Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

https://routerjockey.com/tim-cook-is-leaving-good/

by tonhe • 3 months ago

94 204 3 months ago

sgt6• 3 months ago

Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.
iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.

I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.

zeratax• 3 months ago

Every time I do report these kinds of bugs it's clear to me they clearly do not look at them lol. The Feedback site still thinks windows 10 is the latest windows version and doesn't even display the latest ios version.

maldev• 3 months ago

I reported a bug in Apple Music on windows where it wouldn't update the audio output until you restarted it. They did a change in a few weeks where they made it update the audio output. Probably team dependent, but I was really amazed by how quick they changed it.

azinman2• 3 months ago

They are looked at.

Source: I work for Apple.

burnt-resistor3• 3 months ago

It's unknowable if they look or not consistently across all groups and departments because of their habit of zero feedback/response. I assume they don't look anymore because of assumed overwhelming backlog and lower standards than the past.

Perhaps on their side, AI might be able to consolidate, triage, and perhaps even propose fixes far more scalably than even a huge department of customer support-oriented coders.

redsocksfan45• 3 months ago

Every damn time anybody has trouble with an Apple product, we get this "Well that hasn't happened to me." Great for you, go get yourself a cookie and cram it up your ass.

hyperhello5• 3 months ago

Paste a screenshot into TextEdit doc and make a pdf.

fzeindl2• 3 months ago

Tested this, works for me.

sgt6• 3 months ago

Tested this now. Works like a bomb. https://imgur.com/a/t1ufCqr

watt• 3 months ago

HomeKit cooking your phone battery, period.

Schiendelman7• 3 months ago

What devices specifically?

AnonC2• 3 months ago

While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.

I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.

There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.

I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.

ryandrake• 3 months ago

I'm 1 for 1 on Feedback Assistant. I reported a flaky 10 year old thunderbolt display to them a few years ago, thinking I was probably just shouting into a black hole. It took them six months, but they actually responded to it with a diagnosis (bad hardware) and a workaround so I didn't have to trash the display.

neya2• 3 months ago

Bingo. I have a bunch of Sony WF-Xm4s and Xm3s and an Airpod pro. If I have to take a call, it's always the Airpod for me because it's so reliable. I just snap it into my ears and it literally just works. The Sony - while having a flatter frequency response and a snugger fit, goes for my daily workouts which Airpods sucks for as it keeps falling off. I have never had any connection issues with the Airpods till date. Despite it being connected to 3 devices. The Sony's (rarely) do have connection issues but never the Airpods.

Schiendelman7• 3 months ago

I was excited about Beats because they have the same hardware/software stack as iPods and they fit really well on runs! Give them a try if yoi haven't!

kubik369• 3 months ago

Both can be right, unfortunately. People do not report stuff, but when they do, it tends to get ignored. I have personally stopped reporting feedback to Apple because my tens of bug reports with detailed reproduction steps were simply ignored. This was both on beta and stable releases. One of them was especially egregious — I had an M1 Macbook Air at work and 11.2 update made charging with any dock, USB-C or Thunderbolt, not work, i.e. everything was working, but the laptop was not charging. I had to plug in a separate charger for 3 months until they fixed it in either 11.3 or 11.4. Rolling back did not work because the update updated the controller firmware. There was no mention of this in the release notes.

Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)

Schiendelman7• 3 months ago

If I remember right, that was Apple finally switching to the standards based approach for PD, and a lot of docks having used a hack instead of the standard for years before. It worked with your regular charger because your regular charger properly supported the PD standard.

fzeindl2• 3 months ago

It's true that there are few obvious bugs, but there are many subtle bugs now, usually outside the main interaction flows. 5 years ago, apple's software felt bugfree, essentially.

examples:

- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.

- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.

- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.

Schiendelman7• 3 months ago

I found the first one of those to be fixed recently. I haven't had the Mac note sync problem in about a month.

