Apple CEO Tim Cook Stepping Down, John Ternus Taking Over

[Velli]

Tim Cook brought Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple Vision Pro in terms of hardware.

Come on, how could that ever compete with bangers such as LISA, ROKR, MobileMe, iPod HiFi, and the Puck Mouse?

 

[Tim Jobs the 2nd]

Those who have been very critical of Tim will quickly do the same to John as well. Tim did a great job and I’m sure John will as well.

 

[Tim Jobs the 2nd]

The boat facing the right direction does not help much if it’s at the bottom of the ocean.

Whose job is it to make sure the boat does not sink?

In what world is Apple’s boat close to sinking?

 

[Tim Jobs the 2nd]

The Apple watch evolution (a product attributed to him, although R&D began way earlier) has been incredibly minor.

Funny how people will say this and yet if Apple Glasses or the iPhone Fold are hits, he’ll get none of the credit despite both products being done mostly under him

 

[Steve Adams]

My take on this is nothing is going to change. Ternus was already head of hardware, so all hardware is on his shoulders already.

As for ads etc. That's going to be a thing moving forward. Everywhere. The shareholders won't get their 20 percent growth per quarter by removing revenue streams.

My only hope is that they don't go down the Johnny Ive rabbit hole again, making the thinnest products evaaaaa.

Keep the MBP with all the ports please...hell add them back to the air while you are at it.

iPads are at peak, so let them have more powerful software to run with the processors inside them. Make an offical clamshell keyboard for them so they feel and look like a macbook instead of some add on like the current "magic" keyboard.

iPhone, this is where you need to reverse course a bit. The pro/max are CHONKY now. They need to slim them down a bit. The overall size of them are fine, but thickness needs to be shaved down a bit. create a true creator accessories kit for photography, videography and production. Accessories could use an awesome bump at apple. Instead of a cleaning cloth and a sock with a hole cut in it.

 

[SergueiTemp]

This Ternus guy is even more boring than Cook.

Federighi should've been named CEO.

Yeah, software has not been polished lately, but at least they're doing something, iPad got a great OS update.

And what did Apple hardware achieve? Bulky ugly designs from 2008? The devices barely change, the hardware only gets more cores/clock speed without any meaningful impact but with thermals getting worse and worse every gen.

 

[User 6502]

Yes, he actually said "I can't imagine a life without Apple" and since he stays on the board, he won't have to; pretty slick answer.

He’s clearly on a garden leave. He won’t have any say or actual power, it’s just the way high profile people are ushered out a company.

 

[Seanm87]

To be honest I think it’s time to have someone new who can inject fresh ideas.

Apple has become very stagnant lately and hopefully Ternus injects a bit innovation into Apple again.

 

[Runaway Train]

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.

« He made a ton of money for the shareholders ». That’s his job, and he certainly did it well.

Apple is a huge publicly traded company. Companies of this size simply cannot « innovate » as if they were a smaller nimble enterprise. Too many layers, too much politics and massive bureaucracy. If you’ve every worked for one of these - you know that.

By the time Jobs had passed the plane was already at cruising altitude. Cook’s job was to avoid turbulence, serve first, business class and make sure the inflight movies went off with I out a hitch.

 

[Lioness~]

Looking forward to watch the 1st keynote with Ternus.
Haven’t watched anything with Tim the latest years, which was a great decision.
The only thing that kept me with Apple is the Apple Silicon, so great to see Johny Srouji step up too.

Bye, bye to the cooked guy, won’t miss you a second 😂

 

[dan98]

When a founding CEO dies he takes that unique passion and vision with him - what's left are just poor facsimiles of the original and a bunch of people with mixed intentions; primarily to extract the cash out of the corpse.

All Tim Cook gave was more of the same.. drearily going through the motions while absolutely maximising profit.

Whoever's next will give their own twist on the situation but Apple, as it was, is dead forever. No amount of bleating and dreaming will change that.

