[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and qual...
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Ask HN: How does Apple achieve both secrecy and quality for a
release?
I know there are several counterexamples, but in general I'm
impressed that Apple manages to keep new products/features under
wraps until a major event, and then the product is in stores a
couple weeks later with pretty high quality (user experience,
reliability, minimal major bugs, etc.) Can anyone who has first-
hand knowledge shed some light on how this is achieved with what I
assume is quite limited user testing to contain leaks. Even working
on products with multiple public betas and customer feedback
sessions, it's hard to hit a high quality bar with a product
release.
Author : billti
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-04-18 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
| galogon wrote:
| Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG
| companies, they are the most prestigious place to work. Their
| market cap is on it's way to 10 Trillion. There's very little
| incentive for people to jeopardize this job and give up their
| stock in the company.
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| > Apple is the biggest company on earth
|
| Hardly.
|
| It is number six on this list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...
|
| And does not even appear on this list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers
|
| > they are the most prestigious place to work
|
| Eh, that doesn't seem to be a universally accepted point of
| view.
| fumar wrote:
| I don't know why you are downvoted. I agree. Personal
| experience says that Apple is not a great place to work at
| for PMs. I am curious to hear other folks chime in to round
| out the discussion.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I think GP was talking about market cap, not number of
| employees.
| 1986 wrote:
| And yet, it's number 1 on this list, which is linked from
| both of the lists you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L
| ist_of_public_corporations_by...
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Definitely not the most prestigious FAANG to work at. Perhaps
| if you're a hardware designer/engineer? Certainly not for
| software.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| They all make some decent software and some shit software.
| zeruch wrote:
| "Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG
| companies"
|
| A pointless metric given that over the last 5+ years,
| Google/Apple/Amazon have had and lost that spot back and forth.
| It's a vanity metric and in terms of the actual business, is an
| abstraction.
|
| "they are the most prestigious place to work."
|
| By what criteria? If you are talking about by patents and
| research filed, it would be IBM (which is also the longest
| running firm at over a century), if its hardware one might be
| more impressed by SpaceX, if....etc. "Prestige" is another
| vanity abstraction, and isn't even prone to a metric.
|
| "Their market cap is on it's way to 10 Trillion. There's very
| little incentive for people to jeopardize this job and give up
| their stock in the company."
|
| If that were as true as you state, people wouldn't leave for
| startups at the rate that they do. Startups wouldn't be as
| common in general if these big 'prestige' firms were such a
| thing, but the valley only in the last dozen years or so has
| fallen to that as 'common wisdom' when the actual habits are a
| lot more mundane -- NDAs and it's a small valley so people who
| can't keep a secret don't get hired elsewhere. That was the
| case in the 90s when the big players were HP, IBM, MSFT, Sun,
| SGI,and folks bounced from firm to firm, it was the case a
| decade later when folks started moving into what became the
| dotcom wave........
| mdoms wrote:
| The only Apple product I use is MacOS so perhaps you have a
| different perspective, but their operating system releases are of
| shockingly poor quality. My workplace has a blanket ban on
| installing the latest OS releases because of all the problems
| they cause. And of course this ban isn't enforced by group
| policies because that's not even possible in this ecosystem, so
| they end up having to deal with the fallout regardless.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| "Don't buy/install the first version of any Apple product" has
| been a universal law since the 90s. The M1 is the only release
| I can remember that bucks that.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Have you used Windows recently?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| You can block devices enrolled in a MDM from upgrading to new
| macOS versions.
| choppaface wrote:
| Apple has extensive indoor private test facilities. Like strip
| malls, but each shop is a testing ground. Imagine being paid to
| go hang out at the mall all day. Yea you'll sign an NDA for that.
|
| In addition to the NDAs, Apple tracks employee data very closely
| (e.g. iCloud) to mitigate leaks.
