Apple’s Q3 2025 Results

"Speaking to CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that iPhone revenue was up because the iPhone 16 turned out to be more popular with consumers than the iPhone 15 was during the same time period last year."

Yes, this is what happens when you use deceptive advertising on one and not the other. It's truly amazing how well products can sell when you can just lie about what they do.

That's not to take away from the rest of their performance, that's good for them that they're still growing in the hardware markets.

«It's truly amazing how well products can sell when you can just lie about what they do.»

Apple really starved people for about a decade, left them yearning for a Siri that stops finding things on the web and starts being useful by handling more demanding tasks than just setting timers, creating reminders, and controlling lights at home.

If you’ve been around long enough to remember Sculley’s Knowledge Navigator concept video from 1987, you might agree that there is no other upcoming feature expected with so much anticipation than a truly personal assistant.

Coming from that angle, modern Apple not only produces concept videos again, but presents them as ads:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3c916Mb02E

To be a hopeless romantic about this: The day will come when a young person raises their hand in front of an Apple building, extends their middle finger, and smiles with naive dreams of conquering the status quo while their photo is taken. Probably with an iPhone. The irony.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=steve+jobs+middle+finger+ibm&t=h_&ia=images&iax=images

> The Cook era is now as long as the Jobs renaissance era.

And we are not better off. Jobs had some bad decisions - nobody is perfect. But the Apple of Jobs was revolutionary, while the Apple of Cook was at best evolutionary, if not downright consumer hostile. With restrictions around third party payments, locking down the Mac, and the terribleness of Siri, it's not been great.

Not sure I agree with you @Matt_B. Not sure I disagree....

We are talking about two distinct eras. Think about things with nothing to do with Apple. When Jobs was rehired virtually nobody had email, much less WiFi. Cable was pretty much the "thing" in terms of TV. When Cook took over "wearables" - even watches - weren't around. In another 5090 days, who knows what AI will become?

I understand what you mean about revolution versus evolution, but going back to... Jobs 1.0?... there were personal computers before Apple II. Macintosh computers may have made "desktops" more mainstream, but Xerox was first. Blackberry phones were very popular before any iPhone was introduced. While I'd say Jobs 1.0 and more so Jobs 2.0 were successful, they seem mostly evolutionary too.

@Dave

If you want to consider that the Jobs' era was just evolutionary, then Tim Cook's one is decadence on the software side.

So the Siri vaporware advertisements worked?

>We are talking about two distinct eras.

This.

I don't think Cook would've been as good a CEO for Apple in 1997 as Jobs was. He wouldn't have known, to use Jobs's parlance, where the puck was going to be.

But conversely, I'm also not sure Jobs would be a good CEO today, steering a much bigger, more complex company.

The two have distinct backgrounds and conversely management focuses. Cook is an operations guy; Jobs a products guy.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs had gotten bored of it by around the time the iPhone 6 became massive, and the iPhone a 200 million devices a year business. He might have preferred either demoting himself to focus on a new skunkworks project at Apple, much like he did in the early 1980s, or moving on to form a new startup; the next Pixar or NeXT.

So in terms of "how would Jobs steer Apple today?": perhaps he wouldn't. And even if he did, he probably wouldn't be as hands-on with the Mac as he was ca. 1997-2005, or with the iPhone as he was ca. 2005-11; he did that to save the company and/or bootstrap the product, and then he moved on to the next thing.

@Sören: As a thought experiment, I find it interesting that reading Isaacson’s book you could see a tendency in Steve Jobs to go into politics. He could have seen the way the country is run as a limiting factor on how insanely great Apple’s product could be and devote time to that. Who knows how motivated he would have become once China flipped the script. Apple’s dependency on and exploitation by China, as detailed in Patrick McGee’s book, is certainly something that would have made his blood boil.

These are relevant quotes from Isaacson’s book. This one is on leadership:

«When our discussion turned to the sorry state of the economy and politics, [Steve Jobs] offered a few sharp opinions about the lack of strong leadership around the world. “I’m disappointed in Obama,” he said. “He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a problem I ever had.”»

This one is on education in the context of Steve Jobs voicing his opinions as part of an advisory board formed by Obama:

«Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were.»

