This is the first I’ve ever heard of “Apple Fellows”. According to Wikipedia [0],
> To recognize the best of its employees, Apple created the Apple Fellows program which awards individuals who make extraordinary technical or leadership contributions to personal computing while at the company. The Apple Fellowship has so far been awarded to individuals including Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Rod Holt, Alan Kay, Guy Kawasaki, Al Alcorn, Don Norman, Rich Page, and Steve Wozniak.
I wonder what qualifies “extraordinary”. For example, Chris Lattner, creator of Swift and LLVM, seems to have fit that adjective as well as anyone and yet his name is absent from this list.
Bill Atkinson deserves it. He almost singlehandedly wrote the original Macintosh graphics API, QuickDraw, and also created MacPaint, which defined the UI/UX of the graphical pixel editor. Photoshop is its clear descendant.
The Mac graphics API was interesting, because it was all done in software, as opposed to platforms like the Amiga which relied on graphics hardware. Personally, I think relying on graphics hardware acceleration would have been smarter, as every platform this does now, but it was certainly a bold choice for the Mac.
Atkinson also created HyperCard, which could have been the first web browser had Apple managed it better — Tim Berners Lee references it in his original web proposal document.
It would be interesting to know how many stock options an Apple Fellow receives, and whether it is a one-time award, or continuing.
I wouldn't say that it never caught on, but rather, that its successor (the Web), which it inspired directly, succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
I don’t know anything about HyperTalk but given that we live in an age where the web basically doesn’t work without a fully functional programming language (JavaScript) and a simple database (websql) isn’t the parent correct?
It's not really fair to compare the two that closely. Doing so misses a key aspect of Hypercard, which is how it fit holistically into the operating systems of its time. Hypercard "authors" had the ability to do many of the things their operating system could do from within the HC/HT system.
Hypertalk is also different in purpose and kind from JS. The former is easier to read than it is to write (Hypercard encouraged learning by copying / example), and was explicitly designed for everyday people. It was meant to bridge the gap between "users" and "programmers" and provide true computational media authoring.
It's true that HyperCard and the Web aren't exactly the same in all respects, but that's orthogonal to the fact that the Web drew direct inspiration from HyperCard (like, documented, on record, the inventors of Web browsers and HTTP saying as much).
Also it seems like what you're saying is confirming my point, not contradicting it? HyperCard has a presentation layer and a scripting language, and so too does the Web, both of which were directly influenced by their respective pieces in HyperCard. So how is this not analogous to the Web??
To that point, QuickDraw is still shipping in MacOS although it's officially deprecated. Pretty impressive for an API that began life in 1979. I will dock it for never supporting more than a 1-bit transparency mask, but Atkinson had left Apple before that became important. I think he quit around the time Jobs was first fired.
He made HyperCard on his own and licensed it to Apple for cash, though he stipulated that they had to release it for free. Unfortunately, HyperCard's biggest legacy is only Myst, and the Tim Berners Lee shout-out.
HyperCard has a much bigger legacy than Myst: it inspired how Web browsers work, including the overall navigation look and feel, JavaScript, even the hand pointer! It's one of those super influential things that most people don't know about.
Guilty as charged. HyperCard was a super fun environment to play around in and really easy to make simple games in. It was great for luring people deeper into programming.
Even before the Mac, Apple had a history of doing it in software - Woz make the Apple II floppy drive use way fewer parts than their competitors by driving it in software.
The key criteria is loyalty. Lattner left for the competition before Swift was ABI stable and mature. He didn’t see it through. If he had still been around now, he would likely be on the list.
Lattner created LLVM which finally replaced gcc as the premiere compiler infrastructure across the whole industry. And he created Swift, the future high level language for the whole company. Apple desperately needed something higher level than Objective-C in the age of Javascript coders, and he delivered on that as well.
But I see Apple Fellows as something for people in retirement and he's still mid-career. They can always award it to him later.
The person missing from this list who I'd like to see added is Susan Kare. She defined the look of the early Mac and iPod, designing all the original bitmap fonts and icons. Hugely influential.
Lattner, along with Vikram, created LLVM as a University project, he was only hired by Apple later so at least the initial work wasn’t done while at the company so I’m not sure it would qualify. That combined with the fact that he left before Swift was completed and even then most of the work was being done by others, raises some possible obstacles. It’s a shame, he’s an incredible engineer, but there it is.
Vikram visited the deep learning team I managed in the UIUC Research Park. A very nice guy, and when introductions were made and I heard that he co-created LLVM, to say I was impressed is an understatement.
+1000 karma points for people like Vikram who stay in academia and continue to teach.
> The person missing from this list who I'd like to see added is Susan Kare. She defined the look of the original Mac and iPod, designing its original bitmap fonts and icons. Hugely influential.
Susan did great things. But like Lattner, the whole Apple Fellow thing doesn't apply because she doesn't work for Apple. It isn't some sort of hall of fame, it is a paid position.
Kay was made Apple fellow so he could be lured to work for Apple from where ever he was then working (General Magic or Xerox), can't really remember.-- I think folklore has something on this as well.
Atkinson was given fellowship because Jobs wanted to make him happy. [1]
The way I see it, Apple gives fellowship to people to make them feel themselves important and keep everyone in the room happy and when the press put's their name next to other giants,that must be massive ego satisfaction -- in a positive sense(it was apparently Schiller's idea to use click wheel for original iPod.[2]), for the lack of better choice of words on top of my mouth right now.
Some members of the Macintosh team were awarded fellowship. The list you linked to is not complete, of course, here's someone that wasn't on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Page
The "fellow" title is used to give a person a lot more money and recognition when the person can't or doesn't want to be promoted into management/senior management. Chris Lattner ran Developer Tools at Apple so he didn't need to be Fellow.
