All men have been there, most men outgrow it.

For now, at least, the car only drives routes it's been trained to drive.

Google is pretty good at mapping things.

Since the Google car only just got its learner's permit, it drives accordingly

I think this is meant as a literal statement. The car is able to drive of its own accord, but needs an adult present who can take over if needed. But did you just say that the GOOGLE CAR HAS A LEARNER'S PERMIT?? That's amazing!

Then there was the jerking halt on a side street caused by a car that stopped a little abruptly almost two car lengths ahead.

If you don't think the software is going to err on the side of caution for YEARS after widespread usage, you are mistaken. Eventually we will be so used to trusting these cars that we will probably be napping on the way to work, so who cares that the car hits the brakes a few more times than it should?

And eventually I'm sure these cars will be a model of efficiency, with fast moving currents of cars zipping here and there. One step at a time.

Surprisingly, one thing the car can't do all on its own is use the turn signals.

Hey, how come when I click this button on my site does nothing happen??? THIS PROJECT IS A COMPLETE FAILURE!!!

If Google can get there before a major automaker beats them to it, I'll be really impressed.

The most preposterous statement of all. Please get the reporter on the line and let me place a bet of Google vs all the automakers combined on who will release this technology is first. Assuming that Google hasn't locked up all of the pertinent technologies, this wouldn't be a fair fight.

You're missing the point and the lesson:

    This is how normals think.

Don't just laugh at the ignorance, learn from it.

You or I might be tempted to buy that exact car today as a beta, knowing that we'd have to tweak a lot of things, but (a) I don't want to drive in a world where your beta car with your rooted ROMs is driving around (and you definitely don't want to drive on the same streets as my inexperly-rooted ROMS, trust me); (b) the grandparent comment is underestimating the work involved in micro-mapping all of the possible routes, let alone the vast array of possible interactions between other vehicles, humans, animals, new road hazards, weather, etc. all mixed together.

I'm sure it's going to be a few years. Maybe more than a few. But that's okay with me. The stakes are pretty high for two-ton hunks of metal moving at 60 mph. This is something we all definitely want them to get as close to correct as humanly possible before it's available to consumers.

So this comment being at the top could easily be down to the poster's karma/average karma.

It's impossible to tell without comment scores being displayed, but my feeling is that any ranking influence from average karma must be small, if any. I'd be interested in any concrete information, even if circumstantial.

If, however, I find that average karma does have an effect, I'm going to stop replying to individuals, stop providing information, stop correcting misapprehensions, and concentrate on only submitting populist items. That's clearly what PG would want, if that's how the ranking systems work.

So much of the article seemed to point out the Tim Cook was friendlier in terms of investor relationships, but who cares about that (from a technologist point of view)? I mean, the biggest indicator of the shift in their priorities is that they took 100 billion dollars in cash and used it for stock buybacks and dividends. Can you imagine Google doing such a thing? They would never dream of this, because they are too busy re-investing their profits with their big-picture potentially world changing research projects.

But hey, kudos for Tim Cook for not trying to be someone he is not, he's a money and operations guy. So money and operations will get looked at at the expensive of innovation. But this is not good for those who are used to miracles from Apple:

"It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine," says Max Paley, a former engineering vice president who worked at Apple for 14 years until late 2011.

"I've been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management," he says. "When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority."

Yuck. The geek inside dies a little at reading this.

As an engineer, I understand why you are scared that "global-supply management" is getting involved. But you forget that the volumes that Apple works at have changed in the last 10 years, to the point where new products need to be manufactured at launch, in quantity that no one else in the industry has ever heard off. Good old days where you could manufacture 1 million iPhones in the first quarter and be happy, those days are over.

So pay a bit of respect to global-supply management. Manufacturing is actually as respectable as engineering. Just different concepts, but both optimize under heavy constraints to achieve near-impossible goals (at least at Apple).

They're really not. They're easily as important to the successful design and production of hardware as any of the engineers. The engineers come up with the ideas and products. Supply chain management and manufacturing are the ones that make those products and get them out to the public.

The supply chain people are the ones who are going out and negotiating the contracts for parts, and are the ones who are responsible for making sure that everything is getting shipped at the proper time(and for the proper price). It's a lot of work, and good supply managers aren't there to order the engineers around. They're there to work with them, and make sure that everyone involved knows exactly what risks every change will have on the final product.

Small nit: manufacturing is engineering. Integrating manufacturing into the electrical/mechanical/software engineering process makes good sense.

Anyone can make a thin smooth aluminium laptop. Being in the position of making the premium priced top of the range product, while paying far less for your components than your big box competitors and having such a stranglehold hold on supplies of those components that you can keep competitors out is amazing.

