This is a big company problem. When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have "worked at big companies". But in most cases, they didn't actually build them. So all they have to offer is the "big company baggage" that they were exposed to previously.

You can imagine how it usually works out ... after a few years of zero or negative progress, they'll move on to somewhere else, claiming victory on their LinkedIn profiles. Meanwhile the employees who actually built the company continue to get passed over in favor of another round of impostors.

So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted very far as you'll "never have had the big company experience that we need". Meanwhile, the company starts to stagnate.

/rant

“Big Company Experience” is a fucking plague. Smaller companies hire from them thinking they will bring magic sauce but all they bring is toxicity and political baggage. Meanwhile the people who went against all odds to get the company to where it is are pushed out, because “they’re not the right fit for this scale”. Nobody who says this ever talks about growing people into those roles.

Big Company Experience means you can thrive Roman style bureaucratic power plays, not actually build things. It does take a different kind of person to bootstrap something out of a garage into a company, and then continue that fledgling company to the next phase, but instead of going BCE, they should be tapping back into the Founder Energy, not the BCE people.

I’m not sure if you intended BCE people to have a dual meaning there, but if you did, well played. That’s a term I wouldn’t mind using.

I'm not a Big Company person or a Founder. From my perspective, it's the "continue to the next phase" that is the whole problem.

Not everything needs to be expanded to it's logical extreme. I've worked in a lot of places, and the ideal employer is probably one who is in the middle, and planning on staying there.

The concept of "grow until you've eaten everybody" is sickening, and tiring. Especially for your non-C-suite employees who don't give a fuck about the logo on their shirt. I'm talking of course about most people the second they are no longer within earshot of their boss.

That "momentum, oomph, pizzazz" is not normal all the time. In the words of Mark Meadows, "if everything is sacred; then nothing is sacred." Meaning if you don't prioritize what is truly important, and simply assume that everything is of equally critical importance, then chances are you will fail at many more things than if you focused on the one most important thing.

But companies don't think that way. They see missed anything as missed opportunity. That is rarely the case.

Here's an example; Imagine a machine shop that has 10 customers and 65% on-time delivery. The top 3 customers drive 75% of the businesses revenue. Now lets assume that they are in negotiations with a potential 11th customer who will be their new 5th largest customer.

The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer. And then the rest of the customers will notice that their 65% on time delivery decreases to 55% as a result. Now the 3rd largest customer is quoting their parts elsewhere because they need a second supplier to cover how unreliable your deliveries are.

Do you believe that had the business not taken on the additional customer that they would have "missed a revenue opportunity"? Is that big picture stuff, small picture stuff, or just humans who live in a real world stuff?

In how I view my relationships with customers, I wouldn't want to sacrifice my relationship with customer 3 to get customer 5. My main concern would be in building a stable resilient org, not in growth unless we had a reason for growth.

I understand where you are coming from, but the archetypes I am describing are just as valid for non-profits. The scrappy person who starts something is different than the person that creates a functioning long term org with structure and delegation. The person who is good at launching from zero has a different set of skills than the person to who takes something that has launched into something that is sustainable.

I am not talking about the growth at all costs mindset. I think we agree, it is the growth at all costs mindset that replaces that builder to creates that stable org with a carpet bagger that has BCE that claims they are going to build the business 2x or more but all they bring in is politics. These are the snake oil salesmen that fail up.

If an org needs to be revitalized, rather than bringing in BCE, they should go back and bring in Founder Energy.

> The cut-throat capitalist would pull all their strings to get this customer.

This is an oversimplification. People specialize. There are people in Sales roles, and people in Operations roles. Yes, I absolutely expect the people in Sales roles to pull all their strings to get this customer. Their compensation (including commission) also incentivizes them in that direction. Naturally, closing the sale makes the company look better to its Board and shareholders.

The question is, who is the incompetent guy in Operations who is struggling with 65% on-time delivery? Maybe he's not executing well, maybe he needs to be replaced, especially if OTD slips to 55% and is turning into the weak link in the chain. And where is the executive who is supposed to be overseeing all this, to invest in and buff up Operations so that it will match the momentum of the rest of the company?

It's because almost universally, people almost always want more money.

We should be creating environments where money isn't the largest axis. I'd like more time.

Time and money are interchangeable.

Exchangeable but not interchangeable, the conversion ratios are all wrong now. Even in the early 90s, you could have a part time job and not live with roomates. This is no longer possible even for many people making "good money".

Are they looking for magic sauce?

Or are they looking for someone who can navigate the legality of extending the American stock option scheme to the new office in El Salvador?

Maybe they want someone who knows how to implement a proper system of financial controls, which they've realised they need after a guy brought himself a canoe with the company's credit card?

I can see a founder wanting to hire people to take care of the growing compliance workload that comes with a growing company.