A bit like Disney Legends/Imagineering [1] and Ub Iwerks. Ub created Disney with Walt and drew all the initial cartoons even creating Mickey Mouse, but took a long time to get recognized because of a falling out when Iwerks went to MGM [2].
Eventually Iwerks returned to Disney making amazing imagineering tech, but wasn't added even in the first batch of Disney Legends in '87.
Ub Iwerks wasn't included in Disney's "Nine Old Men" either. [3]
I was gonna make exactly this point. I know Forstall got forced out by management, but don't we have him to thank for iMessage's architecture?
Before Signal, iMessage was pretty much the only secure messaging system readily available to consumers. And more broadly Forstall had a huge role in making the Apple we know today.
You have him to thank for the iPhone in whole. He ran the team that developed iOS and defined the modern smartphone interface. Literally one of the largest software leadership contributions in history.
Do note "readily available to consumers". XMPP never reached a level of polish outside being embedded in part-proprietary solutions that it'd be available to your average user, not to even talk about OTR.
You are arguing that a $600+ phone for yourself and all your friends is more "readily available to consumers" than a $0 downloadable open source open standard software with multiple clients available? Two-thirds of the world population live on less than $10 a day. You are living in quite the bubble. XMPP is way more "readily available to consumers" on world average.
I’m not sure I’m understanding you. Are you arguing that more ordinary consumers have and are using XMPP than are using iPhones, or are you arguing that in theory they could and therefore.... something. I’m just wondering what proportion of those people on $10 a day are happy XMPP users.
There’s a serious point here. Highly technical, bare bones infrastructure componentry like this isn’t actually free to use. It requires that the user have an extensive set of incredibly valuable skills that are very expensive to acquire. In fact I’d argue the skills needed to understand and effectively use a solution like this from scratch, including setting up and running a server, cost a heck of a lot more than $600. That’s aside from the opportunity cost of learning all that, and setting up and running a server.
Maybe in direct comparison to iMessage and considering only economic factors of "availability". Ease of use and how easily your contacts adapt a messenger are far more important factors to your average consumer. If you really want to argue economics, it's hard to argue with any of the other free messengers (Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.) over XMPP.
Gtalk was polished enough. It didn't have OTR built in, but majority of users don't really need end to end encryption anyway, it only makes their life not good.
Also, iMessage never reached a level of polish to work on anything not produced by Apple. If we're taking proprietary vendor specific secure services, Blackberry did it before Apple, too. So, definitely not the first and not the only.
E2E encryption is mostly for people whose lives are already not good. It only works to help those people, though, if enough “civilian” traffic is also using it that any ISP blocking it would be considered to be breaking the Internet.
BBM was not E2E encrypted. BlackBerry always retained the capability to read your message traffic. Apple does not.
Well, I'm not _that_ familiar with BBM since it was never available in my country.
But what makes you think Apple can't read your messages? Do you have any encryption keys that you share between devices? Or you just enter login/password on a new device and voilà all your messages are displayed to you? If that is so, I guess I'll have to tell you something...
Anyway. Last time I checked, iMessage apps source code was not available, you can't verify fingerprints of your contacts in iMessage, so... how do you know Apple doesn't insert a very simple MitM agent that does e2ee both for your and your chat partner, having all messages nicely decrypted in the middle?
So far it looks like the only thing that makes you think Apple can't do that is because they pinky promised this to you. Sorry.
> Do you have any encryption keys that you share between devices? Or you just enter login/password on a new device and voilà all your messages are displayed to you?
You should really look more into the iMessage encryption scheme before attempting to fear-monger about it. The approach it uses to multi-device encryption is well known[1][2], and is basically its entire innovation over other clients—an approach that every other piece of E2E-encrypted chat software has been encouraged heavily to copy, but for some reason none yet have. (WhatsApp specifically is often ridiculed for its requirement to route all your messages through a "primary device", which feels like going back in time after experiencing iMessage's approach.)
To save you the trouble of looking it up: you don't "log into iMessage." There's no such thing as a central "iMessage account." Instead, in iMessage, your devices synchronize state with one-another by participating in an ad-hoc group based on a shared "key bag" of all your devices' private iMessage signing keys.
When you get a new device and want to join it to this existing group, it sends out a signed request on an announce channel corresponding to your iCloud identity, requesting that another device in the group "invite" it to the group. From the user's perspective, this appears as their new device telling them that the iMessage sign-on needs to be confirmed on an existing device; and a modal popping up on all their existing devices, asking whether they want to accept the new device's join request.
If the user confirms the join request, then the existing device the user confirmed on will take its own iMessage keybag, encrypt it with the new device's public key, and send it to the new device. This will then allow the new device to securely "introduce itself" to the rest of the group.
Throughout this process, no key material ever travels unencrypted through Apple's servers. Apple can't recover your iMessage keys; nor are Apple's servers an implicit "participant" of your iMessage sync group. iMessage's cloud backend is, during this pairing process, just a dumb message-queue system between your client devices, one that sees only opaque encrypted messages.
(Note that this also means that it's totally possible to get "locked out of" your iMessage sync-group if you lose access to all your existing devices. This is usually fine, because 1. iMessage clients won't sync history from before a new device joined the group with that new device, so you're not losing access to anything you had any potential to recover anyway; and 2. you can make a new sync-group under an existing iCloud identity/phone number/IMEI/etc., because none of those visible identifiers are the primary key of the sync-group. The sync group has no primary key. It's not a central "entity" with an identifier. It's a mesh, that happens to be reachable through identifiers it registers to—sort of like softphone apps registering a DID number. But those actively-registered aliases aren't a means of security, nor recovery.)
> Last time I checked, iMessage apps source code was not available
People interested in messaging security don't tend to trust source code even if it is available. Unless the build process is deterministic and replicable by the researcher themselves—to produce exactly the artifact distributed by the store—then who knows what of the published source actually makes it into the published binary, and/or what-all else ends up in there as well. (Would you trust Chrome [the binary] just because Chromium is open-source? Would you trust macOS [the binary distribution] just because the XNU kernel and BSD userland are open-source?)
