Extremely Disappointed at Tim Cook’s leadership

[usagora]

You need to know the maximum you'll need going in and once your needs surpass that then these become destined for a landfill, something Apple doesn't say anything about in their environmental statements.

Apple can't help if some consumers are stupid and throw their iMac in the dumpster instead of sending it in for FREE recycling (and possibly a credit as well, depending on its age and condition). They're doing their part.

 

[usagora]

Steve's iMac was also intended to be non upgradable. The new iMac is the closest we've came yet to the original vision. In the bubble of a forum, people do talk about upgrading RAM and the like but that isn't what the average computer buyer even considers, most people buy a whole new PC when their computer is slow from a "virus".

The new iMac will serve any consumer for the next 3-5 years as indented and they'll never care how much or how little RAM it has. The original iMac was the same, a nice colourful machine that just plugs in like a toaster and works.

Yep, it's the same in just about any field. In photography, we call them pixel peepers - they are so obsessed with the details and specs that they miss the big picture (no pun intended!) of what the camera can actually do.

 

[I7guy]

Apple haven’t had a disruptive hit product in a little while, it’s true. But they’ve been building on where they were. It takes time to take products like the iPhone and iPad and build them into massive global behemoths. And it’s not as if they haven’t had great products in the post-Steve Jobs era, look at the AirPods and the Apple Watch.

It’s different being a 2 trillion dollar company compared to what they were. Now there is an array of hardware, software and services to look after, and their every move is closely watched by an army of commentators, leakers and so on. Their supply chain is even in the news, which is not the case for any other company in the world.

And a lot of that has happened under Tim Cook. He may not have the same genius that Steve Jobs displayed with products, but he has his own qualities.

Seems like the M1 is one of the huge successes of Tim Cook. He revitalized the product line. Whether that is genius, courage or more of the same I guess depends on your viewpoint and if your the ipad 1 release in 2010 as a bigger iphone.

 

[Bodhitree]

Seems like the M1 is one of the huge successes of Tim Cook. He revitalized the product line. Whether that is genius, courage or more of the same I guess depends on your viewpoint and if your the ipad 1 release in 2010 as a bigger iphone.

I think you can give Tim Cook a lot of the credit yes. Apple acquired PA Semi in 2009 under Steve Jobs, but developing the chips from mobile chips to an ARM architecture that could mount a challenge on the desktop is something that would have happened in the ten years under Tim Cook. That kind of thing takes long vision, the ability to look quite a few years ahead.

 

[bluespark]

People said all of the same stuff when the original iMac was introduced. It was as if the sky was falling and people speculated that Apple would never have a professional customer again. Last week's event was a consumer-focused event (with the exception of the iPad Pro) and I fully expect the new iMac to be a hit among its target customers (and, in my view, for very good reason). New higher-end ("pro") Macs will be coming, and in the meantime Apple continues to sell the 27" iMac.

More to the point, Apple has released lots of great products under Cook's leadership. The one that jumps out to me the most is the Apple Watch, which was every bit as disruptive in its space as the iPod was in the area of music playback devices. But the M chip effort has also been amazing and transformative, Apple's services segment is vastly deeper and richer than it was under Jobs, the addition of Beats was good both for Apple's bottom line and for its now-realized streaming ambition, and there is much more.

I do miss the fact that Cook is not the product visionary that Jobs was, but Apple is still very much Apple, and it continues to do amazing things -- even if they don't align with your priorities.

 

[chocolaterabbit]

That without mentioning that there has been just many big mistakes and flops. Yes, Jobs would still make them (for instance MobileMe), but since Cook's arrival they are WAY more frequent and massive.

They're massive because Apple is much bigger and therefore more exposed in the media due to journalists looking for ad revenue. Remember Antennagate? That was a way bigger mistake comparatively speaking vs anything Cook has done, especially Jobs' attitude afterwards with his "don't hold it that way" comments. Tim would never have been foolish enough to do this considering Apple's size and influence.

 

[AdamNC]

I think part of it is the rapidness development of products and software. Do we really need a whole new phone designed every single year? A new OS for everything every month? They used to use the same design for a couple of years and make incremental changes in between. I think if they went to a new phone line up every two years, 3 for computers and follow the same timeline for OS's we would see a far better product.

 

[Ethosik]

reduced to an ugly and weak machine without any possibility to upgrade and repair it later.

Weak? Please....look up the M1. It is far better than my 2019 i9 iMac that was $4,500 when I bought it. The M1 competes with an i9-9900k. That is "weak" to you? Why do my parents need MORE than that?

