet am (probably) among the laziest people I've ever met (not that I can't/don't/&haven't worked), but I prefer to do literally nothing (hobbies, only, in limited dosages).
There are many other options... A reframe that may be more compelling:
Anger and lashing out at events you can't control is a form of stupidity. It is emotional stupidity. You are expending resources and energy for no gain. It's natural and expected, but also something we can improve at.
You are also likely harming your goals by engendering ill-will. Any motivational benefit provided by being tough on those you interactive with can be achieved more directly, without 90% of the "asshole" piece. One can be firm, assertive, and determined without the poor emotional regulation.
I have 2 older brothers and idolised them until more recently. To me it sounds like you feel a bit overshadowed. Personally I would reject that whole thing. I know you're proud of them but you don't have to be proud at your own expense.
There are many engineers in the world and quite a lot of driven people who achieve things and enjoy letting one know it but the world is 8 billion people now and nobody can be Isaac Newton or Einstein or whatever. Nobody is really irreplaceable and one should not try to compete for renown unless one wants to make oneself unhappy. If someone loves you and you have enough to eat and somewhere to sleep and you're not overly worried about tomorrow then you're winning and if one of those things is missing then sort it out but don't go around talking about how you're lazy. ** that s*t.
Yes, this is how I observe my Truth; but also, what I'm trying to share/convey is that these "high functioning" individuals (e.g. two of my brothers) view almost everybody else as lazy (myself included).
While there is truth to this, I'm not trying to belittle myself; I'm trying to share how my own super-duper-intelligent brothers view most-everybody-else in this world... at least 7.8 billion of us.
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Thanks for your perspective. I think my biggest frustration (perhaps this is "normal: you got older"?) is that as they've hyperfocused in their specialties, they don't really have time for (almost) anybody else. I guess that's okay.
The argument here is that "know-it-all assholes" arise spontaneously if you excel in a field and care so much about it, which I kind of agree with. The corollary here seems to be that several people associate being an asshole as meaning you're good at something. However, that's just an excuse for being an asshole, as it's not a necessary condition to excel at something. It's only through our lack of discipline to tame our own minds that leads us to becoming assholes in general and using expertise as an excuse.
Those should not be ideals we strive for; you can excel without sacrificing social niceties and we should strive for intellectual humility. As one gets better in their respective fields (specially in ours that is always changing so fast), one should try to keep its ego in check. There is a saying in my country: "No one is so big that they cannot learn, nor so small that they cannot teach."¹
The problem with "know-it-all assholes" is that most think they are always talking to someone below them and their expertise carry on to all other fields². Their pride may prevent them from admitting from learning from even the most ignorant of beings.
As an exercise, ask your brothers the times that they were wrong (specially if there was anytime that came from someone that surprised them). If they fail to recollect many stories, I fear you're only hearing one part of the story and you'll never know it yourself. Steve Jobs himself used to do that: people would bring ideas to him that he would dismiss. A week later, he would come back with the idea presented as his.
We should strive to be gentle and humble to anyone, despite success in a field: we'll never know who we're talking to and what they can teach us. Perhaps is our misconception that we think that we're average (or above average) that prevents us from learning from other people.
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¹There is a variation, "No one is so ignorant that they have nothing to teach, no one is so wise that they have nothing to learn.", but I kinda like the former because it fits perfectly with the Lord of the Rings.
> Once you get past the outer asshole wrapper, these are the people that are driving our societies (for better or worse) "forwards" – do not forget this – they are assholes because they care so much about their work/goals [∑]
I forgot to address that you mentioned explicitly that assholes are pushing our society forward and they are assholes because they care about their work. Be careful to not conflate expertise and assholeness. As I mentioned in my comment, assholeness is a disguise; it's not a necessary condition to be excellent in your field. It may help one to achieve their own goals sometimes --- which in general revolves around getting more money to the highest bidder and themselves. They care so much about their work that sometimes they have a huge blindspot that prevents them from seeing the tragedy of the commons right in front of them (per Upton Sinclair's law). No, it's not expertise, it's lack of character. They are simply unaligned with what's good for society vs. what would bring them more money. Steve Jobs was an expert in some fields, but he needed Steve Wozniak. Wozniak is a great counterpoint to Jobs expert-assholeness: he was an expert (a programmer's programmer), cared about his work, and for all accounts, was kind and ethical. As an example of just an asshole, there's Martin Shrkeli and several other politicians that fit the bill --- just assholes, not experts, pushing their own goals.
The main element missing from my previous comment (which you responded to) is my failure to convey that my two expert brothers' "assholeishness" stems from having to deal with literal stupider people, all day long. Not just customer service dealing with general public -stupid, but actually 40-IQ-points-LOWER -stupid.
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>As an exercise, ask your brothers the times that they were wrong
I know most of the few skeletons hanging in their closets; somehow all the chaos, on the road went to me (they are both indoor cats, now).
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I'll read over more of your thoughts and update if anything else sticks out to me. From a legal-representation-POV, obviously you want a bigBAD asshole representing you (it's just how the game works).
> What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
Is this a true realization though? Lots of people are very nice, but Jobs got a shit ton done that was truly remarkable.
Survivorship bias. My own experience is that the jerks self-select out because no one wants to work for them.
That said, in the entrepreneurial space it's less clear to me this is true. In a team setting? Sure. But the C-suite of a business isn't necessarily a team sport and a lot of wildly successful CEOs are notoriously pieces of shit including Gates, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, and many others.
So many things that could be said about this. For one -- I truly enjoyed the accidental repetition in the article that marked the effort as likely not aided too much by AI.
But I couldn't help, most of the way through it, to crystalize the respone, "How did we get the idea Tim Cook was chosen because he was likely to be much like Steve Jobs?" Honestly, having watched the Steve Jobs commencement address several times, I kept going back to his declaration that "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
Is this the bit where he talks about Steve Jobs getting onto several states' organ-transplant registries (simultaneously) so he could eventually "cut the line," using trafficked Tennessee bodyparts, to get his replacement liver installed?
What I meant was Jobs paid to buy his way to the front of wait-lines, in states he was non-resident (including Tennessee), for a replacement body part (liver); every Tennessean he eventually $"cut"$ had to wait longer (or die) for their turns to receive transplants.
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Jobs died while I worked for Texas' body farm... his "liver line cutting" was big news; my own institution eventually found itself in an unrelated (and much bigger!) bodyparts trafficking scandal (look up "selling Texas bodyparts scandal" circa 2020) [†].
There's lots of money in used bodyparts.
To be quite literal: the majority of Americans are worth more dead than alive (considering 70%+ live paycheck-to-paycheck)...
[†] I am still donating my own body to the accused institution, UNT – I hope an equally-sick-fuck gets me =P
Steve’s main claim to fame was Apple 2.0 when he brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. He had almost no choice but to take radical bet-the-farm bets as the status quo was the company goes bankrupt.
Tim Cook inherited a company on an upward trajectory and kept it going. His core job was don’t $&@? it up, and at that he was very successful. Was Apple potentially less innovative during his tenure? Yeah probably, but it was stable and grew massively under his oversight, which was the job. Most shareholders that held their stock after Steve left are very happy with their returns since then.
He was correct that changing hand positions had a positive effect and a minor imposition. If they had recalled the phones I wouldn't have sent mine back the iPhone 4 was great and I was a satisfied customer. This was a long time ago and it is probably time to move on.
That article and your memory glosses over the fact that Apple redesigned the antenna to fix the actual problem in later devices - the antenna was changed in the Verizon iPhone 4 (which came out later), as well as the iPhone 4S and all subsequent models.
you can blame Tim Cook for other things - but giving trump that useless statue - you can admire Tim Cook for his shrewdness & political capacity.
he knew he was facing an incompetent petty adversary. so instead of preserving his ego - he damaged his instead of damaging Apple itself. that's a martyr like sacrifice.
has Tim Cook put company profits over the customer - yes. but has Tim Cook preserved apple's value & position yes when it could have been severely damaged by trump, YES.
It was shameful handing over the gold to the orange one.
Hopefully in 2 years every company that 'bended the knee' will excise the leadership that thought it was a good idea. Shows a lack of good judgement and understanding of the social order.
Your integrity as a leader has value. Squandering it to slow down some tariffs is foolish.
As someone who spent half their career at Apple, I can't even begin to tell you how ridiculous that sentiment is. You won't find Apple employees who agree with you. It was infinitely embarrassing to see Tim bend over for a fascist asshole. Apple is now in the "bowed to Trump" group.
I will be glad when the Tim Cook era is over for good.
you think the next CEO will be any different? the board wouldn't have elevated him to that position unless he was willing to kowtow to trump when needed
Sigh... I spent over a decade at Apple. Tim was given a very long leash. So no, I don't think Ternus will give Trump a gold "You're a good boy!" trophy. As I said, that was probably one of the most embarrassing things an Apple employee has ever done. Most of the people I know who are still at Apple despise Tim.
