Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good
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If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/
I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.
Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.
Now obviously, this only covers a small portion of Tim's reign over apple, but is it not fair to say you'd have a different overall view of his tenure if he was an honest businessman and ate the tarrifs like he was supposed to, probably tanking the stock in the process?
Where can I get my gold bar, please?
I was doing Apple support since 1995, I saw how they changed.
I mean, they certainly would never have given Trump a gold bar to forgive this case now, would they?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj...
This will never exist.
We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.
Did I say that?
I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.
I want to buy from a company whose goal is to make the best products, not make the most money.
You optimize differently for each.
But so has the rest of FAANG. Did Tim Cook really overperform?
Growth compared to 2011:
Apple ~8×
Microsoft ~13–14×
Google ~10×
Facebook* ~10–15×
Now hardware gross revenue is about 3x the services - but the profit margin is much higher on services.
Apple don't break out the numbers so it's difficult to know how much of that service revenue is tied to people owning Apple hardware and how much is independent ( like Apple Music or Apple TV ).
> Microsoft's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $220 Billion
Those are post iPhone numbers being multiplied.
Also, arguably, iPhones made everyone else on that list stupid rich and drove insane demands for their products. Instagram and Snapchats fortunes need more than Windows Mobile phones ever gave. Apples rising tide helped the web giants.
I'm not a fanboy by any means, just looking at the numbers.
> All that matters seems to be "did the line go up?"
Exactly.
You can't repair your device.
They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product.
They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
Anything I missed?
They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.
The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)
> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.
> Spotlight and Launchpad
Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.
I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.
>"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS
https://www.reddit.com/r/Zoom/comments/1i0j9db/how_do_i_disa...
I do appreciate that your list is specific, but I think these complaints fall well short of "crappy" :).
Also: I don't use Mail.app.
And dismissing the asinine removal of the "get mail" button from Apple's default E-mail program because YOU don't happen to use it isn't exactly respectable, is it?
Mac OS DID satisfy a great many people; I've seen no credible (or even incredible) argument that the recent raft of faffing about with the UI has brought new users into the fold. That's the foundation of so many people's outrage over it: The changes offer no improvement and don't address any longstanding user requests. But it IS demonstrably regressive, and subjectively dated and tacky.
"Transparent" UI came and went 20 years ago for good reason.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.
These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo:
> Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them
> Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?
I don’t think any of the original articles complaints are wrong but I don’t agree with the thesis. They are one of the best selling device manufacturers because the product and ecosystem is so good. My point was that folks, maybe like yourself, who don’t find the ecosystem open enough or the devices repairable enough, are outliers compared to the average consumer.
Oh, it's an analogy. This is a frequently used rhetorical device where you take a similar analogous setup (maybe hypothetical) to elucidate certain aspects of a situation you're considering.
> You can't repair your device.
Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
> They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible
All of their products and services are tightly integrated and have privileged access to hardware that would be insecure to open to 3rd parties.
> They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
If you want to list on their marketplace it's not unreasonable to expect to pay for access. We can haggle on the fairness of 30%
> They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
As a consumer I just can't possibly be made to care about this.
> They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
SPAs perform poorly and eat battery life and have super heterogeneous user experiences, I don't want them on my phone.
As a consumer I like that they don't open the gates on the phone ecosystem to all of the absolute slop we see on android.
> Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
This is a fair point. But when I hear "you can't repair your device" I also think "you can't take it to someone of your choice to repair", which is often true, too, even though that limitation is artificial - witness the Rossmans and others of the world who can absolutely repair these devices. There's a whole YouTube channel of a guy who makes ASMR videos of him doing things like removing iPhone/iPad/MBP storage and replacing it with large capacity chips.
This I think is a fair enough criticism. Screen and battery replacement by 3rd party professionals should be easier. Both of these things would tackle the biggest reasons that iPhones become useless before Apple drops OS support which is quite long compared to Android OEMs.
>As a consumer I just can't possibly be made to care about this.
Not caring that you are not able to effectively use your *telecommunications device* with people that buy a different brand of telecommunications device is wild. Kool Aid is a helluva drug.
Carriers have been reduced to dumb data pipes and they haven't figured out how to live in a reality where the only thing that matters is service quality and price.
Under Jobs, UX was king. Devices had to be intuitive, and features discoverable. Today, all that user-friendliness is gone. The devices are no longer approachable for a newbie: you have to just know how to use them.
It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.
Also, please stop doing this, it breaks apps. It's unnecessary and just forces your apps to cold launch every time you use them.
..which they, as far as i recall, pretty much stole from WebOS back then..
(well, the functionality aspect of it at least)
Quitting apps is something you need to do sometimes. And making it impossible to do, through obscurity, is stupid; as that can leave the application permanently disabled. This is not something I ever want as a developer.
Not to mention that people who don't need to quit an application won't go hunting for a way to do so, and thus the problem solves itself. That's why the vast majority of arguments for crippling things to shield users from "scary complexity" fail: Novice users will not even imagine that these functions are available, let alone go hunting for them.
And I quit apps BECAUSE I want them to "cold launch" next time. But my mom isn't ever going to do that. So rest easy: Your glass-jawed app is safe from the general public.
