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Comment by bobbylarrybobby | Hacker News Reader

The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.

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There were ~60M iPhone users when Jobs was the CEO. There are about ~1.4B right now. Both respectively accomplished very respectable things. It’s not selling for a quick buck if he was able to scale the business to such degrees. That being said, I agree that Apple makes a lot of wrongs.

> There are about ~1.4B right now.

What are you basing this on, the total number of iPhones sold since 2007? If so, it doesn't account for the users that have bought multiple iPhones.

One google shows that’s considered the “current active user” count, not total sales. 2.3 billion by Jan 2024 (so more now) is the estimate for total sales.

I did quick Googling, and it sounded about right. Roughly 50% USA, 20% China, 50% Japan, 30% Europe, 3% India already is a big number.

I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim. However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.

Part of the appeal of Apple was that not everyone and their mom just had an Apple device. They heavily played on that, similar to how fashion does. That "exclusivity" (sort of) is gone now, and it shows with Apple trying to create likable, noncontroversial designs for the larger crowd. They try to make up for it with prices, but it misses the point.

Maybe that was part of the appeal to you.

To most of us, the appeal of Apple has always been primarily that it does what it does well.

I don't think Apple themselves thinks their appeal depends on exclusivity, but rather on a premium experience.

I promise you, in 2005, everyone and their mom had an iPod. If you couldn’t afford the full fat iPod, you bought any of the various cheaper stripped down models. If anything, Apple has gotten more exclusive through their pricing.

Apple became Gucci

Jobs had won complete cultural dominance of desktop pcs with the iMac 27". If you saw a desktop on a tv show for the past 20 years it was an iMac 27". Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.

Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.

I much prefer being able to use third-party displays and not having to get rid of perfectly good screens when getting a new computer.

My current and previous machines were 27” iMacs. The first one, a first gen 5k bought in 2014, is in our kitchen and still heavily used.

I don’t know what I’ll do when I need a new personal machine.

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