 

[Ethosik]

I think part of it is the rapidness development of products and software. Do we really need a whole new phone designed every single year? A new OS for everything every month? They used to use the same design for a couple of years and make incremental changes in between. I think if they went to a new phone line up every two years, 3 for computers and follow the same timeline for OS's we would see a far better product.

This is agile software development in a nutshell. I recently ran into a BREAKING issue with Visual Studio on Windows. They introduced a regression to their C# language support that was valid since 1.0. C# 9.0 had some changes, but they broke existing code bases. Instead of just waiting for Visual Studio 2022 and get things right, they released it as an update to Visual Studio 2019 and broke things. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google and many companies are releasing stuff way too quickly and breaking stuff. From Windows blue screening when trying to print to some printers or deleting user's files, to macOS breaking Bluetooth functionality to Adobe releasing a bad update to After Effects that would sometimes have the last second of audio play twice.

I have worked at a few places now that adopts the "agile" development style and its always get things DONE NOW NOW NOW. So this leads to development being rushed, QA being rushed, and regression being rushed. And they have a "surprise pikachu face" when things have issues.

Things just need to get back to the way it was. Every couple of Windows 10 big updates I have some bad issue. It needs to go back to the old days where we had to wait a few years for an Operating System to be updated.

EDIT: And yes I agree. As someone that really doesn't care about cameras in my iPhone, that seems to be all that is happening to iPhones these days. I really don't notice a difference between my iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 5 camera. I don't need anything more than what the iPhone 5 provided.

 

[AdamNC]

This is agile software development in a nutshell. I recently ran into a BREAKING issue with Visual Studio on Windows. They introduced a regression to their C# language support that was valid since 1.0. C# 9.0 had some changes, but they broke existing code bases. Instead of just waiting for Visual Studio 2022 and get things right, they released it as an update to Visual Studio 2019 and broke things. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google and many companies are releasing stuff way too quickly and breaking stuff. From Windows blue screening when trying to print to some printers or deleting user's files, to macOS breaking Bluetooth functionality to Adobe releasing a bad update to After Effects that would sometimes have the last second of audio play twice.

I have worked at a few places now that adopts the "agile" development style and its always get things DONE NOW NOW NOW. So this leads to development being rushed, QA being rushed, and regression being rushed. And they have a "surprise pikachu face" when things have issues.

Things just need to get back to the way it was. Every couple of Windows 10 big updates I have some bad issue. It needs to go back to the old days where we had to wait a few years for an Operating System to be updated.

EDIT: And yes I agree. As someone that really doesn't care about cameras in my iPhone, that seems to be all that is happening to iPhones these days. I really don't notice a difference between my iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 5 camera. I don't need anything more than what the iPhone 5 provided.

Yup. Yet some things are just the opposite. Like they
opened a new hospital near me in 2017. Dubbed state of the art, leading edge all that BS. Yeah everything like MRI's and all are. Except one of the most important thing. The computer system. It is all Dell Opix running Intel 4th Gen chips, and XP!!!!!!!! I had a test and the room was next to the server room. The IT people should be shot. Computers half in the racks, wires all over the floor, I was like WTF????? Unacceptable for a hospital. The tech says IT is based 2 hours away and they are there 3-4 times a day.

 

[johnhackworth]

I think that Apple is still innovating. However, as a Mac bigot since 1986 I'm not too comfortable with the direction Apple seems to be taking. Macs are becoming more and more like appliances - upgradeability of key components (storage, RAM) will likely disappear for everything but the Mac Pro.

If you want the ability to upgrade your machine post-purchase - you need to go Windows/Linux.

 

[Septembersrain]

My qualm is that after seeing the iPhone 12 variants in Best Buy, they were all yellow without true tone on. It seems like each year they lower the QC or people like their screens looking like that (It's personally ugly to me). Changing the style, upgrading the camera, it feels like a really expensive mediocre upgrade with an ugly screen. I've already had to use color filters on my 11 Pro Max.

I'm not dropping over a grand for a device exactly like mine with such minimal changes. To each their own but I think many are settling on these for high prices with cut corners glaring them in the face.

Edit: I'm also not a fan of feeling like a guinea pig outside of the beta program when they release software that kills batteries and causes the device to start lagging or experiencing other bugs.

