Cook's been great for massively scaling Apple (and its stock price) up, but the art, vision, and soul of the company is gone. It's just a stock price maximizing lawnmower now, just like every other corporate stock price maximizing lawnmower. If that's what shareholders want, fine, I guess. But I'd be bored just manufacturing the same boring rectangles every year. I think Steve would have been, too.
They shipped AirPods and the Apple Watch during his tenure. And the ahem, Vision Pro. The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everything.
> The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
I’m with you. I think Cook has done pretty well. A replacement is not automatically going to be better. I’d wager there’s a good chance we get someone who just wants to squeeze margins rather than invest in risky and logistically complex hardware like the M chips on the Macs.
Not as a shareholder, but as a customer and user I’m very ok if they just focus on making those rectangles.
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.
No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
Does any CEO actually use their own company's products?
The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread..
And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app even though Notes could have done all that if they had improved it a bit.
Steve Jobs was probably one of the few people in charge who actually used his company's own products. You need someone who's annoyed with the status quo enough to make a company to solve it, not just someone elected by a board.
MacOs and iOs are going off the rails. It is clear the CEO is not providing a vision, not guiding the direction, and not assuring the quality of those products.
While not as bad as Windows, which has way too many chefs in the kitchen, it is getting there.
Sorry, are you suggesting that Cook doesn't use a computer in his day-to-day work, or has a Windows PC or Linux box in his office? Somehow I doubt that.
I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustainability v's replace it every 12-24 months. I guess sustainability concerns at Apple ends at ensuring their stock price is sustainable.
What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months?
I've had only two iPhones for almost 11 years. An iphone 6s and currently an iPhone 13 mini there entire time.
They're solidly reliable
In the real world I don't know anyone replacing their phone every 24 months. Usually people keep a phone for 3-4 years and then it gets given to kids/someone else for another few years usage. I doubt any significant number of people are chucking their 1 year old iphone in a draw to sit unused after they get the next one.
I'm on my fourth iPhone in 13 years and have never replaced a phone because of anything related to physical damage. I'd still be on my third but T-Mobile offered such a large trade-in value for my 2020 SE that upgrading was the same price as replacing the battery.
You make a point, but it’s hard to square valuing sustainability with that kind of personal replacement rate when the supported life is several years. That said, your old phone is either being resold or parted, and and the valuable materials from unusable parts are recovered through disassembly.
I feel like there are a lot of iPhone features being slept on. Pairing Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence lets a grandma do some powerful work that she could never have done five years ago.
This is absurd. I’ve kept an iPhone 12 for 4 years, only replacing it last month with a 17 Pro.
Throughout that time my 5 year old phone got every OS and security update. And it’ll get the OS update in 2026 as well. So the phone released in 2020 gets software updates till 2027 - 7 years. The main issue that makes people want to upgrade is battery life degrading. Good thing Apple offers cheap and quick battery replacements in store. I replaced my battery at the 2 year mark for a small amount of money and it felt like a new phone.
What more could Apple possibly do to make their devices more sustainable? The processors are insanely overpowered, so they don’t feel slow. The batteries are easy to replace. The software updates are there. Being a bit cynical, Apple only making small incremental changes each year reduces the need to upgrade even further.
If people want to replace their devices every year or two that’s on them, not Apple.
The best Apple products that I have bought werde made in the Cook area. The M* MacBooks changed the game in terms of overall package. It's hard to overstate how much better I think they are than what was around during Jobs times and the gap has been closing only very slowly.
Whatever he facilitated, it worked for me. Execution matters.
In a company founded by a visionary, it takes a surprisingly long time to squander all the internal culture after that person's departure. I would assume the larger the company was at that moment, the longer it takes.
We can't keep ignoring those Chinese tech companies. The ones that have pivoted into EVs, autonomous vehicles, and humanoid robotics, amongst other things.
Steve wanted to become chairman of the board and teach at Stanford. Given how much he trusted Tim, I’m not so sure the company would have taken a dramatically different path had he been around longer.
But this sounds like an ideal setup, doesn't it? Tim is fantastic at execution, but he does need a shot of big-picture vision every now and then. Tim as CEO with Steve as Chairman, steering the broader direction, feels like it could have been a perfect pairing. The issue with how things actually turned out is that Tim ended up on his own - all execution, no vision.