Buying a canoe with the company credit card is peanuts vs the waste of something like a multi-year ‘AI’ project which delivers zero useful results.

Maybe they should have kept the canoe guy instead of hiring grown up bean-counters who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

See also: the last ten years of AR/VR at Meta.

I read a very interesting theory in a great book called the Sovereign Individual.

The optimum firm size will go down as the cost of communications goes down. Back when messages had to be delivered on horseback, you wanted all your people in one office building.

But now you can send an email in 10 seconds for $0, so it becomes practical to have many spread-out firms cooperating.

Obviously this is not the only factor, but still.

There's another interesting idea in Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind: when many agents with approximately the same processing power cooperate, the higher-level agents must necessarily be out of touch with the details, and will make big policy decisions that look stupid to many of the lower-level agents who have more of the details but less of the big picture. His agents were all part of the same mind, but it seems eerily similar to politics and big-company management.

So maybe startups should try to hire people with startup experience from the same industry since big-picture politicking is less valuable to a startup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_optimal_firm_size

>> So actually, staying at the same company for a long time probably means you're trapped by a glass ceiling and not promoted

Some anecdotal evidence I've seen of this.

I worked at a large publishing company. One of the VP's had been there some ten years. Seven of those as the second in command as the senior VP. Three different times, they hired an outside CEO, passing him over and each time the CEO left after less than two years, they didn't even consider him. He's still there and its clear they have no desire to promote him to CEO. Even knowing this, he continues to stay there which also has a down stream effect where nobody below will be promoted into his position or a parallel VP position, so by him staying? It just stagnates everything below him. Managers leave because they know there's nowhere to go but laterally or out of the company.

More recently, I worked at a huge health care company. One of the senior directors recruited me to join a new AI team he was standing up to do various projects with some emerging AI tools. I felt honored he would seek me out. Turns out, this was his gamble to get promoted into a VP position that he had coveted since being a director for the last five years. Our team kicked ass for about a year, but apparently, it wasn't enough. During our afternoon team meeting, he just announced out of the blue that Friday (it was Wednesday) would be his last day and our manager would be taking over the team after he left. He pulled me into his office a few hours later and explained what had happened. He said his boss (a VP) had told him last month that no matter what our team accomplished, he wouldn't be getting his VP spot at this company. If he really wanted to be a VP, he would have to leave the company since herself and several other VP's, didn't see him as "VP material" which is crazy if you knew what the guy did in his tenure at the company. Unironically, he joined an AI startup as one of two of their VP's. He was there for three years and they got acquired for $300M of which he got a good chunk of.

> "When companies grow, they eschew the folks who helped build it from the ground up and are intimately familiar with the business, products and customers in favor of people who have 'worked at big companies'."

Microsoft's revitalization occurred only after Steve Ballmer was ousted and Satya Nadella pushed out much of the old guard who were set in their ways.

Satya had been at the company for quite a while himself. Perhaps not as long as others, but he was a well known veteran within the company

Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.

Yeah, agree with your take. I think it's especially odd to describe Apple as suffering from this "big company problem" given that it seems like the execs there have tenures much longer than the norm. Cook has been at Apple since 1998, shortly after Jobs' return. Federighi originally worked at NeXT when it was acquired by Apple. Eddy Cue has been at Apple since 1989 and his Wikipedia page says he was instrumental in creating Apple's online store in '98.

Sure, Jobs was such a unique visionary and it was inevitable that things would change after his death, but I still find folks tend to minimize his missteps (the Cube, antenna-gate), while somehow shitting on Cook despite Cook managing the giant ship that is Apple extremely well for nearly 15 years.

Seems more like a political problem. Once a founder leaves, the leadership team no longer has a mandate. Things that were once "my way or get fucking lost" become "I need to justify this decision with the Board, McKinsey, Blackrock, etc".

Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 years and knows every employee by name, but instead went to San Jose State.

Very much agree. The Wikipedia page on Forstall says as much:

> Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public. Forstall had such a poor relationship with Ive and Mansfield that he could not be in a meeting with them unless Cook mediated; reportedly, Forstall and Ive did not cooperate at any level.

> After Jobs' death in 2011, it had been reported that Forstall was trying to gather power to challenge Cook.

Cook has been exceptional for the stock. But we would likely all agree that on the product end (take Siri for example), it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did, I do not believe they would be ok with it being horrendous for over 10 years. Also Apple has had a lot of mishaps under Cook (the wireless Air charger that never got made, butterfly keyboards, Vision Pro, Siri, an OS that is riddled with bugs, iPhone battery slowdown, touchbar on a pro device). I might be missing a few, but he is very clearly not a product guy

>it is absolutely clear he and the leadership do not use the product. If they did

I am absolutely sure they do. The problem is taste. And they are as you said not product people. A high bar for quality expectation. If we remember 50% of people cant taste the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi, while some others could taste which Coca Cola they were manufactured.

