The hardware is in sparkling form. Perhaps the software is closer to average. Where would you pick the next leader from - the hw side or the sw side?!
Is it really so hard to write your articles by yourself? The blandest tone imaginable, all the usual LLM tells in the sentence structure. You are polluting HN and the broader internet by posting this publicly.
I wonder if AI is going to drive certain idioms into extinction (aside from being used by AI).
Stuff like this:
> Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.
And the headings starting with "The"
AI seems to have adopted a style reminiscent of startup marketers circa 2020 - really simple, lots of one liner quips and far too much incredulity about minor things. Now we've come full circle!
I'm the first to say I'm not the best writer...
>Not just sell. Not just ship. Use.
>The honest read ... The hopeful read ...
>The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products.
>Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras
There's also bizarre not-quite-landing uncanny metaphors that LLMs love to do:
>Today's Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation.
>The texture changed.
>And the rot follows that exact line.
If you're surrounded by this kind of writing, it may be good to get other inspirations. It's bad!
This article on the other hand has 1: https://routerjockey.com/introducing-graphiant-the-future-of...
I don't mind either way, but reading through the Tim Cook one without opening the comments on HN, I was 99.9% sure I'm reading AI.
I enjoyed your article and shared it on my family-geek-whatsapp group
LLM's got their inspiration from popular sources written by humans. Now humans are exposed to LLM on repeat basis every day. It looks only normal that writing done with or without LLMs tend to converge to the same style.
Screen time is totally broken. Produces numbers hilariously wrong. Again a problem for people with kids.
Spotlight searching on macOS just breaks and forcing a rescan can fix it for a while, but it can break pretty faster after randomly.
If you do not see this as teh problem with Tim Cook then I have a gold bar to give you.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/
I want ethical companies that grow because of good products, not because of market capture and bribes.
Then avoid becoming a customer/user of companies that grew because of market capture or bribes.
Where can I get my gold bar, please?
I was doing Apple support since 1995, I saw how they changed.
I mean, they certainly would never have given Trump a gold bar to forgive this case now, would they?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/21/tech/apple-sued-antitrust-doj...
This will never exist.
We should want regulated and lawful companies, which we don't have right now.
Did I say that?
I guess many of the people who share their critiques are people who never really liked where Cook was gonna take Apple (and took) to in the first place.
I want to buy from a company whose goal is to make the best products, not make the most money.
You optimize differently for each.
But so has the rest of FAANG. Did Tim Cook really overperform?
Growth compared to 2011:
Apple ~8×
Microsoft ~13–14×
Google ~10×
Facebook* ~10–15×
> Microsoft's market capitalization in 2011 was approximately $220 Billion
Those are post iPhone numbers being multiplied.
Also, arguably, iPhones made everyone else on that list stupid rich and drove insane demands for their products. Instagram and Snapchats fortunes need more than Windows Mobile phones ever gave. Apples rising tide helped the web giants.
I'm not a fanboy by any means, just looking at the numbers.
> All that matters seems to be "did the line go up?"
Exactly.
You can't repair your device.
They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible, making it hard to leave, and not by making such a good product.
They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
Anything I missed?
They make good hardware, yes, but I can't support them as a company.
The constantly sinking level of software quality. They make excellent hardware ruined by crappy software.
These responses talking about Apple's bottom line kind of feel like this convo:
> Cigarettes are bad, they cause cancer. Philip Morris shouldn't be selling them
> Yeah but they sell so many cigarettes! Isn't that great?
> You can't repair your device.
Everything is increasingly integrated for dust/water proofing, components are integrated to reduce the power envelope and push performance. Repairability is the tradeoff.
> They're intently focused on locking you in as much as possible
All of their products and services are tightly integrated and have privileged access to hardware that would be insecure to open to 3rd parties.
> They try their best to force app developers to pay them their 30% tax, even when the devs brought the customers in from elsewhere.
If you want to list on their marketplace it's not unreasonable to expect to pay for access. We can haggle on the fairness of 30%
> They, for so long, refused to support RCS and downgraded the messaging experience with android.
As a consumer I just can't possibly be made to care about this.
> They were trying to intentionally downgrade SPAs so people again need to go through their app store.
