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yogigan 1 minutes ago [-]
If the CEO comes from hardware, it suggests Apple still believes its long-term moat is integrated hardware + silicon + software, not just services.
keepamovin 6 hours ago [-]
This is one of the more broadly normal HN-reaction threads to large public news event I've seen in a while. A lot of love for Apple, respect for the decision, and respectfully stated nuance. Surprising and good.
I still haven't scroll down to the bottom, I don't want to spoil my impression. But it's great to see a positive reaction. Good way to mark the moment. Tim has been CEO for 15 years roughly, since Steve's passing. This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended. I hope he really takes it to the next level.
Got a feeling that Apple has some Amazing new hardware category-making products coming out of the 'skunkworks' over the next 3 years.
user_7832 5 hours ago [-]
I don't intend to be a contrairian purely to be one, but Apple is the same company that (to paraphrase) wanted to "see Saurik cry".
This being hackernews, I hope to be excused for siding with a white hat code-hacker over a trillion dollar corporate.
(And that's not getting into all the other morally questionable stuff they've done.)
throawayonthe 3 hours ago [-]
trying to find the context, saurik seemsto be Jay Freeman[0], known for Cydia[1]; i'm guessing apple was 'unhappy' about his work around software for jailbroken iphones, but nothing immediately popped up, what did they do?
oh i guess it's from a court hearing[2] when his company was suing apple over app store monopoly ("... they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon.")
Forget about saurik; they wanted to countermand their own customers using his code to do things on their own phones they bought from Apple.
The contempt for their customers is palpable these days.
Ygg2 4 hours ago [-]
How dare you insult the forty gazillion company! Stand back ma'am I'll protect you from this handsome hacker ruffian!
Jokes aside, I have started to see Microslop as the lesser of two evils (two evils being MSFT and AAPL, Google being its own parallel universe abomination). Their commitment to backward compatibility really paved the way to cheap PCs for the masses. That said, every day Macroslop is working diligently to prove me wrong.
stavros 3 hours ago [-]
Apple basically spearheaded the war on general computation. Before them, phones used to be more or less open, Apple cracked down on that very quickly.
dvdkon 2 hours ago [-]
Well, before Apple, most phones were appliances with fixed software; there was no openness to speak of. That said, I wish they hadn't continued this trend and instead took inspiration from Windows Mobile.
reaperducer 1 hours ago [-]
Before them, phones used to be more or less open
Wow. Just… wow.
Excuse me while I get permission from sixteen levels of managers inside Cingular, U.S. Cellular, Cincinnati Bell, PrimeCo, and the fifty different regional carriers calling themselves "Cellular One" to offer my app on their networks.
I'm not claiming that iPhones are open to the extent that HN griefers want it to be, but you must have been freshly hatched in the years before the iPhone to think the ecosystem was open.
I say this as someone who developed some of the first mobile phone weather apps. (Before "app" was even a word.)
stavros 43 minutes ago [-]
Or, you know, there's more than one country in the world.
I could flash my Nokia 6210 with whatever firmware I wanted, but I guess that doesn't count, because Nokia and Ericsson aren't American companies.
mapontosevenths 12 minutes ago [-]
I may be guilty of the same thing you're mentioning (I'm in the USA), but my Nokia 6210 came with a carrier lock and I wasn't even able to visit websites via the WAP browser unless my carrier approved of them because WAP acted like a sort of mandatory vendor operated proxy that allowed them to see and filter everything the phone did. They would, for example, filter out websites about ringtones to try and force you to buy theirs for $0.99/piece.
My experience with a Nokia 6210 was very much the opposite of what you describe.
DeathArrow 3 hours ago [-]
Microsoft doesn't give 2 cents now on desktops and desktop software. They care about selling cloud and cloud products.
Since they can't charge a subscription for Windows (like Adobe does for its products), they don't care about it anymore.
hnlmorg 2 hours ago [-]
Do they no longer charge annual licenses for Windows Server?
On that topic, it’s always surprised me just how little Apple invest into their enterprise / business backend services. Everything about the way they integrate Macs into businesses is awkward. Apple could make so much money there if they wanted to. It’s a real missed opportunity.
dangus 48 minutes ago [-]
The issue is that nobody (relatively speaking) uses Windows Server.
I don’t even think Microsoft is all that adamant that their customers use it.
It’s just not competitive with Linux and that ship has sailed. Linux is better and costs $0. Microsoft lets you run .NET applications on Linux and they’re better there.
I think the same thing happened with SQL Server. Nobody’s choosing it for new projects, its niche is basically legacy software.
I agree that Apple is missing an opportunity with business and enterprise but I think the issue is that they’re so far behind that catching up would be a massive investment that might never pay off.
This is similar to saying that Microsoft missed an opportunity with smartphone ecosystems. They could spend billions on getting a smartphone back on the market and it would arrive and everyone would ask the question “why am I buying this when my iPhone has X million apps on its store and is a nearly perfect device?”
If Apple Enterprise Cloud was available today who is switching and why? Apple would have to undercut established players to convince businesses to switch via a massive migration effort.
mapontosevenths 6 minutes ago [-]
I work with fortune 500 clients, and all of them use Windows server for something. Usually a lot of somethings. For example: Active Directory.
If we look at Microsoft's revenue I think it's pretty clear that they do in fact care an awful lot about Windows Server - or at least should.
In fiscal year 2025, Microsoft Corporation's revenue by segment:
Devices: $17.31 B
Dynamics Products And Cloud Services: $7.83 B
Enterprise Services: $7.76 B
Gaming: $23.46 B
Linked In Corporation: $17.81 B
Microsoft Three Six Five Commercial Products And Cloud Services: $87.77 B
Microsoft Three Six Five Consumer Products and Cloud Services: $7.40 B
Other Products And Services: $72.00 M
Search Advertising: $13.88 B
Search And News Advertising: $13.88 B
Server Products And Cloud Services: $98.44 B
Server Products And Tools: $98.44 B
Windows: $17.31 B
radiator 2 hours ago [-]
Why can't they charge a subscription for windows? It could be only a small yearly fee.
MSFT_Edging 51 minutes ago [-]
It's primary benefit is that it comes free with the laptop they bought on Amazon.
Once there's friction there, it'll make other friction seem less bad.
sheiyei 2 hours ago [-]
Because Windows is a garbage product and they would quickly wipe out its userbase by doing that.
dreamcompiler 1 hours ago [-]
I get the impression they care very much about windows because they can sell ads on it.
pcblues 3 hours ago [-]
4 kings.
Wipe if you think you can do better :) It can and has been done.
snypher 11 minutes ago [-]
4 horseman, you're welcome.
mentalgear 5 hours ago [-]
Hopefully the Neo is the beginning of Apple making useful and affordable products for all users, instead of walling their garden to squeeze out every last penny via Cook's 'premium'-upwards-screwdriver tactics ... the history of market-dynamics suggests otherwise, but let's hope and wait there's a mindset change as well.
dash2 4 hours ago [-]
I think it might be the opposite. You make cheap products for everybody because you are going to make money off subscriptions. Personally, I think it's a reasonable strategy, but it might mean they lose their focus on high-end craftsmanship.
ezst 3 hours ago [-]
> craftsmanship
What marketing does to people
boringg 3 minutes ago [-]
I mean not to pile on here. What are you implying that there isn't a high level of craftmanship imbued in the development of mac harware? You'd have much more luck arguing it may be lacking in software but not on the hardware side.
Or are you trying taking issue with the word that craftmanship is only reserved for something akin to Japanese wood joinery or micro batch coffee roasting?
alsetmusic 18 minutes ago [-]
>> craftsmanship
> What marketing does to people
I'm sorry, are my MacBooks Pro, Air, and (my spouse's) Neo not some of the best built laptops you can buy? Maybe there's something better, but these are inarguably some of the best. Absolute top of the line.
See the Verge (I think) reviewing similarly priced laptops priced around the Neo. They were plastic crap, even if they had better specs elsewhere.
dahcryn 3 hours ago [-]
the M line of macbook pro's are beautiful, well crafted, long lasting machines.
MacOS might not be your preferred way of working, and you might prefer cheaper options or USB-A ports, but there is really nothing you could arguably call bad craftmanship in those machines.
inatreecrown2 60 minutes ago [-]
>> nothing you could arguably call bad craftmanship in those machines
my 2 bad craftsmanship cents:
laptop keyboard leaves marks on screen.
laptop's sharp edges leaves marks on wrists.
alsetmusic 17 minutes ago [-]
> laptop keyboard leaves marks on screen.
I don't think this has been a thing in years.
Sharp edges on wrists is true.
k12sosse 19 minutes ago [-]
..from the company that brought you "You're holding it wrong", not just bad but dumb
rpdillon 30 minutes ago [-]
In addition to the sibling comment, I would point out the touch bar was poor craftsmanship and the butterfly keyboard was also poor craftsmanship. They both are addressed now, but there were several years where we had to live with them.
Their software craftsmanship has really suffered in the last 10 years.
hansvm 1 hours ago [-]
I mean, they're not bad, but they have spicy chargers, the corners are uncomfortably sharp, the keyboard often doesn't register, the LCD is prone to vertical bars and other issues even without physical damage and is extremely sensitive to bumps and other minor damage elsewhere on the laptop (not even the display itself), and so on.
pxc 22 minutes ago [-]
Some of these are consequences of what makes them feel "premium" or even "solid". Aluminum is a terrible material for bumps and drops because it dents, and that often damages the internal components.
diegolas 2 hours ago [-]
they're very well designed and built products, craftmanship is something else.
2 hours ago [-]
choudharism 1 hours ago [-]
What is it?
carlosjobim 2 minutes ago [-]
They are mass produced in factories, not made by craftsmen.
sumedh 2 hours ago [-]
Have you used Windows?
kombine 1 hours ago [-]
what does Windows have to do with this? It sucks as much as MacOS
doodledoodahs 58 minutes ago [-]
Have you actually looked at apple products and compared them to the competition? The different in quality of finish is really stark in my experience. Some other manufacturers have some products which have some nice features. Whatever you think of the software or ecosystem, almost Apple hardware is just nicely made.
linhns 3 hours ago [-]
Neo is a good product, but they're making their better products (Macs) more out of reach for a whole class of customers.
JoshTko 3 hours ago [-]
Mac Mini is a stellar product...
netdevphoenix 1 hours ago [-]
> making useful and affordable products for all users,
Affordable, ethical. You can only choose one.
layer8 2 hours ago [-]
> This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended.
Ternus just looks a bit younger. He’ll be 51, and half a year older than Cook was when he became CEO in 2011.
DarkNova6 4 hours ago [-]
> This is one of the more broadly normal HN-reaction threads to large public news event I've seen in a while. A lot of love for Apple, respect for the decision, and respectfully stated nuance. Surprising and good.
In other words, nothing insightful or worth talking about. I don't want to read news for feelgood vibes.
planb 4 hours ago [-]
But there is interesting information in lots of the comments. Like the quote from Ternus about Apple Maps in one of the comments. This gives relevant insight of how he thinks and how he might handle problems when he takes over.
sillyfluke 2 hours ago [-]
If it's interesting to note that there are mostly nuanced takes and positive vibes in the thread, and an otherwise low-value meta comment is deemed to be a worthy top comment for saying so, then I suggest an auto-generated AI summarization comment pinned to every long HN thread. This will surely save everyone the trouble of doing so...
(I am not claiming the top comment is AI generated, only that an AI generated summarization of the thread can function just as well in its stead, despite the occasional inaccuracies)
cimi_ 4 hours ago [-]
This is relevant information for this forum, for good or bad Apple has a lot of impact.
I find your reaction strange, do you read news to be angry and/or afraid? :)
card_zero 3 hours ago [-]
For critical thought. This overlaps with negativity, because criticism is disagreeable.
pembrook 1 hours ago [-]
> I don't want to read news for feelgood vibes.
Yes, as algorithmic engagement has proven, most people want to read the news to get angry about stuff.
But I don't like hanging around that. I'd rather talk about tech news with nerds (old HN) and not just talk about coastal filter-bubble US politics with big tech worker bees (new HN).
US politics has definitely captured the crowd here lately. Half of the comment threads somehow devolve from discussions of Javascript frameworks into hysterical left-populist struggle sessions over the perceived political injustice of the day.
Maybe some feel good vibes and some apolitical news for the day aren't a bad thing.
card_zero 2 hours ago [-]
There's a BBC article on this, with a quote:
> With a new boss, Apple may be showing its strategic interest in deeper integration of AI into its hardware, said Hubbard. "The very strengths that made Apple dominant - their discipline, polish, and control - could become constraints if the next era rewards openness and faster iteration," he said.
The opposite of the basic human interface quality and consistency improvements that several commenters here hope for.
(Admittedly "Hubbard" here is just the first pundit they could grab, an Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, so this isn't the best informed prognostication.)
tcfhgj 4 hours ago [-]
A lot of love for a company which doesn't even let you chose the apps you want to use.
zapzupnz 3 hours ago [-]
A wonderfully out-of-date sentiment.
card_zero 2 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? Something like "freedom is so last year, it's all about obedience now"?
tcfhgj 2 hours ago [-]
oh I just love the replies
hk__2 3 hours ago [-]
This is not a bad thing.
AussieWog93 3 hours ago [-]
Please explain?
garganzol 2 hours ago [-]
Your statement implies that positivity equals to normality. This is the same kind of statement that would imply that negativity or evil is normal.
All those statements are psychological manipulation. Being too positive or too negative makes people blind and mendable by silently suppressing their will to be themselves.
eats_indigo 4 hours ago [-]
I think they're the exact same age at time of appointment?
az226 3 hours ago [-]
But Tim Apple had gray hair
tonyl 1 hours ago [-]
Love for hackernews community
DeathArrow 4 hours ago [-]
> A lot of love for Apple
That makes me wonder why people love Apple but hate all other big companies.
dspillett 3 hours ago [-]
To a large extent: the product, the gloss, the luxury-item impression. People generally aren't looking beyond that deeper into the company behind.
You can see a similar thing in the 3D printing world with Bambu Lab - people love the product (my A1 has been excellent value, very reliable, and I despite preferring my fancy more expensive toy for most tasks I would still recommend it to those starting out without specific needs that such a design can't provide), and any concern about the company behind it (slowly closing off the ecosystem, initially trying to make out that their obviously-inspired-by-the-fullspectrum-scorca-fork colour mixing option was their own original stroke of genius) doesn't matter to them.
With both Bambu and Apple part of why they get this attention is the end-to-end polish that people feel in the product experience (to be fair is a valid reason to choose those products) and a certain amount of luck in them bringing their show to market at the right time, where other companies are seen as producing more interchangeable commodity items. Without that distinction giving people a higher view of the product range, the other companies struggle to get away from the fact that we don't naturally, for good reason, trust nor love commercial entities.
The other thing working in favour of some companies is momentum: some were worthy of some adoration for higher quality products and/or greater customer care than the competition, but are no longer and it takes a while for everyone to realise how much things have changed. Disney is definitely a company that I would add to this pile, and there are others.
Another big company that seems to get a lot more adoration than any of their competition is Nintendo, though I'm not in the gaming market any more so I don't know how much of that they still earn and how much of it is just that at least they aren't Sony or Microsoft!
AussieWog93 3 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of other big companies that people love too. Off the top of my head: Nintendo, AMD, Disney.
In the case of all of them, they may make some questionably ethical business decisions but at the same time do genuinely care about the craft they're in, pushing boundaries and making quality products.
msh 2 hours ago [-]
For a long time apple did a lot better for both "hackers" and normal customers compared to the other big operating system company.
They also made a good unix based OS that was easy to purchase on decent hardware (esp laptops).
briandear 1 hours ago [-]
Have you used Oracle, Salesforce, Windows? That’s why.
oofbaroomf 16 hours ago [-]
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
btown 16 hours ago [-]
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
hobofan 5 hours ago [-]
This may just be my bubble, but even among my iPhone-owning friends, I haven't seen a single person use Apple Maps in Europe, so I wouldn't be surprised if the efforts to improve the map data have been more focused on the US.
louthy 5 hours ago [-]
I’m in Europe. I use it as part of Apple CarPlay for all my navigation and I think it’s much better than Google Maps (for car navigation, at least)
gargs 31 minutes ago [-]
Apple Maps is absolutely very late to the game when it comes to road closures. Google Maps somehow always knows which roads are closed, even if for a few minutes.
k12sosse 14 minutes ago [-]
Because users on Waze report it to them for points
madaxe_again 5 hours ago [-]
Really depends on where you are in Europe. Out here in the boonies of Portugal, it’s excellent if you’re driving a 4x4 pickup truck, which is the only vehicle of mine I use it with, as it picks very direct routes, which often involve ridiculously steep muddy dirt tracks, very narrow bridges, and generally just very underused farm tracks.
I tried using it in Bosnia, once, and it decided to use an abandoned airfield landing strip as a shortcut. Wild stuff.
Zanfa 2 hours ago [-]
This is my exact experience, but with Google Maps. Constantly suggesting gravel (or worse) side roads instead of highways and hallucinating multiple turn lanes etc on a country road about 1 car wide. It's been a few years, but I still remember the time I was in Berlin and buses didn't run due to bad weather, but I had a flight to catch so I had to walk to the Tegel airport and the route Google maps recommended ended up being quite an adventure, having to crawl through a hole in a linked fence on an unlit dead-end road next to the airport.
shakow 1 hours ago [-]
In the Balkans, both Apple Maps and Google Maps are completely lost.
I frequently drive through Serbia/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Macedonia, and if you ever do, do yourself a favor and install something OpenStreetMap-based.
Otherwise, you will be missing new motorways, get thrown on unpaved roads, or even asked to drive on roads that just do not exist anymore.
pfix 4 hours ago [-]
So it was at least concrete / tarmac instead of mud?
madaxe_again 4 hours ago [-]
Concrete. Used the opportunity to do some doughnuts before continuing on our journey.
cvak 4 hours ago [-]
tbf google maps are absolutely shit for car navigation.
omnibrain 2 hours ago [-]
German here and me and my wife almost exclusively use Apple Maps, mainly because it looks and feels nicer. The differences in navigation are miniscule, but if we want to really check the traffic before we start we do a quick glance at Google maps.
One difference in navigation we noticed is, that Apple Maps gives some small local streets - those just one revel above "Feldwege" (agricultural/forestry roads) - more weight than they should have. They are not really "single track" (almost unheard of in Germany) but come close, with no lane delineation dashes, etc.
aprilnya 22 minutes ago [-]
It’s quite good in both Spain and UK. Better at public transport than Google Maps.
brandrick 4 hours ago [-]
European here. Been using Apple Maps exclusively for the best part of a decade now.
hk__2 3 hours ago [-]
Europe here. We have a friend who always gets lost and for that we call him "Apple Maps".
DRW_ 3 hours ago [-]
I've used it quite a lot in Europe - specifically for walking directions in cities. I prefer Apple Maps for walking directions, especially paired with the watch - the data is good and the UX with the watch is excellent.
hbs18 5 hours ago [-]
I'm from Europe and I use it 99% of the time. I find the UI in satnav mode much better (cleaner and readable) than the one Google Maps has. The only time I use Google Maps is when I really want to find something that's not in Apple Maps or when I want to read reviews without fumbling with the web browser.
artk42 5 hours ago [-]
The reason is that Google are highly commercialized first on thier maps, while Apple focused on major markets. E.g. I can remember the times like 2017, when Apple maps was as rocky as possible, but they were working fine in Shenzhen with matching chines to transcriptions, while Google maps sucked at scale there.
shantnutiwari 2 hours ago [-]
Here in the UK, Apple maps is the only app I use. I dont even use the inbuilt car gps.
MrDOS 52 minutes ago [-]
Here in the north east of Scotland, I have to switch back and forth between Google Maps and Apple Maps. Apple Maps provides vastly superior residential navigation (it understands that many houses only have names, not numbers, and knows what those names are), but commercial information (where to find a café, are they open, etc.) is often incomplete or outright missing. It seems like Apple have coughed up for POI licensing from OS Maps or similar, but they're limited to whatever business information they can get from Yelp.
dash2 4 hours ago [-]
I changed to it for car navigation. It's a less cluttered interface and integrates better with voice control than Google maps. I still use Google to find out what's around me in a city, which is probably where the money is.
serial_dev 5 hours ago [-]
I can’t reply to sibling comment, but the Apple Maps native integration in the Apple ecosystem is far far ahead of Google’s. Their CarPlay, Watch, notifications, island etc integration shows how all apps should feel, but not even Google can be bothered to have the integration right.
to be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.
Daub 4 hours ago [-]
in Japan apple maps is commonly used.
akg_67 4 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source that supports this claim?
I haven’t come across anyone using Apple Maps while living in Japan, most seem to use Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps.
nixass 4 hours ago [-]
Outside of the US Japan is the most saturated Apple's market
jesterson 3 hours ago [-]
It's sub par to google maps. As much as I would like to use it in Japan, but it is crappier than Google.
Noone in my circle with iphone uses it. Most of people are using Yahoo maps, which is way better than google and apple maps combined.
jwr 4 hours ago [-]
I use it all the time, because its driving directions interface is so much better than Google, it's not even funny. But it is overall worse than Google Maps.
And they are planning to make it even worse with ads, so.
lynx97 4 hours ago [-]
Well, back in the days, it took Apple 3 years to fix umlauts in PDF documents with VoiceOver. It is pretty much normal that you're being treated as a second-class user if you are not residing in the US. It is a form of digital colonialism. Learn english, move to the US, or suffer the death of a thausand cuts.
pkolaczk 4 hours ago [-]
The interface and the direction instructions on Apple Maps are way ahead of Google Maps. The app performance is also much smoother / snappier, it connects to the car instantly and reliably, where with Android Auto it’been always waiting and pain. But the accuracy of maps is indeed worse.
However my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(
Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.
billziss 4 hours ago [-]
It does not understand English either :)
ChrisMarshallNY 1 hours ago [-]
Very regionally dependent.
Around here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.
I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.
physhster 57 minutes ago [-]
Apple Maps only works well in North America, possibly just the US. The same way a lot of happy paths in Apple products are designed for California/Single Culture/Single Language/Single Residence.
d3ckard 3 hours ago [-]
I'm using almost exclusively Apple Maps in Poland and never had any issue (that I remember). Your mileage may vary and so on.
maciejzj 5 hours ago [-]
Anecdotal evidence, but I do use Apple Maps in Poland and they work just fine for me, I guess the mileage may vary.
71bw 4 hours ago [-]
So does my father - but then again, it is important to remember the context. It's not going to be an issue if you only drive in big cities or on main roads. The only time I really need to use GPS to navigate is going out into the complete boonies, and Waze does that expertly. Apple Maps, meanwhile, helps me remember my Mercedes' stock navigation, which is forever locked in 2011 and runs in 256 colors. :-)
berti 4 hours ago [-]
I kind of have the opposite experience, and really only use maps to find streets within the city limits. The country is easy to navigate with the road signs you see along the way, and it's more enjoyable to navigate that way than following a nagging app.
We might be kind of lucky in New Zealand with the yellow AA signposts at every intersection in the country telling you the nearest towns/communities and their distances in every direction.
pkolaczk 4 hours ago [-]
They do work for me either, but I have learned to double check the locations of POIs with Google Maps to make sure I’ll arrive at the correct place.
nottorp 4 hours ago [-]
Personally I doubt they test the hardware outside an air conditioned and dust less office in California.
daemin 5 hours ago [-]
I made the mistake of trusting Google Maps with driving directions in Sicily, and it always sent me down tiny single lane (but two way) roads because they were "better" by the algorithm. That taught me to trust my gut and follow the highways/main roads rather than use any shortcuts that an algorithm can conjure up. (I'm sure this has relevance in the age of LLMs).
sneak 2 hours ago [-]
These reports seem unhelpful unless you specify the date at which you had this experience, as this thread is about continuous improvement over time.
kakacik 4 hours ago [-]
Well, even generally much better Google maps sometimes tries to force me through unpaved field roads with unavoidable damage to normal cars. Or create absolutely ridiculous 'shortcuts' that save 5 metres but I should exit busy main road to join it again 100m later, spending few minutes trying to join back. Or lead me through forbidden/one way roads from wrong direction that are like that permanently since forever.
Generally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.
krackers 15 hours ago [-]
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
latexr 14 hours ago [-]
Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.
Could Forstall potentially return under new Apple leadership?
afavour 12 hours ago [-]
He produces Broadway shows these days. Never say never but that kind of thing screams an “I’ve got all the cash I need, now I’m following my passions” mindset. You certainly don’t do it for the money…
btown 9 hours ago [-]
And met his co-producer for the (Tony-winning!) show at Lars Ulrich's birthday party! He's doing something right. https://archive.is/ZcTJm
MarcelOlsz 6 hours ago [-]
>He's doing something right.
Yes, being rich.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 13 hours ago [-]
What? No. Why would he even want to?
UltraSane 12 hours ago [-]
Enormous amounts of money?
bitmasher9 12 hours ago [-]
He’s already escaped the permanent underclass.
philipallstar 4 hours ago [-]
Meaning it's not permanent.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
The idea is that it becomes permanent in the future.
Barbing 8 hours ago [-]
> Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat".
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
JKCalhoun 13 hours ago [-]
Forstall fired an engineer I had worked with (and who I respected a lot) to take the fall for Apple Maps.
Barbing 8 hours ago [-]
Like one engineer could ever be responsible for that epic of a fiasco?
dewey 10 hours ago [-]
I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
pjerem 6 hours ago [-]
Another huge exemple : in most big cities in Europe you have special parking lots around big public transit hubs outside of the city where you can park for free as long as you continue your journey by public transit.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
daemin 5 hours ago [-]
There was a Not Just Bikes video about how Google Maps is optimised for driving where it pretty much actively hides the biggest walking routes and promotes roads for driving by making them bigger. Useful in the USA for sure but actively harmful in Europe, given that you're more likely to plan a route by which roads you can see, and unless you know what to look for you're not going to find them easily.
spockz 5 hours ago [-]
Yes. Unfortunately transit between public transit is always walking. No options to take a first part by bike or car, or folding bikes for intermediate hops.
londons_explore 51 minutes ago [-]
The long tail of user desires is loooong. For example "I want to take transit, but please exclude transit options where I cannot take my non-folding bicycle". Or "I don't have a raincoat, suggest only bus stops with a roof, oh and by the way I don't like the uncomfortable seats on the purple line but will take it if there is no other way".
I think LLM's with access to lots of personal data and the ability to scout the web might solve all these use cases in one fell swoop, rather than trying to design a user interface with buttons, algorithms and data sources for every obscure use case.
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
I think you mean country/region capitals, or countries like Germany.
I can assert than this isn't a thing in most Portuguese big cities, although it would be great to have it.
holgerschurig 3 hours ago [-]
In Germany it's often not IN cities, but around. Example for Frankfurt:
The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.
Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.
First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.
And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.
If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.
So it's nice to have this, but it's no all roses.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Well at least on NRW, I can say that there are enough P&R around here.
However compared with European countries like Portugal, this is a complete different reality.
This was my main point, because there are these "in Europe public transport is so great" remarks, yes it is, provided one is lucky to be on the right parts of Europe, as you also kind of refer to by your no all roses scenario.
sobjornstad 32 minutes ago [-]
My favorite Apple example of this is that when the Apple Watch notices that you're walking/running/biking and asks if you want to start a workout, for some reason you cannot accept it with the double-tap-your-fingers gesture. Which is fine if it's warm outside...but when it's winter in Minnesota, if I want to activate it I have to take one of my gloves off, pull up my sleeves, and put the gloves back on, while bitching about how nobody designing the watch lives in a cold climate. (Especially when I'm on a bike. Riding no-hands in the snow is not a smart idea.)
wallst07 1 hours ago [-]
Another example: When taking HOV and the map asks you if you want HOV enabled, there are no options I can force the navigation to take me to the nearest HOV lane.
If it happens to be there, it will say to use it, but I can't say "Route me to the nearest HOV entrance" because I prefer it even if it's 1 minute slower.
gmac 6 hours ago [-]
Staying in a holiday rental and there are no hooks on the walls!
notpushkin 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve started buying cheap self-adhesive hooks on AliExpress and placing them myself. Not sure if they last long but hopefully owners get the message.
turtlesdown11 55 minutes ago [-]
> staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you.
I'll bite, what does this have to do with Apple Maps?
JKCalhoun 15 hours ago [-]
“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
dpark 15 hours ago [-]
> It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
jakeydus 14 hours ago [-]
No product is bug free. Are all products worth using?
mort96 13 hours ago [-]
"No product worth using is bug free" is not the same statement as "all bug free products are worth using". Come on man, this is basic logic.
jakeydus 13 hours ago [-]
You’re right. But your statement was that no product worth using is bug free. I said that no software exists that is without bugs. Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using. But since all software has bugs, that applies to every product ever made. It doesn’t have any discriminating power. So it’s not fallacious on its face but it’s not useful either, and that’s what I was trying to point out.
astafrig 12 hours ago [-]
> Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using.
This is not correct; "If a product is worth using, then it has bugs." (P→Q) does not imply its converse "If a product has bugs, then it is worth using." (Q→P). Buginess is presented as a necessary condition of being worth using, not a sufficient one.
It does, however, imply "If a product has no bugs, then it is not worth using.".
mort96 2 hours ago [-]
To be clear, my statement is that "No product worth using is bug free" (which is what dpark said) does not mean the same as "all bug free products are worth using" (which is what your response to dpark implied).
dpark 10 hours ago [-]
> It doesn’t have any discriminating power.
That was exactly my point. The presence of bugs in a product (in this case Apple Maps) does not mean it should not ship. “No open bugs” cannot be the criteria for whether a product is ready to ship.
worthless-trash 5 hours ago [-]
> “No open bugs” cannot be the criteria for whether a product is ready to ship.
I think you mean, should not.
jachee 12 hours ago [-]
That “pointing out” is, itself, “not useful either.”
jakeydus 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Affric 14 hours ago [-]
I mean the problem was the Google contract, yeah?
fckgw 16 hours ago [-]
Apple Maps is pretty fantastic
drob518 15 hours ago [-]
It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.
