Add to Cook's impeccable timing, that he stepped out of CEO role and into Chairman on exactly his 65th birthday, the very day he became first eligible for his pension
He had what many called at the time an impossible task of taking over from Jobs. There are areas where things could have gone better but overall he had a solid run and kept the company growing post Jobs.
He deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.
Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
> In short, I think Apple has made a good decision here for short term reasons, but I don’t think it’s a short-term decision: I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run.
I'm not so sure it's smart to rely on others for such a major paradigm shift
Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role.
If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
Yeah I think so too. I'm just wondering if the people on software are still the right people. Mac OS has quite a few regressions, and seems to just chug along instead of really using the power of the chips, or massively improving file i/o. Apple still has a chance to do some cool stuff with AI integrations, but they have had interesting local models 3 years ago and apparently nowhere, or no vision, to use it. We're all clapping for Craig Federighi's jokes but I have no idea if he is a great manager or a great presenter.
I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.
I always understood, going to China, as what the industry was already doing, and Apple was in the middle of coming out of bankruptcy, so pressured to get their costs down. Tim Cook, the process guy, would have been given the task to do just that in an industry that was already consolidating in China.
I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.
Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.
Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.
> Cook was, without question, an operational genius
I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
I used to really appreciate Ben Thompson's takes. He started losing me with his love of Meta's VR devices for meetings. Maybe I didn't get it, I thought. I don't agree with him on a lot of things these days.
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1])
It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.
Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.
The book's thesis is frankly unwarranted Apple glazing. Asian Tigers trained PRC decades before Apple. Muh designed in California and manufactured in China was always Cupertino hands Chinese factory specs and Chinese engineers and workers building it into reality. US manufacturing already in the shits by then, the idea that Apple substantively "elevated" PRC manufacturing is huffing copium. PRC process engineering was always the hardest part of the equation that somehow gets credited to US. PRC manufacturing made Apple, not the other way around.
The reality is PRC already had magnitude more high end manufacturing talent by the time Apple entered PRC already and they're the ones that made Apple scribbles at scale possible. The stories of PRC manufacturers having stupendously fast line turn arounds, making changes in hours should disabuse the notion they needed learning, when they already knew how to execute at scale. Apple's derisked manufacturing in other countries still can't do this, PRC was doing this on day one - see overnight turnaround to retool iPhone line from plastic to glass screen 20 years ago. Apple went to PRC because PRC already had competently trained manufacturing workforce, and only one that can operate at speed + scale. Apple buying a few 1000 CNC machines doesn't tip the balance remotely in Apple's favour - if sector moved towards CNC and tighter tolerances, PRC industry would have simply followed, Apple $$$ is nice, but PRC doesn't need Apple $$$ - capex is not a bottleneck for their system. And Apple would have never push enough goods and make $$$ without PRC.
Apple owns the hardware, they own the ecosystem, and as mathematics and compression prevail, smaller param models will live on device via purpose built chips. The lack of action will in the end be apples saving grace.
Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.
Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
> the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.
Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012.
You could call them a "frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet" but we don't even say that about AMD or Intel despite supporting Linux and shipping GPGPU architectures already. Apple's position in the greater AI/GPGPU industry is widely accepted to be forfeit. Even Google's AI hardware strategy is closer to the frontier than Apple's.
The transformer architecture will be 10 years old, next year. We're in the second or third inning of LLMs right now, depending on how much credit you give ELMo and BERT.
Cook Doctrine: "We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution."
And later:
"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."
Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).
I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).
But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
I dont see it as a contradiction. Apple knows its core competencies and has the cash to back to any initiative worth pursuing through acquisition and/or hiring. Cook was a savant at vertically integrating supply the supply chain and horizontally integrating the entire ecosystem. This led to multiple innovations where Apple is the de facto standard for quality.
The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.
Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.
I would bet large sums of money that Apple is waiting to make a hardware play. When there's a sufficiently capable and intelligence-dense LLM, they will bake it into custom silicon and ship "the first MacBook with on-device AI, powered by our new I1 chip". Imagine Siri being powered by an LLM running entirely on-device at 10,000+ tokens/sec.
Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.
I appreciated Cook when I worked for Apple, but since, I've been disappointed with his lack of pushing the envelope like Jobs. He could have taken Apple to higher heights.
That there were 0 equivalent products to the first iPhone is just a blatent lie. But repeated often enough, it overrides memory and becomes true, I guess.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
Honestly, Apple may very well be betting that AI in it's current form is transitional, and might be better off letting others duke it out for now.
We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
This is such a tiresome perspective. The value of the quote from Thiel should be based on how true/predictive/helpful the quote is. Not the political leanings of the person who said it.
Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.
Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.
While agreeing with the consensus that Thiel is an absolute tool; pieces of wisdom can still be extracted from those that you do not like and a critical reader should be able to evaluate any piece of written text for new understandings.
While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.
On the AI/Gemini and the eventual replacement for an internal stack, Apple has done that before with Apple Maps.
At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.
Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.
As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.
Google themselves also did this with Gemini, we saw how quickly OpenAI's lead was erased. It could make quite a bit of sense to use this as a crutch so they (Apple) can overhaul their own efforts free of production pressures.
I'm not really seeing it though. Apple is more hardware and holistic experience, they aren't traditionally pushing the boundaries of "web-scale" nerd software. As long as they can keep on top of the devices that end up in people's hands they will have a place and don't need to be an AI powerhouse. They're doing just fine using Google Search.
My understanding was that Google was withholding access to features (vector tiles, turn by turn) to renegotiate maps usage. The two things I heard they wanted - features gated on Google login, and advertisements.
Apple had been developing their own maps solution already and accelerated it to land before the end of their existing agreement with Google, when Apple would have to accept Google's terms to continue usage. Google apparently had no idea negotiations had fallen through until the keynote.
It was going to ship as beta quality anyway (they were merging multiple sources of third party data), but the timeline meant it became a replacement in whatever form it was in.
I read an article speculating that Ternus was up next in I think wsj and it sounds like a good decision but obviously time will tell. I've been super disillusioned with Cook for years now, I just hope Ternus's approach isn't just more of the same, and that he actually works to innovate/improve the apple ecosystem.
Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.
It may be unfair to Jobs, but I feel like the comparison of him as the genius vs. Cook the talented enabler is a bit flat.
I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).
Ok, while an author's journey will inevitably influence their opinions, and I think Steve Jobs was a revolutionary visionary, the evidence of objective blinders is staggering.
I almost deferred to the classic jab about their being a member of the "cult of Steve Jobs" but then I read their comment about being an intern at Apple University and realized the author was simply institutionally indoctrinated. Clearly I jest but...
Apple did not invent the smartphone. It didn't invent the music player. It didn't invent the portable tablet. It didn't invent the personal information manager.
This was not a zero to one. To some extent you could say he even reused some of his own playbook from his attempt to make the iMac a cult hit. I do think he introduced the right product at the right time, but I think it was his strategy, or obsession, with perfecting the user experience that was definitely a zero to one.
> Well, today we’re introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one: a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second: a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.
Every time that i watch that keynote i think that Jobs should have started that list with the internet communication device thing, then the touch ipod and mobile phone last. The audicience responded to the internet device with a "meh" after the mobile phone announcement.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadHe deserves some downtime and I for one don’t blame him for wanting to wind down. Apple’s approach to privacy is rare in big tech and something I hope the company continues to stand behind. That is a true differentiator in the market right now.
Apple has also broadly sat out the present AI hype cycle, a decision that’s looking increasingly smarter every day.
I'm not so sure it's smart to rely on others for such a major paradigm shift
counterfactuals are hard
If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
are you imaging them creating whole new devices?
I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.
I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.
Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.
Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.
I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
> There was not, under Cook’s leadership, a single significant product issue or recall.
The butterfly keyboards are still talked about here and in other forums. It was a significant product issue. It hurt Apple a great deal. It wasn't the whole product, which I think might be his defense of the wording, but it hurt the whole company's image.
