A Letter to John Ternus

Apple's not that company anymore.

I'm awaiting the day macOS Admin user accounts become a $12.99 / month subscription.

The last line is what I say every time I see a mention of Apple TV. It's a great example. Huge, pointless distraction that isn't even a big moneymaker and doesn't drive device sales. Clearly they see it as advertising since every show set in the modern era is absolutely stuffed to the gills with prominent Apple devices to the point of breaking suspension of disbelief.

And as far as computers go, I don't think they even use them at Apple anymore. They claim to design their other devices on them and that's probably true. But when they aren't actually coding or doing something that requires a computer it's hard for me to believe the executives especially use them or think about them.

Thanks to the iPhone and Services we absolutely are seen as resources to be harvested and manipulated into ever increasing upsells. I haven't heard any actual words from Apple to contradict that (their weird cult-like marketing speak doesn't count) and their actions certainly speak loud and clear.

John Ternus: software quality is not a crime!

Sometimes you fight the good fight even when you know you can't win. Kudos to Marco for that, and hopefully my pessimism is misplaced and his optimism is not.

Ermmm. Did I miss news of Tim Cook retiring and handing things over to John Ternus? Why write this weird open letter? And why address it to the guy who pulled Apple out of its intel slump with stop gap products (Mac mini 2018, iMac Pro, Mac Pro 2019) and then led the revival of the Mac with all of the new AS systems? We’re in a totally different world now from where we were with Dan Ricco, and it’s because Ternus cared and righted the ship.

Maybe address this to Federighi and Eddy Cue?

Have to disagree with the AppleTV comment. It’s a great product, especially when compared to what is built into TVs or other streamer sticks/boxes. I love my AppleTV, and given how advanced and sophisticated Apple’s multimedia stack is, it’s exactly the kind of thing they should be building. They’re basically selling a headless iPhone for $129.

I wonder if at Apple Park there’s a scene like the blue letter from The Hudsucker Proxy

@Ben I may be wrong but isn’t the comment related to Apple TV about the service and not the device?

I did mean the service. The device is fine. Good not great.

But it’s increasingly just an ad platform. Just last night I rented a movie through Apple’s own tv app and during the movie a liquid glass floating window appeared at the top right telling me about something on apple tv and telling me to press the tv button to watch now.

A straight up ad. From Apple. During content I purchased from them.

Apple does not care about users beyond being sacks of money. The other commenter is right, I’m not too worried about Ternus. But his day one job needs to be to finally fire CFed and Cue for ruining the company through software and services decline for a decade.

But of course as long as Apple is making money they will see nothing wrong because they aren’t a company that cares about doing things a special way or the right way for humanity or whatever.

They just want money like the rest of them, full stop. There is no longer any higher ideal whatsoever.

> We love computers. We don’t hide that — we celebrate it!

You know, in the modern context they have a name for a device that has no upgradable parts; a disposable appliance where everything is soldered in, and you can't improve or reconfigure it after purchase...

...it's called an iPad.

What you love are iPads running an operating system less restrictive than iPadOS, not computers.

The foaming over the Apple Silicon "Mac Renaissance" sounds like people waxing lyrical over the quality, and workmanship of the shackles they're willingly fastening around their own wrists.

At least an iPad is priced as disposable.

“Maybe address this to Federighi and Eddy Cue?”

Federighi is either unable to right his ship, unaware that the ship is going the wrong way, uninterested in the discontent of those who are telling him the ship is going the wrong way, or all three. And Eddy Cue has either no taste remaining or no power left with which to wield it.

@billyok

I'd go further to say that Federighi is the person most responsible for Apple software going to garbage, and Cue is the person most responsible for how badly Apple messed up their content stores and apps.

Their job was to push back against Cook, if Cook has any involvement whatsoever in setting agendas for the various departments. Hell, the people who worked under Jobs pushed back plenty, overruled him on things he really wanted.

What we have now, is what the people in charge of the various aspects of Apple WANT us to have now.

I honestly think framework make better computers than Apple.

I think Fairphone make better phones than Apple.

I think Nothing makes better phones and headphones than Apple.

I think there are tons of companies that make better keyboards, and mice (sometimes both) than Apple

I think that bit about Apple being the only ones making great "computers" should serve as a stark reminder to not drink Kool aid year after year.

It will fuck with your brain.

Replies to a few comments:

@Bart - I have no cables, just high speed internet coming in. My Apple TV (I really hate how Apple uses 2-3 names - 3 if you include whatever Apple TV+ is) is logged into my wi-fi and *never* get on the Apple TV app that I'm unable to delete from my Apple TV home screen. Still with me? I let my ISP along with Fubo (and on occasion Sling for a day) provide my sports and shows anymore. Checking out Fubo, I also get these "notifications" at times about... well, sometimes is the sports I'm already tuned in to watching! Since I can't blame the Apple TV app, I call this "notifications" (a shorter word by character count and syllables would be "noise") and still haven't found a setting (not in Settings but in Fubo) to shut them off.

@Someone - Now that there's a sold out (for the moment) $600-$700 MacBook, how does that fit into your statement that at least an iPad is "disposable"?

@Someone - your reply to @billyok, while probably accurate, brought to mind how much has happened in 15 months... nobody voted to have masked police in our cities, regime changes in 2 maybe 3 countries, a critical conduit for 20% of worldwide oil blockaded - all without even a heads-up to NATO, whom our leader (oldest ever) is now talking about (again) about withdrawing. At the same time our leader thinks the Supreme Court should just do like Congress - rubber stamp whatever he wants. (Don't get me going about stock market manipulation, SCREAMING NIGHTLY MESSAGES, renaming structure, demolishing structures, building structures, or just plain kickbacks - some from Tim Cook). No:

"What we have now, is what the people in charge of the various aspects of Apple WANT us to have now."