|
| The major downside to this approach is the sample size cannot be
| "internet scale" and it will be biased towards what Apple thinks
| it knows. That's why things like Apple Maps and Siri had such
| poor roll-outs.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| > In addition to the NDAs, Apple tracks employee data very
| closely (e.g. iCloud) to mitigate leaks.
|
| Intriguing! Could you elaborate more on this?
| meerita wrote:
| Although they have secrecy, it's nothing compared with the years
| 1999-2008. After Jobs, the company practically couldn't hold any
| secret. We know in advance how the next iPhone will be, all the
| components, even things like mac OS or other hardware is easily
| known in advance. To me, the beginning of the end it was with the
| iPhone 4 era, that's when the company started to get careless
| with her movements and way of operating
| 2ion wrote:
| Rather than this being a special quality of Apple, I think the
| marketing strategy of a lot of other B2C brands has now involved
| """leaks""" to enthusiast circles for a long time, probably since
| """evangelists""" and """influencers""" became subjects of pop
| consumer culture --- so I think that Apple leaking not less but
| the others just leaking intentionally more info ahead of release
| to fuel the hype is an important factor at play here.
|
| I don't wish to comment on the "and quality" part in your
| question though.
| layer8 wrote:
| The leaks generally aren't intentional:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/07/16/apple-warns-leakers-to-...
| ineedasername wrote:
| I think part of it is that, sure, leaked iPhone spec's will
| always get some attention, but it's nowhere near as big a deal as
| the first few iPhones or other new product launches. News of the
| next minor evolution of iPhone spec's probably aren't profitable
| enough to devote resources to fretting them out. I think we're
| past the point where (for established products) it's as big a
| deal as when Gizmodo got a hold of a pre release.
| shamino wrote:
| Interests align - those who keep the secrets are better off for
| keeping them (not just for punishment of breaking NDAs, but the
| fruits (pun intended) of revealing something wonderful).
| bredren wrote:
| Apple TV+ has a show about this.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severance_(TV_series)
| textadventure wrote:
| For those too young to remember (or who may have just missed the
| news when it happened, since it wasn't mentioned yet in this
| thread), in 2010 the iPhone 4 was leaked before the release,
| physically, an employee left it in the bathroom of a bar. Someone
| found it, tried to return it to Apple, they didn't take it
| seriously and so this person turned to Gizmodo to make a quick
| buck: https://www.fastcompany.com/1621516/iphone-4-leak-saga-
| start...
|
| They haven't had a leak that big ever since, but occasionally
| things have gotten leaked (specs, components being used, etc)
| from China who does most of the manufacturing.
| [deleted]
| aledalgrande wrote:
| I think that the secrecy at Apple is ridiculous. I interviewed
| for them and they couldn't even tell me they were working on the
| launch of a CI/CD product. Like, come on. That's not exactly
| spaceship tech.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Microsoft does not have this culture of secrecy but makes it
| practically impossible to report issues. I don't see why Apple
| would do worse than them.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| I don't think they do. Hardware specs/features are almost always
| broadly known well before the announcement.
| thehoagie wrote:
| The short answer? $2T can buy a lot of secrecy and extensive QA.
|
| The long answer is I don't think either of these statements are
| necessarily true? Apple products usually leak before their
| official launch. And as for quality while generally ok... Apple
| has had some poor launches including: Apple Maps, Safari on
| Windows, butterfly keyboard mechanisms. And other issues are user
| unfriendly product design like the mouse that has as charging
| port on the bottom rendering it unusable. And still more quality
| issues stem from lack of transparency like Battery Gate.
