Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

https://stratechery.com/2026/tim-cooks-impeccable-timing/

by hasheddan • 3 months ago

350 395 3 months ago

John Ternus to become Apple CEO - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219 - April 2026 (1213 comments)

Add to Cook's impeccable timing, that he stepped out of CEO role and into Chairman on exactly his 65th birthday, the very day he became first eligible for his pension

retired• 3 months ago

Being eligible for Medicare, Cook can finally afford to retire.

aworks4• 3 months ago

Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit...

+1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

caminante• 3 months ago

With a fixed income, I'm worried he can't afford to upgrade his iPhone every year.

ikidd• 3 months ago

Humor seems difficult for people.

Don't worry, I got it.

lvspiff• 3 months ago

At first I was thrown off by everyone calling him "Tim Cook"... we all know its pronounced "Tim Apple"

jmkni• 3 months ago

Gotta hold out for that bus pass

cmiles8• 3 months ago

He had what many called at the time an impossible task of taking over from Jobs. There are areas where things could have gone better but overall he had a solid run and kept the company growing post Jobs.

He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.

Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.

boringg• 3 months ago

100% - if they switched their privacy stance they would lose their devoted crowd but probably keep the main street crowd. Its one of those things that makes me worried that at some point a new CEO or legal team will try to further monetize this and irreparably ruin what they built.

kakacik• 3 months ago

You mean its smart approach to PR about privacy. Actual privacy, especially if you are 95% of the mankind without US passport... thats a topic for long discussion, and not a very positive one.

the_arun• 3 months ago

What is the relation between Privacy & passport?

johanyc• 3 months ago

In short, I think Apple has made a good decision here for short term reasons, but I don’t think it’s a short-term decision: I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run.

I'm not so sure it's smart to rely on others for such a major paradigm shift

throwaway98797• 3 months ago

profits 3.5x yet stock increased 12x

counterfactuals are hard

havaloc• 3 months ago

Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role.

If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.

steveBK12311• 3 months ago

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form.

Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?

Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up)

They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.

ricardobayes2• 3 months ago

Yes, let's hope. And also let's hope that innovation will be more "iPhone" and less "Apple Vision Pro".

heroicmailman• 3 months ago

I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor.

They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.

raw_anon_11119• 3 months ago

I would hope that Apple doesn’t follow Google’s lead. Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and struggles to make great products

pjc508• 3 months ago

For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered.

Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it.

Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

momojo2• 3 months ago

I'm all aboard the "Apple is simply waiting for the models to get dense enough to run on their hardware" hype train.

They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house.

Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.

monkeydust• 3 months ago

What big hardware bets are people expecting him to take?

steveBK12311• 3 months ago

It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software.

Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.

kilroy123• 3 months ago

AR glasses that eventually replace the iPhone.

Rapzid• 3 months ago

People don't understand what a CEO does.

musictubes2• 3 months ago

Medical and health. Cook has said multiple times that he thinks that Apple’s greatest legacy will be “health.”

The biggest hurdle in the health hardware game is regulatory. If they can make a noninvasive blood sugar monitor and get it approved they will both print money and help a ton of people.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 3 months ago

I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering.

Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).

I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.

I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.

ryandrake4• 3 months ago

I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI.

IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."

foobarian• 3 months ago

Speaking of missteps, there was a period in late 2010s where MacBook Pros really took a bad turn IMO chasing some "thinness" fetish, but recovered nicely afterwards. My M4 is a glorious device built like a tank

tsunamifury8• 3 months ago

Only on hacker news would someone believe engineers would focus on the customer function.

Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.

thewebguyd• 3 months ago

It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.

As long as they can go back to simplicity in the process. Apple has been shoving functionality into iOS for a long time now, but it's a haphazard mess. The settings app is a disaster of clutter, and searching for settings doesn't work half the time. It needs a complete rearchitecting before they start shoving more functionality into the phone.

Did you know that iPhones have tap, double tap, and triple tap (on the back of the phone) functionality that can be set to custom actions? I didn't until recently, its buried deep in the Accessibility options for...reasons? This could be promoted to a core feature, with a dedicated space in settings instead of buried.

I'm sure there's other useful functionality hidden behind the settings mess too.

WalterBright3• 3 months ago

I bought a newer iPhone. My older one had the button to go to the home screen, the newer one replaced that with swipe up.

