Greg Joswiak replaces Phil Schiller as head of Apple marketing (opens in new tab)

HyperCard was one of the best tools I've ever used. A real shame it never caught on.

Doing it in software allowed the original MacOS to be much more extensible and live on far longer than would have otherwise been expected.

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.

Mac Paint looks similar to the Xerox PARC painting app:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Smalltal...

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.

Bingo.

Tech output with high business impact + company loyalty = Fellowship

Formula works pretty much the same way at any tech company, including the one I work at now.

And if you've ever had to use Xcode for any meaningful amount of time, you'd know why he's not on that list.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Legends

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ub_Iwerks#Career

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_Nine_Old_Men

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.

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.

Apple is easily the single most successful exercise in branding in modern corporate history, right up there with Nike and Coca-Cola.

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.

If Apple/Phil Schiller are not that good in marketing, who is good for you personally?

My wife has been using Macs since 2011. She’s not suddenly going to rearrange her brain. She wants to use the tool she’s proficient with.

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 imagine financially he probably could've retired a while ago, no?

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.

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.

Phil Schiller needs to go back to awkwardly jumping off of heights to make a impact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MR4R5LdrJw

EDIT: Whoops, just saw someone posted the same clip below.

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

Thanks!

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?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052643

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While I’m sure he agreed with it, the 30% cut predated his management of the store by a decade.

What about the similar fees and cuts of all the other stores?

But this is the end of Apple!

It’s always the End of Apple!!!!

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.

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.