Hacker News Reader

Comment by eddieroger | Hacker News Reader

It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs. They're different people with different drives. In fact, Jobs told Cook not to do what he would do, but do the right thing, and to Cook that was grow the company. I'd love to see the critics do better.

View on HN

So much of Apple's growth is anti-consumer.

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.

> Anything I missed?

The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.

Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.

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.

Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.

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.

> 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.

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" :).

I am a long time mac user and I agree with all of their points. I guess you disagree, but I am not sure why you are being dismissive. Each point is a legitimate criticism from many peoples' points of view.

I acknowledge the complaints, I love a good complaint! My issue is that these superficial, and in many cases, easily remediable annoyances add up to a "crappy OS". MacOS has to satisfy a very diverse userbase from Paris Hilton-types to grumpy Hacker News readers (but thankfully not Bank of America), and I think they do a better than decent job at it.

Also: I don't use Mail.app.

I don't consider the Mac's less-than-half-assed search facilities to be a superficial problem. I don't see how you can argue that a search that doesn't show WHERE it found hits is competent. Beyond that, it often just doesn't work. You can be sitting in a directory full of JPEGs and search for .jpg and get zero results. Zero.

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.

Photos.

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.

This is a very good example of a disruptive bug that destroys the ability to work. I’m making a document on my laptop and using the phone as a camera to take pictures, I am working on, now. Same WiFi, same person, same cloud, inches apart. No work.

airdrop that :) (I do the same all the time and always airdrop from phone to my laptop after taking a pic)

No. Fix the problem.

Not as weird as this really persistent delusion that Linux is anywhere as user-hostile in 2026 as it was in the early noughts.

It has been a while. And I should say when I stuck to distro-tested options, I didn't have many issues. But I always ended up installing and configuring things that ended up causing conflictions, and all too often did clean installs instead of in-place upgrades.

I think maybe part of the argument is that Apple’s closed system was a benevolent dictator-style ecosystem that was actually benevolent. Until it wasn’t.

You might find that you are in the minority though. Nothing wrong with this at all but apple makes some of the best selling products in the market place and that has largely been because of Tim Cook.

Nothing you say is in disagreement with the comment you're responding to. And yeah, Apple is doing really well, in part because of their anti competitive practices. Good for them, bad for us.

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?

How did we jump to cigarettes?

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.

> How did we jump to cigarettes?

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 easily see a totally different perspective on all of these if you try a little.

> 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.

> > 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.

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.

> 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

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.

>> 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.

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.

Who the hell gives a flying fuck about RCS? RCS is bullshit pushed by carriers praying they can get a sliver of marketshare back from Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal when it comes to text communications.

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.

Anyone who wants to communicate cross-OS and doesn't want to use a whole separate application for it, when it should be a basic capability of the phone?

SMS and MMS are still a thing and I don't know anyone not having at least one of the three apps, add Threema to the mix for the nerds and that's it.

Anything I missed?

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.

Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.

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.

Except Jobs approved the design of that screen, which hasn't fundamentally changed since early versions of iOS (iPhoneOS). And it's that way because quitting apps isn't supposed to be something you do very often, if at all. Nowadays people clear the app history by habit, but it was really only supposed to be for misbehaving apps that were burning your battery, so having an affordance to make it easy was never the point, despite how people use it today.

Also, please stop doing this, it breaks apps. It's unnecessary and just forces your apps to cold launch every time you use them.

> Except Jobs approved the design of that screen

..which they, as far as i recall, pretty much stole from WebOS back then..

(well, the functionality aspect of it at least)

Steve Jobs opposed the idea of real applications on the iPhone in the first place. And Jobs also personally insisted that stuff be misspelled in the iTunes UI... if you believe the pushback in the bug report on it. So who cares if he approved another bad idea?

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.

That's not Apple, that's just current design trends everywhere. Jobs was popularizing UX idioms for yet-new hardware to the customer. Now we live in a world where children grow up with tablets.

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.

> developers to pay them their 30% tax

There are provisions for 15%

Cook made sure that the iPhone's battery replacement cost was so high that an upgrade would be more viable. His innovation was to extend that to MacBooks.

You might want to read up on what happened with the dumpster fire that’s vaguely called RCS before you go laying that at Apples feet.

Also Apples cut is 15% unless you’re doing millions in revenue. Same as Google.

Unlike Google, Apple makes you jump through the hoops of their small business program, if it's available, before they'll drop it to 15%, otherwise you're stuck at 30.

It’s like “fill out your name and tell them you made less than a million dollars last year.”

Have you considered that critics might not care about Apple investors?

When we pay premium, we expect premium.

Sadly, too many of us continue to go back for more after our expectations aren't met. This makes it an obvious decision to reduce quality below premium.

There's nowhere to run, unfortunately. Windows and Linux are orders of magnitude worse than even macOS 26. To say that the whole software industry is a dumpster fire would be an understatement.

> It is so easy to sit on and critique from the sidelines. Steve Jobs had a passion for product, and it showed - he pushed the teams to make things he approved of, and that was the measure. Tim Cook had a passion for growth, and as the article states, Apple's income now rival some GDPs.