 

[FireFish]

So you are extremely disappointed with Tim Cook's leadership. First, I think you don't quite understand what "leadership" is. Unless you are an Apple employee, his "leadership" is totally irrelevant to you.

But avoiding to pay Intel their royalties - I would have thought that for Apple Inc. as a company, that would be an excellent move, wouldn't you agree?

So it seems your headline is wrong again. It's not about leadership, it's not about how he is running the company, so what exactly is it that you don't like? Anything wrong with Apple's products? Maybe for you, but many people disagree quite strongly.

Is it a wise decision to decouple the future of Apple with this dependency they’ve always had to Intel? Sure. I wouldn’t argue. But to do it and simultaneously sell it as a major reason to upgrade all of your devices? Well, let’s just say that you’re being taken for a ride to help Apple’s future bottom line. If you like that ride, I guess enjoy.

 

[FireFish]

Never ceases to amuse me when folk talk about "what would Steve do".

The plain fact of the matter is that Cook has allowed Apple to continue its massive climb.

The world today is radically different from the world of Steve Jobs.

The other think that I find so laughable about your post is that under his leadership they had some real turkeys.

In addition, the competition Apple face today is night and day different from the times of Jobs.

In other words, it is only your belief that the Jobs ethos would have continued given all these changes.

What you lack is any actual evidence of this. Ergo your opinion is noted but ultimately pretty irrelevant and pointless.

Jobs' is dead. Move on.

Do me a favor: lineup the last 6 years of iPhones, look at them altogether and name 4 major changes that they’ve stuck with.
I’ll start you out: Camera, fine. But fingerprint auth? Gone, out with the past 4 models, only for them to bring it back for the iPhone 13. Form factor? Tell me with a straight face that Apple hasn’t gone back and forth from curved casing to boxed. Flip flop flip flop. And now that they’ve begun changing to USB-C, which replaces Lightening which replaced the 30 pin connector; all that money spent on useless cables, and now it’s almost an undisputed fact that they’re likely doing away with USB-C charging as they’re bringing BACK MagSafe charging, which as you might have remembered they phased out.

Wbat happened to that unbelievably fast data transfer read/write promises with Thunderbolt? Then Thunderbolt 2.0, then quietly phased out of future pipeline.

At least when Jobs had the balls to tell the world they had to say goodbye to built-in DVD-ROM, he stuck with it.

 

[iRock1]

They're massive because Apple is much bigger and therefore more exposed in the media due to journalists looking for ad revenue. Remember Antennagate? That was a way bigger mistake comparatively speaking vs anything Cook has done, especially Jobs' attitude afterwards with his "don't hold it that way" comments. Tim would never have been foolish enough to do this considering Apple's size and influence.

But following your example, 'antennagate' was fixed ASAP. If Jobs realized he screwed up, he would play foolish and quietly fix stuff.

Cook, on the other hand, sometimes is so lost that he insists on the mistake without even realizing he is screwing things up. Case in point, the downfall of the Macbook during the last half decade.

 

[larrylaffer]

* Make record profits year over year
* Move the desktop to ARM and shake up the industry so much that Microsoft accelerates Windows ARM development
* Dominate US market share for years with the #1 selling smartphone
* "APPLE DOESN'T INNOVATE I MISS STEVE WAHHHH"

The MacRumors forums folks

 

[Sikh]

I think the system will gladly slurp those terabytes in a single year, courtesy of the brilliant Apple OS engineers, by virtue of excessive swapping, with exactly zero consumer involvement.

If that was the case, we would've had plenty of dead NVMe's and soldered on flash storage since 2012 with the introduction of the rMBP and every computer since then. I have not seen any complaints about flash storage all of sudden being dead on any computer since 2012 and even more so since 2016(?) when they started to solder it onto the logic board. I have seen small number of complaints / posts where someone's drive actually died and that was because of a defective drive. I would say its easily <1%

 

[BreakingKayfabe]

I’m not so sure that Apple knows what the **** it’s doing.
My overall confidence in their pipeline and visionary mythology of introducing show-stopping products that are revolutionary and exciting may very well have died with Steve Jobbs.

The iPhone was practically re-inventing the wheel. People need to realize we’re only going to see something like that once in our lifetimes.

 

[windowsblowsass]

I’m not so sure that Apple knows what the **** it’s doing.
My overall confidence in their pipeline and visionary mythology of introducing show-stopping products that are revolutionary and exciting may very well have died with Steve Jobbs.

Yes, no,maybe, I don’t know, can you repeat the question please?

