Great points! I was too harsh and focused too much on the failures, but you’re right a lot of great things have happened over the last 13 years. Steve had some big flops during his career too. I didn’t mention Steve Jobs myself because he’s not coming back and no one knows what he would’ve done had he been the CEO for the last 13 years.
Since it may be of interest, the Kindle version of After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul is on sale at Amazon for $1.99.
https://www.amazon.com/After-Steve-Became-Trillion-Dollar-Company-ebook/dp/B09BNJ4LPX/
From the New York Times’ Tripp Mickle, the dramatic, untold story inside Apple after the passing of Steve Jobs by following his top lieutenants—Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, and Tim Cook, the COO-turned-CEO—and how the fading of the former and the rise of the latter led to Apple losing its soul.
Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator’s death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.
In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.
Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple’s valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world’s stock market into freefall with a single sentence.
Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple’s history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve. His research shows the company’s success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive’s departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple’s shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.
This is really not true.
Siri has trailed their competitors on voice assistants, I completely agree, but Apple have been building Machine Learning into their products for about 10 years very successfully.
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That’s what you think.
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I’ll add that though Tim Cook is a tough, demanding CEO (most good CEOs are), he does not abuse and belittle staff like Steve Jobs is reputed to have done. There is no excuse for such behavior. One can be demanding without being demeaning. From everything I’ve read, Jobs failed in this regard. This is just one instance in which Cook is a better CEO than Jobs. I respect what Jobs did, but not always how he behaved.
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Oh sure. My point was, the market does not agree with the topic of this thread. Doesn’t make unimportant the opinion of those who dislike current perceived behavior for their own particular reasons.
Katie
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+1
The market does not care what Apple sells. Investors will continue to buy AAPL as long as the company continues to grow. That’s why services is so important as iPhone sales appear to be plateauing.
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This is maybe the worst book I’ve ever read about Apple. Tripp Mickie complains about lack of innovation under Cook, while ignoring the entire M-chip revolution. It does have some interesting quotes and stories, but the author’s relentless simplification into “Cook=Financial Robot, Ive=tortured artistic soul” makes it tempting to throw the book across the room at least once per chapter.
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Without Steve Jobs, there would be no Mac, no iPhone, no iPad, possibly not even graphical user interfaces. Apple would just be known as a fruit.
Steve Jobs founded Apple together with Steve Wozniak, at a time when the idea of a computer for ordinary people seemed absurd.
Steve Jobs was 21 and 22 years old when Apple released the Apple I and Apple II computers. He was 28 years old when Apple released the Macintosh. He was 30 years old when the representatives of the majority of Apple shareholders dismissed him as CEO.
Steve Jobs was 34 years old when his next company named NeXT published the NeXT Operating System, on which Tim Berners-Lee later developed the World Wide Web, hypertext and the first web browser. He was 41 years old when Apple bought his company NeXT to use the NeXT OS as the new macOS.
Steve Jobs was 42 years old when Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy and the shareholders asked him to serve Apple again as CEO. He was 43 when he convinced Tim Cook, five years his junior, to join him at Apple as senior vice president for worldwide operations. He was 46 years old when Apple released the iPod. He was 52 years old when Apple released the iPhone. He died at the age of 56.
Even as a very young man, Steve Jobs took on more responsibility for more people than most of his contemporaries and thus helped a great many people.
The amount Apple is reported to be paying OpenAI is zero dollars.
Let‘s pray for privacy as there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I agree. I am not minimizing Steve’s tremendously positive impact. But he could have had that impact while being tough, demanding, AND respectful.
Many great leaders have accomplished remarkable feats and, in doing so, have positively influenced many. However, they have achieved this without resorting to demeaning behavior. For instance, I’m sure Eisenhower was tough and demanding with extremely high expectations, but I doubt he ever resorted to demeaning his troops.
I recognize and appreciate the positive results from Steve’s life, but it is fair also to note that, unlike Steve, Cook (to our knowledge) is not demeaning to others. 
