Edit: typo
But you know what Tim Cook didn’t do? He didn’t screw it all up. Which sounds like faint praise, but I really think it’s inarguable that Jobs remade Apple, stem to stern, blood to bone, software to hardware. And to step in and take over a company that had been reborn like that, and not nickel-and-dime it into mediocrity? Remarkable.
I don’t think anyone is really arguing Cook is a product visionary—I certainly don’t think Cook is himself. But just navigating the political landscape alone is truly impressive.
In the 70s, components were expensive and thus the market was mainframes and big company sales, so required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could be average (like IBM, HP).
In the early 80s, components were getting cheap enough to be affordable by regular people, so a product leader was needed to define the personal computing sector, as the product could not be average (not Commodore, TI, or IBM PC).
In the late 80s - 90s, commoditization meant it was about capturing the value of the personal computing sector, so it required a sales leader to extract the most, and the product could just be average (like Windows, beige PCs).
In the late 90s - 00s, it became cheap enough to start internet companies at scale and opened up an entire market, so it required product leaders to define the core internet offerings of cloud, social media, search, and ecommerce, and the product couldn't be average (not Yahoo, Myspace, or co-lo ISPs).
In the mid 00s, components were getting small & powerful enough, so it required a product leader to define the mobile computing sector, and the product couldn't be average (not Nokia, Blackberry, Win Phone).
In the 10s - now, with mobile and internet now defined, it required sales leaders to extract the most and the product could be average (like Android).
Jobs was a success when product vision was necessary (early 80s, late 90s-00s), and a failure when it was not (late 80s-90s).
Ballmer was a success when sales/extraction was necessary (90s) but a failure when it was not (the 00s), as I consider not leveraging a leading market position into multiple adjacent trillion dollar business sectors a failure.
Cook has been a success for the past decade because the market really needed someone to execute well on the things that were just defined (mobile devices). According to the above theory, it should have been the decade of Android, but Apple's execution has been so much more competent than Google's that they ran away with it.
I agree. However, he is a master at providing the infrastructure and logistics to make other people realise their vision. And he does have a long-term plan.
The scale and efficiency of Apple’s operations, as well as their continued success is mind boggling. There have been a couple of hiccups every now and then (and some tours de force as well); overall it is quite impressive.
It reminds me of Macs back in the 90’s. Very few used Windows for creative work. The MacOS had ColorSync and professionals in photography and print, publishing, etc refused to use anything but a Mac due to the need for colour accuracy in their workflows. To an outsider it may have seemed baffling as to why these computers were considered professional tools when everyone else in business was using Windows.
I perhaps don’t see the Pro in iPad Pro because I am wanting it to basically be a Mac, but tablet. Maybe it is truly an orthogonal product that does pro work differently. But the software story just still feels incomplete. Just feels so limiting in terms of file system and such.
The iPad Pro is a pro device for creative professionals in visual arts only, to my knowledge. It’s definitely not a pro software development tool or anything else of the sort we’d use a Mac for. In some sense you can think of the iPad Pro as an attack on Wacom’s market.
I’m not a creative pro by any stretch of the imagination. I use my iPad Pro for tutoring people remotely in mathematics, a task it excels at. I also play some games on it and use it for FaceTime calls because its front-facing camera is nicer than the one on my M1 MBA.
I’m really happy with my iPad Pro even though I was hesitant about buying one for over a year. I was expecting buyers’ remorse to set in but it thankfully hasn’t. I keep finding new things to do with it. Scrolling through PDFs on the device is way smoother than the MBA, for example, so I’ve used it as a second screen for reading documentation while working.
(I will note my college illustration professor loves her iPad Pro with a passion that would fill an Apple keynote—she ditched her Wacom instantly.)
But though I’m iffy on the Pro in iPad, I am pro iPad, if only because my somewhat elderly parents love the thing. They are like some Platonic ideal of iPad users—they have totally and completely ditched their Mac, and do all their banking and medical records and weather (old people love weather) on their iPad, with a fluency they never, ever came close to achieving with a mouse.