|
| I personally think Apple has a strong fanbase that overlooks
| these issues and is quick to forget
| lozenge wrote:
| The most famous bad launch might be the "you're holding it
| wrong" antennagate. Which has a clear line to the secrecy.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > I personally think Apple has a strong fanbase that overlooks
| these issues and is quick to forget
|
| Apple has a strong core of two users, in my opinion
|
| - people who couldn't give a shit less about the actual
| software, the UX, or whatever else it provides, they just know
| that it can take photos, browse the internet, and that Apple
| products are associated to "premium" and they want to be
| premium. This trickles down to the younger generation through
| their favorite movie stars, singers, tiktok influencers all use
| Iphones, so they want to use Iphones. The "rich" kids at school
| have Iphones and if they see you have the green bubble instead
| of the blue Imessage bubble in group chat, you'll get made fun
| of. (I just had this exact scenario happen with one of my
| friend's daughter, who took my old Iphone 8+ off my hands to
| replace their Galaxy)
|
| - users who have grown to realize all consumer tech is
| essentially trash, and recognize the marginal utility that
| Apple products uniquely offer: namely the fact that their
| products have resaleability, have a pretty well connected
| ecosystem, and at the end of the day, a physical store near you
| that you can take your product to.
|
| I am in the latter boat, having used PCs my entire life,
| modding custom setups, rolling my own linux distros, installing
| the latest de-googled android OS, logitech, the 40 brands of
| headphones and headsets, and all of that fun (miserable) stuff.
| You could tell me right now the latest X1 carbon is 994234%
| faster than my M1 mac, with a graphics card capable of running
| the latest AAA games, and I wouldn't give a shit. I just don't
| give a shit anymore. I want something that will work 99% of the
| time, and let me do my job wherever. Apple products have done
| that for me much more often than when I relied on whatever
| other amalgamations of Dells/Samsungs/Lennovos/Blackberrys/etc,
| whether its getting frustrated with wifi connectivity, not
| having my passwords or photos sync across devices, or fumbling
| with bluetooth headsets and devices from god knows how many
| vendors and companies. Give me an Iphone, a Mac, some Airpods
| and I will deal with whatever minor inconveniences like having
| to charge my mouse upside down.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. As I've gotten older I care far less
| about being on the bleeding edge or pushing a system to its
| limits and more about just being able to sit down and work. I
| don't have the time or energy to configure a linux DE and
| keep it updated/working and Windows isn't something I care to
| ever touch again if I can help it. Mac gives me a unix-y
| (FreeBSD) environment that feels sane and most of the time it
| "just works".
|
| I think a lot of people write off the (G)UI/UX of macOS as
| toy-like but one thing I've also learned is I like looking at
| pretty things. Sue me. I like my apps to look nice, I like my
| UI to look nice, and I like when it all feels
| connected/consistent. Of course there are outliers but far
| fewer than when I look over the wall at linux/windows. It
| really comes down to (for me) "where do you want to spend
| your time?". For myself I want to spend it producing and
| doing the things I love, not endlessly configuring or
| fighting my OS, macOS lets me do that. It's not perfect and I
| won't pretend it is, but it's leaps and bounds ahead of the
| competition when it comes to things that matter to me.
|
| One quick anecdote, when my sisters went to college my dad
| got them Macs (after being a windows-only household growing
| up and him only starting to using Apple products after I did)
| and he still tells me how happy he was with that decision. He
| will say "Do you know how many times I got called to do tech
| support? Zero, not once". He and I both had the "tech
| support" role in our friends/family groups so we both knew
| what a windows computer would have resulted in, we had lived
| it for other relatives in and out of college, heck I rebuilt
| a ton of friends computers when I was in college due to
| virus/malware/slow/etc. The people that would buy a new
| $400-$500 dollar bargain bin laptop every 1-2 years in
| college when their previous one fell apart yet would make fun
| of the cost of Apple computers drove me up a wall seeing how
| I had the same laptop all 4 years and it cost ~$1K (and it
| felt great to carry and looked good to boot).
|
| Do I believe that you can game better on windows or customize
| linux to be your personal nirvana? Absolutely, but neither of
| those things matter to me, I just want to be able to sit down
| and produce, not be digging in config files to figure out why
| my graphics card isn't working.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Thank for articulating what has been in my head for years but
| I couldn't express as well as you. This is how I think a lot
| Apple users feel. I came from the same background as you and
| ended up in the same conclusion.
