John Ternus will replace Tim Cook as Apple CEO

EBone

Ars Tribunus Militum
1,535
Subscriptor
Doesn't change the fact that Tim Cook, given $275 billion to invest in the US or China, chose China. Tim Cook chose to do that so Apple's investors could take home more money, instead of American workers.
American workers have no interest in toiling in assembly lines manufacturing iPhones, the same as they have no interest in picking vegetables.
 
Upvote
39 (43 / -4)
It’ll be interesting to see how Ternus approaches shareholder demands to AI all the things, hopefully Cook will set expectations reasonably there.

Software will be interesting going forward in general. Hardware Apple has delivered in the known Cook way - premium products utilising supply chain to keep margins high. But VR seems dead in the water, Siri hasn’t really improved and Liquid Glass wasn’t really an improvement.
Well, the Liquid Glass guy is gone to Meta, so that may resolve itself. VR may or may not be dead in the water. They have a technological advantage over the industry, but they lack a job to be done by the product. If they can find that, they are in decent shape.

Siri/AI is probably a timing issue. We're in this window that Apple has found themselves in many time before where a tech is viable in the cloud, but not on the device and it seems like Apple is missing out, and then it become viable on the device because tech improves, and Apple builds it in and cleans up. I'm of the view that all of the AI buildout is ultimately stranded assets because invariably the space will be dominated either by in-house expert systems build off of local infrastructure, open-source models that will push the cloud price to zero, and local models where Apple will excel. That is the historical trajectory and I see no reason why it won't play the same way. Apple will be 'beleaguered' in this area for ~3 years, and then their models will fit on device, be free to the device owner as a value-add to the hardware, and the whole subscription market will collapse.
 
Upvote
33 (33 / 0)

sork

Smack-Fu Master, in training
94
That's super-weird... are you saying Apple made my current phone's premium Chinesium manufacturer make a $200 phone with a premium IPS display, and a nice 8-core APU that can literally do everything I ask of it?

Edit: punc...
Well I know you’re being sarcastic but yes, your current gen Chinese phone is cheap because of Apple. At Apple’s size they dictate pricing and command economies of scale. The reason why it has a premium high resolution IPS display is because Apple bought a ton of IPS displays and drove the price down while increasing the total in production. When Apple moved onto OLEDs the prices for these components collapsed further. Before Apple came out with the “retina displays” these high resolution displays were pretty rare and companies charged a ton of money for them on only their flagship devices.

I mean shit look at the brief foray into titanium. Apple did titanium for a handful of years and everyone was tripping over themselves to do something similar.

Same for other components. You really want a company of Apple’s size continuously improving, it really does make it better for the rest of the industry, even in components or tech that Apple doesn’t use.

If you want the opposite of what this looks like see Intel pre Zen 1. Their prices either stayed the same or increased for about the same product (current day nvidia may follow this same trend).

So while yes Apple does lag behind in some hardware features but when they do arrive or arrive first it’s actually good for everyone.
 
Upvote
40 (42 / -2)

Marlor_AU

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
7,713
Subscriptor
Finally I'll note Woz left in 1985, so for 40 of those 50 years the Steve Jobs ethos has been the dominant one, specifically the "I'll pocket $4,650 of the $5,000 of value you created that we agreed to split evenly".
Woz took a two year leave of absence from Apple in 1981 after his plane crash (to resume his studies and run the US Festivals). When he returned, it was largely as an engineering consultant and motivator. His actual tenure at Apple as a designer was really only a few years, and it was centred around the Apple II.

Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985 and spent 12 years with NeXT and Pixar.

During the 12 years of Jobs' absence, there was some initial success under Sculley with the Macintosh (plus continued revenue from the astonishing long-lived Apple II), followed by a remarkable series of missteps, then a revolving door of CEOs trying to "fix" Apple and its stagnating OS. Ultimately, Apple gave up, bought NeXT, and replaced MacOS with an Apple-skinned version of NeXTSTEP.
 
Upvote
27 (27 / 0)

Unclebugs

Ars Praefectus
3,069
Subscriptor++
American manufacturing left for a very simple reason. Your annual health insurance premiums, just your premiums is the same as a Vietnamese factory worker's entire salary for a year. The average American sets on fire about 150% of the annual pay of that same Vietnamese factory worker's on direct car ownership expenses (insurance, inarguably artificially cheap US gasoline, licensing, parking, maintenance). Even a single person's apartment rent is 200% of that Vietnamese factory worker's annual wages. I can keep going regarding 401K matching and student loans and so on.