Also, you might want to do a little research on the current board members.
> "just one generation after IBM had sold its mainframe computers to the Nazis, when that company provided the numbers that would be inked onto the wrists of the prisoners held in concentration camps"
IBM was selling mainframe computers before 1945? That's impressive, since ENIAC, the supposed first general purpose computer, was invented in that year
However, there is very good evidence that IBM did sell calculation and bookkeeping hardware to Nazi Germany, and that the Nazis used it to organize the Holocaust:
> most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent.
The author is doing the same. Personal background has minimal impact in these kind of decisions.
Policy is about what happens to other people for politicians (and billionaires).
It made sense for apple to suck up, in order to avoid vindictiveness and extract benefits.
If they get super lucky, the tide turns and they keep going as if nothing happended a couple of trillion dollars richer.
If they are less lucky things get more authoritarian, they keep most of their autonomy extract more benefits, and dear leader keeps their balls in a small box on his desk.
If they get unlucky, the mercurial dear leader decides he is done with them, and their companies get broken up at best, or they fall out of windows down the road.
We have seen the last scenario play out in Russia, and the second one play out in China.
Taking a stand and calling out what's happening might be the decent thing to do, but gets them nothing.
This of course only applies to billionaires running huge companies, everyone else is pretty much better of making a stand.
John Ternus has been CEO of Apple for about six hours (Pacific Time / California time zone). I have optimism. The head of hardware took over. If anyone is a product person, it might be the guy making their hardware shine.
Where Apple has been falling down is software. Vertical integration of hardware and software is their bread and butter, so I have to think he appreciates the software layer in ways that Cook (a business guy) is unable to appreciate. Wow, I really hope so. This could be a nice resurgence of quality coming up. I really hope I'm right.
I mean, a guy with an engineering degree is gonna be in charge. That's not Steve, who didn't earn a degree but had a deep product sense. But it's very different from Tim, who has no computer-nerd inside.
Satya Nadella was an engineer CEO for the first few years at MS before he became completely AI lobotomized requiring literally all of his peons to do his work for him while he makes weird blog posts about a reality that doesn't exist.
If Ternus doesn't fall into that trap, he'll be great.
He had a kind of decent plan to improve things, but when AI popped up he panicked and went crazy. Same thing happened to Zuckerberg, who abandoned his VR crap and dumped into AI at a massive cost.
The AI companies' marketing plan, FOMO, worked--just on themselves and competitors.
Man, people here are delusional. You think the purpose of a CEO, especially in a multi-trillion dollar company, is to be _the_ product guy?
Everyone here is like “Jobs would have done this would have done that”, but the truth is he never lived long enough to turn Apple into the profitable and, mind you, financially resilient giant that it is today. It’s all idolatrous speculation, meanwhile Tim Cook has actually put in the work.
In Jobs's time, 2007-2011 there was still a lot of overall pushback against PRISM, and also from Apple. I remember reading that they reviewed and only ended up complying with 3 requests. It's not nothing, but Google and Microsoft were far more eager to offer up their data.
Crazy to talk about selling out when the real selling out isnt to the American government, but to the Chinese Communist government. Plenty of Aplle photops with actual dictators.
This is a great read. It accurately describes both the personality differences between Cook and Jobs but also the core of moral leadership. "Here is an idea: Apple could, rather than creating golden bribes for child sexual predators, actually send a message to its users explaining that it would like to continue providing value to its customers, and ask those customers for help making that case to their elected officials."
For those who want to criticize Tim Cook / Apple for working with Trump: I suggest reading "Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family". It's an autobiographical account from Miep Gies; centering around her experience hiding the Frank family.
The critical point is that there are points where she and her husband worked with Nazis, and where Otto Frank even justified one of his employees joining the Nazi party.
To paraphrase, (because it's been a few years since I read the book and I don't have time to look up the text,)
After the Franks were arrested, Meip (who hid the Franks) biked to a Nazi base where a sympathetic soldier fed her. (She was starving.) The soldier kept her in a Nazi prison overnight as a "fake prisoner" because she became too sick to bike home.
Otto Frank called one of his Nazi friends a "Good Man" who (paraphrasing) probably joined the Nazi party because he needed to find business opportunities. (Again, to survive)
hot take: tim cook could sell out apple only because google sold out android. it's like everybody is selling each other and their grandmas out these days.
Agreed. Same thing on desktop: Apple is pulling Windows-style stuff like putting ads in the OS and forcibly bundling software (just try deleting News.app on MacOS) only because Windows has meanwhile reached even lower lows.
> Steve Jobs was, amongst many other things, the biological son of an unmarried Syrian immigrant who was in the United States on a student visa, and he grew up to be a person who had a really good sense of when to say “fuck you" to the man.
What an odd statement. Steve Jobs didn't know his biological parents until he was well into adulthood. And if you're going to bring up his biological father, who he wanted little to do with, why ignore his biological mother, Joanne Carole Schieble?
According to the NY Times, "Steve Jobs developed a relationship with his biological mother, Joanne Schieble [Simpson], while firmly declining a relationship with his biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali."
But, don't forget that Jobs frequented his biological father's restaurant and tipped well. His biological father knew Steve as a customer and didn't learn the truth until after Steve's death.
Agreed, there's zero connection to his biological fathers story and how he grew up. The student visa thing is even more bizzare, it's just a bunch of incongruent sentences
Imagine thinking there is an option but to kiss the ring and still be allowed to play or that there are even two sides.
Imaging thinking it even matters what Tim cook or Trump do. Imagine thinking Tim Cook is anything but a stand in book keeper and stock promoter. Imagine thinking Trump is anything but a heel turn pro wrestler. Trump is bunkem for the masses and Tim Cook is irrelevant and a follower.
Steve was a an idea guy. Tim was a seeker of efficiencies and consensus -- boring and common.
I didn't buy one apple product during Tim's tenure but I still have my IIe and several old Macs converted to Linux.
Genius is often regarded as brutish or mean by lesser people. Your feelings on it do not matter.
The writer is juxta Steve’s bastard of a father’s status as a visa overstay to contrast with Trump’s policy vis a vis illegal immigration (which doesn’t differ much in practice from his lauded predecessors policies) yet Steve if he did not loathe his biological father in the least completely ignored his existence as much as he ignored the existence of his own bastard daughter.
Yes Tim is not Steve. We all knew that and know that, so? It’s still the company that most respects its users’ privacy, which isn’t saying much but it respects it more than other companies with foreigners at the helm such as Microsoft and Google. Not that I think they’d be different if run by American born leadership. Bill nor Eric would not be better. It’s the state of affairs in the world today.
2025. He’s right, Tim Cook is a coward and no better than the rest of the oligarchs who kissed the ring and played the game.
But Anil also falls into this trap of believing the myth of Jobs over who he actually was. Steve Jobs was a Silicon Valley capitalist who took parts the hippie counterculture ethos and baked it into an image that sold well to consumers. He was not some revolutionary, he just successfully used the language of revolution to sell a better product than his competitors.
Early Apple hardware was horrible and only for fanboys with a Steve Jobs messiah complex.
Tim Cook ordered the production of decent hardware and pretty impressive ARM processors.
Jobs is the son of an immigrant? So is Kash Patel.
I do find the submissiveness of tech CEOs towards Trump ridiculous, especially since they pretended to be woke under Biden. Now corporate fascism has been unmasked. Better don't forget if a Democrat wins in 2028 and the CEOs are "woke" again. But singling out Cook? Really?
Yes, Steve Jobs was such a fuck you to the establishment. He never had government contracts with NeXT. The article calls him a son of an immigrant five times as if that is a moral virtue for some reason. Dude was a pretty trash human being in reality but people keep seeing him as tech jesus. This article actually suggests Apple ask its customers to vote towards a particular political issue which is a hilarious take given Apple's size. They will not care if a Deamon from hell becomes the president, they will still negotiate and try to continue operations instead of becoming a political activist.
Author is projecting their own political outlook as the only correct one and is again turning Steve Jobs into tech jesus without acknowledging historical facts and realities of thing. Furthmore, Tim Cook deserves a lot of criticism but not having a spine cannot be one of them because his role isnt to rage against the machine.
"The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA: Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple—and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code."
> Furthmore, Tim Cook deserves a lot of criticism but not having a spine cannot be one of them because his role isnt to rage against the machine.
Isn't Cook the guy who literally gave a gold statue to a sitting US president? I probably couldn't come up with a more spineless move even if I tried. Doesn't require a "rage against the machine" mindset to not intentionally go out of your way to participate in open and public corruption of politicians. Or am I remembering the wrong person here?