Instead, security researchers dump packet captures and analyze them.
And, in this case, those packet dumps reveal that iMessage does... exactly what is stated above.
Ok it's a good wall of text. Apple does copy keys from one device to another. Let's trust (again) that they absolutely have no mechanism to intercept your password and do whatever they want with your data.
Just a simple question. How do you know that when you connect to me over iMessage using state-of-the-art / end-to-end-encryption / made-from-carbon-free-alumeenium (sorry for that one), there is no man in the middle?
With this architecture without visible fingerprints, installing a MitM proxy that would relay data between two separate e2ee chats is not a problem at all:
You <-- e2ee chat --> MitM proxy <-- e2ee chat --> Me
UPD: ok, I get it that you downvoters don't have an answer to simple question and are just disturbed about the fact that security that was promised to you turned out to be just a security theater.
> Apple does copy keys from one device to another.
No, iMessage does that. That's no more "Apple" doing that, than the functioning of a copy of gpg that you installed from Ubuntu's apt repo would be the GNU Foundation or Canonical Inc. "doing that." The client is in ultimate control. Someone wrote that program, but now you have it, and you get to say what it does or doesn't do (if by nothing else than by choosing whether to run it.) The iMessage servers can't make the client do something that's not part of its executable.
You downloaded, and now have, the software—a collection of bits with a fixed function—on your device. You can do what you like to verify those bits, and then either trust them, or not; but either way they're not going to suddenly change out from under you without your consent (which you might supply implicitly by turning on auto-update, but you don't have to do that either.)
When entities like the US Navy use cryptosystems like Tor, they're not blindly installing it from the web, trusting the theoretical guarantees it makes; they're ensuring security in practice by isolating a specific version-under-test, static- and runtime-analyzing the binary to ensure it meets their needs, and then declaring that exact binary good and trustworthy, and giving operatives simple tools to acquire and validate that exact binary.
If you're paranoid, you do nothing less. But nothing about getting iMessage as part of your iPhone's OS stops you from doing any of that. You just take apart the IPSW it ships in, and throw it iMessage.ipa into Ghidra. Once you've verified it, you can say "the version of iMessage that ships in iOS with hash 0xXYZ, is known-good, and can be used for low-security comms."
> Let's trust (again) that they absolutely have no mechanism to intercept your password and do whatever they want with your data.
No, let's trust-but-verify that the binaries are E2E-encrypting the key-sharing process. Then there cannot be a man in the middle.
Also, as I said previously, you never "log into" iMessage, and so you don't have an iMessage "password" per se. iMessage uses your iCloud username to discover the device-group to attempt to join, but it doesn't use your iCloud account to authenticate to that group in any way. Instead, you're basically doing a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_signing_party with yourself, manually pairing your devices with each-other through challenge-response. (This turns out to actually be a convenient kind of key-signing party—and so probably the only time key-signing parties are relevant in practice.)
In the design of the iMessage key-sharing process, the iMessage servers could be replaced with an ephemeral channel on a public IRC server, and the semantics—including the security guarantees—would remain the same. The servers only see—and pass along—opaque, encrypted blobs.
> How do you know that when you connect to me over iMessage using state-of-the-art / end-to-end-encryption / made-from-carbon-free-alumeenium (sorry for that one), there is no man in the middle?
You're moving the goalposts; intra-account multi-device key sharing, and inter-account key exchange, are separate concerns.
What you are asking about is the Fundamental Problem of Key Exchange. And the answers are as they have always been: you either do a key-signing party; or you choose a Central Authority to trust to act as a directory mapping identities to public keys (and then maybe use that key to do a challenge-response identification process with out-of-band signaling elements.)
iMessage solves key sharing better than other messaging services. Nothing[1] really "solves" key exchange any better than anything else.
[1] Except maybe Keybase, but Keybase's unique shape—an identity-aggregating service—is a necessary element of that solution. No chat service can do what Keybase does without getting into the business that Keybase is in.
Actually, I'm not. See the post above, you claimed "BlackBerry always retained the capability to read your message traffic. Apple does not." [1], and I was responding to just that: Apple can read your message traffic. You yourself have proved it in the above reply: iMessage neither allows key-signing (nor even key verification, I must add!), and the Central Authority iMessage users have to trust are Apple themselves. It also has supreme control over all updates that are shipped to your phone, so even if someone does decompile and verify his build of iMessage, it doesn't mean that the targeted user was shipped the same version at all. So let's agree to put to rest your claim that Apple can't read your messages, OK? (note, I don't claim that it does, just that it can)
Now, being NOT paranoid, I'm actually not angry at it, not in the slightest. The downsides of a real privacy and security have a very serious and negative impact on user experience, so for most users the simple capability to sync all their messages from a central server (like Telegram does, "the most secure messenger", hahaha) far outweighs the dangers of being spied upon.
What irks me is the sheepish trust that people place on people who promise them "don't worry, you are super safe, without any downsides of real security, and people buy into it. The prime offender, of course, is Telegram, where users rarely, if ever, use the "Secret chats", but still think that they have the most protected messenger. Not concerning themselves that the features they like most (capability to access from the web, instant sync of messages on any device) comes from it being the least protected of any major messenger.
When you control your own server you kinda don't really need end to end encryption. It only enhances security when you don't trust the entity delivering your messages. It also degrades UX considerably: if the server does not know the contents of your message, it can't do server side archive search, you can't sync devices easily, etc.
> Apple seems to handle this pretty easily with great UX.
Sigh. This again. Ok.
If have end-to-end encryption, you can't read messages on newly connected devices, unless you somehow pass encryption keys to your new device.
