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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

Something that baffles me about modern business is that Apple is far and away the most valuable company in the world, they’re phenomenally profitable, they’ve got an absolute mountain of cash, and they’ve done so by basically eschewing every page in the MBA playbook, and this has had no influence whatsoever on how the business world talks about proper business strategy.

They’re obsessive about quality, they treat design and customer experience as first class parts of the process, they invest heavily in long-term R&D, they have world leading support - they’ve basically done the opposite of what every financial analyst and business consultant in the world thinks is the right move, and as a result they’re worth more than Saudi-Aramco, and yet somehow every company out there is still sprinting in the exact opposite direction of how Apple operates.

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Apple had one leader who thought differently, and that paid off, and now there is already some inertia inside apple because that is part of their brand. They put out one bad keyboard, mess with the ports in their macs and the world judges them harshly, everything is something gate.

Because Apple's way works does not mean other ways do not. Those other ways are way easier and cheaper, and businesses are fine chasing lower hanging fruits.

One part is probably because they are so secretive externally and internally, so there have been no business books on apples culture, playbook etc. No TED talks from ex Apple leaders.

I think Tesla is the closest to trying to follow their model, in a much scrappier way of course.

https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...

Tesla in no way follows Apple’s model. Musk has a very specific way of running companies reflected in both SpaceX and Tesla. That involves two key things Apple would never do:

- ship 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work - iterate and make changes very rapidly to the product

This can be seen in the model 3, which has had significant variations even within a year. Both improvements (better fit and finish) and likely mistakes (deleting lidar).

The same is seen on the SpaceX side. The starship launches were wildly successful despite the catastrophic endings. This can be seen in the live streams of the employees cheering wildly at the end (which completely baffled armchair critics).

I’m on the fence if this is a good way to run companies long term, but the general point is that it’s about as far from Apple’s culture as you can get.

Nit: Model 3 never had lidar, radar is what they removed.

That Apple doesn't ship 90% solutions is laughable. The initial versions of OSX, iPhone etc. had a lot of rough edges, and were practically public betas.

The only difference is that Jobs and later his deciples were able to blow smoke up your ass, and sell the obvious incomplete product as focusing on some other distraction, or something. Clearly the reality distortion field worked.

Hardware vs software. Big difference because one can be easily updated.

You must not recall Antennagate.

I do, that’s one phone in how many models? And that wasn’t even “bad” compared to the flaws spacex/tesla are willing to accept.

I'm not suggesting that Apple has egregious hardware or software problems, but (as a fanboy of neither company) that you're cherry-picking by claim that Apple isn't "ship[ping] 90% solutions to learn very early what doesn’t work".

Panel gaps or whatever at Tesla are obviously something they know about, it's not like nobody at Tesla is aware that their fit and finish doesn't match a Mercedes S-Class.

Whereas Antennagate is something that shouldn't have escaped the lab, I can't really a similar incident with Tesla.

The recent Starship explosion was a success, if you want to see the cost of avoiding rapid iteration when it comes to rockets look no further than the SLS.

Tesla has not been known for great customer service. They are user friendly..ish, but human to human level experience is a hit or miss.

They were in the early days. I remember someone posting about how their Tesla broke down and a Tesla flatbed pulled up with a working car, swapped them out, and left their car as a loaner

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