A Subjective Assessment Of The Tim Cook Era

Does the comparison with Steve Jobs distort any evaluation of his successor’s tenure?

Tim Cook is set to be replaced by John Ternus at the helm of Apple this coming September, as he transitions to Executive Chairman of the Board. The move has been carefully choreographed for some time, much like the launch of a new Apple product. Moreover, Apple is the world’s third-largest company by market capitalization, behind Nvidia and Google. The succession of Tim Cook is therefore far less precarious than that of Steve Jobs in 2011.

Following the announcement of Jobs’ resignation, I published an article in French on Superception titled: “Tim Cook Will Do A Good Job, But He Won’t Be Steve Jobs.”

I wrote at the time:

“Tim Cook will do a good job: He is a proven operational leader who will run Apple in a steady and intelligent way. The Company also benefits from a product roadmap that will sustain it for some time. Steve Jobs’ daily absence may therefore not be felt immediately, unless his management team quickly unravels after losing the cohesion created by his personal leadership.

But Tim Cook will not be another Steve Jobs, because Jobs is unique. Inevitably, there will come a time when the absence of Apple’s co-founder will be deeply felt, as his unmatched ability to envision the evolution of both the market and the Company, and to take unconventional risks to bring that vision to life, will prove irreplaceable.

In short, Tim Cook will manage the momentum Steve Jobs gave Apple well, but I doubt he will be able to generate new momentum when the time comes.”

Fifteen years later, I don’t believe I was wrong in substance, even if the phenomenon I anticipated took longer to materialize than I expected. I underestimated the commercial halo effect created by the iPhone, as well as what I call the “iPhone derivative strategy” (AirPods, Apple Watch, services…) that Tim Cook successfully developed.

Contrary to what Apple wanted us to believe at the time of Steve Jobs’ resignation, and later his death, the Company has not been the same under Tim Cook’s leadership. Under Steve Jobs, Apple invented the future; under Tim Cook, it has optimized – brilliantly – a future that had already been invented.

In fact, Tim Cook’s three major attempts at innovation have all fallen short:

• The Apple Car project was abandoned before ever seeing the light of day, even as companies with far fewer resources succeeded in entering the market.
• The Vision Pro mixed reality headset, designed as a spatial computer, is at best a proof of concept, at worst a rare Apple failure – in terms of sales, use cases, and adoption.
• And yet, Apple’s lag in generative artificial intelligence is arguably Tim Cook’s most significant defeat. It is illustrated by the gap between the high-profile unveiling of “Apple Intelligence” at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2024 and, nearly two years later, the inability to deliver a new version of Siri capable of executing chained actions across apps with contextual awareness – a kind of OpenClaw, only with added reliability and security. Such a disconnect between a demo and a commercial product, on something this critical, is unprecedented in Apple’s history and would never have been tolerated by Steve Jobs. Siri is now being rebooted, using Google’s GenAI.

To this list must be added a deterioration in software quality, epitomized by the Liquid Glass user interface, which manages, within the world’s most design-obsessed company, to make certain elements unreadable. Another heresy Steve Jobs would not have allowed.

But not everyone is Steve Jobs, and that’s precisely the issue when evaluating Tim Cook’s legacy. It is more natural to admire a visionary genius like Apple’s co-founder than a maestro of operational excellence¹ like his successor. The former appears almost supernatural in his foresight; the latter far more prosaic. The former is visible through bold proclamations; the latter operates largely behind the scenes.

To be fair, then, Tim Cook’s track record at Apple is extraordinary – operationally, and even more so financially.

Operationally, he built and managed a system that enabled Apple to launch, market, and deliver products with Swiss-watch precision. The only major blemish, aside from generative AI, was the Apple Maps fiasco, which proved highly flawed when it replaced Google Maps in iOS 6 in 2012. Tim Cook publicly apologized and even recommended that iPhone users turn to competing apps. (Steve Jobs faced a comparable episode with the “Antennagate” controversy in 2010.) But between Apple Maps and Apple Intelligence twelve years later, Tim Cook’s operational record is virtually spotless, aside from Apple’s dependence on China (see “Apple in China” by Patrick McGee).

Financially, over Tim Cook’s fifteen-year tenure, Apple’s revenue increased by 303% and its profits by 354%. Even more striking, its market value rose from $297 billion to $4 trillion, a 1,251% increase. Apple’s shareholders might feel like erecting a statue in his honor, and they would have every reason to do so.

But they would be wrong not to question Apple’s future.

I remember being struck, while reading Adam Lashinsky’s “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired – And Secretive – Company Really Works” in 2012, by a remark from Avi Tevanian, a former Apple executive and chief architect of Mac OS X, shortly before Steve Jobs’ death: “When Steve is gone, the competition still will not have Steve Jobs.”

Today, only Elon Musk can be compared to Steve Jobs in terms of visionary ability². But Apple’s competitors, whether established players like Google with Demis Hassabis, or Microsoft with Satya Nadella, or newer entrants like Anthropic with Dario Amodei and OpenAI with Sam Altman, may not all be as visionary as Steve Jobs, but they are, crucially, more innovative than Tim Cook.

It is no coincidence that Apple, fifteen years after Steve Jobs’ death, still depends, through its iPhone derivative strategy, on innovation initiated by its late leader, just as it once relied on the Mac during his earlier absence.

In this context, John Ternus’ promotion raises questions. Based on what is publicly known, he does not appear to possess the visionary profile Apple attributes to him. Will he be able to create new categories of innovation beyond the iPhone ecosystem? One would expect Apple to build the device that does for the AI revolution what the iPhone did for the digital revolution³, or even to bring about ambient computing, which current technological advances may soon make possible. The list of upcoming Apple products reported by Bloomberg suggests nothing of the sort.

Looking ahead, Apple’s future will depend largely on whether generative AI integrates into existing technological layers (from infrastructure to smartphones), as cloud computing did, or whether it triggers a full-scale transformation of those layers, as the digital revolution did. This is a technological question, but it ultimately reflects Apple’s level of ambition for the years ahead.

Finally, no assessment of the Tim Cook era would be complete without noting how far Apple has drifted from the culture instilled by Steve Jobs. While Steve Jobs famously believed it was better to be a pirate than to join the Navy, Tim Cook has aligned Apple with China’s authoritarian system, cultivated a relationship with Donald Trump beyond what seems reasonable, entrenched certain businesses – particularly the App Store – in increasingly anti-competitive practices, and taken a hard line against unions.

For all these reasons, the challenges facing John Ternus are out of proportion with Apple’s apparent strength. The risk is that the Company has become perfectly optimized, but for a model that is already obsolete.

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¹ Supply chain, manufacturing, inventory and flow management, cost optimization, coordination with product design, industrial launch of new products…

² More than that, Elon Musk combines Steve Jobs’ visionary genius with Tim Cook’s mastery of operational excellence. Which, of course, does not absolve him of his ethical excesses.

³ That doesn’t necessarily mean this device will replace the iPhone, just as smartphones didn’t replace PCs.