Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

sgt

> Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again. > iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.

montgomery_r

I think the criticisms of the current software stack are well founded. There is friction there, stuff doesnt work that should. OP even neglected to mention the glaring Finder column view bugs or the Taboe corner radius window selection issues. But as a user since System 6.x, including A/UX and MacOS X since public beta - it was ever thus. Macintosh pre OSX was well known as an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. After OSX, Snow Leopard was needed to clear cruft. The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!

algoth1

Will we finally have a native way to ‘select all’ text in iPadOs?

danabramov

"But here's the thing" Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.

boxed

Parental controls are just absolutely broken. I hope Ternus has some kids and is upset about this too. Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids. Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.

amelius

Can we have someone like Woz at the helm please?

eddieroger

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Cook that was grow the company. I'd love to see the critics do better.

vlovich123

Oof. This article gets so much wrong… > The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company. > Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO. Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA. > Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix. Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft. > and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better. Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases). > But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top. Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware. Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.

buttocks

This author misses the point because he is a geek. Ordinary users love Apple and do not care about these issues. Ordinary users throw money at Apple. Apple has some bugs to fix but overall the product is good, and that’s why they keep raking in cash. Saying good riddance to Tim Cook because of the system preference pane, among other trivial things (to most people), is simply misunderstanding business.

kgwxd

It doesn't matter who's sitting in the chair, no one is reversing our decent toward the bottom of the barrel in tech, any time soon.

Brendinooo

Honest question, from someone who doesn't own AirPods because I'm cheap: Is there a product in either of AirPods' categories that is generally recognized as either outright superior or a better value? Because both regular and Pro seem like amazing products, and reviews tend to classify them as such. And it's entirely a Cook-led project. Like, if I were to pick one product to prove that Cook cared about product and Apple could still do cool things, that's probably on the top of the list. Calling out one flaw and making that emblematic of his entire tenure feels extremely shortsighted.

tsunamifury

Tim was able to scale jobs and ives legacy for a decade exceptionally well, in large part with the help of Foxconn. And he did a great job of in housing major parts of the stack to reduce dependency. Once that had run out, he ran out and VR plus intelligence were there worst failures the company has ever seen. Completely inept ideas, one that very publicly failed to launch to a hugely damaging degree. Cook was great at growing others legacy, and completely inept at making his own.

anonthrownaway

Amazing HW. SW that is stunningly bad. My example that makes me want to divest myself from my all-in on Apple's ecosystem: Native save as dialog box with a filename text box that shows (at most) 32 characters on the screen at once. Even with the smallest dialog box width possible, there is room to make the filename more than 64 characters. Resizing the box does nothing. They can't be eating their own dogfood here right? Are they all using Linux? How do they sell this crap to the business segment?? This isn't even a bug - it is just terrible SW UI/UX design. I love my Macbook HW (except for the stupid sharp edge) and the only thing that keeps me from ditching it is that for most documents I work on, I am in LibreOffice, which lets me disable the native save as dialog box and use the works as expected LibreOffice one. To the article, I wonder if a HW person will have the mindset required to fix the glaring holes in their SW. Make the whole damn company eat their own dogfood!

saberience

Reads like AI slop, no genuine insight, bland, clearly someone who has very little insight into Apple or Tim Cook. The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did... Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company. He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...

kibwen

Let's stop beating around the bush. Companies don't produce better products unless incentives are aligned to force them to produce better products. Are incentives aligned in a way to cause Apple to produce better software? If not, then it absolutely does not matter who the CEO is. IREAM.

AnonC

I can’t help but agree on the points made in this post. I don’t want the pain of Windows (or another non-Apple OS), but Apple isn’t making it easy to recommend its software on the quality front. If John Ternus puts more focus on what Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue aren’t doing , there is a chance for Apple to make its software better. As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.

sschueller

Tim cook did his job well. He increase stock value over and over again for the delight of the shareholders. He also increased the moat as large as possible. If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company. Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.

jmyeet

I will say that UI designers left to their own devices will tend to make change for the sake of change. And it's annoying. Safari on iOS is a prime example of this. I used to be able to switch from tabs to private browsing. Now I have to go through a tab groups abstraction that I didn't ask for, can't turn off and don't want. Want to open a new tab? Well, that too has gotten annoying. You have to tap near the bottom to bring up the address bar and then you can bring up the tabs screens (that used to be more accessible) or click on the new 3 dot menu on the bottom right. Who asked for this? I prefer my address at the top. It's like desktop. That's another unwelcome change. This change also infected Settings where the search is hovering near the bottom now for some reason. This seems to be part of some wider UI fad because Google Finance now does this too. Just. Stop. Oh I used to just tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top in Safari too. Now I accidentally hit the notch and go to some other unrealted app now. So thanks for that, Apple. I abhor Face ID. So many false negatives. so unreliable. So many more times I have to put my passcode in. Just give me Touch ID. Put it on the home button (like the iPad Air) or do what Samsung did a decade ago and put a sensor on the back. That works really well. Oh the Apple Watch isn't immune to annoying and pointless UI changes too. Even selecting an activity like Outdoor Walk now has a really weird scroll behavior where the "play" button doesn't come up until you stop scrolling. Why? WHY? The old interface was fine. Leadership is keeping these kinds of things in check. Otherwise people make changes to get promoted,, basically. Or it's just ego to reinvent something in their image. Steve Jobs kept Johnny Ive in check. Tim Cook allowed the 12" macbook to happen. As well as the Touch Bar and the butterly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness). But at least those got corrected. And of course Siri is still terrible and almost seems like abandonware at this point.

blueTiger33

Tim Cook was the guy Steve choosed. Don't know him personally, but he is leaving a great company behind. The new CEO has a lot to prove. Design wise, have heard he has made some mistakes but Apple ability to improve, will not fall behind. Hope he is a fighter, a pirate ;)