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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll never forget the time I walked into Cupertino wearing Google Glass when they were close to releasing the iPhone 6 (big screen one) and I was escorted off the property. Lol
One aspect I haven't seen mentioned in other comments is that secrecy and control is part of the core Apple culture, in a positive way. Out of all the big tech co's, Apple has the strongest brand and marketing. They have built an image on good design and high quality products (this is the perception, even if you dispute the reality). They have carefully built this image over the years by releasing products very deliberately, not focused on the tech or specs inside but instead focused on the product as a whole.
Controlling the narrative _requires_ secrecy during development. Every person who joins Apple today is well aware of the culture and how it has contributed to Apple's success. They have every incentive to maintain that secretive culture to continue the success.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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
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.
I don’t think they do. Hardware specs/features are almost always broadly known well before the announcement.
To do that in software is one thing. To pull that off in Cars is quite crazy.