TAG

# Apple

2026-09-01

The iPhone Ranks First on My Board. On the Day It Shipped, It Couldn't Copy and Paste

I scored 99 products; the iPhone came first at 98. But lay out its first eighteen months and almost everything went wrong: no third-party apps, no copy-paste, no video recording, no MMS, 2G only, a $200 price cut 68 days after launch, and a public apology from Jobs. It got exactly one thing right — and that one thing happened to be the only one nobody could retrofit.

2026-08-03

Apple Put a Quota on Bug Reports — and 11 Flaws in the Same Patch Batch Were Found by AI

On August 2 the Financial Times reported that Apple has capped how many security reports a researcher can keep open at once and added a 30-day cool-off period, citing a flood of AI-assisted submissions. One week earlier, on July 27, Apple shipped 8 security advisories fixing 210 vulnerabilities — and 11 of them were found by AI: four credited to Claude, two to OpenAI Codex Security, three to the NVIDIA AI Red Team, two to Z.AI's GLM, and one screen-sharing privilege escalation to an automated engine called Atuin. The same day, GitHub halved its public bounty tiers and moved top payouts into an invite-only track. curl took the third road — leave the door open, remove the money — and reopened this morning after five weeks shut. Three projects, three different parts of the machine: one changed the incentive, one changed reputation, one changed the gate.

2026-08-02

Tim Cook's Last Quarter: Apple Got Caught by Its Own Demand Forecast

On July 30, Tim Cook hosted the last earnings call of his tenure. He warned that iPhone, iPad and Mac will all be supply-constrained in the September quarter, and that Apple has less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, with a shortfall in leading-edge capacity. But he also named the root cause: this is not a supply issue but a demand forecast issue — demand ran beyond Apple's expectation. DRAM and NAND are up 63%–75% year over year, Cook called memory pricing a hundred-year flood, and admitted Apple did not want to raise prices but had to. John Ternus becomes CEO on September 1. A man who spent 25 years running supply chains ends his last quarter stuck on supply — and the root cause is a product judgment.

2026-07-09

The 100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · No. 1 | Steve Jobs: The Only 99 on the Entire List Went to a Man Who Never Wrote Code

I had Claude score the 100 product managers who changed the world, and only one 99 came out of the entire list — Steve Jobs. What's interesting is that the two biggest stories of early 2026 both testify to that score: Apple outsourced the rebuilt Siri to Google Gemini, and OpenAI spent $6.4 billion to bring in Jony Ive, with its first device due in the second half of the year. This piece walks through his six dimension scores one by one: why vision earned a 99, why insight lost a point, the tuition hidden inside the 97 for business — and why the greatest product manager in history happened to be a man who never wrote code.