And the Homepod was a flop even if they brought it back in a smaller form. And what happened to the AirPower charger that never shipped because they couldn't overcome physics? And who could forget the Apple Intelligence features (including new Siri) that a reliable source within Apple has told me the demos in the announcement video never existed in that form internally? According to this person, all the grunts making the things were shocked to see it presented that way because they knew it didn't work.
And opening with a quote from Peter Thiel, a techno-fascist…[0] poor taste. I don't care what that man says about anything.
I stopped reading halfway. I was only curious what he'd have to say. I don't need the opinions of most people about this transition because, as a hardcore Apple user, I've been thinking about this a lot for a while. And I care more about the things said by the hosts of a podcast that I listen to where there are some really thoughtful people discussing aspects of this that I know about as well as aspects that hadn't occurred to me. It was sort of a rubberneck click to see what Thompson might say.
Ben Thompson. Sometimes insightful. This article, meh.
0. Palantir Goes Mask-Off For Fascism. It Won’t End Well. - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/20/palantir-goes-mask-off-f...
It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy.
Frankly, he shouldn't legally have even been able to do this. But that he was, he ought to be crowned one of China's greatest champions of this century.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SerbnYhhw7s
The reality is PRC already had magnitude more high end manufacturing talent by the time Apple entered PRC already and they're the ones that made Apple scribbles at scale possible. The stories of PRC manufacturers having stupendously fast line turn arounds, making changes in hours should disabuse the notion they needed learning, when they already knew how to execute at scale. Apple's derisked manufacturing in other countries still can't do this, PRC was doing this on day one - see overnight turnaround to retool iPhone line from plastic to glass screen 20 years ago. Apple went to PRC because PRC already had competently trained manufacturing workforce, and only one that can operate at speed + scale. Apple buying a few 1000 CNC machines doesn't tip the balance remotely in Apple's favour - if sector moved towards CNC and tighter tolerances, PRC industry would have simply followed, Apple $$$ is nice, but PRC doesn't need Apple $$$ - capex is not a bottleneck for their system. And Apple would have never push enough goods and make $$$ without PRC.
Even if they don't go that route, the data from icloud, cash on hand, and partnerships with sota labs, still position them as a frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet.
Anyway you shake it strategically, Apple still owns the ecosystem end-to-end.
Apple mass-produces raster GPUs and bakes them into an expensive ARM SOC. They are not a drop-in replacement for CUDA or any of the expensive GPGPU hardware. Apple Silicon runs compute shaders just like the GPUs from 2012.
You could call them a "frontier competitor that just hasn't launched yet" but we don't even say that about AMD or Intel despite supporting Linux and shipping GPGPU architectures already. Apple's position in the greater AI/GPGPU industry is widely accepted to be forfeit. Even Google's AI hardware strategy is closer to the frontier than Apple's.
And later:
"I strongly suspect that Apple, whether it has admitted it to itself or not, has just committed itself to depending on 3rd-parties for AI for the long run."
Clearly those two quotes are in contradiction (not that Tim said the 2nd but it is implied that this is where Apple is heading).
I think too that would be a big mistake. I understand LLM's appear to still be in a kind of flux and jumping in too soon could lead to PR headaches (Microsoft's Nazi 'bot problems come to mind).
But in as much as they own the dies for their chips and ought to be able to incorporate radical LLM support on local hardware, they should absolutely be planning a portable Apple LLM.
The silicon behind Apple devices were worth owning and controlling but beyond that he may not have seen how Apples goes 0->1 for AI hence the idea to partner with other leaders. Apple did this for the mobile Web Browser so why not for AI as well. Let others subsidize those capabilities and make consumers/end users prefer Apple devices where it can actually shine.
Let Apple fast follow while others subsidize the R&D and validate the demand. That's what has allowed Apple to always end up on top.
Most consumer tasks don't require a frontier model, and (beyond the app store) Apple isn't interested in being a channel through which a frontier model provider like OpenAI can sell subscriptions to their own model.
Apple Watch, AirPods, M1 Silicon, services.
