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
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.
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.
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.
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 not loathed 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.
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’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 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 [†]
[†] 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?
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 kinda of agree. However, it doesn't mean those should be ideals we strive for; you can excel without sacrificing social niceties. As you get better in your field (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 fields. 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 any story, 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.
-----
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.
----
>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).
----
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.
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.
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."
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."
So he stuck it to the man on occasion let's say. Not all the time.
Remember that there are documented supply chain infiltrations with Apple's total compliance, that they don't conveniently tell about when running their "Apple is secure" ads
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
> 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."
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
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.
> "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:
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.
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.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 6.9 ms ] threadI'm inclined to see Apple Silicon as fairly innovative.
Then why is Apple releasing a folding phone now?
We'll see. I remember when the Apple Car was imminent, and it wouldn't be the first bullshit rumor in the Mac world.
Hell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPower_(Apple) was officially announced.
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.
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.
not one?
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.
Ive has been working at other stuff, like building a Ferrari that looks more like a giant RC car
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.
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.
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.
Steve showed a generation of CEOs that being an asshole was a viable strategy.
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 [†]
[†] 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)
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 fields. 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 any story, 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.
-----
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.
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.
----
>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).
----
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).
Thank you for your replies, I'll muse over this discussion as well.
> From a legal-representation-POV, obviously you want a bigBAD asshole representing you (it's just how the game works).
This one I cannot think of a counterexample right now. It does seem necessary.
Is this a true realization though? Lots of people are very nice, but Jobs got a shit ton done that was truly remarkable.
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.
This sounds so self-gratifying. You could have also written: "I am better than Steve Jobs and I look down on him".
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.
Absolutely right.
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.
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
Remember that there are documented supply chain infiltrations with Apple's total compliance, that they don't conveniently tell about when running their "Apple is secure" ads
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?
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.
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.
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 think it sucks too.
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.
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."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/opinion/apple-tim-cook-ou...
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...
I’d bet he’d never point this out.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
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.
If Ternus doesn't fall into that trap, he'll be great.
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.