If you do not pass keys between devices, and can still read messages sent from other devices, you do not have end-to-end encryption.
If the only thing you put into device when connecting is your login/password, then even if Apple does retrieve keys from your device and passes it to new device, it can pass it to themselves and gain access to your super confidential messages.
So, no, Apple does not handle this pretty easily.
Source: our product has _real_ end-to-end encryption, and it gives the users a rather big amount of discomfort. If you are told you have really secure messenger, but you do not enter anything but your login/password, well, I've got bad news for you.
> Which is kind of the point of all these services.
If your point is privacy, and you really care about it, just run your own communication server for $2/month. You have all the niceties of server side search and device sync, and none of the pain in the ass that is brought by E2EE. And if your privacy isn't worth $2/month, then you probably don't need E2EE either.
According to docs and endless reporting on iMessage, the messages are end-to-end encrypted in transit. In addition to that, they are stored (optional) in your iCloud account, using a separate key, itself stored in iCloud Keychain (protected by 2FA), and this is how you recover them on a separate device. If you opt-out from iCloud backup the messages are not recoverable, can also set them to be erased after 30 days.
> it can pass it to themselves and gain access to your super confidential messages
They can also send your PIN, private keys, all logins and passwords to their own servers, or simply log chats from the system keyboard and UI or any of the OS layers they control. The same is true for any app running on iOS/Android. If you don't trust the OS there is no working around it in software.
> According to docs and endless reporting on iMessage, the messages are end-to-end encrypted in transit.
According to my rather brief examination of iMessage, you can't verify key fingerprints in iMessage. It means that Apple can install MitM on a probed subject any second, and you would never know that it is there. See:
You <-- end-to-end-encryption --> Apple MitM <-- end-to-end-encryption --> Your buddy
You have _zero_ control over it, and the only thing keeping your secure and private is Apple's pinky promise.
> The same is true for any app running on iOS/Android.
Umm, no. There are such things as open source, verifiable builds, and, yes, decentralized messaging protocols. You can take an open source client (for example, from a reputable source like F-droid), and connect to a server totally unrelated to client developer. You can run an encryption protocol where you can actually exchange public keys, verify your keys fingerprints, and confirm the identity of your chat partner. That's what people really concerned with privacy and security do. Others are satisfied with a promise that sounds good enough.
> the only thing keeping your secure and private is Apple's pinky promise
Indeed, that's what I meant in the last paragraph. It also means an open source, verified client, with fully secure encryption, is still powerless against the OS capturing keystrokes. You have to rely on that pinky promise either way unless you control the hardware.
That's true, that's why people who are _really_ paranoid buy special purged phones and flash their own builds of an OS. A friend of mine had a rather successful business selling people such phones.
Changing the goal posts? It was about usability of sync/search, now that's addressed, you've brought up the paranoid case of Apple registering an additional device (which only affects messages from on, forward, not the past, mind you, and it is an active attack that can possibly leave a trace if the sending party is looking at the traffic it originates). Sure there are challenges, and the whole point of designing a secure system is to balance various aspects of the system including usability and even politics so that in practice you maximize security for everyone. Apple's choice seems to have been a good one, and it deserves credit for bringing this much security to the masses at precisely zero cognitive burden to the user. Compare it to email, or other popular chat services, for example.
But yea, it is correct that you can always prove something cannot be done once you tighten up some mutually exclusive constraints. Question is how much it maps the real world and whether some cannot be loosened.
Where do you see changing goalposts? First, I started from the obvious truth that apple wasn't the first service that advertised itself as 'secure'. Then I addressed the popular technofetish about the e2ee: people kinda like to feel secure, but are rarely ready to accept all strings that come attached to real security & privacy.
You see, e2ee is only practical against the service provider that you have reasons not to trust. But if you don't trust Apple, then you should not trust it all the way to the bottom: and at the bottom we see that iMessage apps give a user zero control over said e2ee. You don't really know who decides your messages on another end: your chat partner or MitM proxy.
If you trust Apple that they do not have such proxy, you might as well trust them to not snoop on your chats and store them unencrypted on Apple's servers, saving you from a lot of problem worrying about your keys, devices, etc.
> Then I addressed the popular technofetish about the e2ee: people kinda like to feel secure, but are rarely ready to accept all strings that come attached to real security & privacy.
Yea, but most people don't think about security in terms of black and white, and neither should they. There is no such thing as "real security & privacy" and it's completely disingenuous to suggest that you've found it when it involves trusting you or your company as a third party in placement of, say, Apple.
> If you trust Apple that they do not have such proxy, you might as well trust them to not snoop on your chats and store them unencrypted on Apple's servers, saving you from a lot of problem worrying about your keys, devices, etc.
As a universal statement, this is far too simplistic of a comment about a system's security and trust. Security without a notion of threat model is quite irrelevant. There's quite a large spectrum between trusting Apple with respect to the binary they serve me not being actively malicious and by-and-large does what it says it does; that they are not actively presenting someone else's key to my chat parties, vs. trusting them with my unencrypted data on their servers. At the very least, the latter would not be safe under subpoena, or data leak, or a rouge employee, for instance. Plus, in practice, if they present a malicious binary to everyone or substitute keys, someone likely notices at Apple scale. If I am that interesting of a target for them that they decide to target me specifically, I have bigger worries, as I am trusting the OS and hardware anyway (and still, there's hopefully some level of forward secrecy). In fact, to me, and to vast majority of people, a random exploit in their OS or physical theft of the phone carries a higher risk than Apple directly attacking them.
So, no, I fully reject that iMessage security is substantially equivalent to say, "Facebook Messenger" (even if run by Apple). I posit the delta is almost as much as HTTPS with Let's Encrypt cert compared to plain HTTP. And yes, there are no doubt use-cases that iMessage is ill-suited for; doesn't mean we should just give up on it for the other 99%.