Folks on HN have a strong tendency to label any computer-thing not serving that last use case, for which the iPad Pro is it no help at all, as a toy or "just a consumption device" (not saying you are, but it's a common sentiment on here). It's a kind of occupation-induced blindness, I think.
Oh I am 100% guilty of that, and I admit that. I have been using Photoshop in some capacity since 1994, and I am 37 years old. So that “teeny tiny click targets and lots of keyboard chording” is just baked into the interaction homunculus in my head. It is admittedly difficult to for me to think of an iPad as a “Pro” tool.
A blind spot I am working on, but once you get to be my age, you get set in your ways. You kids and your TikTok…
I pay $2.99 a month for 200GB of iCloud, and what I get in return is a folder on my desktop which is shared between phone, tablet, and laptop. It "just works", I have no complaints. I'd be paying that money anyway just to back up my photos.
The other way of doing things is the 'share' button, and when it works, it's really great. Sometimes it doesn't, because the app I want to use next hasn't registered itself properly or something, so I have to use Save to Files as a fallback. Which is fine and has never failed me.
I get that.
But.
Having used many iPads, my favorite sizes are the 12.9" (Pro) and the Mini.
Why (for the pro—I trust my love of the mini needs little explanation)?
The 12.9" is so big that it's about the size of an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, which turns out to be a really convenient size for reading anything based on... paper. It's outstanding for reading PDFs of, say, textbooks, as it's large enough you might be able to get away with reading it in landscape, and is the best device I'm aware of for reading comics (ditto on the landscape mode, it works great, it's just a little smaller than a real two-page comic book spread). Yet it's light enough not to be a giant pain to hold.
It's amazing for art (with a Pencil). Nice and big, very responsive. The larger screen makes almost anything you'd do on a normal iPad a little better. Movies, browsing, games. Low-distraction writing device with an external keyboard. It's a great companion for music where, again, the larger size is really nice for displaying sheet music or... well, almost anything else music-related you want to do. Last I checked the cameras & mics beat the hell out of most laptops, including Apple ones, for video calls.
Know what it's very close in size to? A 13" MBP or Air. Know what it can do? Become a portable external monitor for same. Damn nice.
2-player board games. Again, the size helps a ton.
My personal uses barely call for all the extra horsepower of the "pro" line, actually, aside from maybe drawing (which, AFAIK, has more to do with specialized hardware on the screen than with CPU power or memory) but holy crap, the screen size. It's glorious. If I could have only one computing device in my house I'd seriously consider making it the 12.9" iPad Pro (assuming I could keep my mechanical bluetooth keyboard, too). I can always SSH/Mosh to a unixy command line somewhere else, but none of my unixy machines are much good for most of what I use the iPad Pro for.
Of course, the Mac is some insignificant portion of the Apple's footprint these days, but I have to say their mobile offerings have been kind of a yawn too. Don't get me wrong, perfectly competent, no need to switch or anything, but iPod to iPhone happened in 6 years (!), and I don't think the Apple Watch is anywhere near that level of consistent culture defining technology that kind of defined "the spirit of Apple" from the original iMac to the iPhone (I'd like to say "to the iPad", but unfortunately the product has been kind relegated to a side purchase vs. the Mac-replacement I think it honestly had the opportunity to be -- and I guess could still be, its not like any "window" has been missed, just hasn't really done much in the last 10 years either, in terms of definitive changes in workflow like the iPhone did).
As a customer, the subscription stuff is honestly just somewhere between boring and annoying. "Apple One" with its 3 different plans and still tremendously confusing options (if I let my parents have access to the movies I've purchased, they can no longer buy their own movies -- what? why? It's strictly more profitable for Apple to let them ALSO use their credit card instead of locking them out of being able to make their own purchases just because I shared my content). Honestly, I have to strain really hard to remember what "Apple One" includes aside from Apple TV+. Oh right, News or something? The ability to not get annoying iCloud space errors that users remain not fully comprehending?
