Tim Cook’s experience in logistics built Apple into the global hegemon it is today. I hope John Ternus’s experience with hardware can kick off a renaissance in both Apple hardware and software design. Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around. I’m also hoping, without any evidence, that maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics.
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
Their software is better than most (if not all) of closed-source universe. That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.
I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
When Apple released its BSD-based OS X at the turn of the century, I was at Rice learning on Solaris machines, and also started dual booting Linux on my personal desktop at the time. My first few years in the working world were spent on Dells running Windows, so by the time I bought my first laptop in 2006, I was excited to spend my dollars on an unusual-looking white Macbook specifically because it had a *nix shell and the developer experience was vastly better to me than any machine I used at my day jobs. I still prefer working on Macs because ever since, they have just worked and Windows has gotten progressively worse (I know, because I have helped my parents with their Surface laptop). Unfortunately, Mac OS X has been less robust in the last several years, and I'd love to see them turn this around, both for the developer experience and for regular consumers. I still like using Photos, but I don't use their cloud for those, and I've been amazed over the years just how uninformative the Photos app on Mac can be when it flakes out and I have to try a rain dance just to get it to sync with my iPhone. That's pretty abysmal for a company that used to just work, but I believe it comes from the top. Steve Jobs used to enforce quality, and I want to see that again!
Similar experience here, started with the same G4 ("white") iBook. That was an amazing machine. Under the hood it was hard to distinguish many differences with Linux/BSD of the time. The UI on top (OSX Tiger) was peerless -- I recall being very excited for the introduction of Spotlight. I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so. Hardware was still great, but they were no longer updating the GNU stuff and anti-features like SIP made it harder and harder to run the applications I want (gdb for example). I gave up not long after they introduced the touchbar
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
SIP is anti-feature for a certain class of users, but the right tradeoff for most consumers. At least you can disable it. And even as a developer I leave it enabled.
It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.
macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.
As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.
The whole experience you're having with the rain dance is because the cloud does just work. It's a vanishing a tiny percentage of people that don't use it.
I hear ya. I'm not in the target market. Surprising, I know, considering how many SaaS platforms I've launched which maintain photos and videos in the cloud!
Many other iPhone/Macbook users have been shocked I don't turn on Messages on my Mac due to a bad experience with sync in the first year that was possible, and I had a similar bad experience with photos in iCloud early on. Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like, and I still feel more at ease juggling many Photos libraries on external hard drives. I avoid Google Photos like the plague, and even though I trust Apple more (for now), I'd still rather not entrust to them my family's personal photos and videos.
As someone who has had the pain, if you're open to some prodding - one of your external hard drives might be broken right now. Don't risk it. Just pay a few bucks a month to avoid missing your memories. :) I don't think they've ever had a data loss.
The thing where Linux (and Android, and Windows at least circa 2023) blows Apple out of the water is in UI latency. The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.
Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.
I have an ‘old’ model (iPhone 14 pro max) and text frequently misses characters due to the lag/input delay. It’s most pronounced when using safari for some reason.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
> The built-in animations on Apple's software are sometimes hundreds of times slower than on their competitors, in ways which can't be accounted for.
You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:
> Enable the “Reduce motion” setting in System Settings.
> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.
You're missing the point here. The "old" Apple would never have tolerated a janky feature that inverts responsibility onto the user and behaves poorly out-of-the-box. Back then it was either lightning fast, jank-free, and intuitive -- or else it doesn't ship.
But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more
Hilariously, this is what the Gnome 2 people would have called an "Unbreak Me" option, something they tried culturally to eliminate more than a decade and a half ago. With... not total success, I guess, but the resulting environment tends to have a very high level of "work and not suck by default" quality -- something that steadily evolving commercial software tends to struggle with maintaining.
It's odd to see this comment, since I've always had the opposite experience (at least when comparing Windows and MacOS -- I haven't used desktop linux much in the past 20 years). On MacOS, when I click something, something happens, or at the very least starts to happen (and I get some visual indication). While in Windows I often click on something and get no indication that something happened or started happening, so I click again, and then suddenly perform the action twice. This most often happens when opening programs, but it happens in other places too sometimes.
I think a big part of this in recent years is SwiftUI just not being fully-cooked and Apple trying to shove it into a bunch of areas without enough attention to performance. Not sure how it is on iOS, but for example, the Settings app feels chuuuunky if you navigate through the panes with up and down arrow keys. I wasn't able to make a selectable list view that worked consistently and didn't feel like a regression compared to an equivalent AppKit view
Package management, too. I recently got a MacBook for work, but it’s sitting on my desk and I’m continuing to use my Lenovo. Managing software updates is much better on Linux. As is managing windows (via Niri in my case). macOS really feels like a downgrade.
I don’t disagree, I just moved back to Linux from macOS myself (Tahoe was the last drop for me).
But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.
Nix is not the same as nixos, and in this case the distinction matters. It has to step carefully around Apple's updates. This further highlights the fact Apple lacks the same quality package management as some linux distros. Nixpkgs (on macos), Ports, and Homebrew packages are toys compared to the EFFORT that goes into maintaining Debian and Redhat packages.
In terms of package management SOFTWARE, however, nix (and guix, lix, etc.) are state of the art and work fairly similar in both linux and macos. A deeper integration with the OS would have been nice.
Package managers are wonderful until you step near our outside of the packaged software - then you better hope you're on a big distro otherwise you may be in uncharted territory.
Why would you use that feature? MacOS doesn't REALLY have multiple desktops (Spaces). That is merely a pre-release feature (for 10 years or so, I think). As evidenced by the many critical user journey bugs it has that don't get addressed.
I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).
Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).
I've been using Apple since IIe in the 80s and all of the UI iterations. People make iOSification comments about macOS, and there have definitely been annoyances as they are seemingly trying to unify the UX. Maybe it'll make sense when they have touch controllable macOS systems, but making things that work well for fingertips and assuming they will work equally as well operating by a mouse is just bad.
As for Linux, I don't think I've ever used a system with UI for any serious amount of time. >99.999% of my usage is on headless systems through a terminal. As god intended.
A major reason Snow Leopard was well received was because of how performant it felt along with the bug fixes. What isn't mentioned anywhere near as much is that it dropped a lot of hardware (PPC). The last G4 Powerbook got about 1.5y of OS support before it was dropped.
iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.
True, it's better than most for sure and I agree it used to be better.
Though a lot of other software for windows and linux are really not that great so the bar is probably on the lower end.