Rekindle8090• 3 months ago

Son you can't even upload HEIC photos to apple support, which is an iphone native file format all of your photos are in by default. Apples support website doesn't support apples file formats

drcongo2• 3 months ago

AirPods and iMessage, agreed, never had a problem. The Home app though remains Apple's unloved ginger stepchild - every major OS release I'm hopeful that they've done something about it, but they never do. I'm starting to think Apple's internal view of Home / HomeKit is that they wish they'd never built it in the first place.

Schiendelman7• 3 months ago

This is tough. Most home devices are built to be absolute bottom of the barrel. Notice that almost every HomeKit device says it only uses 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi?

Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped.

Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.

sgt6• 3 months ago

I hope they do. I use only the basics of HomeKit, a couple switches and CCTV. I'd like to expand and use it for more stuff. So it's important Home is stable.

nsxwolf3• 3 months ago

If you have a lot of Apple devices, and kids that are constantly borrowing them, you'll notice the "AirPods connected to wrong device" problem a lot. All I want is a feature that allows me to say "lock my AirPods to this exact device until further notice."

maxsilver• 3 months ago

iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.

The iMessage one is super common, and is Apple's fault. Easiest way to reproduce it is to have two Macs. (got a desktop and a laptop and use them both? Chances are high you'll encounter it).

The HomeKit (via HomePod mini) is also super common. (HomePod Minis just have bad wifi and unreliable connections, there's something about their WiFi setup that's different from all other Apple products). It doesn't help that Apple spent years prioritizing HomePods as the HomeKit base (though they eventually fixed that, and let you assign an Apple TV to do it).

The others are also common, but not necessarily always Apples fault, as far as I can tell.

(the AirPods, for example, tend to go wherever 'most recent' sounds happen, but a lot of developers are unintentionally triggering conflicting behavior around this. Have Outlook open? An email notification will sound an alarm, stealing AirPod focus away from your other device, but the sound effect will already be done playing by the time your AirPods connect, so to the user, it just seems like the AirPods switched devices for "no reason".)

(HomeKit, for example, is supposed to support Eufy cameras. But Eufy cameras are garbage, despite having a large dedicated base station dock running 24/7, they can support only one small video stream to one single device, ever. So if you have two Eufy cameras installed, HomeKit will fail on the cameras constantly, but it's because of Eufy's basestation limitations, so it's not clear to me how Apple could 'fix' that)

---

The more Apple moves outside of it's own internal ecosystem, the more complex the interactions get, and the less control Apple can feasibly exert over the product lifecycle, so the more it starts "Microsoft-ing" it's work. (We joke about Microsoft Copilot, but Apple has five different products all named Apple TV, the Apple TV (hardware device), Apple TV (the TV software app, which runs on Apple TV, and iOS, but also on Roku and other SmartTVs), Apple TV (the storefront for buying movies and TV shows), and Apple TV (the subscription service) for watching Apple TV (the studio creating original content shows and movies, one show of which is actually called "The Studio")

burnt-resistor3• 3 months ago

AirPod Pro v1 seems to always work, but they favor connecting to Apple branded devices and move seamlessly between them. What doesn't work so well is that iPad Pro M4 doesn't play nice with Bose QC35 multi-point connections because it appears to "play silence" to the headphones even when there is no audio, preventing the other connected device from switching over to play audio.

When I turn my iPhone on and open iMessage, it will sit at a black screen and won't open for several minutes and usually crashes. I want sync to happen on a background thread and be able to access existing content immediately. Sometimes it happens with the phone app too. There really ought to be a universal gesture or trick (that's not pull to refresh) to force iCloud sync in any app that has iCloud sync functionality.

Also, Universal Clipboard works half of the time.

Learn Spelling was removed from most/all non-Pages apps, which is extremely inconvenient because the Apple US English dictionary has tons of missing adverb forms.

iOS/iPadOS selection of text in a web browser (Brave or Mobile Safari) doesn't work as reliably as it did in earlier OS versions. Often, text is selected but refuses to show the text selection popup.

And I refuse to use iOS and macOS 26 because liquid glass is slow and unusable.

montgomery_r2• 3 months ago

I think the criticisms of the current software stack are well founded. There is friction there, stuff doesnt work that should. OP even neglected to mention the glaring Finder column view bugs or the Taboe corner radius window selection issues. But as a user since System 6.x, including A/UX and MacOS X since public beta - it was ever thus. Macintosh pre OSX was well known as an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. After OSX, Snow Leopard was needed to clear cruft.

