How Tim Cook transformed Apple after Steve Jobs
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I've seen many guys like Tim Cook, most worse off ones.
He squeezes suppliers, and know what he is doing.
Others squeeze suppliers, and don't know what they are doing.
On one of my first jobs, I've been witness to one such negotiations down to single cents, and microns of plastic for a few million units customized charger order.
The order was such a whopper for a small sourcing agency, that higher ups were willing to do just anything to not to spook the client.
Our guys quickly understood that the consultant guy doing negotiations on behalf of the client was a round idiot with a level of engineering knowledge of a first year dropout.
He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run.
We managed to at least push back on safety critical parts, on a point that it will fail the certification.
Many years later I found out that the design of the first Kindle charger exactly matched the one we did in everything, but having an extra label.
And 5 years ago I learned that Kindles had multiple issues with melting chargers, and safety recalls.
9 out of 10 companies in the supply chain will just shoot themselves in the foot if they go on doing it like that.
Nobody will point how unreasonable your demands are if you are a giant multinational corporation, moreover so in China. If you do this, and don't know yourself if you are asking a for something stupid, who will know? No one will.
I found that diodes in parallel are surprisingly common around the industry.
This is such a thing which you are pretty much told on day 1 of any electronics course that it is impossible to not to know.
My only thinkable conclusion was that people keep doing it on purpose.
Other extreme cost cutting measures I saw were things like LEDs being used in double role as a diode. Wire wound around PCB used as inductor. Plug pegs being directly soldered to the PCB. Near paper thin plastic with holes from molding defects. Through hole components being soldered to each other. Flybacks without feedback. A 555 coaxed into use in a charger circuit.
You cannot come with any of that unknowingly, nor will you find any of that crap on the open market easily even in China.
It's pretty much an engineering equivalent of a "controlled flight into terrain," a direct result of suppliers being consciously directed into "stripping to the last cent" of the products by such unwitting buyers.
I wouldn't be surprised if reference circuits would have the double diode. Sad, but not surprised.
Makes me think I could intentionally ask for 1 or 2 stupid things, and see if the supplier tells me about it?
Now, because of your reply, I found this old HN post:
"Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause"
You've got these manufactures that are struggling to make basic AC->DC inverters and now you want to throw on a negotiation step? Yeah, not going to end well for these cost cutting idiots.
There are going to be destroyed devices and fires because some idiot decides "Just hard wire 20v and be done with it!"
But then how did you assess the quality of Apple's chargers? Can the same methodology not be applied then to other brands as well?
Overall most of those companies have excellent track records, but I bet everybody still remembers the exploding batteries from Samsung. Meanwhile, Sony actually has a pretty spotty track record (depending on where privacy and safety overlap for you), but most people have forgotten the root kit scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
How do you judge the quality and safety of charger purely by size? Is bigger safer, or is smaller safer? And if so, why don't other brands of the same size meet your quality standard based on that yardstick.
>and demonstrated product quality in other areas
Like their multi-year run of defective butterfly keyboards or hinge design that would cut through the MacBooks display cable over time causing the famous "stagelight effect" AKA "flexgate" where you'd being charged $600 to fix the $6 ribbon cable[1]?
[1]https://www.extremetech.com/computing/284236-some-apple-lapt...
Edit: Ah, I see the downvotes are already here. I guess criticism of Apple with proof is not tolerated on HN.
I'm pretty sure spoonjim was referring to the size of Apple, not the size of the chargers they make.
And how does one battery incident from one brand prove that Apple is the best at making chargers? We're talking about different things here.
"iPhones don't explode so Apple must be the best?"
Samsung Note 7 exploded before it was taken of the market, but any other brand or model did not, so unless you want to hang on the 2016 Samsung Note 7 incident as strawman argument, you have provided no valid arguments.
Who is more likely to commit murder, a randomly selected person or a randomly selected person from those with an existing murder conviction?
How does one negative battery incident from Samsung prove that Apple makes the safest chargers of ALL the major electronics manufacturers?
Because so far you provided no proof or arguments to support this other than "murderer" metaphors and opinionated brand loyalty wrapped in whataboutism focused towards one particular incident, then move the goalpost from safety to quality instead and I showed you proof that quality does not equal safety or vice versa.
Apple phones had antenna problems. You probably should not buy that brand anymore.
If you keep moving the 'logic' goalposts to justify 'Apple is the best', then let me point out to you that bad reception IS just as bad, if not worse than batteries that could potentially explode.
If you've got an accident or an emergency in a more remote area and can't get a reception to communicate all the details to the emergency services in time, then you or others could very well die.
And, as opposed to batteries which due to chemistry reactions are more unpredictable and complex to lab-test for real world use, antenna design and reception quality can be easily tested in the lab before launching the product (RF engineer here), instead of blaming the users for "holding it wrong", so Apple gets no pardons from me on this life endangering fuckup.
Plus, the phones with battery issues that have actually exploded were not more than a handful, so the risk of you actually being affected was low but all were recalled and refunded vs iPhone 4's poor antenna design which would plague all the phones, all the time and instead of a recall you got a rubber bumper lol.
It's well known that Apple prioritizes thinness, aesthetics and industrial design over function and reliability which is ironic given how stupid the magic mouse looks when it's charging.[1] How Jonny Ive green-lit that is beyond me.