And honestly, these things should be deeply insulting to anyone with half a neuron. FIFA's Peace Prize, for example; a toddler is capable of seeing through that.
Look, I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but Cook's job, being the CEO, is playing politics. It is literally part of the job. Making sure your company is not going to get legislated out of existence is one of the things you must do as CEO.
I would not want that job. As a matter of fact, as I started up the ladder in the company I was working for I realized that politics (internal and external) are a big part of the job and I was just not suited nor qualified for it, so I quit. But that is what CEO's must do if they want their company to be successful.
No that was indeed Tim Cook (though it was 24 karat gold plaque not a statue).
Whatever his legacy is, that's a thing people are going to remember him for, Bending the knee to a President who should never have been President in the first place.
> a President who should never have been President in the first place.
According to whom? The American people seemed to think he should be president. The thinly veiled contempt for democracy and voters among those who hate Trump is funny considering how much time they spend talking about "defending democracy".
The Bending the Knee was his second term, he was a convicted felon then (which should have ruled him out in a sane system with sane voters, but so should basically just about everything he's done in his adult life).
He's their clown, they just made him the rest of the worlds problem.
Still they elected him, they can deal with the fall out, the rest of us just wish they'd go away and deal with their own shit.
Moreover Steve did not recognize nor ever speak of his bastard father. Similarly to how he hardly recognized his own bastard daughter. Steve only spoke of his adoptive parents.
Apple has not had an SVP of Industrial Design for 7 years, since Jony Ive left. This is why every phone is a copy of the last and there is no real product innovation anywhere
I love boring-that-works but that's just me. Right about brand preception, it made me move to jolla, lots of suffering and a sense of acomplishment because fewer cents of my money going to far right pockets.
Industrial Designer here and I believe Ive became too influential in areas. I believe a boring and consistent form factor is better than new models every year. This is what killed the USA auto-industry. Personally the iPhone 4 was a great form factor and I was glad for the reversion to that design. Minor tweaks and scaling for size is really all that is needed.
they've started to get a big bulge on the top-left of the device and no longer sit flat on a table. Oh and they popularized silicon cases that dont go in or out of pockets.
> big bulge on the top-left of the device and no longer sit flat on a table
Fucking hate this trend so much. My Pixel 8 is an absolute dogshit phone compared to my Pixel 2 for the same reason. Phones are giant now, impossible to use with one hand anymore, and slide off of fucking everything because they don't lie flat, and are uncomfortable to hold with how top-heavy they are too. I wish phone design would have stagnated, about 10 years ago. A phone's form factor did not need innovating! It was already perfect!
Depends what they're used for, if it's for lightweight-demands mobile communications and simple tasks then I'd definitely agree. However the phone has become the personal computer for many and covers a broad range of tasks, let alone before you consider demanding users.
If you've got one device for all your computing then you want something more capable, I think there's more scope for variation is when it's in conjunction with another device, mobile plus your choice of watch/tablet/laptop/desktop/etc. that doesn't necessarily have to be on your person or quickly accessible, task dependent.
For people who use the phone for everything, this is great. But I hope we will start to see at least some smaller options return to the market for those who just want a simple communication device / have small hands.
I recently booted up an old Samsung S10, and the size is just chef's kiss.
That said one could argue that phones are now "solved" and the idea of iterating and changing just for the sake of changing is unwelcome. Much like laptops?
I don't want my next phone to be something I need to figure out all over again. I want the buttons in the same place, the OS to work the same way..
My phone is just another thing in my daily life like my car or my coffee machine. The less I have to think about any of those things - vs. just using them and getting on with my day - the happier I am.
A phone can only get so big, and there's only so many viable shapes and form factors. I don't know what more innovation anybody expects in a rectangular tablet form factor that can still fit into pockets and purposes. Folding phones are expensive and a gimmick so far and have not achieved much market share.
There's advances to be had in cameras, battery life and other tech inside the rectangular slab, but in terms of innovating on the form factor, the practical reality of what people want to hold and put in their pockets will dictate the maximum size and form factor.
Tbh I want my 3GS form factor back. That design was the "right" one imho, and we lost it due to market pressure for bigger screens and better cameras, when what we needed to do was keep the utility but largely stay off our screens.
But they do keep evolving the iPhone and its functionality. You need taste and a great sense of user experience to do it well. Apple also sells more things than juts iPhones.
I never said that. I said I don't want to see change for change's sake.
If you can come up with a better experience and it's a worthwhile change that materially improves the product, I will take it of course.
On the software side iOS introduces new useful features for sure, I don't deny that. They also took a nice simple flat UI and glass-ified it in a really dumb way. And the OS is so bloated that I lose 10-15% of my storage to packages and installation files (seriously go look up how much of your phone's storage is used by "System files").
But on the hardware side these days they're just fiddling with the camera and moving the buttons around, and that's not something I want to have to care about when I upgrade.
This is of course all subjective, I'm sharing my view here, not implying that I speak for the world.
The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).
"Services" was probably the only place where Apple could grow. So Eddy Cue stepped up and delivered.
I think it sucks too.
That was always the strategy, the whole apple ecosystem was always obtuse and closed off from compatibility with the rest of the computing world just to maximize rents. If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.
As a commercial OS, OS X/macOS was quite compatible: FOSS Darwin core, FreeBSD userland, POSIX compiant certified UNIX, built-in Python and Java support.
Apple/OS X also contributed some nice things, by way of funding, hiring main devs, and/or heavily supporting certain FOSS projects: LLVM and Clang, CUPS printer drivers, WebDAV, WebKit, libc++, and Swift.
Also designed some widely used interface standards: FireWire (started by Apple), Thunderbolt (co-designed with Intel driven by Apple) which eventually turned into USB 4, Mini DisplayPort (later incorporated to the official DisplayPort standard, and even the design re-used for Thunderbolt).
There was nothing to "maximize rents" as there were no rents for the most part of OS X's journey until later Cook. They put out good products and people bought them, getting them out of near certain bankruptcy.
> That was always the strategy
Wrong. Steve would have charged you for everything he thought they deserved, but he'd never allow ads in Apple Maps.
["We like our own stickers better."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAOknlfMgI)
That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.
The openness of PC clones was a mistake IBM failed to regain control from, everyone was like Apple.
It wasn't a mistake there was nothing they could do to prevent it.
The clones happened with cleanroom engineering which is legal.
That is how Compaq managed to avoid the copyright lawsuit, afterwards there were enough options, besides the failed PS/2 attempt, OS/2, or even forcing a new hardware stack.
There is a great documentary[1] about Compaq, that includes this bit of their history I believe.
And an okaish tv show where the first season is very loosely based on Compaqs clean room engineering effort. [2]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/
They could have not allowed MS DOS and gone with and OS they contolled.
A mistake for IBM maybe, but a blessing for computing.
If you consider MS-DOS and Windows 3.x a blessing.
Remember the world had DOS before MS bought it and sold it to IBM.
The world hardly cared about QDOS.
In my bubble, the world was about ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga, Atari ST, before PC clones became relevant.
All equally vertically integrated as Apple.
I still prefer vertically integrated OS's. Documentation and troubleshooting is more difficult when spread across vendors.
You talk of vertically integrated contraptions. What are they for?
General purpose computing.
GPC, eh? :)
Careful... overspecialize (overintegrate), and you breed in weakness.
The world hardly cared about DOS. QDOS,cp/m or otherwise.
Indeed, so what blessing?
This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy.
The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate.
But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients.
Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default.
Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
> Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default
That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default.
They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess.
Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS.
Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like.
Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
The default the GP is probably referencing is the early days all hardware vendors produced their own OS. Apple maintained the status quo as MS changed the status quo. The innovation MS really developed was the software license for OS's.
The first reversed engineered version of BIOS was released in 1982 by Columbia Data Products.
https://www.ntari.org/post/how-clean-room-reverse-engineerin...
Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
How should have IBM acted if they wanted to keep their lock-in?
They did try to keep the lock in, with the release of PS/2 and MCA architecture, which many think it relates only to keyboard and mice ports.
However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2
It's downvoted because it reads as though IBM made a mistake the commenter thinks they should've never made, as opposed to a mistake from IBMs perspective given their business strategy at the time.
That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.
That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.
It was certainly a mistake to base the original IBM PC hardware design in easily obtained electronics, and hope the BIOS copyright would be enough to hold out clones, unlike previous IBM hardware.
But it's not their mistake at all there is nothing they could do, companies went out there and reversed engineered BIOS. They couldn't possibly stop them.
And yet Apple succesfully destroyed the grey box clone market in their space. Clearly it was indeed possible:
https://www.wired.com/1997/09/apple-kills-clone-market/
> The openness of PC clones ...
