Apple’s Heir Apparent Is More Like Tim Cook Than Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s Heir Apparent Is More Like Tim Cook Than Steve Jobs

bloomberg.com

27 pointstareqak46 comments

That's unfortunate. There is a lot of literature out there that talks about how after the founder leaves, usually the COO takes over, because they would leave if they don't get the job, but after that, usually they look for a more "visionary" person, because the COO makes things efficient but not interesting.

Look at Microsoft. When Gates left, Ballmer took over, and did great things for the company financials. Profits and revenue were consistently up year after year. But the company stagnated product-wise and lost favor among enthusiasts and investors. He left the stock 10% worse than when he got there, despite the profits and revenue.

But since Ballmer left, Nadella has done an amazing job continuing the profit and revenue story while also winning back the hearts and minds of developers and investors with some great new products and product vision.

Apple needs a Nadella -- a long time insider who has a strong product vision.

Jony Ive?

Except that he left.

Oh, I totally missed that news.

People with this line of critique against Tim Cook don't actually know how Apple works.

By your own metrics Cook is Nadella. The stock more than doubled under his tenure and the installed base for Apple products has grown massively since 2011 (to 1.4 billion). More people than ever own Apple products.

That seems to be a result of scaling vertical with the existing product line, not horizontally with new better product categories. Even the new ones are all connected to prior innovations (Apple Watch -> extending iPhone's mobile computing to a new screen ala iPad), (Apple Services -> extending iTunes selling mp3s and video).

Their latest 'new' venture which is the TV play is basically derivative of Netflix and Amazon. Going into finance with the credit card thing is semi-interesting but it was also the thing that killed GE (they became a finance company and lost sight of what made GE great, the best products [1]).

The Beats acquisition was an excellent investment and their Airpod's business is doing amazing. So that's something. They need more of that IMO... if they need anything at all.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ge-powered-the-american-century...

> That seems to be a result of scaling vertical with the existing product line, not horizontally with new better product categories.

Nothing wrong with that. It doesn't imply a lack of innovation as well. They provide a good enough improvement on all software, hardware and service fronts to keep customer buying year on year.

A lack of a new breakthrough product doesn't mean lack of innovation from Apple. In my opinion it only means two things:

- The technology is not there yet for a new "iPhone" type of breakthrough.

- The expectation of people on Apple is so high considering their success in the past decade.

That's Balmer, not Nadella.

Jedberg's point is that strong operational CEOs are great at getting more users for existing products. Visionary CEOs are great at inventing new products that can capture new markets the company hasn't previously been in before. The only major new product Apple's introduced under Tim Cook's tenure has been the Apple Watch, which in actual usage is more like an accessory to the iPhone than a new product category. He did a great job growing Apple's existing iPhone, iPad, and Macbook businesses, but a less great job introducing new ones.

See also the a16z essay "Ones and Twos":

https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/

Cook is a Two, as are Eric Schmidt, Sundar Pichai, Steve Ballmer, Sheryl Sandberg, and Dara Khosrowshahi. Ones include Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Andy Rubin, Travis Kalanick, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerburg. Nadella is shaping up to be a One, though I'm not entirely sure on this (I haven't been following Microsoft closely).

You’re not actually saying anything of substance other than Cook isn’t a founder of Apple.

It’s amusing to see people try to give the Apple Watch and AirPods short shrift because they’re both extremely successful products that only look small next to the iPhone (and ignores Cook’s role in that as well). The Apple Watch is bigger than the iPod at its peak and is something that actually makes a dent in the universe at a level other Apple products don’t. There have been dozens of stories about customers and their Apple Watch saving their lives or alerting them to a latent medical condition [1].

To understand Tim Cook’s importance to Apple you have to understand that Jony Ive was already at Apple for several years before Jobs returned and Apple was headed to bankruptcy. Cook is who actually built Apple into the machine that could execute, and it’s why he was officially named CEO in 2011. He was the unofficial CEO for years before that.