Affric 14 hours ago [-]
Google is not without its errors.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
paradox460 11 hours ago [-]
Addresses are hard. OSM Nominatim struggles with them all the time. Probably the biggest hurdle to OSM adoption, imo
drob518 14 hours ago [-]
Yep, they all have flaws. I just fine that when I want to drive somewhere, Google does better for me than Apple, though certainly Apple has improved a lot recently.
cogogo 12 hours ago [-]
actually a sign of our times that we can gripe about this. i remember how annoying it was to rent a car on a business trip without anything other than a road atlas. you had to dedicate a fair bit of cognitive load you really didnt want to use.
drob518 10 hours ago [-]
Indeed. I remember flying to Atlanta and arriving at midnight. I rented a car and had to try to find my hotel in the dark with one of those one-page maps the rental car company had. So, yea, we’ve come a long way for the better.
dboreham 6 hours ago [-]
In the 80s I rented a car from the Minneapolis airport. Drove to my hotel visually navigating with respect to the tall buildings of downtown. Eventually realizing I was in St Paul.
projektfu 15 hours ago [-]
Google Maps often picks the non-idiomatic thing. It'll say the road name when no sign uses that, and it's a US highway that you have been following for a while. Or it will tell you the state highway number when it is a major named artery, and nobody knows that it is a state highway at that point or uses the highway number. This makes it hard to know if it is carrying you along on the same route or if it has come up with one of its weird shortcuts to save 1 minute.
dboreham 6 hours ago [-]
It has absolutely no clue about roundabouts. On a journey in England or France on a road that has a roundabout every mile it will constantly spam you with "take the second exit onto wailing street" every minute, when a human would say "go straight at the next 20 roundabouts staying on the A38".
doix 5 hours ago [-]
You're not wrong that it does that, but that's kinda what I'd expect. Maybe because I'm used to it, but if there's a potential turn it'll say "keep right" or "keep left". So it makes sense to me that it says "second exit".
"Straight" can be ambiguous, second exit isn't. Maybe it's because I'm terrible with directions and hate driving, but I like the constant feedback that I'm going the right way.
flir 4 hours ago [-]
I once printed out a directions from an online map that contained "pass straight over the next fourteen roundabouts" (I think it was on the way into Reading). Lose count, and you are stuffed. I much prefer a turn-by-turn approach.
Affric 14 hours ago [-]
Here in Australia Apple Maps names everywhere by local council, which isn’t used at all, we use localities. I have reported this as a bug repeatedly but they just keep at it.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
paradox460 11 hours ago [-]
Salt Lake City roads are amusing
"Turn right on East one hundred and twenty three thousand South"
drob518 52 minutes ago [-]
Salt Lake City is a perfect grid, better than Manhattan. An address in SLC tells you EXACTLY where it is. It was GPS before GPS.
drob518 14 hours ago [-]
Yep, that’s sometimes true as well.
boxed 5 hours ago [-]
I hate how Google scrapes business addresses so you get like "There's a grocery store X here" but actually that's just their corporate office building. I see that all the time. Machines just don't know.
jonhohle 15 hours ago [-]
On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.
Spooky23 13 hours ago [-]
All true, but you have to measure it against how enshitified Google Maps has become.
trinix912 3 hours ago [-]
Just a week ago I could still create a Google Docs "map" document, add spots, share it with friends who could collaborate from any (incl. non-Apple) device... It's just a pain to do this with Apple Maps compared to how easy and straightforward it is with Google Maps. You can also still import desktop Google Earth bookmark files.
cogogo 12 hours ago [-]
I primarily use Apple maps and bounce back to google sometimes because I think the browser experience is so much better and it is faster to just type my terms right into ironically safari. Every time I do I think it is still simpler and snappier. Especially true if I have recently tried to use the MacOS maps app… that never behaves how I would imagine it should if I go beyond a simple location search. There are things about the ios app that make me crazy too. No qualms about the maps themselves these days.
bravoetch 12 hours ago [-]
I don't agree with that assertion. Just because google maps has become one thing, doesn't excuse Apple maps flaws. They can exist on their merits.
wpm 12 hours ago [-]
The app on macOS is terrible, like all Catalyst/SwiftUI ports. Fisher-Price software.
dlahoda 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ncruces 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe elsewhere it is. Here, it's terrible.
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
cageface 13 hours ago [-]
In the US. In many other countries it's borderline useless.
jdalgetty 16 hours ago [-]
I haven't used google maps in years.
pityJuke 15 hours ago [-]
90% of my usage of it is because it actually displays the map on my Watch, whereas Google Maps & Citymapper only show directions.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
xyst 15 hours ago [-]
It’s okay. It’s still subpar and barely keeping pace with Gmaps
JohnMakin 15 hours ago [-]
it was far inferior to its competitor when it was released
mikestew 15 hours ago [-]
That was, what, twelve years ago? Hardly seems relevant.
JohnMakin 15 hours ago [-]
it's relevant in the context of this conversation:
> Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
While it is great now, it did flop because it was terrible.
mikestew 15 hours ago [-]
Bah, missed that part initially. Thanks.
lotsofpulp 15 hours ago [-]
And they just added ads.
SanjayMehta 4 hours ago [-]
Apple Maps is definitely not amazing in India. All it's good for is "Find My." Only Google is accurate and has good traffic data.
Mindwipe 6 hours ago [-]
That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.
hedora 15 hours ago [-]
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
apatheticonion 5 hours ago [-]
My only hope, however unlikely, is that Apple will recognise that power users, engineers and gamers would really really appreciate running Linux on Macs and they write some drivers for it.
There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.
schnebbau 5 hours ago [-]
Well, that certainly would be one way to wipe billions from their share price overnight.
The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.
miki123211 30 minutes ago [-]
Apple went out of its way to make Linux on Mac a reality. They did a lot to allow third-party OSes when Apple Silicon came out, it's up to the Linux community to do the rest.
There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
3form 4 hours ago [-]
Why would it? Shareholders of the major stocks are generally vibes-based, and I'm sure that if Apple undertook that, they would find a way to build hype around it.
egorfine 4 hours ago [-]
> Linux on Mac will become a reality
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
Why would Apple writing some Linux drivers wipe billions from its share price? You can already install Linux on a Mac if you really want to. Back in the day, you used to be able to install Windows on an (Intel) Mac, and that didn’t seem to have any such effect.
gjvc 5 hours ago [-]
it would likely do the opposite as linux users gravitate to the best hardware for their preferred OS => more hardware sales for Apple
egorfine 4 hours ago [-]
> Apple will recognise that power users, engineers
They will not. Recognizing the value of power users and engineers looks deeply un-Apple to me.
silon42 5 hours ago [-]
As a power user, ThinkPad T (maybe P also) series is better for me (and it's not that close). I run Linux on it.
xandrius 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's due not being interested to things like build quality, screen, track pad, etc.
vichle 2 hours ago [-]
I also have a Thinkpad, but an X1. I'd trade it and my first-born child to get to run Linux on a modern MacBook.
No offense to Lenovo, it's a great laptop. But Apples build quality is on another level, plus if I want to run local LLMs, AFAIK there is no better option.
There's no way I'm going back to macOS though, that shit was bad 5 years ago when I switched and it sounds like it's gotten way worse.
foobiekr 16 hours ago [-]
Hardware people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at software. But we can hope.
trsohmers 16 hours ago [-]
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
Generally speaking, I think both are true. Most people seem to have an affinity for either hardware or software, but rarely for both. Those who do are extremely unique. I don't mean that as an insult to anyone, just as an observatin having worked in both (and personally am much better at software than hardware, even though I enjoy both).
friendzis 5 hours ago [-]
Hardware and software have VERY different deployment cost functions and lifecycles. Having "affinity" for one requires a mindset not really suitable for the other and being able to juggle mindsets, especially short vs long term focus is rare in itself.
jamesfinlayson 6 hours ago [-]
I agree - at university there were software people and hardware people and a small number who studied mechatronics (hardware and software). But even the mechatronic people were really hardware people who just tolerated software.
cogman10 15 hours ago [-]
I find both interesting but have been working in software for over a decade now.
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
buildbot 15 hours ago [-]
Verilog is not the best and that’s not even the worst part - tools like ISE/Vivado and Quartus are even worse!
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
jamesfinlayson 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah at university we had to do some hardware stuff in our software course. I know there were better debug tools available as some students purchased them but playing with microprocessors was no fun.
foobiekr 10 hours ago [-]
I am deeply aware of software people being crap at hardware having worked in embedded for much of my career.
e40 13 hours ago [-]
I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
theodric 5 hours ago [-]
Bodge wires in shipped products beg to differ!
mihaelm 16 hours ago [-]
It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.
relaxing 15 hours ago [-]
What they need is a culture of UX focus, and I don’t think it’s present in the hardware team either.
They’ve coasted too long on consistent visual identity, and even that’s been slipping. Time to focus on actual user needs.
cogman10 16 hours ago [-]
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
coldtea 16 hours ago [-]
The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.
al_borland 12 hours ago [-]
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware"
—Alan Kay
drob518 15 hours ago [-]
In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
16 hours ago [-]
Fr0styMatt88 16 hours ago [-]
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
nottorp 15 hours ago [-]
How? Coding agents are trained on every copy of every tutorial that skips error checking and implements the least resistance path.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
I find that the code AI likes to write actually checks for “errors” too often when often you wouldn’t even want to do that. You don’t need to check every dictionary access and come up with a default value for example
4 hours ago [-]
Fr0styMatt88 14 hours ago [-]
I mean I would hope at least one person actually reviews the code before it goes out, but yeah we all know what hope does :)
ezst 8 hours ago [-]
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is code reviewing might start producing better software.
elzbardico 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, like fixing a annoyance while introducing one or two SEV-1 for sure is going to be great progress.
jinushaun 12 hours ago [-]
I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.
bushbaba 6 hours ago [-]
I hated liquid glass at first, but now i've come to appreciate it. It grows on you
theodric 5 hours ago [-]
So does fungus. I'd prefer to avoid both.
aurareturn 9 hours ago [-]
That guy left to join Meta I believe.
DANmode 10 hours ago [-]
Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.
fauigerzigerk 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, the idea seems to be to force app developers to support transparency so that any future iGlasses device has a good supply of apps from day one (contrary to what happened with Vision Pro).
Apple used to insist that different types of devices require different UI principles. This seems all the more true for a transparent device that you wear on your face while moving around trying not to bump into physical objects.
But we'll see. Perhaps the right level of transparency is situational. If you sit down with iGlasses using them as a screen you might want to reduce transparency while increasing it when you're moving around outdoors. Adjusting transparency could become as routine as adjusting audio volume.
junaru 6 hours ago [-]
VR/AR is a gimmick. Gimmicks have no place on a work tool (macOS). No one is gonna use VR/AR with a laptop. Liquid Glass is Apples Metro UI.
I'm still on 18.x thats insecure by now and switching to Asahi as soon as something breaks.
wiseowise 5 hours ago [-]
> VR/AR is a gimmick. Gimmicks have no place on a work tool (macOS). No one is gonna use VR/AR with a laptop. Liquid Glass is Apples Metro UI.
When I bought a Macbook M1 years ago, then was forced to switch back to a PC and wanted to have something similar in quality - I realized there's NOTHING that compares at ANY price point, let alone $1000.
Quothling 2 hours ago [-]
I've got the smallest version of the m1 macbook air when they came out. It's still my daily driver when I'm not on my corporate T14 gen 6 I7 with 32gb of ram, and while it no longer outperforms my corporate computer it keeps up well enough while being cold to the touch and noiseless. It's also significantly lighter and has better battery life despite being old, though corporate does kill a lot of that on the pc.
Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.
alluro2 3 hours ago [-]
I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...
uyzstvqs 3 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping that they'll finally ditch the sleazy anti-consumer tactics, and just focus on providing real value through real quality. They're definitely in a position where they can do so.
Right to repair with aftermarket parts and app installs from any source without Apple's permission. Then I'll consider using an iPhone.
giancarlostoro 59 minutes ago [-]
Agree, Microsoft needs to be next in my eyes. They have really degraded Windows. I do not know how Bill Gates uses a computer and doesnt lose his colossal shit at how garbage it is on high end Microsoft made devices.
puelocesar 5 hours ago [-]
I also feel burned by that, but to be fair, is there any software in the world that's not getting worse and worse?
3form 4 hours ago [-]
I think lots of backend stuff is getting better over time, but I fail to think of a single thing facing a regular consumer.
tcfhgj 4 hours ago [-]
Typst
imhoguy 5 hours ago [-]
This. I just want Freeform usable on iPadOS again.
Since 26 upgrade it is unusable with 100+ notes. It looks like they merged iOS variant with Macos one. Constant freezes, random unsaves, device gets boiling hot. No fix with factory reset. I love the HW but SW needs more love.
calf 15 hours ago [-]
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
AI?
13 hours ago [-]
UltraSane 12 hours ago [-]
The Apple Vision Pro hardware is remarkable.
crooked-v 16 hours ago [-]
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
crims0n 15 hours ago [-]
Granted I have a big ol' head, but I like the metal frame in all its heft - they feel ultra durable and I don't worry about throwing them in a bag.
necovek 16 hours ago [-]
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
ericzawo 14 hours ago [-]
They are leaps and bounds above any other laptop on the market. Who wants a plastic chasis and nub in 2026 over a modern Macbook Air.
makeitdouble 13 hours ago [-]
They are leaps and bounds ahead for people who want their specific formula or don't really care about computers.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
wao0uuno 5 hours ago [-]
Thinkpads are mostly made out of magnesium alloy. And yes, I prefer Thinkpads over modern Macbook Airs. They let me run whatever OS I want.
odiroot 5 hours ago [-]
They're way behind in the keyboard and touchpad area. Also the I/O ports.
ValentineC 16 hours ago [-]
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
wraptile 7 hours ago [-]
You might be sleeping on trackpoint. I don't remember the last time I used a trackpad once I onboarded on trackpoint - all that hand waving is so tiring when you can achieve the same action even faster by just moving two fingers couple of milimeters. You just move your index from H to trackpoint and thumb from space to mouse buttons which is basically the smallest movement you can do on your keyboard.
ValentineC 5 hours ago [-]
> You just move your index from H to trackpoint and thumb from space to mouse buttons which is basically the smallest movement you can do on your keyboard.
What about gestures, like two-finger scroll, or two-finger hold+click right click?
pxc 33 minutes ago [-]
Systems that have trackpoints have physical mouse buttons, so you can just do real right clicks. Scrolling typically has its own input combo: hold the middle mouse button plus push the trackpoint to scroll in whatever direction you're pushing.
If there's a trackpad as well (usually there is), you can still do all the multi-finger gestures on it unless you choose to disable the trackpad altogether.
Fwiw, I don't find the trackpoint faster or more precise than the giant MacBook trackpads. Its main advantages are being closer to your index fingers' likely resting position on the keyboard, physical mouse buttons, and requiring less vertical space than a giant trackpad.
ezst 8 hours ago [-]
I haven't used a touchpad in recent years that wasn't "good enough", I really don't obsess about those (but I acknowledge that many do here), but I profoundly dislike MacBooks' keyboards. Anyhow, let's not pretend that it matters as much as the broken mess of a desktop environment/windows manager that the OS sitting on top is.
pxc 15 hours ago [-]
> I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
bombcar 13 hours ago [-]
Interestingly enough the Neo went back to a clicking trackpad; you might want to try one and see how it feels for you.
gxs 5 hours ago [-]
Always makes me wonder how people use their machine when I read comments like this
I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software
The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch
It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out
The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond
So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?
pxc 43 minutes ago [-]
Sure, I can tell you one thing that's different right now: I use third-party software to get a three-finger middle click. If Apple's operating system weren't missing basic features like the ability to middle click via the trackpad, I wouldn't have to do that and maybe wouldn't have this problem.
the_lucifer 15 hours ago [-]
> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
necovek 2 hours ago [-]
With Linux, it is really multiple UX ecosystems: you can be in one (eg. Gtk+/Gnome and/or Qt/KDE) and consistency will be there. Not perfect, but MacOS is not much better.
OTOH, I want subpixel rendering on my big screens, and you can't have it with a Mac.
3form 4 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, what are you developing? While regular usage stuff such as HDR is indeed lacking, and general UX leaves a lot to be desired, Linux was always best for me in any software development discipline that I took on, and macOS was a "death by a thousand cuts" instead.
dlahoda 14 hours ago [-]
did you tried nix home-manager for linux software setup? i never was able to use linux until nix.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
happygoose 14 hours ago [-]
if you use nixos you end up feeling like you need to spend more time developing your personal computer's configuration than developing your actual projects, ime.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
honr 13 hours ago [-]
This might have been the case a couple of years ago, but it is certainly not true any more, if you use AI [even occasionally] to manage some of your default.nix and flake.nix files. I learn by getting AI to edit it (default.nix for example), and then study what it did. It helps.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
wao0uuno 5 hours ago [-]
NixOS people are kinda like Jehovah's Witnesses of Hacker News. Every time someone mentions Linux problems there is that one guy asking "But have you tried Nix?". No offense I just find it funny.
eklavya 4 hours ago [-]
I was sooo in your boat just a while ago. Recently (15 days) switched to an Asus NUC pro (mini pc) with intel 225h. I kid you not, I am running Almalinux 10, KDE on it, not even the latest/greatest. I have HDR, VRR, 120Hz, media acceleration, with dual monitors with different settings you name it. Everything works!!
iluvcommunism 16 hours ago [-]
How do you feel about their trackpad? I think they’re the best on the market.
dang 6 hours ago [-]
I wish the trackpad on my macbook were smaller, because my thumbs constantly hit it and smite me into a different reality.
saagarjha 2 hours ago [-]
While typing?
seba_dos1 15 hours ago [-]
They're pretty good, but you can find other good trackpads too. The main thing about Apple is that their trackpads are consistently pretty good, while with other brands it can be hard to figure out what you'll be getting until you try it yourself.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
danielrhodes 16 hours ago [-]
I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
simplyluke 15 hours ago [-]
I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
ebbi 14 hours ago [-]
Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.
spacebanana7 5 hours ago [-]
For example, Tim had the discipline to get out of the EV projects. Which was likely wise given the challenges the sector has faced in profitability, and Apple's long term outside option to accrue vehicular services revenue through CarPlay. Yet someone in his position could have burned $200B pretty easily to try and build a business there.
spacedcowboy 2 hours ago [-]
yep, I worked there for 20+ years, only retired due to health. I was about middle of the park in my group’s tenure there…
lurk2 11 hours ago [-]
> a reputation for a strong engineering culture
We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?
dvt 13 hours ago [-]
> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
SkyPuncher 9 hours ago [-]
I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter.
I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
rolisz 1 hours ago [-]
MacOS sucks. I can't wait for the day Asahi Linux is good enough so that I can bail on it.
Safari, a web browser, randomly stops being able to connect to the Internet (other apps can).
thenakulchawla 8 hours ago [-]
In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.
I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.
VirusNewbie 9 hours ago [-]
Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?
OJFord 5 hours ago [-]
Successful for the business no doubt, but they are an example of 'par with the rest of the industry' aren't they? Nothing market leading about them (except perhaps the price, heh) and not the first in the category, just one of a bunch of good options.
audunw 5 hours ago [-]
Nothing market leading about AirPods? I find it telling that it’s one of the only Apple products that LTT Linus is using, despite not working as well with Android as with iOS. And they have around 30% market share in their product category
OJFord 3 hours ago [-]
You find it telling that some YouTube 'influencer' uses Airpods? You only noticed because of Apple's distinctive white branding, they have market leading marketing, I'll give you that!
basisword 2 hours ago [-]
Their ability to connect and move between devices is 100x better than any competitor. They were also the first to make truly wireless earphones that didn't suck. Judging it now, when the market has finally caught up in most areas doesn't make sense.
steve_taylor 9 hours ago [-]
It's a stealth subscription product. People are losing those things all the time.
suprfnk 5 hours ago [-]
And if not losing, the battery dies in 2-3 years, so you'll have to buy new anyway.
aqme28 2 hours ago [-]
Eh, mine are four years old and still going strong. Battery still lasts longer than I need it to.
ezst 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, what about airpods? Little reason to buy them if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, and if you are, and you are a careful buyer, you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither). I'm not dismissing the marketing forces behind airpods selling by the millions as a "status symbol", but that's very much a "high cost of living country" thing, Apple is inexistent elsewhere, which is most places.
carefree-bob 5 hours ago [-]
Apple didn't use to be a status symbol. I think they earned it. And the fact that they are going all in on Neo tells me they don't care about the status symbol part as much as the profit maximizing. Let me know when Ferrari sells an affordable car.
finghin 4 hours ago [-]
Yep - Apple have worked through to becoming a luxury, upscale brand and there is no reason for them right now to change from that perception with their current market upper hand
windward 4 hours ago [-]
1967, the Dino 206 GT
cjpearson 6 hours ago [-]
This comes off as a quite dismissive and incurious take. Are you quite sure that of the ~500 million consumers who bought a pair, nobody considered utility and it was simply a fashion choice? Or is it more likely that some consumers judge the utility differently from you?
npunt 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Kirby64 8 hours ago [-]
> you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither)
Like what? In the true wireless camp, the Sony's are much less comfortable (and more expensive), the Bose are not as good (and more expensive)...
There's cheaper options, sure, but you're sacrificing build, ANC, battery life, etc.
didibus 5 hours ago [-]
I use AirPods and I have a Google Pixel, Windows laptop, and so on.
eloisant 4 hours ago [-]
That's a very weird choice. I can understand people buying them for the integration with the Apple ecosystem, but outside of it they're just dumb bluetooth earphones. There are better alternatives.
russelldjimmy 3 hours ago [-]
Instead of being curious why someone would make a choice you didn't, you chose to attack the choice! You might as well stick your fingers in your ears and go "na na na I can't hear you!" until you find a tribe of fellow haters.
atonse 12 hours ago [-]
Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.
noahlt 15 hours ago [-]
Hacker News? More like MBA news.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
mrits 3 hours ago [-]
Profit maximizing often involves selling much cheaper and lower quality versions of your products. Often times this involves even getting other companies to mass produce it under your name. The cheapest Mac is arguably their best product.
Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.
11 hours ago [-]
lukeify 15 hours ago [-]
Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.
raincole 9 hours ago [-]
The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.
mancerayder 10 hours ago [-]
There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.
iddan 7 hours ago [-]
The fact they figured out how to transition all their laptops to ARM so it won’t be a stovetop on your lap is amazing
jbmchuck 12 hours ago [-]
Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.
makeitdouble 13 hours ago [-]
To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
Mistletoe 8 hours ago [-]
Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.
wvbdmp 13 hours ago [-]
Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.
jwr 4 hours ago [-]
> without losing its values
I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so.
Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse.
Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.
thenanyu 15 hours ago [-]
Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else
eloisant 3 hours ago [-]
The problem with the word "AI" is that it's a broad term with fuzzy borders depending on who you ask.
But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product...
If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess.
If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.
russelldjimmy 3 hours ago [-]
> It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product.
This is a classic case of thinking that inventing something before others is all that matters, while ignoring that finding a mass market use-case for an existing technology is also important.
ubercore 15 hours ago [-]
I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.
cubefox 15 hours ago [-]
Siri was GOFAI (handwritten software) rather than a model written by a machine learning algorithm.
uncivilized 13 hours ago [-]
Calling the current state of art AI is also generous.
throwawaymobule 4 hours ago [-]
Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.
ivanjermakov 15 hours ago [-]
AI talks started before Jobs was born...
Aachen 2 hours ago [-]
> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things?
From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement:
> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
> That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products
Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it
drob518 15 hours ago [-]
Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.
jayd16 15 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I think Jobs would hate the fuzzy, unpolished results that AI gives you.
tguedes 11 hours ago [-]
I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.
15 hours ago [-]
sneak 2 hours ago [-]
> Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
I could not disagree more. Apple
has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so.
The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death.
The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years.
I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.
w10-1 16 hours ago [-]
His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving:
I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
voncheese 15 hours ago [-]
Thank you for sharing the link, it's a good read.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
Why share it as a quote rather than a link I can click?
nerdsniper 12 hours ago [-]
> I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple
While I agree with all these points, I'd still rather see a hardware guru leading Apple rather than a software-focused leader. The state of software zeitgeist has gotten fairly poor, and the types of formal and thorough "Acceptance Testing" that are common in hardware are more likely to produce great experiences for users than whatever most software leaders are doing today.
Before anyone mentions how all hardware groups seem to produce god-awful software (IoT, vehicles, etc)...I agree, though I have generally attributed this to a lack of budget and vision. I don't expect those two things to be an issue at Apple, but I could be surprised.
npunt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
mghackerlady 15 hours ago [-]
I really wish they did more for free software. I know they contribute heavily to LLVM and are still the main stewards of webkit, but they've very much ignored darwin as a free software operating system, to the point it feels like they only keep it free out of legal obligation
anonym00se1 13 hours ago [-]
Ternus is not a hardware genius. He's a hardware engineer that rose through the ranks at Apple because, from what I've heard from Apple hardware engineers, Dan Riccio liked him "like a son."
herodoturtle 2 hours ago [-]
> His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving
As an aside, I absolutely love the minimal elegance of that web page.
spacechild1 56 minutes ago [-]
> and further that they seem to care about being good people.
Sorry, but this is pretty naive. You simply can't infer the real personality of a CEO from a (well)crafted public letter.
If he really cared about being a decent person, he wouldn't have sucked up to Trump.
liuliu 15 hours ago [-]
I honestly don't know. tim@apple.com is unavailable for quite some time now (since I tried a few years ago), while lisasu@amd.com still works around that time frame.
ladberg 13 hours ago [-]
It's always been tcook@ - and it will get looked at by someone at least
rattus_rattus 12 hours ago [-]
Yes! Can confirm. I emailed him in March 2020 after my 16-day old MacBook Pro had a logic board failure resulting in endless kernel panics. It was just past the return date so I couldn’t just return it and get a new one, so my local Apple Store had sent it in for repair. Then covid hit and everything shut down, so they couldn’t get it fixed and sent back either.
I had emailed with an explanation of what had occurred, and asked if I could get a refund so that I could just purchase a replacement. Within two hours of sending my email, an assistant from his office called me to arrange sending me a replacement. I was really impressed. I honestly figured I would just have to wait until the repair depot opened again, because I didn’t think I would hear back about my email.
Then a month or so later I got a call from the repair depot asking what address I’d like my repaired laptop sent to, since it was supposed to be sent back to the store for pickup (but stores were closed.) So I guess the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth in that case, because the person on the phone from repairs was pretty confused when I said no thanks.
djyde 12 hours ago [-]
I'm really curious how he manages to read through so many emails every day.
lowdude 6 hours ago [-]
I would have assumed that some assistant goes through the inbox and only a (random or filtered) subsample of those mails actually gets read by Tim Cook.
djyde 4 hours ago [-]
I suspect they've implemented some kind of intelligent email filtering system
ugh123 8 hours ago [-]
>but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head
Wonder if he'll be as good as Cook was at kissing Trump's ass. Half serious, half /s.
sshrajesh 46 minutes ago [-]
Apple stock grew 2322.5% during Tim Cook's tenure from 08/24/2011 to 04/20/2026. CAGR approximately 24.29% per annum. Pretty incredible.
kyrra 34 minutes ago [-]
To steal from Twitter:
"Tim Cook took Apple from $350B to $4T"
So? That's a 11X market cap increase. In the same time, MSFT saw a 14X increase, Google saw a 20X increase, Amazon did 28X, Facebook did 35X. We're not even going to talk about NVidia.
Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded. Yay for him?
Pretty easy when you just buy back your own stock with all your profit like Warren Buffet told you to. Incredible.
u_fucking_dork 36 minutes ago [-]
It’s that easy folks. Just buy back your own stock and you print money and success. That’s all it takes.
bofadeez 30 minutes ago [-]
Especially after you inherit a company from Steve Jobs right after the iPhone came out lol
alsetmusic 15 hours ago [-]
For Apple nerds that pay close attention to company, this is no surprise. Third-party dev Marco Arment wrote a blog post speaking to Ternus earlier this month[0].
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
Why would anyone pay close attention to a company ?
It is not a tongue in cheek remark, I am genuinely curious
alsetmusic 10 minutes ago [-]
I dunno. Cause I spend a lot of money on their products and a lot of my time using their software. The announcements they make affect the way I use computers.
Does anyone here pay close attention to updates in the Linux kernel or is that pretty stupid too? (To be fair, you didn't call me stupid, but it's sorta there.)
What's Framework doing? I'm pretty jazzed about their laptops even though I don't buy them.
What about game companies that get bought by Microsoft and now people worry that the franchise they love might get killed?
I'm a nerd and I care a lot about a thing. I don't feel bad about that.
echoangle 4 hours ago [-]
Because you’re a shareholder.
Or because you’re interested in the products and the „company community“ is fun and you like talking about it.
giancarlostoro 57 minutes ago [-]
I have been wanting this for Apple for a while. They are very “boring” when it comes to risk and pushing forward the way Steve Jobs did. I really think they have a lot of potential they are missing out on.
I still hope they eventually sell server blades for macOS.
ghaff 43 minutes ago [-]
Xserve was their big explicit enterprise push. Blades as a whole ended up as something of a niche. Hyperconverged is probably where we've ended up from there for the most part but it's not a big slice of the market.
Apple's big win was that consumer basically became enterprise. There was lots of noise around formal BYOD but in many/most places it just happened whether IT was on-board or not.
zoogeny 15 hours ago [-]
I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
rhubarbtree 5 hours ago [-]
Moving to Apple Silicon perfectly suited Tim Cook’s skill set and is a great foundation for the company’s future. He played to his strengths in a way that genuinely brought huge benefits to the consumer.
Now I think we need to see Apple remake categories the way they did under Steve. If that can happen again, the future is bright.
cg805 10 hours ago [-]
Strategic competence and playing to your strengths is ok to me. Avoiding lots of bad decisions can sometimes be just as good as making some really good decisions.
boppo1 8 hours ago [-]
>massive interest in local AI
Gosh I just read a really hellish thread on what frontier LLMs will become as they're infected with advertising, I hope apple manages to break locsl LLMs (and training?) Into the public discourse
jillesvangurp 9 hours ago [-]
The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room.
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
nxobject 8 hours ago [-]
Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
davkan 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder what Apple TV would look like if they didn’t have Ted Lasso to put out during peak Covid. That’s really their only large mainstream success and in my estimation that success was largely a product of circumstance.
I love their SciFi material but two seasons of severance in three years won’t keep people subscribed. The only reason I have Apple TV for more than a month or two out of the year is due to the bundle plan math working out with family sharing.
Urahandystar 5 hours ago [-]
I don't watch much of it but I do think Apple TV could end up a big winner in the TV wars. The shows they put out are quality and you know they are going to be renewed unlike a Netflix. It seems the strategy is to go for HBO's old position as the king of quality but that is built over decades.
puelocesar 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not the “walled garden” that’s preventing Valve to write Proton for Mac, it’s the lack of Vulcan support. Apple pushed to its own Metal framework when they deprecated OpenGl, which is probably great for performance, but outright denying support for Vulkan was a killer blow for games.
Rapzid 4 hours ago [-]
If Macs were "great" for gaming people would be buying them for gaming.
Aachen 2 hours ago [-]
You can release a phone with desktop-strength hardware running Ubuntu Touch and people will wouldn't buy it to play games because exceedingly few games are made for it
Software support is vital here, you can't just say that if the hardware is good then people would buy it. What good is it if you can't use it?
nfbyte 5 hours ago [-]
This is exactly why the hardware + software vertical integration philosophy is fundamentally retarded. What it essentially means for N hardware vendors to each have their own software platform is that as an application developer, instead of having to develop ONE application, you have to develop N applications. Imagine if Apple hardware just used Linux and macOS / iOS / whateverthefuckOS was just a desktop environment project like Plasma / GNOME / COSMIC. You could still keep the exact same particularities / UX flows / ease of use that people expect from Apple products, AND get free access to the wealth of software and content which exists for Linux and ALSO Windows (because of wine).
bell-cot 12 hours ago [-]
Bold futurism can work very well when you're the (relative) scrappy underdog. So long as you're too smart or lucky to make any huge mistakes.
Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.
tchalla 16 hours ago [-]
> Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Quite successful.
thimabi 16 hours ago [-]
I also liked the part about growing the company while reducing its carbon footprint by more than 60%.
Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.
benoau 13 hours ago [-]
It's probably an even bigger reduction considering their growth.
But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.
Offsetting isn’t real. Buying a few trees doesn’t offset a factory full of trees that fills a river with poison.
pertymcpert 9 hours ago [-]
Carbon offsetting is nothing to do with river pollution.
umpalumpaaa 8 hours ago [-]
Carbon offsetting is risky. You plant a tree and you don’t know if it will die. You create a swampy area to absorb co2 and 10 years later it dries out due to global warming. Offsetting should be used if there is no other way to reduce emissions in the first place. Same is true for sucking carbon out of the air and storing it somewhere… it’s expensive and it should not be the default - we need offsetting and carbon segregation for the really unavoidable stuff
reverius42 7 hours ago [-]
Sucking carbon out of the air using fully renewable energy (solar/wind) is a great thing to do! ... once we've fully decarbonized all other energy use and we have extra, left-over renewable energy.
ihsw 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
pzo 15 hours ago [-]
This is what’s all bad with us stocks and completely disconnected with market value: Revenue jumped 4x but market capitalization got inflated to 12x.
rootusrootus 14 hours ago [-]
Investors are forward-looking, though, so it just means that they think the future looks brighter than the immediate past.
The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.
zarzavat 6 hours ago [-]
Equities as large as Apple act as stores of value like gold, so it could just mean there's more money to be invested. You would need to compare Apple against what happened to the market in general.
pama 15 hours ago [-]
The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.
bagacrap 8 hours ago [-]
pe ratio under 10 in 2013 to ~40 in 2024. You can't deny the multiple expansion.
npunt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cesarvarela 14 hours ago [-]
Some of that is debasement, but some of that is that there is no other brand like Apple.
Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?
benoau 13 hours ago [-]
It's not the brand - it's not like Apple's hit this valuation in isolation Meta, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft all enjoy similar.
It's the cash-money value of putting a fee on all digital goods and subscriptions and cash transactions in a world predisposed to forming and consolidating around monopolies. What does Apple's services revenue look like in another 20 years when Africa, China and India are paying their smartphone provider every time a dollar moves, a few billion more people paying one of two companies every time for their music, movies and tv, games, books, real-world transactions... in de-facto perpetuity.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
Most valued brand, not the most valuable.
boppo1 8 hours ago [-]
Yep. QE was a monumental mistake that killed economic mobility. Asset owners vs wage earners.
throwaway27448 5 hours ago [-]
Do you think market cap should be proportional to revenue?
pembrook 6 hours ago [-]
True, but also Apple is in a far more dominant position today.
That’s a moat in hardware that is going to get even stronger over time. Given this hardware moat they can dip their toes gently into the B2B market they’ve never really cared about and pick up another few hundred billion in high margin revenue over the next 10 years no problem.
I’ve always found it weird that Apple’s entire org runs on Mac but no other Fortune 500 company on earth does. Seems like an opportunity to nibble away at Microsoft.
npunt 4 hours ago [-]
You want to be careful about who your customers are, and what they will do to you as an organization. Enterprise customers create enterprise teams create enterprise culture creates enterprise rot. Apple is wise to play to their strategic position as a consumer product company that lives or dies on great product, because when the buyer is the user thats what they demand.
The real strategic risk for Apple is if it overly locks-in users and falls back into complacency. The discipline of having to continually win customers with better product is ultimately the only thing that will cause them to thrive long term.
pornel 47 minutes ago [-]
He destroyed my trust in Apple in ways that can't be put in numbers.
This growth comes from rent seeking. Greedy fees and lock-in they can sustain due to control of the platform and cultivated duopoly.
Apple narrative around security is patronising and deceptive, used as an excuse for removing users' freedoms (by not letting users replace Apple's services with competing ones Apple protects users from their bad choices). Very conveniently the supposedly most innovative company that is great at UX can't do better than Vista.
Apple's response to pro-consumer laws was petty, vindictive, malicious compliance.
To me Apple morphed from having premium products with excellent integration to having cross-product lock-in that maximizes money extraction from users.
And then there's Cook sucking up to Trump with a golden turd to protect next quarter's revenues. This showed that Cook had no principles more important than profit.
This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.
elicash 13 hours ago [-]
Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.
kristianp 11 hours ago [-]
You're right, Facebook didn't go public until May 2012, after the start of the period mentioned. Amazon went public in '97.
al_borland 16 hours ago [-]
I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.
lotsofpulp 15 hours ago [-]
I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.
BitwiseFool 14 hours ago [-]
Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.
npunt 4 hours ago [-]
Especially when ads win out over UX. Just a month ago I searched for UPS locations in Google Maps and filtered by open, and one place nearby popped up. I put the package in my car and drove over and lo and behold they were closed. When faced with a choice, Google chose to be greedy and make money on an ad unit over providing the correct user experience.
I've used Google Maps for two decades and have 1000s of saved pins. I could have been a customer for life. Haven't used it since.
lotsofpulp 13 hours ago [-]
My comment was tongue in cheek. They are already here:
Which means the only other option is to hopefully be able to pay Apple even more to not have to see ads. Maybe buy more Apple shares to share in this "advancement".
al_borland 12 hours ago [-]
Just because they are hear doesn’t mean they can’t ago away.
Under Jobs they tried iAds. The idea was to make ads so high quality that people would want to interact with them, and they had to go through a vetting process to ensure there were no dark patterns that would make people scared to tap an iAd. After a while, it was decided it didn’t work and they pulled it.
A company is under no obligation to continue bad ideas.
alden5 6 hours ago [-]
God that's really disappointing, having ads in the app store was bad enough but in an app I use everyday lowkey makes me reconsider using an iphone. I know I can always install another app but I feel like apple's moat is their 1st party software and them cheapening it to make a few cents is really disappointing. It feels really dumb going to a nice apple store opening up the app store for the first time on your $1k+ phone and you're immediately served ads so apple can make a few cents. The customer experience downgrade does not seem worth it to me.
al_borland 15 hours ago [-]
Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
projektfu 15 hours ago [-]
It's remarkably annoying, as a business, to keep your Apple Maps data up to date. But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
al_borland 12 hours ago [-]
> But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
I’m not so sure about this. Tapping around to some random businesses around me, I see photos being pulled in from Yelp, OpenTable, and Foursquare.
When I try to view the photos full screen, OpenTable and Foursquare images work seamlessly. Yelp prompts for an app download to jump me over to their world, which is a horrible user experience.
projektfu 2 hours ago [-]
Friends don't let friends support Yelp. Hopefully that's all just cruft. Apple used to get things like open hours from Yelp, but now they have their own, complicated, Apple ID location that I never remember to update and have to go through typical Apple ID machinations to use.
goldfishgold 10 hours ago [-]
I just opened maps and took a look. Kinda shocking to me that there doesn’t appear to be an obvious or easy way to add POI data. Google Maps is huge on promoting users to supply UGC.
TheDong 12 hours ago [-]
They should charge for it.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.
YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.
Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.
The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).
Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.
nerdsniper 12 hours ago [-]
They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:
- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).
- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.
- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.
tencentshill 16 hours ago [-]
Is the loyalty represented by the golden trophy transferrable? Or is it tied to each CEO, like Applecare+?
linkjuice4all 16 hours ago [-]
As long as he goes by "John Apple" he should be ok - usually the bribe gets credited to the surname.
ch4s3 13 hours ago [-]
John Apple, great guy people say he's the best at computers, business I don't know.
kalleboo 9 hours ago [-]
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
It sounds like Cook will continue to get the dirty work of pleasing world leaders while Ternus can focus on actually running the company.
npunt 3 hours ago [-]
Basically. Tim is the ablative heat shield.
nerdsniper 12 hours ago [-]
I believe these bribes/flatteries mostly confer a single-use benefit. Things like golden trophies seem to buy a victory in that moment, but they seem to have little relevance on decisions made even a month later, regardless of who gifted it and whether they're still at the helm.
kashunstva 16 hours ago [-]
I think you will have your answer if you consider which approach nets the recipient the larger number of golden tributes.
lukewrites 8 hours ago [-]
Depends if you want a FIFA Peace Prize or not.
15 hours ago [-]
pupppet 16 hours ago [-]
I'm glad someone mentioned this.
CarbonCycles 14 hours ago [-]
I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
Aachen 2 hours ago [-]
> only a bachelor's degree
That people are still judging someone by their school performance (or, less charitably but how I experienced the difference between "poor" and "good" students in about half of the cases: their willingness to deal with arbitrarily set requirements) after being in the workforce for this long says a lot about society. I'm not sure it's a factor when one is comparing devices in a store, which ultimately is what they created right? Shouldn't we judge them by their work?
Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
guzfip 10 hours ago [-]
> I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.
VadimPR 9 hours ago [-]
What would mathematics have to do with internal company politics, a soft/people skill demanding job?
Rury 7 hours ago [-]
People skills are primarily learned through observation, interaction, and modeling the behavior of others who have already have cultivated social skills. You know, from being around and interacting with people. It's not like studying a certain discipline, such a mathematics, forbids you from ever cultivating these abilities.
Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.
valine 16 hours ago [-]
Apple silicon has been an unmitigated success so it makes sense they’d go with Ternus. On a related note Apple needs to add Ternus to their spell check dictionary
boarsofcanada 14 hours ago [-]
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
caycep 13 hours ago [-]
He also got promoted
anonym00se1 13 hours ago [-]
Ternus had essentially nothing to do with Apple silicon. That's all Srouji and his team.
doctorpangloss 15 hours ago [-]
they made a bet on EUV on better commercial terms than samsung and intel could do for themselves. another point of view is that TSMC's cost structure, of having highly educated, overworked, and wildly underpaid Taiwanese employees, is the real unmitigated success.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
icyfox 16 hours ago [-]
So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
Very happy about this news. I think he might could bring apple back to a innovation culture company again. Seems well balanced Jobs + Cook. Looking forward next 18 month of Apple. I already setup recurring investment for Apple in 2 months ago, finger cross
mastermage 6 minutes ago [-]
Finally John Apple
vicchenai 15 hours ago [-]
15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.
p1necone 10 hours ago [-]
The m1 transition was clean, and the hardware is amazing, don't get me wrong (I just bought a neo and I'm very happy with it). But the transition did look even more amazing than it should have because of just how dogshit Intel macs had gotten, especially around thermal throttling. Apple could have built much nicer systems on Intel already had they just made them slightly thicker and used sensible heatsink and fan designs for the hardware they were putting in them.
(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)
caycep 13 hours ago [-]
To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)
cyberpunk 20 minutes ago [-]
They’ve done a few impressive things also, remember that time they converted the root filesystem on every ios device on the fly with a point release? Kudos to whoever clicked that particular button I’d have bricked it personally ;)
mvkel 14 hours ago [-]
Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
torben-friis 14 hours ago [-]
>Cook is known to be monk-like
How so? Genuinely curious, I've got no idea what he's like as a person.
BitwiseFool 13 hours ago [-]
>"I've got no idea what he's like as a person"
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
wpm 11 hours ago [-]
He reportedly had to essentially be dragged into a new home, as he was still staying in a small apartment nearby the HQ even after Jobs passed away. Dude just didn't give a shit about anything but Apple.
perardi 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say “monk-like”. He’s a college football die-hard. But he is a very chill dude.
I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.
JetSpiegel 11 hours ago [-]
> no overt politics
Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?
mvkel 10 hours ago [-]
That's like saying going to Washington DC at all is "politics."
It'd be bad business stewardship if he didn't; bad for shareholders, ultimately.
It looks silly optically, but it's plain to see that Apple has trump nailed psychologically. And it worked! They knew what was needed to get an administration to support the company in meaningful ways.
May we do better on the next election.
denkmoon 10 hours ago [-]
No, it's just a business tax. Do you see Cook getting on twitter and parroting the god emperor's topic of the day?
moogly 2 hours ago [-]
I saw Cook going to the private screening of the Melania biopic on the same day Alex Pretti was killed.
rootusrootus 10 hours ago [-]
So you think he is a Trump supporter, then? I would have guessed precisely the opposite. My assumption is that the trophy was his way of looking out for the best interests of Apple. In that regard probably a fairly good ROI.
pprotas 1 hours ago [-]
A bribe
dlahoda 14 hours ago [-]
linux and windows are older.
and mac has ios, which with ipads goes desktopy.
(capability based security)
mvkel 13 hours ago [-]
Right. We're not still running Windows Vista, or RedHat. Time for a rethink.
cocacola1 16 hours ago [-]
Off topic, but it’s amusing to see that 3/8 Apple CEOs were Mike, 2/8 were John, and the rest are Steve, Tim, and Gil.
fckgw 16 hours ago [-]
Apple is obsessed with minimalism so much that they refuse to hire any CEOs with first names longer than a single syllable.
pzo 14 hours ago [-]
I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
ebbi 14 hours ago [-]
Every time I see this argument, it comes across as lazy. iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative. But you can't compare the camera from the first few iPhones to the latest ones. I certainly didn't expect, when the first iPhone launched, that the camera on an iPhone would replace my dedicated camera for 90% of my use cases.
celsoazevedo 13 hours ago [-]
You make a good point, but at the same time, things are a bit stale if you look outside the Apple and Samsung bubbles.
For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.
ebbi 12 hours ago [-]
Those examples are still iterative.
OP is alluding to the fact that Apple hasn't created industry changing categories like the iPhone.
celsoazevedo 11 hours ago [-]
OP also complained about the "lack of significant evolution", that's why I gave those examples.
Like the brands I've mentioned, Apple buys their camera sensors (from Sony), battery, and display. And yet they don't have the best camera sensors, the newer higher capacity batteries, the latest display tech, etc.
You can go 2 or 3 iterations before seeing a real improvement, and it's not always because better tech doesn't exist. They're just not pushing hard.
robertjpayne 30 minutes ago [-]
Shipping hundreds of millions of new phones every year isn't pushing hard while earning billions? Near every single company in the world would die to have Apple's balance sheet.
Apple Silicon in the past 5 years has trounced every single market player. Apple has to make decisions on things like sensors based on the supplier being able to deliver hundreds of millions annually -- by the time we see the hardware it was baked and locked in over 12 months ago.
duped 8 hours ago [-]
I think you're looking far too narrowly at technology if you view it only through the lens of a smartphone.
lateforwork 13 hours ago [-]
> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
1970-01-01 12 hours ago [-]
Don't forget about the Apple Car. 100% of that failed, and Tim spent a decade on it. Quite a bit of attention on here, but it seems we've quickly forgotten all about it since it was never seen.
Apple was wise to get out of the EV business. It's very expensive in terms of factories, regulation etc and not very profitable. They had no first mover advantage, government backing or legacy advantage.
What's the best case scenario? Make few billion a year fuzzed with long term warranty liabilities? That might sound nice, but for apple their companion products like AirPods or the Apple Watch easily clear much better profit. Putting their corporate effort into another companion product is more economically sensible and far less risky.
kelseydh 7 hours ago [-]
Really sucks we never got to see any of the prototypes or designs they built for it.
carefree-bob 9 hours ago [-]
I forgot all about the Apple car when assessing Tim's legacy, too.
I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P
Danox 8 hours ago [-]
Apple spent $1 billion over 10 years doing the ground work to see whether or not they wanted to get into making a car and that’s a problem?
Google is gonna spend between February and December 2026 $185 billion on their AI technology, and how much has Microsoft spent somewhere near 100 billion dollars or how about OpenAI (we don’t know yet) but that number will be my numbing or Meta which is some where in the $80 billion mark.
Tim Cook has nothing to worry about Apple didn’t squander billions of dollars they put the money where they should’ve put it in Apple Silicon and everything else they do well.
Google got a $1 billion refund and OpenAI got nothing. I’m sure Sam thought when he went into the meeting with Tim Cook that he was gonna come out with $50 billion and he came out with zip. Apple made the right choice.
linhns 3 hours ago [-]
Looking at the state of EVs nowadays, I'd say Apple dodged a huge bullet. EV is no special without self-driving and also batteries literally become trash after a few years.
robertjpayne 28 minutes ago [-]
EV batteries do not become "trash" after a few years.
chatmasta 14 hours ago [-]
What about Apple Silicon?
pzo 14 hours ago [-]
yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.
p1necone 10 hours ago [-]
The level of power in the iPad, and the level of underutilization of that power due to it being handicapped by the OS is mindboggling to me. Although to some extent it makes sense - with Apple owning the whole supply chain it probably wouldn't actually save them much money to make a less powerful chip just to put in it, and they need selling points for the top end models.
asimovDev 6 hours ago [-]
>ferrari with only gravel roads around
sounds like a ton of fun to me. Just sending it rally-style everywhere :)
a better comparison is buying a Ferrari to drive around your town at 40 km/h
Danox 7 hours ago [-]
And yet it is the best tablet you can buy on the planet top to bottom software and hardware, is it perfect no, what is this phantom alternative to an iPad M4 Pro? Note I already have a desktop computer. I don’t need two of the same thing in short I don’t need Mac OS on two devices.
Krastan 14 hours ago [-]
Its been more than 5 years since the M1 came out in Nov 2020
adastra22 14 hours ago [-]
Believe it or not, more than five years ago.
ValentineC 13 hours ago [-]
> I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
gehsty 1 hours ago [-]
My washing machine still only washes clothes!
n8cpdx 13 hours ago [-]
I think the satellite connectivity is a pretty big deal and iPhone led with that. Also camera control literally changed how I use the phone.
The way you phrased it about changing how you use a phone, I was expecting you control a lot of the phone via the camera somehow (gestures?) and don't need to bother with the pesky touchscreen. But okay no it's just the camera button that has been on cameras and other phones since time immemorial
cheschire 11 hours ago [-]
The Vision Pro was a big bet that failed. But they tried.
j16sdiz 11 hours ago [-]
The satellite message thing?
comrade1234 14 hours ago [-]
Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
xeonmc 7 hours ago [-]
I would have expected a marketer.
Or as some may call it, a Shiller
redbell 56 minutes ago [-]
The other day, I was watching a video by fpt.(@FrontPageTech) entitled Tim Cook is Leaving Apple from Mar 12, and honestly, seeing this news today, I had to go back and rewatch it again and it strikes hard on me, especially at the linked time (https://youtu.be/8xo4uG7YpJI?si=eHP5yyEOFGn85ajv&t=278). At 6:46, Jon Prosser said: John Ternus is the next CEO of Apple.
You may also be interested in this video where Jon Rettinger predicted that John Ternus will be the next Apple CEO.
Goodbye Tim! A new era for Apple (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbqLWZtdQTc)
stetrain 31 minutes ago [-]
This has been reported by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg since 2024. Those other outlets are likely directly or indirectly referencing this reporting.
I’m gonna keep my expectations in check, but this would be a good opportunity to get back to live presentations. I just watched a 1997 Macworld recording and the audience has really been something that I missed since COVID.
John Ternus really did turn the Mac around. The last 5 or so years of the Intel era were a disaster. Hopefully he will be able to turn things around with software too.
voncheese 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah and with long development, lead and change horizons that come with hardware, that's a super hard thing to do.
Software is easier given the shorter cycles. Caveat is, the shorter cycles also benefit competitors.
mpweiher 53 minutes ago [-]
One of the reasons software is harder is that people think it's easier.
michelb 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe, but I think we have to wait for Craig Federighi to leave first.
Tyrubias 16 hours ago [-]
Tim Cook’s experience in logistics built Apple into the global hegemon it is today. I hope John Ternus’s experience with hardware can kick off a renaissance in both Apple hardware and software design. Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around. I’m also hoping, without any evidence, that maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics.
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
TimTheTinker 11 hours ago [-]
I too deeply appreciate the commitment to user privacy they've demonstrated. Their head of user privacy is a man of integrity and commitment.
At the same time, privacy on internet-connected devices is like true liberty and justice -- rare, precious, fragile, and easily lost without active pursuit and sacrifice.
I hope Temus has the courage and principle to keep fighting the good fight.
Fr0styMatt88 16 hours ago [-]
Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).
legitster 16 hours ago [-]
The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
nicoburns 16 hours ago [-]
> The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.
lostlogin 15 hours ago [-]
> and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
The payment Apple gets from Google for being the default search might help explain this. It would be hard to turn down the sums Apple gets.
If you’re referring to their AI services being ‘woefully behind’, that’s just a market sector that they’ve chosen not to focus too much effort on. That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.
I’m not sure what else they are behind on frankly, as their current offerings have been extremely stable from day dot.
How many products has Google released and killed in the past 20 years? Apple managed to land on a good thing with Apple iTunes and iPhotos in the early oughts, and managed to transition those core services into Apple Music and iCloud with little to no disruption to users. iCloud is generally a pretty predictable service that delivers on a core set of user requirements very well.
Also, thief productivity suite isn’t meant to completely replace Office, and for a free package, it meets many users needs perfectly fine.
bigyabai 11 hours ago [-]
> That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.
Define sensible. Apple's B2C margins are peanuts compared to what Nvidia's commanding right now, and they're both ARM retailers competing for the same cutting-edge fab space.
15 hours ago [-]
charcircuit 15 hours ago [-]
>but is woefully behind on the software
iOS is ahead on software security compared to Android, Windows, Desktop Linux, etc.
If you think Ternus wouldn't do it, you are in for a bad time.
valleyer 16 hours ago [-]
Well, I hope I'm not, but yes, I will be quite disappointed if so.
brandall10 15 hours ago [-]
Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
It would be unusual for a leader of such a thing not act in accordance w/ shareholders' best interests, as well to defy likely board guidance.
shye 15 hours ago [-]
Most shareholders may not care beyond the next quarter, but CEO action that led to those results were made couple of years ago at least, and current action will do as much to determine not the next quarter, but one slightly further in the future. Hence Jamie Dimon, for example, making a different decision in a similar matter. As Dimon explained: “[…] we have to be very careful about how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it. So, we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that”[1].
“Capitulating to the current regime on everything is in shareholder’s best interests” is neither a foregone conclusion nor a statement of fact. It’s economic myopia at best.
brandall10 15 hours ago [-]
Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
jmye 12 hours ago [-]
I’m telling you that thinking a->b is myopic. It could be that shareholder value would’ve been higher had Tim Cook told Trump (or Biden, or Trump, or Obama) to go fuck himself. Perhaps the people who spend money on iPhones, specifically, would’ve been more inclined to buy a new iProduct, than they are now that he’s bent the knee.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.
Nevermark 6 hours ago [-]
Counterfactuals are weak opinion, at best.
Given that Apple is doing well, the onus is on someone claiming that Apple would have done better, having a strong argument.
Not "could" have done better, because things could obviously have gone better, worse, or anything else, given any substantive or random difference. Could means nothing.
(And I say this as someone very disappointed with how Cook handled that.)
pohl 27 minutes ago [-]
I’d rather hear from someone suggesting, counterfactually, that they would have done worse had they not capitulated. What’s that argument like?
dwaite 16 hours ago [-]
My condolences in advance
mrexcess 14 hours ago [-]
Wouldn’t Ternus have had a hand in the Apple Silicon backdoor?
Unlikely and it also doesn’t really seem like a backdoor
an0malous 15 hours ago [-]
It's less than the other tech CEOs who seem to evade criticism on HN. Elon literally worked for Trump, accomplished nothing, and ended up just leaking everyone's social security data. Thiel and Palantir are profiting from war and building out the surveillance state. Bezos made a $75M documentary about Melania. Larry Ellison took over TikTok US to squelch any criticism of US and Zionist war atrocities.
14 hours ago [-]
15 hours ago [-]
al_borland 16 hours ago [-]
Depending on who you talk to, this could go either way. Some people want big companies to champion their own political ideals on a larger stage and think Apple should do more. Others would say Apple should stay out of it, after things like their gift to Trump[0], for example.
you mean offering gold bribes to the president along with $$$ to the prez inauguration to curry regulatory favor?
hedora 15 hours ago [-]
#appletoo
whatever1 13 hours ago [-]
The shareholders expect more profits. So no, the only way is ads and fees on the best sellers.
If they can make 50B from ads in the iPhone in 12 months why invent a new device that will make pennies.
Sorry folks, the math is brutal for the big corps. They cannot pivot and make cool things, the market demands to be milked until they bleed.
jtbayly 10 hours ago [-]
Pennies? Their devices have famously high margins.
tguedes 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
riazrizvi 15 hours ago [-]
Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
levocardia 15 hours ago [-]
So you're looking forward to a $2000 iPhone 18e?
riazrizvi 14 hours ago [-]
Pricing is based on customer value and restriction of customer options.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
nozzlegear 7 hours ago [-]
> we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world
What does this look like, in practice? Once China and India and Vietnam "starve the professional capability to compete" (presumably in the manufacture of smart phones) from the US, what would actually change and why?
mohamedkoubaa 13 hours ago [-]
If I never had to replace it again, I wouldn't mind that price.
aziaziazi 9 hours ago [-]
Curious what drove you to replace previous ones?
tempaccount5050 9 hours ago [-]
I can only speak to corporate use, but the most common issues I saw were battery life, charging port issues, and speaker failures, in that order. I managed about 1200 for about 2 years and I'd get 1-3 of those issues a week. I'd say 25% of the time it required a replacement. Average age 2.5 years.
aziaziazi 7 hours ago [-]
That’s repairable for cheaper that buying a new one, isn’t it? Perhaps the rationale is that it’s cheaper because the resell price offset the repair price?
nottorp 4 hours ago [-]
> Hopefully better and American made products.
"Expensive for no good reason" products?
42 minutes ago [-]
aibrahem 12 hours ago [-]
For all the faults of these companies, their founders and CEOs, I genuinely believe the world would have been a bit of a sadder place without companies like Apple and Google. That’s not something I can say about most companies (Microsoft), and honestly, there are companies I think the world would be better off without entirely (Oracle).
unsupp0rted 14 hours ago [-]
The less companies “participate in US politics”, the better for all involved
stetrain 12 hours ago [-]
My guess is that Cook will continue to handle some of the hairier political situations, letting Ternus focus on Apple itself.
tokyobreakfast 14 hours ago [-]
> Apple hardware is already amazing
Apple also made some amazing hardware blunders.
My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.
hamdingers 12 hours ago [-]
Home button issues were one of the most common hardware problems on iPhones <7. The haptic button evaporated an entire class of critical failures, hardly a blunder.
kulahan 11 hours ago [-]
Don't forget that to shut down an iPhone, you need to remember the secret button combination. Of course holding the power button down doesn't shut it off. Why would it? That's just a standard held by EVERY OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICE IN EXISTENCE.
Man, I love Apple, but their stupidity is beyond baffling sometimes. No Siri updates for 10 years, making the hardware harder to use, single-handed use is no longer as easy or comfortable, and they haven't done... anything(?) revolutionary in AGES. Their latest gaff was the Neo - a phone stretched out as much as possible to make a "laptop". They couldn't even bother to make the logo shiny on it, it was such a departure from true Apple style. Let's not forget the 92 lenses on the back of the phone that stick out a quarter inch, a screen that's nearly impossible to replace, and the hilariously pathetic "iphone repair kit" they lend you.
I have zero confidence in this guy. Nothing he had oversight over has gone well, as far as I'm concerned.
firloop 15 hours ago [-]
FTA:
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.
nxobject 13 hours ago [-]
The big bucks are for simultaneously groveling to Trump and China’s leaders. China usually makes or breaks the quarterly numbers after all.
pretzel5297 10 hours ago [-]
> I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
You're kidding right? News [1] just broke about how Apple's permanent notification storage (that they refuse to fix) undermines encryption and is being exploited by law enforcement. And they conveniently left out the fact that they were giving out push notification data to law enforcement without any warrants from their transparency reports [2]. And these are just from the top of my head.
Do we now presume all companies putting the word privacy on their ads are emphasizing privacy? Because Meta and Google does that too.
Wow, the worst example of violation of privacy is...(wait for it) local push notification storage being plaintext. We already bought it, no need to sell more Apple product to us!
fchicken 8 hours ago [-]
I mean...
Really what apple is doing is putting a spin on their core business model of selling users the technology rather than renting it to them by subsidizing its development through spying.
It's not so much that privacy is apple's goal, but rather privacy is inherent to apple's business model (unlike google, which has always been spyware).
tty456 15 hours ago [-]
I feel like Apple's biggest challenges these next 10 years will be logistics, being able to create or take advantage of additional redundancy in the supply chain for their major components.
Danox 13 hours ago [-]
With Ternus being the new CEO don’t be surprised if Apple takes a more active role in designing around the three Stooges of memory and bring it (the design and engineering) in house like the rest of the Apple Silicon chips.
Rapzid 12 hours ago [-]
If he were going to do that he'd already have been doing it just like Tim locking down logistics long before he became CEO.
Don't count on it.
arduanika 15 hours ago [-]
Tapping a hardware guy as CEO sends a good signal, at least to me, looking in from the outside. The company is leading from its strength, and getting back to its roots. I wonder how Woz feels today, seeing this.
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
fchicken 8 hours ago [-]
Chairman Cook was a hardware guy, and is why apple's hardware is excellent.
This just suggests him holding on to more influence. What apple needs, badly, is a software and tech guy (Cook is not a tech guy).
hedora 15 hours ago [-]
If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.
Danox 13 hours ago [-]
No don’t waste any time on Linux, Apple memory independence, clustering and moving on to M5, M6, M7, and beyond, a technocrat in charge yes, hopefully Apple will continue to iterate across the software ecosystems and the hardware systems.
stetrain 12 hours ago [-]
Official support for alternative OSes would be nice, but no reason to throw everything out to make that happen.
16 hours ago [-]
nobodyandproud 15 hours ago [-]
The user privacy can’t be overstressed. It and a sane release cycle are what keeps me on Apple.
nixass 14 hours ago [-]
it means nothing when the UX is hot garbage
tjwebbnorfolk 13 hours ago [-]
I spend my entire day in VSCode and Chrome. Who actually interacts with the built-in OS UI anymore?
ergocoder 12 hours ago [-]
> a renaissance
How many renaissances does one company need? Apple hasn't had enough? lol
JeremyHerrman 15 hours ago [-]
re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
tastyface 14 hours ago [-]
Disagree. Cook shows up to dinner parties with Trump all the time. I think he genuinely feels solidarity with the Epstein class.
nottorp 16 hours ago [-]
> Apple software is terrible
I killed a Finder process that was at 1.2 G ram consumed today...
appplication 15 hours ago [-]
I wish I could get my Chrome memory footprint so low
tester756 15 hours ago [-]
Chrome is equivalent of operating system, meanwhile Finder? :D
nottorp 15 hours ago [-]
Oh I also killed my Teams Chrome tab at the same time. But it was only 1 G :)
15 hours ago [-]
ece 8 hours ago [-]
The problem with Apple software is they stop competition where it makes them money through lock-in. Apple ARM CPUs are great, but the GPUs do leave things to be desired, and they stop competition there too on their platforms.
insane_dreamer 8 hours ago [-]
Siri was pretty bad, though it's noticeably better recently.
