There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everything.
We don’t even have to wait for a new CEO for that! https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/26/ads-might-be-coming-to-app...
Well when the exterior is full, it's time to look inside!
Apparently the name iBalls was considered, but just well it was rejected. The Gonad Pocket accessory is on hold pending litigation by Borat over his Mankini patents.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
If anything I’d be pissed if Cook was out and the new CEO’s strategy involved making chips that needed upgrades every other year again. Or if they were like, “Macs don’t sell well, let’s cancel the product line.”
Of course Macs are still very profitable compared to what PC makers are making. Now they share a lot of the hardware and software stack with iPad/iPhone. So it shouldn't be too costly to maintain. And well Apple's entire ecosystem is built on them anyway. It's not like anyone besides masochists would consider actually developing apps on iPads...
I do: he was CEO when the outcome was realized. Shouldn’t CEO performance be judged by outcomes the company realizes during their tenure?
> judged by outcomes
In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over what was probably the company's darkest period (remains to be seen of course) and the situation was reasonably stable when he took over. Is he the one to blame for all of it?
It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.
So while Cook deserves credit for execution, the roadmap was laid in place by his predecessor.
Before Cook, Apple’s supply chain and manufacturing was a mess—too many of some products and not enough of others.
Back in the day, it was a running joke trying to buy products as an organization—they would announce a new Mac but you couldn’t buy it for 4-6 weeks.
It was Tim Cook who implemented Apple’s build to order system after Dell demonstrated its success. We take it for granted now, but it was a huge development at the time.
I have an idea for a memristor based neural processor for low power on device AI, but its worthless because I dont have the 9 billion dollars to realize this idea...
Let's not get into absolutes. Ideas can be as hard or harder than execution. Not many will claim ideas like Special Relativity are easy to come by.
It really depends on the idea and what you're executing. Often in business both the idea and the execution have to work out to captialize. In this case Jobs might have set the direction and Cook capitalized. Both deserve a share of the credit.
The noise cancelation features, and now the live translation function? So cool.
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.
I fear it is going to start getting visions of monetization and injecting advertisement and tracking into everything.
I don't see where the growth is coming from unless they start trying to squeeze what they've got entirely dry.
I feel like this is a recency bias. Snow Leopard famously had 'zero new features' so they could focus on cleaning things up.
- actually allow privacy, even from apple itself. Like turn off telemetry, not just anonymize it. and opt-in, not opt-out.
- install apps without asking permission
- allow access to your data, for example to export your imessages
Just in general be respectful and polite
For me, I’ve been fine with bean-counter Cook. MacBooks and iPhones are not perfect, but I strongly prefer them to the competition.
It's pretty explicit in intent.
When you first use CarPlay there are consent screens so there are definitely people out there who have picked the wrong one.
some cannot be disabled ("anonymized")
some is still opt-out
just off the top of my head on iphone: settings -> search -> help apple improve search
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
Happy to be corrected though, of course :)
Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.
You can get almost the same rectangles at half the price. /s
The richest and most "powerful" people still have meat-based assistants do all their shit: Take their notes, check their calendars, make their appointments, toast their bread..
And it shows: This is how you get features like "Edge Light" and an Invites app before fixing basic functionality that the peasants rely upon. Like how we get the weird iOS Journal app even though Notes could have done all that if they had improved it a bit.
Steve Jobs was probably one of the few people in charge who actually used his company's own products. You need someone who's annoyed with the status quo enough to make a company to solve it, not just someone elected by a board.
I don't know how you even come to that kind of conclusion at all actually.
Because most products, including iOS/macOS now, have glaring annoyances or shortcomings that have gone unfixed for a long time.
If Tim Cook or even Craig Federighi etc. actually used iOS/macOS in their day to day lives, they would have run into those issues sooner or later and they'd be fixed in a day.
(Hyperbole is a thing but the point stands)
Plenty of CEOs do. The comment you replied to already questioned Tim Cook's usage of Apple products.
Most Apple executives are probably using a Mac. Most engineers at Apple probably code on a Mac. Most engineers in the Bay already use Macs and have been using them for many years.