After a year, the swipe up is still a nuisance. It often doesn't work, and I have to swipe up several times.

ValentineC• 3 months ago

Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China )

Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.

I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)

pstuart• 3 months ago

Apparently Apple invested ~ $50B to advance China's manufacturing capabilities.

As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.

Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.

jmyeet6• 3 months ago

I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected:

1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;

2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and

3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.

tacker2000• 3 months ago

Agree with you, but when was Siri ever “well-regarded”?

Its been trash since day 1.

ezst2• 3 months ago

3. Is what I call a smart move. Sometimes the game is won by not playing, and it's increasingly obvious that the LLM race leads to nowhere (there is no moat, there is nothing unique or clever that Apple can build out of it that can't be mimicked by others, made better, with Apple looking bad as a result, the tech is flawed, with clear diminishing returns, ...). If anything worth of the Apple logo comes out of this, it will be bought for scraps after the unsustainable race has run its course.

EGG_CREAM• 3 months ago

3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.

Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.

munificent• 3 months ago

I suspect that long-term, 3 might not be the wrong choice.

Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.

GeekyBear• 3 months ago

Apple is way ahead in AI, since they are unique in offering a single switch that turns it off if you don't care for it.

musictubes2• 3 months ago

Aerenhart’s biggest task was combining the online store with the physical. That was my understanding of why she was hired. Before that there were many walls between the two retail arms of online and physical.

Ive was the one behind the 15k watches. He wanted the in store experience to be like a jewelry store. They also brought in his friend that had been doing hi end watches and bands to help with the watch design. Beonce got an 18kt gold link band along with her watch. You can only imagine Ive’s glee at the watches being on the cover of Vogue.

divbzero3• 3 months ago

1. Flat UI is the other side of Johnny Ive’s legacy—arguably an error as well, never corrected.

…

3. Agreed that Siri stagnated, was already surpassed by Alexa a decade ago, and even moreso by LLMs today. However, some advantages of Apple Silicon have panned out for AI—e.g., using unified memory to run ML models, instead of requiring dedicated VRAM for a separate GPU.

heathrow83829• 3 months ago

> the next era looks bright.

but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.

are you imaging them creating whole new devices?

Shorel2• 3 months ago

They could bring the wired headphone jack back.

poncho_romero• 3 months ago

They could make the software good again.

michelb• 3 months ago

Yeah I think so too. I'm just wondering if the people on software are still the right people. Mac OS has quite a few regressions, and seems to just chug along instead of really using the power of the chips, or massively improving file i/o. Apple still has a chance to do some cool stuff with AI integrations, but they have had interesting local models 3 years ago and apparently nowhere, or no vision, to use it. We're all clapping for Craig Federighi's jokes but I have no idea if he is a great manager or a great presenter.

I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.

happyopossum• 3 months ago

but they're doubling down on it now

Nahh, they're backing off liquid glass as fast as they can without just rolling back to macOS 15... Tons of people inside apple hate it, and have been very critical of the design leadership. Alan Dye was the design king behind liquid glass, and he was pushed out (or just left, stories vary). His replacement, Stephen Lemay, is widely praised by the folks who hate liquid glass.

iOS 27 and macOS 27 in June will probably have Liquid glass turned back down to 6 or 7, and will at least remove some of the most glaring usability issues.

jarjoura• 3 months ago

I always understood, going to China, as what the industry was already doing, and Apple was in the middle of coming out of bankruptcy, so pressured to get their costs down. Tim Cook, the process guy, would have been given the task to do just that in an industry that was already consolidating in China.

I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.

Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.

Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.

macintux• 3 months ago

Technically Apple was never bankrupt. It certainly came within a few months, but never reached that point.

divbzero3• 3 months ago

I know what you mean by stronger product focus, but phrasing it as “more like Jobs” makes it sound daunting.

doitLP5• 3 months ago

Cook was, without question, an operational genius

I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?

bradleyankrom• 3 months ago

Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?

jinushaun2• 3 months ago

I think people underestimate execution. When something is done well, it looks easy. But if it was so easy, why are other competitors struggling to execute the same thing?

doitLP5• 3 months ago

Yes but those are outcomes — what did he do that got him there? Lots of people want preferential production and lower cost; Was it that he had the budget to pay more and dictate standards? If that’s the case that’s not genius as much as having the balls to make bets that paid off.