If he hadn't tried to self-treat his cancer with acupuncture, fruit juice and herbs, he'd probably be around now to do that. The man was clearly a lucky idiot, and shouldn't be revered, but used as a cautionary tale of unbridled arrogance.
No, Apple had been doing their own silicon (presumably you mean for their phones) while Jobs was still CEO, and he bought PA Semi in 2008 which put them on the path to do their own CPU cores (iPhone 5 with Swift CPU was released the year after he died so he'd obviously seen the core design process through from the beginning to likely initial tape-out or very close to).
Vision Pro is underrated. The issue is that it’s not at a stage where it can go mainstream but the tech is insane. Apple silicon is huge and the only reason I am considering a macbook pro and waiting for the M5 max/pro series.
I think people are underestimating cook because none of these replaced the iPhone and because of the significant degradation in Apple software.
I think Apple has kind of a culture problem where the whole organization has to look-up way too much to its chief to make key decisions.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
Yeah. all you have to do is look at "Apple (lack of) Intelligence" to know that Steve's presence and taste is gone.
User: "Siri, <insert question>"
Siri: "I cannot answer that right now" <end conversation>
User: <follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, so they prefix again with Hey Siri> please ask chatgpt < insert question>
Siri: "Hello, sure I can ask ChatGPT · Check important info for mistakes"
ChatGPT: "Hello, how can i help you today"
User: <insert question>
ChatGPT: Answers question and siri terminates conversation
User: <asks follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, user then goes to settings and disables apple intelligence>
Huge corporations are in the business of manufacturing boring things at scale, throwing money into pits, and moving slowly, it's just what they do, at least after they're initial rise. It seems cynical, but I think only a rare person at a rare company might disagree. As soon as you have dominance, you want to protect that dominance rather try something categorically industry changing. Even if you did, it wouldn't be surprising enough to get much attention unless what it was completely upended your own product line.
I couldn't disagree more. Some of the worst Apple computers I've owned date to the Jobs era. All of the best have been from the Cook era. Apple Silicon has been an enormous success.
(My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.)
The TiBook was a milestone product and a great Jony Ive-led design. Apple has been making silver, thin, metal laptops ever since. Even a titanium iPhone for some reason. The last Titanium model with 1GHz, 1GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, DVI, Firewire, DVD/CD-RW, 64MB Radeon 9000, etc. seems pretty great and could run both Mac OS 9 and OS X. And that glowing Apple logo on the back of the display (which I miss in modern Mac laptops.) The main defects (apparently fixed in later models) seem to be the weak hinge and display cables.
Apple Silicon was started by/during the Steve Jobs era in 2010. You seeing the rewards now (well starting in 2019), because it takes so long to produce a chip.
Well Jobs obviously took risks, way more than Cook ever did. But Yes, Silicon was absolutely the right move, incredible performance leap, at an accessible price (but one could argue it's more of a failure from Intel). Now from a "culture re-definition" perspective, nothing is going to top what Apple did in the 80's and what they did again in the 2000's with the iPhone.
Arguably he overshot innovation, tried to kill the pocket bricks and failed (with a v1 that wasn’t meant to replace the rectangles but was supposed to be a first step toward that). Sounds like you’re ignoring Vision Pro.
Vision Pro is a perfect example of a greed-driven failure. Apple pissed off both devs and megacorps by keeping the ecosystem closed, fighting tooth and nail in courts such that every app needed to pay them 30% and couldn't be installed without their blessing, and unsurprisingly very few massive companies (or hackers) wanted to support Apple's fledgling closed garden. Without software, it's just a gadget.
People blame Cook, and I do too. But for some reason Jony Ive never gets his discredit. He is the one who kicked off the boring rectangle, and it's clear he does not have the capacity to deviate from that. His industrial design was frankly terrible and people have lapped it up. Ever since the iPod, I can't think of an industrial design of Apple's or Ive's that was actually any good. Even today, compare an iPhone to an Xperia. The Xperia is bounds ahead of the iPhone.
What else could shareholders want? Employees, management, founders, customers, vendors could all have other goals, wants or desire but when you have a large number of shareholders that is what they want always.
Shareholders - a large majority of them are institutional with their own shareholders they are accountable to, always want more money - that is a core principle of capitalism.
Occasionally we can tie other objectives to financial gains to get a behave in a specific way, say a green initiative will improve the brand perception therefore brand value - because now they can charge more/ justify current pricing etc.
