Tim Cook seems to be one of those CEOs who sits in his office doesn't participate in the innovation process, while Jobs took a more hands on approach to drive innovations to its ultimate form.
I can't imagine someone presenting this "touchbar" bullspit to Jobs and not getting fired right away for such a dumb idea.
Its hard to give a meaningful critique of Tim Cook as CEO online since you are attacked either by the fanboys, shills, or haters.
However, I think its becoming increasingly clear that Tim is "not a product development CEO". He is clearly, by far, probably one of the best COO's of the last 100 years (yes, I'm totally serious).
Apple would've never had its rebirth if not for the duo of Jobs as product visionary and Cook as executor. Sadly with Jobs passing, Apple is slowly sliding back to the confused, overlapping, inconsistent product catalog circa 1998.
I agree they've generally gotten more inconsistent.
But this is an example of the opposite. It'd be MORE confusing to have the only difference between the Air and the Pro be the Touch Bar, as the author suggests. How does the a touch bar make it "air?"
While I think Jobs was not perfect in many aspects it seems that Apple is unfortunately suffering from his absence. Ive and his team no doubt knows industrial design, perhaps better than any company right now. Yet they can't seem to connect with the needs of real users, their decisions seem more grounded in design "purity" and sometimes there's a disconnect between that and reality.
Tim Cook seems very competent business person, but has little vision on his own. He'll not risk the bottom line out of conviction like Jobs did.
Say what you want about Jobs but it seemed he was driven by a true sense of what users "should" want... the current leadership seems more to be about stock prices and retaining market share.
> Ive and his team no doubt knows industrial design
That's the conventional wisdom, but I dispute it. Ive and his team seem to have lost sight of some of the most basic principles that made the Mac great in the first place, like: it should be easy to tell what parts of the screen contain things that you can click on.
I'm still running Mavericks because I want buttons to look like buttons. Is that really too much to ask?
We'll have to agree to disagree about that. The flat colored circles at the top left corners of windows don't look like buttons to me. And the OS is chock-full of clickable text that is visually indistinguishable from non-clickable text, and hidden controls that only show up when you hover over a magic area of the screen, again with zero visual cues that there is anything there. I like a good easter egg as much as the next person, but not when finding them is actually crucial to getting things done.
There may be some widgets that still look like buttons, but that's not what I'm talking about.
yeah sorry that was what I meant: they know industrial design in itself but failed to understand what users actually need for that design to provide functional benefits. Either their understanding is lacking ... or they're targeting different users
I think Jobs was driven by a genuine desire to make products that were cool, fun, empowering, and elegantly engineered.
A lot of that drive was motivated by unpleasant personal narcissism - he seems to have had a strong need to feel cool, fun, empowered, and elegantly engineered himself.
But still - it pushed computing in directions that were really positive.
I have no idea what Cook is motivated by. I suspect not even Cook knows what Cook is motivated by.
He knows what Jobs looked like from the outside, and he has some ability to follow some of the moves. But it feels as if there's an aloof and maybe even slightly hostile detachment that Jobs never showed much evidence of.
Unless he has an epiphany and understands that user benefits matter more than manufacturing margins, Apple's future is going to look increasingly unexciting.
Yeah, no doubt Jobs was driven by his demons and desire to prove himself ... but layered on top of that seemed to be some kind of genuine ideology and good taste. Say what you want about him but if the choice was between earning a little more or doing what he thought was "right" I think he'd go with the later... and he probably believed it led to the former.
Big companies are so difficult to steer and be allowed to do so, and in an increasingly complex world it's only getting worse. I'm not sure it's feasible for much longer for a person to have the amount of power and charisma needed to steer a company off the beaten path. The ever increasing entropy of modern time complexity is not all encouraging.
But the scary thing is if the current leadership was interested in retaining market share they wouldn't have made niche product out of their most popular mac. So they are failing at industrial design and mass marketing.
Like Bret Victor? Who seems to have been involved in presenting this to Jobs? I'd say he's a pretty interesting guy and probably not worth firing even if you don't like one of his proposals.
Not to mention the Mighty Mouse with the lint-magnet scroll ball, their entire server strategy, and countless software decisions like the iTunes UI, multiple generations of cloud services which were clumsy and confusing, etc.
Jobs was good at what he focused on and other things tended to languish. For the last half decade, everyone has been focused on iOS. Cook seems to be getting the blame for basically doing roughly the same thing while not being Steve Jobs.
Touch Bar is in the same 'spirit' as sending heartbeats in watchOS, the Digital Touch in iMessage. Things that looks cool at first, many viewed as gimmicky, and very un-Jobs.
I can't imagine someone presenting this "touchbar" bullspit to Jobs and not getting fired right away for such a dumb idea.