A few flops, like Apple Vision Pro and their confusion with AI. But that's ok given the wins.
Overall, as a non-founder he's near the tops in CEOs over the last couple of decades. The only non-founders I would put above him are Satya (although he has a had a couple of rough years), Bob Iger, Jamie Dimon and maybe Andy Jassy.
Taking a fair lens to this he is "first round hall of fame non-founder".
We still haven't found and agreed upon the 'best' way for AI to work in a given environment, and the experts in this area aren't working at Apple. Once there is a clear path forwards to use AI best, it makes sense for Apple to jump in.
e.g. Apple buys moonshot or z.ai
Someone locally said they wouldn't listen to anything Strong Towns wrote because they are pro-housing. Even though the article from Strong Towns directly addressed the question the person was asking about quite well.
Tribalism is going to destroy us all. Thiel can have great perspectives, even if he has been undercutting democracy at every turn.
While I do agree that the 0 -> 1 product is the Apple iPhone, the author of this piece does not acknowledge that the Airpods were the 0 -> 1 product under Tim Cook.
This runs counter to today's tribalism which says we must reject truth if it comes from someone who voted for our political opponents.
At the start people laughed at the melting bridges and the airport in a farm (the popular Airfield farm in Dublin, which we visited countless times with our daughter and their friends), but, in the end, it's a competent replacement for Google Maps.
Apple is betting that good enough will get cheaper - with cheaper training, and that it will be possible to run good enough inference with local models fine tuned on the device with data you have on your iCloud. Google will still have their colossal structure and these huge deployments will, clearly, get us to superhuman levels of artificial intelligence, but that's a lot more than good enough.
As the MacBook Neo demonstrates, sometimes the brains of a phone is all you need for a desktop computer, and, if that's good enough for you, it makes no sense to get a Mac Studio with 256GB of memory, unless you want it to tune your iPhone's models in seconds rather than overnight on the charger.
I'm not really seeing it though. Apple is more hardware and holistic experience, they aren't traditionally pushing the boundaries of "web-scale" nerd software. As long as they can keep on top of the devices that end up in people's hands they will have a place and don't need to be an AI powerhouse. They're doing just fine using Google Search.
Apple had been developing their own maps solution already and accelerated it to land before the end of their existing agreement with Google, when Apple would have to accept Google's terms to continue usage. Google apparently had no idea negotiations had fallen through until the keynote.
It was going to ship as beta quality anyway (they were merging multiple sources of third party data), but the timeline meant it became a replacement in whatever form it was in.
This must be a hallucination because it's still a wasteland here.
Maybe in the US and a handful of other countries. See the replies on this thread talking about various issues with using Apple Maps elsewhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47840219#47840616.
Hell I'd KILL for them to just take the time to make Homekit like 10% better.
I think the genius of Cook becomes obvious when you look at the fate of Tesla - if Musk, another impressive mind of our time, had "gone away" in the right window and was replaced by a person like Cook who got it to really broad adoption, then everyone would say "Musk the visionary did it all", but in fact, its much harder to do the right stuff right, than just be the one constantly shooting stuff against the wall wondering what might stick. Jobs was a century defining visionary, sure, but that is not enough, by a far margin. There are so many great ideas out there, where nobody knows how to pull it off (see communism as an off example).
I almost deferred to the classic jab about their being a member of the "cult of Steve Jobs" but then I read their comment about being an intern at Apple University and realized the author was simply institutionally indoctrinated. Clearly I jest but...
Apple did not invent the smartphone. It didn't invent the music player. It didn't invent the portable tablet. It didn't invent the personal information manager.
This was not a zero to one. To some extent you could say he even reused some of his own playbook from his attempt to make the iMac a cult hit. I do think he introduced the right product at the right time, but I think it was his strategy, or obsession, with perfecting the user experience that was definitely a zero to one.
Every time that i watch that keynote i think that Jobs should have started that list with the internet communication device thing, then the touch ipod and mobile phone last. The audicience responded to the internet device with a "meh" after the mobile phone announcement.