The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!

jtfrench• 3 months ago

Working on Snow Leopard was one of my most rewarding experiences at Apple. Loved the ethos behind that update. No new fluff, just make everything work better.

montgomery_r2• 3 months ago

Totally agreed! And I loved Snow Leopard. (And I still love Mac OS - just making the point, there have always been things to complain about :-) )

DrScientist4• 3 months ago

Why oh why for example can't you resize the System Settings window?

If you are in the wallpaper view - there is content off the screen to the right, but no visible scroll bar, nor ability to resize. The only way to scroll appears to use the keyboard to navigate the wallpapers ( which has the side effect of setting them ).

I don't expect these kind of UI issues on MacOS.

DrScientist4• 3 months ago

On the other hand - the transition from Intel to ARM, which has totally transformed their hardware offering, was pretty seamless and is down to large part good software.

algoth1• 3 months ago

Will we finally have a native way to ‘select all’ text in iPadOs?

danabramov2• 3 months ago

"But here's the thing"

Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.

an0malous• 3 months ago

It’s futile, the Internet as we knew it is over. The Great Enshittification of the West is well past the halfway point.

poszlem• 3 months ago

of the West?

pfdietz• 3 months ago

That's an AI slop tell, isn't it?

I wonder if AI is going to drive certain idioms into extinction (aside from being used by AI).

bee_rider• 3 months ago

I don’t think there are AI slop tells anymore. Humans have been reading AI slop for a couple years now, so it plausible enough that any one person will have picked up a couple AI-like phrases.

tonhe2• 3 months ago

Honestly... I think I've been reading too much AI content, because I 100% wrote that. I do use AI to help make outlines and gather thoughts. But the Article was written by me.

leoedin• 3 months ago

Did you do any kind of AI assisted proofreading or grammar? So much of the structure of the article screams AI.

Stuff like this:

Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.

And the headings starting with "The"

AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!

danabramov2• 3 months ago

If you're being honest, I apologize. I find it a bit difficult to believe but maybe it's really that the style is everywhere now. Partially it's sentence pattern cliches:

Not just sell. Not just ship. Use.
The honest read ... The hopeful read ...
The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products.
Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras

There's also bizarre not-quite-landing uncanny metaphors that LLMs love to do:

Today's Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation.
The texture changed.
And the rot follows that exact line.

If you're surrounded by this kind of writing, it may be good to get other inspirations. It's bad!

Bishonen88• 3 months ago

13x 'not ' found in that article. That's what AI's love to write.

This article on the other hand has 1: https://routerjockey.com/introducing-graphiant-the-future-of...

I don't mind either way, but reading through the Tim Cook one without opening the comments on HN, I was 99.9% sure I'm reading AI.

rawoke0836003• 3 months ago

English is not my first language, although I am ok with it, whenever I write I always pump it through an AI first with a prompt of "Make it better English", especially if its a business email with English speaking clients.

I enjoyed your article and shared it on my family-geek-whatsapp group

christophilus• 3 months ago

That is a thing may humans say, though. Doesn’t mean this is AI slop.

cubefox2• 3 months ago

There are several other LLM smells in that article.

Forgeties79• 3 months ago

Writing well is hard but unfortunately people like taking shortcuts and making it our problem

throw12345678912• 3 months ago

This moaning is so fucking boring. Yeah, so what. For what we know this moan can be just some random openclaw instance digging for karma. I come here for discussion, not to read 50% “AI slop” comments.

rawoke0836003• 3 months ago

Agreed ! So what

kwertyoowiyop• 3 months ago

“Here’s the thing” is also a longtime cliche in podcasts, from the before-times when ChatGPT didn’t yet exist.

rawoke0836003• 3 months ago

Or "It turns out..." Somehow it just bugs me, and I'm usually so laidback

swyx• 3 months ago

oh my god it finally happened, a downvoted danabramov comment

NooneAtAll3• 3 months ago

if you cry wolf enough times, people finally wake up

prmoustache3• 3 months ago

The good old "this clearly photoshopped" of the 2020's era.

