While I agree that it's Tim Cook's responsibility to set the course and influence the culture, I doubt a new CEO will be able to so.

I'm not saying nobody can be like Steve Jobs, but Steve Jobs was an anomaly when it comes to C-Levels, and even when it comes to management in general, at least from reading things like www.folkore.org and interviews with people who worked with him.

And I'm not even talking about talent or vision or whatever, it's just about saying no to pointless features that are there for someone's ego or so that someone can get a promotion.

Tim Cook overrides the advice of high-ranking employees in the name of greed and profit, even when warned such decisions will sour long term relationships.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/02/26/testimony-on-external-pur...

I’m not saying anyone will be better than Tim Cook, I’m saying he’s actively bad. Will his successor be actively bad too? Maybe, but the sooner we find out, the better.

Why is this stuff not reported in the mainstream media?

The general publics opinion of Apple is that they are golden and untouchable, the best tech company out there. The reality is much different.

The owners of the stock are embedded everywhere in high, medium and low places. It's in the top ten of nearly every major index and mutual fund. No one is going to complain about Apple until the stock tanks.

So a good trader or shortseller (like the now defunct Hindenburg Research) would make such news public to attempt to make a profit off it.

So why isn't that happening?

> Why is this stuff not reported in the mainstream media?

- Because a lot of journalists are Apple fanbois

- The press publishers don't want to sour relationships with Apple (because of advertising deals)

- Publishing bad things about Apple would infuriate the many Apple fanbois among the readers, causing a shitstorm against the medium

By your logic Apple would never get bad press, and neither would any other brand since all of them have fans. Both of which are obviously and provably false.

Can you show some examples where Apple have got bad press in the mainstream media?

There’s a whole Wikipedia page just for criticism of Apple. Which itself links to other pages of more criticism. Take your pick, plenty of mainstream media articles listed there.

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

Bad press that never affects them somehow.

Of course it does. They changed course several times specifically because of bad press. Like killing the CSAM device scanning, or reinstating Epic’s developer account, or not killing web apps in the EU, or apologising for the crushing ad, or, or, or.

There is even a joke amongst Apple developers who all know that Apple’s claim of “don’t go to the press, it never helps” is a blatant lie as it’s the one thing that works.

> By your logic, Apple would never get bad press.

Not "never", but it is indeed my observation that the press is much "nicer" in their reporting and much more "forgiving" to Apple than to other similar companies.

In some circles, this observation already has become a running gag when the pen pusher is again too impressed of some Apple marketing.

My understanding is that negative press of apple gets you blacklisted from media events and early review devices.

The advertising deals with apple are not that lucrative, iirc.

So bad reviews are avoided to ensure the media gets the early review clicks.

Good point.

That link alone has references to Associated Press and Bloomberg. It’s not hard to do a basic web search and find more, the trial has been covered by many outlets.

Tim Cook strikes me as a bean counter.

That's exactly what he is. He's an industrial engineer who rose up in logistics inside Apple.

Back in the 90s, Apple seemed to have a lot of these same problems. Software quality was declining and they had real trouble executing on anything strategic. They aren't there yet, but they certainly seem to be headed down a similar path.

Steve Jobs wasn't an anomaly because he was Steve Jobs; he was the anomaly because he was the founder and CEO. Founder C-suites can foundationally get away with actual innovation in a way that the board refuses to permit for their successors.

I have been saying this for years: consistent deterioration of ACs/DoDs. There is no limit to scrum and especially the constant refinement to ACs/DoDs.

Yes, you may implement a solution more efficiently by not overengineering it. But at some point constant seek to reduce "complexity" so that more features fit into sprint (funny how story point measure complexity, not time, but sprint is sized in both time and SP capacity) is bound to hit feature completeness. Once you cross over that metaphorical Rubicon it's game over - quality starts to slowly go downhill.

You will not notice it immediately. That edge case that was ignored may not surface for months or years. It may take several idiosyncrasies to line up for a feature to be declared FUBAR. At some point that technical debt does bite you back, but at that point the process (tm) has already optimized away most if not all opportunities for deep refactorings fixing previous rushes to deliver.

First off - it's a sprint forecast, not a sprint commitment. A sprint is timeboxed in the sense of guaranteeing some delivery of incremental functionality for a product on a regular basis. It's aim is not to backdoor the mapping of time to points.