But MacOS is excellent IMO, and Apple's office suite is still my favorite (and I've worked extensively on Win/Lin/Mac for the past 25 years). I can't say I have any more gripes about their SW than most others.
ulfw 8 hours ago [-]
Apple's hardware (at least when it comes to their best selling products) is behind the times though.
Relatively old and small camera sensors, no new battery tech and falling behind manufacturers using silicon-carbon (most evident on the mediocre iPhone Air battery runtime), no design innovation, no alternative form factors etc
DeathArrow 8 hours ago [-]
>Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around.
It used to be the other way around, nice software and mediocre hardware.
nodesocket 15 hours ago [-]
> Apple software is terrible
When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.
unsupp0rted 14 hours ago [-]
> this spoiled cheese tastes terrible
> when’s the last time you tried spoiled milk then?
syabro 12 hours ago [-]
There are still levels below “terrible”
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
by apple software, you mean ios or macos?
lachlanj 6 hours ago [-]
Don’t expect anything to change re politics. The CEO has to look out for the interest of the company.
15 hours ago [-]
elicash 16 hours ago [-]
> Apple software is terrible
The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.
nottorp 4 hours ago [-]
> The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.
Good, can they move to fixing the base OS then?
walterbell 15 hours ago [-]
Did Vision Pro leadership subsequently take over Apple Intelligence?
hedora 15 hours ago [-]
Did they? Why don’t I see people using this product while driving, or even walking down the street?
elicash 15 hours ago [-]
You're asking why, if its software is better than its hardware, people aren't driving cars with them on? Not sure I follow...
dialogbox 15 hours ago [-]
Because the HW is bad and pricing is bad. Not because SW is bad.
Danox 13 hours ago [-]
The hardware is best than class in both software and hardware by a mile who is this other company Meta or is it Microsoft with a HoloLens? Long-term iteration is the only way the Apple Vision Pro will get better if it took 13 years to come up with an M1 processor beginning to end and six years to have your first working modem that can be used in a smartphone there are no shortcuts long hard iteration is the only way.
wat10000 15 hours ago [-]
Because it costs thirty five hundred American dollars?
Danox 13 hours ago [-]
The Apple Vision still needs to get two or three times better preferably with an M6 or M6 processor, whoops, more memory, faster SSD, thunderbolt five etc. oh and it needs to be $1500 Hmm… not possible for another two years? With better software.
And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.
jmye 15 hours ago [-]
The software being good and it being used in a product consumers wanted are two very different things.
What did you think you were asking? Or was this just a lame, ill-conceived gotcha that probably needed another few hours in the oven before being chucked in the garbage?
gabbagool 15 hours ago [-]
I'm genuinely curious why you think Apple software is terrible?
Rebelgecko 10 hours ago [-]
It's all been downhill since snow leopard IMO. Maybe I've just become cynical and jaded over the years, but I don't remember the last time I was excited for a new OS feature. Meanwhile the UX gets worse and worse with every new release. e.g. Tahoes janky corners, the dumbed down System Preferences app, random bugs that apple hasn't fixed for years, etc
apple4ever 15 hours ago [-]
Because there are so many bugs that it makes me wonder if Apple Execs ever use their own software.
For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.
There are PLENTY of examples just like that.
kenferry 14 hours ago [-]
Well, if you're asking if apple execs use that setting, the answer is probably that they don't.
I think the issue is that there are SO many piled up little features everywhere that SOMEone is using that keeping everything working while making any changes at all is very difficult.
I am a fan of more wood behind fewer swings. Don't add something like spaces unless you think you've got something so good that you are confident that it will be the common path.
michael1999 15 hours ago [-]
They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.
jordand 15 hours ago [-]
You've not read about or had the Calculator memory leaks on macOS Tahoe, have you?
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
on windows it does not leak slowly. just preallocates 2x memory for all future leaks.
saintfire 14 hours ago [-]
No one accused Microsoft of writing good software.
xgkickt 10 hours ago [-]
Their presumed lack of regression testing.
CrimsonCape 15 hours ago [-]
When was the last time you used the clusterf* that is iTunes on windows?
Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)
Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.
CrimsonCape 15 hours ago [-]
Also, remember guys, you can't have a shell on iphone because. Nor a text editor. Because. ssh into your iphone? hah. These are all software issues.
simonh 14 hours ago [-]
iSH is a shell for iOS, it has all the common shell tools and you can ssh into it.
charcircuit 15 hours ago [-]
A shell is not useful on a touch screen device.
iOS comes with a text editor built in. Memo.
Ssh server doesn't make sense for an iPhone. How would that even work? It wouldn't be able to do anything or be a worse experience than something properly designed for the user rather than trying to force a 50 year old computing model onto a phone.
throwaway173738 15 hours ago [-]
I’m very upset that iOS doesn’t support using a phone as a jump box.
saintfire 14 hours ago [-]
You say this matter of factly and yet I've seen countless people talk about using termux more than a desktop shell.
Maybe iPhone is different but most phones you can connect a keyboard to, making the shell pretty usable. Not my cup of tea but I have tried it. I'm still holding out on the dream that a good Linux phone might exist one day.
ux266478 14 hours ago [-]
A shell is perfectly useful on a touchscreen device.
> a 50 year old computing model onto a phone
What? Do you think command lines are based on the lambda calculus or something?
uint32_t 10 hours ago [-]
Lambda calculus was more like 90 years ago
testing22321 15 hours ago [-]
> iTunes on windows
For decades it has been speculated they intentionally make that shit so people will be more likely to switch to apple
sgerenser 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve heard this but it doesn’t make much sense to me. People see the shit software, and they think “Apple software is shit.” I don’t think they think “This software is only shit because I’m on Windows, I better switch to Mac and run (basically) the same software there.”
jjjfjjgd 12 hours ago [-]
It’s actually not speculation, they have testified in court, under oath, that they had a whole developer team just to fuck up the user experience.
dev1ycan 12 hours ago [-]
Apple under Tim Cook stopped innovating, entirely. If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)
wtallis 10 hours ago [-]
> If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)
I don't think your fantasy that Steve would have staunchly defended upgradable RAM in the past decade has much grounding in reality. It seems entirely likely that he would have supported the switch to LPDDR to enable better battery life, higher performance and thinner form factors at the cost of sacrificing that upgradability.
alex1138 15 hours ago [-]
I'll forever associate Tim Cook with Zuck
And his "kind of glib"
No, Zuck, you're just mad Apple introduced fine grained control so you can't constantly scrape people's credentials
nozzlegear 7 hours ago [-]
You reminded me of Tim's "you should buy [your grandma] an iPhone" quip which was based (on good advice).
thereitgoes456 16 hours ago [-]
I admire how Tim Cook participates in US politics. He is doing the most while giving the least. I would do the same in his position, he is making the best of a difficult situation, and it is his duty to protect his company and employees.
Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.
amalcon 15 hours ago [-]
I'd be careful normalizing bribery. It's very micro-efficient, almost definitionally, but the macro effects of normalized bribery are well known and not good.
BirAdam 15 hours ago [-]
Bribery is the actual normal function of US politics. That’s what lobbying really amounts to.
The USA has the best government that money can buy.
shimman 14 hours ago [-]
Until you get fascism or welfare reforms, hopefully you aren't on the chopping block by then.
BirAdam 14 hours ago [-]
To be clear, I am not saying this is a good state affairs; merely that it is the normal operating procedure for the USA.
mohamedkoubaa 13 hours ago [-]
Classic is ought fallacy
mcmcmc 16 hours ago [-]
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.
liuliu 15 hours ago [-]
Trump is the president. People voted him into the Office. Tim Cook didn't give him the golden statue before he is in the Office.
Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic. I partially agree, but I also think burning Apple to the ground will not be Tim Cook's legacy and he is in no place to go against the executive branch.
It is not about Trump, it is about the corrupted executive branch. Tim didn't do any crime against humanity in his act.
throwaway173738 15 hours ago [-]
No, before Trump 2 nobody would’ve taken bribes and gifts so openly like this. It’s not even in the same league and it’s some really self-serving argumentation to pretend otherwise.
Every complicity is another nail in the coffin of our democracy.
phist_mcgee 15 hours ago [-]
Nor does the cop who demands $100 for letting you go without arresting you.
But they're still responsible for their own personal piece of the rot in the system.
rescripting 15 hours ago [-]
Is Tim the cop or the motorist in this example?
If a cop says your problems go away for $100, you pay it, because the downside is huge by comparison. The problem is the cop getting away with it, not that you paid the bribe.
2muchcoffeeman 14 hours ago [-]
I hope you’re not comparing a gold trophy to a straight up bribe. It’s like giving Trump your Noble peace prize.
Having the prize doesn’t make you the winner. But it feeds Trumps ego sooooooo muuuuuch, it’s probably the “best” thing you can do to get on his good side without actually giving him anything.
mcmcmc 15 hours ago [-]
> Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic.
This is a ridiculous strawman. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance instead of malice.
I wrote that going above and beyond to curry favor with an autocrat in order to protect your profits is collaboration.
And you read, what? Existing under a government means you necessarily support it because there was an election? You do understand an election means some people voted the other way, right?
pb7 11 hours ago [-]
Not an ounce of self reflection in this comment.
He's not an autocrat precisely because there was an election. He won the election because he got the most votes. He has since failed to do most things he campaigned on because his power is very limited by virtue of our government's structure.
10 hours ago [-]
mcmcmc 10 hours ago [-]
Sorry for dropping the implied “wannabe” in autocrat, I figured HN commenters would be smart enough to infer that based on context. He is pushing and breaking boundaries on every front. No, he never accomplished any of the outlandish promises he made about the economy because he was lying and his team is incompetent, same reason the Iran war is a disaster. Project 2025 has been going pretty damn well though.
tastyface 14 hours ago [-]
Cook stood up to the FBI. He could have stood up to Trump -- he just didn't want to.
vel0city 15 hours ago [-]
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.
thereitgoes456 15 hours ago [-]
I agree, but I'm taking as an axiom that some amount of bribery (tribute, really) had to be done, that Apple could avoid massive government retribution. In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken. It being so gaudy actually helps this case.
vel0city 15 hours ago [-]
> I'm taking as an axiom that some amount of bribery (tribute, really) had to be done
It didn't.
> In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken.
Its not.
> It being so gaudy actually helps this case.
It doesn't.
Normalizing corruption to this level is a bad thing. Period.
The people engaging in this should be in prison. Including Trump.
bigyabai 15 hours ago [-]
> He is doing the most while giving the least.
> Contrast with every other tech executive
What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.
thereitgoes456 15 hours ago [-]
It's fair to say there is not much contrast. But he's kept Apple's DEI and climate commitments in place even after being attacked directly, while Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman are proactively broadcasting right-wing talking points, sometimes pre-emptively. Yes, Cook gave $1 million, but Brockman gave $25 million, and Musk gave much, much more.
bigyabai 15 hours ago [-]
We don't know what deals Cook and Trump have made with each other, we've just seen the byproduct of their relations on the political stage. Nothing Cook did during his tenure de-risked Apple from the consequences of a worsening political state in the US. When the tides turn towards authoritarianism, Apple turns towards compliance. They've done it for both Trump admins.
Cynically speaking, Cook is wise to keep the DEI and climate commitments as bartering chits for Apple's next leadership to forfeit. He knows that Apple needs leverage to get their druthers from the Fed.
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
When you say you don't know something about one actor in an equation, you must apply the same thinking to every other actor. It's not useful to go on the path you're going down.
bigyabai 12 hours ago [-]
I do apply that same logic to figures like Altman and Musk, and I would argue it's been a very useful framework for analyzing their motives.
FireBeyond 16 hours ago [-]
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong).
He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.
liuliu 15 hours ago [-]
He also donated to Kamala Harris campaign. He would also donate to the next Democratic president for their inauguration if they still choose to do this corruptive thing. And your point is?
baal80spam 16 hours ago [-]
I can name some terrible software, but it wouldn't be Apple's.
ValentineC 16 hours ago [-]
macOS and iOS 26 are quite bad.
anonyfox 15 hours ago [-]
Really wanna discuss the current windows debacles? Come on! Apple software regressed but it’s not outright hostile bad still.
array_key_first 15 hours ago [-]
That's an extremely low bar, Windows has been shit for a long time and has basically only degraded. Some people think Windows 10 was good, it wasn't, they just haven't used Windows for long enough.
Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.
tcfhgj 15 hours ago [-]
at least you can still decide on the software you install
esafak 13 hours ago [-]
How do you not install all the ads?
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
what is bad for you? was you at linux or windows - may be apple is best of all bad?
basisword 16 hours ago [-]
Give the competitors a try...
antiframe 12 hours ago [-]
On macOS when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it takes forever. On KDE when I alt-tab to a full-screen app it's instantaneous.
On macOS when I connect or disconnect an external monitor, my applications get all confused on where they should display, especially if I then reconnect a monitor. On KDE when I unplug my monitor everything goes nicely onto one desktop. When I put a monitor back in, everything goes back to where it was before. It just works.
On macOS, every time I install a new program I need to do some dance with System preferences to allow it to run. I tried some command line settings that supposedly disables this, but it never sticks. Every few months, the process is different than it was before. On KDE, I just run my software and it works.
On macOS, I don't have useful window snapping behavior or full-screen behavior, nor am I able to have focus follow my mouse. On KDE, I have these.
macOS just doesn't work for me. But the competitors have a good solution.
bigyabai 16 hours ago [-]
XCode, Apple Music, Siri, Apple Maps, The App Store, Finder, Safari, Spotlight, iCloud...
I'd need another hand to fully count all the Apple apps that have burned me in the past.
jonhohle 15 hours ago [-]
It’s so sad. Circa 2003 OS X wasn’t just good it was amazing. Nearly Movie OS quality. Every release the quality goes down. Every migration to SwiftUI more and more AppKit standard feature get lost.
tonyedgecombe 15 hours ago [-]
In 2003 it was a dog’s dinner. I remember getting kernel panics from pulling out an already ejected USB stick.
rafram 9 hours ago [-]
Guess what people were saying in 2003…
internet2000 13 hours ago [-]
2003 OS X sucked.
jonhohle 9 hours ago [-]
Sucked compared to what? My OS X life began shortly before Panther, and coming from a Linux laptop everything was better. Compared to Windows XP, everything in Panther was better. Panther on a 1GHz TiBook was amazing compared to anything else at the time.
soapdog 16 hours ago [-]
Can we add Photos to that list? Can we add it twice cause it is that bad.
gizajob 15 hours ago [-]
Books can go on it too. No matter the free storage space on my iPad, it relentlessly nerfs stuff to iCloud rendering its utility on long aeroplane journeys completely worthless.
bigyabai 15 hours ago [-]
I'll add it once, we need a donor hand to tally the iOS and WatchOS versions.
vovavili 14 hours ago [-]
>Apple software is terrible
That's a wild claim.
sngz 8 hours ago [-]
The software is what kept me away from iphones even though I hate android hardware
Rover222 14 hours ago [-]
Have you used an iPhone recently?
vovavili 36 minutes ago [-]
Have you used actually terrible software recently?
hei-lima 16 hours ago [-]
Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.
bayindirh 15 hours ago [-]
Their software is better than most (if not all) of closed-source universe. That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.
I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
stephenhuey 15 hours ago [-]
When Apple released its BSD-based OS X at the turn of the century, I was at Rice learning on Solaris machines, and also started dual booting Linux on my personal desktop at the time. My first few years in the working world were spent on Dells running Windows, so by the time I bought my first laptop in 2006, I was excited to spend my dollars on an unusual-looking white Macbook specifically because it had a *nix shell and the developer experience was vastly better to me than any machine I used at my day jobs. I still prefer working on Macs because ever since, they have just worked and Windows has gotten progressively worse (I know, because I have helped my parents with their Surface laptop). Unfortunately, Mac OS X has been less robust in the last several years, and I'd love to see them turn this around, both for the developer experience and for regular consumers. I still like using Photos, but I don't use their cloud for those, and I've been amazed over the years just how uninformative the Photos app on Mac can be when it flakes out and I have to try a rain dance just to get it to sync with my iPhone. That's pretty abysmal for a company that used to just work, but I believe it comes from the top. Steve Jobs used to enforce quality, and I want to see that again!
gradstudent 14 hours ago [-]
Similar experience here, started with the same G4 ("white") iBook. That was an amazing machine. Under the hood it was hard to distinguish many differences with Linux/BSD of the time. The UI on top (OSX Tiger) was peerless -- I recall being very excited for the introduction of Spotlight. I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so. Hardware was still great, but they were no longer updating the GNU stuff and anti-features like SIP made it harder and harder to run the applications I want (gdb for example). I gave up not long after they introduced the touchbar
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
wtallis 7 hours ago [-]
> I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so.
I think it started slightly earlier: 10.7 Lion in 2011 introduced the new full-screen mode that was completely broken on multi-monitor setups, as though Apple entirely failed to test on or even anticipate what was at most a moderately "power user" hardware configuration. They've introduced lots of useless features over the years (eg. Game Center), but that full-screen mode was the first time I recall OS X having such an in-your-face usability regression that was so obvious and avoidable.
10.7 also dropped Front Row, which was a disappointment to me, but is at least understandable in the context of Apple TV existing as a separate product they wanted to steer users toward. Losing Rosetta in 10.7 was also somewhat justifiable, and didn't hurt me much since my first Mac was an Intel machine and I didn't have much of a library of PPC-only applications.
dcminter 7 hours ago [-]
I'm a Linux guy who doesn't really like Macs but has intermittently been required to use them. On the whole I have a grudging respect for Apple (their hardware is peerless), but seeing one screen turn to "brushed steel" when the app on the other was put into full screen mode kind of blew my mind because "UI is worse than Windows" was not, at the time, a failure mode I believed the company was capable of.
simondotau 6 hours ago [-]
The problem is, in the age of the Internet, old operating systems decay. Even MacOS 10.13 is effectively unusable as a primary workstation, NOT because Apple has abandoned it, but because Firefox, Chrome and Homebrew have abandoned it. Yes there are alternatives, but my point stands.
fchicken 9 hours ago [-]
> I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013
Dead on.
Apple's current software is such a joke I almost regret ever having invested in the Mac ecosystem. I still run Mojave for its 32-bit app support for (apple's own) apps that have no contemporary equal.
Apple weathered the passing of Steve surprisingly well, however the cracks still show. Apple's very best is exclusively reserved for those products/devices/software with Jobs' fingerprints on them.
I still run an original iPhone SE as well. The entire tech sphere has gone in such a poor direction, I've increasingly divested myself from tech. If it no longer works with my system, I simply stop using it. It's a happy ("insecure") place.
lukeh 13 hours ago [-]
SIP is anti-feature for a certain class of users, but the right tradeoff for most consumers. At least you can disable it. And even as a developer I leave it enabled.
pdpi 12 hours ago [-]
> the right tradeoff for most consumers
It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.
macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.
As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.
hecanjog 12 hours ago [-]
They could put an LED in the bezel, like the camera indicator.
pdpi 4 hours ago [-]
That works great on a laptop. Less so on a Mac Studio, using non-Apple displays.
phs2501 11 hours ago [-]
More annoying is when you use something like SoundSource (a paid app which adds per-app volume control and input/output redirection to macOS... a feature that by all rights should be built in in any reasonable OS) you get a permanent purple dot indicating a third party tool is intercepting audio.
Again, I get it, but as a power user this kind of stuff is just infuriating.
pxc 8 hours ago [-]
It's also annoying that macOS doesn't already have at least basic per-app volume mixing.
So much pain in macOS is in areas like this, trying to hack basic features back into the anemic OS.
Apple's "OS" updates typically focus on end-user applications that I don't use and never intend to. Meanwhile the core of the OS, and even the desktop environment, feels stagnant compared to many Linux distros.
atomicthumbs 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hnfong 8 hours ago [-]
> no longer updating the GNU stuff
I think that was mainly due to GPL 3.
simondotau 6 hours ago [-]
I’m honestly unconvinced that the “or later” clause of the GPLv2 license is legally valid. Can anyone think of any example where contract terms get to be reinvented by a self-interested third party whenever they choose?
Schiendelman 14 hours ago [-]
The whole experience you're having with the rain dance is because the cloud does just work. It's a vanishing a tiny percentage of people that don't use it.
stephenhuey 13 hours ago [-]
I hear ya. I'm not in the target market. Surprising, I know, considering how many SaaS platforms I've launched which maintain photos and videos in the cloud!
Many other iPhone/Macbook users have been shocked I don't turn on Messages on my Mac due to a bad experience with sync in the first year that was possible, and I had a similar bad experience with photos in iCloud early on. Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like, and I still feel more at ease juggling many Photos libraries on external hard drives. I avoid Google Photos like the plague, and even though I trust Apple more (for now), I'd still rather not entrust to them my family's personal photos and videos.
Schiendelman 12 hours ago [-]
As someone who has had the pain, if you're open to some prodding - one of your external hard drives might be broken right now. Don't risk it. Just pay a few bucks a month to avoid missing your memories. :) I don't think they've ever had a data loss.
fragmede 9 hours ago [-]
It doesn't even have to be Apple. There's Backblaze and Arq and Tarsnap, amongst others. Encrypt the hell out of it and make sure there's a globally redundant copy of your files. If a thief or fire/tornado/earthquake/tsunami takes out your physical drives, where are you?
miramba 4 hours ago [-]
> fire/tornado/earthquake/tsunami takes out your physical drives, where are you?
Hopefully in a place where I can solve the bigger problems I have then!
stephenhuey 9 hours ago [-]
Always good advice! I did start backing up at a location other than my home many years ago, but it’s not in a cloud. The one time I tried Backblaze I wasn’t impressed but I recognize there are other good alternatives and certainly agree with your strong convictions!
rodric 9 hours ago [-]
> Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like
You can use Messages on the Mac without storing messages in iCloud. iPhone, iPad and Mac can all send and receive the same account’s messages, effectively staying in sync without actually syncing them to iCloud’s servers.
lynndotpy 15 hours ago [-]
The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency. The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.
Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.
runjake 14 hours ago [-]
> The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.
You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:
> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled
System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled
lynndotpy 11 hours ago [-]
As others have noted, the "Reduce Motion" doesn't fix anything (neither does Reduce Transparency).
These terminal commands don't fix the problem- there are still lengthy animations, e.g. when swapping desktops or opening folders. These are tasks I sometimes do multiple times per second on Linux.
storoj 14 hours ago [-]
> Enable the “Reduce motion” setting in System Settings.
> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.
You're missing the point here. The "old" Apple would never have tolerated a janky feature that inverts responsibility onto the user and behaves poorly out-of-the-box. Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.
But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more
robotresearcher 9 hours ago [-]
> Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.
That's kinda rose tinted history. System 7 (1990s Mac OS) for example crashed and locked up a whole lot, in my experience. The UI was fantastic and had great consistency, and the developer docs were of a quality that would blow minds today. But the software was not as solid as all that.
Windows was the same or maybe worse at the time. BSOD was common and a nightly reboot was a good idea until NT/Win2000. Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware, so it was a software problem. PC OSes were just not there yet. Windows 2000, OSX, and Linux gradually fixed that.
That's all basic uptime. The UI design drift of MacOS is another story.
ajross 14 hours ago [-]
Hilariously, this is what the Gnome 2 people would have called an "Unbreak Me" option, something they tried culturally to eliminate more than a decade and a half ago. With... not total success, I guess, but the resulting environment tends to have a very high level of "work and not suck by default" quality -- something that steadily evolving commercial software tends to struggle with maintaining.
jcgrillo 13 hours ago [-]
The only thing I need to do to unbreak gnome is twiddle the ctrl:nocaps thing in xkb-options. Everything else is optional.
Lalabadie 13 hours ago [-]
What saddens me is that a decade and a half ago, Apple led that charge with a reliable and unblockable UI thread on the iPhone.
Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.
nomilk 13 hours ago [-]
I have an ‘old’ model (iPhone 14 pro max) and text frequently misses characters due to the lag/input delay. It’s most pronounced when using safari for some reason.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
lynndotpy 11 hours ago [-]
In my experience, iOS only misses keys during the time the keyboard is loading (which can be over a second- crazy!)
But I often have input lags where I will press several keys, and then a period of time (which can be multiple seconds) will pass before my taps are registered.
The 14 Pro Max launched less than four years ago, and should not be slower than an Android which launched a decade prior.
senderista 11 hours ago [-]
I never had any lag on my 4yo iPhone SE until the forced upgrade to iOS 26. Now I finally understand what all those Android users complain about.
phony-account 9 hours ago [-]
> forced upgrade to iOS 26
No-one has forced you to upgrade. I’m writing this on iOS 18.
DeathArrow 8 hours ago [-]
I don't have lags in Android.
brailsafe 14 hours ago [-]
I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance. Not sure how it is on iOS, but for example, the Settings app feels chuuuunky if you navigate through the panes with up and down arrow keys. I wasn't able to make a selectable list view that worked consistently and didn't feel like a regression compared to an equivalent AppKit view
CharlesW 11 hours ago [-]
> I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance.
FWIW, SwiftUI got a huge performance boost for iOS/macOS 26+, and Instruments 26 has been nice for finding performance bottlenecks. You may find the SwiftUI performance auditor in a free/FOSS project of mine (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/commands/ui-design/au...) helpful as well.
Why it took 4 years to get to near-UIKit levels of performance I couldnt say, but I've had a great experience working with it on an app that's 97% SwiftUI.
joemi 14 hours ago [-]
It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.
someguyiguess 11 hours ago [-]
I’ve found Mac OS to be snappier than any of the dozen or so Linux DEs I’ve tried. I use Fedora with XFCE and it’s ok in responsiveness, I’ve got PopOS on another machine. It’s good. But I’ve got MacOS on my other two machines and they just feel so much snappier. And the Macs are 6-7 years old. The other machines are newer (2/3yo).
michaelmrose 10 hours ago [-]
In any case have you tested on the same machine for the most apt comparison? Agr may not be the best predictor of performance when io and memory may be more productive of snappiness than the latest CPU.
Input devices and monitors can make a difference as well.
lynndotpy 11 hours ago [-]
For Windows, my last experience on a personal install was Windows 10 and that was yeeeaaars ago, so... Grain of salt :)
It's not the default, but IIRC Windows could be configured to have zero animations, and I found it to be quite responsive as such.
I'm not talking about the speed of opening programs, but more of the speed of every-second interactions: Unfolding a folder (or other interactions within a program with keyboard or mouse), alt-tabbing across windows, moving between desktops, etc. At least on Windows, I saw far fewer IO-blocking animations than I have on MacOS.
You're right about the "something starts to happen": Apple hides delays behind sigmoidal animations throughout much of their OS. For those who aren't aware of the trick, the delay between the start of the animation and the tail where it starts appears to just be an animation that started on the interaction.
lallysingh 14 hours ago [-]
Windows isn't a useful base of comparison anymore. They really stopped trying years ago.
vachina 12 hours ago [-]
I find using non-Apple pointing device to have drastically improved the latency.
I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.
christophilus 15 hours ago [-]
Package management, too. I recently got a MacBook for work, but it’s sitting on my desk and I’m continuing to use my Lenovo. Managing software updates is much better on Linux. As is managing windows (via Niri in my case). macOS really feels like a downgrade.
setopt 14 hours ago [-]
I don’t disagree, I just moved back to Linux from macOS myself (Tahoe was the last drop for me).
But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.
someguyiguess 11 hours ago [-]
For managing windows I agree Mac OS sucks. But the third party window managers I use for MacOS are better than any other first or third party window managers I’ve ever used. Windows has far better window management than any Linux distro’s default WM. (But it’s terrible in every other way)
someguyiguess 11 hours ago [-]
Except on Linux you have to remember which of the several different package managers each specific system uses. Do I use apt, apt-get, pacman, yum, dnf, flatpacks, build from source?
Homebrew on MacOS is miles ahead in terms of DE in my experience. But yeah I guess by default the “App Store” is meh.
sayamqazi 6 hours ago [-]
There is no such thing as DX with any digital tool. Its just pain and suffering all the way down. Sooner you realize it and make peace with it the better.
DaSHacka 8 hours ago [-]
> Except on Linux you have to remember which of the several different package managers each specific system uses. Do I use apt, apt-get, pacman, yum, dnf, flatpacks, build from source?
How often are you switching systems that you can't remember the package manager?
You could just alias your package manager to something more memorable if it's really a problem, but I feel like this argument only really applies to servers where you may be logging into a variety of different distributions every day.
dlahoda 14 hours ago [-]
did you tried nix on macos? helps with software updates
honr 13 hours ago [-]
Nix is not the same as nixos, and in this case the distinction matters. It has to step carefully around Apple's updates. This further highlights the fact Apple lacks the same quality package management as some linux distros. Nixpkgs (on macos), Ports, and Homebrew packages are toys compared to the EFFORT that goes into maintaining Debian and Redhat packages.
In terms of package management SOFTWARE, however, nix (and guix, lix, etc.) are state of the art and work fairly similar in both linux and macos. A deeper integration with the OS would have been nice.
bombcar 13 hours ago [-]
Package managers are wonderful until you step near our outside of the packaged software - then you better hope you're on a big distro otherwise you may be in uncharted territory.
kinematikk 10 hours ago [-]
This is the biggest thing that irks me after coming from windows. Everything feels so sluggish. I wonder why the internet ist full of people complaining about that. I guess they just dont work fast enough to be bothered by that?
dbmikus 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, I hate how slow it is to swipe between desktop workspaces, for example.
honr 13 hours ago [-]
Why would you use that feature? MacOS doesn't REALLY have multiple desktops (Spaces). That is merely a pre-release feature (for 10 years or so, I think). As evidenced by the many critical user journey bugs it has that don't get addressed.
I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).
Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).
bschwindHN 11 hours ago [-]
I've used spaces since 2013, they work well enough. The animation bug is annoying though. On displays higher than 60Hz, the animation is slower because they made it frame-based instead of time-based, or something silly like that.
I love the three finger gesture to move between them though, it's like moving pieces of paper around. You can also work around the bug I mentioned by swiping faster, but yeah I wish they'd just fix it so we can move on.
honr 10 hours ago [-]
Of course it can be used. But it is very buggy (as in missing or not well-though-out behaviors), which is unlike the typical polish Apple human interaction folks deliver. For example switching between Spaces and then between apps and windows and creating a new app window don't work as expected in some combination of steps and for some apps. There are several other "corner" cases that show the features were not laid out in a full design to exhaustively decide the desired behavior in each case. Which is very much like when someone bolts on a feature to a system without fully nail down its interaction with all other adjacent and relevant features.
bschwindHN 8 hours ago [-]
I'm just responding to your "Why would you use that feature?" question. I use it because I like it, and it works well for me. I'm not disagreeing that they have some bugs and design issues to work out. It seems pretty obvious MacOS doesn't get as much attention as iOS when it comes to these things.