Source? Sound interesting!
http://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown-...
http://www.righto.com/2016/03/counterfeit-macbook-charger-te...
> ...years later I found out that the design of the first Kindle charger exactly matched...
So your employer's client was Amazon?
I don't believe they could've reused the design for some other client.
Just an idea, would it be possible to ask suppliers to jack up prices of THT power diodes so price follows forward current rating?
Right now the only incentive they have is to give you a part that just barely won’t break for the absolute cheapest amount.
As a side benefit this would weed out the bad suppliers and the good ones will seek you out.
Obviously still ridiculous when talking about charger safety but it’s important to remember we only see one side of the story here. Who knows what actually happened. I’ve worked with talented EE engineers on the client side complaining about how the contractor fucked up a board layout, wired things up incorrectly, or swapped out for cheaper “equivalent” parts that were out of spec in some incorrect way.
Branded siemens, and ericsson chargers for phones were $100+ circa 2001
If this charging block was from the Kindle, you're looking at significantly higher volume & several years of advances that drive the cost down. Additionally, since everyone has shifted to stock USB chargers, all chargers have gotten drastically cheaper due to scaling. You can buy a wall USB (C or A) charger for a few $ MSRP which means it costs like 20-50 cents for the components that go into it.
Well, technically, once the first one burned out he still had a spare ;)
You should have insisted on current limiting resistors in series :)
On another note, I can see a small business in selling matched pairs of diodes...
Hah but that will make it cost 0.0005 more per unit, can't have that
Indeed, any kind of specialized skills suffer from the same problem, when you want to cut costs.
You can only get what you paid for.
(and I’m not saying paying for is a sufficient guarantee either...).
> He kept insisting on completely bizarre design changes, and ridiculous cost cutting on design like using 2 cheaper through hole diodes in parallel instead of one a cent more expensive (did not believe my ears, the guy failed EE101 right here,) dispensing with NTC inrush limiters, removing safety caps (he did not know what they are for) and asked us to redo the mold 6! times in order to save some grams of plastic per run.
I've seen this happening plenty of times, too. The higher-ups in many consumer (and even non-consumer!) companies are 100% clueless about these things, but they "know" that Chinese OEMs try to "rip you off" on designs, so they will demand their staff to squeeze them (and will promptly fire or replace anyone who dares tell them that a design is actually okay).
So every once in a while one of these smart guys will show up and make completely stupid demands. And explaining someone who doesn't understand basic electrical engineering concepts just why these demands are stupid is completely unproductive -- they don't just lack an understanding of the jargon, they lack an understanding of the most basic concepts. It's akin to trying to explain someone who doesn't know what a for loop is why you're using a hash table in a place where "a simple array would suffice".
Apple is probably the most cargo-culted company out there, after Google maybe. The number of "Steve Jobs wanabes" that I met who didn't have the billions nor the string of successful products behind them was staggering. I have no doubt Tim Cook is cargo-culted as much as Jobs was.
For anyone attempting this, keep in mind he built a team of world class experts around him.
1) Ever year they manage to diligently upgrade iphones/ipads, macbooks and watches.
2) Every year they make some progress in their quest of removing suppliers by becoming vertically integrated. They don't only remove the supplier. They beat their former suppliers specs. (e.g: M1 chip).
3) Every year they make some progress in their quest of generating more revenue from services. They are managing to launch one or two services a year or create a new program that integrates services into attractive bundles.
All those things are incredibly hard operational challenges. Nothing there seems to be easy and some how they manage to always come ahead in delivering that operational excellence.
Watching AMD, NVIDIA, Sony, Microsoft and others struggling so much manufacturing their products, and then having Apple launch: - 2 new Apple Watches - 4 new iPhones - 3 new Macs - Airpods Max - Homepod Mini
All with Apple's own custom designed chips, even relying on the same chip fabs as those other companies, and still managing to mostly avoid the huge shortages that those others have faced is impressive.
It's probably a combination of their operations, logistics, supply networks - their predictable yearly cycles that allows them to plan out further in advance, having higher margin products that allows them to outbid the competition for capacity, etc, etc...
But as someone who did the fight for the new AMD CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, been on the look out for the new Sony console, and bought a new iPhone, Apple Watch & Homepod mini on release - the Apple experience was such a breeze in comparison. It may seem like an odd thing to be impressed by, but with how much everyone else has been struggling - for it to appear to relatively easy for Apple is notable.
I would not be surprised if the other companies are having shortages because of Apple taking up most of the fab capacity and support engineers.
The whole reason why Apple got the advantage and others dont is merely because Apple is willing put down payment, contract obligation and guarantee over number of years. And their volume will dictate how TSMC plan their capacity. Unless other company are willing to place some sort of bet that they will at least buy x millions on x node within the x years. It is not TSMC's duty to second guess everyone of their customers volume and take the risk of empty Fabs with redundant capacity. Fabs are meant to run at near constant Full Capacity. Most so called Supply Chain expert and professionals are being taught JIT without really understanding the purpose of JIT. I dont like the product and strategy direction of Tim Cook, but he is absolutely a genius in Supply Chain and Operation Management.
Edit: And it just so happens there is a news story on JIT from Toyota https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26151072
And after the Qualcomm and Samsung 4G/5G settlement it seems Qualcomm will try to use Samsung Foundry whenever possible. So it should mean more room at TSMC next year.
You know what was the best thing they could've done to the macOS UI? Leave it alone.