If you go to Google's design you're not going to see an alternative take from the same playground of design, plus or minus some glassiness, emoji, bounce, etc.
There are provisions for 15%
Also Apples cut is 15% unless you’re doing millions in revenue. Same as Google.
Who cares that it's Tim Cook's "passion" unless you're an Apple investor?
I imagine that was probably Cook recognizing that having your entire company propped up by a single hardware product line is a dangerous position to be in.
To that end it is not just Apple investors but Apple customers and Apple as a company that may well end up benefitting from Cook's cautionary strategy. We've seen tariffs threaten Apple's hardware. A future downturn in the economy that erodes a consumer's ability to spend could also wreak havoc on Apple.
That’s underspecified. Part of the problem is that there are multiple incompatible definitions of “better”.
Stock buybacks simulating interest, inflation, and cutting corners on products, gouging devs that list on their app store, oh and they sell a lot of ear buds destined for the ewaste bin in 24-36 months.
Plus the stock market is like Whose Line Is It Anyway; made up points that don't matter to humanity long term while the ewaste and non repairable products do.
Stop carrying water for billionaires who do not care you exist. This is no different than fawning over a Kardashian. We have social systems to replace these people because as a species we're well aware of physics at this point.
If physics hasn't seen fit to spare their biology the effects of entropy (aging -> death) they're not that important.
> The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.
> Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.
Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA.
> Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix.
Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft.
> and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better.
Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases).
> But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top.
Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware.
Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.
At that level and scale it's merely politics.
Source: worked at Apple and at Google and we struggled at Google to build supply chains and get the same cost effectiveness. People talk about how Apple is overpriced and then ignore that the feature set/cost tradeoff is matched by only Samsung on mobile and even then they make a fraction of the money that Apple does.
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.
I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
Source: I work for Apple.
Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.
It seems to be adding it to TextEdit but it disappears when exporting to PDF. Is this a TextEdit.app bug?
I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.
There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.
I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
examples:
- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.
- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.
- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped.
Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).
The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).
The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.
(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)
(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)
---
The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")
When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality.
Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time.
Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms.
iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup.
And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.
I love my Macbook HW (except for the stupid sharp edge) and the only thing that keeps me from ditching it is that for most documents I work on, I am in LibreOffice, which lets me disable the native save as dialog box and use the works as expected LibreOffice one.
To the article, I wonder if a HW person will have the mindset required to fix the glaring holes in their SW. Make the whole damn company eat their own dogfood!
I use all 3 for different reasons, but Macbooks are my daily driver because I want an ecosystem. Too bad there are so many ecosystem fails. I want to believe, but this $4T megacorp can't figure out table stakes.
Whatever's going on in Cupertino, it's hard to arguethe people working on the Linux ecossytem don't eat their own dogfood
The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!
If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ).
I don't expect these kind of UI issues on MacOS.
As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.
On the upside, at least Federighi didn't get the top job.
Safari on iOS is a prime example of this. I used to be able to switch from tabs to private browsing. Now I have to go through a tab groups abstraction that I didn't ask for, can't turn off and don't want. Want to open a new tab? Well, that too has gotten annoying. You have to tap near the bottom to bring up the address bar and then you can bring up the tabs screens (that used to be more accessible) or click on the new 3 dot menu on the bottom right. Who asked for this?
I prefer my address at the top. It's like desktop. That's another unwelcome change. This change also infected Settings where the search is hovering near the bottom now for some reason. This seems to be part of some wider UI fad because Google Finance now does this too. Just. Stop.
Oh I used to just tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top in Safari too. Now I accidentally hit the notch and go to some other unrealted app now. So thanks for that, Apple.
I abhor Face ID. So many false negatives. so unreliable. So many more times I have to put my passcode in. Just give me Touch ID. Put it on the home button (like the iPad Air) or do what Samsung did a decade ago and put a sensor on the back. That works really well.
Oh the Apple Watch isn't immune to annoying and pointless UI changes too. Even selecting an activity like Outdoor Walk now has a really weird scroll behavior where the "play" button doesn't come up until you stop scrolling. Why? WHY? The old interface was fine.
Leadership is keeping these kinds of things in check. Otherwise people make changes to get promoted,, basically. Or it's just ego to reinvent something in their image. Steve Jobs kept Johnny Ive in check. Tim Cook allowed the 12" macbook to happen. As well as the Touch Bar and the butterly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness). But at least those got corrected.
And of course Siri is still terrible and almost seems like abandonware at this point.
If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company.
Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.
For example: handing over the semi-pro video creator space to YouTube. Apple already a thriving podcast ecosystem, but failed to capitalise on it. There was a real opportunity for vertical integration with Apple selling hardware, targeted content creation software (a CapCut-a-like version of FCP), and access to a distribution network.
Also, home automation and security. Cameras, switches, maybe even routers with local backup. Not sold as devices, but as high quality services with obvious benefits that happen to run on specific hardware.
AI: there was the opportunity to develop Siri into an agentic assistant well before anyone else got there.