It can at times align the other way too for risk minimization - a founder wants a large budget for something - like say Zuckerberg with Metaverse[3], or Musk with $1T pay [2] firing the founder is more expensive[1] so shareholders sign off.
Fundamentally it always boils down to profit/value maximization for the shareholders.
---
[1] By no means unique, except for the scale of money spent on a vanity project.
[2] Firing is more expensive - Tesla trades at such crazy multiples those are arguably not viable without Musk. It is probably cheaper to give then $1T pay package or the similar $56b package from 2018 currently being disputed in court.
[3] Almost impossible in Meta's case. The board can fire the CEO in any company, but since Zuckerberg owns > 50% of the voting shares, he as the majority shareholder can also fire the board anytime and replace with a board who will sign off. It is not absolute power though, there are some protections for minority shareholders as Delaware court is showing with 2018 Musk package case.
I dunno, the stuff they have now doesn't really need a lot of innovation. Like, my MacBook isn't very different from the one I bought in 2013 (other than massive performance improvements of course), but I don't really need it to be anything other than what it is. Same with my iPhone. I'll probably only replace that when the battery life gets bad. Most of the "innovations" on those lines have been annoying (touch bar, apple AI, etc.)
In contrast, Microsoft has innovated a lot on the desktop since Windows 7 and I hate almost all of it. I'd happily go back to the old experiences.
If you check my comments Im a routine critic of Apple. Specifically its mis-management of Siri.
But, in my mind, Tim Cook is also responsible for the only exceptional qualities of Apple. Namely its production of the M series chips and the Vision Pro (yes really).
They better have someone outstanding in mind as a replacement.
Otherwise I could easily see the successor mildly improve Siri/AI functions, while continuing Apples new disastrous design language and drop the ball on the supply chain and vertical integration that makes their hardware products second to none.
Ternus is the leading candidate; VP of Hardware Engineering. He was very likely more directly responsible than Cook for all the things you liked about Cook's Apple.
My fear for Apple right now is how most decisions they make appear to incentivize them toward becoming a perpetual middle-man in all aspects of your interactions with their products. They don't manufacture much of anything anymore; its on-contract. They design the M-Series chips, but don't make them. Their software sucks; they'd rather just take 30% of your interaction with actually-good software. Their AI and search sucks; they just pay Google $30B a year for theirs. Etc and etc.
Very few tech companies make the whole stack. Making chips requires specialization and is required for high end chips. Samsung is probably the only company that makes chips for their own phones.
$2k phones has been a thing for a while now, with the folding phones. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold currently starts at $1700 and Google Pixel Pro Fold starts at $1800, and both are over $2100 for the 1TB models.
Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.
It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.
But sure..."unimpressive."
This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.
> Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced
We have very different recollections, then. People audibly gasped when Steve demoed slide-to-unlock on stage. The first generation was sold out for a long time despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.
The VP is cool, but it's still hard to see a future where everyone has one. As soon as I got my original iPhone it was clear that it changed everything going forward. The entire market changed on the spot. The VP has not done that, even if it may ultimately be successful.
Listen, I don't really like the direction Apple has taken either, but since Tim Cook became CEO of Apple in August 2011 the company's stock went from like $15 to like $275; it had a value of $400 billion and now it's worth $4 trillion, ten times as much. Any characterization of him as some kind of failure who killed Apple ("once the biggest tech company on the planet", "isn't growing", "only saved"...) is completely out-of-touch.
"…and it's only saved by the positive offset coming from advertisement and app store growth"
That has been part of the plan for a decade now since Eddy Cue was tasked with boosting Apple's income from "services". (It's worked pretty well for Microsoft.)
It’s not the only thing. The scale up of Apple is massive and so is the supply chain. Those are not really things consumers don’t see directly (just indirectly)
I often wonder why Satya Nadella is so venerated on HN compared to say, Cook or Pichai. As innovators, MS lags way behind both Google and Apple. I can't think of one bleeding edge product released during Satya's tenure. Say what you will about Apple and Google, they still consistently put out products that make you sit up and pay attention. What has MS been doing other than squeezing the MS Office and Azure cash cows?
Nadella is obviously a very smart and successful business leader. He achieved his goals and transformed Microsoft into a very successful, healthy company. This is why I personally think he isn’t just a bland idiot like for example Steve Ballmer.