This is the first case of this in action that I can remember.
>CUPERTINO, California—November 21, 2005—Apple® today announced that it has reached long-term supply agreements with Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung Electronics and Toshiba to secure the supply of NAND flash memory through 2010. As part of these agreements, Apple intends to prepay a total of $1.25 billion for flash memory components during the next three months.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2005/11/21Apple-Announces-Lon...
Here's a more recent example.
>(Reuters) - Apple Inc on Tuesday said it would award Corning Inc $250 million from a $5 billion fund dedicated to U.S. advanced manufacturing.
In the past, Apple has made long-term supply agreements here with its vendors in which it provides upfront cash to lock in supplies of parts and better prices.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-corning/apple-award...
That's not a problem for TSMC who has plenty of customers for commodity nodes, but it would be a millstone round Apple's neck. They don't want to be in the business of owning a commodity process line used by their competitors.
And apple only really cares about privacy from 3rd parties, not privacy from apple for their customers. They don't E2E encrypt their backups, and many other services, which makes their service operation not very attractive. Why use apple services if it's not going to be private, might as well use the better run or cheaper google or amazon ones at that point.
Most interesting thing so far is the M1.
Iterating hardware is extremely complex.
The internal layout of the phones changes every year and all the supply chain needs to get instructions to get the exact adjustments.
New parts need to be procured. New software needs to be integrated and tested.
Every year there are major software updates that launch new stable OS versions.
Every year your ecosystem evolvez and you have to keep everyone in the loop.
I find mind-blowing how good they are at re-aligning all the pieces after major shifts like form-factors or adding propietary silicon.
It’s even more mind-blowing when you think that they are producing millions of these devices and distributing around the world at key times of the year.
I know for some people it’s hard to see innovation in their year updates. But they need nearly perfect operational coordination to achieve what they do at their scale.
Also apple had your choice key escrow/backup for filevault backups, and it's the default option, which is how you deal with the above issue.
Also a few key things are E2E backed up (keychain, health), so that reason hasn't stopped them before.
1994 DOOM
1996 Quake
1997 Quake 2
1999 Quake 3
2004 Doom 3
2007 Crysis < Phones are here
Easy to answer. Well, it's not the complete answer but I think it's crucial:
Small number of different products.
Think about it, why was the first iPhone so good compared to the competition? On paper, it had a fraction of the competition's features. But as a result, what it did it did so much better.
It's intriguing: they managed to scale their hardware in an impressive way, but software lags so far behind it's not even funny.
I think one area that Apple clearly does excel at though is software features that take advantage of specific hardware features. The fact they design the whole product in sync on both the hardware and software side, without either taking priority by itself is truly unique in the industry. So for example the way the M1 has instructions that accelerate particular operations common on the OSX/iOS software stack, or the computational photography software that works hand in glove with the neural engine hardware.
The fact that apple develops their own developer tools, OS, application software, hardware and even CPUs now is unique in the industry and deep software skills are a really important differentiator. Maybe that side is slipping, but if so that will be a big problem for them down the line.
At the end Windows Phone ended up being tightly integrated to the handsets Microsoft built. And it could run extremely well on hardware considered too light to ever run Android smoothly. But it dropped compatibility for a lot of Windows API surfaces.
Windows has to maintain 25+ years of compatibility in certain areas (and still run software that only exists in compiled blobs, the source having been lost a long time ago by whatever enterprise software shop gone bankrupt).
Android has no excuses however. It's OEM cutting corners and shipping patched kernels and "fixes" for their SoC that's plaguing the whole ecosystem.
They remove the supplier because they beat their specs.
It’s that they are very complex iterative processes that take time to organize and are hard to get right. You can’t just quickly ‘own’ either one. Consider how long the iOS and Android of today took to build, or how long it took Apple to get from the A4 to the M1.
I think you are underestimating how much more expensive an iPhone would be if it was made entirely in the United States:
https://fee.org/articles/a-made-in-america-iphone-would-cost...
The argument I've seen for bringing production closer to home is that it's going to be painful either way so we ought to rip the bandaid off, because every year that we continue the status quo represents more money and market power amassed by other nations on the back of American demand.
There's more to corporate or economic strategy than today's cost of doing business.
Considering that trade relationships are fundamentally asymmetrical (ie, you wouldn't have them if you were self-sufficient in the market segment being traded), I think this is a naive view of the wealth transfer and externalities associated with international trade.
Lastly, free trade doesn’t create a wealth transfer, it creates new wealth for both parties. Chinese assembling iPhones lifted a huge number of Chinese laborers out of rural poverty working in much more physically demanding and dangerous jobs at a fraction of the pay. A significant part of Apples market share, market cap, and tens of thousands of US iOS developer jobs are owed to cheaper iPhones enabled by Chinese labor.
The only time “wealth transfer” occurs is when free trade breaks down a monopoly. Like if we ended sugar tariffs, the wealth would be transferred from certain politically connected families in Florida, to US consumers and foreign workers.
The US perceives China as an ideologically incompatible competition at a political level and wants to work with India. That's pretty much it.
The danger is if China has a monopoly on know-how, i.e. if it's not a "commodity". But that doesn't seem to be the case.
However, one day, the iphone will be "good enough", and customers won't pay extra for further innovations... and unless other product lines or new ones (glasses? cars? others?) catch fire, Apple will settle down to become like Sony.
