Hacker News

trying to find the context, saurik seemsto be Jay Freeman[0], known for Cydia[1]; i'm guessing apple was 'unhappy' about his work around software for jailbroken iphones, but nothing immediately popped up, what did they do?

oh i guess it's from a court hearing[2] when his company was suing apple over app store monopoly ("... they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon.")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Freeman [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...

Forget about saurik; they wanted to countermand their own customers using his code to do things on their own phones they bought from Apple.

The contempt for their customers is palpable these days.

How dare you insult the forty gazillion company! Stand back ma'am I'll protect you from this handsome hacker ruffian!

Jokes aside, I have started to see Microslop as the lesser of two evils (two evils being MSFT and AAPL, Google being its own parallel universe abomination). Their commitment to backward compatibility really paved the way to cheap PCs for the masses. That said, every day Macroslop is working diligently to prove me wrong.

I think it might be the opposite. You make cheap products for everybody because you are going to make money off subscriptions. Personally, I think it's a reasonable strategy, but it might mean they lose their focus on high-end craftsmanship.

Neo is a good product, but they're making their better products (Macs) more out of reach for a whole class of customers.

> making useful and affordable products for all users,

Affordable, ethical. You can only choose one.

But there is interesting information in lots of the comments. Like the quote from Ternus about Apple Maps in one of the comments. This gives relevant insight of how he thinks and how he might handle problems when he takes over.

This is relevant information for this forum, for good or bad Apple has a lot of impact.

I find your reaction strange, do you read news to be angry and/or afraid? :)

> I don't want to read news for feelgood vibes.

Yes, as algorithmic engagement has proven, most people want to read the news to get angry about stuff.

But I don't like hanging around people like you. I'd rather talk about tech news with nerds (old HN) and not just talk about coastal filter-bubble US politics with big tech worker bees (new HN).

US politics has definitely captured the crowd here lately. Half of the comment threads somehow devolve from discussions of Javascript frameworks into hysterical left-populist struggle sessions over the perceived political injustice of the day.

Maybe some feel good vibes and some apolitical news for the day aren't a bad thing.

But Tim Apple had gray hair

A wonderfully out-of-date sentiment.

This is not a bad thing.

To a large extent: the product, the gloss, the luxury-item impression. People generally aren't looking beyond that deeper into the company behind.

You can see a similar thing in the 3D printing world with Bambu Lab - people love the product (my A1 has been excellent value, very reliable, and I despite preferring my fancy more expensive toy for most tasks I would still recommend it to those starting out without specific needs that such a design can't provide), and any concern about the company behind it (slowly closing off the ecosystem, initially trying to make out that their obviously-inspired-by-the-fullspectrum-scorca-fork colour mixing option was their own original stroke of genius) doesn't matter to them.

With both Bambu and Apple part of why they get this attention is the end-to-end polish that people feel in the product experience (to be fair is a valid reason to choose those products) and a certain amount of luck in them bringing their show to market at the right time, where other companies are seen as producing more interchangeable commodity items. Without that distinction giving people a higher view of the product range, the other companies struggle to get away from the fact that we don't naturally, for good reason, trust nor love commercial entities.

The other thing working in favour of some companies is momentum: some were worthy of some adoration for higher quality products and/or greater customer care than the competition, but are no longer and it takes a while for everyone to realise how much things have changed. Disney is definitely a company that I would add to this pile, and there are others.

Another big company that seems to get a lot more adoration than any of their competition is Nintendo, though I'm not in the gaming market any more so I don't know how much of that they still earn and how much of it is just that at least they aren't Sony or Microsoft!

There are plenty of other big companies that people love too. Off the top of my head: Nintendo, AMD, Disney.

In the case of all of them, they may make some questionably ethical business decisions but at the same time do genuinely care about the craft they're in, pushing boundaries and making quality products.

For a long time apple did a lot better for both "hackers" and normal customers compared to the other big operating system company.

They also made a good unix based OS that was easy to purchase on decent hardware (esp laptops).

Have you used Oracle, Salesforce, Windows? That’s why.

>And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing.

Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.

There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.

I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.

I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.

Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.

“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”

And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.

Apple Maps is pretty fantastic

Apple Maps is definitely not amazing in India. All it's good for is "Find My." Only Google is accurate and has good traffic data.

That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.

What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.

Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.

Well, that certainly would be one way to wipe billions from their share price overnight.

The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.

> Apple will recognise that power users, engineers

They will not. Recognizing the value of power users and engineers looks deeply un-Apple to me.

