Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's chief executive officer, and hardware engineering chief John Ternus is set to take over September1st, Apple announced today.
2 months ago by JaymesRS to c/technology
Crossposted from https://piefed.world/...
Tim Apple?
Edit: Ah, Johnny Appleseed is the new guy.
A little Johnny Apple seed ready to grow into his new role.
That’ll give him more time to suck off Mr child rapist
probably act like bezos controlling the company from behind the scenes.
I seriously could do a better job than him. I have so many friends and family that used to be diehard apple fans to the point of nausea, that now think of it as a meh kind of company.
Cook's expertise was in the logistics. He's definitely not been a great leader for them putting out exciting products, but he's the reason they're so much less affected by things like global shipping crises or RAM prices exploding than many other companies are.
Then keep him in the c suite running the logistics, not spearhead a giant company and run their reputation in the ground. This is what you get when you don't keep the creatives in the c suite.
I suspect that the thinking when he was appointed was that logistics was going to be key to Apple's future success. And at the time, they also had a number of high profile creative people in other roles, though they have pretty much all moved on since. And if you look at their financial performance in the years since Cook took over—which is the board actually cares about—it's hard to say that this was a bad approach.
In the short term, yes. You can ride a reputation for years. Now the shit has hit the fan.
The work done by the hardware dept to build CPUs has been a great achievement though. While this started under Jobs, Apple now arguably makes the best CPUs in the market. Competing with AMD/Intel is no easy feat.
My old turbo jet engine loud intel MacBook that made noise at the smallest amount of work imaginable vs the silent more powerful m series laptop that lasted what felt like forever battery wise in comparison was such a nice upgrade.
With everything I do now though my M1 and its 16gb of ram is becoming a little limiting so im going to have to do something about that eventually.
Edit: and its less obvious to others, but them making their own modems now is also a pretty big thing.
His biggest failures, as I’ve heard it, revolve around the fact that he only cares about making short-term profits and doesn’t understand human beings. Steve Jobs did a lot of telling him to go fuck himself back in the day, to the great benefit of kot only the company, but to the customers. Why he was put in as the next guy to lead the company is beyond me.
I don't think it's short-term profits exactly, as much as he's just focused on making a profit, to the exclusion of all else. Logistics work doesn't tend to pay off short-term, and that is a lot of what his tenure focused on, with Apple basically bringing everything back in-house.
RAM prices exploding only means Apple takes a tiny hit to their profit margin per device, considering how inflated they were in the first place.
Apple is charging 999€ for the Air in Europe (less with student discounts), while windows PCs that “compete” with it are 1500€+. If Apple is making bank then the competition is outright robbing everyone.
Lol I'm a former diehard Apple hater that's been using an iPhone for 4 years and loves Apple Silicon Macs.
But I still do think they've done a lot of idiotic things lately. iOS 26 works fine on my phone (some people are reporting performance issues), but the UI is hit and miss.
Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could've given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they're calling this.
Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could've given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they're calling this.
I think Vision Pro was doomed regardless. Go back and watch the iPhone announcement, then the Vision Pro announcement. Every single person in the auditorium when Jobs is presenting the iPhone is thinking of the thousand things they can do with that device. In the Vision Pro announcement, there’s none of that energy. If they released something that left zero question as to its purpose, the price could sit at $3K and they wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough. Instead we got an Oculus that won’t support most games and costs 6 times as much.
The vision pro utterly baffles me. When they were making the product did no one ever raise the question of what exactly the product they were making was for, because every single reviewer said exactly the same thing, which was that it was an incredibly advanced product, with zero utility.
Andrew Ti has proposed that part of the problem that the VP exemplifies is that the Bay Area is too expensive for regular people to live in, so you have tech millionaires in their little bubbles never getting input from regular people. Specifically from teenagers. If Apple had taken the VP to malls in (say) Minneapolis and Dallas and LA and Newark, the people wearing it would have been roasted by teenagers, and the designers and engineers would know there was still work to do.
The skeumorphic days of the early 2000s were nice, and gave things a bit of character. The current trend of having everything be flat colours is fine, but does lose a little bit of that whimsy.
Admittedly, part of it might also just be that the grass is greener. We could easily be saying the same thing in reverse if we were still on the gel look of the time.
