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.
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.
Honest question: how can you make your mark on a product that is already perfect? At some point, software goes from meeting the needs of its customers to meeting the needs of the egos in charge.
As an aside:
There will be some quick tells as to whether incoming new Apple CEO John Ternus is more of the same, including seeing whether or not Apple follows Google’s lead and buckles to our mad king’s obsession with trying to rename large bodies of water to feed his gargantuan ego.
John Apple is a spineless fuckwit and immediately capitulated
Fuck this guy give the gross pedo gold gifts, what an absolute piece of fucking shit.
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.
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.
His tenure is that of a businessman, not an innovator or visionary. Good or bad, Jobs was all three.
Vissonary maybe but innovator?
IPhones & MacBooks were well built & marketed but neither was really innovative.
iPhones literally were visionary. The whole industry was trying to imitate blackberry and overnight apple made them completely irrelevant. Android changed to what it is from what was originally a blackberry interface.
MacBooks, yea, it’s a laptop. They had some really good ideas in there, sure. MagSafe and touchpads that didnt royally suck ass were welcome features. The M-series lighting a fire under intels ass was exactly what the entire industry needed. Love them or hate them, even when Apple is bad, they create good trouble in an industry that needed to be proven wrong from time to time.
What was the innovation in the iPhone?
It was worse in almost every way except marketing than the n900.
The technology had reached the point where you could have smartphones by then, I don’t see what was innovative about iPhones.
You can call it visionary, sure because he spread his vision for a locked down phone, but where is the innovation in the iPhone?
And the apple mac, the iMac, iPod, and the iPad, and cofounding apple. Even the concept of iLife and the market targetting strategy. Yes, innovator.
The Apple Macintosh wasn’t innovative. Here’s how you “innovate” an Apple Mac: Take an existing product of your company, the Apple IIGS. Make that worse by reducing the processor clock speed so your new product will be superior in some way, because your new product is going to lack backwards compatibility, internal expansion card slots, color graphics or multi-channel audio.
The iMac wasn’t innovative. It was an evolution of their existing product line in trendy packaging.
The iPod wasn’t innovative. Even the UI was taken from Creative. Rio beat them to the market by several years.
The iPad wasn’t innovative. I was handed a Dell tablet PC a full decade before the iPad hit the market.
Apple was innovative twice in its very long history: The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability, and the iPhone had a capacitive touch screen. The most innovative thing Steve Jobs ever said in his life was “You can just use your finger.”
The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability
The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn’t “innovation” by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.
That was a limitation of the monitor you were using, not the computer. All models of Apple II to include the Plus, e and c had color graphics. But it was common practice to pair them with monochrome monitors, first because they’re cheaper than color monitors, but also…the way the Apple II achieved a 16 color palette was through NTSC artifacting. It only ever tried to send something like six colors over the cable, but when you put two dissimilar colors next to each other, they get smeared together somewhere in the analog domain and they come out some other color. It allowed them to achieve 16 colors, but it had a drawback: Text that was supposed to appear black and white would have green and purple fringes, which made it blurry and hard to read. So if you were using the machine for business or something you might choose a monochrome monitor to get sharper, easier to read text. Apple’s first party monochrome monitors were indeed green.
Huh, interesting to know. Ninth grade me didn’t give a shit about things like that.
I’ve kinda known that most of my life because my elementary school had a lab of IIes, most of which had color monitors, a couple of them had monochrome monitors. So there were a couple of them that were inexplicably “just green.” Most of the rest of that I learned from The 8-Bit Guy on Youtube.
That Wozniak guy’s a good electrical engineer. Clever dude.
capacitive touch screen
The first phone with a capacitive touch screen was the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Prada the iPhone was built with the technology that was around at the time.
People credit the iPhone with creating smartphones but much like Tesla’s the tech was ready and they launched at the right time. I guess Apple patented multitouch slowing down adoption of multitouch on laptops by decades, but I’d credit Apple with that not Jobs.