Loyal Apple fans and customers really like to identify with these principles.
Apple does this really well and most Chinese companies are transactional in nature and have been adversely affected by many political and humanitarian issues that are part of their ethos.
What has Apple done to promote racial equality beyond the same vague performative gestures as every other major Western corporation?
Working with actual genocidal governments is fine though, I mean it's what you say that matters, not what you do.
I wish Samsung used that fact in their marketing, I think it would really play well.
Samsung may feel that it’s risky to trade on that name in the U.S. market.
The fact is nobody even tries to do the level of integration between software and hardware that Apple does. It's hard to compete with an opponent when you don't understand what they are doing, or why they are doing it, or why it works and it's very clear their competitors don't understand any of those things.
As long as the competition sit on their hands following the 'theoretically' ideal business 101 commodification strategy, which hasn't worked for 40 years now, it will continue to not work. But here we are, generations of business managers at Apple's competitors have come and gone and the wait them out strategy keeps losing.
Perhaps similar to silicon valley, with investors and many kinds of skilled labour, all in one place.
If the supply chains can move across the ocean once then surely they can move back again.
Brand, marketing, product strategy, product marketing, industrial design, ui design, millions of lines of code which is all part of design, massive retail distribution chains both direct and indirect, massive loyal userbase, millions of developers, massive supply chain - and the ope rationalizing of all of that.
China is not competing very well in many of those things.
China's advantages are starting to look like working capital , the factories, the labour, and the local supply chain - which is much more advantageous for lower end products but it's still a price advantage more than anything.
I was in the drugstore - there were over 20 different kinds of electric toothbrushes. 20 kinds! I will buy 1 and maybe, maybe another some time in my life. That's a rough business, as is almost everything in hardware.
The 'high end stuff' is not necessarily going to be China. It could, but not necessarily.
https://www.dxomark.com/rankings/
I remember back in the day "Made in Taiwan" or "Made in Japan" was considered a joke and mark of cheap products. That changed fast and to assume the same thing won't happen again with China is a mark of Western arrogance IMO.
Also the whole made in China panic is overblown. Most of the value in the parts in an iPhone is sourced outside China. CPUs in Taiwan (used to be Texas), flash memory in Korea, Japan and the US, camera module in Japan, Gorilla Glass in Kentucky, Japan and Korea etc, etc. Final assembly is only worth a few bucks per phone. It's fighting over scraps.
I just don't see how reversing the relationship - design and software in China, final assembly in the US, is going to benefit the US all that much.
If the risk is seen as China particularly, they only do the lowest value lowest skilled work. Pretty much by definition that's the easiest to relocate. Samsung does most of it's phone manufacturing in Vietnam. Apple has assembly lines in Brazil and India. Yes they're vulnerable to short term pain, but even the recent trade war didn't come even close to the kind of massive economic death struggle that would lead to cutting off access to basic manufacturing. If we end up in an actual war, we'll have more to worry about than not getting the latest iPhone for a few years.
This is a supply issue with silicon/electronics in general. At this point, it would be more of a disaster for any country to lose access to electronics than to oil. I'm not sure where you heard that manufacturing electronics is low skill, but I definitely don't agree.
The point is that there's no difference between the US and some country that has oil resources but no refining capacity. We can dig silicon out of the ground but we can't make anything with it.
The other thing you may be failing to consider is automation. If another economy gets there first, they won't be just building chips. If you're afraid of China becoming the fastest at bringing technology ideas to market, we are already there. And not just some ridiculously useless SV "x but for uber" product. A real piece of reality that turns on and can perform work.
This is even before you get into the national security argument about a trustable supply chain.
I think the flash used to be made in China for a while, but the fancy new stuff is South Korea (Samsung) and Japan (Toshiba). The camera modules are made by Sony in Japan. The CPUs are TSMC in Taiwan. Back in the early years over 40% of the value in the Bill of Materials of an iPhone was made in the USA, including the CPUs by Samsung in Texas, Gorilla Glass by Corning in NY state, I forget all the rest, only about 10% of the cost of manufacture was added in China. It’s probably a bit more now.
China is behind on leading edge integrated circuits.[1] However, China can manufacture a computer from entirely Chinese parts.[2] America cannot manufacture a computer from entirely American parts.
China not only made plans for a 100% domestically produced computer, they have already achieved it.
We don't even have plans.
[1] https://semiengineering.com/china-speeds-up-advanced-chip-de... [2] https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1193625.shtml
Tim Cook builds the supply chain that he wants for himself, his shareholders and coworkers. He pushes for out of the box ideas while scrutinizing every detail of the supply chain, optimizes and repeats.
Tim Cook builds supply chain the way Jobs built for consumers. Jobs needed customer insight, creativity and societal foresight. Instead to make product decisions Cook has a giant user base to "A/B test" (between different phone models/features every quarter), he can afford to wait/purchase/curate good ideas rather than use foresight, and purchase creativity and ingenuity.
Apple no longer needs another Steve Jobs at the throne, they have access to hire two generations of the global population "raised by" and trying to emulate Steve Jobs while having the skills and 90% the talent of Woz. Apple today needs a master of execution that has a willingness to find the right new talent and give them a supply chain platform like never before seen. e.g. If you're talented in CPU and GPU development, where do you want to work in 2021/2022? Cook's supply chain optimization for A1 and M1 has made Apple one of the top three players in the industry. If as a developer, you want to re-think the need for a motherboard, or how to best integrate a Modem with the CPU (maybe a GPU/Neural Net enhanced storage/network card?), there is only one company you can go to right now to build that creative dream. Cook can leverage that creativity and ingenuity to delight customers while pushing like crazy on the supply chain.