Don't get me wrong, they have some great things about it. Garage Band, for instance. It's just not forward thinking, not quality or design oriented anymore, and tries to keep you on their cloud pretty strongly. At least that's how it was around 2017.
Remember iTunes, if I had gone out with the intention of making an inferior product I don't think I would have succeeded. I cannot believe that they were prepared to slap their name onto that utterly garbage piece of software and then proceed to never fix it.
It's still a bewildering oversight that, or something just like it, is the only way you can link with a device.
If you stuff your phone with photos, you can't delete them by connecting them to a computer and sorting through them on that. You have to use a utility to import them either straight onto the computer, or delete them separately on the phone. Even if you use a Mac instead of a PC, you basically need to work with an iTunes-like interface.
Especially with the focus on trying to make the iPad a computer. You're still largely relegated to the iTunes-type interface, unless you sidestep it with a cloud service, or Airdrop.
Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could've given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they're calling this.
I think that they shot themselves in the foot by trying to make it a computer that goes on your face, and have it do as much as possible.
The interface is weird, and comes with a bunch of features that don't seem very useful. The eye thing is simply odd, and the keyboard seems like it would run into the same problems that those laser keyboards that were all the rage back in the day had, where it's awful to type on, since you get no feedback, and are just whacking your hand against a solid surface.
If they had stripped it all the way down into basically being a wearable monitor you can plug into your devices, with workspaces you can expand or move around as you like, in lieu of having a bunch of monitors, it would have been more of a sell.
As it is, it comes across as a proof-of-concept that's stuffed to the gills with gimmicks to try and make it fit a niche, which in turn makes it seem a toy more so than anything else.
If they had stripped it all the way down into basically being a wearable monitor you can plug into your devices, with workspaces you can expand or move around as you like, in lieu of having a bunch of monitors, it would have been more of a sell.
Isn't that pretty much just a VR headset? You can already buy those.
Every decision made about the vision pro was idiotic. They didn't even have a developer kit so you had to buy the full price to device and you didn't even get developer options for your trouble so no one developed for it. It wasn't available outside of North America, it didn't have a controller so interactions were clunky, it didn't support gaming which is basically what a VR headset is for, it would only interact with an MacBook making the effective price even higher, it was uncomfortable, the battery was a randomly a separate part to absolutely zero customer benefit as it wasn't hot swappable, after the big swanky launch event Apple proceeded to completely forget about it and didn't release any updates, and as you say they never made an affordable version.
Literally every other VR headset was a superior option, and apples attempt to rebrand the product as "spatial computing" just confused everyone.
it didn't support gaming which is basically what a VR headset is for
Yeah i dont know. Its a tool/technology. It found a somewhat stable market in gaming and lots of its development is tied to the gaming sector. But saying that is basically what its there for is underestimating its future potential by a lot.
It was also not meant to be VR but rather pass through AR (smart approach for now as optical AR is still not as high fidelity)
Literally every other VR headset was a superior option, and apples attempt to rebrand the product as "spatial computing" just confused everyone.
Again, thats not what they were going for. Cook is apparently super excited about AR & spatial computing and kinda jumped the gun a bit if you ask me. But this was no "Oh no the gamers wont buy it because of the quest or the index etc., quick rebrand it as a spatial computing device"
This stuff is going to fundamentally change how we interact with technology in the next 100 years but apple adapting things when they had their kinks worked out and are ready for a broad audience made it a confusing product coming from them.
That’s my thought too. The Vision Pro is more Newton than anything it’s compared to today. I’m sure that there will be echoes of it in some piece of tech in the next 10-15 years, but it’s not the right device for the right time right now for most people.
That's what I mean though everyone understands VR to be a gaming peripheral first and foremost. Apple then came in to that market with a non-gaming focused VR headset (sorry AR special computing headset) with no obvious practical application.
What am I supposed to do with it it can't game but it also can't do anything else. I literally can't even watch YouTube videos on it. I can watch VR videos on my phone with a piece of cardboard yet this several thousand dollar device from Apple can't do that. So why would I buy it?
Google Cast and Miracast, RCS messaging, probably some find support depending on what you want, and I see a bunch of apps claiming to integrate with the Apple Watch but I have no way to validate them. My Fitbit integrates just fine.
So no, no, no, no, and no.
Thanks for nothing.