And that is what Steve has been saying, you need to care about the product way beyond normal people do. And have the energy to try and push things forward.

The expectation are exceptionally high because we compared it to Steve Jobs era. But even if we lower the standard modern Apple is still not good enough as it is.

To quote Steve Jobs. Stop chasing the bottle line which is what Tim Cook is doing, and start making sure your Top line is done correctly.

Also curious to have chosen John Giannandrea who was behind the failure of Google Assistant and from the era where Google was late in AI, to repeat the same failure with Siri

Jobs had failures but he made up for them with huge success. It's about the average; you can't get everything right all the time but if you manage to correct the course properly it's all good.

You are giving Cook way too much credit. The only thing he did was enrich Apple even more. Pretty much everything Apple has done is a continuation of what existed before or some side project pushed by another exec at Apple. The only thing he pushed for personally is a failure (Vision Pro, its technologically good but that's irrelevant) when it was clear that this is not a product that can be very successful or useful at any price (his arrogance is so big that he somehow thought Meta was just not good, and it's not fundamentally of problem of having nice use cases).

Cook has managed to not destroy or waste Jobs legacy but that's the best thing you can say about him. I don't think just making money is a worthwhile objective for a company, otherwise might as well just do finance, less moving parts, easier profits.

If I had a nickel for every time someone complains about Apple's monopolistic bullshit with the equivalent of "Steve Jobs would have never done this", I'd buy out enough Apple stock to impose myself as the CEO and demand they allow root access on iPads.

Every company was founded by someone and yeah they do go away at some point; for a more recent company as it grows, the founders often get more and more disconnected from the core mission of the company (at least no longer hands-on). Meanwhile they have the B.o.D. whispering in their ears (in parseltongue!) " ....ssss.... you need to hire some big company people to run this businessssss..."

This really eloquently summarizes my experiences working at a “rocketship startup” that tried this - went from a team of 500 shipping like a team of 50 to a team of 1,000 shipping like a team of 50,000.

Suits. MBAs.

Inb4 someone complains that they're an MBA and not so bad. I'm talking about the guys that don't know or care about tech at all. The guys that just wanna be a big executive like they saw on TV.

The same sorta people that were in my 101s at uni who "heard programming was a good job" but didn't otherwise have any interest in tech

One thing to note about "big companies" is that everyone involved at the upper levels are rich enough to engage in recreational lawsuits. So if you say anything true about their performance, you get hit with a defamation lawsuit, possibly in a speech-hostile venue like England. The end result is a conspiracy where it's in everyone's best interest to lie about their peer's performance.

These are "APE[0] hires". Their goal is not to build a better company, their goal is to trade favors and power around a select set of elites brought together by a mutual hatred of the rest of us. You hire an APE for the same reason why royal families used to marry their daughters off - it's a way to trade power. "Worked at big companies" is a code-word for "has enough clout to play with the other lizard people in the room".

[0] Assimilation, Poverty & Exclusion; the opposite of a "DEI hire"

Do you have any examples of defamation lawsuits? I've sold two companies, and have plenty of rich and upper-level exec friends, and I have never heard of a defamation lawsuit amongst tech execs.

There is definitely a stupid game where people don't tell it like it is, but in my experience it's because people don't want to deal with HR at all, and so don't do or say anything that might bring a tut-tut from HR. Because people in HR are beyond annoying...

And HR fears a wrongful-termination lawsuit, not a defamation lawsuit.

This is all in the US, though. The UK has quite different libel laws and so maybe lawsuits are more common there.

The biggest thing that Ahrendts did was merge the online and physical stores. People forget that before she came around there was very little overlap. If you bought something online and you wanted to return it you had to ship it back instead of going to a store. It was one of the things that Cook wanted to get done by retail.

Katie Cotton’s departure was in no doubt at least partly to do with her health. She died not too long after leaving Apple.

It also isn’t clear to me how much Phil Schiller was “sidelined” vs him just wanting to retire.

Funny how that seemingly forgettable caveat is seen as a huge achievement for an executive. As a customer my biggest issue with the apple store is not the return process. It is the lack of them for the population of apple customers given how long it takes to get attended to and the difficulty of securing genius bar appointments. It worked alright 15 years ago but the stores needed to expand along with iPhone market share and they did not at all.

There’s probably some threshold they’ve reached at which just adding more stores doesn’t generate any incremental revenue. So you’ve got to wait a bit longer, well, where else are you going to go?

Maybe I’m just a bit too cynical

And that is exactly the difference between old Apple and New Apple. Old Apple uses Apple Store as experience and services. It is part of the Apple ecosystem. It is not another "real estate property" like other Retail brands that is solely measured by incremental revenue.

Exactly. The entire thing no doubt cost money. That is why we were paying $2000 for a two year old intel chip mbp 10 years ago because the service aspect was a big part of the value proposition.