However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.
For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
Other commenters are raking Apple over the coals for bad experiences with MacOS. By the same token, Windows 11 is beyond awful. It's a complete buggy mess, never mind the secure boot restrictions.
> Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.
The funniest part to me: I can't imagine Jobs on a bicycle. Perhaps when he was a small kid, but as far as I know he was notoriously on the jerky side of strongly motorized vehicles.
Which could perfectly align with his vision of the iPod and iPhone as powerful, but closed and restrictive and expensive ecosystems, replacing computers.
> no matter who leads
Then only the next CEO will have a chance to reinject taste into Apple, so it needs to happen at the same time.
I used Linux for about 25 years. With the rising cost of hardware, I bought an M4 Max MacStudio earlier this year as it was the best bang for the buck on CPU/GPU and the savings on those offset the extortionate pricing on RAM/SSD.
You know what? Despite Liquid Glass being a bit of a downgrade recently, macOS is still good. Do I enjoy it as much as the old lampshade iMac or even 68030 Macintosh? No. Is it absolutely astounding compared to anything else available? Yes. It is. The ecosystem effects with my phone and AirPods is nice, but the computer alone is phenomenal.
I completely understand why people get upset about certain things, but the Macintosh, the iPhone, and even the watch and headset are solid products. Not everyone is going to like them, and I’d be worried if everyone did; yet, I think Cook did okay. No one was ever going to be Steve Jobs, and given Steve’s failings, we should not want anyone to be Steve Jobs. His genius came at a severe cost to his family and to him personally.
Apple is still producing solid products. They have warts, but that was true of every single product that Apple ever released. Nostalgia plays a huge part in making us think things have gotten worse. I have a Mac Classic II, a Performa, a PowerMac G3, an XT clone, and a Pentium machine that I use often… things are so much better now than before.
Even as a diehard Linux user, I totally agree. If you can look past macOS's weak support for gaming, mediocre window management, and hostility towards unsigned binaries, the stability and experience it provides is second to none.
... Even then, you can still get around many pain points with third-party tools. AltTab + Raycast covers window management well enough for me and compatibility layers like Crossover/Wine are already great for gaming (which is hopefully only going to get better with Valve now working on x86 -> ARM translation layers)
Kindly, I think your reality is being distorted. macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8. It's got live tiles, radical acrylic accents, constant cloud service nags, and preinstalled advertisements everywhere across the system. OCSP won't let you launch certain apps unless your DRM API is online, for crying out loud!
It is insulting.
Tim Cook, in his wisdom, pivoted Apple harder into services. AppleTV, App Store, all the kinds of meaningless high-margin slop that can be created without direct competition. This has damaged macOS and iOS perennially, they are feature-poor operating systems when compared with desktop Windows and Android today. Can you imagine how much Apple would be worth if they didn't refuse to sign Nvidia compute drivers right now? Or how iOS would look with Vulkan 1.2 compliance and the Steam Deck's Proton stack? Apple is the #1 party holding Apple back, here!
I daily drive Linux now, but the state of macOS is so ad-ridden and walled-off that I would rather do Linux development with WSL than bother setting up a Mac. It's that bad.
macOS isn't without its sins, but I feel like "ad-ridden” is a stretch compared to the baseline of Windows 11 injecting promotions into the Start menu, OEM Android flavors full of carrier crap, etc. There's iCloud+ nags here and there, but it’s still by far the least noisy consumer OS right now aside from Linux.
Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.
(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)
I believe that Apple is planning for succession, which of course they should, as an obvious responsibility to shareholders, especially given the health issues of the previous CEO Steve Jobs. However, I don't believe that Tim Cook is on his way out. I certainly don't believe that Cook wants to retire. It's not like he has a family to spend time with. Apple is his family.
The final but crucial paragraph in the Financial Times story is a quote from Tim Cook talking about Apple: “I love it there and I can’t envision my life without being there so I’ll be there a while,” he told singer Dua Lipa on her podcast in November 2023.
The story appears to have a lot of hedge words and mere speculation: "as soon as next year" (so how late could it be?), "no final decisions have been made" about Cook's successor, "The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report", "An annoucement early in the year would...", "the timing of any announcement could change" (not that there is any specific timing!).
My impression is that the reporters don't have the faintest clue when or if Cook is leaving.
