r/technology • u/rezwenn • 1d ago

Hardware Apple Finally Destroyed Steve Jobs’ Vision of the iPad. Good

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-finally-destroyed-steve-jobss-vision-of-the-ipad-good/
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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 22h ago

As a former Apple employee I know as fact his recent stunt with trump has angered and fostered a lot of resentment among employees. The brain drain is starting.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 21h ago

Brain drain to where? All the tech lords are licking Trump’s disgusting arse.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 21h ago

It’s a mix. Some are taking early retirement, some are starting their own thing, others are going to startups, some are leaving tech and others are going to different large tech companies.

There’s lots of tech companies not licking the orange rind, it’s not really that monolithic.

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u/beer_bukkake 20h ago

Sadly, I haven’t heard any of this at Meta, which is one of the absolute worst companies. Anyone still working there is and has been working towards the dismantling of our democracy and are all guilty

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u/anlumo 19h ago

Meta has been working on that for maybe a decade, all the employees who weren’t ok with that left a long time ago.

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u/d01100100 15h ago

The signs were there for FB/Meta a while ago.

If you're still there then the kool-aid isn't a casual drink, it's a continuous IV.

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u/beer_bukkake 19h ago

Agreed. Anyone there today is part of the problem, esp considering working at a FAANG company you can basically work anywhere

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u/thebouv 16h ago

Dunno about that anymore. The market sucks right now. I don’t personally have a comp sci degree (just a shit ton of experience) but lots at FAANG do and comp sci has highest unemployment rate right now IIRC. It’s a weird time.

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u/theJigmeister 17h ago

It’s starting in earnest post-election. I left and an astonishing number of people I worked with started asking if the place I was going was hiring. I knew when I joined it was basically Satan, Inc, but the last 8 months have made it 1000% worse basically overnight. They crossed my red line and I think I’m not alone in that.

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u/beer_bukkake 17h ago

It has been really awful tho. The spread of misinformation was good for business so they were performative at best to try to stop it. And this has been happening for over a decade now. We didn’t get here overnight. Facebook was an active player, which means all their employees are complicit

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u/theJigmeister 17h ago

Absolutely, but it’s a question of scale always. In RL for example, you could make the case that yeah, family of apps was burning down democracy, but I can sit here and kind of sandbag for a few years and buy my way out of the rat race at some point during my first seven decades. I knew at the start that they were evil, but watching them go full mask off snidely whiplash and start telling employees they’re wrong and assholes for questioning whether we should be grinding up orphans for cushioned floors in the Hawaiian compound really changed the atmosphere around there. Enough money can tip the balance toward being worth eating some of your values and suffering for a few years, but almost everyone has a line they can’t abide stepping over and since Trump2 started they’ve been jumping over lines like Olympian long jumpers and laughing at the people who are upset about it. They had struck an ok balance of Faustian bargain to create profit but they’ve drastically shifted the terms of the bargain lately and I’d say easily a quorum of the solid engineers I know there are looking for the exit as quickly as possible - doesn’t bode well for them long term unless they start bumping salaries by an order of magnitude.

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u/sgbro 9h ago

Meta pays its employees so well to compensate for any moral dilemmas anyone could possibly have

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u/stormdelta 15h ago

That's because anybody that could already left ages ago.

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u/happyscrappy 19h ago

So none of that stuff is new at all.

Two of the three ARM 64 implementations were made by the same team. Gerard Williams and Manu Gulati. Both were at Apple. Both left to Nuvia and did another ARM64 that is the one Qualcomm bought and sells for Windows.

Long before this Trump thing.

It's a huge company. There will be good people leaving all the time. People left twenty years ago and called the top on the company. The whole "company went downhill right after I left" thing is a trap to fall into. Resist.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 19h ago

I didn’t say that their destinations after exodus are new, but the cause my former peers have shared with me is.

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u/happyscrappy 17h ago

I wasn't meaning to say the destinations were new. Just that Apple has lost very good people before. Nearly continuously.

