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.
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.
Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.
It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.
The repair argument needs some other positive because for most people they're going to get their phone repaired at the store they bought the phone. They're just changing one store for another, if at all.
When switching phones, the only thing a customer sees is a new software and hardware experience, and at the layer of experience I think many people may feel that there isn't an interesting difference in the app store either.
Google championed PWAs and I feel like Google doesn't even talk about the topic very much anymore. The whole conversation around web doesn't care much for mobile atm, with a slight pendulum swing back to more native-ish experience. The differences between touch and mouse/keyboard are just so different that they deserve something more than responsive design.
When the consumer looks at Google vs Apple's messaging app... they're just going to see apps. Maybe one is better, one is glassier, one is more bouncy and more emoji, but they're all just playing in the same playground, aren't they?
That's what I'm saying with these point by point returns. For all the differences we're supposed to observe, from the layer of experience it all feels like the same.
Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add. So you can't eliminate dupes or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
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.
Nothing you say is in disagreement with the comment you're responding to. And yeah, Apple is doing really well, in part because of their anti competitive practices. Good for them, bad for us.
These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo:
> Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them
> Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?
I don’t think any of the original articles complaints are wrong but I don’t agree with the thesis. They are one of the best selling device manufacturers because the product and ecosystem is so good. My point was that folks, maybe like yourself, who don’t find the ecosystem open enough or the devices repairable enough, are outliers compared to the average consumer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sure, but people might try different things. I switched to an iPhone for three months before the keyboard drove me mad enough to switch back to Android.
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...
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.
It's by far the strongest sign of AI writing. I counted 14 instances of the word "not" in this piece, and now I'm wondering if ratio-of-nots-to-length might be a really cheap way to spot text that came out of an LLM.
I think the reason is grates so much is that it's such a cliché. Given their nature, it's not surprising that LLMs would turn to clichés so much.
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.
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.
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!
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
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!
I do usually do a pass through Grammarly, and there are some times when I ask AI for help getting my point across. But I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.
It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.
The repair argument needs some other positive because for most people they're going to get their phone repaired at the store they bought the phone. They're just changing one store for another, if at all.
When switching phones, the only thing a customer sees is a new software and hardware experience, and at the layer of experience I think many people may feel that there isn't an interesting difference in the app store either.
Google championed PWAs and I feel like Google doesn't even talk about the topic very much anymore. The whole conversation around web doesn't care much for mobile atm, with a slight pendulum swing back to more native-ish experience. The differences between touch and mouse/keyboard are just so different that they deserve something more than responsive design.
When the consumer looks at Google vs Apple's messaging app... they're just going to see apps. Maybe one is better, one is glassier, one is more bouncy and more emoji, but they're all just playing in the same playground, aren't they?
That's what I'm saying with these point by point returns. For all the differences we're supposed to observe, from the layer of experience it all feels like the same.
> Anything I missed?
The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.
Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add. So you can't eliminate dupes or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
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.
Nothing you say is in disagreement with the comment you're responding to. And yeah, Apple is doing really well, in part because of their anti competitive practices. Good for them, bad for us.
These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo:
> Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them
> Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?
How did we jump to cigarettes?
I don’t think any of the original articles complaints are wrong but I don’t agree with the thesis. They are one of the best selling device manufacturers because the product and ecosystem is so good. My point was that folks, maybe like yourself, who don’t find the ecosystem open enough or the devices repairable enough, are outliers compared to the average consumer.
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.
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.
> developers to pay them their 30% tax
There are provisions for 15%
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.
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.
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> 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?
When we pay premium, we expect premium.
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.
Have you considered that critics might not care about Apple investors?
> 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”.
> 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×
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.
Microsoft is hardware company too. Surface, Xbox, computer peripherals, etc.
they're clearly not the main revenue drivers, contrary to Apple
> 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.
Is Zuckerberg retiring already? I'd gladly same the same about him then. But this isn't about any of those companies.
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.
Why are you comparing Apple to software companies. Apples to oranges.
