
How does Apple keep secrets so well? (2012) - Moto7451
https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secrets-so-well/answer/Kim-Scheinberg
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sametmax
I don't see what so special about apple. A lot of entities manage to keep
secrets very well. They use a mix of paying their employees well, having a
company culture around innovation, a good security system, and contract
promissing to sue you to death if you rat.

Take the CNES (National Centre for Space Studies in europe): they have
individual scanner gates at each entrances. You can't get in without your
whole body being trapped in a tube, alone. You can move anywhere without the
proper clearance, and often somebody going with you. Each room is locked out
with a card system. All the corridors look the same, so an attacker would have
a hard time going somewhere specifically. The IT system is seriously locked
down. Yet in all rooms you'll find prototypes, scale models and pictures, so
that everybody is proud to work here and feel a sense of responsibility.

Protecting industrial secrets is not an apple thing.

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camillomiller
CNES isn’t working on consumer products used by billions of people, which
where popular enough to generate a market for media publications devoted to
only talk about them. The comparison is completely clueless. Where you to
spill the beans on some new CNES innovation in a bar, the best you can aspire
to is a “cool story bro” remark from some drunk fella sitting next to you. Try
doing that when you’re an Apple engineer working on the iPhone and your beer
burps will be the pullquote of a Bloomberg piece in two hours.

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mstade
Funny you should mention a bar: [https://gizmodo.com/this-is-apples-next-
iphone-5520164](https://gizmodo.com/this-is-apples-next-iphone-5520164)

:o)

~~~
camillomiller
That was the reference ;)

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simonh
I've always found this story a little odd. OSX is really just NeXTSTEP with an
updated UI and application framework. NeXTSTEP was developed and ran on Intel
CPUs throughout the 90s. Right through until OSX was initially released, even
while at Apple Steve Job's personal machine was a Think Pad running NeXTSTEP.
The other thing is that Darwin, the underlying OS of OSX, was released
publicly as PowerPC and Intel binaries, as well as source, right through the
PowerPC years. So people at Apple were at least running the base OS layer on
Intel boxes for development and QA testing, out in the open, right through to
the switch to Intel Mac hardware in 2006. They were even giving Intel Darwin
to the public on installation discs. The only thing missing was the Cocoa UI
layer. Surely Bertrand Serlet would have known all of this? His reaction of
shock and surprise in this story doesn't make any sense.

I can understand that the plan to switch to Intel hardware was a big secret,
but the fact the software ran on Intel the whole time was perfectly obvious.
That such a huge deal was made out of Apple's amazing achievement porting OSX
to Intel, then and even now, leaves me a bit nonplussed.

~~~
_txgb
i worked on a secret project codenamed "Star Trek" porting 68k assembler based
macos to x86 way back in 1992, pretty fun:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project)

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mscasts
Interesting read but it doesn't really answer the question.

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kryptiskt
This question has aged badly, Apple used to keep secrets really well, but now
they're not doing so well. But I can't remember the last major product they
had that wasn't leaked before it was officially announced. And their self-
driving car project has been widely written about without even any product in
sight.

One good way in which they have become less secrecy-obsessed is that they're
now doing public betas of their OSes.

~~~
ksec
That is because there is literally no secret in large volume purchase and
production in Supply Chain. You are talking about a product that will be sold
in 100+ millions in following 12 months. Apple used to keep secrets very well
because they were tiny. And there were way less Apple fans then. Now reporting
news on Apple has become a big business in itself, so much Bloomberg decided
they need a whole team just to report on technology and Apple related news.
Apple Keynote was watched by 20M people in 2014, I wouldn't be surprise if the
number are now over 50M, that rivals many of the most popular sport's top
league live viewers.

But when the product is totally not in the radar of journalist, they came out
of no where. AirPod for example, is one of best Apple innovation in recent
years. It was simple, and it works. Try getting any older bluetooth Ear pieces
works and I would throw them out of the windows within 5 min. it worked so
well that everyone is using it, and they were selling like hotcakes. Since
AirPod is now on radar, there is no escape in media trying to poke at people
and supply chain.

Having said that, they could have done a much better job in software secrecy,
since they control everything within it. And yet time and time again Apple
seems to not put much care into protecting its secrecy.

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gumby
Apple is highly compartmentalized.

I had a friend working on _iPod frameworks_ and he was free to talk with me
about new iPod developments because he only learned about them the same was I
would: by watching the public announcements on YouTube.

A bunch of old Cygnus colleagues work at Apple. One of them, working on the
debugger, said he was shocked when macOS-on-intel came out because he hadn't
heard about it. That team had had to make their own fork of the toolchain (and
presumably the OS!) to fix their own bugs, until it was publicly released. He
said he thought a few weird bug reports about things like stack frame
assumptions that came in from random external addresses (about the generic
gdb) were probably, in retrospect, from the Marklar team, but that he would
never know.

I'm convinced one of the strengths of the Valley is the de facto permeability
of NDAs, and I actually consider Apple's level of secrecy a weakness. Though
they seem pretty satisfied with their approach :-).

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djmips
I see, it was so secret that even Apple didn't know it was developing it.

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Strongarms
Well written, but the answer is still unclear sadly

