How Tim Cook Made Apple His Own | Hacker News Reader

How Tim Cook Made Apple His Own

wsj.com

26 pointsksec43 comments

I don’t doubt and didn’t doubt that Tim Cook could make hundreds of billions of dollars. What I do doubt is that a Tim Cook led Apple will be able to do something like create the “next iPhone.” But, he may not need to.

Tim Cook might not be able to produce a product category on the same level of iPhone, but very innovative products have come out of Apple during his time as CEO. Apple Watch and Airpods are really popular products that have redefined entire categorizes.

You sure about the causation there? It could very well be that iPhone market power propelled those products and the products without the brand behind it would not stand on their own

Google also has a popular brand - what successful product has Google created outside of advertising?

It’s about execution. Apple has been around for 40+ years. You could say that every success came from the Apple //.

A revolutionary search engine? I don’t know if you were around before Google started but on the other search engines that were available you could search all you want and all you would find was spam and unrelated crap.

Uhh, yeah my first “internet application” was a chatbot that integrated with a Gopher server.

My first time learning about optimizing a program was trying to store as much data in the 1st page of memory because reading and writing from it took one less clock cycle on a 65C02 in assembly.

But what has Google done since then? 90% of their profit it still ad based.

I used Google for the first time in years on mobile without an ad blocker and it was about as bad as goto.com back in the day.

Your question is:

> what successful product has Google created outside of advertising?

The answer is a revolutionary search engine, aside of course from their ground breaking email product, their mobile platform that is one of the only two viable ones, the top video platform and so on. These are all very successful products. Regarding the question if these are successful does it matter their financing model is mostly based on ads?

Do you think Facebook is an unsuccessful company?

A product is something that makes money. The search engine only makes money because of advertising. Google has spent literally billions of dollars trying to diversify and has little to show for it.

Yes it matters that a company isn’t diversified. Look at Apple, when phone revenue was stagnant last quarter, they still saw one of their best quarters ever because of Macs and iPads.

Over the last few years, growth has come from “wearables” and services.

I wonder what would happen to advertising in the unlikely case that there was a worldwide pandemic and companies cut advertising? Google was the only big tech company to see revenue decline last quarter.

During the time period that Google has existed, Apple has gone from making all of its money on Macs to...

1 Becoming the leading music retailer and music player for awhile.

2. Pivoted to become the most profitable phone maker.

3. Added tablets.

4. Cook admitted that the Watch business alone is larger in revenue than the iPod was at peak.

5. Many analyst belief that its headphone business alone is just as large as its watch business.

6. All of this and even its tiniest two segments - Mac and iPad are large enough to have a revenue that puts it in the f100.

On another note, how many unsuccessful chat apps has Google had?

Facebook is just a social media company at its core. But, it use to be a platform for games where a lot of its revenue came from before mobile. Facebook has four different platforms that are all successful - Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. How many failed acquisitions has Google had in social - OrKut, Blogger (languishes in obscurity but could have easily been a large platform). Google+?

How is Facebook making any money apart from ads? Especially on a service like WhatsApp.

True. But why is Google the only Big tech company that saw revenue declines? How has FB major acquisitions fared compared to Google’s?

Youtube is popularly believed to be break even at best and it came out in the Oracle trial during discovery that Android had only made Google $23 billion in profit from 2010-2015. At the same time Google is giving Apple billions (reportedly up to $8-$12 billion now) to be the default search engine on iOS.

Maybe.

I use an Android phone and still prefer my Airpods over everything else I've tried. I really don't think it's just branding that made them the hit that they are.

Apple Watch has just not been useful enough for my lifestyle, but everything I hear and read about them, compared to the competition, gives me a similar 'vibe' to the AirPods: even if feature-by-feature there might be better products, they do a good job making their core usage smooth in a way that other products don't.

I don't know if that's true, but for me it definitely was for the iPhone, AirPods, and even MacBooks despite their recent slump. It bothers me that people are assuming that I make my choices just because of branding.

The iPhone was a once in a lifetime aberration. Even when the iPhone was introduced in 2007, there were already 1 billion phones being sold a year. Jobs said that the first year goal was to sell 10 million to capture 1%. Smart phone penetration worldwide is now to the point where almost every adult in developed countries have one and even 45% of adults in developing countries have one.

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-many-people-have-smart...

