The Tim Cook Era
But here we are, living in an era where Cook has now served as Apple CEO longer than Jobs did. The Apple of 2025 is quite different from the company Cook took control of back in 2011. Today’s Apple generates nearly four times the revenue that the company did when Cook took over, driven by more-than-quadrupling iPhone revenue. Back in 2011, there was one iPhone; now there are five, along with several iPad models, a wearables business that basically didn’t exist, an experimental headset, and a revitalized Mac powered by iPhone chips.
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The toughest part to follow of Steve Jobs’s many acts was his role as a guider of product development. Jobs had taste and intuition, and it enabled Apple to do some remarkable things. Cook is not that guy, and the fear was always that under his tenure, Apple would falter.
Did it? Depends on how you view things. From the perspective of investors looking for growth and profit, Cook has taken everything to a higher level. If you focus on product innovation, it’s more of a mixed bag.
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I’d also say that, surprisingly for someone who was once in charge of the Mac at Apple, part of Cook’s legacy is his allowing the Mac to lose its way in the mid-2010s, a time when it seemed like Apple was trying to build the iPad up so that the Mac could be put out to pasture as a legacy device. The addition of USB-C and the controversial “butterfly” keyboard added to the sense of malaise. But to Cook’s credit, Apple pulled the Mac back from the abyss, transitioning to chips originally designed for iPhones and iPads and ushering in the most successful era (by revenue, anyway) in Mac history.
People seem to agree that Apple Silicon saved the Mac, but it’s interesting to consider why. Apple had made a series of bad hardware design decisions. Couldn’t it simply reverse them? After switching to Intel processors, the theory was that Apple no longer had a chance of being ahead in performance, but at least it would never be behind. You’d think that on-par performance plus Apple’s design chops and the superiority of macOS would lead to success.
The post-butterfly Mac notebooks were a reprieve, but they didn’t exactly take the world by storm. Having skipped the butterflies, my 16-inch Intel MacBook Pro was arguably the worst Mac I’ve owned: noisy, hot, random shutdowns, unusable without the failing and non-replaceable SSD, the Touch Bar. Without superior hardware, the Mac had to rely more on its software advantage, but throughout the Tim Cook era macOS has in large part become harder to use and less reliable. Most of the new features have been half-hearted ports from iOS rather than expanding its unique capabilities.
The software problems remain, but with the Apple Silicon processors they’re now offset by a hardware advantage, at least for notebooks. Yes, this is innovation, but I get frustrated whenever Apple is judged based on its innovation—meaning discontinuities like this or whole new product lines. This is what Wall Street likes because it affects the company’s growth potential. To me, what matters is the software. How well is it designed and how well does it work? Everything else—how pleasant the hardware, services, accessory products are—follows from there.
And forget about what wonders “fantasy Steve Jobs” might have accomplished. Just look at what’s happened with music.
Previously:
- The Return of Blood Oxygen for Apple Watch
- History of Apple’s Developer Relations
- “No” Part 2
- Framework Desktop
- Apple Announces American Manufacturing Program
- Apple in China
- WWDC 2025 Wish Lists
- Apple Turnaround
- I’m an Apple Fan in 2025
- Rotten
- A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Permissions Requests
- Butterfly Keyboard Lawsuit Settlement
- Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal With China
- One More Thing: Apple Silicon Macs
- Tim Cook’s App Store Testimony
- The 16-inch MacBook Pro
- The Time Tim Cook Stood His Ground Against the FBI
- New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac
- Apple’s Software Quality Decline
2 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
I worry that software quality, user interface design, and developer relations will continue to flounder post-Cook.
(To the gentlemen who pinned me for not being specific, my bug list is in the "WWDC 2025 Wish List" post comments and I've got more...)
They kept making faulty keyboards way after they knew there is a design flaw with them, same for underwhelming touch bars (when people just wanted to have Macs with touch screens). I wonder why they didn't reverted back immediately, but kept pushing it through years forcing customers who were up for upgrade to buy something they didn't like?