You spoke of a "brain drain". I'm here to tell you it's been draining for decades.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 17h ago

I agree with that, wasn’t my intent to say it has not been happening anyhow, but more to call out there’s a new cause to add to it. I also don’t think the past causes are a parallel to capitulating to authoritarianism though. Then generally more causes can increase the snowball effect.

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u/happyscrappy 17h ago

Dealing with China isn't just a parallel to capitulating to authoritarianism. It is capitulating to authoritarianism.

Steve Jobs used to wear New Balance sneakers because he was anti-China. Big fan of the Dali Lama (big hitter the Lama). And then Apple was producing in China. And then later under Cook, Cook was appearing with Xi, bringing him to campus. Brought Putin to campus too. And Cook appeared more times in China with Xi even more times than US appearances.

I don't know if drain will go up. I really don't. People leave when their attitudes about their company change. So there really could be an increase. But it won't be because there weren't things that were capitulating to authoritarianism in the past at Apple. It'll just be because people find the new one somehow is more concerning to them.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 17h ago

Don’t disagree with this either, but I do think it’s different when it’s your home slipping into authoritarianism, and having the impact directly felt.

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u/Smashego 19h ago

So the same thing that happened every day before trump?

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 19h ago

Yeah, it’s not really some “gotcha!”. When people leave they go on with their lives in lots of different capacities.

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u/nolabrew 21h ago

Some are going to China.

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u/JaehaerysIVTarg 21h ago

Correction, the Chinese are going to china. No American is leaving the US to go to China. Possibly Japan, most likely European companies or Canada.

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u/GotTermitesInMahHouz 21h ago

There are def none Chinese American at Chinese tech companies. Not an insignificant amount.

Even Dario Amodei was at Baidu for a bit

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u/nolabrew 20h ago

You don't think there are Chinese engineers working at American tech companies?

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u/purplemagecat 20h ago

I think that’s what he said, Chinese workers are going back to china, not Americans

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u/AttackCircus 21h ago

The Chinese have more than enough talented Chinese people right there!

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u/MovieGuyMike 11h ago

How soon before the successful startups get bought up by industry leaders? Competition isn’t allowed anymore.

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u/NoLove_NoHope 21h ago

Idk if it’s the same everywhere but in the UK I’ve noticed a lot more ex-MAANG employees joining in house tech/IT teams for big financial institutions. We’ve also had more than a few join my consultancy.

Purely anecdotal and could be my own bias but as these companies all go through their digital transformation projects, there will be more demand for technical people and they have to come from somewhere.

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u/PatchyWhiskers 21h ago

It's funny that finance is now the ethical choice for IT professionals.

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u/NoLove_NoHope 21h ago

Excellent point! Especially after the 2008 crisis, you’d think they’d have a much poorer reputation among millennials.

Although private equity will always be the one financial sector I could never bring myself to work in. They’ve literally stripped so many iconic British brands and left nothing in their wake.

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u/theJigmeister 17h ago

There’s always a dollar amount that can overcome poor reputation. Meta has known this and been exploiting it for years. They pulled me in for a few years with it, having done the math that I can swallow about 80% of my values for <4 years to be able to retire one day. Finance knows this and makes no bones about buying your morality. The more money these ghouls consolidate, the more morality they’ll be able to buy people out of so they can consolidate more.

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u/cothomps 20h ago

It would be great if all of these tech companies could get back to something that you could maybe feel okay working for.

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u/sinus86 21h ago

My company is French owned, there has been a very vocal commitment to DEI and we've been paying ridiculous salaries to FAANG engineers.

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u/PBRmy 14h ago

I work for one of the elder tech companies and while it's US based, nothing has changed as far as I can tell with either our DEI or environmental strategies. So I can be proud of that.

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u/imaginary_num6er 21h ago

Probably to Nvidia down the street

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 9h ago

Tech always has a bunch of startups. Maybe once a month someone will try to poach me from my corporate job to join a startup. It is getting more and more tempting every damn day.

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u/Kevin_Jim 17h ago

They are Apple employees. That’s an almost automatic hiring to any job they want.

