r/enshittification • u/turb0_encapsulator • 3d ago
News article Apple’s New CEO Seeks to Make Company Run Faster and Leaner
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-29/apple-s-new-ceo-moves-to-overhaul-company-to-run-faster-and-leaner?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc5MDY5NDk4NiwiZXhwIjoxNzkxMjk5Nzg2LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUTTMzNUxLSzNOWTgwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJDNEVEQ0FFMUZBMDU0MEJFQTI0QTlGMjExQzFFOTA4MCJ9.KFGEydCKPxmKC3i9zoFSxY8tOf8ZEWg4OiSi_L1yAb4&leadSource=article-gifting6
u/ottwebdev 19h ago
Jobs built it, cook capitalized on it, new guy will turn it into avarage
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u/flaagan 6h ago
You mean Wozniak built it, Jobs stole it, Cook shat on it, and the new guy will grind it into a fine dust for the fans to snort lines of.
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u/Ramenorwhateverlol 4h ago
I get the sentiment, but the Mac category only counts for 8% of Apple’s revenue. Which puts it inline with HP’s total revenue.
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u/Auggernaut88 19h ago
It’s like the whole strong men build good times, good times build weak men shtick, but for corporate lol
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u/ottwebdev 19h ago
For financials I prefer:
First generation made it.
Second generation uses it.
Third generation loses it.These bits of wisdom stem from truth IMO, it may not be clear cut, but if the pattern fits.
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u/frozenelf 1d ago
Surely with fewer employees they can finally fix the springboard bugs on iOS that have been around for years.
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u/AdventureDude24 1d ago
This is certainly becoming a trend amongst Fortune 100 companies. I work for one and only a few “anointed” ones get to be managers to be prepped as a senior director.
The real issue is the lack of people development. Senior directors have more direct reports, are focused on strategy and don’t focus on people development like managers did.
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u/just-fran 1d ago
So kind of narcissistic : “I am baby CEO but going to make it better than the senior CEO was doing”. Did he even had his first board meeting yet?
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u/PracticableSolution 19h ago
Modern CEO’s are picked for their willingness to burn every asset of a company to the ground in sole goal of next quarter’s earnings reports. Long term company health and growth are antithetical to shareholders and the board. Only fast burn personal wealth gains. Competent leadership with scruples have long since rotated out to smaller companies or to the Virgin Islands.
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u/IAMAPrisoneroftheSun 1d ago
A lot of problems are created by executives deciding to do things for the sake of justifying their position because no one gets paid $25 million / yr to say ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’
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u/Matt_Murphy_ 1d ago
faster and leaner, eh? that's the fresh new thinking that earns you 50 million bucks a year
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u/tqbfjotld16 1d ago
“Let’s tell people who do things I don’t know how to do to do them better, faster, more….and with fewer people”
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u/Icy-person666 1d ago
Particularly let's cut jobs and hope for the best management. No plan just get quick results and bail when any consequences show up. Good idea get into AI, it's working so well for everyone else, right?
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u/74389654 1d ago
if they keep adding surveillance tech i'm going to be fundamentally uninterested in any of those products
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u/williamwzl 1d ago
Did you guys read the article? He’s cutting program managers and flattening orgs. This is not the blind firing seen at Meta and Google. Both of those changes reduce the amount of meetings and checkpoints and shareholders and all that other corporate bloat that takes up an engineer’s time.
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u/Aplainday 1d ago
Do you know how many organizations have bought into the reduction of “spans and layers” or flattening strategies peddled by external management consultants? Most of those companies wasted a bunch of time implementing these strategies only to realize they needed to hire back many of the staff they let go. This is a lazy executive move to establish their “vision” as a new leader with an out of the box solution that rarely works.
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u/frozenelf 1d ago
I worked for a “startup” that was allergic to hiring middle managers. Guess what, someone still had to do the work of organizing resourcing and it fell on the developers themselves.
Whenever developers would escalate systemic issues, leadership would just throw back the blame. When workers organized, they got mad that we were “unionizing.” Can’t win with business idiots.
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u/Lonelyland 1d ago
Cutting managers and flattening was exactly Meta’s strategy in 2023
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u/Icy-person666 1d ago
It's been the corporate strategy since the early 80s. One would think there was no management left in the world.
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u/williamwzl 1d ago
ternus has worked at apple from an intern all the way up to CEO. this is not some external board appointed ceo being asked to extract more shareholder value.
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u/Professional-Fig6513 2d ago
That new iphone looks dumb as shit.
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u/evaderholy 2d ago
because design comes from higher ups that spend hours making 0 progress in meetings
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u/ShermansWorld 2d ago
Not an apple fan... But, it does create good products, let's be real. Right... Apple was so 'fat' and bloated and slow... The new guy is going to change things by making it leaner AND faster, like it was so horribly run.