Keyframe2• 3 months ago

I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then months after announcements their supplies are limited or geo locked. Samsung probably comes close, and it helps they're so vertically integrated.

JustExAWS3• 3 months ago

The Pixel only sales 5 million a year…

jinushaun2• 3 months ago

I think you underestimate what he does. It seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but if it were so easy, others would not be so far behind. A difficult thing done well looks easy. Reminds me of when Toyota disrupted auto manufacturing.

Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.

dboreham• 3 months ago

This is how the electronics industry always worked. I times of yore it was IBM who bought up all the capacity in various fabs then defined later what devices would be manufactured on those wafers.

doitLP5• 3 months ago

I’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are!

I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!

throw0101d2• 3 months ago

Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:

* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems

Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.

rootusrootus2• 3 months ago

Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.

Ha, we keep on asking that at my current company, and they keep on doing it anyway. What is it they say the definition of insanity is, again?

alsetmusic4• 3 months ago

Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?

Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).

That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.

doitLP5• 3 months ago

Thanks, but how did he do it? Actually what does he do than saying “ok guys tip priority is moving these units”? Like do he come up with the strategies? Or is he good at picking winners when he sees them from proposals of his underlings?

colechristensen• 3 months ago

Compared to game consoles, graphics cards, and all manner of other electronics things... have you ever seen Apple products on those stock tracker websites? Has there ever been an actual problem with scalpers? Ever had to sign up for a waiting list?

No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff.

The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS

kccqzy• 3 months ago

Squeezing the suppliers in just the right way. When you squeeze them too hard and the pricing is too low, the suppliers stop making quality parts and Apple would have a reputation for hardware failures. Squeezing the suppliers not enough and the pricing is too high, then Apple suffers either from a reduced profit margin or a higher ASP. I find that negotiating with suppliers is an art. Cook is quite good at it.

detourdog2• 3 months ago

The biggest problem Apple had before Cook was inventory management. They would produce more Performas then they could sell which weighed their cash flow. The dead weight of inventory was a really big problem. Right sizing production to meet demand was what initially saved Apple.

jmyeet6• 3 months ago

I haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing.

Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.

As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.

So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.

So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.

Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.

alsetmusic4• 3 months ago

I used to really appreciate Ben Thompson's takes. He started losing me with his love of Meta's VR devices for meetings. Maybe I didn't get it, I thought. I don't agree with him on a lot of things these days.

There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.

The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.

And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.

And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.

I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.

Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.

0. Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/20/palantir-goes-mask-off-f...

dsalzman• 3 months ago

Design flaw vs manufacturing/logistics problem

zenapollo2• 3 months ago

I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1])

It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.

Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerbnYhhw7s

pjc508• 3 months ago

When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.

gedy2• 3 months ago

I think it's more the taking (or at least not growing) skills, jobs, know-how from the US and giving to China, irrespective of if they would have developed on their own in any case. It's not about keeping China down, etc. People like to compare this with Japan in the 1980s, but Japan was indisputably an ally of the US, whereas China has never been.

andrekandre• 3 months ago

  > Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever?

its what the vice prez literally said in a speech; you can look it up on youtube...

fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y

shimman2• 3 months ago

No, but it's kind of pathetic that the elites in America hallowed out our manufacturing capabilities and condemning tens of millions to abject poverty so their shares can be worth slightly more as a sign of societal sickness.

avidiax2• 3 months ago

According to the book, Apple had a special team to prevent divorces among the engineers sent to Asia. That's how long they were over there training.

An argument can be made that Apple nearly singlehandedly advanced China's consumer electronics manufacturing by 20 years, and hastened the decline of U.S. manufacturing while doing it.

China doesn't allow key AI engineers and scientists to go overseas. They literally have exit bans and confiscated passports. The west could have ordered companies like Apple to stop sending engineers, banned companies like Boeing and Rolls Royce from building factories in China, and retained massive wealth, expertise, and national strategic advantage, but allowed it to be pissed away for quarterly profits.

unethical_ban• 3 months ago

Likening postwar occupied Japan, who is still a military and economic partner of the US, to 2000s-2010s China is certainly a choice.

barrkel2• 3 months ago

There's an element of revisionism to this perspective. It used to be thought that integration with the global economy would gradually bring more alignment with Western values as well.

