npunt

To be fair, a PE <10 didn't even represent the ground truth of customer's relationship to Apple at the time. In hindsight we have a lot more information, but in that era there was still a lingering question of whether their iPhone advantage was durable, due to Android competitors. It only later became apparent that the stickiness factor was super high.

From a correct pricing perspective, of all the companies in tech Apple seems one of the most likely to keep customers for a lifetime. They have immense lock-in and customer affinity. I don't know if the correct number is 20 or 30 or 40 but unless the economy completely tanks (which tbf is reasonably possible these days), I can only imagine a majority of their customers today will still be their customers in 15-20 years.

This is a really good take. This is absolutely not software's stable era, we're in for a rough next decade as AI upends every well-established software practice and the very paradigms we've relied on for so long of apps, OS, and ecosystem. This is an era we have to get through and it's going to be messy as hell.

Leadership needs to make sure everything else in the business is in order so that they can contain and shape the direction of the white-hot plasma of AI and its implications. A software leader would be too hands-on in this process and get nerd sniped. Sometimes you need some distance.

Tim Cook really set John Ternus up to succeed as incoming CEO. Apple has a huge constituency that needs to be reassured about this change: customers, fans/developers, wall street, and global political leaders. These are HUGE stakes and John needs early wins with each to be seen as a legitimate successor. Check out what wins he has coming in the next year-ish:

1. Hardware: OLED touchscreen Macs, foldable iPhone (2026) & 20th anniversary iPhone (2027). The message here is about flexing his strength in hardware.

2. Software: Snow leopard-like iOS27/macOS27 fixing a lot of Liquid Glass' rough edges. The message here is he's returning Apple to form with quality software.

3. Ecosystem: Gemini-powered Siri. The message here is he's getting Apple finally on track to meet the promise of AI.

4. Political context: A clean slate. The message here is placating the president (or anyone) is in the past.

The timing is interesting because Apple needed Ternus announced before WWDC27 in June, because that's when Gemini-Siri and Snow Leopard-OS strategy are both being unveiled. But they needed to delay it as long as they could so that Tim Cook could soak up as much Trump-chaos as was necessary. Now that polls and vibes show Trump losing support across the board, politically it's the safest it's ever been to announce this change, and still enough time before WWDC to suggest that what's being announced are his initiatives.

Apple plays the 'it's the best for most people' game, not the 'technically ahead in [one or a few feature categories]' game. They make the lion's share of profit in the categories they compete in because they sell to the mass market; there's 2.5 billion active iOS devices!

Every time I see someone here dismiss this success as status symbol-oriented marketing, I just shake my head at how much that signals a deep misunderstanding of how the world works or what most of the human race wants in a product. Nobody wants the Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds because Sony doesn't even give a shit enough to give them a name people can remember. Nobody wants Bose earbuds because nobody wants to open a buggy spyware-laden app to turn on/off noise cancelling. These products are destined to fail because they make simple things complicated, untrustworthy, bothersome.

People are whole-experience buyers, not single-feature buyers, and the experience nearly every person on earth wants is the magical 'I put it in and it works' experience. What people want is all the upside of the magic of technology and none of the cognitive overhead associated with it. The specific choices that make up a product offering - aka the product marketing - reflect the inherent desire of the customer. Any luxury / status symbol aspects come AFTER that.

Bad take. Each of these offered novel user experience improvements at launch. Yes they leveraged ecosystem (and yes I agree ecosystem lock-in does move devices) but thats also exactly what unlocked the better UX.

In your other thread you mentioned people don't necessarily want iPhones but they buy them to not be excluded from iMessage. I think you vastly underestimate how much regular people want low-bullshit tech experiences and are willing to pay for that.

and dropbox was just rsync

Indeed. UI/UX is actually a pretty shitty career unless you are good enough to regularly pull rabbits out of your hat. At the low end it's just drawing boxes and using someone else's tricks in a system that isn't even the codebase. At the mid end you get the codebase and might occasionally solve interesting problems, but you'll rarely get the recognition and influence equal to its value. Only at the high end do you start getting the rewards, but they tend not to last very long because people quickly adapt to seeing your solutions as obvious.

It's why designers, and creatives more generally, try to cultivate a mystique around themselves, even(/especially?) when they're only mid. The truth is creative work is a lot more playful than it is mysterious, but play is not valued, only mystery is. This leaves many creatives stuck in tension between their internal and external identities.