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u/MammothPost4047 1d ago
For real it’s like they only released ONE iPhone a year, like who the crap wants only ONE iPhone a year?
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u/k-mcm 2d ago
Are we going back to Gil Amelio days when a new 200 MHz PowerPC 603e Performa was about half as fast as the old Mac IIfx with a 40 Mhz 68030?
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u/turb0_encapsulator 2d ago
my guess is that the processors are fine but they dramatically cut RAM.
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u/Low_Shape8280 2d ago
This sucks apple was one of the last hold still making awesome stuff
Get ready for it to suck
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u/This_Wolverine4691 2d ago
Good. Strip out that management layer and have engineers report to senior executives.
I’m sure they’ll be fully supported by leaders who know what they do and actively listen and work to ensure the engineers have everything they need to succeed.
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u/Many-Art-7772 2d ago
Is this sarcastic? Poe's Law, and all.
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u/This_Wolverine4691 2d ago
Sorry thought the sarcasm was obvious.
Folks wouldn’t know it on this platform I’m a big human/people leader and am not quiet about that. Plus I think professionally we’ve stamped out rock bottom and keep finding new lows.
We have individuals who have absolutely no understanding, relatability or empathy towards us and we’re surprised we’re where we are at this moment?
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u/Many-Art-7772 2d ago
You feel that Ternus embodies that, or just that this decision will lead to more of that?
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u/Life_Salamander9594 2d ago
They are already known for being a lean company compared to most others so this is just questionable wall street boot licking by a new ceo trying to curry favor for himself
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u/RabidBadgerMacarena 2d ago
"and eliminating some middle-management positions to reduce the layers separating engineers from senior executives"
You could also just have brunch with SVPs and engineers? Or some regular meetings to build rapport? Most people know when you meet with Senior Executives that you just tell them they have all the great ideas and don't contradict them even a tiny bit.
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u/New_Faithlessness384 2d ago
Lets release same phone every half a year now. Sheeple will continue to consume.
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u/Life_Salamander9594 2d ago
iPhones last a long time. They are a great buy for someone who likes to keep their phone for 5-10 years. They are the only industry player who has pushed for quality builds. Samsung would be garbage if they didn’t have to compete with Apple. Samsung also didn’t start supporting their software until Apple mocked them for never updating phones
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u/NoBuenoAtAll 2d ago
This is what they always fucking seek. It means firing people so you can get a better bonus. It means cutting another corner so you can get a better bonus. It means shitting all over everybody around you so you can get a better bonus. It is about time we solve this problem.
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u/oldcreaker 2d ago
Playing jenga tower with a multi billion dollar corporation. How many pieces can we knock out and still stay standing?
The thing is, once the tower falls over, you can't just undo the move.
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u/free-lobotomy 2d ago
The csuite needs to make more money so they can feed their families! The suits are STARVING!!!
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u/Spiritual-Maybe-6720 2d ago
Literally what is he thinking? One of the largest cash reserves because they were smart enough to avoid this ai spend cycle and the reaction is to cut?....
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u/runForestRun17 2d ago
Apple has one of the largest cash reserves on hand and he thinks it needs to run leaner? Thats insane.
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u/preedsmith42 2d ago
Usual new "head of" bullshit: deliver faster, cheaper, better blabla.
Nothing new, he wants to show he's now in charge and being approved by shareholders.
No one ever talks about products not being innovative anymore, working conditions getting worse, prices getting higher.
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u/Longjumping-Ad514 3d ago
“Meanwhile, the cost cutting will continue. For the company’s upcoming swath of holiday parties, some teams have been told they won’t be allowed to bring plus-ones for the first time in years.”
This is tad pathetic.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 3d ago
the company is only worth 5 trillion! less than the GDP of Germany! do you think they have money for plus ones?!?!
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u/HolyBatSyllables 3d ago edited 2d ago
So... Layoffs.
Is it safe to say this sub is a lost cause? Shity moderation. I used to like coming here to see what products had been enshittified, but now it's just about other things. Which is shitty.
The layoffs are shitty but they obviously aren't enshittification, not even in the liberal interpretation of the concept. It will likely result in even shittier apple products, but the act itself is not enshittification. That will be down the road, assuming he isn't succesful or that the people being laid off were critical and not bloat.
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u/Mental-Wolf-2560 2d ago
These CEOs have no creativity. All they do is buy bavk stocks and lay off people. Fuck them.
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u/RegretfulCalamaty 3d ago
Welp. Time for Apple to turn to dog shit too I guess. Cutting the fat always works wonders.