It’s annoying as crap when it’s just “switch to x” when “x” doesn’t do or can’t do the things someone wants. Then someone else comes in and shoehorns a solution down the throat and everyone cheers because of the android circle jerk.
Yeah.
The hardware is fantastic.
The software is like one of those brides where they bind the feet so they can never become independent. And then services revenue is a goitre on this creatures neck constantly throwing it off balance as it tries to shamble forward.
I very much want ~2010 apple, where the hardware was maybe a bit meh, but the software was top tier.
The hardware is premium. That doesn't mean it's good. It's impossible to work on or upgrade, for example. The parts are all high quality and the design is usually solid (except for a handful of things like systems known to overheat and "you're holding it wrong" antennas), but for how much it costs I don't want to have to buy a whole new one when I want to upgrade or have a hardware problem, no matter how much Apple would want me to.
People say the hardware is top-notch but every single person I know who has an iPhone has a cracked iPhone.
Meanwhile here I am with a supposedly very delicate folding phone and no case, and it's absolutely fine. I'm not careful with it either I've dropped it loads of times. I have no idea why Apple insist on making their screens out of sugar glass.
Who are these people who have cracked screens? I’m being serious when I say I don’t think I’ve seen any cracked phone screen of either make in literally at leave five or six years.
I frankly don't know about Apple and Tim Cook specifically, but broadly a lot of enthusiasts may not be as excited about revenue and profit as they are about how good the experience is for them.
For example, looking at a well executed enjoyable game with no bullshit micro transactions or loot boxes or anything most would agree that is a good game.
But revenue and profit wise some random low effort mobile game with micro transactions would blow that good game out of the water business wise.
Unfortunately, lots of "better business" is explicitly screwing over the customers as much as they can possibly get away with, so I'm not super excited about arguments around revenue, profit, and market cap as a measure of a company I should like to buy from.
Sure, but then people should be honest about what they are actually saying:
“I’m glad he left because I hate what they did to my iPhone during his tenure.” Instead of “I’m glad he left, he’s been a disaster for Apple.”
One is honest and accurate, the other isn’t.
Also in what is Apple really screwing people over? The MacBook is more competitive than it’s ever been so much so that M chips continue to be the gold standard every brand aims to beat and MacBooks are more affordable than ever considering the pricing we’re seeing now. Really, all things considered, the Liquid Glass design is (maybe) a L drop in an ocean of Ws for Apple.
Yeah it’s weird that people argue Tim was bad for Apple. All the major metrics are in the green since he took over, the only complaints I see about Apple today is something abstract like “I don’t like the bubbly design of my device.”
If anything, he has only improved Apple’s products since the mid 2010s when their products were suffering from focusing on thinness instead of usability.
The user experience and user interface has suffered.
Yes, because profit is everything. Just saying.
Do you know why I would do better? I would hire him to do the logistics and handle the CFO, while focusing on R&D, design and what the customers want. He entirely skipped R&D, design and giving the customers what they want.
Plus I would fucking never do this and suck up to a fascist:
(screenshot at 4 minutes in article video):
I’m not optimistic on this one, since one of the features of huge corporations is that the institutional shareholders that own them appoint the person they think will deliver the best YoY growth and Earnings Per Share. For a company that’s mostly saturated its market, this means enshittification and thumbscrew-tightening on its existing customers.
Innocent question:
besides Liquid ass (which really only people online complain about, the average user doesn’t care), in what has Tim Cook been bad for Apple?
The MacBook has become extremely competitive price wise and even the iPhone since all other brands seem to have inflated their prices sky-high. And with the launch of Neo it is even more competitive. The M chip keeps running circles around the competition and Apple stock keeps rising year after year.
So what was the issue with him?
He may not have the product vision or salesmanship of Jobs, but he’s a logistics genius and was a MAJOR part of saving Apple when he came on. I’m reading the book “Apple in China”, and he was very responsible for Apple’s incredible supply chain and the fact that Apple, itself, holds relatively little inventory with the exception of its stores.
The company has grown exponentially under Cook. The problem is that there hasn’t really been an awe inspiring new product developed fully under him.
And he sucked up to a fascist (screenshot at 4 minutes in article video):
I've found it makes more sense when you think of it from the shareholder perspective.