Actually it’d be more accurate to say he’s a founder of Apple 2.0

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/19/apple-watch-prompts-heart-sur...

Ballmer did well product wise. Azure, xbox, office 365, bing and surface were started under him. His big losses were the smart phone and search engine.

If you consider that he inherited the fear of break up from the anti-trust stuff, you'll understand he was fighting with one arm tied behind his back.

Nadella basically reorganized stuff around, slimmed the company down and focused big on CLOUD, AI and Blockchain - the new fads.

The loss of smart phone is unforgivable.

It’s a rough approximation of “lost the entire consumer business”.

Dont forget Zune, Danger, Surface, RT, Vista.

Apple has such in, for an example alluded to in recent news, and form personal experience, Evans Hankey.

"Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, who has now also taken over the company’s legendary design studio."

This might be a dumb question, but does the COO usually manage design? Our COO is very much a supply chain, logistics, procurement and day-to-day administration type manager. I can't imagine him having any sort of sense of good design.

I'm sure he's (he as in Apple's COO) not there in the design trenches on the daily, but he would have final say on overall design, unless I'm misinterpreting what it means in the article.

To be fair I probably would've said the same thing for a CEO before Steve Jobs came along but he's proven himself to a be very rare exception.

The titles at Apple don't really translate to other companies. Product marketing at Apple for example decides on how big features work.

I can see the connection between a Product marketing person and feature development. The connection between the guy responsible for supply chains and operations and product/software design seems a bit weird to me.

But I guess Steve Jobs trusted Tim Cook enough to take over the reigns and he was a COO.

Industrial Design works hand-in-hand with Operations. One without the other means products that can't scale to hundreds of millions at good quality.

https://blog.bolt.io/manufacture-like-apple/

"This might be a dumb question, but does the COO usually manage design?"

I don't think so, but it's not unusual to have CTO, CIO report into COO. I'm guessing there will eventually be a dedicated CDO or a de facto CDO that reports into Williams.

It’s purely speculation on both our parts, but the CDO title was, one could argue, an honorific specifically for Ives and a recognition of his sizeable achievements.

There is no precedent at Apple for it (or many other companies for that matter). While if any company should have such a position it’s Apple, I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t come back anytime soon.

This also confuses me in politics. In one administration a particular member of the cabinet is justice secretary, and in the next election he's an education secretary. I am highly sceptical of the idea that they've studied the intricacies of effective pedagogy in order to get that job.

The jobs are awarded on the basis of political loyalty, ambition, and tribal (party) potential, not domain competence.

In the UK - and I guess the US - they're executive roles. The Prime Minister's office sets policy, with varying levels of debate and pushback, and the department heads implement it.

Executives who climb high enough are allowed to suggest policy of their own, under the oversight of the PM. Ministers direct implementation, but the details of execution are handled by the Civil Service.

No competence is needed. In fact in the last decade or so in the UK most of ministers were absolutely incompetent dolts elevated to purely political appointments - with results that surprised no one.

There seems to be no other explanation for the borderline ridiculous proposals that keep making their way into laws, including but certainly not limited to CAJA 2009 which criminalizes sexual drawings of fictional underage characters - which they admitted in their own reports wasn't based on any empirical evidence and in fact only on hearsay and faulty reasoning from the likes of children's charity workers.

This is an egregious case with the chance to ruin lives (in fact, a substantial number of people are convicted under it each year according to stats in the VAWG report) but I wonder what other deplorable incompetence I'm missing out on seeing from the UK government.

Supply chain certainly seems like an important factor into design at Apple scale.

Which would make complete sense. Anyone like Steve Jobs would be launching their own companies. People running fortune 10/50 companies would have risen through corporate ranks to be CEOs and be more like Cook not Jobs.

Interesting point, I'm inclined to believe this is the case as well. Ive would've been a good candidate but he left to do just that.

The sooner Cook is out, the better. There have been no current offerings in Apple's lineup I would purchase since 2012-2015, and I know I am not alone in this sentiment.