Who cares that it's Tim Cook's "passion" unless you're an Apple investor?

Under Tim Cook's leadership Apple has clearly been leaning into services for some time now. (Whether you like that or not, it looks like Eddy Cue was the one who was tapped to push out in this direction.)

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.

In the age of the internet we’ve got endless people who think they’ve got something or someone all figured out, but no real evidence that anyone really does.

> I'd love to see the critics do better.

That’s underspecified. Part of the problem is that there are multiple incompatible definitions of “better”.

It's just as easy to sit and glaze someone.

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.

> Apple's income now rival some GDPs

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×

the very fact that we're comparing apple, a (mainly) hardware company, to a bunch of software companies is in itself a measure of incredible success for Apple.

Microsoft is hardware company too. Surface, Xbox, computer peripherals, etc.

they're clearly not the main revenue drivers, contrary to Apple

If you look at Apple's profits - it's about evenly split between 'Services' ( like music and app sales etc ) and hardware.

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 ).

yeah I think the key point is in your last sentence - maybe some people would buy Apple Music/TV without an iphone or an AppleTV? I don't think anyone would buy icloud without the hardware though. And presumably they're bundling applecare in the "services" as well :)

If you want hardware then Nvidia about up about 450x since 2011 :-)

Is Zuckerberg retiring already? I'd gladly same the same about him then. But this isn't about any of those companies.

Aside from a false start with Apple Intelligence, Apple did not try to repeatedly and shamelessly shove AI down everyone's throats in all their products and services, which is why their "growth" hasn't been as pronounced as those of the others. And, frankly, I'm OK with that.

They do like to pretend Siri is comparable, though. Which is, frankly, insulting.

> Apple's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $350 billion to $377 billion by year-end 2011

> 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.

Why are you comparing Apple to software companies. Apples to oranges.

You’re comparing Apple to Facebook is especially gross.

On so many levels.

Both are companies are repulsive. There's something comparable here.

Dell?

Market valuation alone is not sufficient, percentage of market-share matters too. Under Cook, iPhone market-share grew from 15-18% to 25% in US and an insignificant amount to ~20% globally. As an example for why market-share matters, TSMC's market-share is ~$2T, while Apple's market cap is $3.93T (as of today). Yet TSMC has a market-share of close to 90% for ICs in circulation today.

I'm not a fanboy by any means, just looking at the numbers.

"There are five companies that we selected because they have absolutely massive growth, far beyond anything else in the market. Should we really say Apple did well just because they're a member of that group?"

You didn’t address any of the criticism towards Cook and the decline of the product under him. All that matters seems to be “did the line go up?”

Apple's current products make everything Jobs released at the end look like primitive tech demos. A couple annoying macOS quirks or controversial UI design decisions don't equal a decline in my view.

You're right, I didn't, because that isn't the measure of his leadership, which was my whole point.

> All that matters seems to be "did the line go up?"

Exactly.

> and to Cook that was grow the company.

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.

> 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.

Yep, Cooks new role is essentially lobbyist.

Yes, the reason Apple was so successful at Cook's helm is because he gifted Trump a plaque.

Why do you think they got most of their components exempted from tarrifs?

I'm aware of the open bribery by the administration. That has nothing to do with my comment.

Right, and without that open bribery they would have had 100% tarrifs on all of their iphones, macbooks and semiconductors, which is an overwhelming portion of their revenue.

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?

I would probably have a stronger gripe with the ridiculousness of the tariffs than Tim Cook's refusal to bribe the president. Also, to say that not bribing would make him an "honest businessman" is slightly unfair. He has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, and if he is aware that lobbying to the president personally to avoid tariffs is what it takes to avoid tanking Apple's profit and share price, he is required to do that.

I'm not going to argue your wants with you because they are your own. Don't buy Apple products if you don't like the way they operate as a company. I don't particularly care for appeasing the administration, either, but it's not like Cook broke the system, so I'm not going to dance on his retirement over it.

Where can I get my gold bar, please?

I like Apple's products. I just purchased an iPhone 17 Pro. It does not mean I cannot still criticize them because of their monopolistic practices.

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...

> I want ethical companies

This will never exist.

We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.

And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because... he pushed people to produce sleek devices? Which is fine, but then I'd propose that growing the company was ethical because it helped retirement portfolios and employed lots of people. The only Apple product I own is a prime-day deal Beats Pill, but I'm not going to claim that Apple grew because of bribes. People do seem to love their products, in ways I find irrational sometimes.

> And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because...

Did I say that?

Sounds to me like Tim Cook was the wrong choice from the beginning then? Or should all the people who came to love the company because of great products just adapt to the company shifting the core focus to "basically a country's GDP" and be fine with 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.

100% agree.

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.

They made some of my favorite products. Their having GDP-level revenue doesn’t benefit me… at all. Their putting less effort into those products negatively affects me. There are more losers than beneficiaries, here. I couldn’t care less how many billions investors got. Monetarily, it’s a net gain. Societally, it’s a net loss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com