On having factories in the US:

«Jobs went on to urge [Obama] that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said.»

Ultimately, and that’s my guess, Steve Jobs would have been more effective at extracting the best possible work from his folks and have Apple continue to lead the way with innovative products. Not only how they are designed but also how they are made and sold. Maybe even attempt yet again to fully automate the assembly of them on the continent they are sold, probably foregoing the whole problem with tariffs, education, and labor.

I also believe his presence made brilliant but difficult people work together instead of disband by demanding greatness and have them fight the difficult road travelled instead of each other. That’s how he seems to have steered and made Apple succeed.

And I’m sure he wouldn’t see it as a demotion to focus on new skunkworks projects. Also, as we saw with the introduction of iCloud, not even cancer could stop him representing Apple by introducing new products and services himself. So might as well stay CEO.

@Adrian

Absolutely right!

Jobs worked wonders because of a handful of key things he had:

1. Everyone recognised his authority. When they occasionally didn't, they faced hell on earth!
2. He cared like crazy about the things he made. This is the one Tim Cook lacks, of course.
3. He inspired "difficult" people to do their best work, together, when no one else could. "The Crazy Ones…"

Number 1 is true "Founder Mode". You get chances others can't. Little remembered but absolutely crucial to everything that happened at Apple since: Steve convinced Apple's board, principally Ed Woolard but also Mike Markkula (Apple's first investor in the 70s, whose cash got them out of the Jobs' garage but who later sided with Sculley to eject him from the company), to give him carte blanche and handpick his own board of directors. He pulled off so much in his second stint at Apple because he had the unique authority of a founder and a legend. Apple was his passion and no one had a chance getting in his way.

You're quite right just how much he still cared—and Apple really was his life—even in his dying days. Nothing was going to tear him away from that company he built, and the unique power it gave him to influence the world…

Well, maybe, just maybe, except for… politics?

Back when I read the Isaacson bio, I shrugged off the politics bits as just being natural chit-chat between the author and his subject. Since when was Steve Jobs going to take a shot at the presidency? What a time sink! And a colossal conflict of interests, too! But that was before a certain other businessman president tore the rules apart. Thinking about it now, for the first time in many years, I must admit you're onto something. Jobs wasn't going to run for office back in the day, not least as Apple became so powerful with the iPhone he cared so much about. But would he consider it when Trump was in the picture, and Biden was so clearly out of steam?

We can't predict alternate realities, of course. Apple with Steve still alive—and you bet: still at the helm—would surely be a different company with a different, more vibrant suite of products than it is now. Who knows how much that could have changed the timeline. But if we were somehow still where we were last year, when Trump was up against the weakest opponents yet, I get the feeling a certain altogether more consequential business leader might have finally been tempted to test his legendary turnaround skills on the United States itself.

>“He’s having trouble leading because he’s reluctant to offend people or piss them off.” He caught what I was thinking and assented with a little smile: “Yes, that’s not a problem I ever had.”»

This is true. Steve, by all accounts, was happy to state his opinion.

Which raises the question: would that have worked in an Apple ten times as large? It's really hard to say how _he_ would've dealt with Trump.

>Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were.

Steve had some problematic takes on labor; see his anti-poaching agreements, for example. How and why does he draw a line between a "worker" and a "professional"? His comments predate an era of increased calls for tech unionization.

I'm not entirely opposed to the idea that teachers' unions prevent innovation in schools, but I'd also say that money, period, plays a huge role. For whatever reason, parents ultimately tend not to vote for politicians who put more _money_ in schools. Things like DonorsChoose should not exist.

>On having factories in the US:
>
>«Jobs went on to urge [Obama] that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You can’t find that many in America to hire,” he said.»

That's true, but is that an endorsement of Trump's take that we should encourage more American manufacturing again? The US already has a relatively low unemployment rate. So who would do the manufacturing, immigrants?

Also… why?

Concentrating all high-tech manufacturing in one region of the world seems bad, but so does having local manufacturing for the sake of it.

>Maybe even attempt yet again to fully automate the assembly of them on the continent they are sold, probably foregoing the whole problem with tariffs, education, and labor.

He tried that in the early NeXT era, and maybe he would've given it another shot in the 2010s or 2020s, but the tech doesn't seem to be there.