Not sure how much has changed since, say, 2006 (before iPhone, Intel Macs, etc.) but I'd offer the biggest thing that's changed since then is the passing on of Steve Jobs in 2010. Here's the funny note... all that meant was Apple was mainly making what Steve Jobs wanted us to have then. YMMV, but I think Macs are better (hardware-wise) and iPhones totally disrupted a few markets at least for a few years.

Oh yeah, and nobody is forcing you to continues using what Apple WANTS us to have. At all. (Unlike our country's leader.)

> I think there are tons of companies that make better keyboards, and mice (sometimes both) than Apple.

Well, most of the $2-3 USB A mice you can buy in supermarkets are better than Apple Magic Mouse.

Quoth Kristoffer:

I honestly think framework make better computers than Apple.

I’d be the happy owner of one of their Framework Desktops (in addition to all all my Apple computers and devices) if I hadn’t heard some of their forum members complain that sometimes the power supply whines. Also, they don’t have a trial period that’s as good as Apple’s — if mine whines, it’s not clear to me that I can just send it back to them and say “sorry, either replace this with one that doesn’t whine (either under load or not) or give me my money back.”

Also, they don’t natively support Debian, my distro of choice, but that’s probably a tiny problem if you don’t care about WiFi support.

Quoth billyok:

Federighi is either unable to right his ship, unaware that the ship is going the wrong way, uninterested in the discontent of those who are telling him the ship is going the wrong way, or all three. And Eddy Cue has either no taste remaining or no power left with which to wield it.

My hunch is that Federighi is clueless on how to cut through a bunch of lying middle managers under him and/or he and his subordinates stand to suffer large retention-and-promotion penalties for “backsliding” on their DEI targets, while no such penalty exists for shipping increasingly software.

shipping increasingly software

I meant “increasingly buggy software”.

@Kristoffer I wouldn’t hold up Fairphone as a shining example. Fairphone 6 still doesn’t have a Secure Enclave (only TrustZone), which the iPhone had since the 5s almost 13 years ago.

The Fairphone 6 may be repairable, but the most common early failures of that model (buttons breaking and phone bricking during charging) cannot be fixed (respectively because they don’t sell replacement buttons or logic boards).

The software is a mess with old kernels with known CVEs, old firmware blobs with known CVEs, old device trees, opaque Chinese TCL blobs, etc., maintained by a Chinese company (T2Mobile). Installing something like /e/OS isn’t going to help because they use the same kernel, firmware blobs and device tree.

Perhaps ironically, the best option is currently Google Pixel. It has modern Secure Enclave (Titan M2), a modern CPU with security extensions like MTE, and it is easily unlockable/relockable. Plus it has great, secure, degoogled options like GrapheneOS.

"if I hadn’t heard some of their forum members complain that sometimes the power supply whines"

I'm not sure how representative that is, and at any rate, these are standard Flex-ATX power supplies. Unlike with Apple's devices, if they're not to your liking, you can just order the exact one you like and put it in your computer.

"stand to suffer large retention-and-promotion penalties for “backsliding” on their DEI targets"

Could you spell out exactly what you are suggesting here, please?

@Dave

> Now that there's a sold out (for the moment) $600-$700 MacBook, how does that fit into your statement that at least an iPad is "disposable"?

That Macbook is a disposable computer, clearly. The irony of it is, it has a worse screen than my iPad Pro, half the RAM, maybe a quarter the storage, but it would still be better for almost everything I do, because iPadOS is such a constant source of slowdowns, blockages and limitations. Just selecting a word - or horror of horrors, trying to change a spelling mistake in a URL in a browser's address well, for example.

That it's selling so well speaks to the problem the Mac has always had - price. Most consumers don't value Apple's hardware aesthetics that bring with them a price premium. At least in the old days you could temper that with the hardware's longevity - a secondhand market that was inflated by the "put more ram and a faster hard drive in" factor.

It will be very interesting to see how the secondhand market for Apple silicon system evolves, given every one will cme with a worn, non replaceable boot drive.

> Not sure how much has changed since, say, 2006 (before iPhone, Intel Macs, etc.) but I'd offer the biggest thing that's changed since then is the passing on of Steve Jobs in 2010. Here's the funny note... all that meant was Apple was mainly making what Steve Jobs wanted us to have then. YMMV, but I think Macs are better (hardware-wise) and iPhones totally disrupted a few markets at least for a few years.

Jobs at least had a real understanding of Apple customers' needs. Sure, he had his pet projects, but he was never as out-of-touch as the current executives have been — with certain products but mostly with all the neutering they've done to Mac OS.

The only thing that's good in today's Macs are the Apple Silicon chips. Sadly, they're simultaneously the reason why today we have Macs that are black boxes, with un-upgradable RAM and un-upgradable storage. I don't care how efficient RAM and storage are — I would like to still be able to upgrade both down the road, instead of having to spend a fortune upfront if I want to purchase a high-specced Mac. A high-specced Mac that still retains a horrible point of failure because in the event of a storage failure out of warranty, I just can't open it myself and replace the internal SSD.

Meanwhile, my 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro is still operational, with its RAM maxed out, the internal hard drive replaced with a much bigger SSD, and the optical drive replaced with a second SSD. It's still useful after using the Mac OS Mojave Patcher by dosdude to bring it to Mac OS X 10.14 Mojave, as it normally wouldn't support anything past El Capitan.

@Nathan

> he and his subordinates stand to suffer large retention-and-promotion penalties for “backsliding” on their DEI targets

I'm not sure what right-wing news source you're getting this from, but this is absolute BS.

this is absolute BS.

You seem very sure of this, and I’d love to be wrong.

What makes you so sure?