Recent quote from Elon Musk: "Every company will soon have EVs. Every company will also have Autonomous driving. But no other company will be able to out compete Tesla at manufacturing." Similarly, Amazon Retails' newest CEO Dave Clark used to head the supply chain logistics. Clearly Apple's board, Amazon's board and Tesla's board all focused on the same thing, supply chain and logistics, imply there is some clear long term customer and shareholder value about it.
Telsa is even more fantasy to believe Ford, VW, or Toyota will never be able to out compete them in manufacturing. Ohh sweet child.....
Tesla is a niche product catering to a small subset of Auto buyers. As other manufacturer ramp up their EV lines it will be clear that Telsa is not going to take over this market.
For example in the US the standard Pickup Truck is still the most popular vehicle, Tesla's "Cyber Truck" as no chance of unsetting the F150 for that title, and F150 Electric will be out in 2022/2023 and most likely will be the fastest selling EV in the US
and it will be interesting to see how the Mach-E does against Tesla
Tesla never produced any ventilators. They bought basically CPAP machines from China. And my current google says as of October, their partnership w/ Medtronics to produce ventillators never materialized. As of October, they're going to help Medtronic build a single part. A single part...9 months after Covid...Not impressed.
Meanwhile, GM & Ford turned around and produced ventilators for our National Strategic Stockpile.
https://www.tesmanian.com/blogs/tesmanian-blog/medtronic-par...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tesla-ventilator-c...
The US now is full of product people who build overseas. While it's currently economically smart, it's a race to the bottom which eventually ends in completely foreign owned companies eating your lunch. It will be interesting to see how and if countries counter this eventuality.
I don't know the current BOM, but for most of it's history more of the value in the components in an iPhone was actually manufactured in the US than in China. Gorilla Glass in New York state, flash memory in Kentucky, the CPUs used to be made by Samsung in Texas. Final assembly is only a few bucks.
A friend of mine here in the UK said the same ting to me a few years ago, his 6 year old boy was playing nearby so I asked him. Which would you prefer for your son, a job in design or software, or a job on an assembly line?
For example with the M1 they didn’t just make a CPU they made an SOC that reduces the need for a heatsink and all the supply chain costs that go with it.
If it were a simple one to one swap, without other efficiency improvements, I agree there is no incentive to take over that responsibility.
This is the reason I feel people are betting Tesla to get an outsized pie of the EV market even when the legacy OEMs catch up. When Tesla started manufacturing things in-house, folks were rightly skeptical about their manufacturing capabilities and their stupid refusal to rely on the automobile supply chain. The stubborn insistence to vertically integrate nearly killed the company.
Now that it has a market cap several times its nearest competitor, it can raise enough capital to focus on capital efficiency of new manufacturing plants to scale up production. In their battery day video, that's what impressed me the most - they have control over every cost center in their supply chain, and can optimize for quicker/cheaper manufacturing much faster than anyone else.
In some aspects, Tesla completely reversed Cook's playbook, and might even succeed at it if demand for Teslas remains high for the next decade or two.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/24/tesla-lags-auto-industry-in-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2020/11/19/tesla-reli...
While I appreciate that it's exceptionally difficult to build an automobile manufacturing and supply chain from scratch, let's not pretend they've somehow overtaken conventional auto companies and that's why their stock price is high.
Given the disproportionate share price when considering comparable EV sales, I'd say TSLA market cap is a function of the MDF - the Musk Distortion Field - rather than actual tangibles.
That's not to say the two are completely disconnected. The MDF explains why TSLA doesn't spend a cent on advertising, which obviously boosts margins.
Much as I respect Steve Jobs’ innovations, I tend to agree. As others have pointed out (though I can’t remember who or where), the iPad and iPhone marked an end point in several decades of advances in personal computing. A thin flat tablet that you operate with one finger! And it listens and talks and sees!
Whenever I have read people lamenting the lack of similar revolutionary advances under Tim Cook—and I have lamented that lack myself—I have wondered what exactly those advances might be. While something may be lurking ahead in the AI/health/direct-brain-interface space, I don't blame Cook for not having taken us there yet.
For all his personal flaws Steve Jobs was all about innovation and didn't mind risking the company to achieve it.
Now Apple is in a stronger position than ever financially but it must the drive to innovate right now at any cost. It was really what made Apple great IMO.
Other smartphone companies are “innovating” with many failed attempts. Apple gets to avoid the failures, refine the feature and deliver successfully.
“Playing catch up” isn’t an issue because Apple can bring any Android feature (hardware or software) to the iPhone in 2-3years.
For example the Swipe keyboard. I needed to wait a few years to get it after I switched from Android to iPhone, but I didn’t mind too much. Meanwhile, thank goodness my phone doesn’t currently fold and break right now. I’m happy to have a folding phone when the tech is 10x better.
well, that explains why the iPhone went from such a unique design to generic plastic android. Glad the 5-esque design is back for the 12 series at least.
The mini I cannot.