Its not that they're blind idiots, its that their motivations are not what they say they are. If they were trying to make the best and most ergonomically advanced product possible, as stated, then their moves often seem stupid and tone-deaf. But, if you consider that they are trying to increase margin as much as possible any action that makes the product or support cheaper by a greater margin than it loses customers, they're moves are brilliant!
More and more users are disgruntled and dissatisfied, but barely any of them skip the lines when the next model comes out, so the shareholder's plan is working excellently.
If we want a return to companies competing for our dollars, we need a return to markets that have competitors. If there are fewer companies in a sector than players on a bowling team, you can bet they are in collusion and acting as a unit in the ways that affect consumer agency, so there is no competition in the classic sense. They all agree to suck together so few will leave. They all win and we all lose.
It’s the biggest company in the world. (Well, unless GPUs are here to stay).
He’s done pretty good.
At least it's a hardware person taking over and not some marketing twat.
I believe his name is John Apple now.
Are Tim Apple and John Apple somehow related?
They are from the Apple clan of Japan, or wherever part of China Apple is from, which has a rich history and leadership of the clan is periodically passed to a successor. This dates back to the fall of the great Steve Apple who was killed by Jewish space lasers that gave him cancer. There is a long voting process involved to select the new leader of the Apple clan and dedicated followers wait patiently for a white air drop that signals the new clan leader has been chosen. As an additional fact John Apple's grandmother was from clan Wutang which has made this choice highly controversial.
The apple never falls far from the tree.
yes, but which tree?
Canon
Johnny Applebookphone
John Appleseed not obvious enough?
article says Tim Cook and shows a picture of Tim Apple.
fucking amateurs.
Damn i came here to make some variation of this joke!
Can the glass theme go away now?
Hilarious that you got downvoted into the negative for daring to voice a dissenting opinion. Truly, Lemmy is a child of Reddit.
Edit: Back above zero! I take it back, maybe I spoke too soon?
I'm upvoting just to counterbalance the people downvoting because they dislike someone else's subjective opinion.
I've only used it in passing when somebody's handed me their phone to put my number in or something but I think the big objection is not what it looks like but it's usability or lack thereof.
Why would I want my user interface to be transparent, isn't the whole point that I need to be able to see the interface surely I want it to stand out from the background.
The other complaint is that the analogy doesn't really work, glass isn't a liquid substance, so why does it make sense for the sliding toggle to morph?
Literally not a single lick of usability improved from glass theme. Lots of elements worse. I support a handful of relatives and none of them like the change and still find the theme confusing.
I do kind of wish that there was a way to bring back the old squishy gel 3D icons, though.
The current thing is a bit of an awkward cross between them, and the flat colours that seem to be basically everywhere now.
I miss the skeuomorphism of the really old versions. I loved that the game center looked like a poker table, for instance.
You mean wannabe Windows 7 Aero? I sure hope so, one of the best things about it is that you can turn it off
You can turn glass off in macOS. On my MacBook running the latest 26.4.1 it's in the System Settings under Accessibility -> Display -> Reduce transparency.
Sadly, there are still a few apps that don't respect Accessibility settings, like Tidal, but it should apply to everything that's part of macOS.
Yes, that's what I did. The very OS doesn't respect it. Not for nothing did they call it "reduce" and not "eliminate". It looks like shit. I have refused upgrading my other Mac to the latest OS version due to this.
Would have been fun if the new guy was called Pine.
Or Adams
I’m hopefully for maybe a return to a hardware focused Apple but we’ll see. Apple silicon was truly great, but I want moar.
I think that's why we haven't seen Apple Silicon advertised that heavily lately.
There's also not much of a point to advertise it at this point. The M-Series chips been around for a good while now, and is used in a bunch of their products. It's basically turned into the status quo, so they have no need to advertise it, particularly as the improvements seem to be mostly incremental for the time being.
Aren't they hardware focused? I don't use any of their products but I keep hearing praise about their M chips and their general build quality. Their phones seem pretty solid too; although, I guess you might not be getting the best bang for your buck when comparing features side-by-side.
Sort of? Apple's reputation is traditionally that they make middle-of-the-road hardware, but make up for the shortcomings with software.
On paper, you can buy a Windows computer with better specs for cheaper, but the Apple computer still holds its own because the software is well-made, at least on the OS side of things. Even if the rest of their software was rubbish, you could get rid of it and still have a good foundation to work from. Hence why the Hackintosh was all the rage some years back. In theory, you could eke out the best of both worlds.
