Interesting.
I'm surprised by how much Apple fans don't seem to like Tim Apple. I thought he was well liked?
Steve Jobs was a visionary, it's extremely hard to replicate someone like that. Steve was also lucky to be living in the era of two major technological revolutions — the PC revolution, and the PMC revolution.
Of course Steve Jobs played a major role in both.
Tim Cook brought Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple Vision Pro in terms of hardware.
Nothing as revolutionary as Steve Jobs but still pretty good.
The problem for Tim is that he ran the company during the era of product maturity. Product categories and their form factors have been established, PCs and PMCs have matured. I think the Vision Pro is a good example of consumers simply not wanting anything more.
The move towards the custom M1 silicone also happened during Tim. That move was monumental! It would kill most other companies.
It can also be argued that Steve Jobs directed the ship and Tim just held on to the wheel.
I'm curious as to what innovations would those want who proclaim that Apple does not innovate?
People don't like Tim Apple because innovation has stalled massively. He inherited all the products he needed from someone else and simply milked them to within an inch of their life. Year after year he gave the bare minimum, while taking things away only to introduce paid-for solutions to the problems he created.
iPhone chargers, iPhone earphones (yes they used to be included), cord extensions in MacBook boxes (yes they were included as standard), hell, even stickers because every penny helps.
How about all the gaslighting about the environment and his motives when in fact the only motivation was cost-cutting or monetising.
He has treated developers like dirt and instead of them wanting to develop for Apple, they resent having to be on the App Store as a necessary evil.
He's been fighting regulators to the point of having no option but to withdraw from entire markets. For example USB-C because there was more to be made by keeping the massively inferior (but proprietary) Lightning when the rest of the industry had moved on for years. RCS. App Store fees. Sideloading of apps. Opening up core technologies e.g. NFC so that competition can emerge so that customers have more choice and better pricing. Tim Cook says no to all. Good for Apple, bad for customers. All under the veil of "privacy" or whatever insincere PR spin he attaches to it.
Software quality has suffered massively. Thoughtful, innovative industrial, visual and UX/UI design is a thing of the past, with 'good enough' now often being the norm.
No world problem solving products ever emerged. The Apple car was a fluke, he could not bring the company to actually deliver. The spatial computing thing is something people kind-of-understand but don't want to use, certainly not as part of their daily lives. The Apple watch evolution (a product attributed to him, although R&D began way earlier) has been incredibly minor.
All-round embarrassment when it comes to AI, Siri, and betting on the right horse for the future. He's been saying AR is the future for 15 years, but the future never materialised. Guess this wasn't the future after all.
He made a ton of money for the shareholders because he understands monetisation and because he was incredibly lucky to inherit everything he needed. But he has no vision, and he won't be quoted by anyone in the future as someone who dreamt of a better future.
Hope that clarifies it for you.