The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.

spongebobstoes• 3 months ago

I don't see these ideas too much anymore. I wonder if it's because America doesn't seem to hold elites accountable to the people

even still, China has westernized a lot over the last 20 years, both in quality of life and in social values

regardless of values, offshoring valuable skills is a way to bring about more equality, but not a way to ensure American dominance

I don't know that American dominance is a good thing

zenapollo2• 3 months ago

That idea was minorly present during Clinton and Bush, by the time Obama was in office I think it was clear that was never going to happen. The book covers the period from 2016 on, so long after that neocon dream.

epistasis2• 3 months ago

he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this

What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?

In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques that would justify not doing the Green Revolution).

In the case of Apple in China, this was not a one-sided transaction, both sides benefited massively.

Now I do think we should be encouraging the US to compete more, which was what the Biden administration was really good at getting going. But mere ban of commerce, and not providing the industrial policy for US industry to catch up China's excellence, leave us in a world where we are all poorer, both the US and China.

The world is not a zero-sum place, capitalism and technological change are in fact quite positive sum, and when we act like everything is zero-sum we are all worse off.

BeetleB2• 3 months ago

What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?

Actually, this is fairly standard via export control laws. When a certain technology is deemed critical, it can be put under export control. When I worked in the semiconductor space, some of the advanced tech we had was subject to these laws. Countries came under different tiers - we could freely discuss the tech with most European countries, but had to be a lot more careful with China and Russia. We couldn't/wouldn't hire Chinese/Russian nationals unless they already had a green card (the legal process was too challenging).

Of course, not saying electronics manufacturing should have been in that bucket. But there is plenty of precedence.

maxglute• 3 months ago

The book's thesis is frankly unwarranted Apple glazing. Asian Tigers trained PRC decades before Apple. Muh designed in California and manufactured in China was always Cupertino hands Chinese factory specs and Chinese engineers and workers building it into reality. US manufacturing already in the shits by then, the idea that Apple substantively "elevated" PRC manufacturing is huffing copium. PRC process engineering was always the hardest part of the equation that somehow gets credited to US. PRC manufacturing made Apple, not the other way around.

The reality is PRC already had magnitude more high end manufacturing talent by the time Apple entered PRC already and they're the ones that made Apple scribbles at scale possible. The stories of PRC manufacturers having stupendously fast line turn arounds, making changes in hours should disabuse the notion they needed learning, when they already knew how to execute at scale. Apple's derisked manufacturing in other countries still can't do this, PRC was doing this on day one - see overnight turnaround to retool iPhone line from plastic to glass screen 20 years ago. Apple went to PRC because PRC already had competently trained manufacturing workforce, and only one that can operate at speed + scale. Apple buying a few 1000 CNC machines doesn't tip the balance remotely in Apple's favour - if sector moved towards CNC and tighter tolerances, PRC industry would have simply followed, Apple $$$ is nice, but PRC doesn't need Apple $$$ - capex is not a bottleneck for their system. And Apple would have never push enough goods and make $$$ without PRC.

Aeroi4• 3 months ago

Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace.

Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.

Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.

davedx3• 3 months ago

Huh, if you don't own the models then you don't own the ecosystem end to end though?

Aeroi4• 3 months ago

If you're using an apple phone to download the chatgpt app on the apple app store. That's still pretty much owning the ecosystem.

bigyabai7• 3 months ago

the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.

Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012.

You could call them a "frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet" but we don't even say that about AMD or Intel despite supporting Linux and shipping GPGPU architectures already. Apple's position in the greater AI/GPGPU industry is widely accepted to be forfeit. Even Google's AI hardware strategy is closer to the frontier than Apple's.

Aeroi4• 3 months ago

Then why is Apple Silicon the best for OpenClaw?

YmiYugy3• 3 months ago

There is a place for local models. Typing prediction, speech to text, etc. But I have yet to see uses of local LLMs that are all that compelling.

Aeroi4• 3 months ago

Imagine in 10 years where local models will be, we're still in the 1st inning.

JKCalhoun• 3 months ago

Cook Doctrine: "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."

And later:

"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."

Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).

I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).