SPAs perform poorly and eat battery life and have super heterogeneous user experiences, I don't want them on my phone.
As a consumer I like that they don't open the gates on the phone ecosystem to all of the absolute slop we see on android.
Under Jobs, UX was king. Devices had to be intuitive, and features discoverable. Today, all that user-friendliness is gone. The devices are no longer approachable for a newbie: you have to just know how to use them.
There are provisions for 15%
Who cares that it's Tim Cook's "passion" unless you're an Apple investor?
That’s underspecified. Part of the problem is that there are multiple incompatible definitions of “better”.
> The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.
> Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.
Tim Cook is not and never has been a salesperson. Head of operations at a company like Apple is a deeply technical role. That’s why he has a degree in industrial engineering and an MBA.
> Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix.
Today’s Apple struggles to ship software to more than 2 billion devices and get all the integrations working smoothly. The Apple of the past a) had lots of similar problems every once in a while even under jobs b) never had to deal with this scale. The correct benchmark isn’t Apple of the past but of similarly sized companies like Google and Microsoft.
> and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better.
Apple has had one badly received and widely panned software release (and honestly I haven’t really had the problems others complained about, but I waited until a few dot releases).
> But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top.
Sounds like the author doesn’t have hands on experience building hardware.
Finally, I’ll note they promoted a hardware engineer to CEO. If the CEO role was so critical to good software then a software person would have been a better pick. A CEO role is different and good product taste is a fickle bitch - even Johnny Ives was struggling there.
At that level and scale it's merely politics.
Personally, I don't think the fact that the Apple keyboard is unusable is a "geek" thing.
1. used to mediocrity and enshittification everywhere 2. live in one ecosystem or another. Appart from developpers, I don't know many people who use Mac AND Windows, iPhones AND android. And resistance to change is there to limit moves between one to another. They wouldn't care if apple keyboard sucks if they never used a better one.
Reality is the success of current products mostly hedges on the momentum their companies have built over the last decade, rather than the actual innovations of those current products. Guerilla advertising is also used super effectively.
I don't think Steve Jobs would have been kept as CEO had he survived cancer.
Most Apple customers of today aren't necessarily the same customers as 15 years ago, the same way a Rolex, Porsche, Louis Vuitton customer in 2026 is not the same person as in the 80's. A lot of current customers are used to mediocrity in everything, from food, to entertainment or tech. I'll exclude Linux desktops because most people do not even know it is a thing, but look at the commercially available alternatives to iOS and MacOS? Android and Windows. That's it. While I appreciate the sadly dwindling additionnal freedom in android, I can hardly call these 2 a frictionless experience either. Are chromebooks still a thing nowadays? I haven't encountered one or a user in years.
Is there a product in either of AirPods' categories that is generally recognized as either outright superior or a better value?
Because both regular and Pro seem like amazing products, and reviews tend to classify them as such. And it's entirely a Cook-led project. Like, if I were to pick one product to prove that Cook cared about product and Apple could still do cool things, that's probably on the top of the list.
Calling out one flaw and making that emblematic of his entire tenure feels extremely shortsighted.
Once that had run out, he ran out and VR plus intelligence were there worst failures the company has ever seen. Completely inept ideas, one that very publicly failed to launch to a hugely damaging degree.
Cook was great at growing others legacy, and completely inept at making his own.
I love my Macbook HW (except for the stupid sharp edge) and the only thing that keeps me from ditching it is that for most documents I work on, I am in LibreOffice, which lets me disable the native save as dialog box and use the works as expected LibreOffice one.
To the article, I wonder if a HW person will have the mindset required to fix the glaring holes in their SW. Make the whole damn company eat their own dogfood!
I use all 3 for different reasons, but Macbooks are my daily driver because I want an ecosystem. Too bad there are so many ecosystem fails. I want to believe, but this $4T megacorp can't figure out table stakes.
Whatever's going on in Cupertino, it's hard to arguethe people working on the Linux ecossytem don't eat their own dogfood
The job of a public-company CEO is to grow the company for the shareholders, they have a fiduciary duty to do this. Tim Cook took all the ingredients that Steve Jobs left him and maximised them, and I doubt there are many people in the world who given the same raw ingredients could have increased the market cap as much as Tim did...
