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  havaloc
  Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role.If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
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  CGMthrowaway
  Add to Cook's impeccable timing, that he stepped out of CEO role and into Chairman on exactly his 65th birthday, the very day he became first eligible for his pension
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  rbanffy
  On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps.At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.
• afro88
  This is an excellent article. And can I just remind everyone that this is what human authorship looks like? Clearly not LLM generated. It has the author's unique tone, take on the subject, research, clear compelling story... A real breath of fresh air to be honest.
• spiralpolitik
  I think the article makes a bit too much of the decision to partner with Google for the AI model. Sometimes knowing where the boundaries of your business are is better than trying to expand too far and getting it wrong.I think Apple understands that the moat in AI is the UX, something that historically they've been very good at. The model is a commodity and I suspect they will quite happily go with another provider if Google doesn't work or buy a company in the inevitable AI fire sale if they can see a good fit.
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  Aeroi
  Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace.Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
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  ryanmcbride
  I read an article speculating that Ternus was up next in I think wsj and it sounds like a good decision but obviously time will tell. I've been super disillusioned with Cook for years now, I just hope Ternus's approach isn't just more of the same, and that he actually works to innovate/improve the apple ecosystem.Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.
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  doitLP
  > Cook was, without question, an operational geniusI’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
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  zenapollo
  I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1])It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerbnYhhw7s
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  cmiles8
  He had what many called at the time an impossible task of taking over from Jobs. There are areas where things could have gone better but overall he had a solid run and kept the company growing post Jobs.He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
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  JKCalhoun
  Cook Doctrine: "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."And later:"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
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  spectraldrift
  The author lost me when they quoted Thiel.
• settsu
  > We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing.That this is a foundational idea for anything is nauseating...
• yazantapuz
  > Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one: a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second: a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.Every time that i watch that keynote i think that Jobs should have started that list with the internet communication device thing, then the touch ipod and mobile phone last. The audicience responded to the internet device with a "meh" after the mobile phone announcement.
• ang_cire
  Honestly, Apple may very well be betting that AI in it's current form is transitional, and might be better off letting others duke it out for now.We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
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• dailen
  Ok, while an author's journey will inevitably influence their opinions, and I think Steve Jobs was a revolutionary visionary, the evidence of objective blinders is staggering.I almost deferred to the classic jab about their being a member of the "cult of Steve Jobs" but then I read their comment about being an intern at Apple University and realized the author was simply institutionally indoctrinated. Clearly I jest but...Apple did not invent the smartphone. It didn't invent the music player. It didn't invent the portable tablet. It didn't invent the personal information manager.This was not a zero to one. To some extent you could say he even reused some of his own playbook from his attempt to make the iMac a cult hit. I do think he introduced the right product at the right time, but I think it was his strategy, or obsession, with perfecting the user experience that was definitely a zero to one.
• homarp
  interesting that using AI models from China is not discussed.e.g. Apple buys moonshot or z.ai
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  david_draco
  That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
• jauntywundrkind
  Apple has such interesting systems. I'm so fascinated to see if they try to become something more, or if they stay dedicated to consumers.They already have very passionate users stringing together ultra high throughput inference systems, using highspeed thunderbolt mesh topologies, or just using single high memory ultra chips.But Apple has some very interesting patents out there to keep scaling up! Holy cow! It's very exciting to think of a hardware guy getting to pioneer this company forward, that has the systems visioneering to navigate really wild systems building. https://bsky.app/profile/ogawa-tadashi.bsky.social/post/3mif...This feels like such a tension though, of having these wildly bleeding edge systems, that you are trying to shoehorn in to your friendly Think Different consumer brand & product offerings. Meanwhile Apple is out of stock for their new iPhone chip powered laptop. And their high end Ultra. There's this bifurcation of the market. It feels weird imagining Apple trying to serve both sides well. How Ternus can navigate an age of brave mew hardware is exciting but also seems so high tension. An Apple that no longer serves the mass market, that starts doing more, is wild to consider.
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  kogold
  It may be unfair to Jobs, but I feel like the comparison of him as the genius vs. Cook the talented enabler is a bit flat.I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).
• schmommy
  I appreciated Cook when I worked for Apple, but since, I've been disappointed with his lack of pushing the envelope like Jobs. He could have taken Apple to higher heights.
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  HardCodedBias
  Impressive Tenue, IMO.Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services.A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
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  alsetmusic
  I used to really appreciate Ben Thompson's takes. He started losing me with his love of Meta's VR devices for meetings. Maybe I didn't get it, I thought. I don't agree with him on a lot of things these days.> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.0. Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/20/palantir-goes-mask-off-f...
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• fleroviumna
  [dead]
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  Lapsa
  [flagged]
• cathyreisenwitz
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  cathyreisenwitz
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• throwaway98797
  profits 3.5x yet stock increased 12xcounterfactuals are hard