But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.

ryandrake4• 3 months ago

LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and entered into partnerships for content grudgingly and always with a plan to control the content vertically once they are able to. The big exception obviously is web search, but I can only imagine how much it pains them to not have an iron-fist control over the search results on Safari. They'll never embrace an AI content roulette wheel.

kalleboo• 3 months ago

I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user

Aren't the notification summaries just that? When they came out there were lots of examples of their horrifying results (summarizing Messages threads to sound like family members died etc)

sowbug• 3 months ago

An older Stratechery article discusses the black-box point: https://stratechery.com/2018/techs-two-philosophies/

Apple and Microsoft want to be your robot exoskeleton, helping you do whatever you were going to do, but better. Google and Facebook want to do things for you and hand you the results.

grey-area2• 3 months ago

I suspect they're already doing that for text autocomplete, which has degraded really badly over the last couple of years.

orky56• 3 months ago

I dont see it as a contradiction. Apple knows its core competencies and has the cash to back to any initiative worth pursuing through acquisition and/or hiring. Cook was a savant at vertically integrating supply the supply chain and horizontally integrating the entire ecosystem. This led to multiple innovations where Apple is the de facto standard for quality.

The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.

Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.

nkohari• 3 months ago

I would bet large sums of money that Apple is waiting to make a hardware play. When there's a sufficiently capable and intelligence-dense LLM, they will bake it into custom silicon and ship "the first MacBook with on-device AI, powered by our new I1 chip". Imagine Siri being powered by an LLM running entirely on-device at 10,000+ tokens/sec.

Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.

schmommy• 3 months ago

I appreciated Cook when I worked for Apple, but since, I've been disappointed with his lack of pushing the envelope like Jobs. He could have taken Apple to higher heights.

david_draco• 3 months ago

That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.

dymk• 3 months ago

What were they?

nicbou• 3 months ago

I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.

peterlada• 3 months ago

100%

__alexs• 3 months ago

I miss my Treo :(

redorb• 3 months ago

You only think you miss your Treo, our minds really put a glow on memories.

detourdog2• 3 months ago

The Treo was great and was definitely possible to read webpages on it. I thought it was the best smart phone at the time. The screen size web browsing and email were all better on the iPhone.

keeganpoppen• 3 months ago

when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.

cubefox• 3 months ago

It also had a large capacitive touchscreen rather than one with a stick and a keyboard underneath, impossibly smooth scroll inertia, a MEMS gyroscope for automatic landscape mode, etc. The GUI was also optimized for the capacitive touchscreen with large buttons everywhere. Android prior to the iPhone did look more like a BlackBerry.

(One could mention however that the iPhone initially didn't come with UMTS, which was already standard at the time for higher tier phones that did cost substantially less than the very expensive iPhone.)

wan23• 3 months ago

The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.

mezeek• 3 months ago

It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.

The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.

"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".

You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.

mft_• 3 months ago

There were plenty of phones with touchscreens before the iPhone. They were crap, with mostly resistive touchscreens, but they existed.

I had a rebranded version of this: https://www.gsmarena.com/qtek_s200-1417.php

My office-mate had one of these a little later: https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-1828.php

(Fun fact: after playing with the Prada phone and seeing how awful it was, we wrote a tongue-in-cheek letter to the CEO of LG applying for roles in their phone development team, which we actually posted to South Korea. Months later, we received a reply from someone in the UK office of LG, denying our application, and not showing any sign of getting the joke.)

HardCodedBias• 3 months ago

Impressive Tenue, IMO.

Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services.

A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.

Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.

Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".

bnchrch• 3 months ago

I'm not sure it's fair to call the Apple Vision Pro a flop in the traditional sense.

While it may not have sold millions of units and been a household staple.

It certainly focused the entire org on manufacturing a suite of chips and hardware that are on a completely different level than their competitors. Apple's now has a clear advantage in all dimensions that matter: compute, power consumption, size, capabilities, etc.

Apple Vision helped created a moat that will be hard for anyone else to cross for at least a decade.

jmyeet6• 3 months ago

At least the Vision Pro wasn't a $70 billion boondoggle like the Metaverse was.

The flops include the mid-to-late 2010s thinness era of Macbooks. Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air. At least this got corrected but it was a flop era.

I think AI is Tim Apple's biggest flop. Apple can make their own hardware. Apple could've invested in their own hardware like Google's TPUs. Siri has really stagnated. If anybody should be doubling down on an AI assistant, it's Apple.

isatty• 3 months ago

I think a couple of failures are necessary for this kind of work.

breakfastduck• 3 months ago

Microslop produces terrible stuff, as bad as they ever have. How on earth can you put mr copilot 365 windows 10 is the last edition above Tim Cook!?

ang_cire• 3 months ago

Honestly, Apple may very well be betting that AI in it's current form is transitional, and might be better off letting others duke it out for now.