As a power user, ThinkPad T (maybe P also) series is better for me (and it's not that close). I run Linux on it.

Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.

I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).

I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.

It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.

Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.

I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.

It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.

The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.

In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).

This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.

There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.

I hated liquid glass at first, but now i've come to appreciate it. It grows on you

That guy left to join Meta I believe.

Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.

I've got the smallest version of the m1 macbook air when they came out. It's still my daily driver when I'm not on my corporate T14 gen 6 I7 with 32gb of ram, and while it no longer outperforms my corporate computer it keeps up well enough while being cold to the touch and noiseless. It's also significantly lighter and has better battery life despite being old, though corporate does kill a lot of that on the pc.

Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.

I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...

I think lots of backend stuff is getting better over time, but I fail to think of a single thing facing a regular consumer.

Typst

AI?

Granted I have a big ol' head, but I like the metal frame in all its heft - they feel ultra durable and I don't worry about throwing them in a bag.

They are leaps and bounds above any other laptop on the market. Who wants a plastic chasis and nub in 2026 over a modern Macbook Air.

> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!

I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.

The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.

As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.

> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!

> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.

And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.

Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.

As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.

Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.

I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.

How do you feel about their trackpad? I think they’re the best on the market.

It’s that easy folks. Just buy back your own stock and you print money and success. That’s all it takes.

Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.

yep, I worked there for 20+ years, only retired due to health. I was about middle of the park in my group’s tenure there…

> a reputation for a strong engineering culture

We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?

In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.

I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.

I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter.

I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.

Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?

Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.

Profit maximizing often involves selling much cheaper and lower quality versions of your products. Often times this involves even getting other companies to mass produce it under your name. The cheapest Mac is arguably their best product.

Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.

The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.

There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.

Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.

To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.

The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.

Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.

Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.

The problem with the word "AI" is that it's a broad term with fuzzy borders depending on who you ask.

But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product...

If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess.

If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.

I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.

Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.

AI talks started before Jobs was born...

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

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

It's always been tcook@ - and it will get looked at by someone at least

I'm really curious how he manages to read through so many emails every day.

Because you’re a shareholder.

Or because you’re interested in the products and the „company community“ is fun and you like talking about it.

Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.

Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.

It’s not the “walled garden” that’s preventing Valve to write Proton for Mac, it’s the lack of Vulcan support. Apple pushed to its own Metal framework when they deprecated OpenGl, which is probably great for performance, but outright denying support for Vulkan was a killer blow for games.

If Macs were "great" for gaming people would be buying them for gaming.

This is exactly why the hardware + software vertical integration philosophy is fundamentally retarded. What it essentially means for N hardware vendors to each have their own software platform is that as an application developer, instead of having to develop ONE application, you have to develop N applications. Imagine if Apple hardware just used Linux and macOS / iOS / whateverthefuckOS was just a desktop environment project like Plasma / GNOME / COSMIC. You could still keep the exact same particularities / UX flows / ease of use that people expect from Apple products, AND get free access to the wealth of software and content which exists for Linux and ALSO Windows (because of wine).

It's probably an even bigger reduction considering their growth.

But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.

https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...

Investors are forward-looking, though, so it just means that they think the future looks brighter than the immediate past.

The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.

The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.

Some of that is debasement, but some of that is that there is no other brand like Apple.

Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?

Yep. QE was a monumental mistake that killed economic mobility. Asset owners vs wage earners.

Do you think market cap should be proportional to revenue?

True, but also Apple is in a far more dominant position today.

Alongside Nvidia they essentially monopolize TSMCs entire latest generation chip supply.

That’s a moat in hardware that is going to get even stronger over time. Given this hardware moat they can dip their toes gently into the B2B market they’ve never really cared about and pick up another few hundred billion in high margin revenue over the next 10 years no problem.

I’ve always found it weird that Apple’s entire org runs on Mac but no other Fortune 500 company on earth does. Seems like an opportunity to nibble away at Microsoft.

This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.

Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.

Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.

Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.

Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.

There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.

YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.

Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.

The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).

Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.

They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:

- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).

- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.

- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.

John Apple, great guy people say he's the best at computers, business I don't know.

Basically. Tim is the ablative heat shield.

> I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.

Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.

He also got promoted

>"I've got no idea what he's like as a person"

Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.

> no overt politics

Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?

Right. We're not still running Windows Vista, or RedHat. Time for a rethink.

You make a good point, but at the same time, things are a bit stale if you look outside the Apple and Samsung bubbles.