>The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency.
I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.
LeFantome 11 hours ago [-]
Linux benefits long term from the fragmentation that hurts it in the short-term. Competing projects means it is harder for software to go too far down the wrong road. Go to far and somebody emerges to replace you. And popular ideas emerge that others can copy from.
With macOS, you really have no choice to use what Apple offers. You can hope they listen to dissent but they may not depending on priorities. And things have to be bad enough to jump platforms before real dissent registers. And things have to get pretty bad for that.
Same issue with Windows of course.
With GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, and the Linux rat pack, it is easy to switch experiences without ditching Linux entirely. And somebody has probably even patched your DE of choice to address the papercuts you do not like.
apple4ever 15 hours ago [-]
> but the problem is, they were better in the past.
So true. I run into so many little and annoying bugs I sometimes wonder if Apple Execs actually use their own devices.
dylan604 13 hours ago [-]
I've been using Apple since IIe in the 80s and all of the UI iterations. People make iOSification comments about macOS, and there have definitely been annoyances as they are seemingly trying to unify the UX. Maybe it'll make sense when they have touch controllable macOS systems, but making things that work well for fingertips and assuming they will work equally as well operating by a mouse is just bad.
As for Linux, I don't think I've ever used a system with UI for any serious amount of time. >99.999% of my usage is on headless systems through a terminal. As god intended.
antipaul 15 hours ago [-]
A Snow Leopard move, at least for iOS, is what's on deck:
A major reason Snow Leopard was well received was because of how performant it felt along with the bug fixes. What isn't mentioned anywhere near as much is that it dropped a lot of hardware (PPC). The last G4 Powerbook got about 1.5y of OS support before it was dropped.
iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.
selcuka 13 hours ago [-]
> The last G4 Powerbook got about 1.5y of OS support before it was dropped.
> macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
Those two cases are not really comparable though, are they? The last Intel CPU Mac was the 2019 Mac Pro, which was discontinued in 2023.
ProfessorLayton 11 hours ago [-]
Aren't they? The last Intel macs were being sold less than 3y ago, and by the time macOS 27 releases they'll be less than 3.5y old.
The broader point is that a "Snow Leopard" release has historically resulted in a lot of hardware being left behind, and many of the devices that could have benefited the most from optimizations were cut off.
asimovDev 6 hours ago [-]
they also used to sell 2018 intel mac minis alongside it for a while as well, didn't they?
fchicken 9 hours ago [-]
Great... yet more attention on iOS
robotresearcher 9 hours ago [-]
Roughly 1.75 billion to 250 million installed OSes, according to public estimates. 7 to 1 ratio.
rjzzleep 8 hours ago [-]
> That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.
You just have to look at their directors managing those software directions and you will exactly why it's become the mess that it is today.
ex_apple_mgmt 10 hours ago [-]
This hits hard.
They were so much better. And have slid slowly into complacency, if not worse.
fchicken 9 hours ago [-]
I miss Steve :((
BiraIgnacio 13 hours ago [-]
True, it's better than most for sure and I agree it used to be better.
Though a lot of other software for windows and linux are really not that great so the bar is probably on the lower end.
spaniard89277 14 hours ago [-]
I use both Linux and Macos, and I'd like to get rid of xcode or have something like Nautilus.
There are many, many things that are completely normal in Linux that are super clunky in MacOS at best.
But at least try to match Nautilus or Thunar ffs.
dlahoda 14 hours ago [-]
I use macos for dev. Not even install xcode tools, neither most apps via apple store.
someguyiguess 11 hours ago [-]
They were also worse in the past at times. Lion was a shit show. Worst OS X release. And does no one remember the 90s?
ransom1538 14 hours ago [-]
We need thinner phones. We need 19 cameras. The future is clear.
hei-lima 15 hours ago [-]
I agree with everything you just said. That’s exactly my take on it.
Arainach 15 hours ago [-]
What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
SJMG 14 hours ago [-]
I'm a decade long Safari user. What's your grievance with Safari and what do you find better?
andrekandre 12 hours ago [-]
not the op but for me safari has been deteriorating for years:
1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background
2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work
3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews
4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome
5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day
6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)
7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app
etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
ksec 11 hours ago [-]
The Tab Overview is due to some background tab reload.
I could basically sums up your experience as Safari is appalling at multi tab resource management. And it has been the case for 14+ years and counting.
It wasn't until Safari 18 before I have most of the rendering issues gone on sites I visit. Safari 26 is completely gone. I haven't encountered one since Safari 26.1.
With a lot of features done, I just hope Safari turn its attention to performance and snappiness of the browser. Multi Tabs doesn't work. For people who uses more than 30+ Tabs is when it start getting slow. Safari used to have an option to unload background tab and that usually fix 80% of the problem but it was taken out some years ago.
lostlogin 12 hours ago [-]
8. Searching for a word on a page is buried below main options in the share menu. WHY?
j16sdiz 11 hours ago [-]
What? you can search from the address bar
lostlogin 9 hours ago [-]
I might be understanding.
But if I want to search for any comment by you on this page, how do I do it?
I’m not after a web search, I just want to see ‘j16sdiz’ highlighted on this page.
Currently I go to ‘…’ > share > scroll down > find on page.
eep_social 8 hours ago [-]
If you tap into the address bar, start typing your search, type enough for it to be specific enough that autosuggest crap
clears, and “On this page” appears. Wildly undiscoverable in practice.
fchicken 8 hours ago [-]
Apple nuked all 3rd party extensions unless they go through their bureaucracy.
Code-signing to force updates should be illegal (including iOS versions)
spartanatreyu 12 hours ago [-]
I have many MANY grievances with Safari:
1. Mandating all browsers on iOS/iPadOS to be powered by Safari (excluding in the EU). This doesn't sound bad, but wait until #3 below...
2. Safari's many bugs. Too many bugs. Oh so many bugs. Damn that's a lot of bugs.
3. Grievance 1 and 2 compound together. Whenever Safari (or a Safari update) breaks a feature, you cannot inform a user that they can use another browser as a work around (because all browser engines are forced to use Webkit on iOS/iPadOS)
4. Bad dev tools. This has been seeing much needed improvements (e.g. being able to type an entire word in the css pane instead of a new character on each line), but it still feels 7 years behind.
5. No way to report bugs. There is a "bug reporter" at bugs.webkit.org, however each bug is auto-tagged with a link to an internal bug tracker within Apple. This means that those who are trying to fix bugs and those are trying to report bugs have a wall between them. There is no way to have a discussion to try to narrow down what the bug is, why the bug happens in one case but not another, what's really the cause of the issue, or why the bug matters more than whoever is assigned it might realise. When reporting a bug to Apple, it's more useful to talk to an actual wall because it might fall on you giving you an actual response.
6. Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly. This one takes some explanation, but it's a little tricky. I'll give three examples then show how they're all the same issue:
Example 1: The cool homepage.
I was working on a website. Two months before launch I decided to spend a month of time juicing up the homepage, then one more month on polish.
On the homepage I decided to use the brand's pre-existing graphics and turning them into a parallax animation (inspired by: https://www.firewatchgame.com/)
It had:
- Regular content on the page
- Parallax layers with simple vector graphics inside them so that when the user scrolled down the page, the user saw a parallax animation of the landscape changing. (e.g. far clouds, far mountains, close clouds, close mountains, hill, foreground, simple bubble particles closer than the regular content on the sides to strengthen the depth of field illusion, etc...)
- Other vector graphics following a motion path animation
- This was done in 2017, so before CSS got scroll driven animation support, or motion-path support. It was also done without JS.
- Everything worked brilliantly, until we discovered that one particular iPhone model rendered an empty blank white page.
- I lost the last month trying pulling the effect apart trying to diagnose the bug (and with Safari's buggy dev tools being no help I had to do it in the dark). I was able to determine when the bug would trigger, and had to tear down my whole homepage and rebuild it with 2 fewer parallax layers before launch and 3 days of polish for the rest of the website before launch.
(you can see the final result at https://myobrace.com, but I really would have liked the extra time for polish, if you're wondering how I achieved the effects without JS and/or scroll-driven animations, I used css's perspective and transform rules to position the elements back in the z-axis then scaled them up so they appeared the correct size with the regular page content so as the page scrolled, the elements further back appeared to scroll at a different speed. I then used SMIL for the motion paths in the SVG elements).
Example 2. The texture
I wanted to add a repeating texture to buttons so they didn't feel so flat without needing a separate network request to download an image.
I tried generating one with SVG but the SVG 1.1 filter effects implementations aren't all hardware accelerated.
I tried generating one with CSS which worked everywhere but Safari.
You can see a texture here where the texture is generated entirely within CSS, and it doesn't work in Safari (but I didn't hide the seams because the result looks like a cool mosaic and I wanted to share the technique): https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr
(if you're curious about the actual texture I used, I hand drew a minimal noise texture in photoshop that could be repeated without showing seams, then base64 encoded it and inlined it within the CSS file so it could be loaded without needing an extra network request. You can see my development version here: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/YzoexGg?editors=1100 (the final version is locked behind a login wall in a child-friendly education webapp))
Example 3. Asset downloading
I made a webapp for kiosk machines that downloads 100mb+ of video assets when logging in for the first time. iPads have a kiosk mode so I supported iPadOS' Safari mode so that the iPads could be used in commercial settings as kiosk machines.
When the final assets were added, the iPad machines would randomly crash during the asset downloading process.
With Safari's completely broken debugging experience, I eventually learned that as Safari downloads a video, as soon as it tries to put that downloaded data somewhere, it has to copy it across to the new place it's being stored, and if you're copying more than 3mb, it crashes the browser.
The fix was to download and store each video in 1mb chunks. This slowed down the installation speed by a bit over 300%, but at least Safari didn't crash any more.
---
Now back to: "Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly."
It turns out Safari on iOS/iPadOS has an invisible time/performance budget. Anytime Safari hits that budget, the browser stops what its doing.
- Drawing texture to screen? How about we stop drawing all textures to the screen, including text. Websites don't need to draw any text right?
- Rendering a texture in CSS? How about you have the color white covering everything else instead.
- Downloading a video that's more than 3mb? How about I crash the browser when the download completes.
Compare this to Firefox and Chrome, as they run out of their budget, they stop starting new work so they old work can finish before starting their next task. The page may take a few milliseconds longer to get to the correct result on slower devices, but the result IS correct.
Even worse:
- Safari has no way of informing the code how close it is to the budget.
- The budget can only be found by trial and error.
- If the iOS/iPadOS device has other apps in the background, the budget is smaller.
- Each device has a different budget, so you have to penalize all Safari devices to the smallest supported budget of the oldest supported device.
- If you hit the budget on the most basic functionality (e.g. a homepage, a button, downloading required assets), then your website / webapp may as well not exist to those Apple users.
ksec 11 hours ago [-]
To be fair, Safari 18 ( finally ) improved a lot on what what reported in both State of CSS and JS. With 26 even better, it is gotten to the point where I believe hopefully 27 it will be a non-issue most of the time. As long as they continue to grind through everything for the next few years and not stop / pulling out resource on Safari Team.
Agree on the time/performance budget. It is pain stupid. As has been the case for so many years. And yet nothing has been done about it.
fchicken 8 hours ago [-]
Since Catalina (maybe since Yosemite), apple has gone down the path of iOSification of its destkop operating system; dumbing it down and trying to own all use cases. Any professional desktop users have long since been chased away, and whatever professionals apple cannot shake: video and music production, have been so shoehorned in to a stupid naïve vision of what their work should look like, it borders on a joke.
No serious computer user can use a Mac anymore, and this is an unfortunate departure from Steve Jobs' Mac where he expended great effort to ensure the Mac remained a serious desktop OS.
The most egregious example of this stupidity is the dumbing down of the Disk Utility app - an app rarely if ever used by normies, and so dumbed down the pros don't want to use it either. Really leaves you scratching your head what the decisionmaking process there was.
Where Steve Jobs' would draw lines in the sand and ask developers and users not to cross it, chairman cook put NATO wire and basically forced users to do as told (safari extensions got nuked, app store apps don't load older versions of software and there's some weird exclusivity agreement, HFS+ support got dropped and apple refused updates to machines that didn't follow, etc. etc. etc. etc.)
The settings app being hot garbage is apple trying to unify their toy phone OS with the desktop OS.
Safari nuked 3rd party extensions so everything has to go through apple's extensions "store".
Apple treated its core base, the ones who saved Apple from collapse in the 90s, like expendable slave. Worse actually; apple actively chased them away like lepers.
This has led to a systemic core rot in apple's software and ecosystem, one that will take years to rectify.... if apple even chooses to do so.
> * You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
Scroll Reverser
rodric 9 hours ago [-]
> You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
The worst. There are even separate toggles in Settings for mouse and trackpad scrolling direction, but changing one changes the other. It is truly amazing that this has persisted for 15 years.
bromuro 13 hours ago [-]
- Let’s hope they don’t change the way macOS manage windows. All the additions they made to accommodate Windows users are useless.
- I don’t have any issue on searching macos settings. Could you provide an example?
- safari is a great browser, i use it as main browser since years and i’d never go back
I think you could keep going saying things that are not true.
zanellato19 13 hours ago [-]
The alt tab implementation on macos is awful.
tossaway0 8 hours ago [-]
Add sharing a contact to your current message in iMessage to that list.
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
for hardware you tried, was it all apple?
jcgrillo 13 hours ago [-]
My latest Mac OSX wtf was sometimes the terminal window shrinks by 1 or 2 columns every time I wake the computer up from sleep, but only when connected via thunderbolt USB C hub to external monitor. Terrifying to imagine how that must be. By contrast, Linux/BSD desktops don't generally seem to pull this kind of weird mindfuck horror movie shit? Like it either works or it's completely, obviously, totally broken. Not some weird subtle in-between thing.
inquirerGeneral 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tyleregeto 15 hours ago [-]
Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
pcurve 15 hours ago [-]
100% agree. As someone who used both Mac and PC for 30+ years, and still use both, Mac OS (and iOS) aren't very intuitive. Lots of hidden functions. The way they organize settings is tough to find. It's always a struggle.
Hammershaft 15 hours ago [-]
Apple hardware is incredible but the OS software & increasingly the design is mid at best.
pkaodev 15 hours ago [-]
My experience is similar. Great hardware. Software is good until there is something I want to do that isn't very obvious, then it's either a hassle or not possible.
My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?
Hammershaft 15 hours ago [-]
There are so many basic gaps in functionality and so many underbaked & poorly designed Mac OS features that I end up papering over with paid 3rd party applications.
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
That is how Apple makes money. By design.
wtallis 10 hours ago [-]
In order for that to actually be a money-making strategy for Apple, those third-party apps that address weaknesses in the OS would have to be sold through the Mac App Store so that Apple gets a cut. I've been a Mac user since before there was a Mac App Store, and I've never bought such a utility through the App Store. I have paid for several such apps over the years in ways that did not generate any direct revenue for Apple, and most of those apps likely could not be distributed through the App Store because of how they muck around with private APIs and other OS internals.
Those third-party apps do increase the overall appeal of Apple's platform, but suggesting that Apple might want to encourage that situation rather than improve their OS themselves sounds like a broken windows fallacy.
pennomi 11 hours ago [-]
XCode is one of the worst pieces of software in history. Imagine writing a code editor that couldn’t keep its syntax highlighting from crashing for multiple years.
fchicken 8 hours ago [-]
You must be a fetus. Apple was leagues ahead of everyone else with the inception of the Mac all the way through Windows 7...
Microsoft finally caught up around that time, but has since added a whole new dimension of enshittification that the only conclusion that can be reached about tech as a whole is that it all sucks and will always suck.
hei-lima 15 hours ago [-]
It's not great, ofc. But I find myself less disgusted by it.
richardatlarge 13 hours ago [-]
Here here
seanmcdirmid 15 hours ago [-]
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
itunes1010 11 hours ago [-]
> 20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it,
Absolutely not, especially not on an Apple thread.
By example, the iPod released in 2001. Anyone who used those early knows the user experience was competitive with the current experience. In 2006, I was using the version of iTunes then which was probably objectively the best desktop music app ever created. There are features then that were just there, that were pioneered, or now absent, like an automatically sorted "least listened to" playlist that are now nearly impossible to find. Sync alone is still an headache the OS community just does on the side, and no one is even bothering to compete on it anymore.
pxc 8 hours ago [-]
Amarok was way better than iTunes in that era. Massively better UI, separation of playback queue from collection browsing, plugin ecosystem, better metadata fetching including lyrics support... And its dynamic playlists were way more capable too.
I had an iPod in those days and Apple's firmware updates that periodically broke third-party sync (while bringing no improvements) is the reason that to this day I've never bought Apple hardware for myself from Apple since that time. Used hardware only.
Every time I had to use iTunes was regrettable. The app was an insanely massive download for the time. It tried to install fucking Safari on Windows for no reason. The UI was somehow simultaneously a sprawling mess and feature-deprived.
Maybe there was a brief period where iTunes was genuinely an interesting app, but even by the mid-aughts, it had been totally surpassed by a number of open-source music players.
But Amarok at that time was only available on Linux. I assume most iTunes fans of the time never got to try it.
angoragoats 14 hours ago [-]
I was using (and writing) software as long as 35+ years ago and I disagree with your assessment that we were “just tolerating it” 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I was using Mac OS X Tiger on a new Intel-based MacBook Pro and it ran like a dream, and had software which mostly followed Apple’s human interface guidelines. Now I run macOS Tahoe and curse under my breath at the lack of design consistency and the iPad-ification of the interface. I’m also shown ads, and in some cases ads that can’t be dismissed or disabled, for things like iCloud and Apple Music.
When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.
seanmcdirmid 13 hours ago [-]
I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute. Of course the intel MBP came out in 2006 (or 2007?) and was an absolute dream setup where hardware caught up with Windows while the software was pretty good as well (I was using a Mac since 2004 or so).
I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.
angoragoats 13 hours ago [-]
> I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute.
I understood that, and I was using it in the same way.
> I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse…
Yeah this is the part I was disagreeing with, and I gave a couple examples showing why it’s meaningfully worse now.
I’ve been using Macs since the 1980s. The timeframe of 20-25 years ago (post Classic Mac OS) was some of the best software Apple has ever released.
seanmcdirmid 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe. I personally couldn’t afford to switch until 2004. And I grew up with PCs (well my first computer was an Osborne). Even then, it felt expensive and slow until the Intel switch.
tomwheeler 11 hours ago [-]
Same here. Two decades ago, I was excited to install updates to commercial software I used because they fixed bugs and brought useful new features. These days I fear updates because they introduce new bugs, remove features I care about, and come with new anti-features that I actively do not want.
The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.
bryanlarsen 15 hours ago [-]
As a cross platform developer, MacOS is far buggier than Linux or Windows in my experience.
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
you mean `bugs i have as developer` or bugs reported by users of your xplat app?
bryanlarsen 14 hours ago [-]
Bugs in the OS I encounter as a developer.
bryanlarsen 9 hours ago [-]
P.S. even if it is buggier than Windows, MacOS has a lot fewer bugs than our app! We do encounter bugs in Linux, but they are almost invariably fixed in up to date distros. Unfortunately we are forced to support old enterprise Linux distros.
boringg 14 hours ago [-]
Huh, Windows?
bryanlarsen 12 hours ago [-]
Yes. I generally don't have to deal with the mess Microsoft has put on top of their bloated but solid kernel / base OS.
soperj 15 hours ago [-]
Safari is a shinning example of how wrong this is.
Sorry.
The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.
dagi3d 14 hours ago [-]
not only Safari, several other apps such as Music (which also has several annoying quirks)
never understood why they did not get their own lifecycle if they have dedicated teams for each of those apps
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
If you're interested, it's to reduce cost. It's incredibly expensive to build something like Music or Maps. If each version is tied to an OS version, it keeps you from having to explode your testing and fixing cycle over time.
Marsymars 12 hours ago [-]
This is especially notably when you want to support all the latest OS features.
My company keeps the testing cycle smaller by only adding new OS-dependent features to its mobile app when the minimum supported OS version gets incremented and a feature is supported in every supported OS version. That means that the iOS app is only now getting features that were added in iOS 15 in 2021.
raw_anon_1111 15 hours ago [-]
So exactly why is that a big deal when unlike Android - they actually keep their phones updated?
SchemaLoad 13 hours ago [-]
It's a deal when they stop updating. It is true they provide OS updates for longer than most, but many people use devices, especially ipads for way longer than the OS supported period. And those people are stuck on an old unsupported browser without being able to update or install a 3rd party one.
raw_anon_1111 13 hours ago [-]
As I said in another reply, Apple just did a security update for the iPhone 5s released in 2013 January of this year.
The latest version of iOS runs on iPads back to 2919.
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android - released in 2019.
So how is it better?
SchemaLoad 13 hours ago [-]
Chrome and Google being bad doesn't make Apple's restrictions good. That said, Android lets you install a 3rd party browser which can choose to keep supporting old devices. iOS locks everything to using the safari engine.
scarface_74 12 hours ago [-]
And the latest version of Firefox requires the version of Android released in 2017… is that really a win?
j1elo 14 hours ago [-]
Unlike Android indeed, when you maintain a perfectly working phone that happens (by accident or force of nature) to live longer than the official lifetime some executives in a remote office had decided to grant it, the web browser cannot be updated any more. Just the single most security sensitive piece of software of any computer. Who would have guessed people were going to complain!
raw_anon_1111 14 hours ago [-]
The iPhone 5s - released in 2013 - just got an update January 2026.
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. Even phones that old aren’t getting other security updates.
Is that really the argument you want to make?
SchemaLoad 13 hours ago [-]
They give occasional security patches for the most critical bugs. They don't do full ios/safari updates. The iphone 5s is on ios 12.
raw_anon_1111 13 hours ago [-]
And neither does Google. The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. The latest version of iOS supports my iPad released in 2019.
whatsupdog 15 hours ago [-]
It's worst in case of freedom, which is the most important aspect for me. Every release they are slowly turning in the screws and make it harder and harder to install apps from developers who haven't jumped through all the hoops that Apple forces them to. I hope this change in leadership will change this strategy.
hedora 15 hours ago [-]
Google is worse. Most of their apps are cloud only with no E2EE. Also, they are much more user hostile when deciding what goes in the store (they make money off spying, but apple makes money off hw, so this makes sense).
Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).
We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.
whatsupdog 15 hours ago [-]
Google has so far allowed installing apps without their explicit permission. So it's much higher on freedom index, imo. And there's no obligation to use Google cloud apps. There's alternative for every Google cloud app.
modeless 14 hours ago [-]
Also, Pixels have unlocked bootloaders and Android is open source to the point where third parties can and do make alternative OS distributions.
cwillu 13 hours ago [-]
And it's necessary to have a second phone to actually use any of that while maintaining access to one's banking app.
The hardware is nominally open only because they enforce participation in their software ecosystem via other means.
DANmode 11 hours ago [-]
> And it's necessary to have a second phone to actually use any of that while maintaining access to one's banking app.
Partially accurate / misleading at most.
cwillu 8 hours ago [-]
I have a phone that can be unlocked, and I will lose access to my banking app (among other things I require) if I do so.
If your “partially accurate” objection is that I didn't describe a perfectly universal experience, I will be greatly disappointed.
DANmode 6 hours ago [-]
What does “unlocked” mean, here?
Are we talking about root checks? Bootloader unlock?
DANmode 7 hours ago [-]
Vouching your comment from dead to reply in good faith:
your bank’s app sucks, tell them they suck,
and or use the webapp.
Tens of thousands of financial institution apps work A-OK on GrapheneOS,
that is my objection.
this_user 16 hours ago [-]
Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."
Veserv 15 hours ago [-]
I much prefer the defect where the root password was the empty string [1].
[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.
Never understood that if statement style, it seems to only exist to create subtle bugs.
bch 10 hours ago [-]
I think of it as BSD style, though of course it could be suggested/mandated elsewhere -
[...]Use a space after keywords (if, while, for, return, switch). No braces are used for control statements with zero or only a single statement unless that statement is more than a single line, in which case they are permitted.[0]
As I look, GNU guide is less specific, but examples[1] show the same style.
The good thing is that -Wmisleading-indentation [2] (comes along with -Wall) catches this indentation error.
Unsurprisingly, given BoringSSL doesn't have a stable API (yet alone ABI), it isn't exposed as a system library.
wfme 15 hours ago [-]
Dare we not look to Android.
goto fail was relevant in 2014 - perhaps not the most useful point in 2026.
wewtyflakes 15 hours ago [-]
I have not found this to be true for the software side of things.
- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.
- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.
- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
Most of the main apps on Apple TV shouldn't require a password anymore; you log in on your phone to authorize. The next Apple TV should simplify this further...
Nevermark 8 hours ago [-]
Apple’s software has a kind of reliable predictability that many appreciate.
But “best” is far too strong a word.
For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.
And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.
With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.
Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.
Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.
I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.
Pro hardware. Toy software.
He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.
That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.
Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.
llbbdd 7 hours ago [-]
The huge strike-out they made with the Vision Pro still blows my mind. I'm in the camp of people who would have possibly shifted my entire working setup to that thing if they'd made just a few less dumb choices with it, and it might have been worth it even at the high price. I still occasionally waste my time checking out the latest to see if they've made any headway towards making it useful, because I'm still recovering from the shock that they haven't. The only way I can see the current state making any sense is if they just wanted to squeeze as much field usage data as possible from early adopters of an overpriced prototype, but that seems so far outside of how Apple normally positions its products that it's hard to believe.
Nevermark 6 hours ago [-]
> I'm in the camp of people who would have possibly shifted my entire working setup to that thing if they'd made just a few less dumb choices
That describes me too. I even did for a while. But it just made the incomprehensible lack of any software ambition more painful.
The software is the only reason the Vision isn't worth the price. A real Pro OS, paired with an Studio M5-Ultra, or with its own M5-Ultra, would be an amazing work environment.
(The only hardware they would need to upgrade for the latter, i.e. its own Ultra, would be making live-battery swapping convenient. Which they should have already done.)
lateforwork 14 hours ago [-]
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
mlinhares 14 hours ago [-]
I haven't really had to work with microsoft software but apple's software quality is abysmal beyond the OS (and even the OS has places that are a joke, like the bluetooth stack).
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
toephu2 16 hours ago [-]
Google is much better at software than Apple...most in the Valley would agree with this.
antipaul 15 hours ago [-]
Performance wise, they often seem solid.
Usability wise (UI/UX/design), they are in the gutter.
tristanb 15 hours ago [-]
Google has one of the worst commercial UX of any products I've ever used.
hei-lima 15 hours ago [-]
It's uneven in my experience. OS-wise (Android, ChromeOS), I've had some big and frustrating problems. On the other hand, I really like some of their web apps (Drive, Docs).
acdha 12 hours ago [-]
For servers, yes, but use Safari for like 5 minutes versus Chrome and it’s clear the reverse is true for desktops, especially if you’re not running with 32+GB of RAM. Google Drive, Photos, etc. are not as good as Chrome.
This is not to say that Apple’s desktop software is great, only that the bar is a lot lower than it had to be when people had to be convinced to buy licenses.
tonyedgecombe 15 hours ago [-]
Only if you put aside the fact that Google makes its money from selling your attention.
15 hours ago [-]
thiht 15 hours ago [-]
Google software is trash
jorvi 14 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the company that still can't their gesture and backswipe UX functioning properly 7 years after its introduction, and with Apple giving them 2 years to study it beforehand.
A decade to produce a non-functioning gesture bar / system. Such a titan among titans.
throw0101a 15 hours ago [-]
> Google is much better at software than Apple...most in the Valley would agree with this.
God, I miss Android so much. iOS still annoys me. The app situation is sadly better on iOS, though.
15 hours ago [-]
whatsupdog 15 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Keyframe 9 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? Most if not all Apple's software is not even the best in their own category, let alone "in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's". If we look at only these three and leave other competitors, you want to tell us that Safari is better than Chrome (Edge is the same now), Pages is better than Docs and Word, Numbers is better than Sheets and Excel, Keynote is better than Slides (arguably) or PowerPoint, Mail is better than Gmail or Outlook, iCloud better than Google Drive or OneDrive (ok lol), Facetime better than Meet or Teams, Apple Maps better than Google Maps or Bing Maps, Siri better than Google Assistant or Copilot... ?
Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..
Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.
Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.
pdpi 12 hours ago [-]
I still prefer macOS to desktop Linux or (yikes) Windows, but the margin has gotten smaller over the last several years. Unfortunately, that's less because Linux or Windows have gotten that much better, and more because macOS has stalled (and even gone backwards in some ways).
root_axis 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe 20 years ago, today it's no better than anything else - well designed in some aspects, total trash in others. The stewards of xcode, spotlight and siri (among many other stinkers) are disqualified from the category of "best"
modeless 15 hours ago [-]
Android and Windows are better than iOS and macOS in many non-trivial ways. They have their own problems too, but as a user of all of them I don't prefer the Apple software. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, is clearly superior.
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
what is most non trivial way example?
modeless 14 hours ago [-]
Android has a far better OTA update system than iOS. The notification system is much better and the default keyboard is better too. It supports multiple user profiles that you can switch between instantly, with their own separate apps and settings and home screens, a long requested feature for iPads that is inexplicably still absent on iOS.
Windows has a better desktop compositor and window manager than macOS. It supports Nvidia GPUs with CUDA. It also has WSL so you can use real package managers instead of homebrew.
Marsymars 12 hours ago [-]
"winget configure" is pretty great in Windows - you can store your personal .config file on GitHub and use it whenever you set up a new PC to install everything you want, uninstall all the cruft you don't want, and set all the Windows config you want via registry keys.
lunarboy 16 hours ago [-]
oh the horror stories I've heard from friends at Apple. Don't think I've heard anyone who writes tests at Apple
2muchcoffeeman 15 hours ago [-]
So, they’re just like every other software outfit.
cybercatgurrl 12 hours ago [-]
and people wonder why they have random regressions in updates. this is it. unit tests and other types of tests are a cornerstone of software stability and does the bulk of the job of preventing regressions
16 hours ago [-]
Congeec 16 hours ago [-]
Best in terms of what? Quality Control? UI/UX?
glenstein 16 hours ago [-]
Presumably in terms of a conventional colloquial sense that's an amalgam of those among other things.
hei-lima 15 hours ago [-]
This!
coro_1 15 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily UI / UX - the entire preferences -> settings change remains the best example. The rest seems pretty good.
poolnoodle 14 hours ago [-]
In my opinion Android (especially the Google Pixel flavour) is vastly more intuitive and logical than i(Pad)OS these days. I almost need to consult a manual to change my wallpaper on iOS. Anything to do with file management or notifications is also just plain bad on iOS. The keyboard is bad. Background downloads don't work reliably. If I want to transfer photos from a computer onto an iPhone I need special software and then cannot delete those pictures on the phone itself. I can choose between 3 multitasking paradigms on iPad – terrible!
tehlike 15 hours ago [-]
Apple could use a fresh approach to their software release cycles. I wish i could talk to someone at apple on this.
bigupthewhole 14 hours ago [-]
Have you seen xcode? Have you seen Appstore connect in comparison to Google play console?
locknitpicker 6 hours ago [-]
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO.