>It only enhances security when you don't trust the entity delivering your messages
Trust in entities is fleeting. You trust an entity today, you might not trust it tomorrow. End-to-end encryption, in contrast, is not fleeting, as long as you trust math.
XMPP servers are really good these days, you know. And, I repeat, if you run your own server, you don't really need e2ee, cause the only one who can access the DB with your messages is a server operator - yourself, i this case, and why would you protect you from yourself?
Also, if you are concerned about privacy, chances are, you are not a private individual and have specially trained people to install that server for you.
Then again, even if you DO need encryption to transmit a critical password or something, well, XMPP clients developers know their business (at least, some of them do), so it is unlikely that you'd be able to screw up something.
> And, I repeat, if you run your own server, you don't really need e2ee, cause the only one who can access the DB with your messages is a server operator - yourself, i this case, and why would you protect you from yourself?
The typical idea is being concerned that a state will physically seize your server—you know, real security and privacy concerns.
> Also, if you are concerned about privacy, chances are, you are not a private individual and have specially trained people to install that server for you.
Is this not ultimtely what iMessages is to people?
If you want real security, you minimize externalized trust. By running your own server you do not have to trust anyone but yourself. And if the server is your own, you don't even need e2ee because in the threat model against which e2ee is helpful the offender is server operator. Replace server operator with yourself, and you remove the need for e2ee.
Of course, if you want a cozy sense of being secure, instead of real security, you say, 'I use end-to-end encryption which I was told makes reading my messages impossible'. With iMessages you can't really verify if your messages are not being sniffed (unlike Signal, or XMPP, I must add), and we now have proven Apple DOES have a potential way to read your messages if they really want it. But you TRUST them not to read your messages. So why bother with E2EE at all, if you already trust them not to spy on you?
(Also, how come people who religiously insist on using an always-on E2EE for their chats are totally fine with Gmail which stores every mail totally unencrypted?)
There is no such thing as “real security”, only varying degrees of protection from a specific threat model. You’ve clearly gained a lot of confidence thinking about this specific threat model while neglecting a more general and useful way to engage in discussion about threat models.
Among other things, you don’t write all the software that goes on your computer, let alone build the hardware yourself, so you’re not “really” secure at all. And because you do claim “real security”, I can’t square your statements with any threat model I can imagine.
> XMPP servers are really good these days, you know.
I definitely would trust Apple more than a random "XMPP servers are really good these days you don't need e2e when you run your own" random commenter on the Internet.
Yup, apparently I should blindly trust you, a person who didn't even bother to read about iMessage architecture [1] even when it was spelled out for him. But yeah, tell me more how your own server is better.
In a typical tech companies, the "Fellow" position is usually given to individual contributors who don't want to get into senior management roles but still worth to take a position equivalent to VP/SVP. Chris Lattner was a director at Apple, so probably he would be simply promoted to VP rather than given the Fellow position.
Many of the major tech companies have these exalted “fellow” ranks, both new and old (IBM, Google, Cisco, etc). From the internal docs I’ve read about the process to get there, you have to both make great contributions to the field as well as be important to the right people at the company.
I think it was Sun who pioneered fellowships as a way of defusing the tension between the desire for higher remuneration in talented engineers + the fact that they are often best suited to staying in an individual contributor role which doesn't enable them to receive it. Many engineers get promoted out of their zone of genius and have to spend time managing others and doing all sorts of other things unrelated to the talent which made them famous.
IBM Fellow program is probably the oldest, initiated in 1962 and with first appointments in 1963. Reading the list of IBM Fellows one quickly notices some well known names that some people might not even recognize as IBMers :)
> notices some well known names that some people might not even recognize as IBMers
Looking through the list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Fellow), some random names I recognize: Frances E. Allen, Gene Amdahl, John Backus, Kenneth E. Iverson, and Benoît Mandelbrot (!).
Pretty neat to see how one company was the hub for so many skilled people in the past (similar to Bell Labs and Xerox PARC). I wonder what that hub is today. Google or MSR?
> Fellows are retired people who don't have to leave.
This is false. Retired people can be fellows but you do not have to be retired. Some Fellows at tech companies are quite young because they were lucky to invent or spearhead famous technology that changed the fortune of the company.
AFAICT, it's akin to 'Emeritus' professor: an honorary designation that allows you to keep some mild affiliation, out of convenience rather than obligation.
I’ve always loved seeing Phil Schiller’s presentations on stage in keynotes for several years, though in the last few years he stepped back and Apple started putting many more people (than before) on stage to present in the keynotes.
A few of his words or lines on stage have been fodder for people to argue on (“courage” when removing the headphone jack from iPhones) or make fun of (“can’t innovate my ass” when introducing the trash can Mac Pro that later went without any updates or news for years). But he was a natural and a master at presentations, IMO.
If one didn’t know about him and watched his presentation, they’d find it hard to believe that a “marketing” person could talk so well about tech.
Craig Federighi is another great presenter who brings in humor along with some puns involving tech terms (not all his jokes may land well, but you gotta give him credit for many that do).
In this mix, I don’t see Greg Joswiak in the same league. He may be a good senior VP of marketing, but a great story teller and presenter he’s not. Sorry, Greg, if you’re reading this. Those others have set standards that are difficult to beat.
I wish Phil well, and hope that he’s able to contribute to Apple for many more years to come.
It's funny, I have the exact opposite opinion of Phil.
Back when I worked at Apple we'd watch every presentation because, hey, it's a good excuse to slack off at the office.
Phil was always the most boring guy because you always knew exactly what he was going to say and exactly what kind of non-answers he'd give to questions.
I mean yeah, it's great he hits the mark perfectly every time, but it's also so, so boring. He's the classic marketing shill. I wonder if his name is really even Fill Shiller, it's too perfect.
