Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.

I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).

I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.

It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.

Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.

I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.

It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.

The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.

In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).

This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.

There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.