March 14, 2025
Keep Apple weird
The problem at Apple is that its CEO is super great at making money and not much else. His driving passion is…wait for it…stuff that makes money. And to someone like that, anything is worth pursuing and potentially abandoning. Remember when the $3,000 face computer was going to be THE THING™ and then it undersold and now you never hear about it anymore? Yeah. (Long thread ahead. Sorry.) 🧵
Steve Jobs was not a good person, at least not for a substantial chunk of his brief life. He treated his daughter like crap, used people to get what he wanted, and generally saw nothing wrong with any of it until much later. BUT. He was passionate about things, and was deeply committed to very few things. The big success story about Steve Jobs is actually pretty simple:
You need to get the rings marked “things I am passionate about” and “things I can get other people excited enough to repeatedly pay me for” to greatly overlap in your personal Venn diagram. His genius was in making that happen over and over. Then, he and his team would tweak a few knobs and do it again.
I think people tend to forget that there were some early “big swings” where Jobs and Co. missed terribly—like the iPod HiFi and the G4 Cube. But they rebounded quickly, and used those failures to get other things right—like the Mac mini and the HomePod. (Remember what I said earlier about being passionate about just a few things.)
Modern Apple doesn’t really do things that way. I’m hesitant to say that there’s no fire or drive there. I mean, Apple Silicon is a success story for the ages. But Cook-era Apple takes a success like Apple Silicon and turns it into a yearly rollout of processor bumped computers in identical cases, iPhone style. And what’s sad is I think Tim Cook thinks this is what Steve Jobs was doing.
I feel like Cook has tried really hard to emulate the Jobs laser focus, but only in these kinds of peripheral ways. It’s like Apple is now a cargo cult of its former self, with the refusal to experiment very deeply anywhere being the biggest indication of a pretty severe misunderstanding of the very playbook they claim to revere.
Again, look at the early “Jobs return” era of Apple. There is some wild shit going on there! It’s like a materials science class is happening in the lobby at Frog design. There’s titanium, and double shot rubber, and lenticular printing and all this wild stuff—but it’s all leading somewhere. There is deep experimentation but most of it is in the name of building a better consumer experience, because that’s what Steve Jobs cared about. The money was a happy, fortuitous accident.
Then Jobs dies, and it’s just in time for the ownership era to end. Computers are commodities, everything is a subscription. Software now is webpages. And here’s Tim Cook looking at what he’s inheriting, and he must be thinking that the worst that can happen is that he fucks it up, right? So how does he not fuck this up?
The difference between an excellent custodian and a visionary is that a visionary isn’t really all that concerned with prior art. “Great artists steal”, or so the quote goes. You take what you need and you make it better as you do it, and you release something like a MacBook Air. You get Intel to work triple overtime designing the first Mac SoC (irony!) and it’s so small it’s astonishing. You borrow, prod, push and pursue with laser focus.
I can’t get inside the head of the modern Apple. I don’t care about Siri or AI. I think most of this stuff is junk. I use Claude with frequency and I think it’s actually really amazing, but I like it as an application for my computer—not as the computer. I think a lot of what has made Apple great has been its (sometimes frustrating) tendency to be a little detached about things.
Remember “Rip, Mix, Burn”? Apple missed the wave of kids making shitty CDs of Staind songs they stole from Limewire on their parent’s Compaq Presarios with CD burners. And it really bothered Jobs. I think he felt like he should have seen it coming. So Apple does this huge campaign and they start putting CD-R drives in all their computers.
Thing is? I thought that was possibly the cringiest Jobs move of them all. Apple, to me, has always been about thumbing its nose and saying “why the fuck do you need 300 applications that all do your taxes? We have four, and they’re the four best ones.” Chasing some hype wave that will be gone in 18 months is just kind of sad and unbecoming.
It’s dumb to announce features before they’re baked. Especially when those features are only intended to surf some imaginary venture capital hype wave. But this seems totally within keeping with what I have observed to be Tim Cook’s passion, which is to make money and increase shareholder value. And to be clear with that as your guide you can do a TON of stuff! I mean, our whole world is based on the generation of capital and the creation of shareholder value and the execution of KPIs.
But at the risk of sounding like some hippie-dippy asshole, that’s not Apple. Part of the charm of Apple is making money hand over fist in a way that seems accidental. They’re the last company to not talk about money, to spot you the cab fare, to tuck the stickers in the box, to say “oh I have one right here” when the parts are missing. Apple is meant to be a paradox.
Apple is the most burned out wastoid you know explaining the Fermi paradox to you in complete and accurate detail on a van ride from Aspen. Apple is a guy from Berkeley taking a job at HP, hating it, but buying a house with his salary because he thinks you’re supposed to do that—but then having no furniture. Apple is the last bastion of whatever was left of the charm of Silicon Valley.
But like a lot of things we’d taken for granted it will be interesting to see how much is left of this in four years. As of right now, this entire Siri thing reeks of some third-rate Google drama from 2007. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s sad because it’s a business faux pas, yes, but it’s more sad because it’s so beneath Apple to be chasing this AI snake oil.
I mean, sure it’s a little overwrought, but with the world lapsing into “say it loud and say it proud, generating capital is the only worthwhile thing ever” mode, having at least one corporation out there that seemed to be following its bliss would be really nice. Naked capitalism is just…very gross. (To me. Like what you like. I guess. Sigh.)
Keep Apple weird—I guess that’s the punchline. Boy, that ship has sailed though, huh? First trillion dollar company. Yikes. Anyway.
— Nick Jones