Overall Tim has done a great job the past 15 years. People unfairly compare him to Steve or wished he could recreate the “good old days” with frequent radical releases - iMac, Mac OS X, iPod, iPhone, MacBook Air, iPad. But after iPad, customers get close to a saturation point. iPad was in many ways Steve’s end goal - the sheet of glass that you touch.
Under Tim we got iCloud, which has sewn the ecosystem (AKA “Digital Hub”) together near-perfectly. AirPods, likewise are near-perfect wireless headphones. I think Steve would have loved Apple Music, with its endless discovery, animated album art, concert schedules, karaoke, etc. Apple Watch and Fitness literally saves peoples lives; personally I’ve used it to get in the best shape of my life at age 40. Apple TV wins Oscars and Emmys. The Mac lineup lost its way for a few years but they are now the strongest in history, with in-house Intel-beating processors enabling a whole generation of new industrial designs. A $599 Mac Mini is as performant as a 2010s Mac Pro; they’re basically in their perfected forms at this point.
The company’s revenue has quadrupled, valuation has increased 10-fold, all while improving their labor standards and getting about 80% their way to carbon neutrality. They’ve been a stalwart advocate for privacy, while much of the industry started mining our psychographic data and scanning our emails. They bungled the release of Apple Intelligence but the claim that they are completely late to the game is incomplete; they’ve been laying the foundation for on-device, privacy-respecting ML/AI that is embedded into the OS/UX rather than a standalone app or cloud service.
I say bravo, Tim. A-. And good luck John.
