Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering.

Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).

I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.

I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.

I always understood, going to China, as what the industry was already doing, and Apple was in the middle of coming out of bankruptcy, so pressured to get their costs down. Tim Cook, the process guy, would have been given the task to do just that in an industry that was already consolidating in China.

I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.

Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.

Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.

Yeah I think so too. I'm just wondering if the people on software are still the right people. Mac OS has quite a few regressions, and seems to just chug along instead of really using the power of the chips, or massively improving file i/o. Apple still has a chance to do some cool stuff with AI integrations, but they have had interesting local models 3 years ago and apparently nowhere, or no vision, to use it. We're all clapping for Craig Federighi's jokes but I have no idea if he is a great manager or a great presenter.

I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.

> Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China )

Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.

I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form.

Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?

Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up)

They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.

>> the next era looks bright.

but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.

are you imaging them creating whole new devices?

I know what you mean by stronger product focus, but phrasing it as “more like Jobs” makes it sound daunting.

Apparently Apple invested ~ $50B to advance China's manufacturing capabilities.

As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.

Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.

What big hardware bets are people expecting him to take?

I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected:

1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;

2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and

3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.

Being eligible for Medicare, Cook can finally afford to retire.

Humor seems difficult for people.

Don't worry, I got it.

Gotta hold out for that bus pass

Google themselves also did this with Gemini, we saw how quickly OpenAI's lead was erased. It could make quite a bit of sense to use this as a crutch so they (Apple) can overhaul their own efforts free of production pressures.

I'm not really seeing it though. Apple is more hardware and holistic experience, they aren't traditionally pushing the boundaries of "web-scale" nerd software. As long as they can keep on top of the devices that end up in people's hands they will have a place and don't need to be an AI powerhouse. They're doing just fine using Google Search.

My understanding was that Google was withholding access to features (vector tiles, turn by turn) to renegotiate maps usage. The two things I heard they wanted - features gated on Google login, and advertisements.

Apple had been developing their own maps solution already and accelerated it to land before the end of their existing agreement with Google, when Apple would have to accept Google's terms to continue usage. Google apparently had no idea negotiations had fallen through until the keynote.

It was going to ship as beta quality anyway (they were merging multiple sources of third party data), but the timeline meant it became a replacement in whatever form it was in.

> competent replacement for Google Maps

Maybe in the US and a handful of other countries. See the replies on this thread talking about various issues with using Apple Maps elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219#47840616.

> in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.

This must be a hallucination because it's still a wasteland here.

There is a place for local models. Typing prediction, speech to text, etc. But I have yet to see uses of local LLMs that are all that compelling.

Huh, if you don't own the models then you don't own the ecosystem end to end though?

> the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.

Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012.

You could call them a "frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet" but we don't even say that about AMD or Intel despite supporting Linux and shipping GPGPU architectures already. Apple's position in the greater AI/GPGPU industry is widely accepted to be forfeit. Even Google's AI hardware strategy is closer to the frontier than Apple's.

I think this is probably not very tin-foil, but I do believe the rumors we were hearing about Cook retiring and Ternus stepping in were less leaks and more intentionally preparing markets for the inevitable transition.

I dont see it as a contradiction. Apple knows its core competencies and has the cash to back to any initiative worth pursuing through acquisition and/or hiring. Cook was a savant at vertically integrating supply the supply chain and horizontally integrating the entire ecosystem. This led to multiple innovations where Apple is the de facto standard for quality.

The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.

Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.

LLMs are just so antithetical to the way Apple works and makes products. They are first and foremost control freaks over the content they present as "From iPhone" or "From Apple". I would be absolutely shocked if they ever one day took content from a non-deterministic black box and presented it directly to the user. They have always human-curated nearly everything user-facing that comes from their products, and entered into partnerships for content grudgingly and always with a plan to control the content vertically once they are able to. The big exception obviously is web search, but I can only imagine how much it pains them to not have an iron-fist control over the search results on Safari. They'll never embrace an AI content roulette wheel.

I would bet large sums of money that Apple is waiting to make a hardware play. When there's a sufficiently capable and intelligence-dense LLM, they will bake it into custom silicon and ship "the first MacBook with on-device AI, powered by our new I1 chip". Imagine Siri being powered by an LLM running entirely on-device at 10,000+ tokens/sec.

Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.

100% - if they switched their privacy stance they would lose their devoted crowd but probably keep the main street crowd. Its one of those things that makes me worried that at some point a new CEO or legal team will try to further monetize this and irreparably ruin what they built.

You mean its smart approach to PR about privacy. Actual privacy, especially if you are 95% of the mankind without US passport... thats a topic for long discussion, and not a very positive one.

I'm not sure it's fair to call the Apple Vision Pro a flop in the traditional sense.

While it may not have sold millions of units and been a household staple.

It certainly focused the entire org on manufacturing a suite of chips and hardware that are on a completely different level than their competitors. Apple's now has a clear advantage in all dimensions that matter: compute, power consumption, size, capabilities, etc.

Apple Vision helped created a moat that will be hard for anyone else to cross for at least a decade.

I think a couple of failures are necessary for this kind of work.

At least the Vision Pro wasn't a $70 billion boondoggle like the Metaverse was.

The flops include the mid-to-late 2010s thinness era of Macbooks. Touch Bar, butterfly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air. At least this got corrected but it was a flop era.

I think AI is Tim Apple's biggest flop. Apple can make their own hardware. Apple could've invested in their own hardware like Google's TPUs. Siri has really stagnated. If anybody should be doubling down on an AI assistant, it's Apple.

Microslop produces terrible stuff, as bad as they ever have. How on earth can you put mr copilot 365 windows 10 is the last edition above Tim Cook!?

> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:

* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems

Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.