The "idea" to merge online and physical stores was way before even Ahrendts arrival. I remember it was a common topic during even Steve Jobs era. But it wasn't done because I think it wasn't a priority. People forget iPhone could lose out to Android like how Mac lost to Windows.

Katie Cotton passed away in 2023. She left in 2013/2014. I think that is quite some time after Apple.

> People forget iPhone could lose out to Android like how Mac lost to Windows.

Global smartphone sales are 74% Android and 22% iOS. They were only "winning" in this regard until 2012

To be fair, I’d counter with Jobs picking Jony Ive. Ive made gorgeous, lustworthy art objects that sucked as computers. The nadirs for me were iPhone 6’s bendgate and the 2015 MBP. Damn the functionality, we’ll make these suckers so slim you can shave with them! No one was begging for a MBP so thin it had to have compromised keyboard switches. Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it, and the trashcan Mac Pro.

Those devices looked beautiful but they weren’t good at actually being used. Jobs let Ive design for a museum, not for the people using his creations. Cook let that continue for a while but finally reined it in and gave us useful designs again.

Which isn’t to say that Cook hasn’t made or isn’t making mistakes. I just meant that as a reminder that it wasn’t all wine and roses under Jobs.

I'd argue Jobs mostly kept Ive under control. Tim Cook let him go nuts (didn't act as an editor) until it was finally seriously hurting the business (butterfly keyboard era) and went in the complete opposite direction by firing him.

Having sat beside both of them together in Caffe Macs some years ago, your assertion seemed exactly correct.

I never met Steve. I met Cook and on a separate occasion Forstall. Cook always struck me as a shy business bean counter. Forstall is an engineer through and through. Such a shame we never got to experience an alternate timeline where Apple was under his leadership.

I think Ive has burn out issue at the time and has clearly thought about departing Apple. ( A book chronicling 20 years of Apple's design in 2015 ) He wanted to design the perfect and final thing and so MBP was rushed. Steve Jobs would have worked him and likely said hey this is good but we must do it incrementally so our user can adopt to changed. How about the Keyboard keys goes to 1.2mm instead of straight to 0.7mm key travel.

It took us 20 years for humans to adopt from the good old 2.5mm keyboard to 1.5mm. And you want to cut in half again in one go?

I think it is best summarised as Steve Job's quote in the movie;

"Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra."

that being said, Ive was important in asking why physical form factors should make sense in human terms. Big computers w/ a lot of ports make sense to comp sci/ee ppl in the lab but people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive. Without Ive challenging the design, Apple wouldn't have even tried.

> But people in the real world have priorities more in line with Ive.

Funny how the latest Macbook brought back the Magsafe connector, HDMI port, and SD card port. Apparently the people in the real world have rediscovered priorities that Ive's design had made them forget

It is just funny how this hyper lean design philosophy ushered in an era of littering your desk, school, and workplace with random usbc dongles from storied $5 chinese brands like iKLingKing or Daehoo and whatever else. So much for the minimalism in practice. At least they created a great deal of work for these chinese producers on amazon.

I it new cables. No dongles anywhere.

Who's responsible for designing the trash can Mac Pro?

> “I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will,” one of Apple’s top executives reportedly said.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...

I kinda wonder how that design would play nowadays, after the Apple Silicon transition. They were stuck because of Intel's thermals, but their own chips seem to be a lot better in terms of performance/watt...

4 USB-C ports almost 10 years ago was inspired actually.

I remember using consumer grade netbook and normal laptop and those have way fewer ports than a workstation. But all were useful ones. Mainly hdmi, ethernet, sd card reader, and usb.

> Also consider the mouse that couldn’t charge while you use it

I've come around a lot on that design. Well, it's still an awful mouse shape as far as I'm concerned. But putting the port on the bottom gets people to unplug the mouse. I like that as a goal. And it can do a temporary charge pretty fast, so the downside isn't very big.

I've never heard from anyone who likes the Apple Mouse enough to use it, but doesn't like the charging from the bottom. It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use it, this has become a bit of conventional wisdom. In reality it's a non-issue.

I have heard from a whole lot of people who don't like the Apple Mouse. I don't like that mouse. But it isn't because of the charge port. It's an uncomfortable shape for my hand, and I prefer a trackball.

I think it's fine for Apple to have one peripheral which appeals to a minority taste. We're not short of mouse designs and they all work with the operating system. It's not even the main peripheral Apple sells for the purpose, that's the trackpad and everybody likes it. I still prefer a trackball, Tim Cook uses some kind of oddball vertical mouse with a bunch of buttons. It's a big design space.

If they wanted to please the maximum amount of people, they'd need to clone Microsoft's mouse, and that would be boring.

