Tim was great for the shareholders and not so much the customer.
I feel like most services got worse, hardware got worse before the M series, but post M I haven’t seen much innovation — just a lot of recycled parts for peripherals like Studio Display, which is premium price but sub premium quality (camera, panel itself, and ports/support).
Phones have massively homogenized under Cook
And software has taken a massive nose dive. As much as I try to like swift, it sucks. And it was a mistake to lose Chris Lattner, because without him Swift has had basically no focus or direction other than boosting SwiftUI.
Nobody has ever managed building production software with Swift outside of app dev, which I think says it finds a poor compromise on real performance vs ergonomics vs safety. I do not think Rust is better, I think Swift makes it too hard to do the right low level things.
AI/Siri has been embarrassing. Shipping cadence is worst in the business, there’s no reason so many updates are tied to OS updates, it’s simultaneously too rapid for trans to build robust software, and too slow to fix bugs and make QOL adjustments.
So when I look back on the last several years of Apple I kinda just see a bunch of departments duct taped together and drifting away from each other, and then the finance team driving all the decisions.
Having tried both Swift and Rust - you can hardly compare them. For me Rust is in a different league. Swift is a modernization and a step forward compared to ObjC, but Rust is a different paradigm altogether. Swift has IMO done a great job for Apple as a platform, but has not achieved universality and had not transcended the platform. Rust has achieved universality, but has not captured any platform in particular yet. Both have not and may never replace C/C++, though my biased opinion is rust may have a chance (at least with C++)
I pick on Rust because of the “write everything in Rust” crowd and just personally I don’t like how the language feels.
I don’t think rust has found fit in the GUI sphere, though it’s getting some adoption from tools like zed, and hopefully some native gui tools get better with it. Swift has some fit there, but it’s not a fair comparison because it’s forced. Swift has nice ergonomics though with callbacks and lib dispatch plus combine that work well for GUIs.
Swift also suffered from poor versioning tools, and platform code differences which have hurt it even if they’ve been patched over.
I agree on everything you’ve said. Rust hype is a bit annoying and can be off putting. AI bros seem to have amplified the effect and I strongly dislike it. GUI is probably the worst area of Rust, but given the universality of Rust, I think it’s expected. I found egui easy to use, though, but far from swift ui, still.
simultaneously too rapid for trans to build robust software
Multiple assumptions here.
That is a typo
I think you underestimate the power of the socks.
Apple is a garbage company. Better than google is not an acceptable measure, and they are only performitiely better than google anyway, they pretend to not kowtow a bit before they do. Google just deepthroats authority because they are the worst.
The only solution is here is to go open source. Tech is an existential risk to society, and already it’s late to stop them. We can stop them though, together.
Better than google is not an acceptable measure
I remember when that would be a pretty high bar. It’s a bit of a distant memory at this point though. It’s crazy how bad tech has become.
I don’t even think they can be called performatively better than google. Has google personally gifted Trump tacky golden shit? Feels like apple has kissed the ring a lot more.
Honestly if there are good alternatives to apple, I would switch to alternatives, I am seriously considering buying a fair phone
Google pixel phones above I forget 3 or 5 can carry graphene os, you can get a used one on swapp or elsewhere for about 300 dollars. Idk about ubuntu.
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The main thing I remember about Tim Cook was him making me realize how wealthy white cisgender gay men were hardly different from wealthy white cisgender straight men.
The whole article has always been really worth a read, seeing how a techbro tried to turn a classic magazine into a tech company somehow. Besides that though, these passages always stuck out to me, because it feels deeply like these wealthy men exploit their sexuality to justify avoiding critique of their actions outside of their sexuality.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic
In 2014, Hughes’s personal life and business life became increasingly intertwined, in ways that would coincide with changes at the magazine. His husband, Sean Eldridge, was running for Congress in a district that spanned the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, but his political campaign was not going the way he had hoped. Eldridge and Hughes had bought a two-million-dollar home in a district in which neither of them had ever lived, and Eldridge began investing in local businesses in what was widely seen as a transparent effort to influence the race.
Ioffe dates the abrupt change in mood to late summer, shortly after Foer’s birthday party—the period when, as many current and former T.N.R. employees noted, Eldridge’s expensive campaign to win a congressional seat started looking hopeless. “We all liked him; he seemed to like us,” she told me. “Everything was going great. Then, in the summer, something snapped, and he started talking to me about money and how we’re losing money and he’s tired of it. And then he became just downright contemptuous and hostile toward us.”
Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” T.N.R.’s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality—pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else—yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”
Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”
The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.
Billionaires aren’t people in the same sense that we are, Cook has turned his back on the queer community, so he can say whatever he wants about himself, but he’s not gay in the same sense that the rest of us are.
Yeah. Billionaires are not people. Good point.
Their biology is the same. What’s missing is common cause.
because it feels deeply like these wealthy men exploit their sexuality to justify avoiding critique of their actions outside of their sexuality.
Not Gay, so don’t know about that angle, but they are ALL some high level of Pscho - just to have ended up where they are. There is simply no way you can be the head of a big Corp and not have trampled on workers, co-workers, customers as well as more fair-minded smaller corps and anything in between. ‘Competition’ is a white-washing word for ‘eternal economic war’ that at that level always spills over to law-fare, info-wars, political corruption/manipulation, psy-ops and any dirty trick in the book - all in the name of ‘Competition’ and being “successful”.