So odd of you to frame this as some sort of personal outrage. Like I'm so annoyed by this "glaring issue" on my device clearly the people working on this don't even use it or "it would be fixed in a day". Lol. Maybe people who actually have to get things done at a trillion dollar company don't have the same constraints as you, or relatedly, the luxury to obsess over your so-called glaring issues.
Tim and other executives might be using their devices as email machines, but it’s not obvious they’re using everything they’re quite literally selling us.
A few random examples:
1: The iOS keyboard is literally broken https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo&pp=ygUQaW9zIGtleWJ...
2: The Music app is barely functional, and will regularly fail to play music. Here it is bugging out, and stacking multiple album covers https://imgur.com/a/Sg8oU1p
3: Offloading an app does not actually save any space https://imgur.com/a/l9vxnhO
There’s so many more, and none of these examples are edge cases.
Hey you try waiting 5+ years on a bug report/feature request for a simple thing. Or things like a rendering bug that survives all year throughout beta into the X.1 release (see the Tahoe Contacts app)
You'd give up. This "outrage" is all the outlet we have left. Shame the system that lets such crap get through!
...yes? Quite often?
I'm all for ragging on CEOs but this seems misguided. The CEO has been a user of the core product at every company I've ever worked for.
If you think Tim Cook is pulling a Samsung Galaxy out of his pocket, I don't know what to tell you.
I thought : If only the CEO would dogfood this instead of farming it out to their lackeys/gofers/personal assistants, etc...
Instead these poor people deal with stuff like that (if they're doing online shit).
"Privatize the profit, socialize the (pain in the ass enshittification, or whatever)."
Then the ending comment that again can't seem to distinguish a generalized slogan re a broad social grievance with a specific claim or discussion. And the sense of personal victimization. Because something is annoying you, well clearly you are being taken advantage of. You didn't even contribute anything pertinent to the discussion except to complain about a wholly unrelated UX experience, only to limply tie it together by doing nothing more than conclude that obviously both CEOs are richer than you are.
He should. He should literally be using competitors for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.
"Should Tim Cook use iPhone?"
>He should. He should literally be using iPhones for real work, at least half of the time, deep in their ecosystem, to understand where Apple products need to improve.
I remember Bill Gates got that to be changed after an e-mail rant he wrote about how bad Windows had become. This was 2002 or so.
(It's "macOS", BTW.)
Jobs blasted folks for bad experiences, whereas I get tripped up by updates making me run through the OOBE, that doesn't contain anything, because its already set up.
The last update ran through the "connect to WiFi" process, and failed because it was already set up and connected to WiFi, but blocked everything until I managed to get through the pointless Next Next Next process. It felt like Windows in 2000.
Strange argument. e.g. Warren Buffet allegedly doesn't even have a computer.
Most people don't really have a team of assistants and other subordinates extracting and processing all of the information they might need to make high level decisions. And I'm pretty sure the employees doing that are generally using actual computers rather than tablets for most stuff.
While not as bad as Windows, which has way too many chefs in the kitchen, it is getting there.
I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustainability v's replace it every 12-24 months. I guess sustainability concerns at Apple ends at ensuring their stock price is sustainable.
I’ve also had it in a case the whole time, if I opened a box and found this thing I don’t think I’d be unhappy. Other than the inevitable gunk that gets in the speakers and the charging hole, it could be new…
I guess it is a race between battery health (80%) and update incompatibility, to see what will kill the thing.
My work phones are typically on a 4-5 year cycle. I’m currently carrying a 12 or 13 pro. I would have upgraded early for USB-C with that phone, but MagSafe is good enough.
So I didn't go 11 years on two models, more like 7 years or so. But I'm definitely not on the two-years-and-upgrade plan.
I miss the SE but the 13 mini is really nice too. It's a shame because the SE is still perfectly capable of running most software I use on a phone, but that software has just gotten more inefficient over time.
I'm kind of the opposite, I would never want to go back to Touch ID. It's so nice that you can set your notifications to be private by default, but the contents will be revealed when you glance at the phone.
The new phone is FaceId ioty is much less reliable than touch id. With touch it just fails if I have wet hands or in cold weather with gloves, faceId fails in many places.