What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
not the op but for me safari has been deteriorating for years:
1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background
2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work
3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews
4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome
5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day
6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)
7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app
etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
- Let’s hope they don’t change the way macOS manage windows. All the additions they made to accommodate Windows users are useless.
- I don’t have any issue on searching macos settings. Could you provide an example?
- safari is a great browser, i use it as main browser since years and i’d never go back
I think you could keep going saying things that are not true.
My latest Mac OSX wtf was sometimes the terminal window shrinks by 1 or 2 columns every time I wake the computer up from sleep, but only when connected via thunderbolt USB C hub to external monitor. Terrifying to imagine how that must be. By contrast, Linux/BSD desktops don't generally seem to pull this kind of weird mindfuck horror movie shit? Like it either works or it's completely, obviously, totally broken. Not some weird subtle in-between thing.
Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
100% agree. As someone who used both Mac and PC for 30+ years, and still use both, Mac OS (and iOS) aren't very intuitive. Lots of hidden functions. The way they organize settings is tough to find. It's always a struggle.
My experience is similar. Great hardware. Software is good until there is something I want to do that isn't very obvious, then it's either a hassle or not possible.
My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?
There are so many basic gaps in functionality and so many underbaked & poorly designed Mac OS features that I end up papering over with paid 3rd party applications.
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
I was using (and writing) software as long as 35+ years ago and I disagree with your assessment that we were “just tolerating it” 20 years ago. 20 years ago, I was using Mac OS X Tiger on a new Intel-based MacBook Pro and it ran like a dream, and had software which mostly followed Apple’s human interface guidelines. Now I run macOS Tahoe and curse under my breath at the lack of design consistency and the iPad-ification of the interface. I’m also shown ads, and in some cases ads that can’t be dismissed or disabled, for things like iCloud and Apple Music.
When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.
I used 20+ years ago as a guideline, not an absolute. Of course the intel MBP came out in 2006 (or 2007?) and was an absolute dream setup where hardware caught up with Windows while the software was pretty good as well (I was using a Mac since 2004 or so).
I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.
I still prefer macOS to desktop Linux or (yikes) Windows, but the margin has gotten smaller over the last several years. Unfortunately, that's less because Linux or Windows have gotten that much better, and more because macOS has stalled (and even gone backwards in some ways).
It's worst in case of freedom, which is the most important aspect for me. Every release they are slowly turning in the screws and make it harder and harder to install apps from developers who haven't jumped through all the hoops that Apple forces them to. I hope this change in leadership will change this strategy.
Google is worse. Most of their apps are cloud only with no E2EE. Also, they are much more user hostile when deciding what goes in the store (they make money off spying, but apple makes money off hw, so this makes sense).
Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).
We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.
Google has so far allowed installing apps without their explicit permission. So it's much higher on freedom index, imo. And there's no obligation to use Google cloud apps. There's alternative for every Google cloud app.
Maybe 20 years ago, today it's no better than anything else - well designed in some aspects, total trash in others. The stewards of xcode, spotlight and siri (among many other stinkers) are disqualified from the category of "best"
not only Safari, several other apps such as Music (which also has several annoying quirks)
never understood why they did not get their own lifecycle if they have dedicated teams for each of those apps
If you're interested, it's to reduce cost. It's incredibly expensive to build something like Music or Maps. If each version is tied to an OS version, it keeps you from having to explode your testing and fixing cycle over time.
This is especially notably when you want to support all the latest OS features.
My company keeps the testing cycle smaller by only adding new OS-dependent features to its mobile app when the minimum supported OS version gets incremented and a feature is supported in every supported OS version. That means that the iOS app is only now getting features that were added in iOS 15 in 2021.
It's a deal when they stop updating. It is true they provide OS updates for longer than most, but many people use devices, especially ipads for way longer than the OS supported period. And those people are stuck on an old unsupported browser without being able to update or install a 3rd party one.
Chrome and Google being bad doesn't make Apple's restrictions good. That said, Android lets you install a 3rd party browser which can choose to keep supporting old devices. iOS locks everything to using the safari engine.
Unlike Android indeed, when you maintain a perfectly working phone that happens (by accident or force of nature) to live longer than the official lifetime some executives in a remote office had decided to grant it, the web browser cannot be updated any more. Just the single most security sensitive piece of software of any computer. Who would have guessed people were going to complain!
And neither does Google. The latest version of Chroma requires the version of Android released in 2019. The latest version of iOS supports my iPad released in 2019.
I haven't really had to work with microsoft software but apple's software quality is abysmal beyond the OS (and even the OS has places that are a joke, like the bluetooth stack).
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."
[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.
Most of the main apps on Apple TV shouldn't require a password anymore; you log in on your phone to authorize. The next Apple TV should simplify this further...
> Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
For servers, yes, but use Safari for like 5 minutes versus Chrome and it’s clear the reverse is true for desktops, especially if you’re not running with 32+GB of RAM. Google Drive, Photos, etc. are not as good as Chrome.
This is not to say that Apple’s desktop software is great, only that the bar is a lot lower than it had to be when people had to be convinced to buy licenses.
It's uneven in my experience. OS-wise (Android, ChromeOS), I've had some big and frustrating problems. On the other hand, I really like some of their web apps (Drive, Docs).
Ah yes, the company that still can't their gesture and backswipe UX functioning properly 7 years after its introduction, and with Apple giving them 2 years to study it beforehand.
A decade to produce a non-functioning gesture bar / system. Such a titan among titans.
In my opinion Android (especially the Google Pixel flavour) is vastly more intuitive and logical than i(Pad)OS these days. I almost need to consult a manual to change my wallpaper on iOS. Anything to do with file management or notifications is also just plain bad on iOS. The keyboard is bad. Background downloads don't work reliably. If I want to transfer photos from a computer onto an iPhone I need special software and then cannot delete those pictures on the phone itself. I can choose between 3 multitasking paradigms on iPad – terrible!
If you are reading Hackers News for the most part, you are out of touch with the normal computer users and that was said over and over again with the introduction of the Mac Neo which appears to be a hit among normal everyday computer users who have never heard of Hackers News, a family member recently just bought one of the new Mac M5 PowerBook's and I expected some cry for help setting it up. Guess what there was none.
In the answer to your question, there is nothing better overall across hardware and software top to bottom and that applies to computers, smartphones, tablets, and watches across five ecosystems.
Android and Windows are better than iOS and macOS in many non-trivial ways. They have their own problems too, but as a user of all of them I don't prefer the Apple software. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, is clearly superior.
