
Tim Cook, Making Apple His Own - kanamekun
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/technology/tim-cook-making-apple-his-own.html
======
selmnoo
I appreciate that Cook shares the personal story of encountering clansmen,
challenging them (at such a young age), but man there are some serious
stretches of truths in the rest of the video. At 4:12 he says he found Apple
and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity through the equality of all its
employees. Is he serious? Not even any sign of cognitive dissonance while he
says it? He was the COO, he had to have known _something_ about the terrible
things that were going on. It wasn't over nothing that nytimes pondered the
question that if Jobs were alive today, whether he would be in jail or not (
[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-
geni...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/business/steve-jobs-a-genius-at-
pushing-boundaries-too.html) ).

As a tech person I'm excited and impressed by Apple products, but let's not
forget the serious wrongs they have done and continue to do. I personally
choose to vote with my dollars and stay away from Apple for this and other
reasons.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
> At 4:12 he says he found Apple and Steve Jobs to believe advancing humanity
> through the equality of all its employees.

Yes, it's clear revisionism.

For example, Jobs didn't believe in donating to charities. The first thing he
did when he rejoined Apple after the NeXt debacle is to cancel all charity
donations. After his death, restoring charities was one of the first things
that Tim Cook did.

There's also ample evidence that Apple treated its employees very poorly,
especially compared to the other Silicon Valley companies (for example, Jobs
refused for years to provide commuting shuttles to its employees despite heavy
complaints and internal petitions).

There is a reason why Apple has never been even in the top 100 companies to
work for.

~~~
gress
Apple pays well.

Shuttles on the other hand, are a controversial elitist perk.

~~~
pook1e
> Apple pays well.

A company requires more than 'pays well' to be a great company to work for, if
that's what you're suggesting.

------
webwielder
>Last year, Apple for the first time introduced two new iPhones instead of
just one: the high-end iPhone 5S, which sold like gangbusters, and the lower-
cost, plastic-covered iPhone 5C, which disappointed.

So disappointing it was the second best selling smartphone in the US! Is it a
law that every article about Apple must adhere to a certain number of press-
created fictions?

~~~
jusben1369
I'm not sure about that law but it is a law that someone must always attack
the press if they say something less than flowery about Apple somewhere. I
don't think many people inside or outside of Apple are arguing that the 5C was
a disappointment sales wise. This though was just one small point in a very
lengthy, balanced article.

~~~
Udo_Schmitz
I think Jim Dalrymple aptly phrases it in his comment to the linked article:
”I found this profile frustrating, vexing. The tone is objective, but the
prose manages to be damning at the same time, working in all the standard,
shopworn stereotypes the Apple community has gotten used to having thrown
their way.“

[http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/06/15/the-new-york-times-
sun...](http://www.loopinsight.com/2014/06/15/the-new-york-times-sunday-
profile-of-tim-cook/)

~~~
jusben1369
Hey Udo. Thanks for that. Quoting Gruber at the end though seemed like the
final nail in the coffin to me. Jim appears to be in the same category as the
original comment above. He's just too overly sensitive. I found the empty
shirt comment up front particularly strange. It seems more than fair to state
that Jobs is to Apple what only a handful of other iconic business leaders
were to their company. That's just contextualizing the challenge Cook has vs
saying he's an empty shirt. You could even argue that's the author trying to
give Tim some breathing room by pointing out what he's following. But then
that would be personal interpretation to the positive which makes me the same
as the other folks (who are heading to the negative)

~~~
Udo_Schmitz
I know that Gruber is pro Apple. But what I like about his comments is that he
has got his facts straight. Like in real hard numbers and statistics. Whereas
the NYTs writing about Apple in the last years smells like hit pieces and/or
click bait.

For another totally unbalanced and very hard to dismiss comment (because he's
got his facts straight) I'll quote Mr. Dilgers latest piece:

“Unsurprisingly, the article's authors Matt Richtel and Brian X. Chen have to
admit early on that Cook "declined to be interviewed for this article." It's
not hard to understand why.

Richtel may be best known for his bizarre hit piece castigating Apple for
working to sell iPads to schools in 2011.

Chen even more famously skewered Apple for even attempting to sell its iPhone
in Japan, where he assured his Wired readers that the nation hated it. He even
crafted quotes from people in Japan saying how "lame" the iPhone was, even if
those quotes were actually completely fabricated.

Then of course, there's the New York Times itself, the publication Richtel and
Chen are currently writing for, which printed its "iEconomy" series
exclusively blaming Apple for everything wrong in the industry.”

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/15/new-york-times-
see...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/06/15/new-york-times-seeks-to-
profile-tim-cook-after-getting-shut-out-by-apple)

------
owenwil
I thought this piece was fabulous and a great insight to a man who is finally
turning around the company from being completely oblivious to helping the
world into a company that cares about the mark it leaves on the world and the
actions it can choose to make with its money.

Instead of sitting on its money, Cook is choosing to use some of Apple's cash
stockpile for good such as by building 100% clean energy datacenters and
beginning to open up to donation to charity/education as well as working to
force its supply chain to be more fair on the humans it relies on.

It's a great new direction for Apple; critics could say it's not enough, but
it's better than the company was under Jobs in terms of philanthropy.

~~~
robg
I thought the most interesting leak from the Apple-FDA meeting notes was the
expression that Apple going into health is a "moral obligation".

~~~
wavefunction
Seems egotistical as well as self-serving. "Health" is one of the few
industries that will continue to provide solid revenues until the penultimate
human perishes from this earth. And I'm not sure what Apple will bring to the
table that noone else on earth can bring, other than Apple-branded products.