I actually like the charging port design. It stops normal user from using the mouse plugging in. Which is not what it was designed for. They could have designed the USB-C port in the mouse does not come with Data Pin. But given it is a wireless mouse it would still work plugged in as wireless mouse powered by cable.

In the end I really think it is a non-issue. The shape still sucks though.

>It's frequently cited as a 'flaw' by those who don't use it

Maybe without this flaw they would use it.

That's possible.

But for a small or medium flaw, you'd expect a bunch of people that complain but keep using it. Only a really big flaw would prevent users entirely and find no complaints among the people that keep using the product. I find it hard to believe it's that big of a flaw. It seems much more likely that the people that started off against the charging decided after trying it that they didn't care very much.

Sorry, what's the advantage here? People are going to unplug the mouse anyway when it doesn't need charging because it feels much more natural. _Forcing_ people to stop using the mouse to charge is a braindead decision

The problem is the software. macOS could remind you to charge the night before, but it always ends up needing charging in the morning as you're ready to start working. One engineer could fix the problem in under an hour if anyone at Apple cared about user xperience.

I’ve used one of those for years and there’s never been any impact on the user experience. Every few months, the low battery warning pops up. At that point, it will still work for hours and it only takes a few minutes to charge so even if it popped up first thing in the morning I’d plug it in the next time I got coffee, went to a meeting, walked the dog, etc.

Designing the mouse so it is useless while the charging cable is connected means that if the battery no longer takes a charge the mouse becomes e-waste.

Does that happen often? Especially compared to the switches?

If any other component fails the mouse becomes e-waste so that's not exactly novel.

And 50% of the original long lasting battery capacity would be fine here.

It might be wrong but it's not braindead.

The idea was to prevent non-techy users from using it plugged-in all the time, which would look stupid. They wanted to accentuate the wireless nature and easy connectivity of the mouse. Essentially a marketing decision.

I disagree with this take but it's worth remembering that it's marketing that turned computing from a niche activity to what it is now (which, by the way, is what makes it a viable career to the people here)

This is ugly. User behavior modification as a product goal. The reverse of how you should build products. You need to start with "The user wants to do X." rather than "I want the user to do X." Who is Apple to dictate the "correct" way for me to use a mouse?

Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.

If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged cause of their battery anxiety from every other device. Then you try it unplugged and you realized you have to plug it in for like an hour every couple months and it's way better than tethering yourself with a cable.

I've used a Magic Mouse daily for work for years and it's literally never been an issue once.

> Users aren't designers, they don't know what they want and will put up with bad experiences because they don't know it can be better.

First, I definitely know what I want from my computer.

Second, flipping my mouse over and being forced to stop using it is an objectively worse experience than plugging it in for charging while using.

I have an MX Master 3 which is also wireless and charges with a cord. While it's charging, I definitely have a degraded experience relative to the wireless one, so I unplug as soon as I can (I sometimes don't even wait for the full charge!) to go back to the better experience. Never once have I considered keeping it connected indefinitely.

> If Apple let the mouse be used when plugged in, everyone would do it immediately and never try using it unplugged

So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer. My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too? Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?

> So what? Why should that bother Apple so much? They sold the mouse. Who cares how the user uses it? A user who chooses to use their mouse while plugged in does not in any way affect the mouse's manufacturer.

If the user has a worse experience, that's a lose/lose situation. Of course they should care about things that affect the experience.

> My Apple keyboard lets me use it while it's plugged in, and the world hasn't ended. Why didn't they put the charger on the bottom of the keyboard too?

A cable doesn't impact a keyboard because it's not moving.

> Why don't they make their phones so you can't use them while charging?

The chance of a phone being left plugged in forever is minimal to begin with, and the hassle of not being able to use it while it charges would be much larger.

How is using a peripheral while plugged in a worse experience? It's a better experience: I've had many more problems with wireless peripherals than wired ones. Bluetooth disconnecting randomly, batteries discharging while I'm working. Wireless is a worse experience in almost all ways.

If you make a wireless peripheral and everyone keeps using it while plugged in, the solution is not to force them to use it wirelessly. The solution is to make the wireless experience actually better so the user voluntarily chooses to use it.

This is about charging, not how it sends data. And the batteries last a long time for this particular device, so there's minimal downside to unplugging. The downside to staying plugged in is there's a cable dragging around that makes the experience of moving the mouse a little bit worse all the time.

A user has to be thinking about something to make a choice. Depending on the user to think about all these little aspects degrades the experience all by itself.

I guess we have to agree to disagree. To me, it's not about charging at all. It's about wireless vs. wired, and wireless is a buggy, defective user experience. I want to use my mouse full time while plugged in due to poor reliability when unplugged, and only Apple's devices say no--for reasons that don't make sense.

I've never been bothered by a cable sticking out of my mouse.

>I want to use my mouse full time while plugged in due to poor reliability when unplugged, and only Apple's devices say no--for reasons that don't make sense.