Android has a far better OTA update system than iOS. The notification system is much better and the default keyboard is better too. It supports multiple user profiles that you can switch between instantly, with their own separate apps and settings and home screens, a long requested feature for iPads that is inexplicably still absent on iOS.
Windows has a better desktop compositor and window manager than macOS. It supports Nvidia GPUs with CUDA. It also has WSL so you can use real package managers instead of homebrew.
I find it hard to believe this comment isn't sarcastic. Apple's software, atleast in particular macos, is horrendous - to the point I ditched my m2 macbook for a thinkpad because of how bad it was. It's like a toy OS.
For all the faults of these companies, their founders and CEOs, I genuinely believe the world would have been a bit of a sadder place without companies like Apple and Google. That’s not something I can say about most companies (Microsoft), and honestly, there are companies I think the world would be better off without entirely (Oracle).
Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).
The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
> The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.
Most shareholders may not care beyond the next quarter, but CEO action that led to those results were made couple of years ago at least, and current action will do as much to determine not the next quarter, but one slightly further in the future. Hence Jamie Dimon, for example, making a different decision in a similar matter. As Dimon explained: “[…] we have to be very careful about how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it. So, we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that”[1].
“Capitulating to the current regime on everything is in shareholder’s best interests” is neither a foregone conclusion nor a statement of fact. It’s economic myopia at best.
Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
I’m telling you that thinking a->b is myopic. It could be that shareholder value would’ve been higher had Tim Cook told Trump (or Biden, or Trump, or Obama) to go fuck himself. Perhaps the people who spend money on iPhones, specifically, would’ve been more inclined to buy a new iProduct, than they are now that he’s bent the knee.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.
It's less than the other tech CEOs who seem to evade criticism on HN. Elon literally worked for Trump, accomplished nothing, and ended up just leaking everyone's social security data. Thiel and Palantir are profiting from war and building out the surveillance state. Bezos made a $75M documentary about Melania. Larry Ellison took over TikTok US to squelch any criticism of US and Zionist war atrocities.
Depending on who you talk to, this could go either way. Some people want big companies to champion their own political ideals on a larger stage and think Apple should do more. Others would say Apple should stay out of it, after things like their gift to Trump[0], for example.
My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.
Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
Pricing is based on customer value and restriction of customer options.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
I feel like Apple's biggest challenges these next 10 years will be logistics, being able to create or take advantage of additional redundancy in the supply chain for their major components.
With Ternus being the new CEO don’t be surprised if Apple takes a more active role in designing around the three Stooges of memory and bring it (the design and engineering) in house like the rest of the Apple Silicon chips.
re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
Tapping a hardware guy as CEO sends a good signal, at least to me, looking in from the outside. The company is leading from its strength, and getting back to its roots. I wonder how Woz feels today, seeing this.
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.
No don’t waste any time on Linux, Apple memory independence, clustering and moving on to M5, M6, M7, and beyond, a technocrat in charge yes, hopefully Apple will continue to iterate across the software ecosystems and the hardware systems.
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.
When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.
The hardware is best than class in both software and hardware by a mile who is this other company Meta or is it Microsoft with a HoloLens? Long-term iteration is the only way the Apple Vision Pro will get better if it took 13 years to come up with an M1 processor beginning to end and six years to have your first working modem that can be used in a smartphone there are no shortcuts long hard iteration is the only way.
The Apple Vision still needs to get two or three times better preferably with an M6 or M6 processor, whoops, more memory, faster SSD, thunderbolt five etc. oh and it needs to be $1500 Hmm… not possible for another two years? With better software.
And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.
The software being good and it being used in a product consumers wanted are two very different things.
What did you think you were asking? Or was this just a lame, ill-conceived gotcha that probably needed another few hours in the oven before being chucked in the garbage?
I admire how Tim Cook participates in US politics. He is doing the most while giving the least. I would do the same in his position, he is making the best of a difficult situation, and it is his duty to protect his company and employees.
Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.
I'd be careful normalizing bribery. It's very micro-efficient, almost definitionally, but the macro effects of normalized bribery are well known and not good.
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.
Trump is the president. People voted him into the Office. Tim Cook didn't give him the golden statue before he is in the Office.
Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic. I partially agree, but I also think burning Apple to the ground will not be Tim Cook's legacy and he is in no place to go against the executive branch.
It is not about Trump, it is about the corrupted executive branch. Tim didn't do any crime against humanity in his act.
> Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic.
This is a ridiculous strawman. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance instead of malice.
I wrote that going above and beyond to curry favor with an autocrat in order to protect your profits is collaboration.
And you read, what? Existing under a government means you necessarily support it because there was an election? You do understand an election means some people voted the other way, right?
No, before Trump 2 nobody would’ve taken bribes and gifts so openly like this. It’s not even in the same league and it’s some really self-serving argumentation to pretend otherwise.
Every complicity is another nail in the coffin of our democracy.
If a cop says your problems go away for $100, you pay it, because the downside is huge by comparison. The problem is the cop getting away with it, not that you paid the bribe.
I hope you’re not comparing a gold trophy to a straight up bribe. It’s like giving Trump your Noble peace prize.
Having the prize doesn’t make you the winner. But it feeds Trumps ego sooooooo muuuuuch, it’s probably the “best” thing you can do to get on his good side without actually giving him anything.
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.
Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.
I agree, but I'm taking as an axiom that some amount of bribery (tribute, really) had to be done, that Apple could avoid massive government retribution. In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken. It being so gaudy actually helps this case.
What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.
It's fair to say there is not much contrast. But he's kept Apple's DEI and climate commitments in place even after being attacked directly, while Zuckerberg, Musk and Altman are proactively broadcasting right-wing talking points, sometimes pre-emptively. Yes, Cook gave $1 million, but Brockman gave $25 million, and Musk gave much, much more.
We don't know what deals Cook and Trump have made with each other, we've just seen the byproduct of their relations on the political stage. Nothing Cook did during his tenure de-risked Apple from the consequences of a worsening political state in the US. When the tides turn towards authoritarianism, Apple turns towards compliance. They've done it for both Trump admins.
Cynically speaking, Cook is wise to keep the DEI and climate commitments as bartering chits for Apple's next leadership to forfeit. He knows that Apple needs leverage to get their druthers from the Fed.
When you say you don't know something about one actor in an equation, you must apply the same thinking to every other actor. It's not useful to go on the path you're going down.
> Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong).
He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.
He also donated to Kamala Harris campaign. He would also donate to the next Democratic president for their inauguration if they still choose to do this corruptive thing. And your point is?
They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.
Because there are so many bugs that it makes me wonder if Apple Execs ever use their own software.
For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.