Is an American more or less productive than an overseas worker? Maybe. But "maybe" is only a little bit....not 5-10X more productive. Americans engineered an extremely expensive society to live where government doesn't socialize the social-service costs via taxes; it instead was "privatized"--which IRL means it falls on employers to subsidize employee's private for-profit market purchase of those same goods/services via inflated prices which eats into profit margin.

Or... 5000 IQ idea...they just don't play that game and offshore everything they can.


And the heck of it is...Americans who did this to ourselves (or ancestors, you get the drift), blame corporations for doing the economically rational (albeit for us citizens undesirable) thing; and foreign states for not self-inflicting this kind of neoliberal policy on themselves. The USA doesn't blame their own self-inflicted policies whose effects they loudly complain about (cost of college loans, cost of cars, cost of medical care, and so on)
I love how you blame the cost of domestic labor as the motivator to moving overseas with manufacturing. It is all labor's fault, yet the top ten percent have taken all that money and lavished it on themselves. The bottom 90 percent of the US population has seen no real wealth growth in the last half century while the greatest redistribution of wealth in US history has flowed totally upwards. We used to call it slavery and/or imperialism, today we simply off shore labor costs while the wealthy keep getting wealthier.
 
Upvote
24 (32 / -8)

Fred Duck

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
7,251
Ruined legacy.
A young man walks into a California pub and takes a seat next to an older man. They strike up a conversation and the older man introduces himself as "Tim."

Tim points out the window. "You see that campus there? I built it with my bare hands and it's the best space ship-shaped campus in all of Cupertino! But do they call me Tim the Campus-builder? No!"

Tim shows pulls up a status window on his iPhone 16 Plus. "You see this supply chain? I made all the deals to create it but do they call me Tim the Supply Chain Maker? No! But you give someone ONE glass pub mat..."
 
Upvote
18 (20 / -2)
Well I know you’re being sarcastic but yes, your current gen Chinese phone is cheap because of Apple. At Apple’s size they dictate pricing and command economies of scale. The reason why it has a premium high resolution IPS display is because Apple bought a ton of IPS displays and drove the price down while increasing the total in production. When Apple moved onto OLEDs the prices for these components collapsed further. Before Apple came out with the “retina displays” these high resolution displays were pretty rare and companies charged a ton of money for them on only their flagship devices.

I mean shit look at the brief foray into titanium. Apple did titanium for a handful of years and everyone was tripping over themselves to do something similar.

Same for other components. You really want a company of Apple’s size continuously improving, it really does make it better for the rest of the industry, even in components or tech that Apple doesn’t use.

If you want the opposite of what this looks like see Intel pre Zen 1. Their prices either stayed the same or increased for about the same product (current day nvidia may follow this same trend).

So while yes Apple does lag behind in some hardware features but when they do arrive or arrive first it’s actually good for everyone.
So, one of the key stories around Apple's impact is their shift to unibody laptop and phones around 2008.

In order to do this, Apple would need CNC mills - a lot of them. Basically more of them than existed on the planet - at least of that size. Nobody had done high volume CNC manufacturing like this (the iPhone was the highest volume durable good ever made, so that's sort of axiomatic), it was only used for low-volume and prototyping. Apple worked with FANUC and DMG-Mori to design models to meet their specific needs - bed size doesn't need to be that big, they wanted tool change, fast changeover, etc. and leaned on China's ability to turn out trained CNC operators in the 10s of thousands (see my comment above about their ability to align industrial policy with educational goals) rather than go with what would have been expected a more fully automated, large scale manufacturing operation. Apple's contract was so large that basically both companies stopped making mid-sized mills except for Apple, and DMG Mori built an unmarked lights out factory just to turn out mills exclusively for Apple. For a period of about 3 years, you pretty much couldn't buy a mid-sized mill because Apple had taken so much of the global production offline. You could get big ones, but not the mid sized ones usually used for prototyping.

There's reporting that HP tried to make a unibody laptop to compete with the MBA, and their engineers designed one but they couldn't get enough manufacturing capacity to make it because nobody could buy mills. The mills you see in a Foxconn factory that make iPhones are owned by Apple, not Foxconn.