We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.

homarp• 3 months ago

interesting that using AI models from China is not discussed.

e.g. Apple buys moonshot or z.ai

spectraldrift2• 3 months ago

The author lost me when they quoted Thiel.

eep_social• 3 months ago

He’s a hack, now you know.

mattcantstop• 3 months ago

This is such a tiresome perspective. The value of the quote from Thiel should be based on how true/predictive/helpful the quote is. Not the political leanings of the person who said it.

Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.

Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.

grey-area2• 3 months ago

I agree it's good not to be tribalistic, but it's also good to be wary of the source of an opinion, particularly if it is from someone quite extreme, Thiel has openly supported fascism, "Democracy and Freedom are not compatible" is a pretty extreme position, so we should be wary of what he says and does.

Here's another quote for you from Graham Greene:

"Sooner or later," Heng said, and I was reminded of Captain Trouin speaking in the opium house, "one has to take sides - if one is to remain human."

mktemp-d• 3 months ago

While agreeing with the consensus that Thiel is an absolute tool; pieces of wisdom can still be extracted from those that you do not like and a critical reader should be able to evaluate any piece of written text for new understandings.

While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.

lokar2• 3 months ago

He is not simply a tool. He is an aggressive and malevolent actor.

judah• 3 months ago

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said, "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes."

This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.

bigyabai7• 3 months ago

Maimonides and Thiel both used eschatology as a tool to bypass material truth.

I'll take both of their opinions with a grain of salt, thank you. Have fun fighting Gog and Magog!

spectraldrift2• 3 months ago

Yes a broken clock might be right twice a day, but I also have limited time in my day. I've read enough of his opinions already and would like to make time for some others!

rbanffy2• 3 months ago

On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps.

At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.

Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.

As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.

jrowen• 3 months ago

Google themselves also did this with Gemini, we saw how quickly OpenAI's lead was erased. It could make quite a bit of sense to use this as a crutch so they (Apple) can overhaul their own efforts free of production pressures.

I'm not really seeing it though. Apple is more hardware and holistic experience, they aren't traditionally pushing the boundaries of "web-scale" nerd software. As long as they can keep on top of the devices that end up in people's hands they will have a place and don't need to be an AI powerhouse. They're doing just fine using Google Search.

aleksiy123• 3 months ago

At the end of the day the only way to get competence and capability is by doing things even if you don’t know how.

And early failures is much more acceptable than I think most people expect.

dwaite3• 3 months ago

My understanding was that Google was withholding access to features (vector tiles, turn by turn) to renegotiate maps usage. The two things I heard they wanted - features gated on Google login, and advertisements.

Apple had been developing their own maps solution already and accelerated it to land before the end of their existing agreement with Google, when Apple would have to accept Google's terms to continue usage. Google apparently had no idea negotiations had fallen through until the keynote.

It was going to ship as beta quality anyway (they were merging multiple sources of third party data), but the timeline meant it became a replacement in whatever form it was in.

politelemon2• 3 months ago

in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.

This must be a hallucination because it's still a wasteland here.

shadow28• 3 months ago

competent replacement for Google Maps

Maybe in the US and a handful of other countries. See the replies on this thread talking about various issues with using Apple Maps elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219#47840616.

ryanmcbride2• 3 months ago

I read an article speculating that Ternus was up next in I think wsj and it sounds like a good decision but obviously time will tell. I've been super disillusioned with Cook for years now, I just hope Ternus's approach isn't just more of the same, and that he actually works to innovate/improve the apple ecosystem.

Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.

appplication• 3 months ago

I think this is probably not very tin-foil, but I do believe the rumors we were hearing about Cook retiring and Ternus stepping in were less leaks and more intentionally preparing markets for the inevitable transition.

ryanmcbride2• 3 months ago

I don't think that's a crazy idea. The media plays a huge part in companies of this size and they definitely have people who think about these sorts of things. Not sure how necessary it'd be though, like they could probably get the same result by just doing what they were gonna do anyway.

kogold2• 3 months ago

It may be unfair to Jobs, but I feel like the comparison of him as the genius vs. Cook the talented enabler is a bit flat.

