The Tim Cook Era

I worry that software quality, user interface design, and developer relations will continue to flounder post-Cook.

(To the gentlemen who pinned me for not being specific, my bug list is in the "WWDC 2025 Wish List" post comments and I've got more...)

They kept making faulty keyboards way after they knew there is a design flaw with them, same for underwhelming touch bars (when people just wanted to have Macs with touch screens). I wonder why they didn't reverted back immediately, but kept pushing it through years forcing customers who were up for upgrade to buy something they didn't like?

@Slava, most likely just the sunk cost fallacy?

@Slava Arrogance among the leadership is presented as courage.

The Tim Cook era will be remembered by me as the worst software era of all time and the worst era for the Mac. Where all their software engineering hires excelled at LeetCode, but couldn't fix bugs to save their lives. Where managers learned stamping "Swift" on their project names was a fast track to a promotion. Where the only KPI anyone tracked was the share price.

The Apple Silicon team is the only group that seems to be unaffected by the Bean Counter menace.

You have to wonder if Jobs would have been as abusive to the developer community as the folks he left in charge.

@Daniël de Kok, I guess you're right, they spent R&D money - they had to stick with it until it amortizes, customer satisfaction be damned.

@Chris Steve Jobs wanted devs to write web apps for iPhone. Federighi made them write apps in Swift. Not much different :)

What are Apple's big innovations after Jobs left the company? I struggle to name all that many.

iPhones on the whole are worse than they were before. Removing the home button and adding a notch is not innovative in my eyes. And Apple ruined the best-in-class UI they designed for it under Jobs. The experience of using an iPhone now is more aggravating than it was 15 years ago, and it can't fundamentally do anything all that different than the older models, aside from having more RAM and a faster CPU.

The iPad is still trying to figure out its purpose in the world, and is on the whole still an oversized iPhone in many ways, hampered by those limitations. The Apple pencil provides a best-in-class drawing experience, at the very least.

The Apple watch is the best candidate for something new and innovative. I haven't personally used one but I have a friend that loves it. Not a total game changer, but obviously a big success.

I struggle to name a single positive thing that's happened to the Mac in the last decade. There's been a clear downward trend in quality since 10.13. Pretty much none of the features Apple has added are game changers. They ruined the UI. It's now buggy and hard to use. Nothing "just works" any longer. Each release is more locked down than the last, with the cynical endgame being that it'll inevitably be as locked down as iOS. I don't want to include Apple Silicon, because it came bundled with undue complexity and security theater. And at the end of the day, Apple Silicon is just a faster CPU than we had before, which is fine, but on its own not enough to make or break a platform. (Oh, I guess there is the OCR feature I mentioned in a previous thread. That one is good. Hardly tips the scales, though...)

Apple Vision Pro is a big toy, a solution looking for a problem, and no one's found the problem. I don't want to count it as innovative unless it actually really does something useful.

Apple Intelligence is a joke. And AI as a whole is proving itself to not be as overwhelming useful as everyone wants to imagine it is.

Apple's services are all buggy messes and are no better than their competition.

In summary...

It seems to me like Apple is just coasting on their earlier successes. They seem institutionally incapable of thinking up something new that people actually want, much less inventing "the next iPhone". And their momentum is running out. They keep making their existing products worse, and don't seem to have any introspection. Whatever their flaws may have been under Jobs, they are now just another soulless tech company making products that everyone needs but kind of suck to use.

If I missed an important detail or product, or am off point on anything I said above, do go ahead and correct me!

The more frustrating issues I run into the more I believe Apple Execs barely use their own products.

It's been 4 OS versions and MacOS on reboot still has trouble with displaying a window that's set for All Desktops. That is just one of many examples.

As an Apple fan who bought one of the iPhone 4S phones when RadioShack was liquidating old inventory a few years back and has deliberately kept the unit from upgrading past iOS 6, I can confidently say that if you’re saying that iPhones are worse now, you’ve got some very powerful rose colored glasses.

Everything about the phone hardware is inferior, and the changes that they’ve made over the years, so subtle that you barely even notice them until they’re gone. The first thing you’ll notice is the screen - it’s very washed out. The cameras. Then the Apple logo on the back - it’s not centered.

Powering the unit up, and you’re missing all of the gestures, the app switcher is still the carousel bar across the bottom, the dashboard/widget overlay slides down with a cheap looking felt texture, and where the sliding motion lacks the same interruptible animation that you see elsewhere in the OS. And yeah, the Settings app is a mess. Everything feels clunky and half-baked. It was objectively not very good, but yes, it was what we had at the time.

You could say “well all things being equal…” but I actually owned one of these very models back in the day and thought it to be entirely adequate and beautiful. Now, all I can see are rough edges and quality issues that make me wonder how I could have ever regarded this as high end and quality.

We don’t realize how much improvement they’ve made until one steps back and opens up an older iPhone or iPad (the Mac… is a different story, haha!), and it’s a testament to the work and forward thinking that is totally Apple, how hard they push forward.

"Steve Jobs wanted devs to write web apps for iPhone. Federighi made them write apps in Swift. Not much different :)"

We'd be in a much better place if Apple focused on making web apps integrated well into iOS.

@Ben Your points are well taken! There are aspects of iOS 6 and earlier I really liked more than the current more recent designs. But there's no doubt that the faster models of iPhone have made it a lot more pleasant to use. And much of the frustration I get with modern iPhones comes from how shitty mobile websites often are to use or how badly designed apps are, which isn't really iOS's fault. I also use the "swipe to go back" and "swipe for control center" gestures that came after iOS 6 all the time... though I strongly feel that getting rid of the home button was a bad idea, and the control center is a lot less useful to me on devices where I have to swipe down from a corner rather than swipe up from below, where my finger can naturally reach it.

The best thing that happened to Apple in the Tim Cook years is not something that Apple did.

It's that Microsoft released Windows 8 when Apple was getting lost in the early days of Lion/Mountain Lion interface enshittification.

If Microsoft had stuck with making refinements to Win7 instead of chasing stupid UI/UX/commerce fads with Win 8-10-11, there'd be nowhere near as many Macs around today.