“It just works” no longer reliably working due to quality drift, but mastered chips and China-driven efficiency has allowed its massive success even though it has been free-riding on the fading “it just works” reputation. Treating Apple as a stock ticker with a logo attached, not as a social technology for making computing humane, is a large discourse blind spot. Thus the discourse largely misses how a decade of quality drift, Siri failure, visual-design missteps, and rent-extracting “services” are termites in the walls of the house…

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Too much of the focus on Apple Computer in THE DISCOURSE is about Apple Computer as a current profit-making and high stock-price operation; not enough on Apple as the “it just works” distributor of high-quality information technology and the translator of new information technology into a form that is actually useful to relatively normal people. Its run since Steve Jobs’s return to the firm is truly extraordinary. And even relative to the truly extraordinary, Apple Computer over the past decade has had two hyperextraordinary excellences of unbelievable accomplishment: its China-centered efficient supply value chain, and hardware in the form of Apple Silicon:

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However, it has also has had four major deficiencies. about a couple of them here.

Now comes M.G. Siegler to talk about a couple of them:

M.G. Siegler: Apple’s Twin Suns <https://spyglass.org/apple-a-new-hope/?ref=email-me-everything-newsletter>: ‘John Ternus takes on design while Craig Federighi takes on AI as Apple prepares for a new CEO.… Aaron Tilley and Wayne Ma… [on] how Apple SVP Craig Federighi was recently tasked with overseeing… AI… [and] Mark Gurman… noting how… John Ternus… quietly tasked with overseeing… design efforts….

This could be a final “test” of sorts for Ternus…. Can he stabilize that ship[?]… And if he can’t in the next few months, does it in some way encumber his path to CEO?… Federighi… is getting the… more challenging and daunting task…. Federighi’s initial reluctance [back in 2018]…. Mike Rockwell… overseeing… Vision Pro… implor[ing] him to use AI more within iOS, which Federighi apparently rejected worried about the unpredictable and chaotic nature of the (still early) technology…

But there are more. Apple’s deficiencies are, I think, major enough that I believe that any of them would have been likely to sink pretty much any other company as a large profit-making institution, if not as a valuable and successful production network:

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