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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I don't work for Apple nor do I have any stake in them, but it can be really frustrating when people make assumptions and conclusions about the company you work for based on the limited information available to them as outsiders.

Do you really think that some silly advert made by the marketing department at Apple has any relevance to whatever the reasons were for the head of CPU design for iOS devices had for leaving?

Things might be changing for the worse inside Apple, but taking these two datapoints and assuming that something big is going wrong in the company seems to be a conclusion that isn't supported by the facts.

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avar: I'm not making any assumptions that anything big is going wrong in the company.

Falling short with national TV ads shown during the opening ceremony of the Olympics is a big deal for a company that until recently showed mostly amazing ads on TV. Losing a person who led CPU design for the company's fastest-growing businesses is also a big deal for a company that considered having that person a major coup.

Could you imagine either of these things -- lousy ads on a major TV event, key person departing -- happening while Jobs was running the show?

Edit: changed "only amazing" to "mostly amazing," which better reflects my views.

The Mac vs PC ads were amazing? I found them unbearable

Yes they were. They were brilliant in creating a direct divide between the "old" PC generation and the new hip Apple crowd.

Compare the message of PC vs. Mac to this message: "We have tools. Tools that work. Oh, and you need a genius to use them right" ?

> We have tools. Tools that work

Not if it is XCode.

What's wrong with Xcode? Seems fine for iOS / Mac OS X development. I surely prefer it above Eclipse and it is in some ways also nicer as Visual Studio.

Keeps crashing all the time.

That is not a tool that "works".

I can't say I share your experience. For my Xcode has been pretty stable, though I will admit it's not a perfect product.

I use the latest Xcode day to day. Xcode is not the kind of tool you can push. If you paint outside the lines, it'll crash.

The Switch ads were entertaining but not effective. The Mac and PC adds were slightly better in both departments but generally not seen as in the league of the iPod and iPhone commercials. The Genius ads seem like more of the same.

To me the only Mac computer ad that has stood out in the last decade or so has been the MBA out of the envelope commercial.

I found the Retina MBP ad to be perfectly executed. Straight up, product centered, beautifully shot, nicely synched with music to give an emotional punch. Better than most of the newer iPhone / iPad ads IMO.

If nothing else, they were at least iconic. People remembered them. What microsoft ad campaigns do you remember?

"Could you imagine [..] key person departing -- happening while Jobs was running the show?"

Avie Tevanian, Jon Rubinstein, Tony Fadell and Bertrand Serlet, all key people at various points in the history of Apple, left while Jobs was still in charge. I wouldn't read too much into this.

Keller could be leaving for a whole slew of reasons. At AMD, he works for a company whose core competency is chip design - his strength. At Apple, he is just a cog in a giant wheel. If he is instrumental in an AMD turnaround, he would have made a bigger impact than if he just pushing status quo at Apple.

I'm not sure this is a major impact for Apple. Firstly, I haven't seen anything groundbreaking come from Apple on the chip side. Secondly, there are plenty of talented people from AMD, Intel,HP, etc who would love to work for Apple. He can be replaced.

No one's calling it the end of Apple, but these are extremely ill-timed events in light of the big question mark hanging over Apple's head after Jobs' death.

When you have that kind of reservation looming about a company, you need to see encouraging signs, not the recent flow of tepid-to-bad news we've been seeing lately.

Between the ads, the loss of the CPU designer, the less-than-inspired iPhone 5 product image leaks (assuming they are real) and insignificant incremental product updates, one shouldn't be blamed for not ignoring the writing on the wall.

If you're going to go on assumed product leaks being true they launched the tear drop shaped iPhone 5 last year.

Encouraging signs:

* In their recent "disappointing" quarter they grew faster than Google.

* Mountain Lion has just become the fastest selling version of Mac OSX ever, shipping over 3 million copies in the first 4 days (from memory, those numbers may be a little out).

* The latest figures show iOS market share increasing despite the fact that the iPhone is due a refresh (which has historically meant sales are at their slowest).

* In a market where PC sales as a whole are decreasing, sales of the Mac are increasing.

But hell, they did some bad ads, the writing is on the wall.

If you know anything about product cycles, you should know that iPhone5 is absolutely signed off by SJ. And it is 100% certain that this phone is not the last product he signed off.

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