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rweichler | 8 months ago

When Cook became CEO, all of this was inevitable. I used to blame Jobs for not picking Forstall as his successor, but it recently dawned on me that it was never his choice to begin with. The board probably crowded him out again, just like the Sculley situation.

In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 167 months passed, he left in August 2011. It has been 166 months since then.

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ksec|8 months ago

Cant believe Tim Cook is about to be CEO longer than Steve Jobs. Thank You for that perspective.

On the other hand Steve Jobs has accomplished far more within the same time frame compared to Tim Cook with far fewer resources. I really like the analogy of "autopilot".

I do think Steve could push Forstall as his successor, but didn't because Forstall wasn't ready as CEO. Tim Cook was a much better choice at the time as they have to compete with Android and they need market share ( in terms of user not sales ) to not repeat the same mistake with Mac vs PC. Tim should have mediate between Forstall and Ive instead of picking sides. The restructuring created power vacuum for Craig and Eddy Cue to pick up. With Crag we end up with OS that is constantly resume / features release driven and Eddy Cue which we end up with Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade. None of them in my opinion are good decisions or great products / services.

anon7000|8 months ago

Accomplish more is relative. At a large, later stage, companies become a lot more stability and long term revenue & sustainability. Which Tim Cook has absolutely excelled at. Sure, Steve was more of a tech revolutionary. But weird designs were super common under him! The Apple design language has been pretty consistent over the past decade.

I think it’s odd this thread is largely complaining about Apple taking too many risks, or making weird designs they don’t like, or being too feature-driven. The fact of the matter is that Apple has by far created the most stable tech ecosystem of any comparable company. With a very consistent design language as well.

Windows has a horrific track record (with only Windows 7 & 10 being well regarded in the past 15+ years). Android typically doesn’t support devices with major software updates past a small handful of years. Apple’s combo of privacy, long term support, and extremely consistent release cadences & design language make it a much more stable platform than practically anything else. They even did an entire hardware architecture change under our feet without downgrading the user experience in any meaningful way.

I mean whether or not you agree or like Apple’s service products like Apple Music, it is absolutely a very smart business decision to continue investing in them. Apple TV has a higher percentage of high quality content than other providers. Apple Music is at worst hardly that different than Spotify. Apple Arcade is just a way to bundle products that already exist.

rweichler|8 months ago

Cook is not "about to be CEO longer than Steve Jobs", he was also CEO from 1976-1985

BitwiseFool|8 months ago

I suspect ego played a part in Steve Jobs selecting Tim Cook as his successor. Famous CEO's tend to pick a successor that is less charismatic and more risk-averse than they were. CEO's that retire 'honorably', so to speak, don't want someone who will outshine them or make sweeping changes to the brand or the company's organization. In other words, they want to preserve their legacy.

Tim Cook is exactly this kind of executive. While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple, the public doesn't give credit for that sort of thing. Now imagine if Steve appointed someone just like himself and the business fumbled. Steve would hate for his legacy to be tarnished by appointing a brash successor.

All that being said, for what it's worth, I don't think anyone could have lived up to Steve's reputation. It is quite unfair to Tim Cook that he will always be compared to what people think Steve Jobs would have done.

blt|8 months ago

IDK, I think Apple creating its own laptop/desktop-class CPU was a pretty bold move with a huge payoff. It's less sexy than introducing an entirely new category of product, but it's not exactly risk-averse either.

bigyabai|8 months ago

> While he has done an incredible job with leading the business and operational side of Apple

Can we say that yet? A lot of value was made in the short term, but it kinda feels like that would happen to any CEO that has an iPhone moment on their hands. Cook's real challenge was to flip the scenario into something sustainable; can Apple take the excitement and turn it into a product line?

They certainly tried. Cook led the charge on the Apple Watch, which fell short of a tentpole offering but still found an audience. Airpods took off, presumably after Cook learned from the failure (and acquisition) of Beats by Dre. And Vision Pro... the less said the better. Maybe there's something still in the holster, but I expect this to be a dead-end product line moreso than Airpower.

Are disposable headphones enough to build a legacy off of? The Apple Watch certainly isn't, and don't even get me started on Vision Pro. We could point to the big one that everyone likes to credit him as; "the supply chain guy", but even that seems to foster political contention in America. Apple's software faces antitrust scrutiny, privacy concerns[0], and an overall degradation in app quality as their attention splits into different markets. The legacy is the important question, and if Tim Cook were to resign tomorrow I think he would be remembered as the CEO that screwed Apple over for good.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

aikinai|8 months ago

Steve knew he'd dead by the time the next CEO's results were in. Do you really think he'd prefer Apple to stagnate rather than continue to soar with a great CEO after his dead?

hn_throwaway_99|8 months ago

Literally everything I've ever read about Forstall and his behavior post-Jobs makes me think he would have been an awful CEO. It just sounded like he was "Game of Thrones-ing" from the second Cook became CEO. E.g. it was widely reported that Ive and Forstall could barely stand to be in the same meeting with each other. I may have some criticisms in my mind about some of Ive's design post-Jobs, but I don't think I have ever heard other folks be critical of Ive's leadership style or personality - everything I've read about him uses words like "inspirational", "remarkable", "calm", etc. I've read tons of criticism about Forstall.

makeitdouble|8 months ago

TBF Jobs wasn't a well-rounded human being either.

It all comes down to what results they can produce inside the organization, people will bear the worst assholes if the output can justify it somehow.

eddythompson80|8 months ago

Man, if Apple 2011-2025 is "on autopilot" I wish I was on autopilot like that. Can you give me a company that wasn't? I'm curious what your bar is exactly.

pndy|8 months ago

Jobs pick him because he knew he's gonna to handle company's financials good once he's gone. My partner says Cook is just a good accountant focused on keeping numbers up and nothing else.

m33pm33p|8 months ago

Wow hard to believe it’s been that long but really puts this era at Apple in perspective