Word is the next CEO is going to be picked ala Charlie and the chocolate factory. I hope that when you bought your Miyake iPhone sock you kept the bone-white ticket naming you the next CEO.
Oh dear here comes lazy barnacle man Grandpa Joe. Watch them ignore rules of the EULA agreement and they are sucked into the factory ventilation shaft holding the new iPhone Lighter-than-Air.
I think Cook left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA. They could've tested the waters by loading up Apple Silicon on PCIe riser cards, maturing the toolkit for AI workloads, and selling them at competitive prices. Yes I know they're in the business of making entire widgets, but it would've been easy money. The hardware and software stacks are there. Unlimited upside with nearly zero downside risk.
Apple seems to be avoiding building server hardware for some reason. It seems like a big opportunity, besides AI, the power efficiency of their chips would surely be attractive for datacentres. I think momentum is building for moving away from x86.
> left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA
What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.
I don't know why this is getting downvoted. Apple for sure could make very capable hardware/software for cloud AI workloads - directly taking on NVIDIA.
Cook’s greatest achievement - Apple’s supply chain - has, as set out in the ‘Apple in China’ book [1], turned into Apple’s biggest risk and weakness. The next CEO won’t be worrying about Siri or Vision Pro; they’ll be trying to deal with Apple’s reliance on China.
I sure hope Cook and teams have been actively working on this for a decade already.
The book is interesting in showing both a lack of early awareness of this weakness, AND some people clearly noticing, AND Apple being very powerful and resourceful when it notices a problem.
Readit News
There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everything.
So while Cook deserves credit for execution, the roadmap was laid in place by his predecessor.
We don’t even have to wait for a new CEO for that! https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/26/ads-might-be-coming-to-app...
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
Well when the exterior is full, it's time to look inside!
The noise cancelation features, and now the live translation function? So cool.
Deleted Comment
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
- actually allow privacy, even from apple itself. Like turn off telemetry, not just anonymize it. and opt-in, not opt-out.
- install apps without asking permission
- allow access to your data, for example to export your imessages
Just in general be respectful and polite
I fear it is going to start getting visions of monetization and injecting advertisement and tracking into everything.
I don't see where the growth is coming from unless they start trying to squeeze what they've got entirely dry.
You can get almost the same rectangles at half the price. /s
The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread..
And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app even though Notes could have done all that if they had improved it a bit.
Steve Jobs was probably one of the few people in charge who actually used his company's own products. You need someone who's annoyed with the status quo enough to make a company to solve it, not just someone elected by a board.
While not as bad as Windows, which has way too many chefs in the kitchen, it is getting there.
(It's "macOS", BTW.)
I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustainability v's replace it every 12-24 months. I guess sustainability concerns at Apple ends at ensuring their stock price is sustainable.
If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change.
I’m on my 13 pro max now and will be at least for another year or two.
Throughout that time my 5 year old phone got every OS and security update. And it’ll get the OS update in 2026 as well. So the phone released in 2020 gets software updates till 2027 - 7 years. The main issue that makes people want to upgrade is battery life degrading. Good thing Apple offers cheap and quick battery replacements in store. I replaced my battery at the 2 year mark for a small amount of money and it felt like a new phone.
What more could Apple possibly do to make their devices more sustainable? The processors are insanely overpowered, so they don’t feel slow. The batteries are easy to replace. The software updates are there. Being a bit cynical, Apple only making small incremental changes each year reduces the need to upgrade even further.
If people want to replace their devices every year or two that’s on them, not Apple.
Dead Comment
Whatever he facilitated, it worked for me. Execution matters.
Do you have a source for this?
- Apple Watch
- Airpods (& Pro) & Beats
- Apple Silicon
- Vision Pro
At $1500 I'd eventually talk myself into it.
At $3500 I'm just waiting.
I think people are underestimating cook because none of these replaced the iPhone and because of the significant degradation in Apple software.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
Deleted Comment
User: "Siri, <insert question>"
Siri: "I cannot answer that right now" <end conversation>
User: <follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, so they prefix again with Hey Siri> please ask chatgpt < insert question>
Siri: "Hello, sure I can ask ChatGPT · Check important info for mistakes"
ChatGPT: "Hello, how can i help you today"
User: <insert question>
ChatGPT: Answers question and siri terminates conversation
User: <asks follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, user then goes to settings and disables apple intelligence>
Egregious...