Well, if you're asking if apple execs use that setting, the answer is probably that they don't.
I think the issue is that there are SO many piled up little features everywhere that SOMEone is using that keeping everything working while making any changes at all is very difficult.
I am a fan of more wood behind fewer swings. Don't add something like spaces unless you think you've got something so good that you are confident that it will be the common path.
When was the last time you used the clusterf* that is iTunes on windows?
Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)
Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.
Ssh server doesn't make sense for an iPhone. How would that even work? It wouldn't be able to do anything or be a worse experience than something properly designed for the user rather than trying to force a 50 year old computing model onto a phone.
You say this matter of factly and yet I've seen countless people talk about using termux more than a desktop shell.
Maybe iPhone is different but most phones you can connect a keyboard to, making the shell pretty usable. Not my cup of tea but I have tried it. I'm still holding out on the dream that a good Linux phone might exist one day.
I’ve heard this but it doesn’t make much sense to me. People see the shit software, and they think “Apple software is shit.” I don’t think they think “This software is only shit because I’m on Windows, I better switch to Mac and run (basically) the same software there.”
That's an extremely low bar, Windows has been shit for a long time and has basically only degraded. Some people think Windows 10 was good, it wasn't, they just haven't used Windows for long enough.
Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.
It’s so sad. Circa 2003 OS X wasn’t just good it was amazing. Nearly Movie OS quality. Every release the quality goes down. Every migration to SwiftUI more and more AppKit standard feature get lost.
Books can go on it too. No matter the free storage space on my iPad, it relentlessly nerfs stuff to iCloud rendering its utility on long aeroplane journeys completely worthless.
Saying Apple Software is 'terrible' is a blatant hyperbole. Has it degraded meaningfully over the last decade in terms of stability? Yes. Has it's capability increased though? Yes. Has it become more secure by design? Yes. Is the UX better than anything else in market? By a country mile.
The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.
He produces Broadway shows these days. Never say never but that kind of thing screams an “I’ve got all the cash I need, now I’m following my passions” mindset. You certainly don’t do it for the money…
You’re right. But your statement was that no product worth using is bug free. I said that no software exists that is without bugs. Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using. But since all software has bugs, that applies to every product ever made. It doesn’t have any discriminating power. So it’s not fallacious on its face but it’s not useful either, and that’s what I was trying to point out.
On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.
It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
Yep, they all have flaws. I just fine that when I want to drive somewhere, Google does better for me than Apple, though certainly Apple has improved a lot recently.
Google Maps often picks the non-idiomatic thing. It'll say the road name when no sign uses that, and it's a US highway that you have been following for a while. Or it will tell you the state highway number when it is a major named artery, and nobody knows that it is a state highway at that point or uses the highway number. This makes it hard to know if it is carrying you along on the same route or if it has come up with one of its weird shortcuts to save 1 minute.
Here in Australia Apple Maps names everywhere by local council, which isn’t used at all, we use localities. I have reported this as a bug repeatedly but they just keep at it.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
Generally speaking, I think both are true. Most people seem to have an affinity for either hardware or software, but rarely for both. Those who do are extremely unique. I don't mean that as an insult to anyone, just as an observatin having worked in both (and personally am much better at software than hardware, even though I enjoy both).
I find both interesting but have been working in software for over a decade now.
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
Verilog is not the best and that’s not even the worst part - tools like ISE/Vivado and Quartus are even worse!
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
They are leaps and bounds ahead for people who want their specific formula or don't really care about computers.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
> I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
did you tried nix home-manager for linux software setup? i never was able to use linux until nix.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
if you use nixos you end up feeling like you need to spend more time developing your personal computer's configuration than developing your actual projects, ime.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
This might have been the case a couple of years ago, but it is certainly not true any more, if you use AI [even occasionally] to manage some of your default.nix and flake.nix files. I learn by getting AI to edit it (default.nix for example), and then study what it did. It helps.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
They're pretty good, but you can find other good trackpads too. The main thing about Apple is that their trackpads are consistently pretty good, while with other brands it can be hard to figure out what you'll be getting until you try it yourself.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.
To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.
His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving:
https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/
I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
I really wish they did more for free software. I know they contribute heavily to LLVM and are still the main stewards of webkit, but they've very much ignored darwin as a free software operating system, to the point it feels like they only keep it free out of legal obligation
Ternus is not a hardware genius. He's a hardware engineer that rose through the ranks at Apple because, from what I've heard from Apple hardware engineers, Dan Riccio liked him "like a son."
I honestly don't know. tim@apple.com is unavailable for quite some time now (since I tried a few years ago), while lisasu@amd.com still works around that time frame.
For Apple nerds that pay close attention to company, this is no surprise. Third-party dev Marco Arment wrote a blog post speaking to Ternus earlier this month[0].
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
> Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.
It's not the brand - it's not like Apple's hit this valuation in isolation Meta, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft all enjoy similar.
It's the cash-money value of putting a fee on all digital goods and subscriptions and cash transactions in a world predisposed to forming and consolidating around monopolies. What does Apple's services revenue look like in another 20 years when Africa, China and India are paying their smartphone provider every time a dollar moves, a few billion more people paying one of two companies every time for their music, movies and tv, games, books, real-world transactions... in de-facto perpetuity.
There’s a lot of commentary to the effect that the Mac hardware is good, but the software is somehow terrible.
Speaking as someone who first used a Mac Plus, graduated to an SE/30, and is now on a Mac mini m4 pro… I can remember when Macintosh was widely held to be an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. The software has always been terrible, until you try the other guys’ stuff. The hardware has often been good, and is in a purple period right now. Enjoy it while it lasts! (It won’t).
I believe it's mostly a single-use benefit. Things like golden trophies seem to buy a victory today, but has little relevance on decisions made even a month later, regardless of who gifted it and whether they're still at the helm.
I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.
Which means the only other option is to hopefully be able to pay Apple even more to not have to see ads. Maybe buy more Apple shares to share in this "advancement".
Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
It's remarkably annoying, as a business, to keep your Apple Maps data up to date. But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
While I don't agree with many things Cook has done during his tenure, like the Touch Bar and removing the SD card slot from MacBooks, I have to admit the man knows how to make money.
Apple silicon has been an unmitigated success so it makes sense they’d go with Ternus. On a related note Apple needs to add Ternus to their spell check dictionary
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
they made a bet on EUV on better commercial terms than samsung and intel could do for themselves. another point of view is that TSMC's cost structure, of having highly educated, overworked, and wildly underpaid Taiwanese employees, is the real unmitigated success.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
Every time I see this argument, it comes across as lazy. iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative. But you can't compare the camera from the first few iPhones to the latest ones. I certainly didn't expect, when the first iPhone launched, that the camera on an iPhone would replace my dedicated camera for 90% of my use cases.
> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
> I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.
Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
In retrospect, it seems Apple telegraphed Ternus well in advance - the NYT had an article well in January that clearly wasn't a source of friction with Apple Marketing.
John Ternus really did turn the Mac around. The last 5 or so years of the Intel era were a disaster. Hopefully he will be able to turn things around with software too.
Thank you Tim Cook, as I am writing this on an iPhone.
Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.
Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.
Very glad to see this finally happen. It's been in the rumors for a while now that Ternus would be the next CEO but the timeline was uncertain.
I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.
He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.
> interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are
As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.
Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with. He has played a singular role in driving Apple's silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry. He has always led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and time and again, his team has delivered breakthrough innovations that have transformed our products. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as Apple's chief hardware officer.
I think it's interesting that the handoff will be complete on Sept 1. That would mean Ternus will helm his first iPhone launch that month. Auspicious timing. Curious the math they calculated when landing on this date. Certainly tees him up for an early win if the products are well-received.
My guess is that they'll release something impressive in September, and they want to give Ternus an early win as you said. Maybe a new completely product or Vision Air.
Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.
Any chance of a future where hardware can be customized at the design stage, like 3D printing but taken to an even higher level, even for 1-off builds? So prompt-driven manufacturing? For example, a watch with a USB-C port?
One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.
To be honest, a lot of industry analysts were skeptical of Jobs' second coming. And when he did a deal with Microsoft, most of them thought they were right in their initial pessimism.
Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.
15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.
To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)
Like Sam Altman, Tim Cook makes me think that what we fear in AI is already here. These two guys are corporate robots that act only in the service of the bottom line.
It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.
Wonder how much of this decision has to do with the current climate and not wanting to deal with the current head. I was quite disappointed to see cook towing the line and bending the knee, let’s see what Ternus will do
Whoa, didn't expect the announcement to come so soon. Of course, the sound bytes were everywhere, but even then, this was a surprise announcement.
So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.
Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]
Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it.
(and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
I don’t closely follow the news about Apple and now I’m wondering why they decided to go forward with this change at this moment.
As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?
Cook is also 65 and doubtless has more money than god. He's been a great success and it's not unreasonable to think he may have wanted to start riding into the sunset. Apple's wishes are irrelevant at some level.
I think supply chain optimization is untenable in a chaotic global trade environment. You don’t need to be an expert to buy from more suppliers and lay in a supply of stock. JIT falls apart when tariffs go from 20% to 120% to 15% based on whims and court cases.
For a long time I was hoping it would be Jeff Williams. For the brief moments these heads at Apple get the spotlight, I always felt he gave off a sense of humanity and sincerity.
Tim has done an amazing job in the post-Jobs era with his logistics. Brought Apple from $350B to $4T. This move makes perfect sense as Apple needs to start their next chapter with how rapid the world is changing at the moment. I do hope Apple's values don't change going into this new era.
Some people might say Tim is leaving but he got himself promoted, just like Bezos. So, being an “Executive” chairman he’s going to be actively involved and be responsible, but not on daily basis and deep into each of verticals.
Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
they replacing person doing horizontal scalability with vertical.
do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?
I'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
Yes, a very successful CEO and he secured a great legacy. I was skeptical when Jobs stepped down, but under Cook innovation did continue, but primarily in hardware.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
One could add the Vision Pro, MacBook Neo, Mac Studio, HomePods, and so on to the list as well.
The reality is everyone just wants another hit product like the iPhone, but its success was based on it being a personal convergence device. You can't really create a second carryable/wearable convergence device and expect it to be wildly successful at the level of the iPhone without it killing off the iPhone.
So far that revolutionary approach by third parties has not succeeded against the iPhone, and the evolutionary approach apple takes with the iPhone means there is no clear inflection point anywhere in the future where the phone form factor goes away.
> Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
The M series transition was perfectly executed, but that trajectory was set up before Jobs left when they went all-in on in-house semiconductor design.
Apple released their first in-house ARM processor 16 years ago, and the M series is descendent from that lineage and acquisitions that got them started in that business such as PA Semi and Intrinsity.
Cook absolutely deserves credit for the successful desktop ARM transition, but building ARM processors in-house was in no way something he directed as CEO.
FaceID, AirPods, Apple Silicon, Vision Pro (though it was flop was a good try). Overall, I would actually place Tim above Steve in terms of business, although maybe not from a Human Computer Interaction design novelty perspective
To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.
Many of their acquired pro tools, and pretty much all of their server hardware and software, though much of that started before Cook took over. Plus the Mac Pro missteps were on his watch, as well as the current cancellation. Apple seems more and more unwilling to invest in niche hardware like the Mac Pro, except where they see it pushing the platform forward, like the Vision Pro.
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.
I appreciate what Cook did for the hardware, but he really failed on the software side. Too many little and annoying bugs. I look forward to Ternus improving that side while maintaining the same hardware quality.
I'm really hopeful about John Ternus stepping into the CEO role. Pretty much everything he's done leading Apple's hardware engineering has been an enormous unqualified success, and for a company like Apple, having hardware lead the company seems like the right step.
Well, if I was Apple, I would not put one of their software guys into the position since the software leadership team has been ineffective. So either hire externally (crapshoot) or promote internally. It makes sense. Hopefully the hardware guys will knock some sense into the software leadership and impose accountability in that arena.
It's exciting to see that the new CEO of Apple is a hardware guy.
I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up.
All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill.
It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.
They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.
I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.
This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.
There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.
Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.
Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.
Apple hardware has been a shining light for Apple for the past 5-10 years, even if a bit lucky. I’m curious how this effects the company as a whole going forward, hopefully positive
Consider that is mostly public headway. Behind the scenes the handover, mentorship, alignment I am sure was already happening for a while. E.g. you probably don't want the incoming CEO to have to immediately clean house or people might end up doubting their decisions, getting anxious or similar. The previous CEO can start retiring, moving people around to clear out possibly problematic leaders, break up internal "gangs" and ways of work - people will be more willing to accept their decision as they've been at the head for a while and have the trust. The new CEO comes in, group dynamics and rules are still fresh and building up between everyone, they don't have a black mark for firing anyone - to me it just feels like it would be a healthier and more mature transition.
To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.
So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.
Given how quickly Cook had to step in for jobs, first in the interim role, four months seems like plenty of time (particularly given he's still executive chairman).