What the phone looks like might change, but no one has created anything as successful as the iPhone since 2007 and it’s hard to get more ubiquitous than the smart phone (not iPhone necessarily).

I think it’s Steve Jobs that was a once in a lifetime aberration. Under his leadership Apple basically created three industries: mass-market personal computing, digital music, and smartphones.

I’ll give credit for one out of three - the personal computer. The digital music market already existed when the iPod came out (“No Wireless. Less Space than the Nomad. Lame.” [1]) The smart phone - a phone that could make calls and run third party apps - already existed.

Apple popularized both and reaped immense profit from it, but you could say the sane about the smart watch under Cook. The Apple Watch is more profitable than the iPod at its peak [2]. Even the iPad was just a big iPhone under Jobs. It didn’t come into its own until years later.

[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

[2] http://www.asymco.com/2019/12/12/ipods-pro/

Sure, Jobs was not an inventor, he was a refiner, like a great chef who takes local village recipes and refines the dishes and the presentation into a $300 Michelin star restaurant. He had a great talent for taking something new, packaging it into something people wanted, and then making them want it. I had several “smartphones” before the iPhone and the first time I used an iPhone I knew it was different. I’ve seen my 9 month old baby do basic navigation on my iPhone, while I seen 45 year old colleagues of mine at the time flummoxed by my Nokia N95.

How is that different than both the iPad (which is much better now than it was in 2011), the Watch and the AirPods.

Jobs was there to see the successful transition to PPC to Intel. Cook will be there to see the transition from Intel to “Apple Silicon”.

But Apple wouldn’t have succeeded without Cooks operational expertise. Apple never had to manufacturer at the scale it does now during Jobs first tenure.

Forever grateful for ditching Jony Ive and his thinness obsession leading to technological compromises.

Such a boring forgettable man. Sounds like he has no human contact. All large corps have such hyper effeciant corporate robots keeping the factory lights on. Nothing to see here unless you study robots.

Cook is a numbers guy. You can't really learn anything or be inspired by a numbers guy

Inspiration doesn’t move products without execution. Apple would have failed no matter how innovative they were under Jobs without Cooks operational capabilities.

Does that apply to Einstine?

Archived at: https://archive.vn/v69CJ

actually this link worked for me thanks, I could read the article.

Mr Cook and Apple are good to make money but not anymore good techs. It is a shame.

Personally I feel good Mr Cook is enslaving hundreds of thousands of Chinese to make a higher profit on the iPhone. Bravo!

Redirects through Facebook

https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/tim-cook-apple-steve-jobs-t...

Redirected through FB for me (asked to verify that was the link I wanted to go to) and then WSJ still showed me a couple paragraphs and a subscribe button if I wanted to read the rest.

Anecdotally it worked for me on mobile. Perhaps your using some kind of Facebook container on Firefox which breaks the referrer somehow?

For what it’s worth; my Apple Watch is my favourite Apple product since the iMac G4, and seems to only be improving, iteration to iteration. Cook has at least brought a truly wonderful, innovative new product to market.

Big Sur seems decent. I’m interested to see how the ARM transition pins out.

However; we can’t ignore the butterfly keyboard debacle; a number of unstable iOS versions; the ludicrously-priced $6000 Mac Pro, (those wheels...) - and a very un-generous axing of 32-bit support with Catalina.

I absolutely refuse to upgrade on my personal MacBook beyond Mojave as I have legacy audio plugins that are 32-bit I’ve paid for that do not have upgrades I use as daily drivers. However I’m an iOS developer for a living; so my work computer must be up to date.

The road with Apple has always had its ups and downs. I think; for Mac users especially, the decrease in cost/lower price point that ARM should provide will determine quite a bit of the future of growth of MacOS in the amount of market share.

The butterfly keyboard is such a classic Apple thing todo.

To push form well beyond the limits of current manufacturing capabilities just because of an ideology.

How many big companies try something that ambitious?

and let's not forget the touch bar.... Urgh. Still holding onto my 2015 MacBook from work and hoping it never dies.

2015 is the best MacBook! Touchbar is terrible, but I applaud them for trying. They are trying imagine a perfect touch interface.

Catalina is a crash happy POS.

Apple has been “axing” backwards compatibility since it created the Mac as a separate line from the Apple //. The last 32 bit Mac that Apple sold was in 2006. Should they have kept 32 but support for x86 software for ARM? Should they still be supporting PPC software? 68K software?

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