Cook's slant was more towards chasing high-end Veblen lifestyle status - cars, watches, premium computers and phones - and less towards social marketing and less shiny but useful consumer devices.
>iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.
Have these ever happened to someone? I have been using an iPhone for 2 years but have never experienced this.
Is there a product in either of AirPods' categories that is generally recognized as either outright superior or a better value?
Because both regular and Pro seem like amazing products, and reviews tend to classify them as such. And it's entirely a Cook-led project. Like, if I were to pick one product to prove that Cook cared about product and Apple could still do cool things, that's probably on the top of the list.
Calling out one flaw and making that emblematic of his entire tenure feels extremely shortsighted.
I’m very bullish on his innovation mindset and on Apple’s next chapter.
Companies don't produce better products unless incentives are aligned to force them to produce better products.
Are incentives aligned in a way to cause Apple to produce better software? If not, then it absolutely does not matter who the CEO is. IREAM.
Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.
I wonder if AI is going to drive certain idioms into extinction (aside from being used by AI).
Stuff like this:
> Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.
And the headings starting with "The"
AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!
I'm the first to say I'm not the best writer...
Or is this also true: "I don't change what a LLM writes so long as it doesn't seem like something I would write"
It's just like vibe coding it's the new normal. We don't notice our own unique voices when writing. But as a collective we do notice LLM voices.
Submissions are different than comments in HN rules - don't worry about it.
>Not just sell. Not just ship. Use.
>The honest read ... The hopeful read ...
>The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products.
>Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras
There's also bizarre not-quite-landing uncanny metaphors that LLMs love to do:
>Today's Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation.
>The texture changed.
>And the rot follows that exact line.
If you're surrounded by this kind of writing, it may be good to get other inspirations. It's bad!
This article on the other hand has 1: https://routerjockey.com/introducing-graphiant-the-future-of...
I don't mind either way, but reading through the Tim Cook one without opening the comments on HN, I was 99.9% sure I'm reading AI.
I enjoyed your article and shared it on my family-geek-whatsapp group
LLM's got their inspiration from popular sources written by humans. Now humans are exposed to LLM on repeat basis every day. It looks only normal that writing done with or without LLMs tend to converge to the same style.
Once that had run out, he ran out and VR plus intelligence were there worst failures the company has ever seen. Completely inept ideas, one that very publicly failed to launch to a hugely damaging degree.
Cook was great at growing others legacy, and completely inept at making his own.
Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids.
Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.
The core problem is TC snatched failure from the jaws of victory by optimizing for the wrong priorities: extreme profiteering over cool (as cool as the past), durable, reliable, desirable products with "souls" and leading innovation into new or under-developed categories. TC was never able to confidently lead into new territory like SJ. That's what Apple is desperately missing.
At some point Apple should realize that, it’s okay to not touch core design principles.
I don't think Steve Jobs would have been kept as CEO had he survived cancer.
Most Apple customers of today aren't necessarily the same customers as 15 years ago, the same way a Rolex, Porsche, Louis Vuitton customer in 2026 is not the same person as in the 80's. A lot of current customers are used to mediocrity in everything, from food, to entertainment or tech. I'll exclude Linux desktops because most people do not even know it is a thing, but look at the commercially available alternatives to iOS and MacOS? Android and Windows. That's it. While I appreciate the sadly dwindling additionnal freedom in android, I can hardly call these 2 a frictionless experience either. Are chromebooks still a thing nowadays? I haven't encountered one or a user in years.
Tim Cook has always been a John Sculley, not a Steve Jobs.
The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did...
Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company.
He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...
2012 — [Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949)
2013 — [Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491)
2014 — [Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546)
2015 — [Apple has lost the functional high ground](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734)
2016 — [Apple's declining software quality](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071)
2017 — [Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914)
2018 — [Ask HN: Why has Apple's software quality steadily gone downhill?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664)
2019 — [Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678)
2020 — [Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639)
2021 — [Apple's software quality has certainly slipped](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881)
2022 — [The erosion of the Mac experience](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193)
2023 — [Mac OS Ventura Issues](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652)
2024 — [Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215)
2025 — [Apple's Software Quality Crisis](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)
You see, I don't think people like Cook (and the majority of corporate managers) can even tell the difference between good and bad products when they use them.
I will give Tim Cook credit for a category software improvement: reliability. While poor performance, memory bloat, and UI slop have been hallmarks of macOS native apps, they have stopped crashing. Xcode is usable. I miss OS X, but I do not miss the instability.
Tim Cook was at least a steady hand at keeping the product tolerably usable. Just wait until a Satya Nadella style CEO takes charge at Apple - we'll be wishing for the halcyon days of Tahoe and Liquid Glass.
Personally, I don't think the fact that the Apple keyboard is unusable is a "geek" thing.
1. used to mediocrity and enshittification everywhere 2. live in one ecosystem or another. Appart from developpers, I don't know many people who use Mac AND Windows, iPhones AND android. And resistance to change is there to limit moves between one to another. They wouldn't care if apple keyboard sucks if they never used a better one.
Reality is the success of current products mostly hedges on the momentum their companies have built over the last decade, rather than the actual innovations of those current products. Guerilla advertising is also used super effectively.