Tim is and was not ever a product or marketing genius as Jobs was, so why compare him to Jobs? Very, very few people in history have ever been as good at product and marketing as Jobs... BUT, Cook is an operations genius, and he led Apple using his particular strengths and he has left Apple as an incredibly healthy company.
He was also insanely smart with some of his strategic moves, e.g. not overhiring during covid and leaving Apple in a superstrong post-covid position, also, not overspending on AI (like Meta), and realizing that all of the AI software providers would ultimately need to put their apps and software on iPhone. I.e. let Apple focus on what its best at (hardware), let others waste their money on AI, we will use the best when it becomes commoditized...
Companies don't produce better products unless incentives are aligned to force them to produce better products.
Are incentives aligned in a way to cause Apple to produce better software? If not, then it absolutely does not matter who the CEO is. IREAM.
As I said in another comment here, when things just work, it seems magical and awesome. But the same areas where deep integration creates the magic is often riddled with a lot of bugs. I report many issues to Apple and follow up those reports with updated information, but most of them don’t get any attention. I don’t have a mental model for where all the feedback and issues go to and who looks at them or takes ownership of them.
If you want a better product you will not get it from a publicly traded company.
Sure you may claim that a bad product is bad for a company in the long term and it is. However short term stock increases are far more desirable than long term stability and growth.
Unfortunately, this is false. Cook announced a switch from CEO to executive chair of the board of directors, which is vastly different from leaving. Technically, Cook is still the boss, or at least one of the bosses, of John Ternus. It sounds like Cook intends to remain in this position for quite some time. Even if Ternus had an inclination, it would be very difficult to turn against Cook with Cook still hovering over his shoulder on the board.
> Apple Silicon is one of the great hardware bets of the last decade.
I'm not sure why people give Cook credit for this? Both Johny Srouji and the P.A. Semi team joined Apple in 2008, when Steve Jobs was still CEO. That was Steve's bet.
> He even pointed at the Sculley era of his own Apple as the cautionary tale.
Jobs is not a reliable narrator here. He and Sculley were actually close and had a good working relationship until there was a power struggle between the two that Jobs lost, which caused personal animosity between them. Also, people like to pretend that there was nothing between Sculley and Jobs, completely ignoring the disastrous Michael Spindler for example.
> But the proof is going to be in the next macOS release.
That's far too soon. Ternus is not even CEO yet! The next version of macOS will be previewed at WWDC only 6 weeks from now, but Cook is not stepping down until September.
Safari on iOS is a prime example of this. I used to be able to switch from tabs to private browsing. Now I have to go through a tab groups abstraction that I didn't ask for, can't turn off and don't want. Want to open a new tab? Well, that too has gotten annoying. You have to tap near the bottom to bring up the address bar and then you can bring up the tabs screens (that used to be more accessible) or click on the new 3 dot menu on the bottom right. Who asked for this?
I prefer my address at the top. It's like desktop. That's another unwelcome change. This change also infected Settings where the search is hovering near the bottom now for some reason. This seems to be part of some wider UI fad because Google Finance now does this too. Just. Stop.
Oh I used to just tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top in Safari too. Now I accidentally hit the notch and go to some other unrealted app now. So thanks for that, Apple.
I abhor Face ID. So many false negatives. so unreliable. So many more times I have to put my passcode in. Just give me Touch ID. Put it on the home button (like the iPad Air) or do what Samsung did a decade ago and put a sensor on the back. That works really well.
Oh the Apple Watch isn't immune to annoying and pointless UI changes too. Even selecting an activity like Outdoor Walk now has a really weird scroll behavior where the "play" button doesn't come up until you stop scrolling. Why? WHY? The old interface was fine.
Leadership is keeping these kinds of things in check. Otherwise people make changes to get promoted,, basically. Or it's just ego to reinvent something in their image. Steve Jobs kept Johnny Ive in check. Tim Cook allowed the 12" macbook to happen. As well as the Touch Bar and the butterly keyboard (allegedly to save 0.5mm in thickness). But at least those got corrected.
And of course Siri is still terrible and almost seems like abandonware at this point.