I'm kind of struck my this because it reminds me of the some contrast between the two platforms during the mid-90s.
While no PC manufacturer controlled their HW stack like Apple did, making Macs more expensive than PCs by almost double, Windows was the only viable OS option as Linux distros had trouble supporting print functionality. Windows was never not hot garbage.
What Mac users got for their money in 1996 was out-of-the-box media production capacity in the form of CD quality (if not DAT on some models) audio and video (though not full-size broadcast quality yet), TTS and -- I _believe_ -- voice rec and of course a superior UX that turned mere users into babbling near-cultish apostles. PCs had superiority in 3D modeling and animation as well as gaming likely helped along by industry adoption (even Steve Jobs' Pixar went PC) but I don't remember any independent PC-based 3D animation folks like I recall independent Mac based visual designers, sound designers/musicians and video producers.
Mac users got their money's worth especially if they were creatives IMHO
I remember the predating two decades when the options were broader than two, and the large majority vertically integrated.
> If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.
Basically what Apple News is, they don’t have a web or Android client.
News is hardly the Internet. And everything in News is on the Internet.
There are news+ articles available to Apple subscribers. This is hardly “the internet”. This is analogous to premium memberships on websites.
Nor is it required that an app developer make an app for every platform. Microsoft doesn’t make office for Linux.
Is there anything on Apple News that doesn't also exist as a web page?
If they could, they would ship an apple version of the internet only available to apple devices.
Well Microsoft tried to do the exact same thing with that dreadful Microsoft Network in the early days of the web. So it's not inherit to Apple only, all large corporations would like their users locked up in their ecosystems.
I don't know that it was always the strategy; there's a difference between openness and rent seeking.
Mmmh ... whats the difference to what MS is doing then? :-D
That isn't true. The original Apple Store proposal by Bertrand Serlet is available and it is pretty clearly driven by the need to polish the user experience of installing and managing applications. Being able to charge a significant premium was just a part of the picture and originally considered to be required to pay for the associated infrastructure of reviews and such.
I am not even talking about the apple store, i am talking about printers, cables and file systems in the 90s. Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
Apple chose SCSI as its connector of choice in the 90s. It was a standard, it was faster and better than Serial, and PC manufacturers never bothered to offer it.
Apple chose an internal connector that worked with their CPUs. They couldn't even offer the connection styles on PCs; they worked differently.
Apple built its own mouse and keyboard cabling because they wanted to allow their users to connect their mouse to their keyboard, and to start the computer from the keyboard. No common cable offered them that.
Apple was literally first to the common rigid diskette. That they came up with file systems of their own is a measure of their early investments, and their need to maintain compatibility. They couldn't move to FAT, they had already made their own stack.
From my side of the fence, PC makers were laggards trying to save pennies who couldn't be bothered to invest in better technologies. Apple's success in cornering the majority of profits in the computer sector is a measure of their continued failures.
> Since the beginning of the company everything they made did not work with stuff from other manufacturers on purpose.
But that's often the right route. Sometimes what the others are doing is not enough to deliver a good result. Micro-USB sucked, so they made Lightning. Flash ran slow, so they helped kill it.
I don’t think there’s inherent virtue in zagging just because everyone else zags if zigging is better.
There’s trade-offs, but in most cases the Apple call has tended to err on the side of ease of use and ease of access to the mass market at the expense of flexibility and versatility for tinkerers. It’s good for a market to have companies willing to make different sets of trade-offs to please different segments of the market rather than all herding around the preferences of a cluster of nerds.
The real problem is that the rest of the industry has “Apple envy” and just copies everything they think they can get away with instead of making their own sets of trade-offs.
I think you have this backwards.
For the majority of apples history their products were incredibly niche mostly used by designers because certain admittedly superior software for these professionals only shipped with MacOS.
The ipod and iphone were the first true mass market products.
And even to this day PCs and Android(outside the US) dominate the market share by user count.
PC and android are not for tinkerers and nerd, they are the default, apple positions itself as the premium.
> he sold out his customers
I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual. Even the visit to the WH dinner - it is the company, Apple, via various structures committed to doing those things with various VPs and staff onboard brainstorming and supporting along the way.
So "John" may bring some nuances but let's not be under the illusion that a huge corporation like Apple would suddenly bounce off to a different track.
> I think it's important to remind ourselves that the responsibility doesn't lie with the one individual.
No, the responsibility lies with the culture of growth at all costs. Margins and revenues must continue to increase, whatever else happens.
If you want to blame someone, blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options. That's what incentivises this kind of behaviour.
As an aside, it's amusing to me that Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products.
> blame whoever decided it was a great idea to pay executives in stock/stock options
Yes, I do agree that extreme forms of capitalism are responsible for ruining practically every aspect of modern tech.
> Apple ran so hard on privacy with (apparently) the explicit intention of creating a market for their ad products
Indeed. It wasn't obvious at the time, but with hindsight we can see that the push for privacy was only in areas where Apple wanted to counter Meta/competitors or gain advantage in specific verticals. It was never "user focused".
Absolutely true. Cook is an officer of the company, and has a responsibility to the company itself; and the current incentive structure that Apple operates in dictates a drive towards rents. Change needs to be exogenous, but there is a certain amount of pushback that even a fiduciary can use, and the evidence here is, to me, damning.
What Apple is doing is really just a symptom of a malaise with the economy in general, that in the last 25 years the business model of everything that possibly can be pushed that way has changed to: Rent Seeking.
In the economics textbook sense of the word. You will own nothing and rent forever. You will not have control over your own data or devices. Having that control is a threat to someone's revenue model for getting you to pay for monthly subscriptions to things and services.
Microsoft's new user out of box experience for Windows 11 is also a fine example of this.
Imagine where we would be at right now if the Windows Phone had been a wild success and the Microsoft App Store on the Windows Phone was also a wild success. You think the fees and commissions charged and terms/conditions for app publishers would be much different?
That is not the economics textbook sense of the phrase.
The first sentence from the wikipedia article seems good to me: "R-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth."
Running an app store that takes some huge % off the top just for distributing a piece of software would meet this definition:
"Rent-seeking middlemen: These actors insert themselves into a transaction by force, law, or monopoly control. They do not make the trade easier or better. They just demand a toll or fee because they control access."
Monopoly app store enforced on devices by firmware/operating system lockout inserting yourself as the only middleman to distribute things meets the definition.
google "economics rent seeking app store"
I think the iconic rent seeking is the distributors of goods and services in Japan. They don’t add value but you cannot buy directly from the mfg. Same could be said of resellers in the US when they have exclusive distribution rights to another company’s products and services.
Which ads are in the OS? Are these the Apple TV and similar, or are there even more?
Per the article:
> For example, just recently, Apple deployed its formidable multi-billion-user global cloud infrastructure in service of… promoting the Brad Pitt Formula 1 movie. People were, understandably, a bit disconcerted to see their wallet payment app sending them promotional messages about a film, and Apple undoubtedly screwed up in polluting a functional messaging channel about transactions with a commercial message, but hey — this is a clear sign Apple knows it’s got the power to drop a note directly into millions of people’s pockets.
There are ads in the Apps Store, and in Maps. Also ads for iCloud subscriptions in the settings if you don't use it.
There are also ads in News and Stocks.
Honestly, I even consider the constant reminder to setup Apple Pay as some kind of ad
Steve jobs was even more cut throat, he would have doubled the prices.
Steve Jobs was a business man and CEO of a company.
Judge the man on what he was. And he was those things brilliantly.
Jobs was also a human and a father, and apparently quite shitty at both. Is that not part of who he was?
If the linux community could focus and organize its efforts it could actually offer an alternative that would reapply pressure that the tech industry has been working hard to lift from itself through creeping encirclement and enclosure, i.e., the Enclosure Acts. People sometimes lament things like how the Europeans stole the land of the indigenous tribes in what would become America or throughout he colonialism in Europe, but what is often overlooked is that this process of taking public lands and giving them to private people was done to the indigenous Europeans long before America was even discovered and colonialism was even engaged in, starting in the 12th century in the UK for example.
What the tech companies have been doing to the internet since about the early aughts has been no different, they've been using the same kind of enclosure strategy to limit and parcel out and divide up the internet among the ruling psychopaths.
> If the Linux community could [...]
This starts with a wrong assumption. Like if there was a "Linux community" company driven by a CEO.
> by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general
I wouldn't care about the rents if they weren't in the form of ads being shoved in everywhere. The "2 ads in the first 3 results" of the App Store is a horror show.
The App Store vig with no exit is, if anything, even more distorting.
> I’m not an uncritical Steve Jobs fan. I know, from having worked closely with people who worked directly for Jobs for many years, that he could be a mercurial, and brutish, boss.