The reliability would not be affected since it moves data wirelessly. The data will never go over the charging cable so your reasons for keeping it plugged in don't make sense.

If I turn off bluetooth and plug my "wireless" Apple keyboard into USB, it works fine, sending data over USB. There's no reason why they couldn't make the mouse the same way.

They designed it as a wireless mouse. Moving the port wouldn't change the reliability of the signals without a redesign.

No, it's utility that turned computing from a niche activity to what it's now. Apple is a fashion statement and it's okay for them to market to that effect, but don't credit the growth of computing to Apple's aesthetic but oft-ill-designed stuff.

> don't credit the growth of computing to Apple's aesthetic but oft-ill-designed stuff.

I'm not; I'm crediting the activity of marketing.

It's an engineering blind spot to think utility = adoption. Emacs is more powerful than MS Word; which one has more users? Which one has an organization dedicated to going around and pointing out how and where it is useful?

It's when you have utility + marketing that you get something like the computer revolution.

Don’t forget the Touch Bars.

Ouch, yeah. I loved the idea of it. I mean, I have a Stream Deck sitting on my desk as I type this, and that's basically a large, freestanding Touch Bar.

But whoever decided to replace physical keys instead of augmenting them with an additional control was out of their mind. And an undifferentiated escape key? On a pro laptop with lots of programmers? The mind boggles.

The real problem with the Touch Bar was that they never made an external keyboard with it. So I could never actually build it into my habits, since it was only actually available to me half the time.

(I'm demonstrably willing to spend money on fancy Apple external peripherals! I have the touchID keyboard, and think the convenience of it was worth the kinda silly price. I'd absolutely have wound up getting an external Touch Bar keyboard...)

There were so many problems with the Touch Bar to pick any one as the ‘real’ problem. As a software developer, I’m used to resting my finger on the F5 key when I’m thinking or in the few seconds before a build finishes. Can’t do that with the Touch Bar.

Also, it reflected the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling in a way that normal keys don’t.

There are plenty more complaints of course, but I never heard anyone say they found a ‘must-have’ use case for it. In a nutshell - all kinds of problems, no significantly better solutions.

I love the Touch Bar. Should have been above the function keys

So every other iPhone, the iPad, the MacBook Air, AirPods and the Watch were not useful because of one bendy phone and a bad keyboard? What great feat of design did Tim Cook bring us?

Iphone 6, 2015 MBP, thrashcan where all under Cook. To me this precisely shows Cook did not have Ive under control.

But there's a dev pipeline. I'm certain those didn't all start their lives 6 months before release.

sure, but I don't think that's really relevant here since the products are years after cooks rise to power.

With all this talk about reining Ive under control, I can’t help but be reminded of that CollegeHumour skit implying Ive is a HAL9000-esq robot holding Tim Cook hostage[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE

I think Jobs failed, but learned a lot from Sculley

That said I hated everuthing about ios 7 from a usability standpoint.

Going to hard disagree with most of this. At any giant company with tons of executives (the article talks about the "Top 100" alone), if you didn't have at least some misfires then it probably means you're being too conservative. If anything, I give Apple props for making management changes relatively quickly when things aren't working out.

For example, I have the exact opposite view of the forcing out of Scott Forstall, which after reading what I think are fairly accurate descriptions of what went down was absolutely the right thing to do IMO. Forstall refused to own up to failures under his watch, which is an absolutely toxic trait in leadership (side note, when you're at that level it doesn't matter if the failure was "your fault", you still need to take responsibility for what happened, identify the root cause and make changes to reduce the possibility of it happening in the future). I am not an iPhone user, but every time the issue of Apple Maps comes ups, people say they love using it and that it's improved leaps and bounds over the years since Forstall was forced out.

> Forstall refused to own up to failures under his watch

Own up for what? Has anyone from Apple own up to Apple Intelligence or other design failures? Even in antenna gate Steve Jobs was defending it as holding it wrong. The firing of Scott was simply a power play. No one expected Maps to be perfect on first try. And it took Apple another 8-10 years before it was useable. But the Map Fiasco, if you could call it that. Was brown out of proportion with zero damage control from PR. A company that perhaps has the best PR department in history of cooperate America. If people are not reading between the line, Apple wanted him out, and very publicly.

>(the article talks about the "Top 100" alone)

Top 100, if that is indeed what it is has also completely changed. It used to be the 100 people Steve Jobs hand picked that if the company failed who he would recruit again for the next venture. And it is nothing "Top". You could be an engineer or doing some other lower level work but still included in the 100.

Now from that article Top 100 becomes management level meetings.

> Own up for what?

The epic failure that was the launch of de-google’d Apple Maps. Apparently Tim didn’t like putting his signature on the apology letter apologizing to customers.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130110043350/http://www.apple....