You see, I don't think people like Cook (and the majority of corporate managers) can even tell the difference between good and bad products when they use them.
Tim Cook was at least a steady hand at keeping the product tolerably usable. Just wait until a Satya Nadella style CEO takes charge at Apple - we'll be wishing for the halcyon days of Tahoe and Liquid Glass.
>iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart.
Have these ever happened to someone? I have been using an iPhone for 2 years but have never experienced this.
At some point Apple should realize that, it’s okay to not touch core design principles.
2012 — [Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227949)
2013 — [Frustrated with iCloud, Apple's developer community speaks up](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454491)
2014 — [Is Apple experiencing a problematic decline in software quality?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8461546)
2015 — [Apple has lost the functional high ground](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734)
2016 — [Apple's declining software quality](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11034071)
2017 — [Apple's had a shockingly bad week of software problems](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15831914)
2018 — [Ask HN: Why has Apple's software quality steadily gone downhill?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16312664)
2019 — [Why iOS 13 and Catalina Are So Buggy](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21330678)
2020 — [Is macOS Becoming Unmaintainable?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24324639)
2021 — [Apple's software quality has certainly slipped](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29229881)
2022 — [The erosion of the Mac experience](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497193)
2023 — [Mac OS Ventura Issues](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199652)
2024 — [Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39530215)
2025 — [Apple's Software Quality Crisis](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)
I’m very bullish on his innovation mindset and on Apple’s next chapter.
sgt•1h ago
> iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened.
I've literally seen nothing of this happen (or to my family all on Apple devices). While I don't doubt they do happen to some unfortunate users, it's important that they report it so that Apple can troubleshoot. It could very well be that, much like myself, nobody at Apple is seeing this, and therefore it's not investigated.
zeratax•1h ago
maldev•23m ago
hyperhello•1h ago
fzeindl•57m ago
sgt•25m ago
watt•1h ago
Schiendelman•32m ago
AnonC•56m ago
I report a lot of nagging issues to Apple through Feedback Assistant. I keep updating the same issues and provide instructions as well as the device diagnostics and any photos/videos. But almost all of them don’t see any kind of action at Apple. They just linger on for years. Only if it’s an OS crash or an important Apple app crashing, it may get some attention.
There are many instances when “things just work” and it seems magical, but in those same areas, there are often too many bugs and issues where one has to do this whole dance of restart, re-pair devices and so on. It used to be that Windows was the butt of frequent jokes on restarting, but Apple’s software has gotten closer to that in many aspects.
I personally suspect that Apple doesn’t have a dedicated and good QA in place. There doesn’t seem to be a push from the top down for software quality. That attention to detail that Apple was famous for is missing on software quality.
ryandrake•43m ago
neya•56m ago
Schiendelman•35m ago
kubik369•53m ago
Apple's "It just works." sometimes gets in the way by obscuring details. Simple example, Airdrop. You share a file, select the person, and it gets stuck displaying sending on the bubble. What is happening? No one knows, because it should "just work". But when it doesn't, you usually have literally no recourse and you are told to wipe your device and try again. From GP's example, the synchronisation. I don't know about iMessage, but synchronising Photos is a nightmare because there is no button to force a sync. You have to connect your phone to power and pray that it will sync. If it doesn't, you have no way to force it. Same thing with AirPods firmware, how do you update it? You don't, it should happen automagically. It didn't? Sucks to suck. You hopefully get the idea by this point :)
Schiendelman•33m ago
fzeindl•53m ago
examples:
- if I change a note on my iphone and wake up my mac, I need to restart the notes-app before it syncs the change.
- if somebody leaves me a FaceTime video-message, I get an "unread"-badge that doesn't get away after I watch the video. There are multiple ways to get to that video and only one of them clears the "unread" badge.
- if I add a pronounciation field to a contact in my iphone, SIRI stops working and I need to restart my iphone to get it back.
Schiendelman•36m ago
rpgbr•32m ago
drcongo•46m ago
Schiendelman•30m ago
Apple tried to do certification for a while in 2018ish, but nobody could get through it, so I think they stopped.
Apple is starting to build their own home devices and I expect them to eat the market and cause improvement via competition.
sgt•23m ago
nsxwolf•43m ago