You’re comparing Apple to Facebook is especially gross.
On so many levels.
Both are companies are repulsive. There's something comparable here.
Dell?
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.
> 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.
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.
> And Steve Job's Apple was an ethical company because...
Did I say that?
Yep, Cooks new role is essentially lobbyist.
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?
I like Apple's products. I just purchased an iPhone 17 Pro. It does not mean I cannot still criticize them because of their monopolistic practices.
I was doing Apple support since 1995, I saw how they changed.
I mean, they certainly would never have given Trump a gold bar to forgive this case now, would they?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj...
> 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.
> I want ethical companies
This will never exist.
We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.
Yes, the reason Apple was so successful at Cook's helm is because he gifted Trump a plaque.
Why do you think they got most of their components exempted from tarrifs?
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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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role.
At that level and scale it's merely politics.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I found the first one of those to be fixed recently. I haven't had the Mac note sync problem in about a month.
Yeap, it was a bug with iOS 24.6: https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/08/iphone-icloud-sync-bug-apple-...
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
Paste a screenshot into TextEdit doc and make a pdf.
Tested this now. Works like a bomb. https://imgur.com/a/t1ufCqr
Tested this, works for me.
HomeKit cooking your phone battery, period.
What devices specifically?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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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!
macOS may be stunningly bad, but Windows 11 and any flavor of Linux are far worse.
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
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.
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.
Federighi has been coasting for years. I hope Ternus fixes that.
On the upside, at least Federighi didn't get the top job.
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?!
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.
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 :-) )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly - they do not GAF because there is no worthy competitor. No one else has a (semi) functional ecosystem...
>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.
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.
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.
Hey ChatGPT, generate a controversed article for my blog. No worries if examples are made up and some information is objectively wrong.
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.
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 ;)
Did Steve Jobs have a passion for iMusic? He wasn't perfect either.
HN should partner with Pangram to give an AI score to things that are submitted.
>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.
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)
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.
Will we finally have a native way to ‘select all’ text in iPadOs?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or maybe you don't understand that for some people there are more important things than "how much money will I make from this?"...
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.
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.
Sure, but people might try different things. I switched to an iPhone for three months before the keyboard drove me mad enough to switch back to Android.
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...
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.
Can we have someone like Woz at the helm please?
much as I love and revere woz that is a terrible idea
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.
LLM slop
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It's by far the strongest sign of AI writing. I counted 14 instances of the word "not" in this piece, and now I'm wondering if ratio-of-nots-to-length might be a really cheap way to spot text that came out of an LLM.
I think the reason is grates so much is that it's such a cliché. Given their nature, it's not surprising that LLMs would turn to clichés so much.
"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.
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.
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!
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
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!
I do usually do a pass through Grammarly, and there are some times when I ask AI for help getting my point across. But I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say.
I'm the first to say I'm not the best writer...
> I always try to change what they write into something I feel I would say.
Or is this also true: "I don't change what a LLM writes so long as it doesn't seem like something I would write"
It's just like vibe coding it's the new normal. We don't notice our own unique voices when writing. But as a collective we do notice LLM voices.
Submissions are different than comments in HN rules - don't worry about it.
Don’t take too much from these comments. HN has an unrelentingly negative tone.
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.
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.
“Here’s the thing” is also a longtime cliche in podcasts, from the before-times when ChatGPT didn’t yet exist.
Or "It turns out..." Somehow it just bugs me, and I'm usually so laidback
It’s futile, the Internet as we knew it is over. The Great Enshittification of the West is well past the halfway point.
of the West?
That is a thing may humans say, though. Doesn’t mean this is AI slop.
There are several other LLM smells in that article.
The author just responded to say that the article is not an LLM product.
There are other people who noticed the LLM smells as well.
Writing well is hard but unfortunately people like taking shortcuts and making it our problem
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).
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.
oh my god it finally happened, a downvoted danabramov comment
if you cry wolf enough times, people finally wake up
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.
Agreed ! So what