This wasn't a durable advantage for Apple but it gave them a huge jump on the industry and it carried them through the iPhone 4-5 era when the product expanded beyond AT&T and volume exploded. In its wake Apple left enormous manufacturing capacity for mills, and a roadmap to follow for high volume unibody aluminum manufacturing that the rest of the industry followed.
 
Upvote
48 (49 / -1)
As an Apple shareholder, I love their stock buybacks.
As a shareholder I absolutely hate it. It's an incredibly poor allocation of capital for the economy.

While Apple's problem has been that scaling the company into making a much wider range of products would likely result in all of those products getting worse due to a lack of focus, Apple could take that capital to spin off a new business that ran somewhat orthogonal to their existing consumer business. They've had two waves of their silicon team leaving because they wanted to take their design ideas to build server hardware. So build a server enterprise competitor off of Apple Silicon, wholly owned subsidiary, independent, shared IP around Apple Silicon.

There are things Apple could do with the cash other than buybacks that would have a better economic benefit for the country, and for the business.
 
Upvote
42 (45 / -3)

graylshaped

Ars Legatus Legionis
67,962
Subscriptor++
Doesn't change the fact that Tim Cook, given $275 billion to invest in the US or China, chose China. Tim Cook chose to do that so Apple's investors could take home more money, instead of American workers.
It isn’t his money to spend, though, is it.
 
Upvote
8 (14 / -6)

graylshaped

Ars Legatus Legionis
67,962
Subscriptor++
So, one of the key stories around Apple's impact is their shift to unibody laptop and phones around 2008.

In order to do this, Apple would need CNC mills - a lot of them. Basically more of them than existed on the planet - at least of that size. Nobody had done high volume CNC manufacturing like this (the iPhone was the highest volume durable good ever made, so that's sort of axiomatic), it was only used for low-volume and prototyping. Apple worked with FANUC and DMG-Mori to design models to meet their specific needs - bed size doesn't need to be that big, they wanted tool change, fast changeover, etc. and leaned on China's ability to turn out trained CNC operators in the 10s of thousands (see my comment above about their ability to align industrial policy with educational goals) rather than go with what would have been expected a more fully automated, large scale manufacturing operation. Apple's contract was so large that basically both companies stopped making mid-sized mills except for Apple, and DMG Mori built an unmarked lights out factory just to turn out mills exclusively for Apple. For a period of about 3 years, you pretty much couldn't buy a mid-sized mill because Apple had taken so much of the global production offline. You could get big ones, but not the mid sized ones usually used for prototyping.

There's reporting that HP tried to make a unibody laptop to compete with the MBA, and their engineers designed one but they couldn't get enough manufacturing capacity to make it because nobody could buy mills. The mills you see in a Foxconn factory that make iPhones are owned by Apple, not Foxconn.

This wasn't a durable advantage for Apple but it gave them a huge jump on the industry and it carried them through the iPhone 4-5 era when the product expanded beyond AT&T and volume exploded. In its wake Apple left enormous manufacturing capacity for mills, and a roadmap to follow for high volume unibody aluminum manufacturing that the rest of the industry followed.
And that was a big part of why Cook was Jobs successor.
 
Upvote
21 (21 / 0)

graylshaped

Ars Legatus Legionis
67,962
Subscriptor++
Apple's hardware design teams (at least they used to) have both generalist and specialist elements. You'll have specialist engineers doing acoustics, and haptics and things like that along with teams that do the individual design of each produc… Industrial design is a different group. Silicon, radios, etc. is a different group.

To the extent that Apple is a consumer product company and the physical iPhone, Mac, etc. represents the heart of the company (as opposed to software, services, etc.) he comes from the very heart of the company off of which everything else hangs.
Worth pointing out here that Cook’s training was as an industrial engineer, who deal with how the pieces work together (or not) in a system, rather than the pieces themselves.
 
Upvote
22 (22 / 0)

bpatb

Ars Centurion
242
Subscriptor
I never understood the hatorade around the trash can Mac Pro. At the time, the trash can was outstanding for pro audio. Silent, fast, portable, way more reliable than the previous generation giant Mac Pros...
Yup. We got great value out of them doing feature film vfx for many years.
 