Thanks. It’s interesting to hear other perspectives.
> Phil was always the most boring guy because you always knew exactly what he was going to say and exactly what kind of non-answers he'd give to questions.
I never felt this way. Maybe it’s because I was never in a place where I could ask him questions or watched a presentation where someone could ask him questions.
> I mean yeah, it's great he hits the mark perfectly every time, but it's also so, so boring. He's the classic marketing shill. I wonder if his name is really even Fill Shiller, it's too perfect.
I didn’t see most of his presentations as marketing shill. Maybe I haven’t been paying much attention to that aspect.
Just a guess, but I assume someone internal to the company has a much different perspective, just because they have more knowledge of how things actually went.
I’ve seen senior folks at my former company do external talks that get rave reviews and my opinion was always “that’s not how it happened at all!”.
Sort of like not eating sausage anymore once you’ve seen how it’s made.
I think his personality worked really well on stage as the guy next to Steve Jobs who ran the Wintel Photoshop filter demos and made excuses for why they aren't as fast as the G4 =p
Quite contrary for me, at least on the keynotes. Remember his "it's so sad that people are using 5 year old computers" or his "courage" speech about removing the headphone jack?
I've heard him talk casually on interviews and he seemed like a super interesting guy though.
> If one didn’t know about him and watched his presentation, they’d find it hard to believe that a “marketing” person could talk so well about tech.
He was responsible for messaging and positioning Apple’s products globally for 4 years, so I guess it’s reasonable to assume he knows something about technology.
I had to talk with my wife about her next home office. We sat down, and talked about a screen, a keyboard, a desk, everything. We looked at a new Macbook Air, maybe a Mac Mini, and ended up at a 21-inch iMac for her, because it has everything but the desk and chair. That discussion, with Shiller now leaving the position, was absolutely engineered by Shiller and his team to happen exactly the way it happened. His influence on computing is deep.
To play devil's advocate, Apple products tend to live or die based on how good they are, not the brand. Apple has produced plenty of duds over the years.
Whereas for Nike they could make the ugliest shoe in the world and people would still buy it.
They're "duds" by Apple's own standards. Their margins and sheer volume means that virtually every Apple product in the Steve Jobs era has been financially successful - excluding maybe the things like the G4 Cube
I guess the point you're trying to make is that the products themselves are doing most of the marketing job. I don't know how much input marketing has on product though.
I'm having a hard time understanding this comment. Did you even consider any options outside of Apple's offerings? Are you saying Shiller and his team intended to make you so blinded by Apple products that you wouldn't even consider an alternative?
> His influence on computing is deep.
Computing what exactly? Facebook and spreadsheets?
I have a hard time understanding comments like yours.
If you’re so happy with whatever you have, why don’t you talk about that, instead of taking the time and effort to go out of your way and getting in the face of someone you don’t even know like this?
I'm not so happy with whatever I have to be so blinded by all of its shortcomings to ignore everything else, I actually use all three OS platforms (Linux, Windows, MacOS) on a daily basis. That's why I find it so hard to understand how someone can be so infatuated by one platform that they ignore all others.
>Apple’s longtime marketing chief, Phil Schiller, is stepping into a slightly smaller role after decades with the company. Schiller is dropping his role as senior vice president of worldwide marketing, but he’ll remain in charge of the App Store and Apple Events. Greg Joswiak, previously the head of product marketing, will take over Schiller’s former position as Apple’s overall marketing leader.
Meta question: I had submitted this link[1] before posting the link here. IIRC this had a score of ~27 at the time; I don't need the karma, but what's best practice for changed-link submissions? Does it make your life easier if I delete my submission, or is there no real difference?
There's no real difference, so don't spend valuable time on that.
Perhaps when we eventually implement karma sharing for posts of the same article, the system will pick up cases like this and give earlier submitters a share.
apologies for my misleading title, I changed it with good intention (to make it clearer than the PR headline) but I misread the content (clouded by my assumptions) and screwed up. sorry!
I saw some snap reactions that boiled down to “he doesn’t want to deal with the potential antitrust firestorm”, but also, the guy is 60, and has worked at what I can imagine must be a frenetic pace for like 30 years, and maybe he just wants to slow down a bit.
He's also still head of the App Store which is the center of the majority of the antitrust firestorm, so it honestly looks more like he'll be able to focus on that for now.
Steve Troughton-Smith suggested on Twitter that he may keep that role only so that they can fire him as a sacrificial lamb when the anti-trust hammer comes down.
Tim Cook just gave a full-throated defense of the App Store under oath before Congress. There's no possibility of Tim making Phil the fall guy. Tim owns this now.
He wouldn't have to "deal with the potential antitrust firestorm" anyway. Apple has perfectly capable legal and government relations departments for that.
There is some pretty impressive fantasy politics going on around this anti-trust stuff. As you say they have departments full of people that deal with all of this, except the times when Cook needs to essentially present their work.
On top of that, nothing is going to happen anyway. Even if in a few years of the process they decide to make changes it'll be a few more years before anything is legislated. So even if people that think what's going on needs to change get everything they want, realistically, it won't be until later in the decade until anything starts to move.
It must have something to do with the way politics is presented to the masses these days, but it's not a TV show. Playing guess the plot line doesn't really work.
Phil Schiller, and the whole marketing group, are an underestimated part of Apple's success over the past 20 years. It's why there's no company like Apple in the tech industry.
Nobody underestimates Apple's marketing. In fact I think it's the other way around, a lot of people pooh-pooh desire for their products as just marketing-susceptible idiots (e.g. "I could get the same features in an Android for $200 less and it comes with a MicroSD slot and headphone jack... but fanboys need their iPhone") looking for a cool brand when the reality is that they also make some of the best products.