Apple does xcode, known for being perpetually broken and an ungodly mess of whatever design it had. Isn't it enough proof to completely reject your claim?
selectnull 14 hours ago [-]
> Apple’s software is the best [...] compared to Google's or Microsoft's
Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.
mcmcmc 15 hours ago [-]
Have you tried Siri lately?
leptons 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure how you can think Finder is better than the alternatives. It's awful, and has always been awful, IMO.
paradox460 11 hours ago [-]
It has one feature I wish everyone else would copy: Miller columns. But even after NeXT used them 35+ years ago, they have remarkably little penetration into other OSes.
I use Pathfinder on MacOS, and it's generally a lot better than finder, but there are features I wish would carry over from other OSes. Windows file check boxes are incredibly useful
leptons 5 hours ago [-]
Miller columns is the biggest waste of screen space that's possible in an OS, and MacOS chose it for Finder. And Apple has been dying on that hill for decades. It's one of the main reasons Finder is awful and Apple's design choices are a joke.
sam0x17 8 hours ago [-]
It's really gone to shit in the last 2 years
wetpaws 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
apazzolini 15 hours ago [-]
> Apple's software is the best in the [category of shit software]
hei-lima 15 hours ago [-]
I kinda agree with this. But that doesn't affect my statemente.
nixass 15 hours ago [-]
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft
Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is
dlahoda 15 hours ago [-]
what is better?
Danox 14 hours ago [-]
If you are reading Hackers News for the most part, you are out of touch with the normal computer users and that was said over and over again with the introduction of the Mac Neo which appears to be a hit among normal everyday computer users who have never heard of Hackers News, a family member recently just bought one of the new Mac M5 PowerBook's and I expected some cry for help setting it up. Guess what there was none.
In the answer to your question, there is nothing better overall across hardware and software top to bottom and that applies to computers, smartphones, tablets, and watches across five ecosystems.
gcau 14 hours ago [-]
I find it hard to believe this comment isn't sarcastic. Apple's software, atleast in particular macos, is horrendous - to the point I ditched my m2 macbook for a thinkpad because of how bad it was. It's like a toy OS.
pharos92 15 hours ago [-]
Saying Apple Software is 'terrible' is a blatant hyperbole. Has it degraded meaningfully over the last decade in terms of stability? Yes. Has it's capability increased though? Yes. Has it become more secure by design? Yes. Is the UX better than anything else in market? By a country mile.
tensor 15 hours ago [-]
The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
Schiendelman 13 hours ago [-]
I don't agree with the whining about liquid glass. Sure, it isn't the design you like. But usability really isn't that different.
tensor 12 hours ago [-]
No, it's objectively bad in terms of usability. There is also the matter of taste, but I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about UX, not style. UX is about functionality and usability.
Contrast is an objective measure. There are well studied and known levels where you can have trouble reading, or an easy time reading. Similarly, things like drag regions not even aligning with visual elements are literally indefensible. This stuff is so basic you'd fail a UX 101 course with it.
Things like spotlight defaulting to the newest item so that when you hit enter and it changes your selected item the millisecond before you hit enter. I'm not even sure how you'd try to defend UI elements literally flickering as either style or not affecting usability.
It's objectively bad by a great many widely agreed upon and studied standards.
rafram 9 hours ago [-]
Contrast was bad in the first couple bets, but now it’s very similar to iOS 18.
reddalo 7 hours ago [-]
I agree. MacOS became completely unusable with Liquid Glass, it totally feels like one of those amateur custom themes for Linux.
I hope the new leadership will bring back better software. As of now, macOS 26 is disgusting.
brikym 16 hours ago [-]
Let's hope John takes his job Siriously
potatoproduct 7 hours ago [-]
Apple doesn't care about privacy, its a convenient USP.
Tepix 7 hours ago [-]
They have behaved in a consistent matter to emphasize user privacy.
What makes you say they don‘t care?
ebbi 14 hours ago [-]
> maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics
I think you're attributing a lot more agency to a CEO role (for a publicly listed company, at the least) than they actually have.
nafistiham 36 minutes ago [-]
Putting the hardware head at the times of AI. Great decision.
nixass 4 hours ago [-]
It's funny how yesterday's John's wiki article didn't even know his exact age/DOB. Now it's corrected :)
alsetmusic 15 hours ago [-]
I think it's interesting that the handoff will be complete on Sept 1. That would mean Ternus will helm his first iPhone launch that month. Auspicious timing. Curious the math they calculated when landing on this date. Certainly tees him up for an early win if the products are well-received.
qubob 13 hours ago [-]
Tim's departure announcement is timed between product announcements. Although, not a surprise to anyone
As for Ternus' timing:
A)Not very Apple to have the CEO do one last launch while on the way out the door (want the full throated, 1000% commitment in execs)
B)Gives John stage for first time as CEO at September Keynote (historically a BFD)
C)It felt right, among all the other time-slots and factors to consider
D)John gets to announce the next One More Thing, and own it. Would be odd for Tim to announce the One More Thing and then resign.
LoganDark 13 hours ago [-]
One more thing: See ya suckers! I'm outta here.
Geee 15 hours ago [-]
My guess is that they'll release something impressive in September, and they want to give Ternus an early win as you said. Maybe a new completely product or Vision Air.
mpweiher 52 minutes ago [-]
Another iPhone mini...
prawn 13 hours ago [-]
iPhone Ultra.
Whatarethese 15 hours ago [-]
Apples first foldable phone. It will be a huge success.
ahmedfromtunis 16 hours ago [-]
When Cook took over, people expected him to fail.
I don't think even Steve Jobs would've been able to imagine that Apple can get this big.
elzbardico 15 hours ago [-]
To be honest, a lot of industry analysts were skeptical of Jobs' second coming. And when he did a deal with Microsoft, most of them thought they were right in their initial pessimism.
Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.
Aachen 2 hours ago [-]
Pundits... or might it just be that people can't predict markets and behavior without large error margins and compounding effects that magnify these errors further over time?
rhubarbtree 5 hours ago [-]
Guilty. I predicted they would decline, due to a lack of new products. I guess I was right in a sense, but I didn’t see the potential of optimising what was already there.
I also love the Vision Pro, actually, I think it’s brilliant, so that was an exception to the rule too.
joshstrange 16 hours ago [-]
Very glad to see this finally happen. It's been in the rumors for a while now that Ternus would be the next CEO but the timeline was uncertain.
I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.
He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.
ignoramous 16 hours ago [-]
> interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are
As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.
Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with. He has played a singular role in driving Apple's silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry. He has always led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and time and again, his team has delivered breakthrough innovations that have transformed our products. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as Apple's chief hardware officer.
kshacker 16 hours ago [-]
Someone archive the leadership page :) to be referenced 12 months from when John takes over
Prediction: Sundar will step aside and Demis will replace him.
(actually I doubt this- Demis does not want to run a big company whose main business is Ads)
threepts 18 minutes ago [-]
demis has always publicly stated he does not care about the business aspect as much as the scientific endeavor.
i highly doubt he will ever want to take over primarily what is an ad/small time hardware company in favour of taking away focus from his ai company
lateforwork 13 hours ago [-]
Tim Cook stepped down when he hit 65. Sundar has 12 years to go to hit that milestone.
cubefox 15 hours ago [-]
The problem is that neither Sundar nor Demis are remotely as focused and competitive as Sam and Dario.
t1234s 14 hours ago [-]
They need to move all of the iOS boatware apps bundled with macOS to the app store so people can choose to uninstall then reinstall them later.
djyde 12 hours ago [-]
While I don't agree with many things Cook has done during his tenure, like the Touch Bar and removing the SD card slot from MacBooks, I have to admit the man knows how to make money.
bschwindHN 10 hours ago [-]
I don't like that Tim Cook added the touch bar and removed the SD card slot, but you have to give him credit for also removing the touch bar and adding the SD card slot ;)
1123581321 9 hours ago [-]
Hah, had a funny moment along these lines. SD vs MicroSD came up as a topic. I glanced down at my M3 MBP and said, “looks like MacBook Pros use the regular SD slot.” The guy solemnly informed me that actually, Apple had removed the SD card slot from my laptop. His face turned red when I turned it to show him.
haikerapp 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
apple4ever 15 hours ago [-]
I appreciate what Cook did for the hardware, but he really failed on the software side. Too many little and annoying bugs. I look forward to Ternus improving that side while maintaining the same hardware quality.
tgrover 4 hours ago [-]
That's a surprising and amazing decision. Putting a key element of the hardware side of the business at the head of it might lead to a some amazing hardware upgrades and innovations! All for it
qsz13 15 hours ago [-]
I just hope they can bring back the live events for the product releases.
perfmode 14 hours ago [-]
Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.
nxobject 13 hours ago [-]
In retrospect, it seems Apple telegraphed Ternus well in advance - the NYT had an article well in January that clearly wasn't a source of friction with Apple Marketing.
Cook will handle the politics and optics, he will remain like a king representing Apple without any true power.
Ternus will be the soldier in the trenches.
I feel excitement for the future of Apple.
smeeth 16 hours ago [-]
I'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
tptacek 16 hours ago [-]
Things he effectively presided over:
* Apple Silicon, the most far-reaching technical transformation in the company's history (probably a bigger deal than macOS itself)
* Apple Pay
* The Watch and Airpods product categories, both of which Apple now dominates.
All while holding on to its position in phones and improving (drastically) its computers.
It feels like a pretty successful term.
smeeth 16 hours ago [-]
Tim was a great CEO.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
dwaite 15 hours ago [-]
One could add the Vision Pro, MacBook Neo, Mac Studio, HomePods, and so on to the list as well.
The reality is everyone just wants another hit product like the iPhone, but its success was based on it being a personal convergence device. You can't really create a second carryable/wearable convergence device and expect it to be wildly successful at the level of the iPhone without it killing off the iPhone.
So far that revolutionary approach by third parties has not succeeded against the iPhone, and the evolutionary approach apple takes with the iPhone means there is no clear inflection point anywhere in the future where the phone form factor goes away.
carefree-bob 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, a very successful CEO and he secured a great legacy. I was skeptical when Jobs stepped down, but under Cook innovation did continue, but primarily in hardware.
caycep 13 hours ago [-]
Also the discipline in not blowing massive R&D chasing AI; but having the machines/architecture best suited to said AI...
fckgw 16 hours ago [-]
> Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
kube-system 16 hours ago [-]
The M series transition was perfectly executed, but that trajectory was set up before Jobs left when they went all-in on in-house semiconductor design.
basisword 15 hours ago [-]
Come on. Attributing a product to a guy that died 15 years ago instead of the guy running the company for the last 15 years is absurd.
kube-system 15 hours ago [-]
Apple released their first in-house ARM processor 16 years ago, and the M series is descendent from that lineage and acquisitions that got them started in that business such as PA Semi and Intrinsity.
Cook absolutely deserves credit for the successful desktop ARM transition, but building ARM processors in-house was in no way something he directed as CEO.
wpm 11 hours ago [-]
PA Semi was acquired in 2008.
Jobs was likely very burned out on IBM failing to deliver a 3Ghz PowerPC G5 and one with a low enough TDP for a PowerBook.
So he switches to Intel because he needs chips, but the vulnerability still exists, and it's what happened again after the Skylake launch and the ensuing 4 years of terrible Macs designed for silicon that didn't exist.
Steve saw the danger, and probably acquired PA Semi because of it as well as the fact that PA Semi actually did deliver a power efficient PowerPC G5, even if it was a bit late.
Steve had the vision. Cook executed it very well. They both deserve credit.
oldnetguy 16 hours ago [-]
His legacy is he used Apple to help build China into a technological powerhouse at the expense of American workers.
Not to the same scale but yes. At least there are Teslas still made here.
With Apple it's the scale of what was done.
ebbi 14 hours ago [-]
That's a pretty reductive take.
8avo 4 hours ago [-]
Tim Cook is a businessman who made the company bigger than Jobs could.
But he is not an aestheticist as much as Jobs was. See how Cook has been destroying the faces of iPhones and Macs, which had a huge dent or what is ironically called a "dynamic" island on the top of the screen. Back of iPhones is desparetely ugly.
Also he has not been presenting what makes us exicted. Apple's Siri is forgotten so that he has to rely on Google's Gemini instead of developing their own. While Samsung's Galaxy has been deploying its 7th foldable phone, Apple has done none. Leaks are usual so we can tell what he will show at its annual conference well before he acutually does and it gives us no surprise at all.
In a short term, "what Cook's Apple has innovated?" -- I guess zero. Rather, deteriorated.
As a long-standing user who started computer life with Performa 5220, keep using Macs as main machines and now run M3 MAX Macbook Pro to develop web apps, current Apple is never what I think it should be.
Making the company bigger is great. But what about their products and services? These are also where Cook has been leading to. He seems to forget Job's aphorism, "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
So I hope the new CEO changes the course.
drowntoge 16 hours ago [-]
To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.
We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.
lunarboy 16 hours ago [-]
FaceID, AirPods, Apple Silicon, Vision Pro (though it was flop was a good try). Overall, I would actually place Tim above Steve in terms of business, although maybe not from a Human Computer Interaction design novelty perspective
16 hours ago [-]
shrubble 16 hours ago [-]
What did they shut down? Aperture comes to mind, anything else?
jshier 13 hours ago [-]
Many of their acquired pro tools, and pretty much all of their server hardware and software, though much of that started before Cook took over. Plus the Mac Pro missteps were on his watch, as well as the current cancellation. Apple seems more and more unwilling to invest in niche hardware like the Mac Pro, except where they see it pushing the platform forward, like the Vision Pro.
basisword 15 hours ago [-]
>> Few new products were launched
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
ninjahawk1 9 hours ago [-]
Big shoes to fill. Steve Jobs vouched for Tim Cook to be CEO…then Tim has been the CEO to see Apple become a global billion dollar company. This new CEO has been at apple for like 25 years (I think) so I’m sure he’ll do fine.
aanet 15 hours ago [-]
Whoa, didn't expect the announcement to come so soon. Of course, the sound bytes were everywhere, but even then, this was a surprise announcement.
So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.
Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]
Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it.
(and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
caycep 13 hours ago [-]
Granted, 65 is probably a milestone for anyone. I think BMW has a hard stop for its execs at that age
aanet 11 hours ago [-]
Agreed... EU (and most countries, afaik) have age limits for CEOs, which I do support.
Though US famously does not, which is a curse in itself, IMHO.
Though tbh, it's worth wondering if Berkshire Hathaway without the Sage is still the same...
mandeepj 15 hours ago [-]
Some people might say Tim is leaving but he got himself promoted, just like Bezos. So, being an “Executive” chairman he’s going to be actively involved and be responsible, but not on daily basis and deep into each of verticals.
Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
snowwrestler 11 hours ago [-]
> Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
I bet that was just good message management. The steadiest approach to a CEO transition is to make it seem a long way off until the moment it happens. Markets don’t like any wobbling at the top.
bg24 8 hours ago [-]
It is a net positive to have a technologist and hardware leader at the helm. In this era, Apple can hire the right people to build software faster. but they need a strong hardware leader at the helm to differentiate themselves. In local AI, they have a unique opportunity, but limited window of time.
thimabi 16 hours ago [-]
I don’t closely follow the news about Apple and now I’m wondering why they decided to go forward with this change at this moment.
As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?
ghaff 15 hours ago [-]
Cook is also 65 and doubtless has more money than god. He's been a great success and it's not unreasonable to think he may have wanted to start riding into the sunset. Apple's wishes are irrelevant at some level.
wombatpm 16 hours ago [-]
I think supply chain optimization is untenable in a chaotic global trade environment. You don’t need to be an expert to buy from more suppliers and lay in a supply of stock. JIT falls apart when tariffs go from 20% to 120% to 15% based on whims and court cases.
Gagarin1917 16 hours ago [-]
Tim must have wanted to enjoy 4/20 without worrying about company drug testing.
arduanika 15 hours ago [-]
He already had the trail of his retirement mapped out, and picked the perfect moment to blaze it.
LarsDu88 16 hours ago [-]
Probably didn't want to sit through any more executive kowtow meetings with the Orange Man
vaughan 5 hours ago [-]
For me this is the perfect timing. Just this week I was fed up with my iPhone (and most of the Apple ecosystem) and bought a Google Pixel 10 Pro.
pacifi30 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you Tim Cook, as I am writing this on an iPhone.
Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.
Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.
didibus 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why so many people seem to think Apple software is terrible, I recon it's quite good personally, what's the issue with it?
Aachen 2 hours ago [-]
Do you have any specific questions? The request for "what's wrong with Apple software" is about the size of a Wikipedia page to answer and what people are saying in the comments seems quite clear to me. Since you're referring to comments, but none in particular, I'm not sure what parts you want an elaboration on. It might also help to just ask in a thread that has information you find unclear
It has become very buggy in recent years. Lots of glitches. And the liquid glass fiasco didn’t help.
Historically there were so few bugs in Apple’s software that to encounter even one was a jarring experience. Now they’ve reverted to the mean, and it’s just as buggy as Windows or Android. So if you’re comparing with them, no big deal. But compared to Apple standards we’ve fallen a long way.
didibus 5 hours ago [-]
I see, as someone who recently came to Apple (about 2 years ago), from Windows and Android, Apple software seems pretty good, like above those.
rhubarbtree 4 hours ago [-]
You mean the underlying code or the defect rate?
montgomery_r 12 hours ago [-]
There’s a lot of commentary to the effect that the Mac hardware is good, but the software is somehow terrible.
Speaking as someone who first used a Mac Plus, graduated to an SE/30, and is now on a Mac mini m4 pro… I can remember when Macintosh was widely held to be an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. The software has always been terrible, until you try the other guys’ stuff. The hardware has often been good, and is in a purple period right now. Enjoy it while it lasts! (It won’t).
npunt 4 hours ago [-]
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.
lastdong 7 hours ago [-]
I have used Macs since the Classic era. My best Mac was a PowerBook G4 that could run Windows on a VM faster than most Windows machines at the time. My first MacBook was brilliant, but I have noticed a decline since then. My 6-year-old MacBook Pro really struggles nowadays, whereas I remember a time when people proudly said their 10-year-old Macs were still snappy even during rosetta.
Currently, Linux is the preferred choice for work. Windows 11 Enterprise is not bad when stripped of all social, news, and 360 ads overhead, but Microsoft is really trying hard to mess it up there too.
Edit: 6 years old, not 4, and also Intel Macbook, so due an upgrade for sure
argsnd 6 hours ago [-]
Your M2 MacBook Pro really struggles? That is genuinely crazy, given that I use one as a daily driver and it feels just as fast as the day I bought it.
I think the Apple Silicon transition has increased Mac longevity far beyond the Intel or PowerPC eras, and I am quite baffled you think otherwise.
lastdong 5 hours ago [-]
You’re right, it’s 6 year old, so a dinosaur by technology standards! I see your point.
argsnd 5 hours ago [-]
Is it an Intel MacBook? I think those sucked for obvious reasons outside Apple’s control (Intel getting stuck at 14nm for ages) which they’ve already fixed (by abandoning Intel).
The M1 MacBook Air was more powerful than the top Intel i9 MBP config if I recall correctly.
vincnetas 9 hours ago [-]
when job of ceo is to make sure that policies around the globe don't interfere with business: "Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."
RaoulP 15 hours ago [-]
For a long time I was hoping it would be Jeff Williams. For the brief moments these heads at Apple get the spotlight, I always felt he gave off a sense of humanity and sincerity.
michelb 7 hours ago [-]
Earlier than I expected. Seeing that Johny Srouji got promoted as well, this reshuffle might have been a way to make sure he stays for a few more years as well?
ChrisMarshallNY 11 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a good choice. Glad to have an engineer in charge. Tim Cook is no spring chicken. I do hope Ternus maintains the focus on privacy.
That focus on privacy pisses off a lot of devs (Yours Truly, included), but I sincerely believe in it. I write apps that Serve a demographic that values privacy.
6thbit 13 hours ago [-]
So John gets to announce the Fold comes september
oidar 16 hours ago [-]
situations like this should allow for relaxing the title rules to "unbury" the lede.
retinaros 5 hours ago [-]
Say what you want of Tim and he might not be directly responsible for it but the M1 chip is the greatest achievement of apple since the iphone
detectivestory 16 hours ago [-]
And John Ternus will be CEO
cobckm 14 hours ago [-]
Tim has done an amazing job in the post-Jobs era with his logistics. Brought Apple from $350B to $4T. This move makes perfect sense as Apple needs to start their next chapter with how rapid the world is changing at the moment. I do hope Apple's values don't change going into this new era.
Rapzid 4 hours ago [-]
All FAANG except Netflix are trillion to multi-trillion companies now. And Microsoft too.
Tim is fine, but there are clearly other, more powerful forces at play than "Tim Apple amaze".
instagraham 15 hours ago [-]
I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.
mabedan 15 hours ago [-]
If Johny Ive stayed, he could have become CEO... Now he has to design Ferrari dashboards and AI Pins
nottorp 4 hours ago [-]
> he could have become CEO
Oh that would have been a treat. He would have made Apple hardware so unusable for real work that I'd have switched back to beige boxes running Linux.
I'm sure he dreams about keyboards that are harder to type on and even more sensitive to dust than the emoji keyboards of yore.
denkmoon 12 hours ago [-]
What an absolute tragedy that would be for the world
geodel 14 hours ago [-]
"Designing AI Pin has been the greatest privilege of my life. I'd rank it higher than anything I did before"
Petersipoi 10 hours ago [-]
You buy that? If he really did say that, it's just a mixture of cope and a passive aggressive attempt at a jab.
ykl 16 hours ago [-]
I'm really hopeful about John Ternus stepping into the CEO role. Pretty much everything he's done leading Apple's hardware engineering has been an enormous unqualified success, and for a company like Apple, having hardware lead the company seems like the right step.
Austin_Conlon 16 hours ago [-]
Wonder to what extent Craig Federighi was considered and what the decision-making factors were there.
mrbnprck 15 hours ago [-]
Age, possibly. Ternus has 6 more years until retirement than Federighi.
lateforwork 13 hours ago [-]
To what extent do you think Apple software has done well under Craig's leadership?
mabedan 15 hours ago [-]
He could have not wanted the job to begin with. CEO is no joke, and for him would mean to say goodbye to software forever.
troupo 12 minutes ago [-]
I wish he would say good bye to software forever. Apple software is getting worse by the minute it seems.
lasky 8 hours ago [-]
Big day!
Least understood yet most influential company in the history, present and future of the venture capital backed tech world.
they replacing person doing horizontal scalability with vertical.
do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?
Fanofilm 9 hours ago [-]
Apple needed a "AI CEO". Hopefully John Ternus is Apple's "AI CEO". That is the win-vs-lose.
Apple included.
mizzao 9 hours ago [-]
Apple accidentally has a giant moat in having the only hardware that can run AI models locally on consumer products, plus not having thrown a huge pile of money into the tar pit of model training, which is ultimately becoming a race to the bottom with identical products, perfect competition, and razor thin (currently negative) margins.
They're gonna be fine in the AI age just like Costco was able to be a honey badger about e-commerce.
smath 45 minutes ago [-]
I for one am happy to see an engineer at the helm.
nelox 14 hours ago [-]
China is effectively run by engineers, so that is a good hedge for Apple.
zeristor 16 hours ago [-]
How long to the next ATP podcast?
kylec 16 hours ago [-]
I think they usually record on Tuesdays, so not long
DerekL 15 hours ago [-]
“We broadcast most episodes live on Wednesday nights at 8 PM US Eastern time.”
I think this is also why they release so late in the week. News usually happens before they record.
16 hours ago [-]
richardatlarge 13 hours ago [-]
Like Sam Altman, Tim Cook makes me think that what we fear in AI is already here. These two guys are corporate robots that act only in the service of the bottom line.
dhruv3006 6 hours ago [-]
Apple software about to get better and better :)
Aboutplants 16 hours ago [-]
Apple hardware has been a shining light for Apple for the past 5-10 years, even if a bit lucky. I’m curious how this effects the company as a whole going forward, hopefully positive
avadodin 3 hours ago [-]
John Apple, gotcha
adrianwaj 13 hours ago [-]
Any chance of a future where hardware can be customized at the design stage, like 3D printing but taken to an even higher level, even for 1-off builds? So prompt-driven manufacturing? For example, a watch with a USB-C port?
One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.
cooper_ganglia 15 hours ago [-]
John Ternus is the perfect choice. I expected Craig, and that would've been great, but Ternus is going to really be something special in that role!
lateforwork 13 hours ago [-]
Why would Craig have been great? macOS usability and quality has suffered greatly under Craig.
10 hours ago [-]
nixpulvis 15 hours ago [-]
Apple is good at hardware, they need help with software. I hope putting a hardware guy in charge can still improve this situation.
carefree-bob 14 hours ago [-]
Well, if I was Apple, I would not put one of their software guys into the position since the software leadership team has been ineffective. So either hire externally (crapshoot) or promote internally. It makes sense. Hopefully the hardware guys will knock some sense into the software leadership and impose accountability in that arena.
hamasho 13 hours ago [-]
It's exciting to see that the new CEO of Apple is a hardware guy.
I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up.
All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill.
It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.
They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.
I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.
MrBuddyCasino 3 hours ago [-]
"(Apple’s Board of Directors): Looks like Tim couldn’t Cook. But maybe John can Ternus around."
I know the rumors were swirling for the past few months, but just 4 more months of Cook seems like pretty short notice, no?
grusgrus 15 hours ago [-]
Consider that is mostly public headway. Behind the scenes the handover, mentorship, alignment I am sure was already happening for a while. E.g. you probably don't want the incoming CEO to have to immediately clean house or people might end up doubting their decisions, getting anxious or similar. The previous CEO can start retiring, moving people around to clear out possibly problematic leaders, break up internal "gangs" and ways of work - people will be more willing to accept their decision as they've been at the head for a while and have the trust. The new CEO comes in, group dynamics and rules are still fresh and building up between everyone, they don't have a black mark for firing anyone - to me it just feels like it would be a healthier and more mature transition.
To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.
So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.
porcoda 9 hours ago [-]
Yup. The rumor mill was talking about a CEO change for a while, and around the time you saw the rumors building you saw the departures you mentioned. Ternus was being mentioned as the likely successor at least back to November last year. So internally the shifts have already been happening for some time, only observable on the outside via the high profile departures.
jjk166 15 hours ago [-]
In 2021 the average time from announcement to new CEO for S&P 500 companies was 3.5 months, so this seems reasonably normal.
4 months in his _current_ role, but he’s not going anywhere—he’s remaining on as Chairman, which is still very much involved day-to-day.
basisword 16 hours ago [-]
Given how quickly Cook had to step in for jobs, first in the interim role, four months seems like plenty of time (particularly given he's still executive chairman).
toephu2 15 hours ago [-]
Not really. Anyone and everyone is replaceable. Even Steve Jobs.
16 hours ago [-]
MPSimmons 16 hours ago [-]
So, John Apple?
alanwreath 16 hours ago [-]
Johnny Apple Seed references incoming…
sultanofsaltin 14 hours ago [-]
Pretty simple hot take:
This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.
There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.
Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.
Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.
3 hours ago [-]
butterlesstoast 14 hours ago [-]
Anyone else notice the header text gets cut off on mobile? On an iPhone 17 no less...
torben-friis 14 hours ago [-]
Can't reproduce on an OPPO, funnily enough.
heisenbit 6 hours ago [-]
He is 50 and been in Apple almost all his working life. Is that not a mono-culture risk for a CEO?
shaky-carrousel 5 hours ago [-]
I'm looking forward for all the Temu jokes we're going to see.
ozmaverick72 14 hours ago [-]
Can not believe no one has asked the obvious question - is his nickname Tina ?
14 hours ago [-]
sacrosaunt 16 hours ago [-]
About time. Hopefully we can see some meaningful hardware improvements in the coming years.
Cider9986 15 hours ago [-]
What is wrong with the hardware now? iPhone 17 series is great, Macs have no competition, Apple Watches lead in accuracy.
Me thinks Apple software is the problem—I put Asahi Linux on my Mac.
sacrosaunt 15 hours ago [-]
No issue performance-wise but I wish there was more innovation, especially with the iPhones. For example, I was really impressed with Samsung's privacy screen demo.
celsoazevedo 14 hours ago [-]
The iPhone is fine, but I find them to be... boring. The SoCs are very good, but they don't have the best cameras, the best batteries, the fastest charging, the most innovative displays, etc. Apple isn't pushing that hard there.
nurettin 7 hours ago [-]
> Arthur Levinson, who has been Apple’s non-executive chairman for the past 15 years, will become its lead independent director on September 1, 2026.
What are these titles? Why? Who does what? It feels like a linkedin tea party.
jsemrau 10 hours ago [-]
He is proof that LinkedIn doesn't matter.
sva_ 16 hours ago [-]
I believe his name is Tim Apple
apgwoz 9 hours ago [-]
And his successor John Turnip.
registeredcorn 4 hours ago [-]
It would certainly be neat to hear if Apple can find the guts to do something interesting with new leadership at the wheel. As is, it feels like the entire company has just been a bizarre, indifferent stasis for near two decades.
didip 16 hours ago [-]
wow… I didn’t expect this. My guess would have been after the current administration.
Why so soon?
PlunderBunny 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I thought Cook would stay on until the end of the Trump-admin in order to keep ‘swallowing the dead rats’ so that the next CEO would have a clean plate.
rhubarbtree 5 hours ago [-]
Midterms Nov, so it’s all about to be over - either trump heads towards impeachment, America doubles down on its descent, or democracy ends. Either way, not point hanging around after that. If he’s impeached there’s a fresh start. If he does well, then this regime isn’t going anywhere for the long term. If the elections aren’t free then better get used to it.
So nothing further to wait for,
13 hours ago [-]
Trung0246 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe Mac Mini M5 this year?
isodev 8 hours ago [-]
Oh finally! Ternus is at least fun to look at during keynotes so we have that to look forward to.
16 hours ago [-]
Se_ba 2 hours ago [-]
So now in charge will be John Apple, got it.
yalogin 15 hours ago [-]
Wonder how much of this decision has to do with the current climate and not wanting to deal with the current head. I was quite disappointed to see cook towing the line and bending the knee, let’s see what Ternus will do
pupppet 15 hours ago [-]
Anyone know why?
Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.
tonyedgecombe 15 hours ago [-]
Or something is about to happen.
cooper_ganglia 15 hours ago [-]
Committing $100M to U.S. manufacturing is pretty good for one's legacy, I'd say.
pertymcpert 15 hours ago [-]
You give a trinket to a near dictator in order to not have your company, which you're responsible for, dragged over the coals and attacked by a psychopathic goverment. In the grand scheme of things this was a completely genius play and did no harm to anyone.
tjmc 11 hours ago [-]
That's a reasonable take - Apple had a gun to their head regarding tarriffs and exposure to China, but I'd still love to know how Steve would have played the same hand.
draw_down 15 hours ago [-]
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neuralkoi 15 hours ago [-]
I hope they will turn Siri around with these changes.
bofia 11 hours ago [-]
This would not be on The Successor
arjunthazhath 8 hours ago [-]
Tim did cook well!!
bilsbie 15 hours ago [-]
Will this change their AI strategy (or lack of)
geodel 14 hours ago [-]
Like blowing hundred billion dollars for undifferentiated technology?
bilsbie 15 hours ago [-]
Do.you.think.he’ll.fix.the.usability.issues?
ourmandave 11 hours ago [-]
What if, right after Tim is gone, all the leaks of iPhone designs and colors stopped?
I'm just askin' questions.
sMarsIntruder 4 hours ago [-]
What are you suggesting?
celeryd 10 hours ago [-]
Apple is currently lightyears ahead in privacy compared to any other major consumer tech company, is this going to still be the case with Mr. Ternus at the helm? That's not a question meant to be answered right away, but my current mindset evaluating the change in leadership as a consumer.
EDIT: Also, can Apple take over the data center already? I am sick of HP and Dell.
djyde 15 hours ago [-]
I always thought Craig would become CEO.
boarsofcanada 14 hours ago [-]
If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.
gigatexal 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah glad to see a hardware person take the helm and not a bean counter. The hardware is masterful now. Let’s keep it that way. Wonder if he kills the Vision Pro.
Good luck to him. If he was behind the Neo, then he deserves the post. That's the perfect new product in the mac world.
visviva 16 hours ago [-]
Suggest changing the title to include both parts, if they fit: "Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman, John Ternus to become Apple CEO"
airstrike 16 hours ago [-]
I'd go with "John Ternus to become Apple CEO[, replacing Tim Cook]"
the bit in brackets ain't even necessary since we all know Tim is the CEO
dzonga 14 hours ago [-]
Tim Cook will be one of the legendary CEOs in history.
he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.
qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.
all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.
laughing_mann 12 hours ago [-]
Please, do not make the products any thicker!
shmerl 11 hours ago [-]
Will it change Apple's extreme bend into lock-in for the better?
RyanZhuuuu 15 hours ago [-]
can't believe craige is not the ceo
t0lo 12 hours ago [-]
RIP Tim, the best derivative by the book uninspired machine to ever do it.
greatgib 13 hours ago [-]
Sad to see Tim Cook leaving as I was enjoying this downtrend of Apple products that is driving users to more open (and better) solutions like Linux PCs.
I cross fingers for John Ternus to still be greedy and not being too competent.
tastyface 14 hours ago [-]
Good riddance to an effective CEO whose entire legacy will be tarnished by a giant, gold-plated asterisk.
nodesocket 14 hours ago [-]
I wish Apple would lean into gaming and create a competitive GPU system. Does not have to compete with a 5090, but 5070 level and game developers will come and port games. Huge untapped market. I still have to run a dedicated gaming PC just to play games (especially Flight Simulator).
16 hours ago [-]
segmondy 15 hours ago [-]
Tim saw the ram shortage and said, "WTF am I suppose to do with this? I'm out of here!" Better leave a hero ...
kmeisthax 16 hours ago [-]
My personal hope for John Ternus is that he relaxes some of Apple's anti-competitive bullshit to the point where the company is willing to make iPads actually useful for anything other than 2D drawing apps. As someone who has been daily-driving an M1 iPad Pro for five years, the iPad is the most glaring hole in Apple's lineup in terms of usefulness.
Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.
walterbell 15 hours ago [-]
Now that the Microsoft exclusive has ended for Qualcomm (ex-Apple) laptops, upcoming Arm laptops from Dell/HP/Lenovo should be well supported by Google's unified ChromeOS+Android desktop, which includes a full Debian Linux pKVM VM with vGPU accelerated graphics. Plus the Nvidia-Mediatek Arm gaming laptops.
These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.
MacOS already runs on iPhone SoC in Macbook Neo.
jbverschoor 15 hours ago [-]
I'd love the m5 ipad pro (with some more RAM please), and just use macos on it
I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad
iamakrt 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe MAC mini M5
quaddoggy 15 hours ago [-]
Surprised that someone from Gen X is getting the opportunity to lead a company of this caliber. We've spent most of our adult lives getting smothered by Boomers and Millennials.
Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.
esafak 13 hours ago [-]
Google is gen x.
silisili 10 hours ago [-]
And Microsoft. And Netflix. And Uber.
I'm perplexed by the assertion, unless it was some joke that went over my head.
tmp10423288442 16 hours ago [-]
@dang can we fix this to mention John Ternus becoming CEO
nalekberov 16 hours ago [-]
If Apple really wants to keep their long term users in its ecosystem, it should really drop stupid Liquid glass design, stop making macOS look like its mobile OSs, and bring skeuomorphism back, which was removed by John Ive.
spockz 16 hours ago [-]
I disagree. They should bring quality back before reintroducing more changes. Okay, maybe that means dropping Liquid Glass. But also readopt the HIG. Increase stability and performance and reduce attack vector.
reddalo 7 hours ago [-]
John Ive was the catalyst for the horrible UX that macOS has now.
tamimio 13 hours ago [-]
I have to admit, regardless of whatever opinions you may have on Apple, Tim is/was probably the best bug tech CEO in the sea of evil ones out there, or evil and grifters, he remained focused on what’s the best might be for the users and also the company.
xyst 15 hours ago [-]
At least John has an engineering background, been with company for couple decades and not some private equity/hedge fund/wannabe Steve Jobs visionary douchebag.
Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.
dcchambers 16 hours ago [-]
"Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman"
*John Ternus to become Apple CEO*
Talk about burying the lede, lmao.
arduanika 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Can we get a title change please?
Among the dup stories submitted, this one has the best content but the worst title.
linzhangrun 10 hours ago [-]
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jocelyner 6 hours ago [-]
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simonebrunozzi 16 hours ago [-]
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commandersaki 13 hours ago [-]
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trippsydrippsy 4 hours ago [-]
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gopheryourshelf 16 hours ago [-]
Apple's headquarters The Ring made under Tim Cook represents what Apple today is . Kissing the Ring of Trump
nateb2022 16 hours ago [-]
$AAPL down almost 1% after-market on this news
dnnddidiej 16 hours ago [-]
which news? this one or the daily middle east blunder.
ribosometronome 16 hours ago [-]
Look like it briefly went down to above what it started today at.
whalesalad 16 hours ago [-]
that's a rounding error
platevoltage 16 hours ago [-]
That is not terribly significant at all.
mathisfun123 16 hours ago [-]
"it's priced in" - lol
nozzlegear 16 hours ago [-]
"The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe)."
alanwreath 16 hours ago [-]
It’s not novel to critique or idolize anyone, especially given the roll undergoing the changing of the guard. It’s not like hundreds of managers are changing.
They are all still there.
But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?
al_borland 16 hours ago [-]
Many companies have quite a shakeup in management around big changes like this, though I’m not sure how Apple operates internally. Maybe they are an exception to the rule?
andsoitis 16 hours ago [-]
> Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring
“Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art” — Andy Warhol
auggierose 7 hours ago [-]
You can argue that Warhol never made anything that qualifies as art.
Kuyawa 15 hours ago [-]
Mister Ternus, please create an Apple TV.
It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.
My credit card is ready...
not_that_d 2 hours ago [-]
Asking as a non American. Why would this matter to me? Why should I care about this?
I still haven't scroll down to the bottom, I don't want to spoil my impression. But it's great to see a positive reaction. Good way to mark the moment. Tim has been CEO for 15 years roughly, since Steve's passing. This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended. I hope he really takes it to the next level.
Got a feeling that Apple has some Amazing new hardware category-making products coming out of the 'skunkworks' over the next 3 years.
This being hackernews, I hope to be excused for siding with a white hat code-hacker over a trillion dollar corporate.
(And that's not getting into all the other morally questionable stuff they've done.)
oh i guess it's from a court hearing[2] when his company was suing apple over app store monopoly ("... they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon.")
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Freeman [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia
[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...
I think I found the original comment I had read (featuring a reply by saurik himself): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43853055
The contempt for their customers is palpable these days.
Jokes aside, I have started to see Microslop as the lesser of two evils (two evils being MSFT and AAPL, Google being its own parallel universe abomination). Their commitment to backward compatibility really paved the way to cheap PCs for the masses. That said, every day Macroslop is working diligently to prove me wrong.
Wow. Just… wow.
Excuse me while I get permission from sixteen levels of managers inside Cingular, U.S. Cellular, Cincinnati Bell, PrimeCo, and the fifty different regional carriers calling themselves "Cellular One" to offer my app on their networks.
I'm not claiming that iPhones are open to the extent that HN griefers want it to be, but you must have been freshly hatched in the years before the iPhone to think the ecosystem was open.
I say this as someone who developed some of the first mobile phone weather apps. (Before "app" was even a word.)
I could flash my Nokia 6210 with whatever firmware I wanted, but I guess that doesn't count, because Nokia and Ericsson aren't American companies.
My experience with a Nokia 6210 was very much the opposite of what you describe.
Since they can't charge a subscription for Windows (like Adobe does for its products), they don't care about it anymore.
On that topic, it’s always surprised me just how little Apple invest into their enterprise / business backend services. Everything about the way they integrate Macs into businesses is awkward. Apple could make so much money there if they wanted to. It’s a real missed opportunity.
I don’t even think Microsoft is all that adamant that their customers use it.
It’s just not competitive with Linux and that ship has sailed. Linux is better and costs $0. Microsoft lets you run .NET applications on Linux and they’re better there.
I think the same thing happened with SQL Server. Nobody’s choosing it for new projects, its niche is basically legacy software.
I agree that Apple is missing an opportunity with business and enterprise but I think the issue is that they’re so far behind that catching up would be a massive investment that might never pay off.
This is similar to saying that Microsoft missed an opportunity with smartphone ecosystems. They could spend billions on getting a smartphone back on the market and it would arrive and everyone would ask the question “why am I buying this when my iPhone has X million apps on its store and is a nearly perfect device?”
If Apple Enterprise Cloud was available today who is switching and why? Apple would have to undercut established players to convince businesses to switch via a massive migration effort.
If we look at Microsoft's revenue I think it's pretty clear that they do in fact care an awful lot about Windows Server - or at least should.
In fiscal year 2025, Microsoft Corporation's revenue by segment:
Once there's friction there, it'll make other friction seem less bad.
Wipe if you think you can do better :) It can and has been done.
What marketing does to people
Or are you trying taking issue with the word that craftmanship is only reserved for something akin to Japanese wood joinery or micro batch coffee roasting?
> What marketing does to people
I'm sorry, are my MacBooks Pro, Air, and (my spouse's) Neo not some of the best built laptops you can buy? Maybe there's something better, but these are inarguably some of the best. Absolute top of the line.
See the Verge (I think) reviewing similarly priced laptops priced around the Neo. They were plastic crap, even if they had better specs elsewhere.
MacOS might not be your preferred way of working, and you might prefer cheaper options or USB-A ports, but there is really nothing you could arguably call bad craftmanship in those machines.
my 2 bad craftsmanship cents:
laptop keyboard leaves marks on screen. laptop's sharp edges leaves marks on wrists.
I don't think this has been a thing in years.
Sharp edges on wrists is true.
Their software craftsmanship has really suffered in the last 10 years.
Affordable, ethical. You can only choose one.
Ternus just looks a bit younger. He’ll be 51, and half a year older than Cook was when he became CEO in 2011.
In other words, nothing insightful or worth talking about. I don't want to read news for feelgood vibes.
(I am not claiming the top comment is AI generated, only that an AI generated summarization of the thread can function just as well in its stead, despite the occasional inaccuracies)
I find your reaction strange, do you read news to be angry and/or afraid? :)
Yes, as algorithmic engagement has proven, most people want to read the news to get angry about stuff.
But I don't like hanging around that. I'd rather talk about tech news with nerds (old HN) and not just talk about coastal filter-bubble US politics with big tech worker bees (new HN).
US politics has definitely captured the crowd here lately. Half of the comment threads somehow devolve from discussions of Javascript frameworks into hysterical left-populist struggle sessions over the perceived political injustice of the day.
Maybe some feel good vibes and some apolitical news for the day aren't a bad thing.
> With a new boss, Apple may be showing its strategic interest in deeper integration of AI into its hardware, said Hubbard. "The very strengths that made Apple dominant - their discipline, polish, and control - could become constraints if the next era rewards openness and faster iteration," he said.
The opposite of the basic human interface quality and consistency improvements that several commenters here hope for.
(Admittedly "Hubbard" here is just the first pundit they could grab, an Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, so this isn't the best informed prognostication.)
All those statements are psychological manipulation. Being too positive or too negative makes people blind and mendable by silently suppressing their will to be themselves.
That makes me wonder why people love Apple but hate all other big companies.
You can see a similar thing in the 3D printing world with Bambu Lab - people love the product (my A1 has been excellent value, very reliable, and I despite preferring my fancy more expensive toy for most tasks I would still recommend it to those starting out without specific needs that such a design can't provide), and any concern about the company behind it (slowly closing off the ecosystem, initially trying to make out that their obviously-inspired-by-the-fullspectrum-scorca-fork colour mixing option was their own original stroke of genius) doesn't matter to them.
With both Bambu and Apple part of why they get this attention is the end-to-end polish that people feel in the product experience (to be fair is a valid reason to choose those products) and a certain amount of luck in them bringing their show to market at the right time, where other companies are seen as producing more interchangeable commodity items. Without that distinction giving people a higher view of the product range, the other companies struggle to get away from the fact that we don't naturally, for good reason, trust nor love commercial entities.
The other thing working in favour of some companies is momentum: some were worthy of some adoration for higher quality products and/or greater customer care than the competition, but are no longer and it takes a while for everyone to realise how much things have changed. Disney is definitely a company that I would add to this pile, and there are others.
Another big company that seems to get a lot more adoration than any of their competition is Nintendo, though I'm not in the gaming market any more so I don't know how much of that they still earn and how much of it is just that at least they aren't Sony or Microsoft!
In the case of all of them, they may make some questionably ethical business decisions but at the same time do genuinely care about the craft they're in, pushing boundaries and making quality products.
They also made a good unix based OS that was easy to purchase on decent hardware (esp laptops).
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
I tried using it in Bosnia, once, and it decided to use an abandoned airfield landing strip as a shortcut. Wild stuff.
I frequently drive through Serbia/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Macedonia, and if you ever do, do yourself a favor and install something OpenStreetMap-based.
Otherwise, you will be missing new motorways, get thrown on unpaved roads, or even asked to drive on roads that just do not exist anymore.
to be frank, I have a feeling that Google has more / better data.
I haven’t come across anyone using Apple Maps while living in Japan, most seem to use Yahoo! Maps or Google Maps.
Noone in my circle with iphone uses it. Most of people are using Yahoo maps, which is way better than google and apple maps combined.
And they are planning to make it even worse with ads, so.
However my biggest gripe with Apple Maps in Poland is that Siri does not understand Polish and cannot be told to navigate to a Polish address. It just can’t understand the street and city names :(
Btw: I haven’t counted the times Google Maps wanted me to go through the worst possible traffic jam (where the traffic jam was not visible on the map) or a closed road. I guess it just happens with every navigation system that errors happen.
Around here (Long Island, New York, USA), it’s better than Google Maps. I get to compare a lot, because I have a friend that uses GM, and constantly sends me Google Maps universal links.
I hear that it is a lot less effective in rural areas, though, and I think Google Street View is better than the Apple variant.
We might be kind of lucky in New Zealand with the yellow AA signposts at every intersection in the country telling you the nearest towns/communities and their distances in every direction.
Generally they are fine, but not literally in every aspect in every place, Europe or not.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...
Yes, being rich.
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
I think LLM's with access to lots of personal data and the ability to scout the web might solve all these use cases in one fell swoop, rather than trying to design a user interface with buttons, algorithms and data sources for every obscure use case.
I can assert than this isn't a thing in most Portuguese big cities, although it would be great to have it.
The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.
Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.
First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.
And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.
If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.
So it's nice to have this, but it's no all roses.
However compared with European countries like Portugal, this is a complete different reality.
This was my main point, because there are these "in Europe public transport is so great" remarks, yes it is, provided one is lucky to be on the right parts of Europe, as you also kind of refer to by your no all roses scenario.
If it happens to be there, it will say to use it, but I can't say "Route me to the nearest HOV entrance" because I prefer it even if it's 1 minute slower.
I'll bite, what does this have to do with Apple Maps?
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
This is not correct; "If a product is worth using, then it has bugs." (P→Q) does not imply its converse "If a product has bugs, then it is worth using." (Q→P). Buginess is presented as a necessary condition of being worth using, not a sufficient one.
It does, however, imply "If a product has no bugs, then it is not worth using.".
That was exactly my point. The presence of bugs in a product (in this case Apple Maps) does not mean it should not ship. “No open bugs” cannot be the criteria for whether a product is ready to ship.
I think you mean, should not.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
"Straight" can be ambiguous, second exit isn't. Maybe it's because I'm terrible with directions and hate driving, but I like the constant feedback that I'm going the right way.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
"Turn right on East one hundred and twenty three thousand South"
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
> Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
While it is great now, it did flop because it was terrible.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.
The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.
There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/about/
They will not. Recognizing the value of power users and engineers looks deeply un-Apple to me.
No offense to Lenovo, it's a great laptop. But Apples build quality is on another level, plus if I want to run local LLMs, AFAIK there is no better option.
There's no way I'm going back to macOS though, that shit was bad 5 years ago when I switched and it sounds like it's gotten way worse.
I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
They’ve coasted too long on consistent visual identity, and even that’s been slipping. Time to focus on actual user needs.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
Apple used to insist that different types of devices require different UI principles. This seems all the more true for a transparent device that you wear on your face while moving around trying not to bump into physical objects.
But we'll see. Perhaps the right level of transparency is situational. If you sit down with iGlasses using them as a screen you might want to reduce transparency while increasing it when you're moving around outdoors. Adjusting transparency could become as routine as adjusting audio volume.
I'm still on 18.x thats insecure by now and switching to Asahi as soon as something breaks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.
Right to repair with aftermarket parts and app installs from any source without Apple's permission. Then I'll consider using an iPhone.
Since 26 upgrade it is unusable with 100+ notes. It looks like they merged iOS variant with Macos one. Constant freezes, random unsaves, device gets boiling hot. No fix with factory reset. I love the HW but SW needs more love.
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
What about gestures, like two-finger scroll, or two-finger hold+click right click?
If there's a trackpad as well (usually there is), you can still do all the multi-finger gestures on it unless you choose to disable the trackpad altogether.
Fwiw, I don't find the trackpoint faster or more precise than the giant MacBook trackpads. Its main advantages are being closer to your index fingers' likely resting position on the keyboard, physical mouse buttons, and requiring less vertical space than a giant trackpad.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
I’ve worked in big tech and fast growing startups, side by side at one point or another next to hundreds of nerds that love talking about hardware and software
The touchpad is almost universally loved - I have never ever once her anyone complain about the click - most people didn’t even notice the switch
It has 3D Touch and all that and I’ve never gotten a false click - ever - not exaggerating, in however long they’ve been out
The only complaint I’ve ever heard more than once is that sometimes it takes a second to respond
So I ask you: how do you use your laptop? If no one else complains about this, it’s at least worth asking the question: what do you think you’re doing differently than everybody else?
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
OTOH, I want subpixel rendering on my big screens, and you can't have it with a Mac.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
Safari, a web browser, randomly stops being able to connect to the Internet (other apps can).
I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.
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.
Like what? In the true wireless camp, the Sony's are much less comfortable (and more expensive), the Bose are not as good (and more expensive)...
There's cheaper options, sure, but you're sacrificing build, ANC, battery life, etc.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so.
Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse.
Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.
But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product...
If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess.
If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.
This is a classic case of thinking that inventing something before others is all that matters, while ignoring that finding a mass market use-case for an existing technology is also important.
Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things?
From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement:
> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
> That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
(Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different)
I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products
Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it
I could not disagree more. Apple has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so.
The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death.
The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years.
I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.
https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/
I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
Why share it as a quote rather than a link I can click?
While I agree with all these points, I'd still rather see a hardware guru leading Apple rather than a software-focused leader. The state of software zeitgeist has gotten fairly poor, and the types of formal and thorough "Acceptance Testing" that are common in hardware are more likely to produce great experiences for users than whatever most software leaders are doing today.
Before anyone mentions how all hardware groups seem to produce god-awful software (IoT, vehicles, etc)...I agree, though I have generally attributed this to a lack of budget and vision. I don't expect those two things to be an issue at Apple, but I could be surprised.
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.
As an aside, I absolutely love the minimal elegance of that web page.
Sorry, but this is pretty naive. You simply can't infer the real personality of a CEO from a (well)crafted public letter.
If he really cared about being a decent person, he wouldn't have sucked up to Trump.
I had emailed with an explanation of what had occurred, and asked if I could get a refund so that I could just purchase a replacement. Within two hours of sending my email, an assistant from his office called me to arrange sending me a replacement. I was really impressed. I honestly figured I would just have to wait until the repair depot opened again, because I didn’t think I would hear back about my email.
Then a month or so later I got a call from the repair depot asking what address I’d like my repaired laptop sent to, since it was supposed to be sent back to the store for pickup (but stores were closed.) So I guess the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth in that case, because the person on the phone from repairs was pretty confused when I said no thanks.
Wonder if he'll be as good as Cook was at kissing Trump's ass. Half serious, half /s.
"Tim Cook took Apple from $350B to $4T"
So? That's a 11X market cap increase. In the same time, MSFT saw a 14X increase, Google saw a 20X increase, Amazon did 28X, Facebook did 35X. We're not even going to talk about NVidia.
Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded. Yay for him?
(It keeps going at https://x.com/politicalmath/status/2046428057255211032 )
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
0. https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus
It is not a tongue in cheek remark, I am genuinely curious
Does anyone here pay close attention to updates in the Linux kernel or is that pretty stupid too? (To be fair, you didn't call me stupid, but it's sorta there.)
What's Framework doing? I'm pretty jazzed about their laptops even though I don't buy them.
What about game companies that get bought by Microsoft and now people worry that the franchise they love might get killed?
I'm a nerd and I care a lot about a thing. I don't feel bad about that.
Or because you’re interested in the products and the „company community“ is fun and you like talking about it.
I still hope they eventually sell server blades for macOS.
Apple's big win was that consumer basically became enterprise. There was lots of noise around formal BYOD but in many/most places it just happened whether IT was on-board or not.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
Now I think we need to see Apple remake categories the way they did under Steve. If that can happen again, the future is bright.
Gosh I just read a really hellish thread on what frontier LLMs will become as they're infected with advertising, I hope apple manages to break locsl LLMs (and training?) Into the public discourse
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
I love their SciFi material but two seasons of severance in three years won’t keep people subscribed. The only reason I have Apple TV for more than a month or two out of the year is due to the bundle plan math working out with family sharing.
Software support is vital here, you can't just say that if the hardware is good then people would buy it. What good is it if you can't use it?
Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.
Quite successful.
Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.
But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...
The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.
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.
Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?
It's the cash-money value of putting a fee on all digital goods and subscriptions and cash transactions in a world predisposed to forming and consolidating around monopolies. What does Apple's services revenue look like in another 20 years when Africa, China and India are paying their smartphone provider every time a dollar moves, a few billion more people paying one of two companies every time for their music, movies and tv, games, books, real-world transactions... in de-facto perpetuity.
Alongside Nvidia they essentially monopolize TSMCs entire latest generation chip supply.
That’s a moat in hardware that is going to get even stronger over time. Given this hardware moat they can dip their toes gently into the B2B market they’ve never really cared about and pick up another few hundred billion in high margin revenue over the next 10 years no problem.
I’ve always found it weird that Apple’s entire org runs on Mac but no other Fortune 500 company on earth does. Seems like an opportunity to nibble away at Microsoft.
The real strategic risk for Apple is if it overly locks-in users and falls back into complacency. The discipline of having to continually win customers with better product is ultimately the only thing that will cause them to thrive long term.
This growth comes from rent seeking. Greedy fees and lock-in they can sustain due to control of the platform and cultivated duopoly.
Apple narrative around security is patronising and deceptive, used as an excuse for removing users' freedoms (by not letting users replace Apple's services with competing ones Apple protects users from their bad choices). Very conveniently the supposedly most innovative company that is great at UX can't do better than Vista.
Apple's response to pro-consumer laws was petty, vindictive, malicious compliance.
To me Apple morphed from having premium products with excellent integration to having cross-product lock-in that maximizes money extraction from users.
And then there's Cook sucking up to Trump with a golden turd to protect next quarter's revenues. This showed that Cook had no principles more important than profit.
AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%
I've used Google Maps for two decades and have 1000s of saved pins. I could have been a customer for life. Haven't used it since.
https://ads.apple.com/maps
Which means the only other option is to hopefully be able to pay Apple even more to not have to see ads. Maybe buy more Apple shares to share in this "advancement".
Under Jobs they tried iAds. The idea was to make ads so high quality that people would want to interact with them, and they had to go through a vetting process to ensure there were no dark patterns that would make people scared to tap an iAd. After a while, it was decided it didn’t work and they pulled it.
A company is under no obligation to continue bad ideas.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
I’m not so sure about this. Tapping around to some random businesses around me, I see photos being pulled in from Yelp, OpenTable, and Foursquare.
When I try to view the photos full screen, OpenTable and Foursquare images work seamlessly. Yelp prompts for an app download to jump me over to their world, which is a horrible user experience.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.
Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.
The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).
Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.
- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).
- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.
- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.
It sounds like Cook will continue to get the dirty work of pleasing world leaders while Ternus can focus on actually running the company.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
That people are still judging someone by their school performance (or, less charitably but how I experienced the difference between "poor" and "good" students in about half of the cases: their willingness to deal with arbitrarily set requirements) after being in the workforce for this long says a lot about society. I'm not sure it's a factor when one is comparing devices in a store, which ultimately is what they created right? Shouldn't we judge them by their work?
Also considering this is HN
> Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture
Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.
Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...
(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
How so? Genuinely curious, I've got no idea what he's like as a person.
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.
Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?
It'd be bad business stewardship if he didn't; bad for shareholders, ultimately.
It looks silly optically, but it's plain to see that Apple has trump nailed psychologically. And it worked! They knew what was needed to get an administration to support the company in meaningful ways.
May we do better on the next election.
and mac has ios, which with ipads goes desktopy. (capability based security)
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.
OP is alluding to the fact that Apple hasn't created industry changing categories like the iPhone.
Like the brands I've mentioned, Apple buys their camera sensors (from Sony), battery, and display. And yet they don't have the best camera sensors, the newer higher capacity batteries, the latest display tech, etc.
You can go 2 or 3 iterations before seeing a real improvement, and it's not always because better tech doesn't exist. They're just not pushing hard.
Apple Silicon in the past 5 years has trounced every single market player. Apple has to make decisions on things like sensors based on the supplier being able to deliver hundreds of millions annually -- by the time we see the hardware it was baked and locked in over 12 months ago.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apple+car
What's the best case scenario? Make few billion a year fuzzed with long term warranty liabilities? That might sound nice, but for apple their companion products like AirPods or the Apple Watch easily clear much better profit. Putting their corporate effort into another companion product is more economically sensible and far less risky.
I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P
Google is gonna spend between February and December 2026 $185 billion on their AI technology, and how much has Microsoft spent somewhere near 100 billion dollars or how about OpenAI (we don’t know yet) but that number will be my numbing or Meta which is some where in the $80 billion mark.
Tim Cook has nothing to worry about Apple didn’t squander billions of dollars they put the money where they should’ve put it in Apple Silicon and everything else they do well.
Google got a $1 billion refund and OpenAI got nothing. I’m sure Sam thought when he went into the meeting with Tim Cook that he was gonna come out with $50 billion and he came out with zip. Apple made the right choice.
sounds like a ton of fun to me. Just sending it rally-style everywhere :)
a better comparison is buying a Ferrari to drive around your town at 40 km/h
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
> lets you quickly open your iPhone camera and access common camera settings *points at button* (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-the-camera-contro...)
The way you phrased it about changing how you use a phone, I was expecting you control a lot of the phone via the camera somehow (gestures?) and don't need to bother with the pesky touchscreen. But okay no it's just the camera button that has been on cameras and other phones since time immemorial
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
You may also be interested in this video where Jon Rettinger predicted that John Ternus will be the next Apple CEO. Goodbye Tim! A new era for Apple (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbqLWZtdQTc)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-08/apple-s-n...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-05/who-wi...
https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?is=2ZpwOgsBxfMkkloh
Software is easier given the shorter cycles. Caveat is, the shorter cycles also benefit competitors.
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
At the same time, privacy on internet-connected devices is like true liberty and justice -- rare, precious, fragile, and easily lost without active pursuit and sacrifice.
I hope Temus has the courage and principle to keep fighting the good fight.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.
The payment Apple gets from Google for being the default search might help explain this. It would be hard to turn down the sums Apple gets.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/03/just-one-word-in-the-google-a...
I’m not sure what else they are behind on frankly, as their current offerings have been extremely stable from day dot.
How many products has Google released and killed in the past 20 years? Apple managed to land on a good thing with Apple iTunes and iPhotos in the early oughts, and managed to transition those core services into Apple Music and iCloud with little to no disruption to users. iCloud is generally a pretty predictable service that delivers on a core set of user requirements very well.
Also, thief productivity suite isn’t meant to completely replace Office, and for a free package, it meets many users needs perfectly fine.
Define sensible. Apple's B2C margins are peanuts compared to what Nvidia's commanding right now, and they're both ARM retailers competing for the same cutting-edge fab space.
iOS is ahead on software security compared to Android, Windows, Desktop Linux, etc.
It would be unusual for a leader of such a thing not act in accordance w/ shareholders' best interests, as well to defy likely board guidance.
---
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/business/video/jp-morgan-chas...
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.
Given that Apple is doing well, the onus is on someone claiming that Apple would have done better, having a strong argument.
Not "could" have done better, because things could obviously have gone better, worse, or anything else, given any substantive or random difference. Could means nothing.
(And I say this as someone very disappointed with how Cook handled that.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230
[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
If they can make 50B from ads in the iPhone in 12 months why invent a new device that will make pennies.
Sorry folks, the math is brutal for the big corps. They cannot pivot and make cool things, the market demands to be milked until they bleed.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
What does this look like, in practice? Once China and India and Vietnam "starve the professional capability to compete" (presumably in the manufacture of smart phones) from the US, what would actually change and why?
"Expensive for no good reason" products?
Apple also made some amazing hardware blunders.