Upvote
17 (17 / 0)

sarusa

Ars Praefectus
3,267
Subscriptor++
Apple employees I know are pretty happy about this choice of Ternus. He's a decent competent guy and hardware has been doing way better at Apple for the last many years than software has (Liquid Glass koff). He's not a sales or marketing a-hole, and best of all he's not an AI-hole.

So basically they feel he was the best one for the job and surprisingly the most competent guy actually got picked! I guess because this isn't Microslop.
 
Upvote
27 (27 / 0)

graylshaped

Ars Legatus Legionis
67,962
Subscriptor++
I'm of the view that all of the AI buildout is ultimately stranded assets because invariably the space will be dominated either by in-house expert systems build off of local infrastructure, open-source models that will push the cloud price to zero, and local models …
Hey, those are the buckets I see, too—the difference being I think all three will co-exist.

I’m not convinced cloud prices ever go to zero, though, but low enough for post-scarcity conditions to assert themselves.
 
Upvote
3 (3 / 0)

TylerH

Ars Praefectus
4,972
Subscriptor
Very happy that an engineer is CEO. I don't believe anyone can match the vision that Jobs had, but Ternus, I think, can get closer that Cook did.
Jobs wasn't an engineer, though. He was the guy with the vision. Hopefully the new guy also has vision, but it's the engineering chops that will keep the company moving on its yearly micro-iterations on hardware/software.
 
Upvote
10 (10 / 0)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…

foobarAndBlech

Smack-Fu Master, in training
18
Subscriptor
Thanks Tim Apple for Apple silicon, even if you hate Apple you should appreciate what Apple does to drive the rest of the industry forward. If not for them we’d all still be on thick rectangles of a phone with 720p TN displays with total shit CPUs and GPUs.

Yes they fall behind in some areas but then they absolutely dominate in other areas which forces all the other companies to catch up.
Apple silicon came from Steve Jobs via his purchase of PA Semiconductor.
 
Upvote
10 (13 / -3)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…

adamsc

Ars Praefectus
4,266
Subscriptor++
It really wasn't a bet-the-company move, and it was also expected (and expected to succeed) by everyone in semiconductor. Apple had been making their own (excellent) microarchitectures inhouse for iPhones since Swift in 2012 (2011? - it's been a while.) Cyclone and its successors were clearly desktop grade. The question among anyone paying attention was "when", not "if", they'd move the Mac.

That viewpoint requires ignoring an awful lot of people saying otherwise until roughly the M3. A lot of people overweighted the benefit of x86 compatibility, developers’ willingness to port, assumed a more traditional system architecture, or assumed Intel would get back on their feet before Apple could scale up from phones and the lower end of the laptop segment. I don’t think it was hugely risky but it was far from a sure bet.
 
Upvote
15 (15 / 0)

adamsc

Ars Praefectus
4,266
Subscriptor++
I love how you blame the cost of domestic labor as the motivator to moving overseas with manufacturing. It is all labor's fault, yet the top ten percent have taken all that money and lavished it on themselves.

I read the first part of their comment completely differently: notice how they identified healthcare as the primary driver for high labor costs? That’s precisely because our rich people don’t want to pay their fair share of taxes and they managed to get a bunch of white people to vote for their CEOs as long as they promised to screw black workers even harder. We’re paying more every year because we haven’t quite hit a critical mass of people willing to break that unholy bargain, and most of that is the affluent (rich and fools who think they’re closer to rich than working class) people rather than factory workers.
 
Last edited:
Upvote
26 (28 / -2)

crepuscularbrolly

Ars Tribunus Militum
1,770
Subscriptor++
It’s because the most vocal critics often judge the new thing against the old thing, instead of against what’s actually appropriate and useful.

“NO SLOTS OMG” was barely relevant to Mac creatives when the trash can design shipped. Apple then spent a shit-ton of money to make a Mac Pro with slots after years of actual customers telling them they liked quiet, portable, powerful machines. The fact that the last Mac Pro was a recycled design was a tell: Apple just gave the shouty folks what they wanted and it still didn’t sell terribly well, because it isn’t what most Pro customers need.

Today, an 8GB Mac SKU gets the same criticism an 8GB PC would, despite vastly different memory mapping schemes and efficiency between the two OSs.
Yeah, I remember when everyone said the Rio (or whichever) MP3 players were so much better than the iPod. Or that Blackberrys were better than the iPhone because the BB had physical keys. Or, going back, that using some wacky new connector called USB rather than the standard PS2 was dumb.
 