>if you didn't have at least some misfires then it probably means you're being too conservative.

Think you've dunked too far into the McKinsey kool-aid here.

Bullshit, because I don't even know what "the McKinsey kool-aid" is on this topic.

But the best companies/teams I've worked at realized that some mistakes are inevitable, and they had a culture that quickly remedied those mistakes, learned from them, and moved on. The worst companies either (a) had "analysis paralysis" issues or (b) made lots of the same mistakes over and over and refused to learn.

> Promote Craig Federighi, after all these years I am still not convinced he is the right person for the job

Yeah I wonder about Federighi. He doesn't seem to catch much criticism from the Apple pundits—I assume because he's one of the few SVPs that seems like a real human in interviews and videos and not a stilted robot like the rest of them. But Apple's software, and macOS in particular, seems to be rotting from the inside out. Changes ship and everyone says "boy this is a step backwards, I hope they iterate quickly" and then it sits, almost entirely unchanged, for years on end. e.g. new Settings in macOS, Stage Manager on the iPad.

With how much the hardware team has been knocking it out of the park since the ARM transition it's really starting to feel like the software is the weak link. This rumoured massive redesign this year has me feeling very anxious.

It is not about design features and bugs etc. The whole iOS feels a lot slower than before despite having much more processing power.

Android caught on, and now feels smoother than iOS. And that is with iOS animation tuned off.

I have met Craig a couple times. The man radiates charisma like a god damn movie star. The whole vibe in the room changes when he enters. Something about it, man.

It's obviously the hair. His epic lion’s mane.

I'm told he has the superpower of memory. Someone told me they had an eng review with him on a year prior, which ended with action items for the team to fix XYZ. Then a full year they had another review, and Craig came in and right away asked, "Did XYZ get done?"

> Putting too much trust on Eddy Cue

I've never understood the love for Eddy Cue. Apple pundits all seem to love him. Personally, I am really unimpressed by everything he's done. My understanding is he's been really good at negotiating big contracts.

I just don't think his execution or vision are exciting and, as you are hinting at, I don't think his moral compass points in the right direction. That said, despite some early pushback, my understanding is that Schiller was ultimately on-board with holding to the 30% cut.

Eddy Cue did an amazing job with the original Apple.com online store in the late 90s, the first version of the iTunes Music Store, and the early App Store. Interestingly these were all big WebObjects apps.

I wonder if there’s some interesting server-side technology culture story here and how it trickles down to the way services operate for consumers on the client side. Just pure speculation.

This is a fantastic comment, I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment on Angela Ahrendts. What was once a magical experience going to a apple store has devolved into a nightmare. A few reasons why:

- The complete removal of spontaneity of the shopping experience. You wander over to look at a laptop and decide you want to buy it. Asking a employee is disagreeable as most have a ear bud in their ear receiving instructions or messages from who knows what, they hurriedly ask if you made an appointment or placed the order online and then rush away and sometimes return.

- Such a heavy emphasis on online booking for every conceivable issue. If you want a genius bar appointment you are angrily told you need an appointment and such an appointment is only available days or weeks away and at a inconvenient time for someone with a 9-5 schedule(Tuesday at 2pm work?).

- Last years accessories are gone. Try finding a iphone case that was made for a phone you bough 7 months ago and an employee looks at you like you are trying to buy a model T - (Wait you are looking for a iphone 15 case, wow thats a really old model, I don't think we have anything for that anymore).

- Insane levels of crowds, I can't think of the last time I saw a apple store open in the past 6-7 years that didn't have crowds inside the store like disneyland with service dogs, screaming kids and grumpy boomers yelling about how to transfer their grandkids photos from a phone to computer, just a terrible experience to deal with.

I bought the first iphone in 2007 and have had a model for almost every two years and have been going to the apple stores since then, and the past few years have seen a huge drop in customer experience due to alot of the issuses I listed above.

It does not bother me I’m hundreds of miles from an Apple Store because every time I look into one it is so crowded. Shopping online feels like a luxury experience in comparison (so blown away my M4 mini came in a tiny box!)

I don't see that being a strong case against Eddy Cue. Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue, and as a whole those services probably make bank. Apple TV+ especially funds good television. Even if it loses money, funding the arts carries intrinsic value.

> Apple's 30% cut makes them tons of revenue

Compared to? All taxes mean fewer transactions – and purchases that never happen don’t generate revenue. This is not easily measurable. Most SaaS or similar services probably go through other devices or email to handle transactions.

Apples payments and subscriptions are excellent products but how much goes through there of say revenue for streaming services like Spotify and Netflix? Is that even supported? As an iOS user, I would never dream of trusting that the IAP prices are a good deal, and especially if I want to support the company I would sign up on their website.

I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason.