Now, flip that around, and investor-wise, you are spot on! I am LONG $AAPL, just short Apple products (software specifically). Which is unfortunate, because they are still probably the best, just no longer... "good". It used to feel like a premium experience, for a premium price, now just the latter.
Apple can be seen as an excellent MBA course in operations, as probably to be expected. I'm not going to say Steve was a all knowing genius, but it's a pretty dang smart move to put someone in place who will put the company on such firm economical footing while you wait for your next big thing (person) to emerge from the organization.
> Those keyboards were really bad, and not everyone has the ability to just swap them out with the new fancy computers coming out now, so many will be feeling them for some time to come.
The butterfly keyboards are the only laptop keyboards made to date that I can type on for a full day. So speak for yourself: long may I be “stuck” with mine.
They are doing well in hardware and services. Software, not so much. Design they have gone downhill.
I mean, maybe compared to Apple 2011. But compared to Microsoft 2021, Google 2021, Linux 2021, Android 2021, HP 2021, Lenovo 2021, Dell 2021? They're definitely on top.
Which ain’t exciting, but, the rotting corpse of Compaq over there in the corner stands as warning of what could have been.
Ups and downs. The M1 iMac is very interesting. I am not sure I love it but it is encouraging to see some more playful design and new approaches.
Seems Jobs was bang on with wanting Tim Cook as his successor.
Oh yes. Jobs could be stubborn and did make mistakes every now and then. The first iMac mouse was another ergonomic and reliability disaster.
Under Jobs, they would regularly create whole new categories and concepts of technology and revolutionize others. I don't recall it happening since; they capitalize on everything that was created under Jobs (and do it well).
I think if we peeled back the facade, we can begin to see that it's been an operations play since Jobs died, and though the M1 is pretty dang amazing, what probably brought it over the line is the insane profit margins and 'upcylcing' Mac sales for folks having a M1 vs M3, etc...
But as everyone here has said - it could have been worse.
In a sense, they are diluting their products.
Remember the apocryphal story that when Jobs came back to Apple, he split a whiteboard into four quadrants and listed just one product in each?
Now Apple has several dozen products. And each category is anywhere from 1 to 4 different products often with differences so minor as to not make any sense (iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12 Pro Max, the difference is slight size increase and cameras, that's it; or iPhone 12 Pro vs iPhone 12; there are four different iPads; etc.)
Apple looks like it's trying to cover every niche, and often does that semi-satisfactorily.
Slightly tangential: they've completely dropped the ball on MacOS software side: there hasn't been a good software release from them literally for years. The only exception is the new Messages in BigSur, and they spent untold hours in close collaboration with the Catalyst team to make it work. Almost every other new first-party app from Apple on MacOS for years has been an unmitigated disaster that has never seen a designer in a vicinity and that breaks any version of Apple's own HIG guidelines.
That said, it could've been much much much worse. So, count our blessings :)
He showed that during keynotes (I remember he used that to unveil the first iBook).
The situation then was a bit different, though. Apple needed to be much more focused and had fewer resources to throw at new devices. They also needed a clean break from the past and could not start from scratch 10 different product lines. But Jobs himself did away with the 2x2 matrix, for example with the eMac and the Cube. The 12’’, 15’’, and 17’’ PowerBooks used the same name, but the differences were more significant than between the various iPhones 12.
You got me until this point ngl
Sure, the accessoires and e.g ram are steeply overpriced
14 years later: base iMac has two ports (three more + ethernet will cost you $200).
Not that it's lousy, but it's definitely stripped down.
Examples
- first iPhone doesn’t support MMS
- cut the headphone plug in new iPhones
- stop supporting Adobe Flash
- load apps through the App Store only in iOS
Abandonment of the floppy drive.
Abandonment of the CD drive.
Abandonment of Firewire.