The main thing I remember about Tim Cook was him making me realize how wealthy white cisgender gay men were hardly different from wealthy white cisgender straight men.

The whole article has always been really worth a read, seeing how a techbro tried to turn a classic magazine into a tech company somehow. Besides that though, these passages always stuck out to me, because it feels deeply like these wealthy men exploit their sexuality to justify avoiding critique of their actions outside of their sexuality.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/inside-collapse-new-republic

In 2014, Hughes’s personal life and business life became increasingly intertwined, in ways that would coincide with changes at the magazine. His husband, Sean Eldridge, was running for Congress in a district that spanned the Catskills and the Hudson Valley, but his political campaign was not going the way he had hoped. Eldridge and Hughes had bought a two-million-dollar home in a district in which neither of them had ever lived, and Eldridge began investing in local businesses in what was widely seen as a transparent effort to influence the race.

Ioffe dates the abrupt change in mood to late summer, shortly after Foer’s birthday party—the period when, as many current and former T.N.R. employees noted, Eldridge’s expensive campaign to win a congressional seat started looking hopeless. “We all liked him; he seemed to like us,” she told me. “Everything was going great. Then, in the summer, something snapped, and he started talking to me about money and how we’re losing money and he’s tired of it. And then he became just downright contemptuous and hostile toward us.”

Hughes’s eroding relationship with the staff took on an ideological edge. On the morning that Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, announced that he was gay, MacGillis wrote a note to “the Plank,” T.N.R.’s internal e-mail listserv for writers and editors. “I see the celebration of his announcement, while entirely justifiable, as another sign of what’s happened to liberalism today, where rights/identity liberalism trumps economic liberalism,” he wrote. “This is, after all, a guy who embodies so much of what’s amiss in the age of inequality—pulling down $378 million in 2011 alone; Apple skirting taxes more brazenly than anyone else—yet those revelations have caused barely a stir.”

Hughes responded to the note six minutes later: “I think those are valid issues, although Apple has acted squarely within the law,” he wrote. “The law itself is fucked up. But I don’t think you can underestimate the difficulty of his decision or how tone deaf that argument would be today.”

The other editorial employees on the list were surprised by the response. It was an internal listserv for writers and editors, and the staffers didn’t realize that Hughes, who had relinquished his title as editor-in-chief when he installed Vidra, was on it. MacGillis responded by saying that he would hold off on writing, but added, “Just for the record, though, it is not so clear that Apple acted squarely within the law. The law’s a mess, but Apple pushed the bounds of it more than anyone.” He pasted text from a piece in the Times that questioned some of Apple’s practices.

Tim was great for the shareholders and not so much the customer.

I feel like most services got worse, hardware got worse before the M series, but post M I haven’t seen much innovation — just a lot of recycled parts for peripherals like Studio Display, which is premium price but sub premium quality (camera, panel itself, and ports/support).

Phones have massively homogenized under Cook

And software has taken a massive nose dive. As much as I try to like swift, it sucks. And it was a mistake to lose Chris Lattner, because without him Swift has had basically no focus or direction other than boosting SwiftUI.

Nobody has ever managed building production software with Swift outside of app dev, which I think says it finds a poor compromise on real performance vs ergonomics vs safety. I do not think Rust is better, I think Swift makes it too hard to do the right low level things.

AI/Siri has been embarrassing. Shipping cadence is worst in the business, there’s no reason so many updates are tied to OS updates, it’s simultaneously too rapid for trans to build robust software, and too slow to fix bugs and make QOL adjustments.

So when I look back on the last several years of Apple I kinda just see a bunch of departments duct taped together and drifting away from each other, and then the finance team driving all the decisions.

RIP Tim Apple. You embarrassed a once innovative brand but at least you made a lot of money.

MacOS was so much better when Steve Jobs was in charge.

Tim Cook REALLY made it worse. Steve Jobs made sure the user experience was generally good, although admittedly there were many times when he was pigheaded. On a personal level, Steve Jobs was a terrible person, but he made the operating system very good and very consistent.

And Tim Cook didn’t care about any of that, and macOS is now SUPER inconsistent and much less user friendly. It’s still better than Windows, but MAN is it so so so much worse.

To be fair, once we reduced electronics to black slabs and tiny earbuds there’s not much more we can revolutionize

As an aside:

There will be some quick tells as to whether incoming new Apple CEO John Ternus is more of the same, including seeing whether or not Apple follows Google’s lead and buckles to our mad king’s obsession with trying to rename large bodies of water to feed his gargantuan ego.

John Apple is a spineless fuckwit and immediately capitulated

Timothy Donald Cook (born November 1, 1960) is an American business executive who served as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc. from 2011 to 2026, and has been the company’s executive chairman since September 2026.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook

I read that as “spineless copulation” and was both confused and a little intrigued as to how that could be

Agreed. The new CEO isn’t off to a great start, either. Bending the knee in your first few days is not a good look.

Such a bottom.

Tim apple is such a fruit.

Anche most likely the device you are using right now as well