Upvote
17 (18 / -1)
I’d say the Apple Silicon developments have been impactful (directed by Srouji, of course).
They had to move away from Intel. The flaws of Spectre and more that were unpatchable, and power consumption, lead Apple to move to its own chips along with control of pricing and supply. While it bothered some that older apps don't work on Silicone, most have caught up.
 
Upvote
0 (7 / -7)
invariably the space will be dominated either by in-house expert systems build off of local infrastructure, open-source models that will push the cloud price to zero, and local models where Apple will excel. That is the historical trajectory and I see no reason why it won't play the same way. Apple will be 'beleaguered' in this area for ~3 years, and then their models will fit on device, be free to the device owner as a value-add to the hardware, and the whole subscription market will collapse.
The RAM and tensor cores (not to mention power) necessary to run flagship AI models will not fit on a phone in 3 years, or 5 years, or 10 years. And that's ignoring the fact that flagship AI models are nowhere near ideal in functionality. If new/more powerful processors are necessary to improve AI, then that target is even further away.
 
Upvote
-11 (2 / -13)
They had to move away from Intel. The flaws of Spectre and more that were unpatchable, and power consumption, lead Apple to move to its own chips along with control of pricing and supply. While it bothered some that older apps don't work on Silicone, most have caught up.
They didn't HAVE to move away from Intel.

But, when the chips that you're designing for your cell phones are almost as fast as the chips you're buying for your laptop and desktop computers, why not... ?
 
Upvote
5 (5 / 0)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…
I’d really like to learn more about that, if you have any recommendations for reading or watching (documentaries, etc.). I’m aware of the existence of the Pride wallpapers and watch bands, but that’s about it. As an outsider, that looks like rainbow capitalism; but if Apple’s got our backs for real, even with all their faults, I think that would be a good enough reason for me to stick with them for some of my tech needs.

As for the article: I have my disagreements with some of the things Tim Cook did as a leader, but I think that overall, he did a lot of good with his position. Farewell.
I'm not sure how to prove Apple's "granola gayness", if that's what you're asking for but:
1. For a very long time you could walk into Cafe Macs(Infinite Loop campus cafeteria) barefoot.
2. All my benefits would have extended to my "partner" in 2002... 2002, in America, in Wisconsin. I believe they even covered some gender reassignment. Again in 2002.

Those are the only things that I have personally witnessed that are exceedingly granola liberal. But I can tell you, overall, Apple is pretty gay.
 
Upvote
30 (30 / 0)
Hey, those are the buckets I see, too—the difference being I think all three will co-exist.

I’m not convinced cloud prices ever go to zero, though, but low enough for post-scarcity conditions to assert themselves.
Oh, I think they'll coexist, but the on-device bucket will increasingly strip the value out of the cloud bucket. The expert system bucket is entirely distinct and doesn't interact with the other two, and likely will have quite a lot of value. But the value comes from integrating your own IP into the system so there's going to be loads of different silos.
 
Upvote
6 (6 / 0)
Jobs wasn't an engineer, though. He was the guy with the vision. Hopefully the new guy also has vision, but it's the engineering chops that will keep the company moving on its yearly micro-iterations on hardware/software.
He wasn't just the vision though. He was the gatekeeper. If you didn't have the alignment of the job to be done and the answer to that in the product, you didn't get to ship. This is how Apple could be late to a market and still win the market - because they identified the job to be done and shipped the solution. Andreessen said it like this:

"There's a pattern in our industry, Apple crystallizes the product and the minute Apple crystallizes it, then everyone knows how to compete."

It also was reflected in his statement on focus:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Jobs job was to say 'no' a lot.
 
Upvote
24 (24 / 0)

Fred Duck

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
7,251
So, one of the key stories around Apple's impact is their shift to unibody laptop and phones around 2008.
Is this to highlight the impact Apple have on the industry or is it something Tim Cook is responsible for?

Along those lines, a commenter on Ars once wrote that Apple did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to make Apple Pay feasible in the United States but no one knows about that. Is that correct?