I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).

physicles2• 3 months ago

This is in fact what happened with SpaceX. Musk had the vision to make first stage reusability a thing with the Falcon 9, and Gwynne Shotwell is the operational genius behind the juggernaut that it is today.

Hilarious quote from her Wikipedia page:

Shotwell has received particular praise from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson for her "phenomenal" leadership of SpaceX as it developed the Falcon 9 into the "workhorse" of the space launch sector.[19] Nelson had reportedly been concerned in 2022, after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, that it would be a distraction at SpaceX, but became more comfortable after meetings with Shotwell left him feeling reassured that she was in charge of day-to-day operations.

kogold2• 3 months ago

Well, there you go! Thanks for that piece of information :)

dailen• 3 months ago

Ok, while an author's journey will inevitably influence their opinions, and I think Steve Jobs was a revolutionary visionary, the evidence of objective blinders is staggering.

I almost deferred to the classic jab about their being a member of the "cult of Steve Jobs" but then I read their comment about being an intern at Apple University and realized the author was simply institutionally indoctrinated. Clearly I jest but...

Apple did not invent the smartphone. It didn't invent the music player. It didn't invent the portable tablet. It didn't invent the personal information manager.

This was not a zero to one. To some extent you could say he even reused some of his own playbook from his attempt to make the iMac a cult hit. I do think he introduced the right product at the right time, but I think it was his strategy, or obsession, with perfecting the user experience that was definitely a zero to one.

magarnicle• 3 months ago

As a kid I literally sent Apple an email saying "hey, my mum's phone is tiny, surely you could stick a phone in an iPod?".

primax• 3 months ago

Yes I would say any honest reading of Apple's position in the last 30 years is they are not a zero to one company, they are a 0.5 to 1 company.

They take great ideas, cut half the functionality out, put it in a shiny white and aluminium case and make it fashionable.

yazantapuz• 3 months ago

Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one: a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second: a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.

Every time that i watch that keynote i think that Jobs should have started that list with the internet communication device thing, then the touch ipod and mobile phone last. The audicience responded to the internet device with a "meh" after the mobile phone announcement.

mrkpdl• 3 months ago

It was a different time. Less nerdy people already had phones and iPods. And were already keen for better versions of those things. The Internet communicator part was more abstract, it wasn’t clear to a non-technical person why they would even want such a thing. The iphone showed them why by first putting a better phone and iPod in their hands…

settsu• 3 months ago

We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing.

That this is a foundational idea for anything is nauseating...

jauntywundrkind• 3 months ago

Apple has such interesting systems. I'm so fascinated to see if they try to become something more, or if they stay dedicated to consumers.

They already have very passionate users stringing together ultra high throughput inference systems, using highspeed thunderbolt mesh topologies, or just using single high memory ultra chips.

But Apple has some very interesting patents out there to keep scaling up! Holy cow! It's very exciting to think of a hardware guy getting to pioneer this company forward, that has the systems visioneering to navigate really wild systems building. https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mif...

This feels like such a tension though, of having these wildly bleeding edge systems, that you are trying to shoehorn in to your friendly Think Different consumer brand & product offerings. Meanwhile Apple is out of stock for their new iPhone chip powered laptop. And their high end Ultra. There's this bifurcation of the market. It feels weird imagining Apple trying to serve both sides well. How Ternus can navigate an age of brave mew hardware is exciting but also seems so high tension. An Apple that no longer serves the mass market, that starts doing more, is wild to consider.

spiralpolitik• 3 months ago

I think the article makes a bit too much of the decision to partner with Google for the AI model. Sometimes knowing where the boundaries of your business are is better than trying to expand too far and getting it wrong.

I think Apple understands that the moat in AI is the UX, something that historically they've been very good at. The model is a commodity and I suspect they will quite happily go with another provider if Google doesn't work or buy a company in the inevitable AI fire sale if they can see a good fit.

afro88• 3 months ago

This is an excellent article. And can I just remind everyone that this is what human authorship looks like? Clearly not LLM generated. It has the author's unique tone, take on the subject, research, clear compelling story... A real breath of fresh air to be honest.

grvdrm• 3 months ago

Recently think that Ben's writing is more complex and verbose than ever, but I agree with your point entirely. He is writing it, not AI. I don't listen to his voiceovers but think of the articles as narrated by a captivating in-person presenter/lecturer.

Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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