Furthermore, Sprint Planning/Refinement are just innocuous ceremonies whose only aim is to facilitate productive discussion between a Product Owner/Manager and an Implementation team as regards delivery timelines and priority ordering thereof. Done properly, it allows a pragmatic approach to achieving a predictable software delivery cadence via mutual compromise.

If the process turns into 'fit as many features into the sprint as possible' at the expense of Performance/Stability/Functionality or Technical Debt accumulation, you're really just doing the 'fast' version of Cheap/Fast/Good Waterfall Project Management.

Most consumer electronics companies are like this. It's not only a yearly release cycle but a Christmas release cycle. New Shiny Thing has to be in the stores by late November so all development has to be done in August so the factories can start producing the first trial batches.

I never buy products when they are first released. I prefer to wait at least 3-4 months so that production has had time to tweak all the settings and weed out the funky first component deliveries. Also the software devs will have fixed the worst bugs by then.

I am entirely sure that a notes app can be updated in january.

> What these companies need to do is slow down and stop chasing every shiny thing

Who is dealing in fantasies now, friend? :)

Apple's software really isn't in crisis. It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.

But it doesn't matter - Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.

It's not that they're chasing shiny things. They're cosplaying competence and they genuinely don't know it. They think they're actually competent, elite really, because they attend 'elite' schools, get good grades and go work at the 'best' places.

They have it ingrained in them that anything a poor person says can be disregarded because poor people are losers, because they're poor. They're an unintentional suicide cult. They genuinely don't know it. You can't convince them of anything because they are rich. If you complain - go see a therapist, there's something wrong with you.

You can youtube search Garys Economics. It's a poor kid who slipped into the rich kids club and defected. It's quite eye opening.

> Who is dealing in fantasies now, friend?

I said they need to, not that I think they will. But they have in the past. There is a reason Snow Leopard is still lauded today.

> It's just very low quality relative to what people who've written software for a living know to be possible.

No, it’s low quality relative to what Apple users came to expect. There was a time when “it just works” was an aspirational goal which permeated their decisions and you could see the results.

> Apple is a prestigious jobs guarantee program for rich kids first, entity that delivers value to consumers second.

What a bizarre conspiracy theory. No company gets to that stratospheric level of success by making hiring incompetent rich kids their primary goal.

Feel free to tell me where I said it was a primary goal.

It’s right there in the bit I quoted. That’s what the word “first” means.

By the way, I did catch the rant you posted before. I tried to reply to it but after writing it up and hitting reply, you had already deleted it.

It is first in the context of the two goals being discussed.

You've gone ahead and made it the first goal in the context of all goals a company has (thus making it 'primary').

That's not a legal move :)

Re-reading my own post - the bit you narrowed in on is the least interesting and controversial in my mind.

We know rich parents do all sorts of things to pad their kids' resumes to get into fancy schools. We know kids game the system to get highest possible grades. We know kids grind leetcode to get the job. We know companies prioritize hiring according to school, grades, ability to pass leetcode. We know people very often prioritize their career trajectory above needs of the company. We know companies prioritize stock price over delivering value to consumers.

I just shortened into a single sentence and you've misunderstood it to mean something bizarre. Oh well.

> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame.

I don't see a connection between yearly release cycles and a broken notes application. They shouldn't be doing anything that is particularly affected by such changes and the problem they are trying to solve has been mostly solved for 40+ years now.

While it certainly applies to some things, there's a different, bigger issue happening as well.

My understanding is that Apple outsources loads of software not seen as "critical". I think that's the first place for them to look.

The release cycles seem to lead to an annual reshuffling of teams to meet deadlines causing quality issues for anything that is not an advertised feature.

Some of this could be resolved by open sourcing their less important apps like Files, Notes or Home which barely ever get touched, yet are full of quirks and bugs. Those apps should be public examples of good SwiftUI coding.

> The way I see it, the yearly release cycle is to blame. No one inside the company has time to do anything properly anymore. Features are announced and rushed every year, and we’re reaching the point where by the time something which was announced at a WWDC is out of beta, we’re preparing for the next one.

At many places where I've worked, the mentality is: "If that bug didn't block last year's release, then why would it block this year's release?" So it survives one release, it never gets fixed.