50 years of @Apple
From the early days of the #iPod to bringing the #iPhone into the world, some of the most formative years of my career were spent there. The products and teams stay with you. But more importantly so does how Apple thinks.
A few lessons that have held true for decades:
1) Start with the user, not the tech. The question isn’t “what can we build?” but “what problem actually matters?”
2) Focus is everything. Apple is defined as much by what it says no to as what it builds.
3) End-to-end matters. Hardware, software, services. It all has to work together.
4) Details are the product. What feels small is what users remember.
5) Debate hard. Commit fully.
6) Build for the long term.
We’re in another moment of massive technological change. The fundamentals haven’t changed.
The companies that win build things people actually use and can’t imagine living without.
Congrats to everyone who has been part of Apple’s first 50 years! 🙌
PMs don’t just ship features. They kill them. Shipping isn’t the job. Shipping the right product is. A great PM doesn’t fall in love with the roadmap. They fall in love with the problem and have the guts to say: This isn’t solving it. This adds complexity. This doesn’t matter. Every feature, setting, UI, element should fight to exist.
At Nest, we had one rule:
If you can’t explain why it matters, it doesn’t ship.
You had to tell us the why.
The reason a real person would care.
That one rule killed dozens of features.
New art project.
Train and inference GPT in 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python. This is the *full* algorithmic content of what is needed. Everything else is just for efficiency. I cannot simplify this any further.
https://t.co/HmiRrQugnP
The Big Omarchy 2.0 Tour: If you're ready to try something totally different after using a Mac or Windows, this is your invitation to an adventure! https://t.co/2Bb7BOAEUl
Continuing to making improvements on https://t.co/aX65MKZSJN - this weekend focused on addressing bugs and improving copy. Do you notice the changes? What else should I change? #buildinpublic