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He was indeed quite a brilliant CEO. But agree the correct technical name for what Apple became, by Cook's careful calxulatioi, is ... Boring

Honestly in a mature market, that’s not so bad. Like I’ve been happy with all my iPhones.

2/9/26, 1:44 pm0 reposts3 likes

Boring has a lot going for it. Hence the unparalleled success. During its prior rocky years, even when Jobs wasn't there, Apple was always striving for radically new things. 1/

Karl Bode

@karlbode.com

there is more to life than financial success, surprisingly enough

I don’t mind the boring so much as I mind the capitulation. The problem is no one really knows what the new thing is until they try a bunch of dumb failed nonsense. At least right now. I fully expect something new will some up that’s not just NVIDIA trying to sell me cards.

Also the Chips they have been creating are works of art that pushes what’s possible. The first M processor did stuff I didn’t think possible. 6 deep pipelines, huge reorder buffers, just all sorts of innovation there. And since chip guys are very secretive probably a bunch more that we don’t know.

Woz was unhappy to see the Apple II abandoned prematurely, in his view .... 2/

Yeah, and while the Mac was visionary, it for sure could have been a failure. Sometimes it’s good to take big swings like that. But big corporate behemoths are not great at that. I worked at IBM for a while. We did a lot of very cool chip work. Was it iPhone level creating? Nah.

That’s been a big thing I’ve done as an engineer. Look at “unsexy” problems that need solving but are being ignored. Usually very neat stuff happens there and there is less cutthroat competition.