That's a pretty big euphemism for Steve Jobs being a piece of shit. What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
I've repeatedly said here on HN that Steve Jobs was king of the assholes and a huge piece of shit, and been soundly flamed for it. A vast amount of first hand anecdotes of him being an asshole exist and are likely not fabrications by the people reporting them. And yet people think he's some sort of god like figure because apple made cool products.
You can be a jerk and be brilliant at the products you create. One can admire the latter while criticize the former.
Jobs revolutionized music and computing.
Agree
If anything he was one of the few hard a-holes that managed to channel that to productive purposes
Being a jerk is easy. Being a jerk that still keeps people motivated it really hard.
Kubrick was known for that as well.
As a counter point some very boring individuals who are not jerks nor capable of forming a cult of personality have invented singularly iconic and widespread products which achieved great market share. One example would be Eugene Stoner and his design for the AR-15/M16.
You’re comparing Eugene Stone to Steve Jobs?
No, I'm saying Eugene Stoner was a singularly boring individual apart from inventing one thing. Sort of an anti steve jobs.
Yeah but I would not say the products Stone invented are the same kind of, and I quote, “iconic”, as the products that Jobs invented. They’re just in totally different universes.
The AR-15 pattern rifle is certainly iconic; on its own probably more so (i. e. more recognizable) than almost all of Jobs's products. When allowing for the typical collective amnesia, the only two products that match, or manage to exceed, its iconographic status are the iPhone and the iPad; when bringing in historical expertise you can probably add the Apple II.
Interesting. I wouldn't have guessed that if you asked people in the US or around the world to pick the most iconic products that they would rank the AR-15 in particular above the top Apple products.
I guess it is possible, but I would be very surprised.
I might even think that the AK-47 or the Glock have more name recognition. But what do I know?
> I might even think that the AK-47 or the Glock have more name recognition.
A "yes" on the AK, and a "no" on the Glock.
The AR-15, incl. its variants, isn't called "America's Rifle" for nothing; it's the West's (tm) (cultural) analogon to the AK. Make the test and ask some "normies" to pick out an AR-15. Then do the same for the Apple products. I doubt many will be able to pick out an Apple II.
I'm just casually familiar with guns, if I saw an AR-15, I'd call it an AK-47. Or a machine gun. Every single human walking the earth has an iPhone or its replicant.
It's good to have a fandom.
> I'm just casually familiar with guns, if I saw an AR-15, I'd call it an AK-47. Or a machine gun.
Okay. Sure. Just as there are people who call(ed) every video game console, or even home computer, under the sun "a Nintendo". I wouldn't call that casual familiarity... but I'm not here to argue about it.
> It's good to have a fandom.
I s'pose. If you've thought that's me you're sordidly mistaken; I'm not a gun afficionado but just somebody who's got to shoot short- and long-barreled guns to keep my weapon's permits, which I need if I ever have to carry one on the job. I would describe myself as casually familiar with guns, not more.
Stoner is more of a Wozniak. You’re comparing a guy who patented part of a rifle that later got used in another company’s DOD bid (and keep in mind militaries are strongly incentivized to standardize on platforms for basic logistics reasons), to a narcissistic asshole who sold something to a mass consumer market. Just different skillsets.
As much as Steve Jobs was an asshole, at least he didn't invent tools whose only purpose is to kill people...
Like, maybe find a better example?
Mikhail Kalashnikov.
Fun fact: Stone and Kalashnikov were friends.
It's the implication that success excuses it that sucks. The fans don't care how their status symbols came about - only that they have them. The illusion is presented that without him we'd all be using MS-DOS to this day.
I don't get your point.
He was, objectively, a huge POS. Ask anyone who worked with him. He ruined people for capital gain. He failed to acknowledge his first child. He time and again made people miserable.
The man, the myth, the legend.
That phrase gets bandied about quite casually in my experience. Usually is an ironic light joke about somebody in your peer group on talking to other people or near your peer group.
As such, it's been sort of semantically watered down quite a lot in our popular cult.
But it's perfect for people like Steve Jobs.
He was a huge piece of shit. Yet, when I lived in Silicon Valley, I saw parents scrambing to get a house in the right district so their kid could go to Homestead High and have a shot of "being like Steve Jobs." They want their kids to be deadbeat dads who die in their 50s?
No one has been remembered for being extra nice alone. I mean, being an asshole is inconsequential if you are brilliant.
Only total losers whine about such silly things in successful people...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers
Never heard about this dude..
Amazing, kind, intelligent individual that was part of tons of kids morning routines growing up.
> No one has been remembered for being extra nice alone.
That might depend on how strict "alone" is. (Perhaps by definition, only having a singular exceptional trait makes it challenging to be renown.) For example, might Fred Rogers count? Or Dolly Parton who, though remembered for many things, has kindness as a core part of her legacy.
I think many people are remembered for being kind, but only by those who knew them very well, such as family and friends.
Yea, you should be already known for some other things. Then being nice could add to it. But just being nice is not going to make you known.
>No one has been remembered for being extra nice alone.
RIP Dolly
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[meme:bobbyHILL@classroom_window.jpeg] "Thanks to Dolly, these kids can read, and they are very upset..."
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Long live the Queen['s Imagination Libraries]!
Steve Jobs will be forever be remembered as an asshole.
Well, depending on how you define success, I'd say Trump is successful getting elected as POTUS twice. He sure is a brilliant man to be revered, and the people complaining about his allegations are surely losers... (sarcasm to be certain)
I spent 11 years at Apple and attended many meetings with SJ. It was amazing to see how quickly he could understand a problem while, at the same time, being brutally harsh about why it hadn't already been solved. No one but Steve would have been allowed to consistently act that way towards coworkers.
Steve showed a generation of CEOs that being an asshole was a viable strategy.
I grew up in a one-highschool Texas town, a notorious football powerhouse. The brainwashing we received as players was incredible, and we were definitely respected members of our community (e.g. newspaper would interview us; girls; getting away with murder).
The football t-shirts we were given for dailywear said something to the effect of "loved by few, feared by some, respected by ALL" – and I just can't help but feel this message was terrible advice for [our] young impressionable minds.
We probably deserved it, when playing more-modest football programs, when the opposing team changed their objective from scoring points to breaking our ankles (literally).
----
All to say, I have several brothers, two of whom are experts in their respective fields (engineering and law), with decades (each) of practice and expertise:
they come off immediately as know-it-all assholes (to most people; to me, occassionally) simply because their levels of expertise come with the sacrifice of social niceties (not always, but often).
[within their circles, however, they are respected as gods]
----
But to offer from their perspective (as a stupider brother of these two): most people my two "asshole" brothers deal with actually are quite stupid [relatively]; they are having to deal with us "morons" on an hourly basis [†]
Once you get past the outer asshole wrapper, these are the people that are driving our societies (for better or worse) "forwards" – do not forget this – they are assholes because they care so much about their work/goals [∑]
[†] remember the Carlin joke: think of the average person, and realize that half of people are dumber that that || to true geniuses (which I am not, but two brothers are) we are all "fucking idiots, most of the time" (to paraphrase their amalgamation)
[∑] e.g: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law> [tl;dr: half the work is performed by the sqrt(#people)]
I don't think intelligence entitles anyone to being an arsehole thought it might sometimes be frustrating. Lets say we make AIs that are more intelligent than us in the end - do we want them being arseholes to us just to achieve some new technology or dream that they have? Perhaps we would be just as happy without scalable fonts on our computers or phones that we can doom-scroll on and don't need to be whipped into achieving them?
>do we want them being arseholes to us
My hypothetical argument (based on forty years with these two humans) is: the opposite would be worse (for these rare mental powerhouses "to not care," to not produce).
The bigger concern I have in a world of genAI-overlords is that too many competing AIgoalsetters will result in us humancattle becoming "tragedied in the commons," where too many competing goals overwhelm the limits of actual humanity's desire "to care" [i.e. most people do NOT want to work all the time; these two brothers do, as I presume hyperintelligent genAIs will, as well].
#They'reMadeOutOfWeights #Inexhaustable
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I am an identical twin with one of these entities, yet am (probably) among the laziest people I've ever met (not that I can't/don't/&haven't worked), but I prefer to do literally nothing (hobbies, only, in limited dosages).
> the opposite would be worse
There are many other options... A reframe that may be more compelling:
Anger and lashing out at events you can't control is a form of stupidity. It is emotional stupidity. You are expending resources and energy for no gain. It's natural and expected, but also something we can improve at.
You are also likely harming your goals by engendering ill-will. Any motivational benefit provided by being tough on those you interactive with can be achieved more directly, without 90% of the "asshole" piece. One can be firm, assertive, and determined without the poor emotional regulation.
