There hasn't been lack of category killers during his stint. If anything they are running out of places on the human body where you can stick a small computer.
Surely the next CEO will hopefully not ruin the company and brand by cramming ads into everything.
So while Cook deserves credit for execution, the roadmap was laid in place by his predecessor.
Before Cook, Apple’s supply chain and manufacturing was a mess—too many of some products and not enough of others.
Back in the day, it was a running joke trying to buy products as an organization—they would announce a new Mac but you couldn’t buy it for 4-6 weeks.
It was Tim Cook who implemented Apple’s build to order system after Dell demonstrated its success. We take it for granted now, but it was a huge development at the time.
I have an idea for a memristor based neural processor for low power on device AI, but its worthless because I dont have the 9 billion dollars to realize this idea...
Let's not get into absolutes. Ideas can be as hard or harder than execution. Not many will claim ideas like Special Relativity are easy to come by.
It really depends on the idea and what you're executing. Often in business both the idea and the execution have to work out to captialize. In this case Jobs might have set the direction and Cook capitalized. Both deserve a share of the credit.
We don’t even have to wait for a new CEO for that! https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/26/ads-might-be-coming-to-app...
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
If anything I’d be pissed if Cook was out and the new CEO’s strategy involved making chips that needed upgrades every other year again. Or if they were like, “Macs don’t sell well, let’s cancel the product line.”
Of course Macs are still very profitable compared to what PC makers are making. Now they share a lot of the hardware and software stack with iPad/iPhone. So it shouldn't be too costly to maintain. And well Apple's entire ecosystem is built on them anyway. It's not like anyone besides masochists would consider actually developing apps on iPads...
I do: he was CEO when the outcome was realized. Shouldn’t CEO performance be judged by outcomes the company realizes during their tenure?
> judged by outcomes
In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over what was probably the company's darkest period (remains to be seen of course) and the situation was reasonably stable when he took over. Is he the one to blame for all of it?
It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.
Well when the exterior is full, it's time to look inside!
Apparently the name iBalls was considered, but just well it was rejected. The Gonad Pocket accessory is on hold pending litigation by Borat over his Mankini patents.
The noise cancelation features, and now the live translation function? So cool.