LLM's got their inspiration from popular sources written by humans. Now humans are exposed to LLM on repeat basis every day. It looks only normal that writing done with or without LLMs tend to converge to the same style.

boxed• 3 months ago

Parental controls are just absolutely broken. I hope Ternus has some kids and is upset about this too.

Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids.

Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.

amelius• 3 months ago

Can we have someone like Woz at the helm please?

stuartd• 3 months ago

much as I love and revere woz that is a terrible idea

emo_engine3• 3 months ago

woz is a hacker, not a product designer

eddieroger4• 3 months ago

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

Noaidi3• 3 months ago

and to Cook that was grow the company.

If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/

I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.

aleph_minus_one• 3 months ago

I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.

Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.

phkahler• 3 months ago

Yep, Cooks new role is essentially lobbyist.

M3L0NM4N3• 3 months ago

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

eddieroger4• 3 months ago

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

Where can I get my gold bar, please?

LtWorf• 3 months ago

I want ethical companies

This will never exist.

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

thevillagechief• 3 months ago

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

embedding-shape• 3 months ago

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

I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.

ap99• 3 months ago

100% agree.

I want to buy from a company whose goal is to make the best products, not make the most money.

You optimize differently for each.

pjmlp• 3 months ago

When we pay premium, we expect premium.

trimethylpurine• 3 months ago

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

MrBuddyCasino• 3 months ago

Apple's income now rival some GDPs

But so has the rest of FAANG. Did Tim Cook really overperform?

Growth compared to 2011:

Apple ~8×

Microsoft ~13–14×

Google ~10×

Facebook* ~10–15×

namdnay3• 3 months ago

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

eddieroger4• 3 months ago

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

enraged_camel• 3 months ago

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

bonesss• 3 months ago

Apple's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $350 billion to $377 billion by year-end 2011
Microsoft's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $220 Billion

Those are post iPhone numbers being multiplied.

Also, arguably, iPhones made everyone else on that list stupid rich and drove insane demands for their products. Instagram and Snapchats fortunes need more than Windows Mobile phones ever gave. Apples rising tide helped the web giants.

infecto4• 3 months ago

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

rib3ye• 3 months ago

You’re comparing Apple to Facebook is especially gross.

swader9992• 3 months ago

Dell?

glitchc• 3 months ago

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

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

danaris• 3 months ago

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

miltonlost• 3 months ago

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

nsxwolf3• 3 months ago

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

eddieroger4• 3 months ago

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

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

Exactly.

DrewADesign• 3 months ago

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

AstroBen• 3 months ago

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

You can't repair your device.

They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product.

They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.

They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.

They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.

Anything I missed?

They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.

tempodox2• 3 months ago

Anything I missed?

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

moffers• 3 months ago

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

infecto4• 3 months ago

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

ch4s32• 3 months ago

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

You can't repair your device.

Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.

They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible

All of their products and services are tightly integrated and have privileged access to hardware that would be insecure to open to 3rd parties.

They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.

If you want to list on their marketplace it's not unreasonable to expect to pay for access. We can haggle on the fairness of 30%

They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.

As a consumer I just can't possibly be made to care about this.

They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.

SPAs perform poorly and eat battery life and have super heterogeneous user experiences, I don't want them on my phone.

As a consumer I like that they don't open the gates on the phone ecosystem to all of the absolute slop we see on android.

CWuestefeld• 3 months ago

Anything I missed?

Under Jobs, UX was king. Devices had to be intuitive, and features discoverable. Today, all that user-friendliness is gone. The devices are no longer approachable for a newbie: you have to just know how to use them.

mandeepj• 3 months ago

developers to pay them their 30% tax

There are provisions for 15%

SanjayMehta2• 3 months ago

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

dd8601fn2• 3 months ago

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

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

rayiner• 3 months ago

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

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

JKCalhoun• 3 months ago

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

I imagine that was probably Cook recognizing that having your entire company propped up by a single hardware product line is a dangerous position to be in.