For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.

> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.

That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.

Apple was wise to get out of the EV business. It's very expensive in terms of factories, regulation etc and not very profitable. They had no first mover advantage, government backing or legacy advantage.

What's the best case scenario? Make few billion a year fuzzed with long term warranty liabilities? That might sound nice, but for apple their companion products like AirPods or the Apple Watch easily clear much better profit. Putting their corporate effort into another companion product is more economically sensible and far less risky.

Really sucks we never got to see any of the prototypes or designs they built for it.

I forgot all about the Apple car when assessing Tim's legacy, too.

I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P

yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.

Its been more than 5 years since the M1 came out in Nov 2020

Believe it or not, more than five years ago.

For anyone else wondering what this means:

> lets you quickly open your iPhone camera and access common camera settings *points at button* (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-the-camera-contro...)

The way you phrased it about changing how you use a phone, I was expecting you control a lot of the phone via the camera somehow (gestures?) and don't need to bother with the pesky touchscreen. But okay no it's just the camera button that has been on cameras and other phones since time immemorial

One of the reasons software is harder is that people think it's easier.

The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.

Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.

Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.

Start here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...

Depending on who you talk to, this could go either way. Some people want big companies to champion their own political ideals on a larger stage and think Apple should do more. Others would say Apple should stay out of it, after things like their gift to Trump[0], for example.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...

you mean offering gold bribes to the president along with $$$ to the prez inauguration to curry regulatory favor?

#appletoo

Pennies? Their devices have famously high margins.

> Hopefully better and American made products.

"Expensive for no good reason" products?

So you're looking forward to a $2000 iPhone 18e?

Home button issues were one of the most common hardware problems on iPhones <7. The haptic button evaporated an entire class of critical failures, hardly a blunder.

Don't forget that to shut down an iPhone, you need to remember the secret button combination. Of course holding the power button down doesn't shut it off. Why would it? That's just a standard held by EVERY OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICE IN EXISTENCE.

Man, I love Apple, but their stupidity is beyond baffling sometimes. No Siri updates for 10 years, making the hardware harder to use, single-handed use is no longer as easy or comfortable, and they haven't done... anything(?) revolutionary in AGES. Their latest gaff was the Neo - a phone stretched out as much as possible to make a "laptop". They couldn't even bother to make the logo shiny on it, it was such a departure from true Apple style. Let's not forget the 92 lenses on the back of the phone that stick out a quarter inch, a screen that's nearly impossible to replace, and the hilariously pathetic "iphone repair kit" they lend you.

I have zero confidence in this guy. Nothing he had oversight over has gone well, as far as I'm concerned.

Wow, the worst example of violation of privacy is...(wait for it) local push notification storage being plaintext. We already bought it, no need to sell more Apple product to us!

I mean...

Really what apple is doing is putting a spin on their core business model of selling users the technology rather than renting it to them by subsidizing its development through spying.

It's not so much that privacy is apple's goal, but rather privacy is inherent to apple's business model (unlike google, which has always been spyware).

The big bucks are for simultaneously groveling to Trump and China’s leaders. China usually makes or breaks the quarterly numbers after all.

With Ternus being the new CEO don’t be surprised if Apple takes a more active role in designing around the three Stooges of memory and bring it (the design and engineering) in house like the rest of the Apple Silicon chips.

Chairman Cook was a hardware guy, and is why apple's hardware is excellent.

This just suggests him holding on to more influence. What apple needs, badly, is a software and tech guy (Cook is not a tech guy).

If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.

it means nothing when the UX is hot garbage

Disagree. Cook shows up to dinner parties with Trump all the time. I think he genuinely feels solidarity with the Epstein class.

I wish I could get my Chrome memory footprint so low

> this spoiled cheese tastes terrible

> when’s the last time you tried spoiled milk then?

There are still levels below “terrible”

> The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.

Good, can they move to fixing the base OS then?

Did Vision Pro leadership subsequently take over Apple Intelligence?

Did they? Why don’t I see people using this product while driving, or even walking down the street?

It's all been downhill since snow leopard IMO. Maybe I've just become cynical and jaded over the years, but I don't remember the last time I was excited for a new OS feature. Meanwhile the UX gets worse and worse with every new release. e.g. Tahoes janky corners, the dumbed down System Preferences app, random bugs that apple hasn't fixed for years, etc

Because there are so many bugs that it makes me wonder if Apple Execs ever use their own software.

For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.