|
| >You could tell me right now the latest X1 carbon is 994234%
| faster than my M1 mac, with a graphics card capable of
| running the latest AAA games, and I wouldn't give a shit.
|
| You could have your cake and eat it too as I hear the M1s are
| pretty competitive with most PC laptops.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| It's just not something that can be articulated, I am
| afraid, because admittedly, there is a degree of
| subjectivity to it. It's the value of being frustrated and
| hassled the least amount of possible by low grade consumer
| tech which is intruding into more aspects of our lives each
| passing moment. This isn't saying Apple products aren't
| frustrating, but the combination of using their products
| together is less frustrating and less hassle than the
| alternatives.
| jedberg wrote:
| Fear. They make a big deal about punishing leakers to make people
| fear what will happen if they leak.
|
| Also control. Here is a story I heard from an iPad launch
| partner, who got an iPad before it was announced:
|
| The device arrived in a large box with little plungers sticking
| out to press the buttons and the screen. You couldn't actually
| see the device inside, so there was no way to know what buttons
| were on it, what its dimensions or weight were, etc. Furthermore
| the box had to be kept in a locked room with strict access
| controls. Anyone who had access to the room had to be under
| draconian NDA that included severe personal penalties for leaking
| anything (like enough to financially ruin you). Also everything
| was watermarked so you couldn't release photos without them
| knowing exactly where it came from.
|
| The box was taken back and replaced with a standard consumer
| model after the launch. Most people in the company weren't even
| aware they were a launch partner until after the announcement.
| kirbyfan64sos wrote:
| They don't do as well with hardware, due to lack of wide testing:
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1504449580595040258
|
| > Since they want to keep new hardware support a secret, they
| work on it in parallel on another branch / whatever. So all the
| betas only include a subset of the changes going into the real
| release. And then when the -RC drops, they merge major changes,
| especially around boot/HW.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| My (opinionated) take on how this is possible:
|
| - Apple has practically unlimited money
|
| - The company can afford the best of the planet's talent
|
| - The companies business is ethical and therefore the top layer
| of talent hesitant to join ad-based companies pick Apple
| naturally
|
| - The company is highly design driven, which means it's the
| perfectionists making most decisions (roughly speaking)
|
| All this seems to have a cultural impact that optimizes for
| quality without much a/b testing.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| Their cult graphic designer following in the 90's and 00's and
| insistence on top spec hardware has helped them enormously
| because that cult group following is intrinsically linked to
| the media sector and thats helped then enormously because I've
| never known of anyone to bad mouth Apple as a result, but
| Google and Microsoft, thats different. They became the premium
| product manufacturer in IT.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| It's also infamous for relatively low pay and a culture of
| brutal overworking, and during the jobs years, seemingly a fear
| of the CEO.
| jarjoura wrote:
| They also do not invest in their workforce the way other Bay
| Area companies do. For example, they do not really encourage
| engineers to grow outside hired abilities and make it almost
| impossible to find time to work on anything except the Radars
| (tasks) put in front of you. Plenty of managers would proudly
| say out-loud they would prefer someone go build a new
| skillset outside of Apple and then come back. (This is
| jokingly referred to as your "next tour of duty" as many
| engineers actually do come back.)
|
| They also make it challenging to switch teams internally, you
| basically compete for the same role an external candidate
| would, and you interview as if you were an external
| candidate.
|
| All of that makes it very easy to get burnt out and so either
| you are someone bought into the "cult" of Apple and couldn't
| see yourself working anywhere else, or you peace-out once the
| rose-colored glasses come off.
| [deleted]
| viro wrote:
| low pay?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Compared to other FAANG. They will match high offers, but
| will not go out of their way to set particularly high
| comps.
| obarthelemy wrote:
| I Lolled.
|
| Highly ethical ? They're China's lapdogs (Google left China).