To that end it is not just Apple investors but Apple customers and Apple as a company that may well end up benefitting from Cook's cautionary strategy. We've seen tariffs threaten Apple's hardware. A future downturn in the economy that erodes a consumer's ability to spend could also wreak havoc on Apple.

tempodox2• 3 months ago

I'd love to see the critics do better.

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

PunchyHamster• 3 months ago

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

coolkewlcuil• 3 months ago

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

Stock buybacks simulating interest, inflation, and cutting corners on products, gouging devs that list on their app store, oh and they sell a lot of ear buds destined for the ewaste bin in 24-36 months.

Plus the stock market is like Whose Line Is It Anyway; made up points that don't matter to humanity long term while the ewaste and non repairable products do.

Stop carrying water for billionaires who do not care you exist. This is no different than fawning over a Kardashian. We have social systems to replace these people because as a species we're well aware of physics at this point.

If physics hasn't seen fit to spare their biology the effects of entropy (aging -> death) they're not that important.

duxup• 3 months ago

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

foobartab• 3 months ago

LLM slop

vlovich1232• 3 months ago

Oof. This article gets so much wrong…

The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.
Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.

Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA.

Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix.

Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft.

and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better.

Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases).

But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top.

Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware.

Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.

epolanski• 3 months ago

Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role.

At that level and scale it's merely politics.

vlovich1232• 3 months ago

It’s clearly both technical and political. But what you think Tim did nothing technical in his time at Apple and built up technical teams to make it into the powerhouse through luck? Tactics are fine but strategy is everything and Cook clearly is both tactically and strategically excellent.

Source: worked at Apple and at Google and we struggled at Google to build supply chains and get the same cost effectiveness. People talk about how Apple is overpriced and then ignore that the feature set/cost tradeoff is matched by only Samsung on mobile and even then they make a fraction of the money that Apple does.

buttocks2• 3 months ago

This author misses the point because he is a geek. Ordinary users love Apple and do not care about these issues. Ordinary users throw money at Apple. Apple has some bugs to fix but overall the product is good, and that’s why they keep raking in cash. Saying good riddance to Tim Cook because of the system preference pane, among other trivial things (to most people), is simply misunderstanding business.

stavros2• 3 months ago

Let me guess, anyone who thinks Apple products are a buggy mess is a geek, and everyone else is ordinary, No True Scotsman style?

Personally, I don't think the fact that the Apple keyboard is unusable is a "geek" thing.

prmoustache3• 3 months ago

The thing is most people are:

1. used to mediocrity and enshittification everywhere 2. live in one ecosystem or another. Appart from developpers, I don't know many people who use Mac AND Windows, iPhones AND android. And resistance to change is there to limit moves between one to another. They wouldn't care if apple keyboard sucks if they never used a better one.

SecretDreams• 3 months ago

Ordinary users love lamp, so to speak.

Reality is the success of current products mostly hedges on the momentum their companies have built over the last decade, rather than the actual innovations of those current products. Guerilla advertising is also used super effectively.

rglullis• 3 months ago

Or maybe you don't understand that for some people there are more important things than "how much money will I make from this?"...

buttocks2• 3 months ago

I understand it, but I am not the majority Apple user.

kgwxd• 3 months ago

It doesn't matter who's sitting in the chair, no one is reversing our decent toward the bottom of the barrel in tech, any time soon.

prmoustache3• 3 months ago

I think so too.

I don't think Steve Jobs would have been kept as CEO had he survived cancer.

Most Apple customers of today aren't necessarily the same customers as 15 years ago, the same way a Rolex, Porsche, Louis Vuitton customer in 2026 is not the same person as in the 80's. A lot of current customers are used to mediocrity in everything, from food, to entertainment or tech. I'll exclude Linux desktops because most people do not even know it is a thing, but look at the commercially available alternatives to iOS and MacOS? Android and Windows. That's it. While I appreciate the sadly dwindling additionnal freedom in android, I can hardly call these 2 a frictionless experience either. Are chromebooks still a thing nowadays? I haven't encountered one or a user in years.