Unfortunately that’s not what happened.
iPhone 4: 115.2 x 58.6 x 9.3 mm or 62.781 cm^3
iPhone SE: 138.4 x 67.3 x 7.3 mm or 67.994 cm^3
iPhone 12 mini: 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.4 mm or 62.473 cm^3
[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP587?locale=en_US
And that is part of the reason why you see lots more leaks from Supply Chain in post iPhone 4 era.
Both product lines seem much healthier now - last year's redesign of the iPhones was solid and the watch looks much more attractive with all of the health features.
I'm still using a 6 as my daily phone, which means my phone is closer in generation to the original iPhone that it is to the latest one. I wish the (equally expensive) android phones I use at work had anywhere near that longevity.
1. Upgrade to the latest version, which makes the iPhone slower (arguably intentionally).
2. Don't upgrade, but many apps require an updated iOS version to install, so you won't be able to install/update your apps anymore.
Since there's no third party app store, older iphones are just doomed to die slowly. I have a 4s and downgraded as soon as I could to iOS 5. The os is faster but I can install very few apps.
I agree that some of the flagship iPhones since the iPhone 6 have had less unique designs, but what are you describing as "generic plastic android?" None of the flagship iPhones after the iPhone 3GS have had any significant exterior plastic. Are you talking about the iPhone 5C? I'm pretty sure that's the only one that ever had a plastic enclosure.
The iPhone 4 through 5s felt like luxury devices.
The glass back panel on my 4s was totally* impractical. I was afraid to set the phone down on any rough surface, afraid the glass would crack, smudges were now something to avoid on two surfaces instead of just one.
And I liked it and I miss it.
* Well, okay: one practical advantage of the glass back is how secure it felt in my hand. Fingertips don't slip on glass like they do on a matte metal surface.
IMO, the 4 and 4S are still the nicest designs in the iPhone lineup.
Something you use 8 hours a day should first of all be pleasant to use and reduce the risk of long term damage to your wrist (carpal tunnel syndrome or similar).
I've never found the Magic Mouse uncomfortable to use. I generally use a trackpad anyway. I value that it's portable, looks nice, and works great with OS X. To each their own.
Look at the “puck“ for example.
I should better describe it as "controlled-flicking": kinetic energy is imparted onto the mouse via the fingers - not the palm - but the mouse never loses finger contact.
Do you not type with your right hand?
I think their argument for the charging port on the bottom is because they didn't want people to be able to use it plugged in (so people wouldn't just leave it plugged in), it was intentional.
“We were going to put that model into a box so people wouldn’t see it.” Farag said.
Jobs darted right for the unfinished one saying, “That’s genius…We don’t want to have any buttons,” according to Farag.
As one would expect, someone from the design team quickly jumped up and agreed with Jobs as if that was one of the options all along."
https://www.techspot.com/news/55958-how-a-misunderstanding-w...
As far as not thinking about a button to click - that only works if the idea of 'right-click' doesn't exist. In the real world where it does now you just have to know to control-click, which seems strictly worse.
> As far as not thinking about a button to click - that only works if the idea of 'right-click' doesn't exist.
Well, when you adjust your timeline back to when that first one-button mouse came out in 1984, one can argue whether the idea of right-click as we know it today really existed! There were multi-button mice already, but there wasn't any standardization as to what the buttons did, so Apple's insistence on "there is just one button and it does THE THING" was at least defensible. And IIRC early versions of Windows pretty much ignored anything but the left button, although applications could receive clicks from them. I'm pretty sure the "right-click for a context menu" idea that's become standard today actually started with OS/2.
> In the real world where it does now you just have to know to control-click, which seems strictly worse.
Or you could just right-click. :) Every mouse Apple has sold since 2005 supports right-clicking (and OS X actually supported right-clicking from the start if you plugged in somebody else's mouse!). Their trackpads lets you click with two fingers for a right-click effect.
Fair point that when this started the right click menu wasn’t super established. That said, at some point it was, probably more than 20 years ago.
Today the Magic Mouse supports right click, but is still a bad mouse in my (and many others) opinion. It’s form over function. The Magic Trackpad is great though.
I’m about as big an Apple fan as exists so this isn’t some tribal argument. It’s just not a good design and I think they do it because multi-click mice look ugly. They pretend it’s for other reasons with some rationalized explanation, but in the mouse case I don’t think it is.
Big retailers don't like Bluetooth mouses because they have huge returns from them.
Usually they will place a few unconspiciously in the corner, but otherwise give most of shelf space to non-bt mouses.
Why so? People can't freaking press the PAIR button, even if you slap a big red sticker on it.
This is also the reason retailers insist on having batteries inserted into the mouse at factory, or have internal batteries charged to full before shipping.
They are getting ridiculous.
I like MX mouses better, but none of the mice on the market has... horizontal scrolling. Horizontal, true, scrolling.
The Mac didn't support context menus (control-click) until MacOS 8 in 1997 (13 years after the original Mac), and even then it was solely for shortcuts, and never for required functionality (unlike on Windows where some apps locked features behind that button)
All Apple input devices sold today support an alternative click (two finger tap on touch devices)
I can imagine customers using the wireless mouse with the cable attached is something that would grind Steve's gears as well. Preventing the situation with a flipped tortoise design is a Steve thing to do.
You say this as if it's absolutely typical of Steve Jobs. I read it and think exactly the opposite. Jobs was certainly a stickler for aesthetics, but also for usability. I've read numerous accounts of him lashing out when he found a workflow noticeably frustrating.