A computer, an MP3 player, a tablet, starting a business.
How are any of those innovations?
I’d say killing yourself by ignoring medical advice for an easily treatable desies or pretending your daughter isn’t yours were innovations, but royals have been doing that for centuries.
Like what did he do that was innovative?
Yes and no, the first iPhone was innovative, but after that, it just became refinement.
What was the innovation in the iPhone?
It was worse in almost every way except marketing than the n900.
The technology had reached the point where you could have smartphones by then, I don’t see what was innovative about iPhones.
There were way more than 2 things that Apple produced under Jobs…
Ok and none of them were innovative.
Timothy Donald Cook (born November 1, 1960) is an American business executive who served as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc. from 2011 to 2026, and has been the company’s executive chairman since September 2026.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook
To be fair, once we reduced electronics to black slabs and tiny earbuds there’s not much more we can revolutionize
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.
RIP Tim Apple. You embarrassed a once innovative brand but at least you made a lot of money.
Cook diversified Apple’s product lineup, overseeing the introduction of many new products such as the AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Vision Pro, AirTag, Apple silicon in its Mac lineup and expanding its services business.
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.
OK but what about the profits? Isn’t that the only important thing?
Applle is…cooked
I read that as “spineless copulation” and was both confused and a little intrigued as to how that could be
Fuck apple. I’ll never forgive jobs for nuking the internet. When jobs killed Flash in order to herd users into his app store, the internet was never the same.
Flash was a buggy piece of shit and was blocking development of HTML 5. Adobe was the monopolist in that scenario not Apple. Sorry about Newgrounds and Strongbad but Flash had to go.
lmao thanks for the laugh. HTML / JS is still a buggy pile of slop. Apple and Google both dropped support so they could stop Flash from providing app experiences through the browser and forced people into their own app stores. Flash was installed on 99% of computers around the world. It was top tier web and it STILL hasn’t recovered. The current web experience is complete garbage in comparison.
HTML / JS is still a buggy pile of slop.
In what world is JavaScript considered buggier than Flash, either in the actual content in the wild or the client-side software rendering/running that content? It wasn’t true when Flash died and certainly isn’t true today.
Flash was a security nightmare, with all sorts of kludges patched on to try to deal with fundamental flaws in how it handled privileges. If you want to go back to the days where zero click exploits can take over your machine just from a browser visiting the wrong URL, leave the rest of us out of that vision.
The current web experience is complete garbage in comparison.
Mm, and what makes you think that handing Adobe the keys to control everyone’s web experience would make it better?
“In what world is JavaScript considered buggier than Flash” if I have to walk you through this then this conversation is over lmao
No, you’ve got it all wrong. Flash was buggy and insecure proprietary software written for proprietary OSes. I’m glad it died, after several years of trying to fight its normalization on the web, where you’d need to install shitty plugins like gnash on Linux to try to see the same web that people were seeing on Mac or Windows.
The web should always be built on open standards, and Flash was the biggest barrier to that ideal at the time that iPhones came out. Flash deserved to die, and I celebrated when it did.
nah hard disagree. Flash was the core of the web and it got gutted so Apple and Google so leach their 30% cut from their app stores. HTML / JS is still a buggy piece of crap that depends on what the major browser makers declare is valid, no better than adobe had with flash. Flash was the browser in the browser and they hated it.
Well, now we have Safari holding things back, being it’s the only browser engine on iOS (other iOS browsers are just Safari reskins). It’s the buggiest and most outdated of the major browsers, but you can’t ignore it because the iDevice market is too big. It’s pretty much the new IE6.
Opinion? That’s a fact. We use androidified version of iOS just because the guy was just after profiting.
Apple, you buy one, you regret it for the rest of your life. Never ever again.They were the best when competition was Windows 95 and immature Linux or when iPhone was the only phone with usable UI. But in 2026 Apple is just an “Idiot tax”.
