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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook has overstayed his welcome. He should have left years ago at this point. That plus the fact that all his successors are built on the same nondescript mold he came out of, does not bode well for the strategic vision of Apple.

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I know Tim does a better job, but he is the mirror image of his counterpart at Google. Made from the same mold. Great peace time substitutes, lousy leaders.

The CEO of Google seems to be navigating the AI war pretty competently.

A few months back everyone was writing the eulogies for Google and how they fumbled AI. Now Gemini is one of the top models (if not the best) and it is extremely capable and price competitive

Meanwhile Apple is still trying to wrap the head around AI. (Didn't stop them from making a splashy marketing campaign though)

So no, both companies are not the same.

I didn’t say the companies were the same.

Google has no idea how to survive in the new paradigm.

> Tim Cook has overstayed his welcome.

This isn't the first time an influential leader (like Jobs) chooses the next leader only for everyone to realize the next person isn't a "leader" type, but rather someone who was put in charge to maintain the status quo, not tarnish the previous leader's legacy, and not come up with crazy new ideas.

It doesn't look to have achieved those goals this time around.

Innovators like Jobs are incredibly rare. We're lucky he chose someone who would not only preserve the company, but stave off the worst of the enshittification that has eaten Microsoft and HP. Cook is also surprisingly protective of privacy and civil rights. I'll take him over 99% of executives these days.

In what sense is Cook protective of privacy and civil rights? Apple collaborates with the government to the full extent that is required to have access to their market, irrespective of privacy and civil rights implications. China, for example.

In the sense that they don't go much much further than just the bare minimum required by government regulations from the various jusrisdictions they operate in, and they don't treat this overreach as their primary profit center, thereby incentivising themselves to push it as far as they think they can get away with, the way all the other major tech companies do?

The "bare minimum" includes full support of oppressive government's surveillance and censorship requirements that target any sort of dissent, as well as handing over full unsupervised access and ownership of those citizens' data to their government.

So please spare us the PR, arguing that Apple "cares" about privacy or civil rights is dishonest. If they cared about those values they wouldn't be operating in China.

Let me push back on that: Cook was an extraordinarily good choice as successor to Steve, but he also should have left a while ago.

I'm hoping for John Ternus to take the reins soon. At least from the casual outside observer, he seems like someone that's actually excited about tech and customer experience.

Maybe Apple is too big to have a product person as CEO? They are so big that they essentially need a diplomat at the top spot? If so, at least let someone like Ternus call the internal shots and lead the products.

Ternus generally comes across well - technically knowledgeable and a good speaker - but also he is literally the only notable Apple executive who is significantly younger than Cook.

Apple is extremely not the type of company to recruit a CEO from outside, so if Cook is doing any kind of succession planning I have to imagine it's Ternus.

Multiple failed large projects under his watch, Apple Intelligence, Apple Vision, Apple Car. For comparison, Huawei and Xiaomi both have launched cars. Samsung AI offering is much better than Apple's.

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