I have always felt that Tim Cook's biggest legacy at Apple wasn't so much any one revolutionary product that he spearheaded, but his acute business acumen. Tim Cook's appointment as CEO was not predicated on his ability to one day become a product visionary (that role went to Jony Ive). Instead, Tim Cook would go on to methodically build a formidable moat that has both successfully defended against invaders and grown its install base considerably, and this is what has led to Apple weathering the current economic storm way better than other once tech-darlings like Google and Facebook (who today just announced they were retrenching more than 10,000 people).
Since Tim Cook took over in 2011, I have bore witness to how the iPhone install base has steadily grown to well over a billion users currently, and I don't think you can attribute this milestone sole to Steve Job alone, and not the people running the company who also helped make this a reality, because they are the ones who set the current direction for the company (and then the rest execute).
It's also going to sound ironic in a thread with people bashing Apple for supposedly prioritising profits over everything else, but I find that their actions is precisely because Apple had learnt a painful lesson from the past when they did precisely that - focus too much on profits
at the expense of market share. And I think this is the context that people are missing.
Tim Cook would first begin by doubling down on the iPhone. They went from selling the 4s model in 2011 to adopting a multi-year strategy of gradually lowering iPhone pricing and offering more variations (sometimes including a mix of older models) in order to reach larger swaths of the smartphone user base. This is the exact opposite of their Mac strategy in the 1990s, where Apple had a complicated web of Mac models, each with different feature sets meant to chase a particular market niche.
In addition to making the iPhone more accessible to users, Apple is still able to maintain industry-leading profit margins (the iPhone SE likely has a margin comparable to flagship iPhones by virtue of being able to reuse an old but timeless design that has all but been amortised over the years). You don't see such a strategy working with the competition.
There is a certain elegance and beauty in the way Apple has been able to execute their business strategy flawlessly year after year that I feel has gone largely under-appreciated in a forum where being "innovative" is often conflated with being "first", even if it means said company is first to come out with a product that nobody wants or is otherwise fundamentally flawed.
You then have 1 billion-strong active user base who then goes on to purchase other Apple products (eg: iPads, Macs), accessories (Apple Watch, AirPods), services (Apple One, AppleCare), apps etc. You have services like iMessage proving incredibly effective in retaining existing iPhone users. Heck, Apple even earns from each and every Apple Pay transaction even as we speak!
It is this affluent user base that will give the rumoured AR glasses the boost it needs to succeed as well, simply because most of the people with the disposable income to spend on an expensive iPhone accessory are, by definition, iPhone users!
This is Tim Cook's innovation - the building of a formidable ecosystem around the iPhone that has led to record sales year after year after year. I don't know how one can do better, but I can certainly think of a multiple of ways that Apple could have done a lot worse in (and I can't resist pointing out that a lot of them started out as suggestions about what Apple "ought to do" or risk being "doomed"). Acquire Netflix anyone?