But that's just like my opinion, man.

~~~
gumby
Actually revenues in the "health" industry aren't necessarily solid; there's a
huge survivor bias and tons of companies making cures for rare diseases and
_not_raking it in. (Note: I have a drug I worked on in clinical trials so I'm
not simply pulling these claims out of my backside).

But what can Apple "bring to the table?" Well, to quote the variably-
attributed saying, "quantity has a quality all its own." Apple can produce
something compatible with an ENORMOUS installed base of active users, and can
make a difference. Just getting people to exercise more would be great. By the
end of the year they could have 10X the number of users fitbit does. Nobody
else can do that.

Note I'm not trying at all to claim they are angels: they are definitely out
to make a buck. And they can make a great product or they could make a lousy
one. They've done both. However I think, based on where they are right now,
they will try to make something actually useful and beneficial.

~~~
wavefunction
These are great points but I would point out that "solid revenues" and "not
raking it in" are not necessarily incongruous or exclusionary. What's wrong
with steady and consistent revenues? It's not going to turn you into Mark
Zuckerberg but it will sustain a business, employ people usefully, and provide
a steady financial base to take chances from.

~~~
robg
The point is that even for Apple, engaging on healthcare is risky. Yes,
margins are available at volume, but it's not their standard modus operandi
given the costs of regulation and reimbursement.

------
Zigurd
This is a great example of PR and "business journalism" playing out at the
highest levels, and yet another example of why the NYT is the last of a dying
breed, and not the future. Not one skeptical, much less difficult <cough>wage
collusion</cough> question.

You could do much much worse than to keep the distinctiveness and high
standards of Jobs's Apple while weeding out the bad idiosyncrasies a tyrant
can leave behind. And doing that while preventing the oversize egos of a bunch
of 3/4-scale Jobs wannabes from exploding over each other. Tim Cook's Apple is
less random, but otherwise much the same as Jobs's, and that's good.

Isn't it enough to be the competent keeper of a visionary's flame without
turning a business into a museum, or a self-parody? Eventually Apple will need
to be really different from Jobs's Apple. But not for a while.

------
leorocky
Apple has a simple and transparent strategy that is good for its customers:
pay a premium and get a premium product. They don't violate your privacy, they
don't usually show you ads (although they do have an ad network, limited to
mobile apps, iTunes and the Mac app store I'd think).

They have a limited number of SKUs. Apple makes a few good products, each one
representing the Apple brand in all its glory. The vertical integration from
hardware, to software and cloud is something nobody else can do except maybe
if Microsoft if it gets serious about the Surface (despite the poor sales).

It might be true that we see less of the innovation that the Steve Jobs era
was known for, but they haven't changed at the heart. They're keeping their
design quality, their finish, and the vertical integration. Apple isn't making
any junk and exploiting its brand and deceiving its customers with shitty
products.

Having said that, it doesn't mean that Apple's products are for everyone. I
don't like iCloud and I don't particular like iOS, but even so I can see the
value in what they're doing.

~~~
XorNot
"Don't violate your privacy" \--- what?

As compared to...who, exactly? They _have_ an ad network, and they _have_ a
cloud product - by definition they're holding onto as much of _your_ data as
any other company in those businesses.

~~~
arn
They have an ad network but it doesn't necessarily mean they are good at the
ad business

[http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/18/apple-iad-
stingy/](http://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/18/apple-iad-stingy/)

"Apple's unwillingness to share large amounts of consumer data is hurting its
iAd business, according to Madison Avenue media buyers that spoke with AdAge.
The company is said to be "downright stingy" with the information it shares,
too slow at developing ad products, and "too reticent to foster
relationships." "

~~~
stephencanon
You seem to be using a strange definition of the word "good". Are the ads you
see on the internet (based on datamining your personal information) better
than the ads you see in magazines and TV (which are based only on very coarse
aggregate statistics)? Are today's TV ads significantly better than those of
the 1980, when demographic information was far coarser still?

For all the promises of "only seeing ads for things you're interested in",
data-mining based advertising has been a colossal flop from my perspective as
a consumer. We've surrendered a tremendous amount of personal information and
gotten hamfisted targeting attempts and obnoxious "viral" campaigns in
exchange. It makes me nostalgic for the stupid but well executed beer
commercials of the 1980s. Not giving away all your personal information is not
the same as not being good at advertising.

------
pistle
Is this the final piece in the soft PR work rattling through "journalism" this
week? Daring Fireball did a piece not wholly unlike this as well. The timing
is a bit odd for there to be this meta discussion that is pivoting Cook and
Apple from the post-Jobsian "rudderlessness" to a New-New-Apple Cookian era
that is both highly positive and would have been, to paraphrase, impossible
with Jobs at the helm.

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

~~~
rimantas
And by coincidence WWDC just happened recently where many interesting things
were announced.

------
yuhong
I wish Tim would actually do things like reduce Apple's secrecy. For example,
technically Mac OS X prerelease seeds are under NDA, but how often does this
actually get enforced? And I have wished for a Mac version of
[http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing](http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing) for a
while now.

~~~
goatforce5
Ask and ye shall receive:

"Apple has graciously relaxed its NDA for new technologies, meaning that we
don't have to wait to talk about all of the shiny new toys we have to play
with."

[http://nshipster.com/ios8/](http://nshipster.com/ios8/)

~~~
yuhong
Thanks, didn't know they just did it recently.

------
ser_ocelot
I slogged through the article hoping to see mention of the no-poaching
shenanigans. Disappointing.