I have 2 older brothers and idolised them until more recently. To me it sounds like you feel a bit overshadowed. Personally I would reject that whole thing. I know you're proud of them but you don't have to be proud at your own expense.
There are many engineers in the world and quite a lot of driven people who achieve things and enjoy letting one know it but the world is 8 billion people now and nobody can be Isaac Newton or Einstein or whatever. Nobody is really irreplaceable and one should not try to compete for renown unless one wants to make oneself unhappy. If someone loves you and you have enough to eat and somewhere to sleep and you're not overly worried about tomorrow then you're winning and if one of those things is missing then sort it out but don't go around talking about how you're lazy. ** that s*t.
>don't go around talking about how you're lazy
Yes, this is how I observe my Truth; but also, what I'm trying to share/convey is that these "high functioning" individuals (e.g. two of my brothers) view almost everybody else as lazy (myself included).
While there is truth to this, I'm not trying to belittle myself; I'm trying to share how my own super-duper-intelligent brothers view most-everybody-else in this world... at least 7.8 billion of us.
----
Thanks for your perspective. I think my biggest frustration (perhaps this is "normal: you got older"?) is that as they've hyperfocused in their specialties, they don't really have time for (almost) anybody else. I guess that's okay.
The argument here is that "know-it-all assholes" arise spontaneously if you excel in a field and care so much about it, which I kind of agree with. The corollary here seems to be that several people associate being an asshole as meaning you're good at something. However, that's just an excuse for being an asshole, as it's not a necessary condition to excel at something. It's only through our lack of discipline to tame our own minds that leads us to becoming assholes in general and using expertise as an excuse.
Those should not be ideals we strive for; you can excel without sacrificing social niceties and we should strive for intellectual humility. As one gets better in their respective fields (specially in ours that is always changing so fast), one should try to keep its ego in check. There is a saying in my country: "No one is so big that they cannot learn, nor so small that they cannot teach."¹
The problem with "know-it-all assholes" is that most think they are always talking to someone below them and their expertise carry on to all other fields². Their pride may prevent them from admitting from learning from even the most ignorant of beings.
As an exercise, ask your brothers the times that they were wrong (specially if there was anytime that came from someone that surprised them). If they fail to recollect many stories, I fear you're only hearing one part of the story and you'll never know it yourself. Steve Jobs himself used to do that: people would bring ideas to him that he would dismiss. A week later, he would come back with the idea presented as his.
We should strive to be gentle and humble to anyone, despite success in a field: we'll never know who we're talking to and what they can teach us. Perhaps is our misconception that we think that we're average (or above average) that prevents us from learning from other people.
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¹There is a variation, "No one is so ignorant that they have nothing to teach, no one is so wise that they have nothing to learn.", but I kinda like the former because it fits perfectly with the Lord of the Rings.
²I'm not raising the Dunning-Kruger card here.
> Once you get past the outer asshole wrapper, these are the people that are driving our societies (for better or worse) "forwards" – do not forget this – they are assholes because they care so much about their work/goals [∑]
I forgot to address that you mentioned explicitly that assholes are pushing our society forward and they are assholes because they care about their work. Be careful to not conflate expertise and assholeness. As I mentioned in my comment, assholeness is a disguise; it's not a necessary condition to be excellent in your field. It may help one to achieve their own goals sometimes --- which in general revolves around getting more money to the highest bidder and themselves. They care so much about their work that sometimes they have a huge blindspot that prevents them from seeing the tragedy of the commons right in front of them (per Upton Sinclair's law). No, it's not expertise, it's lack of character. They are simply unaligned with what's good for society vs. what would bring them more money. Steve Jobs was an expert in some fields, but he needed Steve Wozniak. Wozniak is a great counterpoint to Jobs expert-assholeness: he was an expert (a programmer's programmer), cared about his work, and for all accounts, was kind and ethical. As an example of just an asshole, there's Martin Shrkeli and several other politicians that fit the bill --- just assholes, not experts, pushing their own goals.
Thank you for sharing your extensive perspective.
The main element missing from my previous comment (which you responded to) is my failure to convey that my two expert brothers' "assholeishness" stems from having to deal with literal stupider people, all day long. Not just customer service dealing with general public -stupid, but actually 40-IQ-points-LOWER -stupid.
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>As an exercise, ask your brothers the times that they were wrong
I know most of the few skeletons hanging in their closets; somehow all the chaos, on the road went to me (they are both indoor cats, now).
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I'll read over more of your thoughts and update if anything else sticks out to me. From a legal-representation-POV, obviously you want a bigBAD asshole representing you (it's just how the game works).
> What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
Is this a true realization though? Lots of people are very nice, but Jobs got a shit ton done that was truly remarkable.
Survivorship bias. My own experience is that the jerks self-select out because no one wants to work for them.
That said, in the entrepreneurial space it's less clear to me this is true. In a team setting? Sure. But the C-suite of a business isn't necessarily a team sport and a lot of wildly successful CEOs are notoriously pieces of shit including Gates, Bezos, Zuck, Musk, and many others.
> You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.
This sounds so self-gratifying. You could have also written: "I am better than Steve Jobs and I look down on him".
It can also be taken as an attack on the cult of personality surrounding Jobs.
So many things that could be said about this. For one -- I truly enjoyed the accidental repetition in the article that marked the effort as likely not aided too much by AI.
But I couldn't help, most of the way through it, to crystalize the respone, "How did we get the idea Tim Cook was chosen because he was likely to be much like Steve Jobs?" Honestly, having watched the Steve Jobs commencement address several times, I kept going back to his declaration that "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."
Bill Burr has the only reasonable take on Steve Jobs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3s-qZsjK8I
Is this the bit where he talks about Steve Jobs getting onto several states' organ-transplant registries (simultaneously) so he could eventually "cut the line," using trafficked Tennessee bodyparts, to get his replacement liver installed?
source re: "trafficked Tennessee bodyparts"?
What I meant was Jobs paid to buy his way to the front of wait-lines, in states he was non-resident (including Tennessee), for a replacement body part (liver); every Tennessean he eventually $"cut"$ had to wait longer (or die) for their turns to receive transplants.
----
Jobs died while I worked for Texas' body farm... his "liver line cutting" was big news; my own institution eventually found itself in an unrelated (and much bigger!) bodyparts trafficking scandal (look up "selling Texas bodyparts scandal" circa 2020) [†].
There's lots of money in used bodyparts.
To be quite literal: the majority of Americans are worth more dead than alive (considering 70%+ live paycheck-to-paycheck)...
[†] I am still donating my own body to the accused institution, UNT – I hope an equally-sick-fuck gets me =P
Can you please summarize? I can't handle Burr's strident delivery for more than a few seconds.
Totally off topic. I think it's important to point out that this is the first planned CEO transition at Apple. Every other CEO was fired or died.
Jobs resigned six weeks before he died.
My guess if he could stand up he would have continued to go to work.
That's a technicality
2025-09 would be helpful context for the article link
The article is a bit disingenuous.
Steve’s main claim to fame was Apple 2.0 when he brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. He had almost no choice but to take radical bet-the-farm bets as the status quo was the company goes bankrupt.
Tim Cook inherited a company on an upward trajectory and kept it going. His core job was don’t $&@? it up, and at that he was very successful. Was Apple potentially less innovative during his tenure? Yeah probably, but it was stable and grew massively under his oversight, which was the job. Most shareholders that held their stock after Steve left are very happy with their returns since then.
I think I, and maybe even Jobs, would be more interested in whether phoneholders are happy with the phones they’re holding.
Considering he told them they were holding it wrong when they weren't happy with it, I doubt that.
He was correct that changing hand positions had a positive effect and a minor imposition. If they had recalled the phones I wouldn't have sent mine back the iPhone 4 was great and I was a satisfied customer. This was a long time ago and it is probably time to move on.
https://news.macgasm.net/iphone-news/how-apple-fixed-antenna...
That article and your memory glosses over the fact that Apple redesigned the antenna to fix the actual problem in later devices - the antenna was changed in the Verizon iPhone 4 (which came out later), as well as the iPhone 4S and all subsequent models.
No where did I say the phone didn’t need a redesigned antenna. Just that as shipped it did function.
if the design was bad then people weren't holding it wrong.
How semantic do you want to get?
Well that’s a fickle and non-homogeneous bunch. You place too much importance on your own opinion.
> You place too much importance on your own opinion.
No, I don’t. It’s worked brilliantly for me for decades. You should try it sometime - if you have any decent opinions, that is.