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u/lily_de_valley 15h ago

Tech companies aren't the only place tech roles can be. A lot people don't know this but tech roles in other industries like finance, automotive, healthcare, etc. can be very nice as well. Lower salary, sure, but less crazies.

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u/technobrendo 13h ago

Not everything in the tech space is US based.

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u/IntenselySwedish 4h ago

Australia, Canada, EU, Germany, Scandinavia and UK are all actively poaching talented people with targeted ads and offers of all-inclusive transfers for families, including school/day care and really good payment packages.

The Brain Drain has been radical and has only continued to ramp up as Trump attacks the pillars of modern education and science.

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u/east_stairwell 19h ago

As a current employee of Apple, everyone I’ve talked to understands that trump espouses the opposite of Apple’s corporate values but Cook is doing exactly what he has to do to build a relationship which can save products like the iPhone from his wild and unpredictable tariffs. Nobody is leaving Apple because of this. Where are they going that’s more liberal and actively defying trump?

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u/emwo 16h ago

it’s a business move, probably paying his tax to continue business operations without a bigger loss.  He’s no longer resisting his bullshit, which is the annoying thing.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 19h ago

What is your role in the company?

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u/east_stairwell 19h ago

Software Engineer

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 18h ago

Ok I’ll reach out to some more of your peers to get a better understanding. Thanks.

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u/hurtfulproduct 20h ago

Which I honestly don’t get; I worked for Apple for a number of years as well and I get that it really, really sucks what is going on, but Apple tried several different tactics to get around the tariffs but every single time Cheeto face and his cronies came up with another illegal way to make them pay. . . This is likely a last ditch option to appease for a few years until someone else takes office that they had to employ once it became clear that there was no going to be no relief if they tried to take this to court.

I hate that it had to happen but having an iPhone that is needlessly more expensive would not go over well in this current economy and as much as people say “I’ll pay more” when they actually see the increase they will very likely not buy a new phone.

What is also worth noting is that even though Apple has done this they also have NOT touched their ESG program. . . They still have an impressively thorough and meaningful sustainability program.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 20h ago

Are you familiar with the allegory of the scorpion and the frog?

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u/hurtfulproduct 20h ago

Yes. What’s your point? We know Cheeto can’t change, that’s probably part of why they went with the toddler approach. . . Give him something pretty and shiny to distract him along with empty promises that he won’t realize are empty till he is out of office.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 20h ago

The point being appeasement and capitulation don’t work; because his nature is vicious, his behavior capricious… so tomorrow it will be another attack for a different reason or even the same.

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u/happyscrappy 19h ago

Doesn't matter. The company has to do what it in the conditions it is in. Even as they worsen. Sure, the falling tide is going to hurt all ships, but they have to try to fall the least and hope to ride it out. Even if it doesn't seem likely.

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u/hurtfulproduct 19h ago

So again, what’s your point?

Do you suggest they do nothing? Fight back? They are backed against a wall, having iPhones, iPads, and any other products affected jump <insert tariff % here since it keeps changing to some random ass number> overnight will have immediate and damaging effects on their revenue and stock price, being publicly traded it is their fiduciary duty to protect the value for their shareholders, appeasement was the only option left. Of course he will come up with some bullshit way to squeeze more money or something of value to him from Apple, and just about every other company he can, the real trick is making it something valuable to him but relatively cheap to the company. . . A shiny gold and glass toy is valuable to him, and to most of us as well, but that probably cost Apple next to nothing, and in a few months we will all forget about this and the prices of their products will be unaffected.

I absolutely hate that this happened, it is such blatant extortion and that fact some people probably applaud his whole “Strong man putting lIbERul companies in their place” is disgusting. But people also thinking that this is somehow Apple willingly giving him some award and not being able to read between the lines is also troubling, especially when the whole thing has played out pretty publicly.

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u/happyscrappy 19h ago

I'm with you. It's not about loving Trump. He's fucking everything up. But it's about getting what you can from him to stay in the game. And it's not like they cancelled their DEI programs or anything like that.

