How does Apple keep secrets so well? (2012) | Hacker News Reader

How does Apple keep secrets so well? (2012)

quora.com

51 pointsMoto745123 comments

I don't see what so special about apple. A lot of entities manage to keep secrets very well. They use a mix of paying their employees well, having a company culture around innovation, a good security system, and contract promissing to sue you to death if you rat.

Take the CNES (National Centre for Space Studies in europe): they have individual scanner gates at each entrances. You can't get in without your whole body being trapped in a tube, alone. You can move anywhere without the proper clearance, and often somebody going with you. Each room is locked out with a card system. All the corridors look the same, so an attacker would have a hard time going somewhere specifically. The IT system is seriously locked down. Yet in all rooms you'll find prototypes, scale models and pictures, so that everybody is proud to work here and feel a sense of responsibility.

Protecting industrial secrets is not an apple thing.

Apple makes mass market products by the zillions and has a long external supply chain. They can't put everyone in tubes.

And, 99% of people don't care about the secrets that CNES is hiding. Most people are actually interested in Apple's next product, making it much hard to keep a secret.

I was also sort of hoping for suggestions on how Apple can efficiently put more people in tubes.

I don't think making mass market products or having a long supply chain necessarily means you can't keep secrets. I mean, Nintendo seems pretty damn good at keeping their cards close to their chest, arguably even better than Apple in that sense, and they've got a decent supply chain and mass market products. Same goes with Valve.

Quite a few smaller companies there are the same way too. You very rarely hear about leaks coming from Retro Studios or Rare for example. Companies have definitely have a more secretive culture, and while it won't 100% stop leaks, it'll definitely keep them to the bare minimum.

Ok, but you're replying to something I didn't say.

CNES isn’t working on consumer products used by billions of people, which where popular enough to generate a market for media publications devoted to only talk about them. The comparison is completely clueless. Where you to spill the beans on some new CNES innovation in a bar, the best you can aspire to is a “cool story bro” remark from some drunk fella sitting next to you. Try doing that when you’re an Apple engineer working on the iPhone and your beer burps will be the pullquote of a Bloomberg piece in two hours.

Funny you should mention a bar: https://gizmodo.com/this-is-apples-next-iphone-5520164

:o)

That was the reference ;)

So you're saying security at this marketing driven consumer products company isn't so special, because government agencies developing top secret military technology are far more secure? Well, I suppose you're right but I don't think that's the sort of comparison most people would make.

>I don't see what so special about apple. A lot of entities manage to keep secrets very well.

A lot of entities where everybody and their dog (including all the media) care and want to get the scoop about their latest products?

Or places like CNES, where 90% of people have never even heard of or care about?

This comparison is laughable. Apple faces far more scrutiny than CNES.

I've always found this story a little odd. OSX is really just NeXTSTEP with an updated UI and application framework. NeXTSTEP was developed and ran on Intel CPUs throughout the 90s. Right through until OSX was initially released, even while at Apple Steve Job's personal machine was a Think Pad running NeXTSTEP. The other thing is that Darwin, the underlying OS of OSX, was released publicly as PowerPC and Intel binaries, as well as source, right through the PowerPC years. So people at Apple were at least running the base OS layer on Intel boxes for development and QA testing, out in the open, right through to the switch to Intel Mac hardware in 2006. They were even giving Intel Darwin to the public on installation discs. The only thing missing was the Cocoa UI layer. Surely Bertrand Serlet would have known all of this? His reaction of shock and surprise in this story doesn't make any sense.

I can understand that the plan to switch to Intel hardware was a big secret, but the fact the software ran on Intel the whole time was perfectly obvious. That such a huge deal was made out of Apple's amazing achievement porting OSX to Intel, then and even now, leaves me a bit nonplussed.

i worked on a secret project codenamed "Star Trek" porting 68k assembler based macos to x86 way back in 1992, pretty fun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project

Interesting read but it doesn't really answer the question.

This question has aged badly, Apple used to keep secrets really well, but now they're not doing so well. But I can't remember the last major product they had that wasn't leaked before it was officially announced. And their self-driving car project has been widely written about without even any product in sight.

One good way in which they have become less secrecy-obsessed is that they're now doing public betas of their OSes.

The AirPods were a huge surprise.

The last really major new product announcement was the watch which was a while ago, so it's hard to tell. With really big projects it's hard to hide their existence, even for the military let alone a private firm, but Apple have always been very good at concealing critical details. For example we knew they were working on a web browser, phone, tablet and watch but little else until the public announcements and each came with big surprises. We know they're working on self-driving tech, but beyond that what do we really know about it?

For most of those "leaks": with enough people speculating and coming up with ideas of what Apple might do, there is a high probability of a few people being correct.

That is because there is literally no secret in large volume purchase and production in Supply Chain. You are talking about a product that will be sold in 100+ millions in following 12 months. Apple used to keep secrets very well because they were tiny. And there were way less Apple fans then. Now reporting news on Apple has become a big business in itself, so much Bloomberg decided they need a whole team just to report on technology and Apple related news. Apple Keynote was watched by 20M people in 2014, I wouldn't be surprise if the number are now over 50M, that rivals many of the most popular sport's top league live viewers.

But when the product is totally not in the radar of journalist, they came out of no where. AirPod for example, is one of best Apple innovation in recent years. It was simple, and it works. Try getting any older bluetooth Ear pieces works and I would throw them out of the windows within 5 min. it worked so well that everyone is using it, and they were selling like hotcakes. Since AirPod is now on radar, there is no escape in media trying to poke at people and supply chain.

Having said that, they could have done a much better job in software secrecy, since they control everything within it. And yet time and time again Apple seems to not put much care into protecting its secrecy.

Apple is highly compartmentalized.

I had a friend working on iPod frameworks and he was free to talk with me about new iPod developments because he only learned about them the same was I would: by watching the public announcements on YouTube.

A bunch of old Cygnus colleagues work at Apple. One of them, working on the debugger, said he was shocked when macOS-on-intel came out because he hadn't heard about it. That team had had to make their own fork of the toolchain (and presumably the OS!) to fix their own bugs, until it was publicly released. He said he thought a few weird bug reports about things like stack frame assumptions that came in from random external addresses (about the generic gdb) were probably, in retrospect, from the Marklar team, but that he would never know.

I'm convinced one of the strengths of the Valley is the de facto permeability of NDAs, and I actually consider Apple's level of secrecy a weakness. Though they seem pretty satisfied with their approach :-).

I see, it was so secret that even Apple didn't know it was developing it.

Well written, but the answer is still unclear sadly

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