There are PLENTY of examples just like that.

They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.

You've not read about or had the Calculator memory leaks on macOS Tahoe, have you?

Their presumed lack of regression testing.

When was the last time you used the clusterf* that is iTunes on windows?

Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)

Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.

> If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)

The MacBook Pro started using non-removable batteries in 2009. Also: https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

I don't think your fantasy that Steve would have staunchly defended upgradable RAM in the past decade has much grounding in reality. It seems entirely likely that he would have supported the switch to LPDDR to enable better battery life, higher performance and thinner form factors at the cost of sacrificing that upgradability.

You reminded me of Tim's "you should buy [your grandma] an iPhone" quip which was based (on good advice).

I'd be careful normalizing bribery. It's very micro-efficient, almost definitionally, but the macro effects of normalized bribery are well known and not good.

> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.

No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.

> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.

Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.

> He is doing the most while giving the least.

> Contrast with every other tech executive

What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.

> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong).

He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.

macOS and iOS 26 are quite bad.

XCode, Apple Music, Siri, Apple Maps, The App Store, Finder, Safari, Spotlight, iCloud...

I'd need another hand to fully count all the Apple apps that have burned me in the past.

The software is what kept me away from iphones even though I hate android hardware

Have you used an iPhone recently?

Their software is better than most (if not all) of closed-source universe. That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.

I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.

Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.

On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.

What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?

I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:

* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.

* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.

* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around

* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.

* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you

* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order

* Safari. Enough said.

I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.

Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.

I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.

XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.

> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.

20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.

People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).

As a cross platform developer, MacOS is far buggier than Linux or Windows in my experience.

Safari is a shinning example of how wrong this is. Sorry.

The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.

It's worst in case of freedom, which is the most important aspect for me. Every release they are slowly turning in the screws and make it harder and harder to install apps from developers who haven't jumped through all the hoops that Apple forces them to. I hope this change in leadership will change this strategy.

Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."

I have not found this to be true for the software side of things.

- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.

- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.

- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.

Apple’s software has a kind of reliable predictability that many appreciate.

But “best” is far too strong a word.

For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.

And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.

With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.

Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.

Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.

I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.

Pro hardware. Toy software.

He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.

That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.

Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.

> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's

You are comparing against the wrong thing.

Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:

https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0

NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.

> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's

But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.

I haven't really had to work with microsoft software but apple's software quality is abysmal beyond the OS (and even the OS has places that are a joke, like the bluetooth stack).

I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.

What do you mean? Most if not all Apple's software is not even the best in their own category, let alone "in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's". If we look at only these three and leave other competitors, you want to tell us that Safari is better than Chrome (Edge is the same now), Pages is better than Docs and Word, Numbers is better than Sheets and Excel, Keynote is better than Slides (arguably) or PowerPoint, Mail is better than Gmail or Outlook, iCloud better than Google Drive or OneDrive (ok lol), Facetime better than Meet or Teams, Apple Maps better than Google Maps or Bing Maps, Siri better than Google Assistant or Copilot... ?

Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..

Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.

Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.

Google is much better at software than Apple...most in the Valley would agree with this.

I still prefer macOS to desktop Linux or (yikes) Windows, but the margin has gotten smaller over the last several years. Unfortunately, that's less because Linux or Windows have gotten that much better, and more because macOS has stalled (and even gone backwards in some ways).

Maybe 20 years ago, today it's no better than anything else - well designed in some aspects, total trash in others. The stewards of xcode, spotlight and siri (among many other stinkers) are disqualified from the category of "best"

Android and Windows are better than iOS and macOS in many non-trivial ways. They have their own problems too, but as a user of all of them I don't prefer the Apple software. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, is clearly superior.

oh the horror stories I've heard from friends at Apple. Don't think I've heard anyone who writes tests at Apple

Best in terms of what? Quality Control? UI/UX?

In my opinion Android (especially the Google Pixel flavour) is vastly more intuitive and logical than i(Pad)OS these days. I almost need to consult a manual to change my wallpaper on iOS. Anything to do with file management or notifications is also just plain bad on iOS. The keyboard is bad. Background downloads don't work reliably. If I want to transfer photos from a computer onto an iPhone I need special software and then cannot delete those pictures on the phone itself. I can choose between 3 multitasking paradigms on iPad – terrible!

Apple could use a fresh approach to their software release cycles. I wish i could talk to someone at apple on this.

> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO.

Apple does xcode, known for being perpetually broken and an ungodly mess of whatever design it had. Isn't it enough proof to completely reject your claim?