2025 Apple is a perfect representation of 2025 America.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45258743
you can blame Tim Cook for other things - but giving trump that useless statue - you can admire Tim Cook for his shrewdness & political capacity.
he knew he was facing an incompetent petty adversary. so instead of preserving his ego - he damaged his instead of damaging Apple itself. that's a martyr like sacrifice.
has Tim Cook put company profits over the customer - yes. but has Tim Cook preserved apple's value & position yes when it could have been severely damaged by trump, YES.
It was shameful handing over the gold to the orange one.
Hopefully in 2 years every company that 'bended the knee' will excise the leadership that thought it was a good idea. Shows a lack of good judgement and understanding of the social order.
Your integrity as a leader has value. Squandering it to slow down some tariffs is foolish.
As someone who spent half their career at Apple, I can't even begin to tell you how ridiculous that sentiment is. You won't find Apple employees who agree with you. It was infinitely embarrassing to see Tim bend over for a fascist asshole. Apple is now in the "bowed to Trump" group.
I will be glad when the Tim Cook era is over for good.
you think the next CEO will be any different? the board wouldn't have elevated him to that position unless he was willing to kowtow to trump when needed
Sigh... I spent over a decade at Apple. Tim was given a very long leash. So no, I don't think Ternus will give Trump a gold "You're a good boy!" trophy. As I said, that was probably one of the most embarrassing things an Apple employee has ever done. Most of the people I know who are still at Apple despise Tim.
Also, you might want to do a little research on the current board members.
> "just one generation after IBM had sold its mainframe computers to the Nazis, when that company provided the numbers that would be inked onto the wrists of the prisoners held in concentration camps"
IBM was selling mainframe computers before 1945? That's impressive, since ENIAC, the supposed first general purpose computer, was invented in that year
They were not, obviously.
However, there is very good evidence that IBM did sell calculation and bookkeeping hardware to Nazi Germany, and that the Nazis used it to organize the Holocaust:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
> most of the things people attribute to him seem like guesses about a guy who was very hard to predict and often inconsistent.
The author is doing the same. Personal background has minimal impact in these kind of decisions.
Policy is about what happens to other people for politicians (and billionaires).
It made sense for apple to suck up, in order to avoid vindictiveness and extract benefits.
If they get super lucky, the tide turns and they keep going as if nothing happended a couple of trillion dollars richer.
If they are less lucky things get more authoritarian, they keep most of their autonomy extract more benefits, and dear leader keeps their balls in a small box on his desk.
If they get unlucky, the mercurial dear leader decides he is done with them, and their companies get broken up at best, or they fall out of windows down the road.
We have seen the last scenario play out in Russia, and the second one play out in China.
Taking a stand and calling out what's happening might be the decent thing to do, but gets them nothing.
This of course only applies to billionaires running huge companies, everyone else is pretty much better of making a stand.
The best way to make a stand for them is to use their money to fund education.
John Ternus has been CEO of Apple for about six hours (Pacific Time / California time zone). I have optimism. The head of hardware took over. If anyone is a product person, it might be the guy making their hardware shine.
Where Apple has been falling down is software. Vertical integration of hardware and software is their bread and butter, so I have to think he appreciates the software layer in ways that Cook (a business guy) is unable to appreciate. Wow, I really hope so. This could be a nice resurgence of quality coming up. I really hope I'm right.
I mean, a guy with an engineering degree is gonna be in charge. That's not Steve, who didn't earn a degree but had a deep product sense. But it's very different from Tim, who has no computer-nerd inside.
Satya Nadella was an engineer CEO for the first few years at MS before he became completely AI lobotomized requiring literally all of his peons to do his work for him while he makes weird blog posts about a reality that doesn't exist.
If Ternus doesn't fall into that trap, he'll be great.
He had a kind of decent plan to improve things, but when AI popped up he panicked and went crazy. Same thing happened to Zuckerberg, who abandoned his VR crap and dumped into AI at a massive cost.
The AI companies' marketing plan, FOMO, worked--just on themselves and competitors.
> requiring literally all of his peons to do his work for him while he makes weird blog posts about a reality that doesn't exist.
And also being a supporting character at podcasts: https://youtu.be/WEnBCfzsgyE?t=95
Man, people here are delusional. You think the purpose of a CEO, especially in a multi-trillion dollar company, is to be _the_ product guy?
Everyone here is like “Jobs would have done this would have done that”, but the truth is he never lived long enough to turn Apple into the profitable and, mind you, financially resilient giant that it is today. It’s all idolatrous speculation, meanwhile Tim Cook has actually put in the work.
Comparing Apple to China, Steve Jobs was Mao Zedong while Tim Cook is like Deng Xiaoping. Lets see if the next CEO will be Apple's Xi Jinping.
Oh yeah Jobs was such an anarchist who stuck it to the man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
In Jobs's time, 2007-2011 there was still a lot of overall pushback against PRISM, and also from Apple. I remember reading that they reviewed and only ended up complying with 3 requests. It's not nothing, but Google and Microsoft were far more eager to offer up their data.
I've seen the other reality and two words: no notch.
he sure does like talking about steve jobs
Crazy to talk about selling out when the real selling out isnt to the American government, but to the Chinese Communist government. Plenty of Aplle photops with actual dictators.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/opinion/apple-tim-cook-ou...
I'm glad the abominable child sexual predators were mentioned. Poor Aisha bint Abi Bakr
This is a great read. It accurately describes both the personality differences between Cook and Jobs but also the core of moral leadership. "Here is an idea: Apple could, rather than creating golden bribes for child sexual predators, actually send a message to its users explaining that it would like to continue providing value to its customers, and ask those customers for help making that case to their elected officials."
> There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"!
Absolutely right.
Generally people who have fu money don't want their fu money to be reduced by a fu amount. There is your answer.
anil sold out stackoverflow
For those who want to criticize Tim Cook / Apple for working with Trump: I suggest reading "Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family". It's an autobiographical account from Miep Gies; centering around her experience hiding the Frank family.
The critical point is that there are points where she and her husband worked with Nazis, and where Otto Frank even justified one of his employees joining the Nazi party.
To paraphrase, (because it's been a few years since I read the book and I don't have time to look up the text,)
After the Franks were arrested, Meip (who hid the Franks) biked to a Nazi base where a sympathetic soldier fed her. (She was starving.) The soldier kept her in a Nazi prison overnight as a "fake prisoner" because she became too sick to bike home.
Otto Frank called one of his Nazi friends a "Good Man" who (paraphrasing) probably joined the Nazi party because he needed to find business opportunities. (Again, to survive)
hot take: tim cook could sell out apple only because google sold out android. it's like everybody is selling each other and their grandmas out these days.
Agreed. Same thing on desktop: Apple is pulling Windows-style stuff like putting ads in the OS and forcibly bundling software (just try deleting News.app on MacOS) only because Windows has meanwhile reached even lower lows.
A worse person does not make another good.
Quote:
> There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"!
> Steve Jobs was, amongst many other things, the biological son of an unmarried Syrian immigrant who was in the United States on a student visa, and he grew up to be a person who had a really good sense of when to say “fuck you" to the man.
What an odd statement. Steve Jobs didn't know his biological parents until he was well into adulthood. And if you're going to bring up his biological father, who he wanted little to do with, why ignore his biological mother, Joanne Carole Schieble?
According to the NY Times, "Steve Jobs developed a relationship with his biological mother, Joanne Schieble [Simpson], while firmly declining a relationship with his biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali."
https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/2...
But, don't forget that Jobs frequented his biological father's restaurant and tipped well. His biological father knew Steve as a customer and didn't learn the truth until after Steve's death.
That story is not quite true: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-jobs-and-biological-fathe...
Agreed, there's zero connection to his biological fathers story and how he grew up. The student visa thing is even more bizzare, it's just a bunch of incongruent sentences
Regardless, he wouldn't be in America without immigration. That's the point.
Neither would I. What’s your point?
Imagine thinking there is an option but to kiss the ring and still be allowed to play or that there are even two sides.
Imaging thinking it even matters what Tim cook or Trump do. Imagine thinking Tim Cook is anything but a stand in book keeper and stock promoter. Imagine thinking Trump is anything but a heel turn pro wrestler. Trump is bunkem for the masses and Tim Cook is irrelevant and a follower.
Steve was a an idea guy. Tim was a seeker of efficiencies and consensus -- boring and common.
I didn't buy one apple product during Tim's tenure but I still have my IIe and several old Macs converted to Linux.
Genius is often regarded as brutish or mean by lesser people. Your feelings on it do not matter.
The writer is juxta Steve’s bastard of a father’s status as a visa overstay to contrast with Trump’s policy vis a vis illegal immigration (which doesn’t differ much in practice from his lauded predecessors policies) yet Steve if he did not loathe his biological father in the least completely ignored his existence as much as he ignored the existence of his own bastard daughter.
