[Opinion] Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation

cross-posted from: lemmus.org/post/25140646

karlbode.com/apple-ceo-tim-cooks-legacy-is-dull-products-and-spineless-capitulation/

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.

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.

You have low standards if you think Apple products are perfect.

I’m speaking theoretically about the software cycle. At some point, the product does what it’s supposed to do as best as it can. Then what happens? People in charge feel they need to make their mark, so things just kind of drift around for no solid design reason worth customers getting used to.

Thanks for explaining the downvotes, though.