My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.
Man, I love Apple, but their stupidity is beyond baffling sometimes. No Siri updates for 10 years, making the hardware harder to use, single-handed use is no longer as easy or comfortable, and they haven't done... anything(?) revolutionary in AGES. Their latest gaff was the Neo - a phone stretched out as much as possible to make a "laptop". They couldn't even bother to make the logo shiny on it, it was such a departure from true Apple style. Let's not forget the 92 lenses on the back of the phone that stick out a quarter inch, a screen that's nearly impossible to replace, and the hilariously pathetic "iphone repair kit" they lend you.
I have zero confidence in this guy. Nothing he had oversight over has gone well, as far as I'm concerned.
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.
You're kidding right? News [1] just broke about how Apple's permanent notification storage (that they refuse to fix) undermines encryption and is being exploited by law enforcement. And they conveniently left out the fact that they were giving out push notification data to law enforcement without any warrants from their transparency reports [2]. And these are just from the top of my head.
Do we now presume all companies putting the word privacy on their ads are emphasizing privacy? Because Meta and Google does that too.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-push-notification-s...
Really what apple is doing is putting a spin on their core business model of selling users the technology rather than renting it to them by subsidizing its development through spying.
It's not so much that privacy is apple's goal, but rather privacy is inherent to apple's business model (unlike google, which has always been spyware).
Don't count on it.
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
This just suggests him holding on to more influence. What apple needs, badly, is a software and tech guy (Cook is not a tech guy).
How many renaissances does one company need? Apple hasn't had enough? lol
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
I killed a Finder process that was at 1.2 G ram consumed today...
But MacOS is excellent IMO, and Apple's office suite is still my favorite (and I've worked extensively on Win/Lin/Mac for the past 25 years). I can't say I have any more gripes about their SW than most others.
It used to be the other way around, nice software and mediocre hardware.
When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.
> when’s the last time you tried spoiled milk then?
The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.
Good, can they move to fixing the base OS then?
And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.
What did you think you were asking? Or was this just a lame, ill-conceived gotcha that probably needed another few hours in the oven before being chucked in the garbage?
For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.
There are PLENTY of examples just like that.
I think the issue is that there are SO many piled up little features everywhere that SOMEone is using that keeping everything working while making any changes at all is very difficult.
I am a fan of more wood behind fewer swings. Don't add something like spaces unless you think you've got something so good that you are confident that it will be the common path.
Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)
Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.
iOS comes with a text editor built in. Memo.
Ssh server doesn't make sense for an iPhone. How would that even work? It wouldn't be able to do anything or be a worse experience than something properly designed for the user rather than trying to force a 50 year old computing model onto a phone.
Maybe iPhone is different but most phones you can connect a keyboard to, making the shell pretty usable. Not my cup of tea but I have tried it. I'm still holding out on the dream that a good Linux phone might exist one day.
> a 50 year old computing model onto a phone
What? Do you think command lines are based on the lambda calculus or something?
For decades it has been speculated they intentionally make that shit so people will be more likely to switch to apple
The MacBook Pro started using non-removable batteries in 2009. Also: https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html
I don't think your fantasy that Steve would have staunchly defended upgradable RAM in the past decade has much grounding in reality. It seems entirely likely that he would have supported the switch to LPDDR to enable better battery life, higher performance and thinner form factors at the cost of sacrificing that upgradability.
And his "kind of glib"
No, Zuck, you're just mad Apple introduced fine grained control so you can't constantly scrape people's credentials
Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.
The USA has the best government that money can buy.
No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.
Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic. I partially agree, but I also think burning Apple to the ground will not be Tim Cook's legacy and he is in no place to go against the executive branch.
It is not about Trump, it is about the corrupted executive branch. Tim didn't do any crime against humanity in his act.
Every complicity is another nail in the coffin of our democracy.
But they're still responsible for their own personal piece of the rot in the system.
If a cop says your problems go away for $100, you pay it, because the downside is huge by comparison. The problem is the cop getting away with it, not that you paid the bribe.
Having the prize doesn’t make you the winner. But it feeds Trumps ego sooooooo muuuuuch, it’s probably the “best” thing you can do to get on his good side without actually giving him anything.
This is a ridiculous strawman. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance instead of malice.
I wrote that going above and beyond to curry favor with an autocrat in order to protect your profits is collaboration.
And you read, what? Existing under a government means you necessarily support it because there was an election? You do understand an election means some people voted the other way, right?
He's not an autocrat precisely because there was an election. He won the election because he got the most votes. He has since failed to do most things he campaigned on because his power is very limited by virtue of our government's structure.
Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.
It didn't.
> In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken.
Its not.
> It being so gaudy actually helps this case.
It doesn't.
Normalizing corruption to this level is a bad thing. Period.
The people engaging in this should be in prison. Including Trump.
> Contrast with every other tech executive
What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.
Cynically speaking, Cook is wise to keep the DEI and climate commitments as bartering chits for Apple's next leadership to forfeit. He knows that Apple needs leverage to get their druthers from the Fed.
He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.
Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.
On macOS when I connect or disconnect an external monitor, my applications get all confused on where they should display, especially if I then reconnect a monitor. On KDE when I unplug my monitor everything goes nicely onto one desktop. When I put a monitor back in, everything goes back to where it was before. It just works.
On macOS, every time I install a new program I need to do some dance with System preferences to allow it to run. I tried some command line settings that supposedly disables this, but it never sticks. Every few months, the process is different than it was before. On KDE, I just run my software and it works.
On macOS, I don't have useful window snapping behavior or full-screen behavior, nor am I able to have focus follow my mouse. On KDE, I have these.
macOS just doesn't work for me. But the competitors have a good solution.
I'd need another hand to fully count all the Apple apps that have burned me in the past.
That's a wild claim.
I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
I think it started slightly earlier: 10.7 Lion in 2011 introduced the new full-screen mode that was completely broken on multi-monitor setups, as though Apple entirely failed to test on or even anticipate what was at most a moderately "power user" hardware configuration. They've introduced lots of useless features over the years (eg. Game Center), but that full-screen mode was the first time I recall OS X having such an in-your-face usability regression that was so obvious and avoidable.
10.7 also dropped Front Row, which was a disappointment to me, but is at least understandable in the context of Apple TV existing as a separate product they wanted to steer users toward. Losing Rosetta in 10.7 was also somewhat justifiable, and didn't hurt me much since my first Mac was an Intel machine and I didn't have much of a library of PPC-only applications.
Dead on.
Apple's current software is such a joke I almost regret ever having invested in the Mac ecosystem. I still run Mojave for its 32-bit app support for (apple's own) apps that have no contemporary equal.
Apple weathered the passing of Steve surprisingly well, however the cracks still show. Apple's very best is exclusively reserved for those products/devices/software with Jobs' fingerprints on them.
I still run an original iPhone SE as well. The entire tech sphere has gone in such a poor direction, I've increasingly divested myself from tech. If it no longer works with my system, I simply stop using it. It's a happy ("insecure") place.
It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.
macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.
As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.
Again, I get it, but as a power user this kind of stuff is just infuriating.
So much pain in macOS is in areas like this, trying to hack basic features back into the anemic OS.
Apple's "OS" updates typically focus on end-user applications that I don't use and never intend to. Meanwhile the core of the OS, and even the desktop environment, feels stagnant compared to many Linux distros.
I think that was mainly due to GPL 3.
Many other iPhone/Macbook users have been shocked I don't turn on Messages on my Mac due to a bad experience with sync in the first year that was possible, and I had a similar bad experience with photos in iCloud early on. Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like, and I still feel more at ease juggling many Photos libraries on external hard drives. I avoid Google Photos like the plague, and even though I trust Apple more (for now), I'd still rather not entrust to them my family's personal photos and videos.
Hopefully in a place where I can solve the bigger problems I have then!
You can use Messages on the Mac without storing messages in iCloud. iPhone, iPad and Mac can all send and receive the same account’s messages, effectively staying in sync without actually syncing them to iCloud’s servers.
Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.
You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:
https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a
> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled
These terminal commands don't fix the problem- there are still lengthy animations, e.g. when swapping desktops or opening folders. These are tasks I sometimes do multiple times per second on Linux.
> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.
https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...
But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more
That's kinda rose tinted history. System 7 (1990s Mac OS) for example crashed and locked up a whole lot, in my experience. The UI was fantastic and had great consistency, and the developer docs were of a quality that would blow minds today. But the software was not as solid as all that.
Windows was the same or maybe worse at the time. BSOD was common and a nightly reboot was a good idea until NT/Win2000. Solaris and BSD would have months of uptime on similar hardware, so it was a software problem. PC OSes were just not there yet. Windows 2000, OSX, and Linux gradually fixed that.
That's all basic uptime. The UI design drift of MacOS is another story.
Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
But I often have input lags where I will press several keys, and then a period of time (which can be multiple seconds) will pass before my taps are registered.
The 14 Pro Max launched less than four years ago, and should not be slower than an Android which launched a decade prior.
No-one has forced you to upgrade. I’m writing this on iOS 18.
FWIW, SwiftUI got a huge performance boost for iOS/macOS 26+, and Instruments 26 has been nice for finding performance bottlenecks. You may find the SwiftUI performance auditor in a free/FOSS project of mine (https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/commands/ui-design/au...) helpful as well.
Why it took 4 years to get to near-UIKit levels of performance I couldnt say, but I've had a great experience working with it on an app that's 97% SwiftUI.
Input devices and monitors can make a difference as well.
It's not the default, but IIRC Windows could be configured to have zero animations, and I found it to be quite responsive as such.
I'm not talking about the speed of opening programs, but more of the speed of every-second interactions: Unfolding a folder (or other interactions within a program with keyboard or mouse), alt-tabbing across windows, moving between desktops, etc. At least on Windows, I saw far fewer IO-blocking animations than I have on MacOS.
You're right about the "something starts to happen": Apple hides delays behind sigmoidal animations throughout much of their OS. For those who aren't aware of the trick, the delay between the start of the animation and the tail where it starts appears to just be an animation that started on the interaction.
I plug a Mac into a 120hz monitor with a high refresh rate mouse and it is gloriously snappy, snappier than any Windows PC I’ve ever used.
But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.
How often are you switching systems that you can't remember the package manager?
You could just alias your package manager to something more memorable if it's really a problem, but I feel like this argument only really applies to servers where you may be logging into a variety of different distributions every day.
In terms of package management SOFTWARE, however, nix (and guix, lix, etc.) are state of the art and work fairly similar in both linux and macos. A deeper integration with the OS would have been nice.
I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).
Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).
I love the three finger gesture to move between them though, it's like moving pieces of paper around. You can also work around the bug I mentioned by swiping faster, but yeah I wish they'd just fix it so we can move on.
I wouldn't expect that of Android because it's Java and Kotlin parts run in a VM and there's a garbage collector pausing the execution at times.
With macOS, you really have no choice to use what Apple offers. You can hope they listen to dissent but they may not depending on priorities. And things have to be bad enough to jump platforms before real dissent registers. And things have to get pretty bad for that.
Same issue with Windows of course.
With GNOME, KDE, COSMIC, and the Linux rat pack, it is easy to switch experiences without ditching Linux entirely. And somebody has probably even patched your DE of choice to address the papercuts you do not like.
So true. I run into so many little and annoying bugs I sometimes wonder if Apple Execs actually use their own devices.
As for Linux, I don't think I've ever used a system with UI for any serious amount of time. >99.999% of my usage is on headless systems through a terminal. As god intended.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-will-reportedly-...
iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.
> macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
Those two cases are not really comparable though, are they? The last Intel CPU Mac was the 2019 Mac Pro, which was discontinued in 2023.
The broader point is that a "Snow Leopard" release has historically resulted in a lot of hardware being left behind, and many of the devices that could have benefited the most from optimizations were cut off.
You just have to look at their directors managing those software directions and you will exactly why it's become the mess that it is today.
They were so much better. And have slid slowly into complacency, if not worse.
There are many, many things that are completely normal in Linux that are super clunky in MacOS at best.
But at least try to match Nautilus or Thunar ffs.
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background
2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work
3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews
4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome
5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day
6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)
7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app
etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
I could basically sums up your experience as Safari is appalling at multi tab resource management. And it has been the case for 14+ years and counting.
It wasn't until Safari 18 before I have most of the rendering issues gone on sites I visit. Safari 26 is completely gone. I haven't encountered one since Safari 26.1.
With a lot of features done, I just hope Safari turn its attention to performance and snappiness of the browser. Multi Tabs doesn't work. For people who uses more than 30+ Tabs is when it start getting slow. Safari used to have an option to unload background tab and that usually fix 80% of the problem but it was taken out some years ago.
But if I want to search for any comment by you on this page, how do I do it?
I’m not after a web search, I just want to see ‘j16sdiz’ highlighted on this page.
Currently I go to ‘…’ > share > scroll down > find on page.
Code-signing to force updates should be illegal (including iOS versions)
1. Mandating all browsers on iOS/iPadOS to be powered by Safari (excluding in the EU). This doesn't sound bad, but wait until #3 below...
2. Safari's many bugs. Too many bugs. Oh so many bugs. Damn that's a lot of bugs.
- See: https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show...
- Also see the State of CSS developer survey where Safari makes up such a large portion of pain reports that "Safari" is its own category: https://2025.stateofcss.com/en-US/usage/#css_general_pain_po...
- And again in the State of JS developer survey: https://2025.stateofjs.com/en-US/features/#browser_apis_pain...
3. Grievance 1 and 2 compound together. Whenever Safari (or a Safari update) breaks a feature, you cannot inform a user that they can use another browser as a work around (because all browser engines are forced to use Webkit on iOS/iPadOS)
4. Bad dev tools. This has been seeing much needed improvements (e.g. being able to type an entire word in the css pane instead of a new character on each line), but it still feels 7 years behind.
5. No way to report bugs. There is a "bug reporter" at bugs.webkit.org, however each bug is auto-tagged with a link to an internal bug tracker within Apple. This means that those who are trying to fix bugs and those are trying to report bugs have a wall between them. There is no way to have a discussion to try to narrow down what the bug is, why the bug happens in one case but not another, what's really the cause of the issue, or why the bug matters more than whoever is assigned it might realise. When reporting a bug to Apple, it's more useful to talk to an actual wall because it might fall on you giving you an actual response.
6. Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly. This one takes some explanation, but it's a little tricky. I'll give three examples then show how they're all the same issue:
Example 1: The cool homepage.
I was working on a website. Two months before launch I decided to spend a month of time juicing up the homepage, then one more month on polish.
On the homepage I decided to use the brand's pre-existing graphics and turning them into a parallax animation (inspired by: https://www.firewatchgame.com/)
It had:
- Regular content on the page
- Parallax layers with simple vector graphics inside them so that when the user scrolled down the page, the user saw a parallax animation of the landscape changing. (e.g. far clouds, far mountains, close clouds, close mountains, hill, foreground, simple bubble particles closer than the regular content on the sides to strengthen the depth of field illusion, etc...)
- Other vector graphics following a motion path animation
- This was done in 2017, so before CSS got scroll driven animation support, or motion-path support. It was also done without JS.
- Everything worked brilliantly, until we discovered that one particular iPhone model rendered an empty blank white page.
- I lost the last month trying pulling the effect apart trying to diagnose the bug (and with Safari's buggy dev tools being no help I had to do it in the dark). I was able to determine when the bug would trigger, and had to tear down my whole homepage and rebuild it with 2 fewer parallax layers before launch and 3 days of polish for the rest of the website before launch.
(you can see the final result at https://myobrace.com, but I really would have liked the extra time for polish, if you're wondering how I achieved the effects without JS and/or scroll-driven animations, I used css's perspective and transform rules to position the elements back in the z-axis then scaled them up so they appeared the correct size with the regular page content so as the page scrolled, the elements further back appeared to scroll at a different speed. I then used SMIL for the motion paths in the SVG elements).
Example 2. The texture
I wanted to add a repeating texture to buttons so they didn't feel so flat without needing a separate network request to download an image.
I tried generating one with SVG but the SVG 1.1 filter effects implementations aren't all hardware accelerated.
I tried generating one with CSS which worked everywhere but Safari.
You can see a texture here where the texture is generated entirely within CSS, and it doesn't work in Safari (but I didn't hide the seams because the result looks like a cool mosaic and I wanted to share the technique): https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/Yzbmvbr
(if you're curious about the actual texture I used, I hand drew a minimal noise texture in photoshop that could be repeated without showing seams, then base64 encoded it and inlined it within the CSS file so it could be loaded without needing an extra network request. You can see my development version here: https://codepen.io/spartanatreyu/pen/YzoexGg?editors=1100 (the final version is locked behind a login wall in a child-friendly education webapp))
Example 3. Asset downloading
I made a webapp for kiosk machines that downloads 100mb+ of video assets when logging in for the first time. iPads have a kiosk mode so I supported iPadOS' Safari mode so that the iPads could be used in commercial settings as kiosk machines.
When the final assets were added, the iPad machines would randomly crash during the asset downloading process.
With Safari's completely broken debugging experience, I eventually learned that as Safari downloads a video, as soon as it tries to put that downloaded data somewhere, it has to copy it across to the new place it's being stored, and if you're copying more than 3mb, it crashes the browser.
The fix was to download and store each video in 1mb chunks. This slowed down the installation speed by a bit over 300%, but at least Safari didn't crash any more.
---
Now back to: "Performing incorrectly is more important than getting the performing correctly."
It turns out Safari on iOS/iPadOS has an invisible time/performance budget. Anytime Safari hits that budget, the browser stops what its doing.
- Drawing texture to screen? How about we stop drawing all textures to the screen, including text. Websites don't need to draw any text right?
- Rendering a texture in CSS? How about you have the color white covering everything else instead.
- Downloading a video that's more than 3mb? How about I crash the browser when the download completes.
Compare this to Firefox and Chrome, as they run out of their budget, they stop starting new work so they old work can finish before starting their next task. The page may take a few milliseconds longer to get to the correct result on slower devices, but the result IS correct.
Even worse:
- Safari has no way of informing the code how close it is to the budget.
- The budget can only be found by trial and error.
- If the iOS/iPadOS device has other apps in the background, the budget is smaller.
- Each device has a different budget, so you have to penalize all Safari devices to the smallest supported budget of the oldest supported device.
- If you hit the budget on the most basic functionality (e.g. a homepage, a button, downloading required assets), then your website / webapp may as well not exist to those Apple users.
Agree on the time/performance budget. It is pain stupid. As has been the case for so many years. And yet nothing has been done about it.
No serious computer user can use a Mac anymore, and this is an unfortunate departure from Steve Jobs' Mac where he expended great effort to ensure the Mac remained a serious desktop OS.
The most egregious example of this stupidity is the dumbing down of the Disk Utility app - an app rarely if ever used by normies, and so dumbed down the pros don't want to use it either. Really leaves you scratching your head what the decisionmaking process there was.
Where Steve Jobs' would draw lines in the sand and ask developers and users not to cross it, chairman cook put NATO wire and basically forced users to do as told (safari extensions got nuked, app store apps don't load older versions of software and there's some weird exclusivity agreement, HFS+ support got dropped and apple refused updates to machines that didn't follow, etc. etc. etc. etc.)
The settings app being hot garbage is apple trying to unify their toy phone OS with the desktop OS.
Safari nuked 3rd party extensions so everything has to go through apple's extensions "store".
Apple treated its core base, the ones who saved Apple from collapse in the 90s, like expendable slave. Worse actually; apple actively chased them away like lepers.
This has led to a systemic core rot in apple's software and ecosystem, one that will take years to rectify.... if apple even chooses to do so.
> * You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
Scroll Reverser
The worst. There are even separate toggles in Settings for mouse and trackpad scrolling direction, but changing one changes the other. It is truly amazing that this has persisted for 15 years.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?
Those third-party apps do increase the overall appeal of Apple's platform, but suggesting that Apple might want to encourage that situation rather than improve their OS themselves sounds like a broken windows fallacy.
Microsoft finally caught up around that time, but has since added a whole new dimension of enshittification that the only conclusion that can be reached about tech as a whole is that it all sucks and will always suck.
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
Absolutely not, especially not on an Apple thread.
By example, the iPod released in 2001. Anyone who used those early knows the user experience was competitive with the current experience. In 2006, I was using the version of iTunes then which was probably objectively the best desktop music app ever created. There are features then that were just there, that were pioneered, or now absent, like an automatically sorted "least listened to" playlist that are now nearly impossible to find. Sync alone is still an headache the OS community just does on the side, and no one is even bothering to compete on it anymore.
I had an iPod in those days and Apple's firmware updates that periodically broke third-party sync (while bringing no improvements) is the reason that to this day I've never bought Apple hardware for myself from Apple since that time. Used hardware only.
Every time I had to use iTunes was regrettable. The app was an insanely massive download for the time. It tried to install fucking Safari on Windows for no reason. The UI was somehow simultaneously a sprawling mess and feature-deprived.
Maybe there was a brief period where iTunes was genuinely an interesting app, but even by the mid-aughts, it had been totally surpassed by a number of open-source music players.
But Amarok at that time was only available on Linux. I assume most iTunes fans of the time never got to try it.
When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.
I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.
I understood that, and I was using it in the same way.
> I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse…
Yeah this is the part I was disagreeing with, and I gave a couple examples showing why it’s meaningfully worse now.
I’ve been using Macs since the 1980s. The timeframe of 20-25 years ago (post Classic Mac OS) was some of the best software Apple has ever released.
The macOS Tahoe release is a great example of this. I can't think of a single thing I prefer about it and could easily name ten things I hate about it.
The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.
My company keeps the testing cycle smaller by only adding new OS-dependent features to its mobile app when the minimum supported OS version gets incremented and a feature is supported in every supported OS version. That means that the iOS app is only now getting features that were added in iOS 15 in 2021.
The latest version of iOS runs on iPads back to 2919.
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android - released in 2019.
So how is it better?
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. Even phones that old aren’t getting other security updates.
Is that really the argument you want to make?
Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).
We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.
The hardware is nominally open only because they enforce participation in their software ecosystem via other means.
Partially accurate / misleading at most.
If your “partially accurate” objection is that I didn't describe a perfectly universal experience, I will be greatly disappointed.
Are we talking about root checks? Bootloader unlock?
your bank’s app sucks, tell them they suck,
and or use the webapp.
Tens of thousands of financial institution apps work A-OK on GrapheneOS,
that is my objection.
https://security.it.miami.edu/stay-safe/sec-articles/macosx-...
[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html
The good thing is that -Wmisleading-indentation [2] (comes along with -Wall) catches this indentation error.
[0] https://man.openbsd.org/style - happens to be same for at least NetBSD.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Syntactic-Conve...
[2] https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html
However, it's bad. I much prefer the rare, elusive, postfix if:
It can create some very readable code when used right, with short and simple conditionals.Or comments such as: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/rel...
Unsurprisingly, given BoringSSL doesn't have a stable API (yet alone ABI), it isn't exposed as a system library.
goto fail was relevant in 2014 - perhaps not the most useful point in 2026.
- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.
- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.
- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.
But “best” is far too strong a word.
For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.
And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.
With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.
Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.
Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.
I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.
Pro hardware. Toy software.
He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.
That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.
Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.
That describes me too. I even did for a while. But it just made the incomprehensible lack of any software ambition more painful.
The software is the only reason the Vision isn't worth the price. A real Pro OS, paired with an Studio M5-Ultra, or with its own M5-Ultra, would be an amazing work environment.
(The only hardware they would need to upgrade for the latter, i.e. its own Ultra, would be making live-battery swapping convenient. Which they should have already done.)
You are comparing against the wrong thing.
Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:
https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0
NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
Usability wise (UI/UX/design), they are in the gutter.
This is not to say that Apple’s desktop software is great, only that the bar is a lot lower than it had to be when people had to be convinced to buy licenses.
A decade to produce a non-functioning gesture bar / system. Such a titan among titans.
Perhaps. Assuming it actually keeps existing:
* https://killedbygoogle.com
Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..
Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.
Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.
Windows has a better desktop compositor and window manager than macOS. It supports Nvidia GPUs with CUDA. It also has WSL so you can use real package managers instead of homebrew.
Apple does xcode, known for being perpetually broken and an ungodly mess of whatever design it had. Isn't it enough proof to completely reject your claim?
Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.
I use Pathfinder on MacOS, and it's generally a lot better than finder, but there are features I wish would carry over from other OSes. Windows file check boxes are incredibly useful
Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is
In the answer to your question, there is nothing better overall across hardware and software top to bottom and that applies to computers, smartphones, tablets, and watches across five ecosystems.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
Contrast is an objective measure. There are well studied and known levels where you can have trouble reading, or an easy time reading. Similarly, things like drag regions not even aligning with visual elements are literally indefensible. This stuff is so basic you'd fail a UX 101 course with it.
Things like spotlight defaulting to the newest item so that when you hit enter and it changes your selected item the millisecond before you hit enter. I'm not even sure how you'd try to defend UI elements literally flickering as either style or not affecting usability.
It's objectively bad by a great many widely agreed upon and studied standards.
I hope the new leadership will bring back better software. As of now, macOS 26 is disgusting.
What makes you say they don‘t care?
I think you're attributing a lot more agency to a CEO role (for a publicly listed company, at the least) than they actually have.
As for Ternus' timing:
A)Not very Apple to have the CEO do one last launch while on the way out the door (want the full throated, 1000% commitment in execs)
B)Gives John stage for first time as CEO at September Keynote (historically a BFD)
C)It felt right, among all the other time-slots and factors to consider
D)John gets to announce the next One More Thing, and own it. Would be odd for Tim to announce the One More Thing and then resign.
I don't think even Steve Jobs would've been able to imagine that Apple can get this big.
Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.
I also love the Vision Pro, actually, I think it’s brilliant, so that was an exception to the rule too.
I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.
He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.
As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.
Srouji stays to lead hardware, https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/20/srouji-chief-hardware-o...
(actually I doubt this- Demis does not want to run a big company whose main business is Ads)
i highly doubt he will ever want to take over primarily what is an ad/small time hardware company in favour of taking away focus from his ai company
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
Ternus will be the soldier in the trenches.
I feel excitement for the future of Apple.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
* Apple Silicon, the most far-reaching technical transformation in the company's history (probably a bigger deal than macOS itself)
* Apple Pay
* The Watch and Airpods product categories, both of which Apple now dominates.
All while holding on to its position in phones and improving (drastically) its computers.
It feels like a pretty successful term.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
The reality is everyone just wants another hit product like the iPhone, but its success was based on it being a personal convergence device. You can't really create a second carryable/wearable convergence device and expect it to be wildly successful at the level of the iPhone without it killing off the iPhone.
So far that revolutionary approach by third parties has not succeeded against the iPhone, and the evolutionary approach apple takes with the iPhone means there is no clear inflection point anywhere in the future where the phone form factor goes away.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
Cook absolutely deserves credit for the successful desktop ARM transition, but building ARM processors in-house was in no way something he directed as CEO.
Jobs was likely very burned out on IBM failing to deliver a 3Ghz PowerPC G5 and one with a low enough TDP for a PowerBook.
So he switches to Intel because he needs chips, but the vulnerability still exists, and it's what happened again after the Skylake launch and the ensuing 4 years of terrible Macs designed for silicon that didn't exist.
Steve saw the danger, and probably acquired PA Semi because of it as well as the fact that PA Semi actually did deliver a power efficient PowerPC G5, even if it was a bit late.
Steve had the vision. Cook executed it very well. They both deserve credit.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/06/17/g-s1-72...
With Apple it's the scale of what was done.
But he is not an aestheticist as much as Jobs was. See how Cook has been destroying the faces of iPhones and Macs, which had a huge dent or what is ironically called a "dynamic" island on the top of the screen. Back of iPhones is desparetely ugly.
Also he has not been presenting what makes us exicted. Apple's Siri is forgotten so that he has to rely on Google's Gemini instead of developing their own. While Samsung's Galaxy has been deploying its 7th foldable phone, Apple has done none. Leaks are usual so we can tell what he will show at its annual conference well before he acutually does and it gives us no surprise at all.
In a short term, "what Cook's Apple has innovated?" -- I guess zero. Rather, deteriorated.
As a long-standing user who started computer life with Performa 5220, keep using Macs as main machines and now run M3 MAX Macbook Pro to develop web apps, current Apple is never what I think it should be.
Making the company bigger is great. But what about their products and services? These are also where Cook has been leading to. He seems to forget Job's aphorism, "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
So I hope the new CEO changes the course.
We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.
Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]
Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it. (and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Though US famously does not, which is a curse in itself, IMHO.
Though tbh, it's worth wondering if Berkshire Hathaway without the Sage is still the same...
Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
I bet that was just good message management. The steadiest approach to a CEO transition is to make it seem a long way off until the moment it happens. Markets don’t like any wobbling at the top.
As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?
Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.
Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.
Historically there were so few bugs in Apple’s software that to encounter even one was a jarring experience. Now they’ve reverted to the mean, and it’s just as buggy as Windows or Android. So if you’re comparing with them, no big deal. But compared to Apple standards we’ve fallen a long way.
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.
Edit: 6 years old, not 4, and also Intel Macbook, so due an upgrade for sure
I think the Apple Silicon transition has increased Mac longevity far beyond the Intel or PowerPC eras, and I am quite baffled you think otherwise.
The M1 MacBook Air was more powerful than the top Intel i9 MBP config if I recall correctly.
That focus on privacy pisses off a lot of devs (Yours Truly, included), but I sincerely believe in it. I write apps that Serve a demographic that values privacy.
Tim is fine, but there are clearly other, more powerful forces at play than "Tim Apple amaze".
Oh that would have been a treat. He would have made Apple hardware so unusable for real work that I'd have switched back to beige boxes running Linux.
I'm sure he dreams about keyboards that are harder to type on and even more sensitive to dust than the emoji keyboards of yore.
Least understood yet most influential company in the history, present and future of the venture capital backed tech world.
do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?
Apple included.
They're gonna be fine in the AI age just like Costco was able to be a honey badger about e-commerce.
https://atp.fm/live
One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.
I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up. All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill. It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.
They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.
I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.
https://x.com/tomieinlove/status/2046337143703007672
To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.
So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.
[0] https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/2021-ceo-...
This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.
There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.
Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.
Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.
Me thinks Apple software is the problem—I put Asahi Linux on my Mac.
What are these titles? Why? Who does what? It feels like a linkedin tea party.
Why so soon?
So nothing further to wait for,
Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.
I'm just askin' questions.
EDIT: Also, can Apple take over the data center already? I am sick of HP and Dell.
the bit in brackets ain't even necessary since we all know Tim is the CEO
he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.
qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.
all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.
Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.
These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.
MacOS already runs on iPhone SoC in Macbook Neo.
I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad
Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.
I'm perplexed by the assertion, unless it was some joke that went over my head.
Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.
*John Ternus to become Apple CEO*
Talk about burying the lede, lmao.
Among the dup stories submitted, this one has the best content but the worst title.
They are all still there.
But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?
“Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art” — Andy Warhol
It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.
My credit card is ready...