Their growth segment is services and services have been taking an increasing share of total revenues (even with record iPhone sales).
That's where they'll be focused on, so prepare for mode ads and data collection.
Ternus is the Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering and notoriously skeptical of new technology. If they wanted someone who was AI- minded, they would have made Craig Federighi CEO.
apparently he helped lead the team behind M-series chips and Airpods which are Apple’s few good genuine innovations of the last decade so he seems promising!
Federighi is the one who talked Cook in to moving the company towards AI, and he’s the person who was put in charge of the AI-ification of Siri when the previous fly was let go. Turnus is a hardware guy. The two things he’s most responsible for are Apple Silicon and AirPods.
Oh, and he was the one who pushed for the Macbook Neo, which has been hugely successful -commercially, in terms of reception, and has even had CEOs of other companies like Dell saying it’s a serious threat to their business
There have been rumors of Cook retiring for the past five years, at least, and I’m pretty sure that shareholders are quite happy with Apple market cap at almost $4 trillion.
It has nothing to do with AI.
I completely forgot about that shit. So stupid.
gobbling trumps nub, dint help you in the slightest.
Cook is going to transition to executive chairman, and he will "assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."
His new role is literally Trump Gobbler
Good, maybe I won't have to see this a$$hole's face in articles and such anymore.
I was gonna say. Complaining about Apple not working well (or at all) with 3rd party hardware and software has always been an exercise in futility. Like since the late 1980's, always.
Long ago they positioned themselves as a premium brand with an image to maintain. Can't let the plebs skate by with cheap add-ons.
You see, people keep complaining about Apple software, and defend their lock-in and lock-out practices at the same time. I just can't help but point out the options. Less futile than pointlessly complaining.
The MacPro line has been finally canceled after being neglected for years.
Doesn’t surprise me. The Mac Studio is essentially a trash can Mac Pro but less trash can and more Mac Mini.
Mac Studio is a Mac mini with better cooling and better all around specs.
The trash can MacPro was kinda cool when introduced, but then they never bother to upgrade it.
We can only hope incoming is as careful with our information as outgoing is.
I can still remember the first time he had to do a presentation with Steve and he was shaking. Crazy how well trained everyone is for those presentations by now.
Woz hasn’t done anything at Apple since the Apple IIGS. He has been a honorary employee since the late 80’s. Woz doesn’t come close to Federighi and the new CEO when it comes to competency.
BFD, I switched to a Fairphone 6 (De-Googled) and I'm not looking back. The only thing I might miss, a tiny bit, is the iWatch.
? And apparently Tim Apple isn't even called Tim Apple? Is this whole company some sort of mirage?
Good for you
Sadly the apple watch sensor + algorithm is the singular best PPG optical heart rate tracker on the market.
Not enough to put myself in danger of the Israeli Pegasus sending me one text to inject spyware but still...
Seems like iphone lovers are mighty upset at you.
I don’t think it’s that, it’s that this comment doesn’t really add anything and it’s annoying to see the same tribalistic tropes repeated in every single post about phone brands. I despise the dogged fanboyism of the android and iOS people.
I didn’t up or downvote for the record.
I despise the dogged fanboyism of the android and iOS people
Same. Which is why I like to see Fairphone, Jolla and GrapheneOS etcetc mentioned as much as possible :)
The fuck is that headline? The CEO is stepping down as CEO? Like, is it really important to let people know what CEO means?
I mean, he is stepping down from that position but will continue to be with the company. If the headline just said he's stepping down it could imply that he's leaving entirely which would not be true.
fair enough
I can hear the meeting already “we haven’t gotten onto the ai bandwagon enough yet, clearly we’re gonna miss out on all those profits that are 100% bound to happen (my ai told me so).”
Oh shit. Didn't he just do an interview thing where the guy asked him about retiring and his perspective on when he would "know" it's the right time?
He’ll have more time to learn how to wave a flag
I wonder what this will mean for Apple and whether this is an ominous foreshadowing of the ongoing hardware crisis. It seems to me like this would only be happening if the Macbook Neo has a difficult coming year or two down the line and he's taking the fall preemptively. Either that or perhaps undisclosed health issues.
All these pedo’s look the same
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
go to feed...
John Apple
save