(My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4
However, software-wise, the peak was 10.6. There hasn't been the same level of quality ever since.
What else could shareholders want? Employees, management, founders, customers, vendors could all have other goals, wants or desire but when you have a large number of shareholders that is what they want always.
Shareholders - a large majority of them are institutional with their own shareholders they are accountable to, always want more money - that is a core principle of capitalism.
Occasionally we can tie other objectives to financial gains to get a behave in a specific way, say a green initiative will improve the brand perception therefore brand value - because now they can charge more/ justify current pricing etc.
It can at times align the other way too for risk minimization - a founder wants a large budget for something - like say Zuckerberg with Metaverse[3], or Musk with $1T pay [2] firing the founder is more expensive[1] so shareholders sign off.
Fundamentally it always boils down to profit/value maximization for the shareholders.
---
[1] By no means unique, except for the scale of money spent on a vanity project.
[2] Firing is more expensive - Tesla trades at such crazy multiples those are arguably not viable without Musk. It is probably cheaper to give then $1T pay package or the similar $56b package from 2018 currently being disputed in court.
[3] Almost impossible in Meta's case. The board can fire the CEO in any company, but since Zuckerberg owns > 50% of the voting shares, he as the majority shareholder can also fire the board anytime and replace with a board who will sign off. It is not absolute power though, there are some protections for minority shareholders as Delaware court is showing with 2018 Musk package case.
In contrast, Microsoft has innovated a lot on the desktop since Windows 7 and I hate almost all of it. I'd happily go back to the old experiences.
But, in my mind, Tim Cook is also responsible for the only exceptional qualities of Apple. Namely its production of the M series chips and the Vision Pro (yes really).
They better have someone outstanding in mind as a replacement.
Otherwise I could easily see the successor mildly improve Siri/AI functions, while continuing Apples new disastrous design language and drop the ball on the supply chain and vertical integration that makes their hardware products second to none.
My fear for Apple right now is how most decisions they make appear to incentivize them toward becoming a perpetual middle-man in all aspects of your interactions with their products. They don't manufacture much of anything anymore; its on-contract. They design the M-Series chips, but don't make them. Their software sucks; they'd rather just take 30% of your interaction with actually-good software. Their AI and search sucks; they just pay Google $30B a year for theirs. Etc and etc.
Johny Srouji team did instead.
https://www.apple.com/leadership/johny-srouji/
https://www.apple.com/leadership/john-ternus/
Don’t forget how unimpressive the iPhone was, when it was first introduced. It has probably become the most successful product in history.
Yeah, totally... a full touchscreen computer in your pocket with no physical keyboard, pinch-to-zoom magic people thought was CGI, a browser that wasn't a joke, visual voicemail, and an OS so smooth it made every other phone look like it ran on car batteries. Truly underwhelming stuff.
It literally redefined an entire industry, vaporized half the product lines at Nokia/BlackBerry/Palm/Microsoft, and set the blueprint for every smartphone that exists today.
But sure..."unimpressive."
This is the weirdest revisionist history I've ever heard.
If you mean that the iPhone has come a long way and that it was unimpressive relative to the phones we have 18 years later, sure. But unimpressive it was not.
We have very different recollections, then. People audibly gasped when Steve demoed slide-to-unlock on stage. The first generation was sold out for a long time despite being eye-wateringly expensive compared to competing devices like the BlackBerry.
The company isn't growing from years, and it's only saved by the positive offset coming from advertisement and app store growth.
That has been part of the plan for a decade now since Eddy Cue was tasked with boosting Apple's income from "services". (It's worked pretty well for Microsoft.)
Satya Nadella is by most accounts the best person to lead Microsoft, currently the largest software company in the world.
"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste," said Steve Jobs. That largely remains true.
Jobs called the computer "a bicycle for the mind." It immediately evokes a sense of freedom, magic, and fun.
Satya Nadella calls AI "a cognitive amplifier," which sounds like some kind of cool Excel formula.
Without taste being reinjected into Apple, it will remain uninspired and uninspiring, no matter who leads.
However, it’s clear that Nadella’s goals are everything but noble. He doesn’t care about the product, and he really doesn’t care about the customer. He only cares about number go up.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
As the CEO of Microsoft, he must use Windows, right? Unless he has a Mac
Like how can he use that ad-riddled mess every day and think it's fine, knowing he could make it so much better?
