Cook’ s product lines and services, and my opinion of each (YMMV):
Apple Pay (2014) - hit, real ‘out of the box’ thinking. Few instances of this since.
Apple Watch (2015) - hit, eventually. The rewriting of history to claim it was always a fitness product while conveniently forgetting the initial courting of the luxury fashion market (the Edition, the Galleries Lafayette pop-up, Angela Ahrendts, etc.) is typical Cook BS.
Apple Music (2015) - miss. iTunes + Beats Music still can’t overtake Spotify, arguably hugely overpaid for the latter too. And the App is still a buggy piece of crap.
iPad Pro (2015) - hit, initially to head off the Surface, latterly a magnificent piece of hardware. Still, really just a development of Jobs’ product that Jobs himself would never have approved. Which may be a good thing, or a bad thing.
Apple Pencil (2015) - hit. Steve didn’t stylus, Tim dared.
AirPods (2016) - slam-dunk, out-of-the-park hit.
HomePod (2017) - miss. A fatiguing listen, with a near-useless implementation of Siri; and being closed to all music services other than Apple Music is sheer stupidity. The later HomePod mini is however a spectacularly good audio product (albeit it still only works with Apple Music).
Apple TV+ (2019) - expensive miss (though with the occasional hit, and indeed Oscar!).
Apple Arcade (2019) - lazy miss. Courted the gaming sector, then decided they weren’t interested in putting in the hard yards. Just buy Nintendo, already!
Apple News+ (2019) - miss. Outside of Apple One, does anyone actually pay for this?
Apple Card (2019) - miss. Apple Pay it is not.
Apple Silicon/M1 (2020) - more epoch than hit, although it does have direct lineage back to PA Semi and the A4, therefore as much Jobs as Cook.
Apple Fitness+ (2020) - miss.
Apple One (2020) - miss.
AirPods Max (2020) - unsure; great product but massively overpriced, and with lazy as hell updates.
App Tracking Transparency (2021) - hit.
iCloud+ (2021) - unsure. Some great features, still way too buggy and overpriced compared to the competition.
AirTag/Find My network (2021) - big hit. Nefarious use cases cannot be blamed on Apple.
Apple Vision Pro (2024) - very large miss. Magnificent engineering but a $4000 tech demo/beta in search of a market.
Apple Intelligence (2025) - humongous, utterly embarrassing miss.
MacBook Neo (2026) - hit, but it’s just the new iBook, let’s be honest.
His various macOS, iOS and iPadOS updates are not listed. On those I will offer: the iOSsificaition of macOS has been a f ucking disaster; iOS and iPadOS continue to be brilliant under the hood but have barely innovated UI-wise since iOS 7 and have been going backwards UX-wise for some time now. System software should be a - if not the - priority for Jonny Appleseed.
Not much to quibble about. But there are 4 points I disagree with:
Apple Music: Hit, and only got better since the introduction of lossless and spacial audio. Syncing playlists from my computer(s) to my iPhone, iPad and AppleTV for my home theater/HiFi rig has been used literally every day. I chose Apple Music of Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz.
Apple Music has 110 million paying users.
Comparatively:
Spotify has 290 million paying users.
Amazon Music has 82 million subscribers
Tidal has (guestimated) 3 million paying users
Qobuz has 300,000 paying users
Reason for noting 'paying users' is: Spotify has roughly another 500 million non-paying users. Apple doesn't offer a 'free service' option.
AppleTV+: has been F-ing fantastic. Love their content.
AppleTV+ has 45 million paid subscribers
Comparatively:
Hulu has 65 million paid subscribers
DirectTV has 11 million paid subscribers
Charter Communications TV has 12.5 paid subscribers
YouTube TV has 10 million paid subscribers
Netflix has 325 million paid subscribers.
Amazon has 210 million paid subscribers
HBOMax has 130 million paid subscribers
Apple ONE:
About 43% of Apple Customers are reported to having an Apple One Bundle. ...we're one of the estimated 43%. Hardly a miss.
Apple Silicon/M1. While the A4 chip developed and release in an iPhone under Steve Jobs, Cook without a doubt took a leap of faith to abandon Intel (and AMD) and go with the ARM-based Apple Silicon chips in it's desktops and laptops. That took balls. ...When rumors were swirling Apple was thinking of ditching Intel, a lot of people thought they were turning to AMD as their new supplier, since they had an AMD relationship via video-card/GPUs.