There are likely to be more visionary companies emerging in future years however - innovation itself will never die, just continue to re-emerge in unlikely ways.

 

[krspkbl]

Tim had some **** ups with AI being the biggest one. I wouldn't be surprised if that was what has made him leave.

Vision Pro i think does have a place in some form. If they stick with the headsets then they need to be cheaper with better battery life. Maybe the "Vision" name will live on through glasses.

Apple wouldn't be the giant it is today if it wasn't for Tim but yeah it does feel like it's time for him to leave. Can't wait to see what John does with Apple. I'm excited 🙂

 

[decafjava]

Well Tim did accomplish some important things but it's time for fresh ideas and blood at top. A hardware person is a good choice IMHO.

 

[Steve Adams]

They need to aggressively fix Liquid glASS. The little things, once fixed, will make it awesome. I love my iPad much more because of multi window support. It's how I use my windows systems, so to have that same functionality on my iPad is a winner.

 

[ScanTheNavian]

To be honest I think it’s time to have someone new who can inject fresh ideas.

Apple has become very stagnant lately and hopefully Ternus injects a bit innovation into Apple again.

To have that I think Apple needs to have more passionate individuals like in the Jobs era. People who are willing to shout, quarrel and butt heads for their ideas. But it can't be done without an intuitive, intelligent and charismatic person like Jobs keeping them in check. It's no wonder we haven't seen that in Cook's era as, while he has his strengths, he's very far away from having the patience and passion required for it. He prefers to have Golden Retrievers while Jobs had Siberian Huskies.

Hopefully Ternus can somehow reach a place between those two Apples and not just keep sailing Cook's ship.

 

[surferfb]

Thats a cheap question. These CEOs don't get paid millions to sit there on money and invest it a little and make a bit more. Asking a random online chatter to come up with innovative products is a cheap question. The average individual isn't an inventor or innovative but they know when a good product comes out as in the iphone and ipod. The world does as well.

The CEO doesn’t get paid millions to come up with the innovative ideas. That’s the responsibility of those below him/her.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

I'm cautiously optimistic about this transition. I think Ternus is probably less prone to taking chances than Cook was. But maybe that's actually what Apple needs right now: A hard look at the product line(s) and maybe a bit of pruning, and refining?

Also, I'm starting to wonder if Apple have a potential ace up their sleeve; some new product (other than Apple Glasses, HomePod/iPad hybrid Home device, or whatever AI-wearable they've got to combat Jony Ive's "AI-pin"), that could - and I'm not saying it will - be "the next big thing", ie. something as successful as the Apple Watch or AirPods has been (each of whom generate as much revenue as a mid-range Fortune 500 company). That's just a hunch though, and may be totally wrong... 🙂

I also liked Gruber's take on this:

Another Day Has Come

If you agree that Apple itself was It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.

daringfireball.net

 

[apps1991]

John Ternus Now tech or IT corporates know a good CEO must have solid engineering chops

 

[MilaM]

Since Cook still seems to be in a very powerful position at Apple, I'm wondering how much freedom the new CEO will have to realize his vision for Apple. I really disliked Cooks obsession with services and the way this strategy has influenced how Apple software works in practice. Maybe a hardware and product guy will be more focused on interoperability? Probably just wishful thinking 🤷‍♂️.

 

[shapesinaframe]

Not surprising it’s happening, surprised it took this long. Given the increased frequency of monumental f-ups, it’s overdue.

The Apple Car 📉
The Apple Vision Pro 📉
Apple Intelligence 📉
Liquid Glassing all of the operating systems 📉
The Mac Pro 📉

 

[surferfb]

He’s clearly on a garden leave. He won’t have any say or actual power, it’s just the way high profile people are ushered out a company.