An engineer in the top seat. Nice. First bit of business? A solution to the camera bump/plateau gets my vote.
No one remembers this but if you hunt the corners of the internet, you'll find that back when iPhones first appeared and people first began putting them in cases, the case would interfere with the flash and so testing was instated to compensate for it. The bump/plateau is a solution to a different problem.
 
Upvote
6 (6 / 0)

zogus

Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
7,247
Subscriptor
He wasn't just the vision though. He was the gatekeeper. If you didn't have the alignment of the job to be done and the answer to that in the product, you didn't get to ship. This is how Apple could be late to a market and still win the market - because they identified the job to be done and shipped the solution. Andreessen said it like this:

"There's a pattern in our industry, Apple crystallizes the product and the minute Apple crystallizes it, then everyone knows how to compete."

It also was reflected in his statement on focus:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

Jobs job was to say 'no' a lot.
This sentence belongs in the preface of every business school textbook on strategy. Strategy is about deciding what you’re going to spend time, money and people on, which is the same thing as deciding what you’re not going to do. I as a consumer don’t always like what they end up not doing (Aperture! Time Capsule! Arrgh….), but I have to admit they are brutally correct and effective more often than not.
 
Upvote
15 (15 / 0)
Post content hidden for low score. Show…
Well, yeah, both of those things have been doable by machines for decades. Why would we wanna do that? I'd rather blame the companies for moving production overseas and paying 1 cent on the dollar to foreign workers instead of re-investing in America to build those machines and then train people to use them.
Except you're wrong - neither one is doable by machines, not broadly.

iPhone sits in the in-between space where it's too big for a pick-and-place and too small for conventional robotics. Still takes about a million workers to make iPhones. That's ⅓ of the US manufacturing labor force, and most don't have the training needed.

And California has a completely different agricultural economy from the rest of the US not because of the state's climate but because California is where almost all of the nation's high-labor crops have moved. Half the farmworkers in the US are in California, because we don't have machines to tie grapes, pick tomatoes well enough for produce (canned tomatoes are automated), harvest lettuce, prune almond trees, and hundreds of other crops. We've automated the shit out of corn, but you can't do that with strawberries even today.

In the latter case, there's a cultural truth that we don't really come to terms with. The US established what farm labor looked like - slaves. And then for the next century black sharecroppers. Culturally we don't have a notion of white people working in fields. Driving the tractor, sure, but picking cotton, no. John McCain once sort of alluded to this:

"Fed up, McCain at one point gave an audience a personal offer. The senator told them: "I'll offer anybody here $50 an hour if you'll go pick lettuce in Yuma ... and pick for the whole season. So, OK, sign up!" There wasn't exactly a flood of applications."

It's not a question of Americans not being hard workers, it's that we have an expectation of what is and isn't an appropriate job that we've never really come to terms with which is not radically different from men's aversion to care work like nursing. Of course they can do it. That's not why they don't.

But immigrants - they don't show up with American cultural expectations.
 
Upvote
44 (46 / -2)
I wonder if there's a case to be made for a "tick-tock" leadership cadence at tech firms (or any firm), where leadership pivots between growing wide and growing tall. Jobs started went wide by launching all kinds of new products. Cook grew tall by mastering supply chain. Ternus comes in possibly to go wide again by focusing on expanding the product portfolio, until a future successor comes in to go tall with those new launches, and so forth.
Personally, I dont think going wide is the right play unless it is another computing device with a deep aoftware stack reusing macOS. They are not a siloed organization and bringing on that width would just slow them down further. One more platform to support with the same N engineers.

What much of Apple leadership is missing is vision. They are keeping the lights on and running the store like pros but I don’t think they understand what they have well enough to do something novel with it. They don’t own the business code. That is the part that Steve didn’t leave behind. Too worried the recipe would break. Not worried enough it would stagnate. It’s not like Steve didn’t reinvent Apple several times over.

I would personally recommend scaling back to a 2 year (or continuous) software release schedule. Too much of the calendar is devoted to bake time and the patch season in the fall. The time for novel work is vanishingly small.

They can do far more with their novel GPU architecture than they are. That is languishing. Too much tunnel vision on GPU running out of wired memory in RAM. Not looking hard enough at alternative storage that is 10x cheaper for AI. Professional grade AI runs on consumer devices when the 2 TB model can run in 2 TB of consumer priced storage.
 
Upvote
-11 (3 / -14)