\n
Tim Cook\u2019s tenure as Apple CEO ends September 1 when he takes the role of executive chair. He will be replaced by John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran and head of its hardware engineering division. I get the sense Cook\u2019s professional obituaries will focus on his steady hand, execution success and lack of intra-company drama. All of those are virtues but I suspect the media, ever in love with a narrative of its own concoction, will use them as cudgels. Consider this an attempt to balance the record ahead of Cook\u2019s damning with the faintest of praise.<\/p>\n
Cook is quiet and private, making it easy to paint him as a bland managerialist who coasted on the success of the iPhone. In Ternus, Apple once again has a \u201cproduct guy\u201d at its helm, a term loaded with enough subtext to sink a battleship. You can feel the implication that it\u2019s only \u201cproduct guys\u201d who have the vision, taste and knowledge to innovate. By extension, Cook was never “a real nerd,” but an empty finance guy that never understood what makes Apple tick.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one thing Silicon Valley loves more than money, it\u2019s a mercurial genius upon whom they can rest their dreams. Figures with a capital-V vision who invent new product categories with a flick of a wrist, captains of industry who inspire awe and devotion. And making enough money that even a Rockefeller would start thinking “gosh, that\u2019s a bit much.”<\/p>\n
The Jobsian myth-making obscures his talents and minimizes the number of misses he had along the way. Jobs\u2019 first tenure at Apple ended in failure and NeXT, for all its innovation, didn\u2019t survive as a standalone hardware maker. Many of his ideas were too big and ambitious to succeed and his refusal to compromise made them sink. His time in the wilderness made him a better manager, and a far better storyteller. But to suggest Jobs was gifted with Midas\u2019 touch is wrong, since for all his vision and taste, he needed strong execution.<\/p>\n\n\nKimberly White via Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIt doesn\u2019t help that Jobs is the ur-example of Silicon Valley\u2019s tech genius founder which means so many there have never stopped looking for his successor. The title of \u201cthe next Steve Jobs\u201d has been diluted to the point of meaninglessness at this point given the list of nominees. Those include Elizabeth Holmes, Elon Musk, Adam Neumann, Trevor Milton, Sam Altman and Travis Kalanick. Given that sort of company, I\u2019m sure Cook is delighted when people say he\u2019s no Steve Jobs.<\/p>\n
I suspect, in part, Cook was seen as a mere employee (derogatory) rather than a startup founder who built something himself. That obscures his success, first at IBM and Intelligent Electronics where he took up a COO role at 34. Even in an industry that treasures youth, I doubt these companies would elevate someone as young as Cook unless he was damn good. And when he got to Apple in 1998, his role was to make the wheels of the company turn. We may laud Jobs and Ive for dreaming up the products but, to quote Jobs himself, \u201creal artists ship.\u201d By that metric, Cook was the real artist.<\/p>\n
When Cook took over as Apple CEO, it was just weeks before Jobs passed away, in what must have been a very hard time. Holding the company together after such a shock while grieving for your own loss must have been an enormous challenge. And while Cook had Jobs\u2019 army of lieutenants around him, it was upon Cook to actually lead that team. That he then took Apple to the outrageous success it is today is proof of his ability to actually make things happen. Think about how it was Cook that used Apple\u2019s initial success to make good deals with manufacturers that wound up boxing out so many of its rivals.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure Cook lacks the taste and vision of a Jobs or an Ive, and instead relies upon the skill of his team. I\u2019m not sure why that would be painted as a bad thing <\/em>given the roster of people Apple pays to have such taste. If Cook is lacking in taste, he\u2019s not lacking in humility, and clearly knows well enough to not meddle in things. Friends, that\u2019s not the sign of a bad leader, it\u2019s the sign of a good one, who makes his team feel trusted, respected, and listened to. Think about how rapidly Cook democratized the Apple keynotes, making stars of many of its senior executives, rather than trying to put on a Steve Jobs tribute act.<\/p>\nHis tenure as CEO wasn\u2019t flawless: Hiring John Browett to replace Ron Johnson at Retail was an early error \u2014 but one that Cook was smart enough to correct just six months later. The power struggles with Scott Forstall could be a miss given Ive\u2019s instincts around user interface design. On the product front, we had the embarrassment of AirPower, the stop-start work on the Mac Pro and the muted rollout of the Vision Pro. The lack of proactive management of the App Store and the opacity of its workings counts as a big strike, too. I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll get some chatter about the Apple Car project from people who thought that was ever a good idea.<\/p>\n
As for the Trump Stuff(\u2122), I have some sympathy for Cook, who probably didn\u2019t expect to play diplomat when he took the job. His ties to the current administration have tainted his reputation, even if his engagement seems finely calibrated. As CEO of Apple, he\u2019s responsible for around 170,000 people and has legal obligations as the head of a public company. As much as he may<\/em> wish to flick the bird at the Commander in Chief, he has to tread a fine line. And it will be for him to wrestle with his own conscience to decide if he did the right thing down the line.<\/p>\nOne of the pitfalls of a sustained period of success is that people lose sight of how things were in the bad old days. You can anticipate the editorials saying Cook \u201cfailed\u201d on AI because he wisely avoided not launching head-first into a boondoggle. \u201cFailed\u201d on launching a new product category in the post-Jobs world, even though the Apple Watch and AirPods are, on their own, a bigger business than some major corporations. \u201cFailed\u201d by building a subscription and services business despite every single hardware company in the world doing the same thing.<\/p>\n
I’d say Cook’s judgment was far better than anyone has given him credit for, and he’s made plenty of earth-shattering changes of his own. Think about Apple Silicon and how it has upended the order of things in the chip world, almost inadvertently taking a wrecking ball to Intel’s dominance. A technology transition that was so seamless, so undramatic, and yet with so many dividends, that the idea of Apple using other people’s chips in its hardware feels like ancient history.<\/p>\n
To all of those people, I\u2019d say look \u2014 look! \u2014 with your own stupid eyes at the MacBook Neo. Look at a company that found a way to produce hardware like that<\/em>, with performance like that<\/em>, for that <\/em>sort of price! The MacBook Neo is so good and so cheap that it\u2019s made the rest of the consumer electronics industry look like incompetents. It may not be a shiny new gadget you can show off to the envy of your early adopter friends, but it\u2019s going to make a meaningful difference for countless people.<\/p>\nWe can all agree that no kid is going to hang a poster of Tim Cook on their bedroom wall in the same way they might with Jobs, or even Musk. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a bad thing, because Cook\u2019s legacy isn\u2019t in headlines or fawning biopics, it\u2019s in a legacy of actually getting things done.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tim Cook\u2019s tenure as Apple CEO ends September 1 when he takes the role of executive chair. He will be replaced by John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran and head of its hardware engineering division. I get the sense Cook\u2019s professional obituaries will focus on his steady hand, execution success and lack of intra-company drama. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":83955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_daextam_enable_autolinks":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/d1261700-3e56-11f1-9de7-98a9144fd99d.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diyhaven858.wasmer.app\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}