Disagree. This is a founder problem. Once founders go away, you are left with the MBAs and characters that are fit for business, but lack the umph you are describing.
Sure, Jobs was such a unique visionary and it was inevitable that things would change after his death, but I still find folks tend to minimize his missteps (the Cube, antenna-gate), while somehow shitting on Cook despite Cook managing the giant ship that is Apple extremely well for nearly 15 years.
I am absolutely sure they do. The problem is taste. And they are as you said not product people. A high bar for quality expectation. If we remember 50% of people cant taste the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi, while some others could taste which Coca Cola they were manufactured.
And that is what Steve has been saying, you need to care about the product way beyond normal people do. And have the energy to try and push things forward.
The expectation are exceptionally high because we compared it to Steve Jobs era. But even if we lower the standard modern Apple is still not good enough as it is.
To quote Steve Jobs. Stop chasing the bottle line which is what Tim Cook is doing, and start making sure your Top line is done correctly.
Under these parameters, hiring the failson, yale graduate, CEO of TooBigToFail Inc. to be VP of Operations, is much easier than promoting the guy who worked at the company for 200 years and knows every employee by name, but instead went to San Jose State.
> Steve Jobs was referred to as the "decider" who had the final say on products and features while he was CEO, reportedly keeping the "strong personalities at Apple in check by always casting the winning vote or by having the last word", so after Jobs' death many of these executive conflicts became public. Forstall had such a poor relationship with Ive and Mansfield that he could not be in a meeting with them unless Cook mediated; reportedly, Forstall and Ive did not cooperate at any level.
> After Jobs' death in 2011, it had been reported that Forstall was trying to gather power to challenge Cook.
You are giving Cook way too much credit. The only thing he did was enrich Apple even more. Pretty much everything Apple has done is a continuation of what existed before or some side project pushed by another exec at Apple. The only thing he pushed for personally is a failure (Vision Pro, its technologically good but that's irrelevant) when it was clear that this is not a product that can be very successful or useful at any price (his arrogance is so big that he somehow thought Meta was just not good, and it's not fundamentally of problem of having nice use cases).
Cook has managed to not destroy or waste Jobs legacy but that's the best thing you can say about him. I don't think just making money is a worthwhile objective for a company, otherwise might as well just do finance, less moving parts, easier profits.