Much better than having to pull it out, hold in in a way that it can see my face, then swipe up, then wait for the stupid animation at the top of the screen to finish and the actual unlock to occur and then finally be able to use the device.
In that sense they are very bad customers because they won't upgrade for social status reason or just novelty. They actually need to come up with something that is worthwhile, which is pretty hard. That being said, I'm pretty sure many of those users would upgrade if they could keep the small format and make it more reasonably affordable by removing most of "useless" stuff. It seems like they tried that with the air (no multiple cameras, no multiple speakers) but they made it too big and went with thinness for feeling points. They could have just kept it reasonably sized (under 6") and designed the internals in the same way while keeping it flat but not too thick.
I think Apple is a bit lost because their design focus too much on looks/feelings and social status points. They lack the focus that Apple products used to have, this is what made them interesting: deceptively simple in presentation but actually providing everything that you need without going crazy on the gimmicks.
As it is, one wonders why he should go with an iPhone. They are just chasing specs sheet points, trying to maximise the amounts of stuff they can put on the phone in order to create the appearance of "value". At this game they get destroyed by competitors like Samsung and even more the Chinese. Before, one could argue for an iPhone because of the CPU lead or the software but nowadays none of those things really matters or can even be considered an advantage.
Apple will keep selling lot's of iPhone because they are still somewhat the "hip" brand and people really don't like to change habits. But they are going to need to provide more value in the long term. Since the high-end doesn't meaningfully evolve anymore, brands have started a price war and Apple will definitely need to adapt if it doesn't want to have its crown stollen. In the US they have some time, but I think they are already losing ground in the EU and China has clearly stopped caring about their devices.
I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.
With 4G, you could actually do something quickly.
Not an Apple product user, but my wife and kids are, and... install the OS upgrade? That pretty much bricked 2 of our phones and a friend's as well.
Recently I dropped my phone (while in a case) and now there's a black spot on the screen.
Stuff like this. I live a life between a lot of DIY work and software dev, so I'm physically probably rougher on it than most, but also a heavy user of the technology too.
Not to mention the e-waste from non-repairable battery-based devices like air-pods.
Corporation make planned obsolescence decisions that happen to benefit themselves, then can dress it up as "water resistance".
Wouldn't be so bad but Apple's anti-consumer decisions are unfortunately imitated.
I'm OK with wireless charging and using the USB port for audio or other purposes, though occasionally I want to use wired Ethernet or Thunderbolt displays at the same time as wired audio, and I also use a wired charge/audio dongle as a car adapter (though there are wireless chargers available.)
And the 3.5mm<->USB-C dongle works perfectly and is tiny.
But every new OS version manages to use more CPU and GPU and burn down that battery faster even if it's brand new, since the older chips have to work harder to run them than they had to work to run the older OSes.
I replaced my battery which was showing around 83% of original capacity last year, in a 3-4 year old phone. I was skeptical of the 83% reported number. Nope. The new battery didn't last much longer, nowhere close to how long it lasted on the OS it shipped with.
(This software-cpu-bloat is not unique to Apple. My Pixel, after 4 years or so, was practically unusable just from the amount of background shit the CPU was doing, compared to when it was new.)
All the App Store discourse would be moot if they clearly enforced a minimum software quality but they are way too greedy to actually do that. So in the end you are subjected to the same software bloat as Android but you just pay more for the device.
Pixels get slow because they have very weak CPUs to begin with. If you had gone with a Samsung the experience would be much better (not too different than that of an iPhone, even though the look is of a different taste).
If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change.
I think it also has to do with the shift in computing population. It was easy to convince tech people to buy a new OS based on a feature list. When computers became more widely used, it became harder and harder. E.g. when OS X still had paid upgrades, it was very hard to convince non-tech family to buy the update. Buying a new device is easier, because the features are immediately visible to people and carrying a newer devices is also a form of social signaling.
At the same time, the internet became far more hostile and running an OS that has all the security updates is important. So, it's easier to get people to update when the updates are free.
I’m on my 13 pro max now and will be at least for another year or two.