 

[matrix07]

I think part of it is the rapidness development of products and software. Do we really need a whole new phone designed every single year? A new OS for everything every month? They used to use the same design for a couple of years and make incremental changes in between. I think if they went to a new phone line up every two years, 3 for computers and follow the same timeline for OS's we would see a far better product.

Exactly!

 

[matrix07]

* Make record profits year over year
* Move the desktop to ARM and shake up the industry so much that Microsoft accelerates Windows ARM development
* Dominate US market share for years with the #1 selling smartphone
* "APPLE DOESN'T INNOVATE I MISS STEVE WAHHHH"

The MacRumors forums folks

In a nutshell.

 

[Bodhitree]

The iPhone was practically re-inventing the wheel. People need to realize we’re only going to see something like that once in our lifetimes.

That’s kind of true. The beauty of the iPhone was that it unified all the different devices in your pocket. Back in 2006 I was carrying an iPod for music, a phone, and a chunky laptop in my backpack. One single iPhone replaced all of that, and gave me gps for maps. It was a transformative device.

That kind of opportunity doesn’t come along that often.

 

[Chester Stone]

firefish – Every item on your list of supposed deficiencies in the "post-Jobs" Apple was present in the during-Jobs Apple. For example:

• "Removing a key hardware component, causing an uproar, but swearing it is better off."

Steve Jobs did this with serial and parallel ports, the floppy disk, FireWire, the compact disc, and the list goes on. (You weren't including software here, but I assume you've also heard of Flash.) Steve was always proud of this focus, and this characteristic's continued presence indicates Apple carries this forward.

Headphone jack, Escape key (which came back), MagSafe charging (coming back), ...

• "Returning to the older hardware component that was once removed, and now bring it back."

Your example was Lightning (though Lightning has never been absent from the product line since it was introduced). Remember the iPod shuffle? The second generation had buttons, the third generation didn't, and the fourth generation did. Steve explained he understood that people liked the buttons and they brought them back. Again, proudly.

The square-edged iPad Pro in 2018 went to a USB-C port, before coming back to Lightning this year.

Similar example: Going to Butterfly keyboards, touting them as better than the original keyboard in layout and travel, then coming back to the original (better/less noisy/more travel) keyboards.

Likewise, the Touch Bar is going away soon, in upcoming MacBook iterations..

MagSafe is coming back, etc.

• "Watching the form factor for the iPhones go back & forth between cylindrical then back to rectangular."

I assume you mean "rounded" by "cylindrical." Sure, and the PowerBook once had more squared-off corners, various early MacBooks had rounded corners, and the later aluminum MacBooks brought back more squared-off corners again. Again, Steve featured and described these proudly.

• "Now I'm hearing fingerprint biometric is coming back??!!"

Similarly, Touch ID has never been absent from Apple's product lineup since it was first introduced, so there's no sense in which it's "back." I can't really compare this to Jobs since he died before that introduction, but he certainly seemed to have an eye out for the privacy and security of people's data – a whole other topic.

The iPhone X removed Touch ID in favor of Face ID, and since then, the only new iPhones with Touch ID have been the iPhone SE (2020). It might come back to new iPhones in the form of under-the-screen fingerprint detection.

Anyway. If those indicators are how you measure whether Apple remains as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs, I'd say you've provided a decent case that it is.

It's not a monolithic either/or. There are similarities because large organizations change slowly, and many long-time veteran decisionmakers are still around, like Chris Espinosa, Kim Vorrath, Eddy Cue, ... but there is change, and the debate is whether or not software/hardware/design quality suffers without the product-innovation leadership under Steve Jobs.

Will it become like Disney after Walt's passing? I don't know, but there is growing macOS bug creep and a more sprawling product lineup.

 

[SuperMatt]

The square-edged iPad Pro in 2018 went to a USB-C port, before coming back to Lightning this year.

Minor correction: The new iPad Pro still uses USB-C, not Lightning. (Supports USB 4 and Thunderbolt 3)

iPad Pro - Technical Specifications

See full technical specifications for iPad Pro — resolution, size, weight, battery life, and storage capacity — for Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + Cellular models.

www.apple.com

 

[James Godfrey]

Personally I have enjoyed cooks leadership, he has brought so much to the table different sized devices, Apple Watch, AirPods, AirTags, more services…

I think he is doing a great job and apple are definitely still innovating in a current stagnant tech world…

Problem is their products are so far ahead of their time, it’s hard to bring anything new to the table for a consumer friendly price.