Being Chairman of the Board is absolutely not garden leave. An executive chairman, especially of a major company like Apple, has formal authority and fiduciary duties. Like evaluating (and potentially firing) the CEO, approving long-term corporate strategy and major decisions, maintaining relationships with partners and policymakers, fiduciary oversight, etc. Cook will have real power and influence. I’m not claiming he’s going to be shadow CEO or more powerful than Ternus, but the Executive Chairman of a company isn’t a courtesy title.

Outside of a small subset of Apple enthusiasts disproportionally represented in sites like MacRumors, Cook is incredibly well respected and liked. This is especially true at Apple, and doubly so for shareholders, which is who the board represents. The board (and honestly, probably the executive team) is going to want Cook involved.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

It's important to remember that Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook as his successor. Cook managed to execute on Steve Jobs' decade long roadmap and grow the company to unimaginable heights.

But Tim Cook was anything but a visionary and he completely missed what Steve Jobs intended for Siri, which debuted in the iPhone the day before his death. New blood is needed and an engineer who's a stickler for detail is a great place to start.

Bring on the next Era.

I think the reason Jobs picked Cook was because he wanted someone with competency to preserve his legacy, not a drastic change in Apple’s direction. It’s an understandable decision but I wished he picked a product person with more of a vision for Apple instead.

 

[jido]

Yeah, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't blurt out expletive apple multiple times, sometimes in public.
I cancelled Apple Fitness after subscribing since the very beginning because I had a year of fighting to get my AppleTV to connect to my phone or watch for authentication, often spending more time than the workout would have been trying to get it to even let me in before giving up. Just works .... my .....

Or Apple Maps... I put a multi-destination route in, connect to car play. Get out at the first stop, car still running, and CarPlay loses connection....come back to drive to the next stop, and after reconnecting Apple Maps clears my route...

There are a whole host of these stupid issues that have cropped up in recent years, and Tim Cook would rather focus on making the weirdest product segmentation decisions and expanding into vehicles than to have his teams double down on quality. I've always said, you look at the number of revised products a company like Dell can pump out in a year, and then you look at Apple and its like they have a single hardware team moving from product to product letting some products go 3 or 4 years or more between desperately needed updates. Richest company in the world refuses to staff up to meet the needs of their customers. We couldn't possibly invest in more engineers to fix our software bugs, we need to get more emojis in our software....

Instead of becoming a financial services company and focussing on how they can ignore court orders and keep their 30% fee on software they didn't write, they should focus on building their own products. Its not that we are bashing Apple products, which are still really well made... we dislike the company slowly releasing more and more buggy software or or charging 10-yr old prices on RAM and storage.

He will not be missed. He coasted on Steve Jobs product pipeline. There is a reason so many Apple loyalists in here were fed up with him. At least he will have more time for movie nights with the cheeto.

I don’t agree with everything said, but that kind of issue is symptomatic of what is wrong with Apple today.

Usability issues need to be taken much more seriously.

 

[Agent OrangeZ]

Should have gotten Elon Musk. He made autonomous cars a reality, when Tim couldn't.

 

[_apple_apple_]

To be honest I think it’s time to have someone new who can inject fresh ideas.

Apple has become very stagnant lately and hopefully Ternus injects a bit innovation into Apple again.

The C-suite at Apple are not untouchable creative geniuses; the board can replace them at any time with less benevolent people. Even Apple is perpetually at risk of sliding into 'evil' territory. Their decisions are all analytics/logistics driven like every other company, these staffing changes won't radically change that.

What I'm curious about, is if they'll use this staffing shake-up to roll out other shake-ups. For example, dropping the 'i' naming convention (iPhone, iCloud, etc); usually that would seem like a terrible idea, but during a shake-up you can spin it as a bold new direction, a necessary step towards future greatness, etc.

Apple does file a ton of patents, but only a small number are about new low-level tech. R&D is expensive, riddled with patent land-mines, and usually killed by impractical fabrication realities. Sometimes they get a win here though, like their SoC stuff, and some audio stuff. They've more or less delegated that problem to other companies, and focus on the harmony between hardware/software/services/experience. These days inventors are researchers and they are all over the place.