“My position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated”

>"I was informed that my position as Product Manager of Automation Technologies was eliminated for business reasons"

At one of my former employers, when they wanted to get rid of someone nicely, that is provide them their due retirement benefits, etc. They'd eliminate the position. Few months later they'd come up with a new position with similar function with a new person in charge.

At least they were nice about it, I suppose, but appeared quite transparent.

>“the power of the computer should reside in the hands of the one using it.”

A great vision, and one that I share. But I think that it's also a vision that is completely incompatible with Apple.

Just for fun / boredom, if he was granted $100,000 worth of shares every year since 1997 and reinvested his dividends after they started paying out, he'd have somewhere near 800,000 shares today worth nearly $85 million.

"PC" in Apple lingo refers to Windows machines.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/10/31/cook-why-would-y...

Well perhaps they can get Xcode on iPad Pro!

Well what machines are they going to be making all the apps on then? You really think iOS will overtake?

Or they have been treating macOS as a mature OS where there is little space for the revolution. Except that part of "barely touching" is not really true.

  > You can also tell that macOS is not a priority because
  > security updates for same kernel issues always come weeks
  > after they've been fixed on iOS.

Or you can tell that iOS has much larger user base and hence the priority for security fixes.

I am not entirely convinced that Apple has a coherent plan for the future, at least one that is stable and not shifting every few months.

I mean, they clearly had some sort of iCar focus which they just shifted away from, which puts them back squarely on iOS devices. But smartphones aren't the growth market that they were a few years ago. Unless they can find some sort of new market to expand into, they're not going to be able to be the same sort of asymptotic-growth-fueled company they were since the iPod came out.

Either they need another iPod / iPhone / iPad (and I'm not entirely sure that the iPad deserves to be there, next to the prior two, but it kept things going for a while), or they have to really retrench to be a stable-market company, serving the upgrade-every-few-years premium smartphone buyer.

I often read that macOS is doomed because it is obviously understaffed and not aimed at pros anymore. Maybe. But I don't agree that the iPad is in better shape (as Tim Cook's comment might suggest).

iOS 10 on iPad Pro has been just as buggy as macOS 10.12 on my Mac, but nobody even mentions iCloud failures anymore, or glitchy layouts after rotating the device (hello status bar??).

iOS 10 also hasn't brought any new "pro-ness" to the iPad. Most updates have felt like "me-too" releases next to the iPhone (except for iOS 9 with split screen and Pencil support).

Depending on which analytics site you ask, Apple has cut off ~35% of deployed iPads from updates this fall, which means that iPad app developers can't be smug about fragmentation anymore. It's also hard to look down on AppKit as the framework that hasn't aged well next to the complicated monster that UIKit has become (compared to iOS 5, sigh).

Not to mention that tablet sales have slowed down, and both current iPad models (Pro 9.7" and 12.9") are too expensive to buy on a whim.

If Apple has a plan for the future, then I don't see it on the horizon yet.

I'm quite happy with hammerspoon for MacOS GUI automation. I'm using it to collect the screenshots for a hyper(term) theme gallery (https://hyperthemes.matthi.coffee).

Although now I'm not sure how much hammerspoon relies on the official APIs.

Apple is intensely focused on monetization of anything now that the iPhone is turning into a more mature (i.e. Lower growth) product.

Do you really expect that a company that is monetizing power brick extension cables in $3000 laptops and USB cables in $700 phones is going to continue to give away the store with things that deliver high value at low cost?

I think JavaScript was added and AppleScript Editor renamed to Script Editor as Apple's hint that AppleScript is a dead language.

Automator is what it is (I don't use it), but we have to be realistic in admitting it never really caught on. Even drag-and-drop GUI programming is too intimidating to the average user.

I hope this is not a harbinger of Apple giving up on user automation entirely.

I can't speak for the Apple of today, but when I left Apple in 2010 there were more wizened, "gray-beard" programmers working for Apple than at probably all the SOMA startups combined. Of all the things you could accuse Apple of (and there are plenty), I think ageism has got to be near the bottom of that list.

Why would you think that? It's relatively uncommon for companies to transition employees when they decide to remove whole business functions.

maybe he automated his own position

My understanding is that Apple rarely "fires" people. It was explained to me that they merely suggest it's time to move on. Repeatedly.

It seems very unlikely to me that this was anything personal or age related. However, Sal was highly identified with his role. He's an absolutely awesome guy who lives and breathes user automation every waking minute. Personally, I'd find it hard to imagine him in a different role, and maybe Apple mgt was suffering from a similar failure in imagination — or maybe Sal himself just wasn't interested in a different role.

Yup, that's exactly what my company's open plan office is missing. 50 people muttering aloud at their computers all day.

Voice control is not automation, you just replace using your mouse/keyboard to perform actions with using your voice to perform them, but you still have to do each one. Automation is having the computer perform multiple seemingly disconnected tasks one after the other without supervision. How you start the automated workflow is irrelevant.

The part that really scares me there is "UNIX CLI (shell)". Does that mean Terminal itself could be about to go? I'm sure Apple could explain it away with "there are many third-party offerings like Cathode & Prompt for the handful that need it".

It's there, it works, you haven't looked at it in years. Apple may or may not care about it, but apparently neither do you.

Automation probably gets us excited about ideas to streamline our lives, but nobody ever gets around to it. I certainly hope it remains well-supported because there are people who actually need it (accessibility comes to mind). Also because I did actually just use it in a toy project.

It can't be all that important to you if you couldn't even remember if it was installed.