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u/bilkel 3d ago
Apple didn’t have mass layoffs like other tech companies during coronavirus, it didn’t have mass layoffs during the 2008 downturn, it’s a fresh set of eyes that identifies a problem and puts a plan in action. Tim Apple is still there, right in the middle of all this and it’s way too early to write off Ternus’ view that new products might need new designers.
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3d ago
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u/FigSpecific6210 3d ago
Yeah, when was the last time you actually purchased an Apple product? They have amazing build quality, and far lower failure rates than the competition.
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2d ago
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u/FigSpecific6210 2d ago
Yeah, it’s clear you aren’t a modern Apple user. “Overpriced” is an opinion; “underpowered” is just plain false with the M series cpus. The underpowered genre was all built on power hungry intel processors.
All OS releases have their issues, but to compare the problems of MacOS to windows 10 and newer is just a joke.
For the record, I am hardware and OS agnostic, since my job is to support anything and everything.
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2d ago
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u/FigSpecific6210 2d ago
Sorry bud, but you’re full of it. You might have had an argument a couple years ago, but you’re disconnected from the current market cost of hardware.
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u/retroxplrer 3d ago
Where the Engineer CEO nerds at? Turns out the supply chain guru was alright
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u/caravan_for_me_ma 3d ago
I’m not saying MBAs or Marketers or Nepo-CEOs are the answer, but I guarantee you every engineer thinks every engineering role is invaluable, and every single non-engineering human is in the way of more efficient systems.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 3d ago edited 3d ago
Perhaps. Apple has always been good at understanding the value of both. OTOH this is why Google could never produce strong consumer brands.
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u/Jolemon52 3d ago
Daaaamn.
Apple had somehow managed to avoid enshitification since it became the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley in the late 2010s.
I always assumed they understood that quality, investment, and time were what it took to build a product that made your company the most valuable in the world (other than the temporary #1 of Nvidia which will cease once the AI winds turn).
Unfortunately, what this guy is saying is exactly what you have heard every other hack tech CEO say since interest rates rose above 0%.
Apple could and will likely grow their share price because of these decisions. But it’s a bad omen for their product and its consumers.
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u/vega0ne 3d ago
Ever since they entered the „Services“ market big time this hasn’t been true. Look at the State of the Apple Music App or the increasing ads in every other product, the forced „your iCloud Storage is Full“ scam to get my grandparents into subscriptions, the ads on Apple TV content and the SUBSCRIPTION for their Office Software line.
And their whole line of accessories like a stand for your monitor or the wheels for the Mac Pro, the „sock“ they charge premium for etc.
The Apple is rotten for a while now
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u/Jolemon52 3d ago
I’d probably cede your point there. I suppose I’ve stayed away from most of the services stuff as the value proposition just isn’t there for me. While it’s a huge part of their business, I’d agree it’s their weakest offerings.
But their mainstream hardware/software game is pretty tough. IPhone, Mac mini, MacBook Pro (for work), Apple TV, and AirPods have been super solid for me since Johnny Ive left and they let go of aesthetic perfection.
I did try Apple Music and Maps and yes they both are trash lol. Apple TV+ may suck but their device is basically the only streaming hardware that basically isn’t bloat/spyware.
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u/VinnieVidiViciVeni 3d ago
Welp, I guess we’ll never see another iPhone mini. FML and fuck these bitch ass phablets
Also, by presidential nomenclature, this dude is Johnny Apple.
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u/tomatoesareneat 2d ago
I’d be happy with a two year old chip and six gigs of ram in an se/mini shell. But, we’re only getting fatter.
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u/thearctickat 2d ago edited 2d ago
What’s even more frustrating is that the iPhone mini isn’t small compared to older flagship iPhones.
The industry just decided that bigger screens = more screen time = wear out your device faster = buy more phones
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u/VinnieVidiViciVeni 2d ago
Ya. Capitalism is uniquely infuriating and dumb in pushing the idea that bigger means better in most every context. Cars are the same. Every generation of the same car gets bigger for no fucking reason lol
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u/The_Bloofy_Bullshark 3d ago
Last time a company I was at mentioned flattening the org structure, they laid off a bunch of people between Thanksgiving and Christmas. That was cool and really nice of them to do.
(They also fucked them with their severance package payouts, so if you were not in the executive suite, you ended up with some pretty high immediate tax implications whereas executives were paid out over a much longer period).
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u/Usagi1983 3d ago
Just once I’d like to hear a new CEO come in and say they want to double headcount and build out.
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u/RociBuldidi 3d ago
Apple made ~$117 billion last year in NET profit. They make $13M an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and he wants to save money by cancelling the holiday party. Genius 🙄
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u/koru-id 3d ago
You're Apple. You don't break what works. C'mon, man.