Yes Tim is not Steve. We all knew that and know that, so? It’s still the company that most respects its users’ privacy, which isn’t saying much but it respects it more than other companies with foreigners at the helm such as Microsoft and Google. Not that I think they’d be different if run by American born leadership. Bill nor Eric would not be better. It’s the state of affairs in the world today.
Nah.
Cook was simply too weak to resist enshittification. He was just another CEO.
Steve Jobs was a sociopath and an absolutely terrible leader himself, but he was a different kind of terrible.
“Mainframes”
2025. He’s right, Tim Cook is a coward and no better than the rest of the oligarchs who kissed the ring and played the game.
But Anil also falls into this trap of believing the myth of Jobs over who he actually was. Steve Jobs was a Silicon Valley capitalist who took parts the hippie counterculture ethos and baked it into an image that sold well to consumers. He was not some revolutionary, he just successfully used the language of revolution to sell a better product than his competitors.
Early Apple hardware was horrible and only for fanboys with a Steve Jobs messiah complex.
Tim Cook ordered the production of decent hardware and pretty impressive ARM processors.
Jobs is the son of an immigrant? So is Kash Patel.
I do find the submissiveness of tech CEOs towards Trump ridiculous, especially since they pretended to be woke under Biden. Now corporate fascism has been unmasked. Better don't forget if a Democrat wins in 2028 and the CEOs are "woke" again. But singling out Cook? Really?
Yes, Steve Jobs was such a fuck you to the establishment. He never had government contracts with NeXT. The article calls him a son of an immigrant five times as if that is a moral virtue for some reason. Dude was a pretty trash human being in reality but people keep seeing him as tech jesus. This article actually suggests Apple ask its customers to vote towards a particular political issue which is a hilarious take given Apple's size. They will not care if a Deamon from hell becomes the president, they will still negotiate and try to continue operations instead of becoming a political activist.
Author is projecting their own political outlook as the only correct one and is again turning Steve Jobs into tech jesus without acknowledging historical facts and realities of thing. Furthmore, Tim Cook deserves a lot of criticism but not having a spine cannot be one of them because his role isnt to rage against the machine.
> He never had government contracts with NeXT.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/steve-jobs-apple-next-cia-161b65f9
"The Hidden Debt That Apple Owes to the CIA: Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple—and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code."
> Furthmore, Tim Cook deserves a lot of criticism but not having a spine cannot be one of them because his role isnt to rage against the machine.
Isn't Cook the guy who literally gave a gold statue to a sitting US president? I probably couldn't come up with a more spineless move even if I tried. Doesn't require a "rage against the machine" mindset to not intentionally go out of your way to participate in open and public corruption of politicians. Or am I remembering the wrong person here?
Why do you think it is spineless? I thought it is masterfully manipulative.
And honestly, these things should be deeply insulting to anyone with half a neuron. FIFA's Peace Prize, for example; a toddler is capable of seeing through that.
The juxtaposition illustrates the mastery Tim displayed in his manipulation.
Look, I hate Trump as much as the next guy, but Cook's job, being the CEO, is playing politics. It is literally part of the job. Making sure your company is not going to get legislated out of existence is one of the things you must do as CEO.
I would not want that job. As a matter of fact, as I started up the ladder in the company I was working for I realized that politics (internal and external) are a big part of the job and I was just not suited nor qualified for it, so I quit. But that is what CEO's must do if they want their company to be successful.
Bowing to the king** is not a CEO's duty.
> Or am I remembering the wrong person here?
No that was indeed Tim Cook (though it was 24 karat gold plaque not a statue).
Whatever his legacy is, that's a thing people are going to remember him for, Bending the knee to a President who should never have been President in the first place.
> a President who should never have been President in the first place.
According to whom? The American people seemed to think he should be president. The thinly veiled contempt for democracy and voters among those who hate Trump is funny considering how much time they spend talking about "defending democracy".
The Bending the Knee was his second term, he was a convicted felon then (which should have ruled him out in a sane system with sane voters, but so should basically just about everything he's done in his adult life).
He's their clown, they just made him the rest of the worlds problem.
Still they elected him, they can deal with the fall out, the rest of us just wish they'd go away and deal with their own shit.
Moreover Steve did not recognize nor ever speak of his bastard father. Similarly to how he hardly recognized his own bastard daughter. Steve only spoke of his adoptive parents.
Apple has not had an SVP of Industrial Design for 7 years, since Jony Ive left. This is why every phone is a copy of the last and there is no real product innovation anywhere
Crocodiles haven't changed much in 200 million years. Maybe it's possible that a form factor is largely correct for its use case after a while?
I'm inclined to see Apple Silicon as fairly innovative.
"yo we heard you like camera bumps so we put camera bumps on your camera bumps so you can camera bump while you camera bump"
I wouldn't say they're an exact copy...
> Maybe it's possible that a form factor is largely correct for its use case after a while?
very much so -- same for UI components, which they keep changing for no good reason except to feel "fresh and new"
"delightful"
Fresh and new is a feature. And it is one that affect purchase decisions and brand perception.
I love boring-that-works but that's just me. Right about brand preception, it made me move to jolla, lots of suffering and a sense of acomplishment because fewer cents of my money going to far right pockets.
> it made me move to jolla
Where's Jolla? I did a quick place search (explicitly excluding La Jolla) but nothing turns up.
Industrial Designer here and I believe Ive became too influential in areas. I believe a boring and consistent form factor is better than new models every year. This is what killed the USA auto-industry. Personally the iPhone 4 was a great form factor and I was glad for the reversion to that design. Minor tweaks and scaling for size is really all that is needed.
Yes they haven't shipped keyboards that break after a while for being too thin
Ive has been working at other stuff, like building a Ferrari that looks more like a giant RC car
they've started to get a big bulge on the top-left of the device and no longer sit flat on a table. Oh and they popularized silicon cases that dont go in or out of pockets.
> big bulge on the top-left of the device and no longer sit flat on a table
Fucking hate this trend so much. My Pixel 8 is an absolute dogshit phone compared to my Pixel 2 for the same reason. Phones are giant now, impossible to use with one hand anymore, and slide off of fucking everything because they don't lie flat, and are uncomfortable to hold with how top-heavy they are too. I wish phone design would have stagnated, about 10 years ago. A phone's form factor did not need innovating! It was already perfect!
I don't get the markets obsession with big phones. May be size is a proxy for battery life...
Depends what they're used for, if it's for lightweight-demands mobile communications and simple tasks then I'd definitely agree. However the phone has become the personal computer for many and covers a broad range of tasks, let alone before you consider demanding users.
If you've got one device for all your computing then you want something more capable, I think there's more scope for variation is when it's in conjunction with another device, mobile plus your choice of watch/tablet/laptop/desktop/etc. that doesn't necessarily have to be on your person or quickly accessible, task dependent.
For people who use the phone for everything, this is great. But I hope we will start to see at least some smaller options return to the market for those who just want a simple communication device / have small hands.
I recently booted up an old Samsung S10, and the size is just chef's kiss.
That said one could argue that phones are now "solved" and the idea of iterating and changing just for the sake of changing is unwelcome. Much like laptops?
I don't want my next phone to be something I need to figure out all over again. I want the buttons in the same place, the OS to work the same way..
My phone is just another thing in my daily life like my car or my coffee machine. The less I have to think about any of those things - vs. just using them and getting on with my day - the happier I am.
A phone can only get so big, and there's only so many viable shapes and form factors. I don't know what more innovation anybody expects in a rectangular tablet form factor that can still fit into pockets and purposes. Folding phones are expensive and a gimmick so far and have not achieved much market share.
There's advances to be had in cameras, battery life and other tech inside the rectangular slab, but in terms of innovating on the form factor, the practical reality of what people want to hold and put in their pockets will dictate the maximum size and form factor.
Tbh I want my 3GS form factor back. That design was the "right" one imho, and we lost it due to market pressure for bigger screens and better cameras, when what we needed to do was keep the utility but largely stay off our screens.
But they do keep evolving the iPhone and its functionality. You need taste and a great sense of user experience to do it well. Apple also sells more things than juts iPhones.
you can’t think of a single thing that could be better about the hardware and software experience of phones?
not one?
I never said that. I said I don't want to see change for change's sake.
If you can come up with a better experience and it's a worthwhile change that materially improves the product, I will take it of course.
On the software side iOS introduces new useful features for sure, I don't deny that. They also took a nice simple flat UI and glass-ified it in a really dumb way. And the OS is so bloated that I lose 10-15% of my storage to packages and installation files (seriously go look up how much of your phone's storage is used by "System files").
But on the hardware side these days they're just fiddling with the camera and moving the buttons around, and that's not something I want to have to care about when I upgrade.
This is of course all subjective, I'm sharing my view here, not implying that I speak for the world.