| Also they're the ones who don't want to pay employees for the
| time they spend being searched, nor acknowledge when their
| platform or their customers have a virus.
|
| Design-driven ? They're the ones with keyboards with a 30%
| failure rate and $500 repair cost. (They're PR and financials
| driven).
|
| They certainly have unlimited money, and have shown they're not
| afraid to sue, and bully, or reward compliance.
| minerva23 wrote:
| They market ethics, and like most things they market, the
| claims are often misleading or exaggerated.
|
| That said, of the companies who market their ethics, Apple
| seems to actually _do_ more than most.
| [deleted]
| Apreche wrote:
| Money
| guessmyname wrote:
| It is relatively simple: strong Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).
|
| One of my previous employers worked with Apple a couple of years
| ago to ensure the stability and security of Apple Arcade, and
| every employee, even the janitor, needed to sign an extensive NDA
| to ensure the secrecy of the project.
|
| We kept "the secret" for six (6) months or so, and at one point
| we almost lose the contract because someone mentioned the
| project's name during a phone call, at home, while a family
| member was listening, and that person told someone else, and that
| someone apparently talked about it somewhere and Apple found out.
|
| Fortunately, the CEO managed to, somehow, keep the contract.
|
| Even inside Apple, they have to sign NDAs when you need to talk
| with a different team about a new product, project, feature, etc.
| I asked about it during recent interviews (January 2022) to join
| a team that is supposed to have massive cross-team work with the
| entire engineering organization.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| And yet we have had an avalanche of leaks about their car
| project (and even the fact that it existed, then didn't, and
| now apparently exists again). This plus all the product leaks
| makes me think we should be giving the leakers a lot more
| credit.
| [deleted]
| ffhhj wrote:
| > strong Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs).
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468894/cops-raid-home...
| turnsout wrote:
| This is from conversations with friends at Apple over the years.
| Apple employees: please confirm/complicate!
|
| - Secrecy does actually get in the way. It's not great when you
| aren't aware of large features or products that will impact your
| work.
|
| - Apple hires people who have great product design instincts, and
| even end-users know Apple's foundational design principles.
| However, lack of feedback from end-users does occasionally bite
| them (see: aborted Safari redesign)
|
| - Apple takes QA very seriously and invests in high quality QA
| engineers. QA is not just "a step in the process" or a
| marginalized outsourced group.
|
| - It's a culture of accountability, not committees. Every product
| and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). When
| something isn't working out, the first question is "who's the DRI
| on this?"
|
| - Most of the organization is highly siloed by function. This
| allows units to focus entirely on their objectives, which can be
| productive. But it makes cross-functional collaboration rare. In
| my opinion, this is why certain aspects of Apple's ecosystem feel
| disjointed, missing, or don't hang together holistically as well
| as they could.
| throwthere wrote:
| More about Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) from gitlab--
| It's an interesting organization concept imo. [1]
|
| From the article-- Of course, when things do go wrong, it's
| also the DRI who (usually) takes the fall as was the case when
| Scott Forestall, then iOS senior vice president, was forced to
| resign after he "refused to sign the letter apologizing" for
| Apple's infamously error-laden Maps app redesign in 2011.
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-resp...
| ResNet wrote:
| > It's a culture of accountability, not committees. Every
| product and feature has a DRI (Directly Responsible
| Individual). When something isn't working out, the first
| question is "who's the DRI on this?"
|
| This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of _blameless
| postmortems_ [1] adopted at Google et al. Does this culture
| lead to blaming said responsible individual, or is the feedback
| seen as constructive?
|
| [1] https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
| lesuorac wrote:
| Blame and responsibility can be orthogonal concepts.
|
| An SRE may be blameless for a bug but they may also be the
| DRI for getting an incident resolved.
| safarithrow wrote:
| > This seems to be in contrast to the tenet of blameless
| postmortems [1] adopted at Google et al.