The RAM and SSD being soldered to the logic board is beyond inexcusable. I count on upgrading my laptops over time, and have, for every Mac I've ever owned, to get a few extra good years out of them.

Even the environmental impact is nonsense.

Jobs loved unupgradable hardware. What you are seeing now all started under Jobs when he came back. Do you think Jobs would have moved the iPhone/iPad to be more like the Mac if he were still alive or vice versa?

>> Jobs loved unupgradable hardware.

First off, I don't think any of Apple's computers from 2012-2015 had much to do with Jobs, nor did I mention him by name.

Second off, if Jobs loved unupgradable hardware so much, then why have I upgraded every single Mac I've owned since my first original 2005 Mac Mini?

Why am I now paying more for something that will be derped in three years because I can't upgrade the RAM and can't justify the extra cost at the moment?

If Apple even offered a service to do such a thing, but no.

I've upgraded every computer I've ever had - I would never purchase a brand new computer that I could not extend the life of later on - nor have I, from Apple. (I'm talking desktop computers, the iPad is most certainly not a computer - until I can develop on it, and have full access to the filesystem, I'm not calling it a computer).

This pattern has only emerged in the past few years, and I will absolutely refuse to buy another MacBook until I can upgrade it myself.

If that means I go back to hackintoshing a ThinkPad (I use Logic and Final Cut professionally, and occasionally do iOS work with Xcode) - I'll be more than happy to give Lenovo my money - and hey, I'll actually have some usable ports while I'm at it.

First off, I don't think any of Apple's computers from 2012-2015 had much to do with Jobs, nor did I mention him by name.

Well, since the entire premise of the article and even the title is that the next person in line is more like Tim Cook than Steve Jobs and you said that you would be glad when Tim Cook left, it’s a reasonable assumption that you were implying you wish Apple had someone more like Jobs.

Second off, if Jobs loved unupgradable hardware so much, then why have I upgraded every single Mac I've owned since my first original 2005 Mac Mini?

Seeing that it’s kinda hard to solder a spinning hard drive to the motherboard, Apple really didn’t have a choice back then....

Why am I now paying more for something that will be derped in three years because I can't upgrade the RAM and can't justify the extra cost at the moment?

Is there such a thing as a price sensitive Apple customer? If you’re looking for the most affordable, best bang for your buck piece of electronics, you shouldn’t be going anywhere near apple.com.

I'm talking desktop computers, the iPad is most certainly not a computer - until I can develop on it, and have full access to the filesystem, I'm not calling it a computer).

So now the definition of a computer is “something you can develop on”? What’s the advantage of having “full access to the file system” over “having a common repository on the device where you can share files across applications”?

But really, most of the laptops are only upgradeable to 16GB ($200 extra) or at the most 32GB ($400 extra from the base 16GB). Why wouldn’t you just max them out from day one? All of the current desktop Macs (except maybe the low end iMacs?) have user upgradeable RAM. The motherboard of the laptops don’t support more than 16/32GB of RAM so you would never be able to upgrade pass that anyway.

Jobs himself wanted Apple 8-bit computers to have sealed cases. If anything, the latest moves by Apple (the new Mac Pro) shows a trend towards what you want not the other way around.

But I think expecting Apple to become a radically different product company than it's been for the last few decades is asking a lot.

The new Mac Pro is a terrible example of one move in an upgradable direction, which has moved to a ludicrous price point that received many laughs while we watched the keynote in one of the senior dev rooms at a top 5 Canadian bank that I work for.

What about Apple removing the non-touchbar model of the MacBook Pro - is that a direction anyone asked for? The words 'touch bar' are the equivalent of 'Voldemort' in the IT world, with 'butterfly keyboard' maybe second.

