Apple vs the Law

I dream of an alternate reality where Steve Jobs makes snide remarks about politics, sets things right with the App Store (worldwide), Siri, Ai and the lackluster UI and quality control of software lately. Steve would get on top of things and speak his mind and we were all better off for it.

There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.

Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.

your dream sound cool, would love to see it play out in some form!

Sane computer design, in what way?

I still see unopenable devices, batteries glued to death and even more closed systems. Next they reverted to liquid glass UI, is that sane?

I admire Steve Jobs as a visionary as much as everyone else, but I never thought it was fair for people to keep discounting Tim Cook as the “lesser” man between the two. He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation. He took on the operations and supply chain work that no computer nerd or product visionary ever wants to take. He did the hard, unsexy work that no one wanted to do and yet people see him as worse for it.

the keyboards on the laptops don't break in masses for one.

I have no idea, as the two dumbest Macs, the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh and the "Trashcan" Mac, were before and after Jobs, respectively.

> He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation.

Are you comparing Cook to Jobs as an Apple investor or as an Apple customer? As an Apple customer, not an investor, I don't care at all about the company's stock market valuation.

Investors seem to love Tim Cook. Warren Buffett recently said that Tim Cook made more money for Berkshire Hathaway than Buffett himself did. But as an Apple customer, I don't give a crap about Buffett or Berkshire either.

The difference between Cook and Jobs is that Cook is a money person and not a product person. According to his biographer, Jobs lamented that Cook was not a product person. And IMO the products have suffered under Cook: not in terms of profit, but in terms of design and functionality, the things a discerning customer cares about.

I think what's special about Jobs was that, ironically, he had no special training. Of course he was smart, ambitious, and charismatic, but he wasn't an engineer (before Apple, Jobs outsourced some of his work to Woz and took credit for it), wasn't even a professional designer, and he certainly wasn't an MBA. He had no qualifications whatsoever to start a tech company. Jobs was simply a computer enthusiast who had the great luck of meeting a computer genius, Steve Wozniak. Since Jobs was ordinary in many respects, he was able to empathize with ordinary computer users; that was one of his primary roles within Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the user experience, from a first-person perspective. Few if any other massive tech companies have been built by such a founder.

It's easy to assume that Apple is where it is today because of Jobs. But when you look back, there are actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook since Job's death that led Apple here.

Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.

If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.

Timid? Dude seems pretty ruthless by all anecdotes and how his company has operated. But he has a quiet demeanor and Southern accent, so many will assume he is weak and stupid. He seems to use it to his advantage.

Steve Jobs was an asshat and the restrictions Apple puts on their software are exactly in line with what he would've done. He was firmly against third party apps on the iPhone in the first place and had to be convinced to permit it. Everything Apple is doing right now is in line with what Apple was doing when Jobs was still around. He would've had plenty to talk about, but none of it would be about no longer infringing users' rights.

Back in the early 2000's when Apple was still the cool, alternative, underdog computer company, it did things very differently, but for the same reason as it always did: make a profit.

Not silly thin and overheating is the main way, your criticism is still valid though.

You might call it ambitious to "so stubbornly fight regulation", I'd call it immoral and corrupt.

>He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy

My God, No. The privacy thing started with Steve Jobs. Steve was such a private person he would change his car every few months to avoid having car plate. He started the war against Android on privacy when 99% of media including HN thought Google was NOT invading on privacy and were the media darling.

>actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook

>He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro

Engineer Led.

>has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+),

Eddy Cue lead and actually worst decision ever. The services you listed are burning money. And as I have repeated again they are only there to dilute the real profits from App Store and Google Pay search.

>wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods).

Beats acquisition was about streaming. None of the hardware headset engineer actually made into AirPods. AirPods are done by old guards Apple who Steve brought in from B&W. Apple Watch was Willian's and Jony Ive project.

As someone on HN once said which I think sums it up perfectly, Apple has been left on AutoPilot since Steve Jobs passed away.