No issue performance-wise but I wish there was more innovation, especially with the iPhones. For example, I was really impressed with Samsung's privacy screen demo.
The iPhone is fine, but I find them to be... boring. The SoCs are very good, but they don't have the best cameras, the best batteries, the fastest charging, the most innovative displays, etc. Apple isn't pushing that hard there.
Tim Cook will be one of the legendary CEOs in history.
he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.
qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.
all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.
Yeah, I thought Cook would stay on until the end of the Trump-admin in order to keep ‘swallowing the dead rats’ so that the next CEO would have a clean plate.
Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.
You give a trinket to a near dictator in order to not have your company, which you're responsible for, dragged over the coals and attacked by a psychopathic goverment. In the grand scheme of things this was a completely genius play and did no harm to anyone.
Sad to see Tim Cook leaving as I was enjoying this downtrend of Apple products that is driving users to more open (and better) solutions like Linux PCs.
I cross fingers for John Ternus to still be greedy and not being too competent.
If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.
Yeah glad to see a hardware person take the helm and not a bean counter. The hardware is masterful now. Let’s keep it that way. Wonder if he kills the Vision Pro.
I wish Apple would lean into gaming and create a competitive GPU system. Does not have to compete with a 5090, but 5070 level and game developers will come and port games. Huge untapped market. I still have to run a dedicated gaming PC just to play games (especially Flight Simulator).
Surprised that someone from Gen X is getting the opportunity to lead a company of this caliber. We've spent most of our adult lives getting smothered by Boomers and Millennials.
Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.
I have to admit, regardless of whatever opinions you may have on Apple, Tim is/was probably the best bug tech CEO in the sea of evil ones out there, or evil and grifters, he remained focused on what’s the best might be for the users and also the company.
My personal hope for John Ternus is that he relaxes some of Apple's anti-competitive bullshit to the point where the company is willing to make iPads actually useful for anything other than 2D drawing apps. As someone who has been daily-driving an M1 iPad Pro for five years, the iPad is the most glaring hole in Apple's lineup in terms of usefulness.
Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.
Now that the Microsoft exclusive has ended for Qualcomm (ex-Apple) laptops, upcoming Arm laptops from Dell/HP/Lenovo should be well supported by Google's unified ChromeOS+Android desktop, which includes a full Debian Linux pKVM VM with vGPU accelerated graphics. Plus the Nvidia-Mediatek Arm gaming laptops.
These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.
I'd love the m5 ipad pro (with some more RAM please), and just use macos on it
I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad
At least John has an engineering background, been with company for couple decades and not some private equity/hedge fund/wannabe Steve Jobs visionary douchebag.
Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.
If Apple really wants to keep their long term users in its ecosystem, it should really drop stupid Liquid glass design, stop making macOS look like its mobile OSs, and bring skeuomorphism back, which was removed by John Ive.
I disagree. They should bring quality back before reintroducing more changes. Okay, maybe that means dropping Liquid Glass. But also readopt the HIG. Increase stability and performance and reduce attack vector.
"The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe)."
It’s not novel to critique or idolize anyone, especially given the roll undergoing the changing of the guard. It’s not like hundreds of managers are changing.
They are all still there.
But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?
Many companies have quite a shakeup in management around big changes like this, though I’m not sure how Apple operates internally. Maybe they are an exception to the rule?
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.
Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.
On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.
These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.
It's really easy to fail to see this in the heat of things.
macOS has a feature where it puts an orange dot on the top right corner of your screen whenever your microphone is recording. That orange dot is normally part of the menu bar, and completely unobtrusive, but will still show up on top of full-screen windows (e.g. it'll show up on top of games if you're on Discord talking to friends), which is distracting as hell.
As horrendously annoying that little dot is, what's the alternative? Either you have an uncircumventable marker saying you're being recorded, or you don't. Any way to turn that thing off that doesn't involve disabling SIP would be trivial to exploit by anybody who managed to plant malicious recording software in the first place.
Many other iPhone/Macbook users have been shocked I don't turn on Messages on my Mac due to a bad experience with sync in the first year that was possible, and I had a similar bad experience with photos in iCloud early on. Maybe the sync is fast now, but my usage would put my in a higher iCloud tier than I'd like, and I still feel more at ease juggling many Photos libraries on external hard drives. I avoid Google Photos like the plague, and even though I trust Apple more (for now), I'd still rather not entrust to them my family's personal photos and videos.
Improving interface response times is the single best thing Apple can do to improve their UX. I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
As far as I know, MacOS is the _only_ desktop OS with this problem. The only way to fix this problem on MacOS is to do everything inside a virtual machine running anything but MacOS.
Now that said iPhone is a thousand times faster, just invoking the keyboard can cause a serious delay with stutters.
In any case, it’s odd that hardware is multiples better yet it doesn’t always nail something as basic as typing
You can turn down the animation times for most of this with "defaults write" commands. Set them to 0 or as small as you want. Here's a good list to get started:
https://gist.github.com/j8/8ef9b6e39449cbe2069a
> I don't need an interface which throbs, wiggles, jiggles, shines, and refracts, I need an interface that's snappy and fast.
System Settings -> Accessibility -> Reduce Motion: Enabled System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce Transparency: Enabled
> This is always the default answer to this question online, and I’m sick of it! It doesn’t even solve the problem, but rather replaces it with an equally useless fade-in animation.
https://arhan.sh/blog/native-instant-space-switching-on-maco...
But this eroded over time. Nowadays both Mac and iOS are bloated pieces of crap that reek of design by committee. A lot of people blame Alan Dye (and they are probably right to do so) but there are other factors too. With Steve and Jony gone, they need someone who cares to step in and assert control once more
But did you try Homebrew and its extensions? It works pretty well for managing both terminal and GUI apps, and has some useful extensions like Brewfile, MAS, etc. Its not perfect, but for single-user Macs with an up-to-date OS version, it works quite well.
In terms of package management SOFTWARE, however, nix (and guix, lix, etc.) are state of the art and work fairly similar in both linux and macos. A deeper integration with the OS would have been nice.
I use both linux (with a decent tiling window manager; the tiling management being the least important part of it) and macos. And certain things are just not possible to do with macos. On linux I can have 300+ open terminal windows AND CAN find the one I need when I need to. On macos 20 (counting in Termianl tabs, which are implemented as windows, underneath) is about the high mark that it gets annoying to work on. On macos, you can't effectively work on multiple projects that use the same software (editor + terminal, for example). You can work with different Applications, though, and that is managed pretty well (better than most linux window managers that I have seen).