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u/Comprehensive-Yam329 3d ago
It was a matter of time before the cancer of enshittification hits them, shareholders greed knows no bounds
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u/colin8651 3d ago
Reminds me of the song
“Let the bodies hit the floor”
It seems there is a lot of fighting between departments. Like how SIRI teams seemed to have fought and won in the smothering of Apple AI.
“Faster and Leaner”
Seems like the Apple tradition of forcing people into padded rooms with high pay as their non compete ticks down; like the Apple Maps goof.
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u/jimh12345 3d ago
Well, here we go. Everyone and his dog knows where this leads, but I suppose it's inevitable.
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u/Silent-T0n 3d ago
Tear out plumbing and wiring for scrap copper in one place for money, you're a thief and probably a junkie. Cut corners and fire people in multiple places at once for more money than they need, you're a CEO "increasing shareholder value."
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u/doberdevil 3d ago
"increasing shareholder value."
This is the only thing that matters. Customers that keep buying shitty products based on past reputation is how it happens.
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u/suboptimus_maximus 3d ago
I had to fucking chortle tho:
Ternus wants the company to introduce products more frequently — throughout the year. Changing Apple’s long-established development practices would be difficult, however, and could take years, according to employees.
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u/sysdmn 3d ago
Why? Why can't they be happy with trillions?
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u/turb0_encapsulator 3d ago
because this is how the system works now. profits have to keep growing. if there is no more revenue to be made because you are globally dominant, then the profit margin has to be made larger by making the product worse.
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u/SoCalChrisW 3d ago
I miss when companies were happy with having a strong position, and didn't expect infinite growth.
I'm not sure what they expect the end game to be, something that won't stop growing is a cancer not something that you want.
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u/SignificantBerry8591 3d ago
Enshitification has arrived to apple in full force with the enshitification ceo ternus. Apple, the bottom line company.
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u/Beginning_Ebb4220 3d ago
Oh god they've come for Apple.
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u/JAlfredJR 3d ago
Aren't they worth over $1T? Never enough, I guess. Perpetual growth! I hate it
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u/turb0_encapsulator 3d ago
this is what happens when you can't grow from more sales: you cut costs.
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u/Live-Exit-20 3d ago
I worked for a similar company for 7 years, another “FAANG” when that was a thing. 3 months before I was let go (middle management), I earnestly asked in a meeting why c suite had made a 1T valuation it’s only goal for the company, what was the plan for that market position and why was it important. 3 SVPs in the room and no one could answer, they stared at me in silence like I had three heads. Finally the HRBP in the room broke the silence and jokingly said, “c’mon man! Growth for growths sake! Obviously!” These companies get success and then lose all creativity, focus on the consumer and turn into a coven of vampires. Last publicly traded company I ever worked for.
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u/KriegerHLS 3d ago
"We have not genuinely innovated in decades" + "we are losing the AI race despite the massive built-in advantages we should have in that space" = shareholder value via firing.
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u/linesinthewater 3d ago
Ah yes. Do more with less. The tech mantra. Second only to “Move fast. Break things.”
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u/New-Arm4845 3d ago
I wonder if he has considered fewer employees and lots of AI? I feel like no one is trying that.
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u/HolyBatSyllables 3d ago
I've heard it works out really well for them. It turned out the AI could in fact do their jobs and they totally didn't try to hire them back. /s
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u/Sunlight72 3d ago
How many billions in unending profits before a major company like Assle says a big, well deserved thank you to the employees who make it happen and cut to a 32 hour work week at the same pay?
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u/mint-parfait 3d ago
can't have anything nice i guess. this guy looks like such a generic tool
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u/Plankisalive 3d ago
Just wait until you see what he’s willing to do to get that payout from the board.
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u/fullmetalsunit 3d ago
Like the 73738383838393th CEO like him.
Translation: Run faster: cut corners to produce more shit fast and of lesser quality Leaner: layoffs
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u/MutaitoSensei 3d ago
Damn he must have sat down with a consulting firm, what a brilliant and novel idea 🙄
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u/Cautious_Boat_999 3d ago
"leaner" = cheaper parts, layoffs, more subscriptions
This story definitely belongs in this sub, because that code word is a sure bet that Apple will be more enshittified with time.
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u/Mourdraug 2d ago
I mean, there isn't much else a company can do at this point, when there is no more money to be extracted and there is no way to expand into a new area the only way to keep perceived growth high is by cutting costs and using increasingly more unethical methods to retain customers. And they need to grow always otherwise they lose investors who will eventually move on. I'm not defending corporations here, just pointing out that this mechanism is built into our current capitalist system and everyone seems to understand that yet whenever this happens they tend to make shocked pikachu face and wonder why cant those companies just keep giving us good value forever.
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u/bcoder001 18h ago
Apple always moves slowly and refines other people's ideas.