Exactly. It can be difficult to explain to someone who used Android their whole life that iMessage (for example) is such a huge differentiating feature (at least in the US) when they see iPhone users as sheeple who buy purely based on marketing and product placement. Apple does a really good job of taking care of the little details on many of their devices, even if Macs are very expensive for what you get and the ecosystem has such a significant lock-in effect.
Also, despite the fact that it’s shallow, status signaling is sometimes useful. Just like with the well-dressed Manhattan lawyer example in the recent thread about physical attractiveness in legal justice, having the right product in the right crowd subconsciously affects how others see you.
Yes, but you have to consider also that people have different priorities. For example, you say that "iMessage is a huge differentiating feature", but if most of that person's social circle uses other services, there is no advantage there. And UI polish might rank lower compared to the lock-in.
I'm not saying you're wrong to value those things, but a good amount of people don't. So no amount of explaining why iMessage is great will convince them, even if they understand and agree iMessage is great, since the "maximum appreciation" for any feature is capped by the perceived value of its premise.
I think that’s very fair. If you’re able to have that kind of conversation with someone, hopefully it’s easy for them to see that Apple’s stellar marketing wasn’t the reason you bought an iPhone; there were logical reasons behind it as well.
I've had androids and find that iphones have better battery life so that was my main reason for sticking with the iphone. Maybe that's different now.. not sure. I don't like paying $1k for a phone for sure.
If there's something people underestimate about Apple's marketing it's the general awareness we have for their products, their capabilities, and market fit.
Like here's an exercise, someone comes to you for a computer recommendation. They want a work laptop, home laptop/tablet (something with a keyboard), and an all-in-one. Give a recommendation from Apple, Dell, and HP.
Personally, I don't need to go to google to look up the Apple products I'd recommend, and I'm not even a fanboy. I don't think I can name a product from HP off the top of my head, and I know I'd need Dell's search tools to harrow in on something.
It's a virtuous cycle. They ship very few products because each product is very successful. Each product is very successful because it's good and the awareness and consumer desire is high. And the small number of products both helps in manufacturing quality and in profit margins.
Well it's made easier by the fact that they only have one of each category. Want a desktop all-in-one? You'll want the iMac. This one is "the best iMac ever." They only compare them against themselves, so you can know that the 2015 is better than the 2014 and worse than the 2016.
What surprises me is that Apple continues to ship stuff like the base model 21.5 iMac that is just objectively a terrible computer (until yesterday, had a spinning boot drive!) when the whole idea is that you just buy the Apple thing and don't need to know that you should upgrade to an SSD.
> What surprises me is that Apple continues to ship stuff like the base model 21.5 iMac that is just objectively a terrible computer (until yesterday, had a spinning boot drive!) when the whole idea is that you just buy the Apple thing and don't need to know that you should upgrade to an SSD.
They do seem to be coming out of it finally, but for a good while almost every Mac's entry level config was awful, the spinning hard drives being the worst offender considering a computer without an SSD just feels broken these days.
I was about to say that the 21.5" iMac isn't so bad now they've dropped the platters, until I checked and saw that they're still selling the model with a 1080p panel!
To me, Tim Cook's lasting influence on the Mac is the transition from a "good, better, best" set of configuration options to "poor, good, better". Continuing to sell old and crappy models to hit a price point—like the 2010 MacBook Air that continued to be sold with only minor spec bumps until 2018, and the aforementioned entry-level iMac which has been around since 2012—reflects very poorly on them.
Well they don't really have only one of each category. They just market it like that and instead of giving variations a different product name, they treat it like the same product but with different attributes. For the laptops for example, they have different size models with different performance specs and hardware that changes over time. But they sell all of those options as a Macbook Pro. You might have a 2018 Macbook Pro 13", but by calling it just the Macbook Pro, they keep the number of models that users need to know about manageable.
I don't think it's just that they have fewer items in a category (they do) but that if you took all their SKUs for all products into markets, sub-markets, demographics, and ultimately individuals making purchases/using a particular SKU and organized it into a hierarchy - it would be almost a perfect tree with very few leafs touching the same branch.
Compare to Dell, whose equivalent datastructure would be a directed graph that probably contains cycles and non-sensical topology.
Exactly. I hate to use the phrase "it just works," but the number of things I have to "break" in windows to make it usable is too damn high.
For example, I have a 2008 MacBook Pro that's whipped out on rare occasion to simply act as another computer when I need to test something. It works fine. It's on macOS Yosemite, I think, but it's certainly not up to date since most of its time is spent powered off in a closet. Whenever I boot it, I usually get a banner saying it got a security update or something while I'm using it.
I also have a tower PC that is used for tower PC things, also rarely. It has Windows 10 Enterprise Eval, and I decided to be a good consumer and give it a license because it's been unlicensed since 2017. It's also running far slower than it should be for the specs it has. Turns out, it hasn't updated since 2017, but that's fine, I'll just update it.
Well, I can't license it without updating. The build's expired.
I also can't seem to get it to discover that the Fall 2017 build of Win10 is not the current build. I think that's because it's unlicensed. I'm currently working on getting Windows reinstalled, I'm probably fucking it up some way, but I don't use this PC enough to warrant spending this much time on it.
What I'm trying to say here is that there is a decent amount of fanboyism contributing to Apple's success. However, the little things they do to make their software work better makes it worth it in my opinion. I have never had an issue with a Mac being too "out of date" to do stuff on; that 2008 Macbook Pro still works (with the wonders of an SSD). That's what sold me.
I was considering getting a windows laptop to replace my current macbook pro, but this experience, combined with many others, doesn't make it worth my time to save that money.
I don't think loyalty based on product quality is "fanboyism." I think that's called brand loyalty and it's hard-earned. I only ever buy Toyota/Lexus vehicles because Toyota vehicles have been exceptionally reliable for me. As soon as I observe that this isn't true, I'll stop buying them. I'm not a fanboy, I'm a fan.