Every year or so I try adding a couple of Spaces, and always regret it a couple of hours later, switching back to a single Space (+ a few fullscreen apps).
So true. I run into so many little and annoying bugs I sometimes wonder if Apple Execs actually use their own devices.
As for Linux, I don't think I've ever used a system with UI for any serious amount of time. >99.999% of my usage is on headless systems through a terminal. As god intended.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/15/ios-27-will-reportedly-...
iOS 26 is slated to drop a bunch of iPhone models. macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
A Snow Leopard release isn't great news for a lot of people.
> macOS is dropping all all macs with Intel CPUs.
Those two cases are not really comparable though, are they? The last Intel CPU Mac was the 2019 Mac Pro, which was discontinued in 2023.
There are many, many things that are completely normal in Linux that are super clunky in MacOS at best.
But at least try to match Nautilus or Thunar ffs.
I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:
* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.
* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.
* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around
* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.
* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you
* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order
* Safari. Enough said.
I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.
1. ios performance in scrolling and loading (especially on my ipad pro m2) is unbearably slow, just stutters everywhere when loading a page in the background
2. tap-and-hold to open a link menu is so strange; sometimes it highlights text instead of showing the menu, sometimes it works ok, there is some kind of strange ui timing issue at work
3. on ipad and ios the tab overview display scrolling is absolutely appalling like 4fps level slow... completely unbearable to scroll through tab previews
4. developer tools are abysmal compared to chrome
5. on desktop performance is also extremely slow compared to chrome, its night and day
6. battery usage is so bad on ipad, just leaving some tabs open they run down the battery and chug memory (i know this is more a web thing, but they should at least freeze tabs in the background or make it an option)
7. just strange bugs on ipad, when tapping a text field the keyboard pops up, then suddenly disappears and the pops up again... just a terrible app
etc etc lots of paper cuts, but the performance issues are the biggest for me... i like the tab groups + auto save and icloud sync and built-in spellcheck, but its getting harder and harder to resist the alternatives
I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.
XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.
My favourite example being looking for the volume mixer, and after looking online the top advice seemed to be to pay for a 3rd party application for that... Wtf?
20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.
People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).
When it comes to the software, I’d take the Tiger experience over the Tahoe one hands-down.
I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse, but my computer usage probably varies greatly from yours.
I understood that, and I was using it in the same way.
> I don't think software is improving today, which is why I have to be nagged to upgrade. I don't think it worse…
Yeah this is the part I was disagreeing with, and I gave a couple examples showing why it’s meaningfully worse now.
I’ve been using Macs since the 1980s. The timeframe of 20-25 years ago (post Classic Mac OS) was some of the best software Apple has ever released.
Both those ecosystems are rapidly enshittifying (apple cannot even reliably process keystrokes with subsecond latency, and google is banning sideloading).
We need a third, actually user-serving and open alternative. Maybe the new CEO will slow or reverse the bleeding on the iOS / MacOS side.
The hardware is nominally open only because they enforce participation in their software ecosystem via other means.
The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.
My company keeps the testing cycle smaller by only adding new OS-dependent features to its mobile app when the minimum supported OS version gets incremented and a feature is supported in every supported OS version. That means that the iOS app is only now getting features that were added in iOS 15 in 2021.
The latest version of iOS runs on iPads back to 2919.
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android - released in 2019.
So how is it better?
The latest version of Chrome requires the version of Android released in 2019. Even phones that old aren’t getting other security updates.
Is that really the argument you want to make?
I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.
https://security.it.miami.edu/stay-safe/sec-articles/macosx-...
[1] Actually, the defect was that creating a root account was a unprivileged action, so anybody could create a root account on your machine with a password of their choice. The most obvious presentation is that you could login to root by pressing enter twice with the empty password; the first time creating root with the empty password and the second time logging you in.
https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/02/22/applebug.html
However, it's bad. I much prefer the rare, elusive, postfix if:
It can create some very readable code when used right, with short and simple conditionals.Or comments such as: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Security/blob/rel...
Unsurprisingly, given BoringSSL doesn't have a stable API (yet alone ABI), it isn't exposed as a system library.
goto fail was relevant in 2014 - perhaps not the most useful point in 2026.
- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.
- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.
- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.
But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.
This is not to say that Apple’s desktop software is great, only that the bar is a lot lower than it had to be when people had to be convinced to buy licenses.
Usability wise (UI/UX/design), they are in the gutter.
A decade to produce a non-functioning gesture bar / system. Such a titan among titans.
Perhaps. Assuming it actually keeps existing:
* https://killedbygoogle.com
You are comparing against the wrong thing.
Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:
https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0
NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.
Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is
In the answer to your question, there is nothing better overall across hardware and software top to bottom and that applies to computers, smartphones, tablets, and watches across five ecosystems.
Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.
Windows has a better desktop compositor and window manager than macOS. It supports Nvidia GPUs with CUDA. It also has WSL so you can use real package managers instead of homebrew.
If they can make 50B from ads in the iPhone in 12 months why invent a new device that will make pennies.
Sorry folks, the math is brutal for the big corps. They cannot pivot and make cool things, the market demands to be milked until they bleed.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.
The payment Apple gets from Google for being the default search might help explain this. It would be hard to turn down the sums Apple gets.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/03/just-one-word-in-the-google-a...
iOS is ahead on software security compared to Android, Windows, Desktop Linux, etc.
It would be unusual for a leader of such a thing not act in accordance w/ shareholders' best interests, as well to defy likely board guidance.
---
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/business/video/jp-morgan-chas...
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003230
[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
Apple also made some amazing hardware blunders.
My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.
I think you're attributing a lot more agency to a CEO role (for a publicly listed company, at the least) than they actually have.
The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.
If we're paying $1000 for a Chinese phone that we'd pay $2000 for, we'll end up paying that price when the manufacturers have finally starved the professional capability to compete from the rest of the world. As we get closer to that point, the urgency to onshore is increasing.
Exploitation when we can get away with it is in our social nature as humans. So this isn't about the Chinese, or any other culture. It's just necessary for this to be onshored because it's critical.
Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.
And his "kind of glib"
No, Zuck, you're just mad Apple introduced fine grained control so you can't constantly scrape people's credentials
I killed a Finder process that was at 1.2 G ram consumed today...
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.
When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.
> when’s the last time you tried spoiled milk then?
The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.
And to do that more than likely the engineering and design of memory systems probably needs to come in house. No more outside dependency.
What did you think you were asking? Or was this just a lame, ill-conceived gotcha that probably needed another few hours in the oven before being chucked in the garbage?