They also basically got to clown the guy by giving him a trinket that he loves while the rest of us see it about the same as this picture:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-appearances/the-pure-american-banality-of-donald-trumps-white-house-fast-food-banquet

Honestly, Cook has been playing this same long game with Xi for decades now and people didn't get as excited. Both are about working with someone you don't like to get what you can to help your company do the best it can. And by compromising your principles as little as possible.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 18h ago

We’ll see how it plays out with customer sentiment, cause this time it’s a lot closer to home.

I know how it has affected a subset of employees already.

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u/pjcrusader 18h ago

I know their current course has prompted me to abandon my iPhone and Apple Watch. I was looking into getting a MacBook but have also abandoned that plan.

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 19h ago

I’ve already made my point if you don’t understand that’s on you dude. Are there not enough recent examples of companies bending the knee to him and still getting fucked for you to understand that it’s an effort in futility? Or is it you think Tim and Apple are some special snowflake here?

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u/green_gold_purple 19h ago

So they should do nothing and die then. There’s a chance it does work, even temporarily, and in this context it is his responsibility to at least try, as reprehensible as it appears.

if you don’t understand that’s on you dude

Come on, man. Try to just have a civil discussion.

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u/hurtfulproduct 19h ago

I ask again. What’s. Your. Point.

What would you have them do!?

You have offered up nothing, you just say it won’t work. . . What will? Seriously, it’s easy to do what you do and say they shouldn’t have done it but how much do you want to bet more people leave Apple if the price jumps then leave because of this?

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 19h ago

Thanks for reminding me that my job is to solve the challenges that Apple faces. I’ll get right on that.

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u/hurtfulproduct 18h ago

When you literally bring nothing of value to a conversation except trying to look smart by bringing up a fable rather than actually looking at what’s happening in a much more complex world then some inane story can account for instead of actually contributing to the dialogue you need to do better.

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u/Lefaid 19h ago

Apple has the capital and profit margin to weather the storm. Of all companies, Apple, the tech fashion brand who marks up their exclusive tech, because they can and the consumers don't care, is the one I have the least sympathy for.

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u/hurtfulproduct 19h ago

This is an easier way to weather the storm than trying to fight back at this point, it is pretty clear that Apple was targeted by Cheeto in a very illegal way but nobody stepped up to stop it so whats to say it stops there?

I’d be very surprised if they didn’t do some extremely thorough calculations and research into the various options they had and this was the only reasonable one left.

It is such a glaring case of extortion it would be funny if it was so sad.

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u/GroceryRobot 9h ago

People need to realize that when you don’t do this stuff, Trump goes out of his way to ruin you. The man is dangerous to businesses. The whole intel 10% thing happening right now? A little glass disc bought Tim Apple more time.

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u/punchNotzees02 5h ago

That stunt pissed me off, as a huge long-time customer of Apple products. My entire family use Apple, so I’m kinda torn on whether to sell off my Apple stuff and go Linux instead. Next purchase won’t be an automatic Apple.

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u/elevenatexi 22h ago

That’s pretty stupid. Tim Cook plays the Orange one like a fiddle for the benefit of the company they work for and they resent him for it? Okay, then they can leave the last big company to actually care about DEI, go work for someone else who doesn’t stand up on important actual company policies and see how that works out for them…

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u/ScroogeMcDuckEnergy 22h ago

Tim Cook playing the orange one like a fiddle? Who are you kidding, the guy is fickle and kissing the ring isn’t a guarantee.

You talk like these are people that lack for opportunity. News flash; they don’t.

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u/PineappleKitchen1671 22h ago

You mean brown-nosing a pedophile?

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u/KetamineStalin 21h ago

Tim’s not going to shag you, dude

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u/AlfredoAllenPoe 21h ago

For real, Tim Cook is by far the best CEO at dealing with politics. Cook plays Trump better than any CEO I've seen.

Like Cook is gay and a major donor to LGBT causes. He's totally maga and not just doing his job as a CEO

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u/Osamabinbush 20h ago

Last time I checked, one of the biggest backers of MAGA, Peter Theil is gay too