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I live in the United States so the odds that I have any privacy left are close to zero. In the past year, I have been offered free credit monitoring by two major companies that have leaked my data.
And a third company may have leaked even more people’s data.
Update: I just opened a letter from a company that says they have leaked, among other things, my social security number, my contact information, and my payment card numbers, etc.
And they also provided the hackers with my health insurance information and my medical records (in case they didn’t already have a copy)
But they will pay for a year of credit monitoring!
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All businesses make bets. Some pay off, some don’t. If you’re not taking risks and making mistakes then your company will be overtaken by one that is.
- VisionPro - failed? years to early to tell yet. Let’s chat in 5-7yrs.
- LLMs (sorry they’re not real AI’s) - it a couple of years time no one will remember they were late to this party.
There are many challenges at Apple - software quality, documentation of APIs, developer relations. App Store 30% tax. etc.
As someone who advises businesses on Product Management, I would be worried if they weren’t experimenting.
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I completely agree, but in non tech circles they’ve become synonymous. I had a customer recently which required that Machine Learning and LLMs form part of the definition for AI in our contract. I pushed for them to be excluded, but I was overruled due to the common narrative being that they are.
But on that point ChatGPT is not real AI, it’s simply pattern matching using the knowledge it’s given.
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Completely disagree.
LLMs, machine learning, computer vision, speech reception, game (chess, go) playing, neural networks, expert systems, … I could go on, all fall under the domain of Artificial Intelligence.
It is a very broad field, and in my discussions I try always to use the specific subfield, i.e LLM, versus the generic AI.
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I agree with Ted Chiang’s characterization of LLMs as applied statistics, it seems like a much more accurate description then the rather nebulous term artificial intelligence.
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Yes, that makes far more sense.
The Wiki definition you linked has a flaw though that, it doesn’t define what Intelligence is that could be exhibited by machines.
Following instructions (programming) or pattern matching (What’s in this photo?) isn’t Intelligence, no decisions are being made, the Computer is either following it’s programming or executing what the model it uses has been programmed with knows.
As I’ve said before, in 20 years people will look back and laugh at those who described ChatGPT as AI.
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That you choose to use a colloquial definition of AI, and not the technical definition used by researchers in the field, is like Humpty Dumpty in the Alice stories claiming that words mean whatever he wants them to mean.
Artificial Intelligence is computer programs doing things that if a human did them would be considered a sign of intelligence. LLMs clearly do things that if were done by a human would be considered intelligent. And this is why so many C-level folks are buying the hype (sadly, this includes those at my current employer, I feel your pain with the contracts).
AI is all about programming, so of course and AI program would be following instructions. People identify things by pattern matching. AI is using computers to do things that people would call intelligent. How it is done will of course be different in hardware than wetware. But saying that computer vision is just pattern matching by following an algorithm, and thus isn’t artificial intelligence shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what artificial intelligence is.
AI != I
Finally, defining intelligence in general is a difficult problem. There is plenty of literature on the subject, so I won’t rehash it here (and would likely do a poor job at it anyway).
What comes after finally? Just for the record, I do not think that there is any understanding exhibited by LLMs. And I think that is where non-AI researchers get hung up on these things.
Summing up (finally cubed?) I think that we agree more than we disagree, in that LLMs, machine learning, et. al., do not have any understanding of the data being manipulated. So claiming these tools aren’t AI misses the point. The correct claim is that they are not intelligent. Semantics? Perhaps. But as Lewis Carrol was showing with Humpty Dumpty, semantics matter.
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Humour only. My father was a professor of Computing Science from the late '60s on. (His obituary: Michael Levison Obituary - Ottawa, Ontario | West Chapel misses his time in the UK).
He frequently commented, “Marvin Minsky has been promising me AI since …” (I don’t recall the date). My father observed that it was never delivered. In memory of my father, I call what I see. These are fancy random number generators, that have some utility.
cc: @geoffaire
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