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What the heck is going on at Apple?

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148 points methuselah_in | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 16:54 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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827a ◴[07 Dec 25 19:18 UTC] No.46184236[source]▶
IMO: Cook is going to announce his retirement by the end of Q1, they've already selected a CEO (probably Ternus), the incoming CEO wants leadership change, and some of these departures are because its better that this purge happens before the CEO change than after. I think this explains Giannandrea, Williams, and Jackson.

Dye may have also been involved in that, given how unpopular he was internally at Apple. But more likely just personal / Meta offered him a billion dollars. Maestri leaving was also probably totally uninvolved.

Srouji is the weirdest case, and I'm hesitant to believe its even true just given its a rumor at this point. Its possible he was angry about being passed over for CEO, but realistically, it was always going to be Ternus, Williams, or Federighi. If Ternus is the next CEO, its likely we'll see Apple combine the Hardware Technologies and Hardware Engineering divisions, then have Srouji lead both of them. I really do not see him leaving the company.

The other less probable theory is that they actually picked Fadell, and this deeply pissed off many people in Apple's senior leadership. So, what we're seeing is more chaos than it first seems.

Generally, as long as Srouji doesn't leave, these changes feel positive for Apple, and especially if there's a CEO change in early 2026: This is what "the fifth generation of Apple Inc" looks like. I don't understand the mindset of people who complain about Apple's products and behavior over the past decade, then don't receive this news as directionally positive.

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this_user ◴[08 Dec 25 02:05 UTC] No.46187494[source]▶
Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.

What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.

The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.

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majormajor ◴[08 Dec 25 03:50 UTC] No.46188093[source]▶
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years

How frequently do you expect a new major product category across the industry? Is there any company who launched one that wasn't ChatGPT in the same time frame?

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soared ◴[08 Dec 25 04:11 UTC] No.46188206[source]▶
This is a good point, technically chromebooks fit this definition?
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1. majormajor ◴[08 Dec 25 05:00 UTC] No.46188546[source]▶
Personally I wouldn't count Chromebooks as something newer than Apple's last category-creating product since the iPad is in roughly the same time frame and netbooks a few years before that.

The Apple Watch is newer and is where I'd say the cutoff is for Apple.

--

At a higher level, I'd say there were two personal-computer-hardware revolution periods that Apple featured heavily in:

1) home personal computers and then the GUI-fication of them and the portable-ification - the wave the Apple II was part of, and then the one the Mac mainstreamed, then laptops where Apple was pretty instrumental in setting design and execution standards

2) mainstream general-purpose/software-defined mobile devices (vs single- or few-function gadgets). Initial failures or niche products (Newton from Apple, Palm/PocketPC more successfully as a niche later) and then Apple REALLY mainstreaming with the iPhone and the extensions that were the iPad and Watch. I'm leaving out the iPod here since "single-purpose MP3 players" were a transitional stop on the gadget->general purpose device trend. (But that general purpose nature also makes it hard to invent a new mobile device category.)

Of things that have been percolating for a while, maybe VR/AR takes off one day, I'm not sure there's mass appeal there. Are people going to get enough utility over a phone to justify pop-up ads in their field-of-view all day long?

It's possible the LLM/transformer boom could lead to some new categories, but we don't know what that would look like yet, so it's hard to penalize Apple for not being a super-early first-mover in the last 3 years since nobody else has figured out a great hardware story there either, and even in their prime they were less of a "first mover" than a "show everyone else how it could be done better" player.