Which (squinting) was printed in the WSJ in 1980: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1148/1*wXZ9t85eJnREeDw...
But "bicycle for the mind" might be John Sculley, 1986: https://archive.org/details/apple-retro-books-collection/App...
Unless of course Jobs said it earlier.
The funniest part to me: I can't imagine Jobs on a bicycle. Perhaps when he was a small kid, but as far as I know he was notoriously on the jerky side of strongly motorized vehicles.
Which could perfectly align with his vision of the iPod and iPhone as powerful, but closed and restrictive and expensive ecosystems, replacing computers.
> no matter who leads
Then only the next CEO will have a chance to reinject taste into Apple, so it needs to happen at the same time.
I used Linux for about 25 years. With the rising cost of hardware, I bought an M4 Max MacStudio earlier this year as it was the best bang for the buck on CPU/GPU and the savings on those offset the extortionate pricing on RAM/SSD.
You know what? Despite Liquid Glass being a bit of a downgrade recently, macOS is still good. Do I enjoy it as much as the old lampshade iMac or even 68030 Macintosh? No. Is it absolutely astounding compared to anything else available? Yes. It is. The ecosystem effects with my phone and AirPods is nice, but the computer alone is phenomenal.
I completely understand why people get upset about certain things, but the Macintosh, the iPhone, and even the watch and headset are solid products. Not everyone is going to like them, and I’d be worried if everyone did; yet, I think Cook did okay. No one was ever going to be Steve Jobs, and given Steve’s failings, we should not want anyone to be Steve Jobs. His genius came at a severe cost to his family and to him personally.
Apple is still producing solid products. They have warts, but that was true of every single product that Apple ever released. Nostalgia plays a huge part in making us think things have gotten worse. I have a Mac Classic II, a Performa, a PowerMac G3, an XT clone, and a Pentium machine that I use often… things are so much better now than before.
Would like better window management though. Just copy Omarchy.
... Even then, you can still get around many pain points with third-party tools. AltTab + Raycast covers window management well enough for me and compatibility layers like Crossover/Wine are already great for gaming (which is hopefully only going to get better with Valve now working on x86 -> ARM translation layers)
> yet, I think Cook did okay.
Kindly, I think your reality is being distorted. macOS could have gotten so good over the past 15 years; today, it's a pale imitation of Windows 8. It's got live tiles, radical acrylic accents, constant cloud service nags, and preinstalled advertisements everywhere across the system. OCSP won't let you launch certain apps unless your DRM API is online, for crying out loud!
It is insulting.
Tim Cook, in his wisdom, pivoted Apple harder into services. AppleTV, App Store, all the kinds of meaningless high-margin slop that can be created without direct competition. This has damaged macOS and iOS perennially, they are feature-poor operating systems when compared with desktop Windows and Android today. Can you imagine how much Apple would be worth if they didn't refuse to sign Nvidia compute drivers right now? Or how iOS would look with Vulkan 1.2 compliance and the Steam Deck's Proton stack? Apple is the #1 party holding Apple back, here!
I daily drive Linux now, but the state of macOS is so ad-ridden and walled-off that I would rather do Linux development with WSL than bother setting up a Mac. It's that bad.
Of course, if you consider iCloud's deep integration into Finder and the rest of the operating system a form of advertising, macOS is infested with ads. But then you’ve basically redefined “ad” to mean “any tightly integrated first-party service,” i.e. the core value proposition people are buying into with Apple's ecosystem at all.
(I still agree with your points about the lost potential of macOS, though)
Or it could have gotten a full imitation of Windows 11.
The final but crucial paragraph in the Financial Times story is a quote from Tim Cook talking about Apple: “I love it there and I can’t envision my life without being there so I’ll be there a while,” he told singer Dua Lipa on her podcast in November 2023.
The story appears to have a lot of hedge words and mere speculation: "as soon as next year" (so how late could it be?), "no final decisions have been made" about Cook's successor, "The company is unlikely to name a new CEO before its next earnings report", "An annoucement early in the year would...", "the timing of any announcement could change" (not that there is any specific timing!).
My impression is that the reporters don't have the faintest clue when or if Cook is leaving.
What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.
Edit: dare I add apple watches
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/thechipletter/p/apple-in-china
The book is interesting in showing both a lack of early awareness of this weakness, AND some people clearly noticing, AND Apple being very powerful and resourceful when it notices a problem.