Throughout that time my 5 year old phone got every OS and security update. And it’ll get the OS update in 2026 as well. So the phone released in 2020 gets software updates till 2027 - 7 years. The main issue that makes people want to upgrade is battery life degrading. Good thing Apple offers cheap and quick battery replacements in store. I replaced my battery at the 2 year mark for a small amount of money and it felt like a new phone.
What more could Apple possibly do to make their devices more sustainable? The processors are insanely overpowered, so they don’t feel slow. The batteries are easy to replace. The software updates are there. Being a bit cynical, Apple only making small incremental changes each year reduces the need to upgrade even further.
If people want to replace their devices every year or two that’s on them, not Apple.
Whatever he facilitated, it worked for me. Execution matters.
Steve was so effective precisely because he was able to get deeply involved in the day to day details in ways no other CEO has (whether on product matters, or personnel matters). That's not what you do as chairman of the board.
Jobs in that role would likely take a much more occasionally-active role w.r.t. future product direction since that was kind of his bread-and-butter and the company was his long-time passion project. Not because that's the regular purpose of that role, but because that's what he'd probably want to keep doing.
His claims, specifically on cancer, were widely and roundly rejected by the scientific and medical community. This is not a controversial statement, either - his supporters proudly proclaim that his views are rejected by the vast majority of experts which, in my opinion, pretty much sums it up.
I highly recommend people avoid falling into this dangerous rabbit hole.
"Probably", he'd not be around today. Even with his money, it'd be improbable.
If he had received real care immediately after diagnosis, he’d almost certainly be alive and cancer free today.
Not moving goalposts, but on another note:
He refused regular treatment for 9 months, for an allegedly slow-growing type of cancer?
That still doesn't sound that crazy, especially given he lived another 8 years.
Per this paper, with surgery and treatment, a 50yr old man diagnosed with grades 1/2, stage 1 pnet tumor, has a median additional lifespan of 23 years. You can do the regression yourself for all of his characteristics but there’s no reason as one of the wealthiest people on earth that he couldn’t have lived to old-age.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinre.2018.08....
Think of cancer like trying to stop an exponential growth curve. Waiting months for treatment can mean billions or trillions of additional cancer cells you need to clear. And instead of being able to carve them out of one location, they’re now all over your body requiring systematic poisoning.
He had an overwhelming presence in SF until the New Wave of the 1960s
Many universities had depts to study “parapsychology.” The end of that era is the basis for the opening of Ghostbusters. I’m using popular media as shorthand for how wide-spread these ideas were, but military and intelligence operations seriously studied this stuff too, and in many countries, not just the U.S.
This is the way science goes; people can only work with what is known at the time. Newton was doing alchemy while inventing the basis for modern physics. It’s tempting to look back and condemn people by the standards of what we know today, which is based on additional evidence and theory developed over decades or centuries since. But I think it inhibits understanding of how such knowledge is created over time.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdvzYtgmIjs&t=2825s
(in case the link goes down: Tim Cook, Sir Jony Ive KBE, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Code 2022 Interview with Kara Swisher)
- Apple Watch
- Airpods (& Pro) & Beats
- Apple Silicon
- Vision Pro
I think people are underestimating cook because none of these replaced the iPhone and because of the significant degradation in Apple software.
At $1500 I'd eventually talk myself into it.
At $3500 I'm just waiting.
Putting their CPUs in laptops wasn't an incredible initiative from Cook either, it was basically an inevitability that mobile class cores would eventually intercept high end CPUs for performance after Dennard scaling ended, and it was widely predicted by many Apple watchers even before their own core came out, but particularly after the first ones came out.
Some thought it would be sooner, some later. If Intel hadn't shat the bed for a decade, and/or if the PA Semi team and subsequent Apple CPU team turned out to be in the Samsung or Annapurna tier, then it might have taken many more years, or they might have switched over to an ARM Ltd core IP. But the trajectory for how things turned out was set in motion squarely by Jobs. Who brought up the CPU group and introduced the first high performance Apple CPU silicon.
Jobs oversaw Apple silicon, Jobs switched to using Apple CPU cores.
Previous switches were to Intel around 2006 (Jobs), with last one in 2023 (Cook). And to PowerPC around 1994 to 2006 (Jobs)?