These sick people would sell someone else’s mom as slaves if they could get ahead on that move, but will always appear lovely, friendly etc, simply because that is the image they want people to see, and that is the image they are paying big money to other corps to create.
It is pretty cringe to see people worshipping these disgusting sub-humans in charge of big corp…
The main thing I remember about Tim Cook was him making me realize how wealthy white cisgender gay men were hardly different from wealthy white cisgender straight men.
Same with Bessent, or maybe even worse.
They want us to flight because of color, gender, sexual orientation etc. so we don’t notice that the real war is a class war.
It’s sad that so many people still don’t see this.
Ain’t no war except class war.
Fuck this guy give the gross pedo gold gifts, what an absolute piece of fucking shit.
Agreed. The new CEO isn’t off to a great start, either. Bending the knee in your first few days is not a good look.
MacOS was so much better when Steve Jobs was in charge.
Tim Cook REALLY made it worse. Steve Jobs made sure the user experience was generally good, although admittedly there were many times when he was pigheaded. On a personal level, Steve Jobs was a terrible person, but he made the operating system very good and very consistent.
And Tim Cook didn’t care about any of that, and macOS is now SUPER inconsistent and much less user friendly. It’s still better than Windows, but MAN is it so so so much worse.
admittedly there were many times when he was pigheaded
Arguably, he’d still be alive today if he wasn’t so pigheaded.
Behind the Bastards had a good one on Jobs, where they went into a little bit how he believed in this mucus theory, it was pure madness. And it’s why he died.
It’s still better than Windows
The problem there is that Windows has been lowering the bar for a decade now.
Engineers made the OS good. Steve didn’t do shit.
Well that’s not correct.
Engineers are great at developing a product.
But having someone at the end who’s using the product and insisting on consistency because he’s anal-retentive and a pain in the ass will mean the product is consistent with the evaluator’s goals.
macOS used to have a lot of underlying features that worked consistently no matter which app you were using, and Apple destroyed that.
Either Jobs was having an effect, or it’s a damned strange coincidence that the severe reduction in consistency in macOS started just at the point that he died.
Yeah, Apple were doing so great with their engineers until 1997, and then Jobs came back and ruined things.
I like the word inconsistent. It’s been over a decade since I stopped using macs — so I don’t remember exactly what it was that bothered me — but one of the biggest reasons why I stopped using macs was the inconsistency. Within the OS, between apps, between iOS and macos, etc…
At least he gave us some basic window management features. It’s still miles behind what Windows and Linux has unfortunately.
15 years later and the Photos app on iOS is still the same nearly useless pile of shit.
Your just not using it the Approved Apple Way™ that’s all.
/s
To be fair, once we reduced electronics to black slabs and tiny earbuds there’s not much more we can revolutionize
We could have not done that, or we could have at least made the software better.
I remember thinking things like rollable screens and shit would be fun, but even that shit no one wants to risk anymore
We could have not done that, or we could have at least made the software better.
Blame jobs, not cook.
Also, fuck jobs, the liver stealing psycho
Blame jobs, not cook.
Why not both?
fuck em both, but Cook wasn’t the one that started the enshittification trend with the ipod
Yea, fuck them both.
That’s why I’m confused by this article. It just seems like attacking Apple for the sake of attacking Apple. I say this as someone who used to be a Apple hater because Apple products were far more expensive than their competitors (now everything is just expensive) and I couldn’t afford them back then.
People expect constant revolutionization, but 1) that’s not feasible and 2) what are they looking for exactly? What do they want to see done?
People say how bad the software has gotten on Mac, but I don’t see it. Sure, they have bugs around the time the next big OS update rolls out (much like any other OS including both Windows and Linux), but 1) you don’t have to upgrade to the latest version as soon as it updates and 2) they fix the bugs soon after that.
The only good point the article seemed to have is the Apple Vision Pro VR part, I will agree with them on that. Other than that, it seems just like an attack article, and done by anger, and like fair enough, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have good products.
I dunno, this is probably an unpopular opinion anyway, and I never expected I would be an Apple defender in this sense, and I don’t even have an iPhone because I prefer Android’s development ecosystem, and on my PC I have been daily driving Linux for the past 9 years anyway.
I never owned an apple product because of their “killing batteries from afar” fiasco. Once I saw Tim Apple giving trump little golden trinkets on television I knew my decision was right. It reminded me of putting money in the collection plate.
For me it was “forced integration of your music library with Apple music” when the ipod was all the rage.
That was the death knell for me as well. I think it was around when I had my last iPod, the… Nano?
Applle is…cooked
Willing to bet $10 the next guy drives it straight into the ground harder and faster.
OK but what about the profits? Isn’t that the only important thing?
I read that as “spineless copulation” and was both confused and a little intrigued as to how that could be
Plenty of nonchordate animals reproduce sexually. Tapeworms, for example.
Who the hell designed that rainbow?!
“I dunno about no Rob Janoff, but I know all about how to Rob Juanoff, if yaknow what I’m sayin”
Flawless.
A+
Clearly you don’t need no instructions to know how to rock
Oh. I see.
dude can’t even design a website that scrolls properly and he’s responsible for billion dollar company logos‽
Don’t forget the further entrapment in subscription hell with Apple one.
Fuck Tim Apple and his gifting of trinkets to a shit demon.