Brendinooo• 3 months ago

Honest question, from someone who doesn't own AirPods because I'm cheap:

Is there a product in either of AirPods' categories that is generally recognized as either outright superior or a better value?

Because both regular and Pro seem like amazing products, and reviews tend to classify them as such. And it's entirely a Cook-led project. Like, if I were to pick one product to prove that Cook cared about product and Apple could still do cool things, that's probably on the top of the list.

Calling out one flaw and making that emblematic of his entire tenure feels extremely shortsighted.

Schiendelman7• 3 months ago

The Max are honestly magic too. I got rid of Bose and Sony headphones because these are worth every penny. They work perfectly, they switch between devices really well, the noise canceling is great, and they don't hurt to wear for long periods of time.

tsunamifury• 3 months ago

Tim was able to scale jobs and ives legacy for a decade exceptionally well, in large part with the help of Foxconn. And he did a great job of in housing major parts of the stack to reduce dependency.

Once that had run out, he ran out and VR plus intelligence were there worst failures the company has ever seen. Completely inept ideas, one that very publicly failed to launch to a hugely damaging degree.

Cook was great at growing others legacy, and completely inept at making his own.

anonthrownaway3• 3 months ago

Amazing HW. SW that is stunningly bad. My example that makes me want to divest myself from my all-in on Apple's ecosystem: Native save as dialog box with a filename text box that shows (at most) 32 characters on the screen at once. Even with the smallest dialog box width possible, there is room to make the filename more than 64 characters. Resizing the box does nothing. They can't be eating their own dogfood here right? Are they all using Linux? How do they sell this crap to the business segment?? This isn't even a bug - it is just terrible SW UI/UX design.

I love my Macbook HW (except for the stupid sharp edge) and the only thing that keeps me from ditching it is that for most documents I work on, I am in LibreOffice, which lets me disable the native save as dialog box and use the works as expected LibreOffice one.

To the article, I wonder if a HW person will have the mindset required to fix the glaring holes in their SW. Make the whole damn company eat their own dogfood!

nsxwolf3• 3 months ago

macOS may be stunningly bad, but Windows 11 and any flavor of Linux are far worse.

anonthrownaway3• 3 months ago

I know :(

I use all 3 for different reasons, but Macbooks are my daily driver because I want an ecosystem. Too bad there are so many ecosystem fails. I want to believe, but this $4T megacorp can't figure out table stakes.

xethos• 3 months ago

Parent's workaround was literally to use software frequently found on Linux desktop (and typically absent on MacOS and Windows)

Whatever's going on in Cupertino, it's hard to arguethe people working on the Linux ecossytem don't eat their own dogfood

saberience• 3 months ago

Reads like AI slop, no genuine insight, bland, clearly someone who has very little insight into Apple or Tim Cook.

The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did...

Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company.

He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...

tonyedgecombe• 3 months ago

Apple failed on AI. It may well work out for them but it certainly wasn’t planned like that. They announced vapourware then failed to deliver.

kibwen• 3 months ago

Let's stop beating around the bush.

Companies don't produce better products unless incentives are aligned to force them to produce better products.

Are incentives aligned in a way to cause Apple to produce better software? If not, then it absolutely does not matter who the CEO is. IREAM.

AnonC2• 3 months ago

I can’t help but agree on the points made in this post. I don’t want the pain of Windows (or another non-Apple OS), but Apple isn’t making it easy to recommend its software on the quality front. If John Ternus puts more focus on what Craig Federighi and Eddy Cue aren’t doing, there is a chance for Apple to make its software better.

As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 months ago

Federighi has been coasting for years. I hope Ternus fixes that.

On the upside, at least Federighi didn't get the top job.

sschueller• 3 months ago

Tim cook did his job well. He increase stock value over and over again for the delight of the shareholders. He also increased the moat as large as possible.

If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company.

Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.

anonthrownaway3• 3 months ago

Exactly - they do not GAF because there is no worthy competitor. No one else has a (semi) functional ecosystem...

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 months ago

No one can say if it was "as large as possible." It's at least plausible he left money on the table with some missed opportunities.

