That one is obvious. The decision was made long before that. Apple’s A-series of chips were clearly on that trajectory for years prior.

The bigger decision was deciding to buy NEXT instead of Be Inc. That decision brought Steve Jobs back to the company and acquired a modern operating system to replace Mac OS Classic.

Amelio was fired for his decision even though it was the right one to save the company. That’s the truly hard part about being a CEO.

You take the bet because it's not even your entire profit stream and iPhone is much more of your revenue.

Tim Cook's operational experience helped them increase their market cap dramatically once he took over, so I'm not sure you can discount the value of him as CEO.

A bad CEO can definitely drive a company into the ground, so in many cases I think the pay can make sense. Spending the money does not assure a good pick though...

Except the M1 did not magically show up at the CEO's doorstep by one of their underlings in 2018. Apple (i am guessing) would have had several secret projects pointing towards this. Doesn't seem out of the ordinary given how many parallel streams they would have had to invest in to bring all those iP[aeiou]*d devices (running non-intel) to market?

Confer with the team around me to ensure I make an informed decision. Hopefully they do the same. Maybe the CEO has the final say, but they don't make decisions on their own. I'm sure there's tons of research behind those decisions that was not collected by the CEO on their own.

You're Apple's CEO in 2018 and due to a decade of skillful engineering you own a proven platform that's already shipped in 2 billion devices, and is now objectively fast enough to run a PC, the demands of which are not all that different from the 12.9" iPad that already exists. Do you respect the work of this talented semiconductor organization by refactoring the Mac to use the same CPU?

In what way is this a tricky decision?

Pay experts—using our may-as-well-be-infinite warchest—to do literal years of R&D on several options and pick the best one, such that the decision's not anywhere near as risky as you imply?

You know, same thing they've surely been doing with VR behind the scenes for years and years. If/when they finally release a product, it won't be because the CEO just suddenly decided to make a big bet, but because they'd made a ton of small bets and waited for one of them to look worth betting big on.

I think Apple'd be easy-mode for a CEO, actually. Tons of capital behind you to undo all but the gravest "whoopsie", and no direct competitors credibly doing anything like the same thing you are (others making devices, sure, but nobody even really trying to attack your niches—not really). It's why they can fuck up a few times in a row and it hardly even matters, as long as they come back to their senses within a few years.