I think you underestimate what he does. It seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but if it were so easy, others would not be so far behind. A difficult thing done well looks easy. Reminds me of when Toyota disrupted auto manufacturing.

Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.

> Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?

Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).

That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.

I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then months after announcements their supplies are limited or geo locked. Samsung probably comes close, and it helps they're so vertically integrated.

Squeezing the suppliers in just the right way. When you squeeze them too hard and the pricing is too low, the suppliers stop making quality parts and Apple would have a reputation for hardware failures. Squeezing the suppliers not enough and the pricing is too high, then Apple suffers either from a reduced profit margin or a higher ASP. I find that negotiating with suppliers is an art. Cook is quite good at it.

> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?

The biggest problem Apple had before Cook was inventory management. They would produce more Performas then they could sell which weighed their cash flow. The dead weight of inventory was a really big problem. Right sizing production to meet demand was what initially saved Apple.

I haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing.

Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.

As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.

So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.

So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.

Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.

The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said, "You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes."

This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.

While agreeing with the consensus that Thiel is an absolute tool; pieces of wisdom can still be extracted from those that you do not like and a critical reader should be able to evaluate any piece of written text for new understandings.

While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.

This is such a tiresome perspective. The value of the quote from Thiel should be based on how true/predictive/helpful the quote is. Not the political leanings of the person who said it.

Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.

Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.

He’s a hack, now you know.

When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.

There's an element of revisionism to this perspective. It used to be thought that integration with the global economy would gradually bring more alignment with Western values as well.

The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.

> he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this

What law do you want to write to make it so that knowledge can't be transferred to other countries?

In the mid 20th century, the Green Revolution, partly led by Norman Borlaug, fed billions, and was a huge transfer of knowledge to other countries, and hugely beneficial for all of humanity. (The critiques, well they exist but they are refinements, not critiques that would justify not doing the Green Revolution).

In the case of Apple in China, this was not a one-sided transaction, both sides benefited massively.

Now I do think we should be encouraging the US to compete more, which was what the Biden administration was really good at getting going. But mere ban of commerce, and not providing the industrial policy for US industry to catch up China's excellence, leave us in a world where we are all poorer, both the US and China.

The world is not a zero-sum place, capitalism and technological change are in fact quite positive sum, and when we act like everything is zero-sum we are all worse off.

The book's thesis is frankly unwarranted Apple glazing. Asian Tigers trained PRC decades before Apple. Muh designed in California and manufactured in China was always Cupertino hands Chinese factory specs and Chinese engineers and workers building it into reality. US manufacturing already in the shits by then, the idea that Apple substantively "elevated" PRC manufacturing is huffing copium. PRC process engineering was always the hardest part of the equation that somehow gets credited to US. PRC manufacturing made Apple, not the other way around.

The reality is PRC already had magnitude more high end manufacturing talent by the time Apple entered PRC already and they're the ones that made Apple scribbles at scale possible. The stories of PRC manufacturers having stupendously fast line turn arounds, making changes in hours should disabuse the notion they needed learning, when they already knew how to execute at scale. Apple's derisked manufacturing in other countries still can't do this, PRC was doing this on day one - see overnight turnaround to retool iPhone line from plastic to glass screen 20 years ago. Apple went to PRC because PRC already had competently trained manufacturing workforce, and only one that can operate at speed + scale. Apple buying a few 1000 CNC machines doesn't tip the balance remotely in Apple's favour - if sector moved towards CNC and tighter tolerances, PRC industry would have simply followed, Apple $$$ is nice, but PRC doesn't need Apple $$$ - capex is not a bottleneck for their system. And Apple would have never push enough goods and make $$$ without PRC.

It was a different time. Less nerdy people already had phones and iPods. And were already keen for better versions of those things. The Internet communicator part was more abstract, it wasn’t clear to a non-technical person why they would even want such a thing. The iphone showed them why by first putting a better phone and iPod in their hands…

This is in fact what happened with SpaceX. Musk had the vision to make first stage reusability a thing with the Falcon 9, and Gwynne Shotwell is the operational genius behind the juggernaut that it is today.

Hilarious quote from her Wikipedia page:

> Shotwell has received particular praise from NASA Administrator Bill Nelson for her "phenomenal" leadership of SpaceX as it developed the Falcon 9 into the "workhorse" of the space launch sector.[19] Nelson had reportedly been concerned in 2022, after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, that it would be a distraction at SpaceX, but became more comfortable after meetings with Shotwell left him feeling reassured that she was in charge of day-to-day operations.

Yes I would say any honest reading of Apple's position in the last 30 years is they are not a zero to one company, they are a 0.5 to 1 company.

They take great ideas, cut half the functionality out, put it in a shiny white and aluminium case and make it fashionable.

As a kid I literally sent Apple an email saying "hey, my mum's phone is tiny, surely you could stick a phone in an iPod?".

I owned those devices. They were really bad, so I think it's fair to say that. There's a reason we kept calling everything else a potential iPhone killer, and forgot them all.

The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.

when the iphone originally came out, this was absolutely true. the way it handled rendering the desktop versions of pages alone, w/ the double-tap-to-zoom put it in its own tier beyond the blackberries / n-gages / etc. contemporaneously extant. beyond that, it was clearly just a better ux on existing tech, i’ll give you that.

It's not a lie. All you need to do is watch the unveiling.

The most important bit (and reason it's not a lie) is when Jobs demoed scrolling.

"So... here i have all my songs... how do i scroll? I just... take my finger, and swipe".

You can hear the crowd visibly gasp. Every product before was arrow-keypad based and was not designed for touch. Plus it didn't have a desktop level OS, plus the capabilities of a desktop level OS. There was no equivalent.

What were they?

I miss my Treo :(

Design flaw vs manufacturing/logistics problem