For example: handing over the semi-pro video creator space to YouTube. Apple already a thriving podcast ecosystem, but failed to capitalise on it. There was a real opportunity for vertical integration with Apple selling hardware, targeted content creation software (a CapCut-a-like version of FCP), and access to a distribution network.

Also, home automation and security. Cameras, switches, maybe even routers with local backup. Not sold as devices, but as high quality services with obvious benefits that happen to run on specific hardware.

AI: there was the opportunity to develop Siri into an agentic assistant well before anyone else got there.

Cook's slant was more towards chasing high-end Veblen lifestyle status - cars, watches, premium computers and phones - and less towards social marketing and less shiny but useful consumer devices.

fartfeatures• 3 months ago

Also a couple of big investments that might have been better spent elsewhere e.g. Apple TV+ and the Apple Car. The vision pro and the audible gasp the audience let out when the price was revealed was a particular low point. Having owned that device for 14 days before returning it I wish they had left the screen off the front, reduced the weight by 25% and done something about the price. What good is a developer device that is hard to make, expensive and flashy.

jmyeet• 3 months ago

I will say that UI designers left to their own devices will tend to make change for the sake of change. And it's annoying.

Safari on iOS is a prime example of this. I used to be able to switch from tabs to private browsing. Now I have to go through a tab groups abstraction that I didn't ask for, can't turn off and don't want. Want to open a new tab? Well, that too has gotten annoying. You have to tap near the bottom to bring up the address bar and then you can bring up the tabs screens (that used to be more accessible) or click on the new 3 dot menu on the bottom right. Who asked for this?

I prefer my address at the top. It's like desktop. That's another unwelcome change. This change also infected Settings where the search is hovering near the bottom now for some reason. This seems to be part of some wider UI fad because Google Finance now does this too. Just. Stop.

Oh I used to just tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top in Safari too. Now I accidentally hit the notch and go to some other unrealted app now. So thanks for that, Apple.

I abhor Face ID. So many false negatives. so unreliable. So many more times I have to put my passcode in. Just give me Touch ID. Put it on the home button (like the iPad Air) or do what Samsung did a decade ago and put a sensor on the back. That works really well.

Oh the Apple Watch isn't immune to annoying and pointless UI changes too. Even selecting an activity like Outdoor Walk now has a really weird scroll behavior where the "play" button doesn't come up until you stop scrolling. Why? WHY? The old interface was fine.

Leadership is keeping these kinds of things in check. Otherwise people make changes to get promoted,, basically. Or it's just ego to reinvent something in their image. Steve Jobs kept Johnny Ive in check. Tim Cook allowed the 12" macbook to happen. As well as the Touch Bar and the butterly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness). But at least those got corrected.

And of course Siri is still terrible and almost seems like abandonware at this point.

blueTiger33• 3 months ago

Tim Cook was the guy Steve choosed. Don't know him personally, but he is leaving a great company behind. The new CEO has a lot to prove. Design wise, have heard he has made some mistakes but Apple ability to improve, will not fall behind. Hope he is a fighter, a pirate ;)

dandare• 3 months ago

The Tenet Cook Forgot: make products you’d be proud to use yourself.

You see, I don't think people like Cook (and the majority of corporate managers) can even tell the difference between good and bad products when they use them.

AlexandrB• 3 months ago

Counterpoint: things can always get worse.

Tim Cook was at least a steady hand at keeping the product tolerably usable. Just wait until a Satya Nadella style CEO takes charge at Apple - we'll be wishing for the halcyon days of Tahoe and Liquid Glass.

samth• 3 months ago

HN should partner with Pangram to give an AI score to things that are submitted.

shibaprasadb• 3 months ago

Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.
iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.

