John Siracusa, one third of the excellent ATP podcast, developer of several niche Mac utilities, and author of some of the best operating system reviews of all time, has called for Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to step down. Now, countless people call for Tim Cook to stand down all the time, but when someone like Siracusa, an ardent Mac user since the release of the very first Macintosh and a staple of the Apple community, makes such a call, it carries a bit more weight.
His main argument is not particularly surprising to anyone who’s been keeping tabs on the Apple community, and the Apple developer community in particular: Apple seems to no longer focus on making great products, but on making money. Every decision made by Apple’s leadership team is focused solely on extracting as much money from consumers and developers, instead of on making the best possible products.
The best leaders can change their minds in response to new information. The best leaders can be persuaded. But we’ve had decades of strife, lawsuits, and regulations, and Apple has stubbornly dug in its heels even further at every turn. It seems clear that there’s only one way to get a different result.
In every healthy entity, whether it’s an organization, an institution, or an organism, the old is replaced by the new: CEOs, sovereigns, or cells. It’s time for new leadership at Apple. The road we’re on now does not lead anywhere good for Apple or its customers. It’s springtime, and I’m choosing to believe in new life. I swear it’s not too late.
↫ John Siracusa
I reached this same point with Apple a long, long time ago. I was an ardent Mac user during the PowerPC G4 and G5 days, lasting into the early Intel days. However, as the iPhone and related services took over as Apple’s primary source of income, I felt that Mac OS X, which I once loved and enjoyed so much, started to languish, and it’s been downhill for Apple’s desktop operating system ever since. Whenever I have to help my parents with their computers – modern M1 and M2 Macs – I am baffled and saddened by just how big of a convoluted, disjointed, and unintuitive mess macOS has become.
I long ago stopped caring about whatever products Apple releases or updates, because I feel like as a user who genuinely cares about his computing experience, Apple simply doesn’t make products for me. I’m not sure replacing Tim Cook with someone else will really change anything about Apple’s priorities; in the end, it’s a publicly traded corporation that thinks it needs to please shareholders, and a focus on great products instead of money isn’t going to help with that.
Apple long ago stopped being the beleaguered company many of its most ardent fans still seem convinced that it is, and it’s now one of those corporate monoliths that can make billions more overnight by squeezing just a bit more out of developers or users, regardless of what that squeezing does to the user experience. Apple is still selling more devices than ever, and it’s still raking in more gambling gains through digital slot machines for children, and as long as that’s the case, replacing Tim Cook won’t do a goddamn thing.
I recall firing up ArsTechnica MacOs reviews during long distance train trips. Despite never owning a Mac and having no intention to do so. They have always been a fascinating read on their own. Only comparable to Anand’s (and old Ars John Stokes).CPU reviews.
Time giants walked among us… 😉
Thom is 100% correct on this, I loved using Mac OS 8, 9 and X (the first few releases) but when I have to use it now, its disjointed, like you still hints of what it was, just a mix mash of iOS, weird design choices and head scratching behaviors.
RumblePony,
I wonder how much of this is intrinsic to all aging platforms?
I see the same lack of direction and greed indicators at microsoft with windows. I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Greed may play less of a role with FOSS, but many users have been complaining about the direction for linux desktops too. Fans of gnome resented changes taking place around the time of gnome shell and libadwaita.
https://news.itsfoss.com/gnome-libadwaita-library/
I’ve heard the same said of KDE 5/plasma.
Are we simply guilty of “rose tinted glasses”, or is something more substantial happening such that it makes sense for us to be less thrilled about the project over time?
In my eyes XFCE seems to not have been phased by this phenomenon, which could make sense because XFCE didn’t try to follow the trends reinventing wheels. I kind of appreciate this but I wonder what everyone else thinks.
I don’t see anything that creates the excitement like there was around windows 95. It would be easy to write this off as “you old now”, but I don’t see young people getting excited either. So I’m under the impression that younger generations don’t share the excitement there was in the 90s. Is mature technology getting boring for everyone? My kids don’t seem to share the excitement in technology that I remember having. I don’t know how much of this is observer bias versus an accurate assessment though. I especially want to hear the perspective of somebody young: is technology exciting? Or does it just feel “meh”?
All technology and advancements are eventually taken for granted. Take a simple, think like a search engine. When Google first came on the scene it was an absolute game changer. It was exciting! Now, if someone makes an update to search engine you’ll be lucky if it even gets acknowledged. AI is the new “exciting buzzword” the trouble is the hope is far in advance of the capability
It used to be that there was one hit TV show and everybody would stay home on Thursday night to watch it. so they could talk about it the next day at work or school. It was a shared cultural phenomena and generated a lot of excitement. Now, there are 100 decent option on streaming services. Everybody subscribes to different services, or torrent sources, and we can all watch different things at different times. Even the “hits” have less impact and universality.
I think technology has done the same. We used to all be held back by the same stuff and would collectively celebrate every advance. Now, we are all doing different things with different stuff. Like with TV, even the big stuff hit a smaller audience and creates a smaller splash. There is so much else to compete with.
Apple has been going downhill ever since Steve Jobs was no more at the helm. While a controversial figure, you can’t deny that Apple was the most revolutionary and best of quality, with the user-interest in mind, with Jobs. I’ve read articles about him, how he built a team of certain people that nobody else would put together because of the conflict it would produce. But it was exactly that conflict that gave us great products, because these people were thinking out of the box. And the first thing Cook did, was to dismantle this team.
Ergo, what Apple would need would be another figure like Steve Jobs, who isn’t afraid to step on some peoples’ toes and who’s at the same time a perfectionist. But that will not happen, as it goes against the general corporate rules and involves more money being spent on perfecting a product and taking risks.
Mrokii,
Maybe if you are talking about UI, but under the hood I have to disagree. I found that the classic Macs at school (ie prior to macosX) suffered from plenty of faults thanks to antiquated engineering, particularly around memory subsystems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Mac_OS_memory_management
This could cause regular crashing issues for the entire OS, which I could reproduce with commercial software at school.
At least with OS-X, they switched to a higher quality unix base, and users were better off for it. But apple under Jobs allowed macos to loose focus, becoming one of Job’s unwanted children. Iphone was the new baby. I really do think the downward spiral for macos started on Job’s watch. This was overlooked because of the success of iphone, but still.
Obviously their valuation is fine, but in terms of developing macos into something more, neither Jobs nor Cook may have been the best CEO for this. I actually think apple had a good opportunity to become the leader of FOSS operating systems had they wanted to. They had a favorable GUI on the desktop and the unix base offered excellent opportunities server side too. Under different leadership apple could have had more success in these markets. But for better or worse apple would shift to phones instead with macos development being significantly de-prioritized.
MacOS was a product of it’s time. All of its competitors (dos, windows 3x/9x, amigaos, tos, riscos etc) had similar flaws.
Jobs clearly recognized the problem early as the design of nextstep was much better, and apple/microsoft also replaced their legacy platforms over time too.
bert64,
Yes, I agree that everything has flaws. I think it’s fair to say Jobs’s wasn’t technically minded though, not like Wozniak was in any case. Apple’s focus on core technologies was way less pronounced than Sun for example. From my (biased) perspective Sun brought us a lot more important technology. However look at who failed and who succeeded. I think apple shows that technological strength may not be the best path to success.
Thom, can you give examples of how macOS is ‘disjointed’? Okay Stage Manager sucks, but it would be helpful to get multiple examples to get to a ‘disjointed OS’.