A magic trick is a good way to put it, especially for laypeople. I see your point and agree, it's always hard to know going in which ideas you're going to one-shot (and be slightly embarrassed about having one-shotted) and which only come from the courage to kill early darlings and continue down the road of uncertainty.

We're fortunate if we even get that latter opportunity, given most want to take the easy path and cargo cult someone else's idea. The thing I've noticed is that the hard path to continue the exploration often gives the cargo cult answer but with a nuance or two for one's context that make all the difference. I'm curious if you have experienced that as well.

Yeah a lot of this is a very very cleaned up, performative version of design process. It's like its own subgenre. Original thinking is wild, feral, messy, often solo tho heavily influenced by the context around you. None of that presents well.

However I bristle at the idea that core design decisions are usually super obvious, even when the end results are. Not sure this is even your point so forgive the tangent if not, but this issue is my particular hill to die on, it's 100% the single biggest gap in understanding that I see between those that regularly engage in original creative work vs those who do not.

People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!" But that's all hindsight, like saying "I could have bought bitcoin in 2010!" It's not even wrong, it's answering an entirely different question of capability, not probability.

The question is would you have come up with that, were you tasked with the problem and put in the same context? I'd estimate for most great-but-simple inventions, it's not many people who could plausibly say that, because so much of what we bring to bear on problems comes from our own histories and unique perspectives & influences, not to mention talents and predilections.

This distinction between could vs would is core to understanding creative output, especially the ideas that are the simplest to use or understand. The delta between understanding vs coming up with there is often vast; simple things are often the hardest things of all to conceive.

I can't do these one-sentence-per-paragraph, you-have-zero-attention-span we-have-AI articles. If I wanted LinkedIn I'd go there. This has no right being #1 on HN.

Sonic Mayhem!

thanks swyx! you're always on top of stuff

Read/watch this interview [1] with Ada Palmer on her new book about the Renaissance. Florence did this for a time.

> You put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people whom they owe money to. Their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower.

> They’re actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. They rule the city for two or three months. At the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and then a different nine guys share power for the next three months. It’s a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything.

[1] https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ada-palmer

Yeah there’s balances to be struck. Tho I would push back a bit on the notion of great works being outdated. Think of them more as having survived the gauntlet of time, crushing generation after generation of newer writing with their undeniable superiority, emerging as the strongest and most adaptable ideas & stories that couldn’t be stopped even by the churn of centuries of change in language, culture, ideologies, wars and more.

Eg Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will eat alive nearly anything written today, it accurately critiques a future it never saw like a laser beam cutting across time. Few if any works today possess such original and enduring foresight.

This is especially true as a generation of people are now getting deskilled by AI. Even if we have the writers capable of such feats, we likely lack the audience for those works because that requires a societal sophistication we may have lost. And so those works may never be adequately appreciated to let them ever break out of this little moment in time.

The mouse cursor binning special case is starting to look like how animals perceive, where we detect patterns and develop predictive models over time in how they are going to act, and that confidence leads to more deeply encoding those patterns for lower energy usage. Obviously the mouse cursor is a hand-rolled example in a controlled 2d environment, but it makes me wonder what efficiencies lie in identifying patterns in 3d environments once you construct an accurate enough 3d scene out of the images you have.

Do you have other examples of special cases you're looking at? Any 3d ones?

Love the effort here, been thinking about what this kind of tool might look like for a while. Something like this coupled with better prosocial affordances in the medium will do a lot to improve discourse online. I wrote up one a while back [1] but things like that are only a small part of a much bigger picture.

The overall problem needs to be tackled from all angles - poster pre-post self-awareness (like respecify but shown to users before posting), reader affordances to reflect back to poster their behavior (and determine if things may be appropriate in context vs just a universal 'dont say mean words'), after-post poster tools to catch mistakes (like above), platform capabilities like respectify that define rules of play and foster a enjoyable social environment that let us play infinite games, and a broader social context that determine the values that drive all of these.

[1] https://nickpunt.com/blog/deescalating-social-media/

I think you vastly underestimate the importance of fiction. Fiction may be the best canvas for creative and abstract thought, the place where possibility is explored and the 'what' and 'why' is established, without being mired in details. Before we invented things, we thought of things to invent, and in those moments we were writing fiction.

Technical writing is 'how', and that's being absolutely consumed by AI. When AIs can build anything, the question of what we should build and why is the most important.

Yep. From what I recall from my time in education about a decade ago, Common Core standards were generally considered excellent. The rollout of Common Core tests wasn't that great, but that should have been a one-time adaptation period, but everything got mired in politics and bit by bit got torn apart as states all went their own way.

Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them.

And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.

1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:

https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

Great read! Agree with the themes & tensions you identify.

Taste is pretty transferable, I think what you're talking about is intuition. The foundations of intuition are deeply understanding problems and the ability to navigate towards solutions related to those problems. Both of these are relatively domain-dependent. People can have intuition for how to do things but lack the taste to make those solutions feel right.

Taste on the other hand is about creating an overall feeling from a product. It's holistic and about coherence, where intuition is more bottom-up problem solving. Tasteful decisions are those that use restraint, that strike a particular tone, that say 'no' when others might say 'yes'. It's a lot more magical, and a lot rarer.

Both taste and intuition are ultimately about judgment, which is why they're often confused for one another. The difference is they approach problems from the opposite side; taste from above, intuition from below.

I agree with your assessment otherwise, PM can be a real smoke screen especially across domain and company stage.

This is based on changes in trends and is somewhat of a moving target so I'll give some dates.

In the 2000s, 'forums' were forums, and 'social network' was the dominant term for products like FB and Myspace. A movie even came out with that name. Both were also 'communities'. These are verifiable on Google trends.

In the 2010s, 'social media' became the preferred term, mainly because it contrasted with 'the media' as the other major source of information available, but also because it was just an easier to use and more generic term than 'social network'. 'Forums' were still largely forums, tho like all activity online, on occasion it got lumped into 'social media'.

Sometime in the 2010s we started to delineate 'social network' from 'social media' as distinct eras of social products and properties of how the products work. This became extremely clear once the era of video took over in ~2020, as video is historically 'media' in a way that exchanging text never was.

The term 'networking' is/was its own thing and mostly unrelated to 'social networks'.

FWIW I did market analysis for Yahoo's online communities division in 06 and worked on two FB app startups, one which was a college social network, and interfaced a lot with FB in 08-12. All of these words and fine delineations were essential to my work and part of the research I was doing at the time. I looked over my notes to confirm.

I too think this is likely the only workable solution. My bias is the OS/ecosystem layer is the right place to handle access to the digital world.

However as digital access becomes more and more essential to doing anything in life, this makes the layer even more load bearing, so I wish to see a legal framework for privacy/security as well as appeals process for the painful edge cases where people get locked out for whatever reason. That problem is even harder.

I agree it has roughly the same inherent design biases as X with a few nuances, though it now has drastically different creator incentives both explicitly and implicitly.

I'm not advocating for that either, I'm only pointing out that "if everyone just" is a collective action problem that is a non-solution because it doesn't describe the mechanism by which everyone does something.

Your example confuses the locus of control. The platform is making the choice and relies on user inaction rather than action. Users as a whole basically always descend gradients, and if they like / are addicted to the service, they'll descend with enough momentum to carry them over one-time friction like an ID check. The null hypothesis is they continue using the service. For it to be an "if everyone just" answer, it would be "if everyone just decided to stop using these extremely sticky services" because that is the de facto choice they are presented with. And it similarly suffers from an "if everyone just" lack of plausible mechanism.

The point of calling out non-solutions masquerading as solutions is to keep people's energy focused on possible but unstated solutions, rather than spending time blaming people for behavior largely determined by myriad immovable circumstances.

Disagree, that's reductive and beside the point.

It's useful to have words that distinguish major classes of activity online, even if several types are combined on a given platform. "Messaging", "Chat Rooms", "Streaming", "Forums", "Social Networking", and "Social Media" are all different things. You can quibble about what constitutes the edges of the definitions but they all have different key activities they enable.

If you lump everything together, you fail to understand the necessary nuances to identify the problems let alone solve them.

The key to understanding any given social platform is to understand the proportion of which activity that platform enables. This tells you things like the incentives, constraints, externalities, etc of the platform. Different designs have different effects.

OPs is closer to the truth; the shift from network -> media shows a useful distinction between what the focal point of activity is.

Note that "social" (as in social interaction with people you know) in "social networking" is a requirement, while it is not in "social media". You may as well call it "parasocial media" since that is the way most people use it most of the time.

Thus 'social media' is primarily based on content, while 'social networking' is primarily based on social connection and interaction.

Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone to just do something.

Agree, wish there were quality of life improvements to Civ1 that kept the simplicity and aesthetics fully intact, while modernizing some of the tedious mid/late game stuff like managing each city in a large empire based on some straightforward goals like 'more science' or 'fastest path to rocketry' or whatnot.

Freeciv unfortunately has none of the charm of Civ1.