Have these ever happened to someone? I have been using an iPhone for 2 years but have never experienced this.

swader9992• 3 months ago

Did Steve Jobs have a passion for iMusic? He wasn't perfect either.

paulglx• 3 months ago

Hey ChatGPT, generate a controversed article for my blog. No worries if examples are made up and some information is objectively wrong.

infecto4• 3 months ago

I think the criticisms are valid but I also still find that Apple has created one of the best ecosystems in the marketplace. It’s hard for me to pin any of the individual complaints on a broad failing of Tim Cook.

nalekberov• 3 months ago

Agreed, System Settings was the worst redesign in entire Apple history in my humble opinion. Previously it was so simple that you didn’t have to scroll.

At some point Apple should realize that, it’s okay to not touch core design principles.

jshaqaw• 3 months ago

Can we add to the software failure list that Finder is an underpowered mess? Like the author said, fixing Finder won't have a correspondingly visible ROI. But haven't any of the Apple developers using these machines just said "ENOUGH" already. I used to like Pathfinder and was willing to just pay for that as an alternative but that software is just buggy enough that it's annoying to rely on for something as important as file management.

josefrichter• 3 months ago

It’s overreacting. HW is fantastic. some SW less so. Some bugs feel ridiculous and they’ve been around for ages - true. But overall, try to fire up a windows machine once in a while. It will give you a very quick reminder that you’re just used to a very high bar.

kneel• 3 months ago

You think this company would have gone bankrupt by now

2012 — [Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949)

2013 — [Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491)

2014 — [Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546)

2015 — [Apple has lost the functional high ground](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734)

2016 — [Apple's declining software quality](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071)

2017 — [Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914)

2018 — [Ask HN: Why has Apple's software quality steadily gone downhill?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664)

2019 — [Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678)

2020 — [Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639)

2021 — [Apple's software quality has certainly slipped](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881)

2022 — [The erosion of the Mac experience](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193)

2023 — [Mac OS Ventura Issues](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652)

2024 — [Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215)

2025 — [Apple's Software Quality Crisis](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)

emo_engine3• 3 months ago

it probably would've if not for the iPhone

woodydesign• 3 months ago

John Ternus has been the core leader behind two of Apple’s most important post-Jobs achievements: AirPods, its best new product in that era from my pov, and the transition from Intel to Apple Silicon, one of its most ambitious and successful strategic bets.

I’m very bullish on his innovation mindset and on Apple’s next chapter.

xbar• 3 months ago

My model of Tim Cook's vision for Apple was "To sell more, we must be more simple. Configuration is complexity and complexity eats battery life which we must defend against user decisions and bad software. Permit software products to be as minimally configurable as necessary to support the features and battery life we advertise. Defects of insufficient configurability are therefore features. Mail and web cannot be defeated as open standards, all others can be. Close them and own them at 30% revenue cut."

I will give Tim Cook credit for a category software improvement: reliability. While poor performance, memory bloat, and UI slop have been hallmarks of macOS native apps, they have stopped crashing. Xcode is usable. I miss OS X, but I do not miss the instability.

emo_engine3• 3 months ago

“John [Sculley] came from PepsiCo, and they, at most, would change their product once every 10 years. To them, a new product was, like, a new-size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. Well, for PepsiCo, that might have been okay. But it turns out, the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies. Like, oh, IBM and Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox…So you make a better copier or a better computer. So what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company is not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision-making forums. And the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts usually about wanting to really help the customers.”

Tim Cook has always been a John Sculley, not a Steve Jobs.

serhack_• 3 months ago

I'm very sad to see some bugs catch by my fuzzer that was coded in three minutes of cargo-fuzz, disrupting UX. I filled some apple feedbacks that were fortunately fixed by some engineers, but I wonder what's happening under Q&A testing.

burnt-resistor3• 3 months ago

s/salesperson/CFO/ This was such a poor, inapplicable word choice that weakened their argument. Regardless of former or current roles, actions and attitudes matter.

The core problem is TC snatched failure from the jaws of victory by optimizing for the wrong priorities: extreme profiteering over cool (as cool as the past), durable, reliable, desirable products with "souls" and leading innovation into new or under-developed categories. TC was never able to confidently lead into new territory like SJ. That's what Apple is desperately missing.

maxglute• 3 months ago

LLM slop aside, it would be nice to have a less rational Apple leader that launches riskier products. Get that car out.

Tim Cook Is Leaving. Good

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