Seems to me the 2020 switch went mostly seamlessly thanks to the work done with the earlier switch to Intel.
Phones and iPads started with ARM and are still ARM to this day.
Moving laptops to ARM ISA with Apple cores can be credited to Cook, but it was not a big move or a risky step like standing up their own CPU design team was. From the release of Swift and onwards, all the punters were speculating about when (not if) it would happen, and you could really plot a performance line for Apple vs Intel/AMD CPUs and make a pretty educated guess when it would happen.
And yes, the powerpc and x86 switches gave them a lot of experience doing the ARM switch, with fast emulation, fat binaries, etc., and others like IBM had implemented TSO modes in weakly ordered CPUs and others like Transmeta had special instructions for x86 flags emulation. It wasn't really a huge technical gamble beyond what Cook inherited to move to ARM.
If Apple had enough money back then to bankroll full R&D on both the chip design and the foundry, they would have never gone with Intel in the first place. Intel won because of massive volume PC sales got them with a similar amount of money thrown into PowerPC it would probably stayed competitive.
Apple Silicon share many similarities in design philosophy with PowerPC and Apple had invested in ARM way before Cook was even considered as a CEO replacement.
The best thing we can say about Cook is that he managed to not fuck it up. In practice he is just a greedy snake that is very good at sucking every last drop of profit of anything Apple manages to create. He has very little positive influence on the vision and roadmap side of things.
The fact that people keep praising Cook is just reflection of the times, where money in itself has become a goal and the sole worthwhile target.
This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.
But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.
Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.
His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).
Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.
For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
User: "Siri, <insert question>"
Siri: "I cannot answer that right now" <end conversation>
User: <follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, so they prefix again with Hey Siri> please ask chatgpt < insert question>
Siri: "Hello, sure I can ask ChatGPT · Check important info for mistakes"
ChatGPT: "Hello, how can i help you today"
User: <insert question>
ChatGPT: Answers question and siri terminates conversation
User: <asks follow up question, but then user realizes that siri has ended the conversation, user then goes to settings and disables apple intelligence>
Egregious...
(My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.)
However, software-wise, the peak was 10.6. There hasn't been the same level of quality ever since.
Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases.
Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco!
But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal computing. From the iMac "make it simpler by going back to basics, but future-looking basics" to "easier to manage, funner to use music players" through showing how smartphones and then tablets could be far more functional and usable than MS', Palm's, or Nokia's visions. The watch is the next best category-definer since then, and the iCloud cross-device stuff generally feels better-done than competitors still, but otherwise... refine, refine, refine, and slowly add more ads and upsells. Microsoft or anyone else could run that playbook, in a way that they never could match the Apple playbook from 1997 to 2011.
(One side question here is "are there new segments out there waiting to be invented?" which I don't know the answer to. But even so, "becoming just another upsell-pushing, ad-driven, software-subscription-service provider" wasn't a necessary path.)
It’s tempting to compare one’s memory of an old late-cycle OS, after all the UI changes have been accepted and the bugs squashed, to the day-1 release of a new OS today, when UI changes seem new and weird and there are tons of bugs they knowingly shipped to hit the launch date (just like with Snow Leopard). But it’s not really a fair comparison.
However, when it comes to UX, stability is a major component, and this is where Mac OS X is vastly superior to cooperative multitasking, lack-of-memory-protection Mac OS 9 and below. I prefer the classic Mac UI, but Mac OS X had a better UX.
Running Apple's "Macintosh" screen saver reminds me that Apple used to care about every pixel. Now even basic user interface elements like the menu bar are clunky, with things like the Window menu not aligning properly (even on a wide display where there is more than enough space.) Menus getting lost behind the notch is another annoying problem.
It seems like Microsoft learned from Apple's original approach somewhat, at least for Windows 95 through Windows 7 (though I think for a while there was a dead zone below the start menu, a fairly obvious mistake), but Apple seems to have strayed from the path with an invisible, gestural interface.
Apple has done an amazing job integrating all that hardware. And I say this as someone who was looking to buy a notebook to install Linux, as its my favorite OS.
So what im doing is put Ubuntu Server Arm + kde-desktop in VMware and use it as my main dev env.