It's as if Audi not only made great cars - but also had all the worlds supply of tires and engines and was paying half as much as chevy for them!

When Job's decided to remove floppy disk drives and made iMacs that you couldn't upgrade the components from computers people called it lame. (This really upset people)

When the first iPad came out most people called it lame. (Has everyone already forgotten this? People were screaming it was going to fail, because it didn't run OSX).

To dismiss Apples success as only dependent on supply chain management is missing the mark in my opinion. Apples success in a large way hinged on Jobs ability to make decisions that in the immediate would piss people off but in the long term seem obvious.

Yes they have some very nice products - but what has moved them from a niche supplier of shiny toys for the 'money > sense' crowd to a gaziilion $$ market cap - is that their excellence in delivering on these products.

A lot of this feeds into the the products. They don't need cheesy Blah inside stickers because they don't need to earn that extra $0.50 They don't have to bend over to the demands of Walmart buyers or chase the latest fad because they are in a position to decide the fad.

But they don't have a unique technical skill. They have an Intel CPU, an NVidia card and a li-ion battery in an aluminium case with a Unix OS and a pretty gui. It's delivering this package at that price with that margin that now makes them special.

Apple doesn't have "cheesy blah inside" stickers because that doesn't delight users and make the product better to use. They're stupid. Apple also doesn't chase fads because fads are just that, "a fad" and rarely do fads have long lasting staying power like a good product should.

Where they do shine is in build quality and user experience which comes from owning the entire product - HW/OS/sales channel/support - and having enough margin to do it well. That's the difference between them and an equally specced Sony laptop running Windows.

It's the profit margin that really makes them special. Sony used to make products of this design and build quality but then to compete had to cut costs and so quality and had to accept the bloatware and stickers. Apple's brilliance has been in managing the process so that they can cut production costs while increasing quality and adding more stuff.

I give a huge amount of credit to Cook for this. Jobs demanding rounded corners on dialogs or sticking to a single button mouse whatever focus groups said was good technical leadership, Ive's produce design is great. But dominating the manufacture and supply network to the extent that Apple have done and with the effectiveness they have done is a major achievement and is not easy.

Look at Boeing having to delay the 7E7 because it couldn't get rivets - while Apple has 747 freighters booked ready to fly new products straight to the store the day they are released.

... this is insanity. These UXs you refer to are Apple copies that were released years after the Apple UX. Windows7 has a nice UX because Apple forced it to. People were abandoning Windows for OSX, so Microsoft invested in their UX.

Your comment is like saying, "Henry Ford's Model T was no big deal. It's hardly even better than my 1990 Honda Civic." No shit!!!!

It's like saying a BMW is unsafe because they copied seatbelts from Volvo.

Wow, that's a false framing of reality. You also fail to acknowledge that apple won the product fight before they had a stranglehold on supplies.

Apple's executing a $45B buyback and dividend program that's expected to run over three years.

They made $6B in profit last quarter.

Thus, while they're losing $45B over three years, if they keep on track, they'll make far more than $72B during that same period of time. (That's assuming they never make more or less than $6B a quarter over the next three years... in Q1, they made $13B in profit.)

The buyback and dividends make investors happy and keep Apple's stock from being diluted by employee grants and options, and those programs can be done with the company still making solid profits. Seems like a win-win.

And don't think Apple's not reinvesting profits for future products and innovations. If anything, Apple's track record over the past 14 years should be a clear sign that they're always aggressively reinvesting profit in improving every part of their business, and are always quietly working on something new.

Finally, the person quoted was one point of view, and we have no perspective on how he left Apple. Your inner geek doesn't need to be that worried.

They're not really "losing" $45 billion with the buyback. They're spending $45 billion in cash(which they have) to get $45 billion in stock. The end result, since they don't need to get a loan to execute the buyback would be basically nothing on their books(unrealistically assuming the stock doesn't move at all).

The overall point I was trying to make is even though they're giving up some cash, they're making more than enough each quarter to cover that loss of liquid capital. Apple's buyback and dividend programs should have zero impact on their ability to fund R&D or to invest in future products. (Assuming they continue their long trend of year-over-year revenue growth, of course.)

Apple doesn't design and build buildings, which are expensive, time consuming, and generally done in small quantities.

They design products meant to reach millions of people and as such design and engineering of that feat is innovative in its own right.

Your statement, taken more broadly, would dismiss the work of companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Their goals are to bring their unique products to a wider market providing a next generation experience.