Many many moons ago, before the iPhone existed, I found myself reading an email from Steve Jobs while coding in the garage at 3:30AM.
The email exchange had to do with difficulties we were having working with Apple hardware in the context of hardware we were developing. I reached out to Steve at 3:00 AM and got a response thirty minutes later. After replying with a detailed explanation of the issues we encountered I got a one sentence reply back from Steve: "I understand".
The next morning, actually, later that same morning, I got a call from someone from Apple. He said "Steve asked me to take care of this". That person was Greg Joswiak. We were invited to come up to headquarters to discuss the issues and work out a path forward. I met him and many other members of the engineering team while there.
Both Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi respond to emails that come from anyone, just like Steve Jobs did. That’s wild how Joz had you even come into the headquarters to sort out that hardware issue.
Yeah, it was very cool to not only get straight to the top at three in the morning but to also see immediate action. We were in Cupertino the very next week, took a few road cases full of test equipment and hardware, setup in one of the conference rooms and had a bunch of great conversations with a range of engineers and non-engineers as well. Good memories of a different era for Apple. Once the iPhone took off priorities changed.
Very glad Phil remains in control of AppStore mainly because he has respect for independent software developers. Eddy Cue, Hairforce One and Apple Employee #8 see them like unsigned musicians and should not be involved with developers in anyway.
What's more is that it's clear their new boss (Tim Apple), like millions of others, is only now beginning to realize that the "gangster tactics" (of using math to restrict app functionality) is not totally about about preventing malware, ensuring privacy and protecting the brand reputation with users. He seems almost blind-sided by the world governments moving to act on a level that even Billy and Balmy didn't have to face after many years of actually killing the life's work (and thus the life) of hundreds of earlier software professionals (RIP Jay Miner).
I legitimately cannot tell from the way this is worded if this is a promotion or if he's stepping aside. I guess that's intentional and means it's the latter, right?
Phill became 60 years old, this step is just him taking a smaller role while he can educate his replacement until he decides to retire (which is certainly financially possible for him to do after he becomes 65).
is this "actualized $73MM in gains from selling AAPL shares" or some backdated math like "at the current price, the amount of shares he's sold are worth $73MM"?
I would assume he could retire now. He's been with Apple forever, he must have a ton of stock. I assume he's not depending on social security to fill any income gaps, and that the majority of his net-worth is likely outside of tax advantaged retirement accounts.
I don't get why any of these people stay so long in their roles. If you're SVP or CxO at any of these large tech companies for any significant amount of time, it basically means you've achieved perpetual generational wealth. You've beaten the game. Why keep playing? Once your net worth is eight digits, what really does the ninth digit get you?
When you don't have to work you're probably more likely to be in a place where you enjoy it. Having said that, I wonder how much work these guys do once they're in these roles and have already proving themselves time and time again. I imagine most of the less satisfying work is delegated away and they get to spend time on whatever they want.
Wouldn't we all be doing that if we could? Earn enough that you can have a team of people taking care of the menial tasks that are high effort/low reward and focus your attention into the important bits.
I believe I'd enjoy any role like that, if I'm skilled enough to tackle the problems I want to while having a trusted team which I can delegate things I know how to do but don't want to.
I can imagine those roles being a lot of fun. They know what they're doing, respected in their roles, working with people they like and respect I would guess. Salary can't be bad and you'd expect they can offload any of the work they don't like to subordinates.
That does appear to be the idea, yes. It reads like a demotion in role but a promotion in seniority.
The navy used to have the concept of a "desk admiral", which was an admiral with no ships. It was effectively a promotion into a less relevant role - which is exactly what this feels like.
When Phil took over the App Store from Eddy Cue, he made substantial improvements in how developers were treated in amazingly short span of time. Developers should be very sad when he finally retires.
Responsibility for the App Store was taken from Eddie Cue and given to Phil Schiller at the end of 2015.
Eddie still runs iTunes and Apple Music, iCloud, Maos, Apple Pay, and their productivity apps. He’s been known to work so hard he falls asleep in meetings.
I don't know if it's the age (like Phil mentioned he wants to spend time with Family, Friends, Personal projects) or it's the recent criticism that areas like App Store and others got.
Whatever I always enjoyed Phil Schiller on stage. While Jony Ive's voiceover looked like a real marketing material, Phil's presentations were always energetic and real. Especially his way of introducing new hardwares and processors. I'll miss his presentations. Hope he gets good time to do what he wants!
If the move were due to the recent App Store criticism, it would be odd for the App Store to remain part of his reduced portfolio, as seems to be the case.
Individuals do not make companies, and individuals have reasons outside of work for doing what they do. The man has worked at Apple for almost 35 years, and is 60yrs old - why would he want to continue in a huge role instead of reducing his role?
Oh wow “the marketing.... not the product”. How to utterly, hilariously miss the point.
The marketing is the product. This is exactly why so many people don’t get Apple and how they operate. Do you know who came up with the concept for the click wheel on the original iPod? It was Phil Schiller, he suggested it in a meeting with all the senior heads on how the device should work. Marketing, design and engineering work incredibly closely together at Apple.
Phil would be a great loss (it seems he’s not actually going yet), but Apple has lost major contributors before. They have a strong team and incredible depth of talent. They’ll be ok.
> To recognize the best of its employees, Apple created the Apple Fellows program which awards individuals who make extraordinary technical or leadership contributions to personal computing while at the company. The Apple Fellowship has so far been awarded to individuals including Bill Atkinson, Steve Capps, Rod Holt, Alan Kay, Guy Kawasaki, Al Alcorn, Don Norman, Rich Page, and Steve Wozniak.
I wonder what qualifies “extraordinary”. For example, Chris Lattner, creator of Swift and LLVM, seems to have fit that adjective as well as anyone and yet his name is absent from this list.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Corporate_affairs