They were brilliant at pushing for new stuff but it came with the issues of pushing a little to fast at times.
Apple Silicon definitely transformed expectations for laptop performance and battery life, especially in a fanless design like the MacBook Air.
I do wish my M1 MacBook Pro weren't bulkier and heavier than my old intel model. I went all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt so I would have liked 4 ports (or more). But the battery life and performance are probably worth it. And the MacBook Air 15" is lighter and thinner than the 15" intel models, but still has good battery life.
This was so incredible to see play out in real time.
You know where else this is happening now? Car makers and CarPlay.
CarPlay might be objectively better but car makers are giving them the boot, for very good reason.
Apple overplayed their hand (or as you say, was incredibly greedy) and now they get to live with the consequences.
That's very different from a Toyota x Apple partnership.
So no, those are two different scenarios. The era of Apple controlling the platform is gone. (Except for legacy ones)
So this is a classic game theory situation. You want all participants (Toyota, Honda, Ford) to cooperate (not have CarPlay) and not defect. So participants watch each others move.
If they stick together, all of them stand to win.
If one defect, in the short term they might win but in the long-term Apple will seek to commoditize the car maker.
They increasingly just don't buy Tesla. Strong growth in that segment lately.
I recall though, back in 2021 we rented one as a test drive situation. The UX was so horrific I did an immediate 180 on that idea. Hard pass. Carplay might've saved that sale, their stock infotainment is trash.
I wouldn't be surprised if they go all on in Carplay Ultra near the end.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-13/tesla-is-...
>Tesla Inc. is developing support for Apple Inc.’s CarPlay system in its vehicles, according to people with knowledge of the matter, working to add one of the most highly requested features by customers.
>The carmaker has started testing the capability internally, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the effort is still private.
I'll let you in on a secret. Ask yourself what the business case of CarPlay is. "Why" should Apple do CarPlay. Put yourself in the shoes of a VP at Apple pitching CarPlay. Are they saying "let's invest millions of dollars in inventing the UI for cars and give it away for free, for .. goodwill?"
Nope, the slide deck would say 'Cars are the next computing platform. That's where most people spend time. So imagine is we (Apple) were meaningful present there .. and that's why we need to invest in it'
So, yes CarPlay is a move to control another computing formfactor. One they do not manufacturer (like tv and Apple TV) ...and unfortunately for them, car makers are wiser this time around.
> unfortunately for them, car makers are wiser this time around
Maybe. Ditching CarPlay does not currently seem like the wise decision, given how many of us have decided that omitting it is a deal killer. I love my Lightning, but I do not for one nanosecond trust that Ford would keep the app ecosystem on my truck running as long as Apple will keep iOS working on iPhones.
The reasons are subscription revenue and user data. Not sure which of those you consider very good.
What else could shareholders want? Employees, management, founders, customers, vendors could all have other goals, wants or desire but when you have a large number of shareholders that is what they want always.
Shareholders - a large majority of them are institutional with their own shareholders they are accountable to, always want more money - that is a core principle of capitalism.
Occasionally we can tie other objectives to financial gains to get a behave in a specific way, say a green initiative will improve the brand perception therefore brand value - because now they can charge more/ justify current pricing etc.
It can at times align the other way too for risk minimization - a founder wants a large budget for something - like say Zuckerberg with Metaverse[3], or Musk with $1T pay [2] firing the founder is more expensive[1] so shareholders sign off.
Fundamentally it always boils down to profit/value maximization for the shareholders.
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[1] By no means unique, except for the scale of money spent on a vanity project.
[2] Firing is more expensive - Tesla trades at such crazy multiples those are arguably not viable without Musk. It is probably cheaper to give then $1T pay package or the similar $56b package from 2018 currently being disputed in court.
[3] Almost impossible in Meta's case. The board can fire the CEO in any company, but since Zuckerberg owns > 50% of the voting shares, he as the majority shareholder can also fire the board anytime and replace with a board who will sign off. It is not absolute power though, there are some protections for minority shareholders as Delaware court is showing with 2018 Musk package case.
In contrast, Microsoft has innovated a lot on the desktop since Windows 7 and I hate almost all of it. I'd happily go back to the old experiences.