I mean, I guess it would be cool if it was just Elon Musk rolling around in his single space ship or Tesla Roadster. But it's much more exciting that this can be the case for many people.

As has been endlessly observed, the Mac drew heavily on the innovative ideas at Xerox PARC, but it added many refinements, including affordability. Similarly, there were other mp3 players before the iPod, and other smartphones before the iPhone, but part of what set Apple apart was bringing all those capabilities together in a way that was greater than the sum of the parts. That doesn't mean that the parts are unimportant.

The dividend and stock repurchase will be more than paid for out of operating cash flow. In other words, even with them the cash pile will increase.

Look at some of the analysis that Horace Dediu is doing to observe that Apple is actually investing a tremendous amount of capital ($7B this year) in as yet unknown equipment, maybe real estate. (http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/22/up-to-eleven/) That's not including the billions they spend on R&D. If that's not reinvesting profit in a big picture way, I don't know what is.

Is it possible to be as big and successful as Apple but also maintain some kind of startup pro-geek mentality? Was this mentality ever there in recent years? My understanding it was something of a Jobs-led dictatorship that worked because Jobs had good judgement and good taste. I suspect most meetings have global-supply management involved. Apple makes items on the scale of tens of millions. Input from the guys who make that happen past the finished prototype stage is going to be important.

I'm never sure what to think about these articles. They come out every so often for every big company. A few months ago it was how Google is getting too corporate. Or how Facebook is working its employees too hard. The inner gossip of how companies are run, especially by bitter ex-employees, isn't usually useful information.

For Jobs, a private or merely theoretical manifesto wouldn't have been enough. Apple designs everything from the concept to the manufacturing process to the unboxing and initial startup experience. For a something to be a true design reference, it had to cover all these bases. That means it needed to be a real product that actually shipped. Which it did.

If you measure the return using everything that followed its lead - which includes the flagship store - it has recovered its investment a bazillion times over. Whatever else the Cube may have been, it was not a mistake. The one-button hockey puck mouse with the too-short cable? That was a mistake.

Another way of looking at the Cube (and its successors) is that it's a `desktop laptop'.

Now, identify one - just one - computer that shared those trademark corners when the Cube came out. Nothing else looked even remotely like it, including Apple's earlier products. Now, there's little - if anything - done by Apple that doesn't mesh with the Cube beautifully. Even the individual keys on the current wireless keyboard (which I'm using to type this) and the trackpad off to the side are clearly post-Cube, and entierly consistant with the direction it set...a decade ago.

In terms of towering achievements in industrial design, the Cube is to computing what the 1927 Yankees are to baseball.

But when Jobs picked Sculley, he was young and inexperienced. He probably had never worked with 'an MBA' so he didn't know what to watch for

Also, the relationship with Sculley went downside fast. When things don't match, this is usually what happens.

And I will say that the design and interactions on thesixtyone.com were much much much nicer (which is especially notable for the two sites being so similar). But I did miss the ability to set up a preferred genre.

Its designed that way, so I get it that I need to press the button for genre and actually listen for something longer than 30 seconds (thus media player feel). Its what people really into discovering music probably are doing - spending their time feeding those sounds into their brains (and selecting newly discovered artist AND buying their music).

As per changing the music industry ("I just want to thank you for everything you do for independent artists."), it must be that artist do get discovered via the service (See prev. paragraph, I guess [my comment, not the article]). This 'function' is just not readily visible on the site. If this works that way, I would add I really like this 'magical', invisible twist in the service.

I guess the kind thing you want to see as an artist is a whole bunch of listens for an artist you think you can do better than. Or money.

You mean are not? :) It's interesting how many preconceptions we have - I mean, selecting 'ambient' I were prepared for getting fuzzy, 'not-exactly-what-i-call-ambient' stuff. Where in different kind of service (say, internet radio) I really want to get almost exactly what I mean by 'ambient'. Just part of a deal using such a service. Amazing how all this adds to perception of the service and its usability (and success or failure).

(If I ever write a book that will be about 'contexts'.) :)

If you are building something to make money, then sure go with lean startup principles and A/B it to death. If you are building something as an act of creation, or as a tool that you want to use, and especially if you are building something that has been done 1000x before, trust your own insights and not those of strangers on a talk board.

Being different (not arbitrarily different mind you, but insightfully different) is a huge and uncommon differentiator, and can led you in amazing directions if you stay true to it.

GO WITH YOUR GUT!

On a more bizarre level, use the same logic as coffeescript (java - coffee), and get something like 'C-matra' (Sumatra being another Indonesian isle, like Java).

I'm somebody that switched by the way, but I thought I was in the overwhelming minority.