|
| While teams may vary, in my experience postmortems seek to
| understand where in the process a breakdown occurred, rather
| than fault individuals.
| [deleted]
| spoonjim wrote:
| My employer stopped promoting QA and the best ones all went to
| Apple.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Sounds like a genuinely very impressive setup.
| pezo1919 wrote:
| Could you please give an example what could be better
| holistically / what other company does it well?
| turnsout wrote:
| Siri is the biggest example, as a product which crosses
| SW/HW/services boundaries across nearly every device they
| make. Apple owns the whole stack down to the silicon, yet
| Siri is still not where it needs to be. Looking in from the
| outside, I suspect their organizational structure is standing
| in the way.
| nojito wrote:
| Siri is not where it needs to be because Apple refuses to
| mine user data to enrich it.
|
| They also are very hesitant to allow researchers to publish
| their breakthroughs which makes recruitment very hard.
| Although this is changing
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/
| lancesells wrote:
| I have trouble with Siri setting a timer, telling me the
| weather, or letting me turn on and off individual lights
| (it used to do this). Data mining might be some of it but
| I don't see how that is an issue with a timer.
| e40 wrote:
| I have set timers with Siri 100's of times. It's
| practically the only thing I do with it. Hasn't failed me
| once.
|
| Just yesterday, though, I said "Hey, Siri, navigate home"
| and that literally got into a failed state. The first
| time I did it it told me I didn't have a "Home" contact,
| so I made it. Didn't work when I was in the car
| yesterday, but it did just now. So, I agree, there are
| issues with Siri.
| dmd wrote:
| And there's also the issue that it doesn't seem to have
| any concept of priors. Every now and then I give Siri
| (and Maps) a try, and it's always something like, I ask
| it to "navigate to [name of local business]" and it
| starts navigating to a business with the same name ...
| but 2000 miles away. Even though it does have that
| business on the local map...
| turnsout wrote:
| Yeah, I hear that. Apple's privacy position makes Siri a
| bigger challenge, but I don't think that alone explains
| why Siri is so far behind. They can do a LOT on-device
| these days.
| deepsun wrote:
| > When something isn't working out, the first question is
| "who's the DRI on this?"
|
| Wow. Every company in SF Bay area I worked at stressed that
| they don't look for who's to blame, but on how to solve the
| issue.
| turnsout wrote:
| The intent is not (or shouldn't be) to find a scapegoat--it's
| so others know WHO exactly is going to help resolve the
| issue.
|
| That said, from what I've heard, culture at Apple varies
| heavily by group and manager. There are plenty of horror
| stories!
| bberenberg wrote:
| I think there is a clear difference between being responsible
| for something, and being blamed for something. There may also
| be overlap. My experience has been the anti blame culture
| (which is a good thing) has been twisted into a lack of
| ownership and responsibility in some orgs (which is a bad
| thing).
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| If you want to solve an issue, it makes sense to reach out to
| the person who is responsible for the domain the issue is in.
| Nothing in the sentence you quoted implied any amount of
| blame.
| azemetre wrote:
| I kinda took it as more of a find the person immediately,
| understand the situation and why they made those choices,
| then find a path forward. It probably can be used
| nefariously, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
| quartesixte wrote:
| Responsible Engineers are a thing in hardware engineering.
|
| It's less of making scapegoat to blame, and rather a person
| who has been empowered to call the shots on their product,
| and entrusted with knowing their product or domain inside
| -out like the back of their hand. If something goes wrong,
| you ask for the RE/DRI so you can get the person who is
| supposed to have all the answers, well, answer.
| jaywalk wrote:
| In many cases, the first step in "how to solve the issue" is
| "who is responsible for this?"
|
| It doesn't have to have anything to do with blame.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Yes, as in who knows this component more in-depth than
| anyone else in the company and is best able to solve any
| problem with it?
| tw600040 wrote:
| To do that in software is one thing. To pull that off in Cars is
| quite crazy.
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