What decisions made during Jobs's tenure would you consider comparable to the Magic Mouse's charging port?
* The mouse supports fast charging - 2mins on the charger gives you all day use.
* A full charge will give you more than 2mo of battery life - nearly 3.
* In 24 months, you will have to put it on the charger between 6 and 8 times TOTAL.
With that context, the design makes perfect sense for a wireless mouse.
I tried a wireless keyboard once and every 10 minutes it would hang and repeat the last key I pressed for 10 seconds. How much better is the situation today?
I started using Apple wireless peripherals over a decade ago and haven’t experienced anything like what you describe once. I remember PC peripherals doing that kind of thing in the 90s though, back before everything switched to Bluetooth and everything used proprietary IR dongles etc.
Their keyboards got progressively worse as well.
Another great example was the iBooks that soaked up skin oils and became gross and disgusting.
During Jobs's tenure? The 2010-era Apple Bluetooth Keyboard is actually my favorite keyboard to type on. I'm currently using one I tracked down on eBay after my original finally broke.
> Another great example was the iBooks that soaked up skin oils and became gross and disgusting.
That's a long term problem. It's not the same type of general workflow issue that Jobs was really good at identifying.
Ugh. I absolutely hated that keyboard. Felt like tapping on a slab of granite all day long.
He's using the design to make you use it wirelessly (the way he wants). You're not supposed to use it like a normal mouse. The fact people moan about this would even make him more sure about it..
Also it came out back when and he probably saw it and approved it
The real issue is the horrible sensor and tracking. It is absolutely unusable as a mouse.
* PA Semi, 2008 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
* Licensing then hiring most of the Imagination Technologies GPU engineers, including setting up an office down the street from them in St Albans, 2017-2020.
* some of Dialog Semiconductor, 2018
* Intel's smartphone division, 2019
* Intrinsity, who had some cutting edge chip design, 2010
There's also an unbelievable ton of photography, micro-display, motion capture, ar, computer vision companies they've acquired. They're plucking up 3-5 promising talented players a year in terms of microminiature sensors/displays/optics.
Apple, the most exciting, gigantic, talent-acquiring behemoth that capital has ever given rise to. They do deserve accolades for doing great work, yes. But I also just am so very very sad to see so much talent disappear off the open market, distressed that the lead seems to only grow & grow over everyone else. At least if these engineers were working at Qualcomm or MediaTek the fruits of the labor could be shared, but Apple has total iron claims on their chips. It's imbalanced as it is, & Apple seems to have all the money & all the power to keep tipping.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
All that talent was up for grab: What were the other players waiting for?
Note: I'm not judging that analysis, just trying to refine the interpretation.
That's exactly the problem with monopolies. As one two or three companies get to be ever more outsized giants (Apple: 2.2T$, Amazon & Microsoft: 1.6T$), owning more of the talent pool, there's less other players with any chance to build up success, to acquire talent.
People can keep making small, successfully-acquired companies, but this idea that it's everyone elses fault for not challenging the monopoly is not a statement I'm very sympathetic to.
Monopolies have nothing to do with this.
All that happened is that Apple made better investments than their potential competitors.
The best way to put it is it's the difference between designing an AK-47, and designing a battleship. Most techies look at things, and assume they're like a AK-47; if the big players don't use it, DIY guys can still home-craft their own AKs and it'll have a profound impact on the world. But with many of these sorts of tech firms that are getting acquired, if they aren't actually having their stuff used by one of the big guys, it may as well not exist. If you design a battleship, and there's not a nation-state interested in building it, despite having what may be an excellent design, you've got ... nothing. Nobody can DIY that like they can a design for a rifle.
A very good analogy here would be graphics cards. If I come up with a software innovation, like a new rendering technology, it's viable for anyone to slot into a game engine somewhere and play with. If I come up with a new hardware design, and it doesn't get applied by one of the actual hardware vendors out there, it may as well not exist.
It's not like these people had their work stolen -- they were compensated!! Presumably quite well.
So, you're a fan of a free market, where free is defined as whatever direction Apple wants to go. Got it. Free for Apple to do as they please.
I don't know if there's quite "consensus", but definitely one of the top 3 greatest, most important events in all computing was the Gang of Nine taking & extending IBM's AT Compatible bus to build the new, intercompatible ISA[1] bus. It took the fractured, proprietary world of microcomputers by storm, savaged many great company, by creating a genuine open market for personal computers. It commodified the system, allowed anyone to compete & to deliver peripherals & changes & innovations. The Gang of Nine freed a locked down proprietary computing market. Without their actions, we might not be typing on laptops, we might not have smartphones today. They freed the market. Innovation churned greatly, because there was so much going on, so much creativity, so many different things being tried.
Today, only a very very few have the power to shape things. There are only two major smartphone OSes on the planet. There are only a couple scrappy hopefuls about, intent on freeing the market from this stagnancy, from everyone being on the same OSes for the entire next decade too: folks like Pine64, who are building a Linux PinePhone project, who are building great low cost open source dev boards, who are building DIY low-bandwidth long-distance LoRaWAN[2].