That's a wild claim.
Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.
The USA has the best government that money can buy.
No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.
Everyone in the United States is complicit to the horrible things done by the Trump administration by your logic. I partially agree, but I also think burning Apple to the ground will not be Tim Cook's legacy and he is in no place to go against the executive branch.
It is not about Trump, it is about the corrupted executive branch. Tim didn't do any crime against humanity in his act.
This is a ridiculous strawman. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume ignorance instead of malice.
I wrote that going above and beyond to curry favor with an autocrat in order to protect your profits is collaboration.
And you read, what? Existing under a government means you necessarily support it because there was an election? You do understand an election means some people voted the other way, right?
Every complicity is another nail in the coffin of our democracy.
But they're still responsible for their own personal piece of the rot in the system.
If a cop says your problems go away for $100, you pay it, because the downside is huge by comparison. The problem is the cop getting away with it, not that you paid the bribe.
Having the prize doesn’t make you the winner. But it feeds Trumps ego sooooooo muuuuuch, it’s probably the “best” thing you can do to get on his good side without actually giving him anything.
Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.
It didn't.
> In that lens, this bribery, while bad, is the least destructive form it could have taken.
Its not.
> It being so gaudy actually helps this case.
It doesn't.
Normalizing corruption to this level is a bad thing. Period.
The people engaging in this should be in prison. Including Trump.
> Contrast with every other tech executive
What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.
Cynically speaking, Cook is wise to keep the DEI and climate commitments as bartering chits for Apple's next leadership to forfeit. He knows that Apple needs leverage to get their druthers from the Fed.
He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.
For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.
There are PLENTY of examples just like that.
I think the issue is that there are SO many piled up little features everywhere that SOMEone is using that keeping everything working while making any changes at all is very difficult.
I am a fan of more wood behind fewer swings. Don't add something like spaces unless you think you've got something so good that you are confident that it will be the common path.
Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)
Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.
iOS comes with a text editor built in. Memo.
Ssh server doesn't make sense for an iPhone. How would that even work? It wouldn't be able to do anything or be a worse experience than something properly designed for the user rather than trying to force a 50 year old computing model onto a phone.
Maybe iPhone is different but most phones you can connect a keyboard to, making the shell pretty usable. Not my cup of tea but I have tried it. I'm still holding out on the dream that a good Linux phone might exist one day.
> a 50 year old computing model onto a phone
What? Do you think command lines are based on the lambda calculus or something?
For decades it has been speculated they intentionally make that shit so people will be more likely to switch to apple
Apple software isn't bad, but it is often obtuse and buggy. And, with iOS 26, usability has taken a big hit.
I'd need another hand to fully count all the Apple apps that have burned me in the past.
MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
> Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
While it is great now, it did flop because it was terrible.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
They’ve coasted too long on consistent visual identity, and even that’s been slipping. Time to focus on actual user needs.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
Why share it as a quote rather than a link I can click?
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
0. https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus
Quite successful.
Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.
But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...
The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.
Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?
It's the cash-money value of putting a fee on all digital goods and subscriptions and cash transactions in a world predisposed to forming and consolidating around monopolies. What does Apple's services revenue look like in another 20 years when Africa, China and India are paying their smartphone provider every time a dollar moves, a few billion more people paying one of two companies every time for their music, movies and tv, games, books, real-world transactions... in de-facto perpetuity.
AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
https://ads.apple.com/maps
Which means the only other option is to hopefully be able to pay Apple even more to not have to see ads. Maybe buy more Apple shares to share in this "advancement".
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.
OP is alluding to the fact that Apple hasn't created industry changing categories like the iPhone.
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
How so? Genuinely curious, I've got no idea what he's like as a person.
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
and mac has ios, which with ipads goes desktopy. (capability based security)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
Software is easier given the shorter cycles. Caveat is, the shorter cycles also benefit competitors.
Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.
Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.
(actually I doubt this- Demis does not want to run a big company whose main business is Ads)
I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.
He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.
As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.
Srouji stays to lead hardware, https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/20/srouji-chief-hardware-o...
As for Ternus' timing:
A)Not very Apple to have the CEO do one last launch while on the way out the door (want the full throated, 1000% commitment in execs)
B)Gives John stage for first time as CEO at September Keynote (historically a BFD)
C)It felt right, among all the other time-slots and factors to consider
D)John gets to announce the next One More Thing, and own it. Would be odd for Tim to announce the One More Thing and then resign.
One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.
I don't think even Steve Jobs would've been able to imagine that Apple can get this big.
Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.
It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.
My credit card is ready...
So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.
Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]
Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it. (and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?
Ternus will be the soldier in the trenches.
I feel excitement for the future of Apple.
Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?
do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
* Apple Silicon, the most far-reaching technical transformation in the company's history (probably a bigger deal than macOS itself)
* Apple Pay
* The Watch and Airpods product categories, both of which Apple now dominates.
All while holding on to its position in phones and improving (drastically) its computers.
It feels like a pretty successful term.
I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.
The reality is everyone just wants another hit product like the iPhone, but its success was based on it being a personal convergence device. You can't really create a second carryable/wearable convergence device and expect it to be wildly successful at the level of the iPhone without it killing off the iPhone.
So far that revolutionary approach by third parties has not succeeded against the iPhone, and the evolutionary approach apple takes with the iPhone means there is no clear inflection point anywhere in the future where the phone form factor goes away.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
Cook absolutely deserves credit for the successful desktop ARM transition, but building ARM processors in-house was in no way something he directed as CEO.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/06/17/g-s1-72...
We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
https://atp.fm/live
I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up. All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill. It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.
They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.
I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.
This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.
There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.
Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.
Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.
He fawned over Trump and gifted him a 24-karat gold plaque (as Apple lobbied for tariff exemptions).
Apple donated to Trump’s White House ballroom.
And it removed ICE tracking apps from its stores following a demand from the DOJ.
Remember this."
https://bsky.app/profile/rbreich.bsky.social/post/3mjxhqhyqo...
To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.
So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.
[0] https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/2021-ceo-...
Me thinks Apple software is the problem—I put Asahi Linux on my Mac.
he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.
qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.
all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.
Why so soon?
Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.
the bit in brackets ain't even necessary since we all know Tim is the CEO
Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.
Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.
These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.
MacOS already runs on iPhone SoC in Macbook Neo.
I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad
Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.
*John Ternus to become Apple CEO*
Talk about burying the lede, lmao.
Among the dup stories submitted, this one has the best content but the worst title.
They are all still there.
But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?
“Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art” — Andy Warhol