> I’ve said before that even if they were allowing (or better, forced to allow) competition, people would still pay a premium, maybe 10%, to have all subscriptions in one place with one-click unsubscribe. They simply don’t believe their own product can stand on its own without crutches, for some bean counter reason.

The users aren't the issue, the developers are. Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS in order to get users into their dark patterns where you have to call to unsubscribe; can you imagine what shady game developers would do?

> The users aren't the issue, the developers are.

Just to clarify, you are referring to companies, not necessarily their developers.

> Companies as reputable as the New York Times are willing to forgo easy subscription flows inside of iOS

No they don’t? I just check their app listing and you can use Apples own IAP. In either case, NYT can have reputable reporting while still being complete slimes when it comes to subscriptions. And even so, it strengthens the argument that Apple and other subscription aggregators deliver value (relatively - our CC centric payment world is abysmally bad), meaning users are willing to pay, meaning merchants are willing to use it to get sales they couldn’t otherwise.

> can you imagine what shady game developers would do?

If what, they could do whatever they wanted? Apple (or any other curator) could still police against fraud and misleading consumers. What does that have to do with the 30% tax?

I am sure plenty of people, if not majority of people will happy pay the 10% premium just because the subscription goes through Apple and have a peace of mind. That allows them to easily unsubscribe.

That is the thing about the whole 30%. It is not flexible, stringent and does not adopt to market. Even Tax by state have more flexility than they do.

And I have been saying this since 2013 but every time I get downvoted to oblivion for it. If Apple had move their Game into a Separate Store. They would have kept 75% to 80% of their App Store revenue at 30% cut. They could then charge 10% on top of all subscription and 15% for downloads. Once you include all the payment processing fees, fraud and additional services and value Apple offers the 10% extra meant for example Netflix actually earns more from an Apple's sign up. That create incentives for other companies to work with this Model. While Apple would still keep ~90% of their current App Store revenue. And I assume without much of the backlash and regulation that they had to fight and costing them hundreds of millions in operation, PR and brand damages.

As an ex Apple engineer myself, I've got to say the Angela Ahrendts thing was profoundly disgusting, and a partial reason i quit, despite thriving in a great team. They gave her 75 million dollars vesting over 3 years, as i recall, she did jack shit, and quit the day after all the money vested. Total failure of character judgement not only of the Burberry lady but of the hardcore engineers who believed in Apple (and I still do, but quit for cancer research work, another hobby).

Probably an agreeability thing? The iconoclasts who get things done tend to be disagreeable, but success at a reality scale is different than success in a large company.

You get promoted and go up because of your peer coworker group's support, which creates a strong incentive to not rock the boat and go against sacred cows that work well enough. The person who succeeds in big company post a hypergrowth phase is a very different person than one who made the hypergrowth happen.

granted, this is me just speculating, but personality type of Tim Cook dreaming up highly precise supply chains and generating precise business numbers quarter to quarter might make him vulnerable in terms of the character judging side of things...

I don't know if Ahrendts is in this category she did transform Burberry into a high-end luxury online sales+retail company. She really was the exact opposite of the old head of the Currys boss, John Browett. I think she was responsible for how the Apple Watch is sold. For example, trying it on and having that experience. It's a tricky thing to get right, and I think she's got it spot on. Also, the watch strap business must have one of the highest margins ever, and I feel like she must be in part responsible for those sales and how you try on the straps. That Apple Store feels a lot like going into a Burberry where you can just experience stuff and people are happy to talk to you about anything and not try and sell you anything, so I'm not sure she should be in the category of everyone else you have here because in that respect, the stores do feel very good.

As soon as Craig Federighi was taking over from Bertrand Serlet, quality started to decline. The only one to not notice is Tim Cook.

Because Cook is a supply chain mastermind not a software UX and QA guy. You can tell Steve Jobs is missing.

I am reminded that the day he told over macOS team. They have been shipping features for features sake. And I dont remember a single new useful thing about from continuity. We are now 10+ years, macOS apart from facelift isn't all that better than before. If anything it might have gotten slower.

On the one hand Tim Cook has done better than I expected, but on the other hand I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the company

> The problem isn't JG. It is Tim Cook. He is exceptionally poor at judging character.

Evidently, he is very good at increasing share value though.

aren't a lot of App Store/dev relations critics frustrated with/ Schiller though?

> Craig Federighi […] merging iOS and macOS team together.

What year was that?

In the absence of someone giving you a better answer, my hazy memory says 2015 or early 2016?

Given what we know about Apple's hardware platform direction, on hindsight, it seemed like a good strategy. Note: I am talking about the team merging, not merging macOS and iOS themselves.

It was 2016. Right after I quit.

Eddy Cue owns Maps too

Maps is my default now, it’s improved so much relative to Google Maps. (At least in my area)

Yeah, Apple maps is my default, too. No ads and is accurate. Google maps is still better for finding businesses and streetview is still much, much more comprehensive.