Have you seen xcode? Have you seen Appstore connect in comparison to Google play console?

> Apple’s software is the best [...] compared to Google's or Microsoft's

Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.

Have you tried Siri lately?

I'm not sure how you can think Finder is better than the alternatives. It's awful, and has always been awful, IMO.

It's really gone to shit in the last 2 years

> Apple's software is the best in the [category of shit software]

> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft

Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is

I find it hard to believe this comment isn't sarcastic. Apple's software, atleast in particular macos, is horrendous - to the point I ditched my m2 macbook for a thinkpad because of how bad it was. It's like a toy OS.

The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.

MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.

They have behaved in a consistent matter to emphasize user privacy.

What makes you say they don‘t care?

One more thing: See ya suckers! I'm outta here.

Another iPhone mini...

iPhone Ultra.

Pundits... or might it just be that people can't predict markets and behavior without large error margins and compounding effects that magnify these errors further over time?

There were several exec departures in 2025, https://archive.is/JcYOY

Srouji stays to lead hardware, https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/20/srouji-chief-hardware-o...

  Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with. He has played a singular role in driving Apple's silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry. He has always led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and time and again, his team has delivered breakthrough innovations that have transformed our products. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as Apple's chief hardware officer.

Someone archive the leadership page :) to be referenced 12 months from when John takes over

Hah, had a funny moment along these lines. SD vs MicroSD came up as a topic. I glanced down at my M3 MBP and said, “looks like MacBook Pros use the regular SD slot.” The guy solemnly informed me that actually, Apple had removed the SD card slot from my laptop. His face turned red when I turned it to show him.

Tim was a great CEO.

I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.

Yes, a very successful CEO and he secured a great legacy. I was skeptical when Jobs stepped down, but under Cook innovation did continue, but primarily in hardware.

Also the discipline in not blowing massive R&D chasing AI; but having the machines/architecture best suited to said AI...

The M series transition was perfectly executed, but that trajectory was set up before Jobs left when they went all-in on in-house semiconductor design.

Can you say the same for tesla or cisco?

That's a pretty reductive take.

Many of their acquired pro tools, and pretty much all of their server hardware and software, though much of that started before Cook took over. Plus the Mac Pro missteps were on his watch, as well as the current cancellation. Apple seems more and more unwilling to invest in niche hardware like the Mac Pro, except where they see it pushing the platform forward, like the Vision Pro.

Agreed... EU (and most countries, afaik) have age limits for CEOs, which I do support.

Though US famously does not, which is a curse in itself, IMHO.

Though tbh, it's worth wondering if Berkshire Hathaway without the Sage is still the same...

He already had the trail of his retirement mapped out, and picked the perfect moment to blaze it.

I see, as someone who recently came to Apple (about 2 years ago), from Windows and Android, Apple software seems pretty good, like above those.

You’re right, it’s 6 year old, so a dinosaur by technology standards! I see your point.

You buy that? If he really did say that, it's just a mixture of cope and a passive aggressive attempt at a jab.

“We broadcast most episodes live on Wednesday nights at 8 PM US Eastern time.”

https://atp.fm/live

I think this is also why they release so late in the week. News usually happens before they record.

Yup. The rumor mill was talking about a CEO change for a while, and around the time you saw the rumors building you saw the departures you mentioned. Ternus was being mentioned as the likely successor at least back to November last year. So internally the shifts have already been happening for some time, only observable on the outside via the high profile departures.

No issue performance-wise but I wish there was more innovation, especially with the iPhones. For example, I was really impressed with Samsung's privacy screen demo.

The iPhone is fine, but I find them to be... boring. The SoCs are very good, but they don't have the best cameras, the best batteries, the fastest charging, the most innovative displays, etc. Apple isn't pushing that hard there.

Midterms Nov, so it’s all about to be over - either trump heads towards impeachment, America doubles down on its descent, or democracy ends. Either way, not point hanging around after that. If he’s impeached there’s a fresh start. If he does well, then this regime isn’t going anywhere for the long term. If the elections aren’t free then better get used to it.

So nothing further to wait for,

That's a reasonable take - Apple had a gun to their head regarding tarriffs and exposure to China, but I'd still love to know how Steve would have played the same hand.

And Microsoft. And Netflix. And Uber.

I'm perplexed by the assertion, unless it was some joke that went over my head.

"The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe)."

You can argue that Warhol never made anything that qualifies as art.