Or, let's take the Mac Mini - which, when I was 15 years old, was inexpensive enough that I was able to save up myself and purchase it, new, from an Apple Store - which has now jumped up several hundred dollars in it's basic configuration. That 15-year-old kid, who justified saving up $500 over a whole summer just to get an Apple computer, couldn't have even afforded it now.

What I'm seeing is hardware I don't want - that none of my friends in either the creative professional media industry (audio / film) want - and all of the devs I've seen complain avidly about the first chance they get.

The new Mac Pro only shows me a trend towards more impractically expensive, locked-down hardware, designed basically to increase Apple's year-over-year instead of provide year-over-year excellence in their products.

I used to love Apple, for years and years. I'm forced to use a 2017 15" MBP at the office and I can't stand it. It's disappointing. I still keep an iMac G4 from all those years back in use almost every day as I've filled it with every season of the Simpsons, Futurama, Seinfeld, etc, and I just love the design...it's a sad reminder of how the mighty fall.

I don't think it's fair to call the Mac Pro price ludicrous (ok the stand is a bit much). The components literally cost that much and it is geared towards a particular audience (e.g. Pixar).

> The new Mac Pro only shows me a trend towards more impractically expensive, locked-down hardware, designed basically to increase Apple's year-over-year instead of provide year-over-year excellence in their products.

Literally nothing has changed for the last few decades! I'm not defending Apple. However, if you think this is anything new you're crazy.

I avoided getting on that bandwagon in the first place and my wallet and my sanity is happy with the choice.

>I count on upgrading my laptops over time, and have, for every Mac I've ever owned, to get a few extra good years out of them.

You are not Apples current target demographic. You want to upgrade? go ahead and order new device, sell your old one if you must feel like you got "most out of them".

Where Apple is now is directly a result of Steve Jobs view of computing, which Tim Cook is continuing for at least the current term, but that does not mean that Tim Cook is bad for the company.

It can easily be argued that what you dislike about today's Apple is really a result of Steve Jobs/Jony Ives era of Apple. The original Macintosh was a sealed box, with custom screws that was designed to prevent people from getting into it and upgrading it (I know, I have one in my attic). This decision, after Jobs left, was changed by John Sculley and into a new generation of upgradable Mac systems.

Tim Cook has shown an independence from Jobs thinking on how things should be and is willing to make pivots in how the company operates. We may see more of these changes towards the upgrade functionality that the new Mac Pro brings to filter down to the portable lines in future iterations. There's been whispers that the next generation of MacBook Pros are influenced in this way.

Change doesn't come quick or easy and if the new Apple Design Team starts thinking about upgradability again, then I have no doubt that Tim Cook will support that. Also, there are potential laws being proposed that may change the idea of fixability that may help move this along as well.

Cook has opened up the company to listening to what Apple commentators and users are saying and making those adjustments, the outreach during WWDC is markedly more open than previous years where access to executives was highly limited and controlled.

I'd love to see what Steve Wozniak would produce if given Apple's current resources. My impression is that he's a real engineer's engineer.

Or barring that, I'd love to just be his neighbor. He seems like a great guy.

I grew up near by, and he had a reputation for giving away ipod nano's on Halloween

The history of the CL-9 says it'd be a lot of fun toys for engineers and a stock price jump for Apple's competitors.

Number 2 at a company does not automatically mean heir apparent. In fact it has historically been very rare for a COO or other such executive to get promoted to CEO.

At Apple, it's the norm in the sense that Cook replaced Jobs.

There was the interregnum during which Apple was more like other companies, but then Jobs returned, and here's what we have.

It has happened once, so not exactly the "norm". Also I imagine the circumstances that would require them to pick a new CEO will be very different from last time.

I honestly wouldn't mind this at all, I think there's a lot he could and does add to the company

I think Eddy Cue would make an excellent CEO. He seems very charismatic which is what Cook never had.

Didn't Steve Jobs apparently groom the ousted Scott Forstall to be his successor?

No. Every time he took a leave of absence, Tim Cook was the acting CEO.

Bring back Forstall! Just kidding. A little.

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