Society needs to support healthy competitive free market innovation. Simply measuring how quickly one company is free to do whatever it wants, how quickly it can iterate, is not enough. All great events in computing, the modern saga of computing as we know it, came from a genuine freedom to explore & tinker with what might be possible. Leaving Tim Cook in charge of this human project is drastically against the human spirit of liberty & progress, and there's no good in computing that has ever come from these kinds of totalizing powers, extreme vertical integration, & closed systems. These players have always ended up ossifying, off in some crystal palace they've built themselves, direly needing to be disrupted. Being free from competition, alone in your innovating, is a tragedy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...
What other definition of free do you suggest?
The companies and employees they hired also had the freedom to reject the offers if they so chose. Freedom is consent.
As an aside, using the ISA bus as an example of the benefits of open systems is ... Kinda weird. ISA busses were open, but the remainder of the systems tended to be clones of a proprietary system, and they "took the world by storm" by snowballing on the success of said proprietary system.
PCs didn't only become successful after ISA created an open market for peripheral cards -- that enabled a slew of companies to expand and profit on an existing demand for PC compatibles running DOS/Windows.
Where is AT&T defining the market today?
Where is General Motors in the world of operating systems today, despite being an early licensee of UNIX?
Ditto Intrinsity.
Except these companies had a massive headstart over Apple, and failed to deliver. Furthermore Qualcomm generally act to suppress innovation through patents.
Apple's competitors believe this, they aren't about to invest millions on these small technical innovations and improvements that by themselves are incredibly niche. Instead Apple brings these incremental innovations, which otherwise would be relegated to specialist parts if they survived at all, to hundreds of millions of customers all over the world. If Apple hadn't done this the chances these advanced technologies would be in so many people's hands right now would be close to nil.
If it didn't get forcibly put into people's hands, it probably would have died on the vine.
One of the things apple's always understood is the idea of "across-the-board" availability. Take some specialist part, like, oh, say, a mouse, or a sound card, and make it so that all of your machines ship with it, period. It's the new "lowest common denominator". We had mice back in the DOS/Apple II era; good mice, even, it's just that nobody wrote anything that supported them (outside of a few specialist apps like some art programs), because only a few really rare people had them.
When apple made the mac, they'd learned this lesson, and made it mandatory - this is actually why they initially refused to put a CLI into the thing, even though their own MPW dev tools had one: they wanted to make it more difficult to do cheapass ports of stuff like VisiCalc than it would be to build a new, gui-based program to solve the same problem from scratch. (Amongst other things, this open-field helped a certain company launch a new gui-based spreadsheet app called Excel, which has done rather well for itself.)
I find that people often seem to read strong personalities as sort of autocratic by default, even if they're not. Often when in those situations I've had to explain to coworkers that "No, he wasn't shooting you down, that was your chance to explain further / show him more."
Guy Kawasaki described it as, Jobs was so confident he brought a guy into Apple who took the company away from him. He was so full of himself it was impossible for him to be in any way threatened by capable subordinates no matter HOW good they were: he'd just bully them and be mercurial and try to get their maximum performance out of them.
So in a sense, it was all the other people. Not him.
And in another sense, it took a very unusual person to be able to do that, and be constantly outclassed, and not begin to act defensively. There's a cost to it: Apple was doing the Newton way way before there were cellphones and such. Jobs wasn't that wise, just impossibly audacious, and as such he did manage to operate a team of exceptional people. He wasn't the team, but as far as a leader being the leader, he was about as intense as Gordon Ramsay, and absolutely he let the people around him shine: to him, that WAS him looking good.
And it wouldn't make you safe from criticism for even five minutes, but he did love it when people around him were great. Jobs was the 'A players hire A players. B players hire C players. You hired THAT GUY?' manager. He not only expected people around him to excel, he literally demanded it.
I'm from the midwest. When I worked my first 'real job' I worked with some folks from the east coast. They could be very blunt and harsh to my Midwestern ears.
Right until I realized that when they speak to you that way they're really engaging you and seeing if you'll respond in kind in order to demonstrate how certain you are about what you said.
The right words with the right emphasis and it was all "Well Tom seems to think..." and they're on board with you.
Took me like 12 months to figure that out, that and them kinda hassling me was a sign of respect ;)
The problem is knowing what is right, and that is exactly the strength of Steve. Often by intuition, and some by experience where he made mistakes and he quickly correct. And right now the designed by committee seems to be lacking the latter attribute.
Tim Cook is also much more focused on Revenue and Profits with their Strategy. Steve is much more product based.
Microsoft struggles with it as well, it's not something their enterprise customers are asking for.
And Foxconn have been told to bring up Apple supply lines in India.
No wonder, Bloomber is one of very, very, very few Western media operating in China through a franchise agreement.
In the past I have found Bloomberg pretty impartial on China, with good criticism and analysis of China's policies.
It’s not hard to leave China. It’s hard to leave China for the US.
I hope between Tim Cook's and Michael Bloomberg's successors we can finally invent the technology to make that work as expected
The terrible official biography of him actually notices that he was better the second time around and totally ignores it, but this is the reason.
I was looking for deeper analysis of what made Steve Jobs' tick, and how he approached building products. Walter Isaacson didn't have a technological understanding of Apple's products of the time, so I found his history pretty superficial.
I learned much more about Steve Jobs approach from listening to the interviews he did over the years.
https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball...
TLDR: When the visionary CEO (Gates, Jobs) leaves, a guy from operations (Ballmer, Cook) gets promoted to CEO, and keeps doing what he does best, operate and keep profits climbing.
When the next CEO (Nadella, ?) comes, there can be focus on innovation again.