From “think different “ to “Rethink nothing!”. It’s time for Tim to go!

[aevan]

I assume you have evidence to back this claim up?

Of course they do, the evidence comes from such sources as “I feel like it is true” and “my brain told me so”.

 

[Ctrlos]

Why would or should they replace him?

Just asking chatgpt, it seems Apple's market cap was 350 - 500 billion when Tim Cook took over, versus today when 3.3 trillion (or if you will, over 3,000 billion).

Using any and every metric available, Apple has been wildly successful with Tim Cook at the helm.

Until about 2 years ago I would have also said the same thing. But Apple's recent internal chaos is the sort of mismanagement that brought down other historic brands in the past, notably RIM.

 

[heretiq]

Until about 2 years ago I would have also said the same thing. But Apple's recent internal chaos is the sort of mismanagement that brought down other historic brands in the past, notably RIM.

So, does this support OPs assertion that one of the most successful CEOs in the history of commerce should be preemptively removed while presiding over the world’s most valued company with the highest brand loyalty and CSAT ratings .. because the company stumbles occasionally while doing things that are impossible for 99.99+% of businesses?

 

[seek3r]

So, does this support OPs assertion that one of the most successful CEOs in the history of commerce should be preemptively removed while presiding over the world’s most valued company with the highest brand loyalty and CSAT ratings .. because the company stumbles occasionally while doing things that are impossible for 99.99+% of businesses?

these folks also seem to be forgetting Jobs had plenty of stumbles too, no one’s perfect, they’re looking back with rose tinted glasses

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

Until about 2 years ago I would have also said the same thing. But Apple's recent internal chaos is the sort of mismanagement that brought down other historic brands in the past, notably RIM.

So, does this support OPs assertion that one of the most successful CEOs in the history of commerce should be preemptively removed while presiding over the world’s most valued company with the highest brand loyalty and CSAT ratings .. because the company stumbles occasionally while doing things that are impossible for 99.99+% of businesses?

Not only do I agree with this, I also absolutely hate the comparison to RIM.
It’s a comparison that barely makes sense, RIM did one thing well for a *very* short amount of time. They didn’t have a massive ecosystem of devices, they had the blackberry… and nothing else.

All it took for blackberry to fall was for their phone to become less desirable.
Apple easily could have followed the same path if they refused to do anything after the iPod.
But they haven’t, instead they’ve diversified.
Computers, phones, tablets, speakers, watches, streaming platforms, digital marketplaces, custom silicon, all of their own software and services, headphones, item trackers, headsets, TV boxes, and so on and so on.
Plus, unlike RIM, Apple has a 50 year legacy.

 

[AgentElliot007]

And that ultimately is what these threads are usually about. Certain people want to go back to the time where they were 'special' and 'set apart'. Better than others and a cut above the rest.

But outright stating that invites the inevitable comments of entitlement and criticism for thinking what they think - they are better than every one else because they use an Apple device. So, it's cloaked in criticism about Apple's practices. I.e., if Apple is 'great' again, then so am I. Fix Apple and I look like a god of tech again, the discriminating connoisseur who sagely and wisely made the right choice - while the rabble fight over the also rans.

This attitude was predominant in the iPhone subforum for years. It's never gone away completely unfortunately.

Or some people simply want more product-oriented leadership and ecosystem cohesion which has been greatly lacking. Doesn’t matter if it was Tim or anyone else, this many years of floundering user experiences is enough to start calling it how it is. They’ve masked much of the problem with hardware and chip teams still outperforming the competition, but the software in general, the cloud experience, the intelligence experience, the devices claiming to work easily together but never doing so experience.

Enough.

Someone needs to step in, look at the whole, and crack the ol’ whip as they say, as the ship is once again massively out of sorts.

 

[Siliconguy]

Tick Cook evaluation:

Positives;

M series systems. Still ahead of the pack. AMD can match the performance but at the cost of higher power consumption.

General business management. As many products and supply chains as Apple manages this is no easy task and they are doing very well.

Negatives;

The AI debacle. Much was promised, little was delivered.

OS quality is in the crapper, the rollouts of IOS/iPadOS 18 and Sequoia were terrible probably because too many resources were stripped from OS testing to the AI debacle which still failed.

The goggles. Fine as a technology demonstrator, lousy as a product. At best it shows the way to a future product as the Lisa did. Recall a great many Lisas ended up in a landfill after the Mac shipped.

The Apple Car. File that under "What were they thinking?" (Thinking or smoking?)

I'll add one more, the dogged refusal to upgrade base RAM. The midrange Mac mini from 2014 came with 8 GB. The 2012 came with 4 GB, but was upgradable. I suspect many AI features will not be working on 8 GB Macs in the near future. There is a reason they suddenly upgraded Base to 16 GB.

Along with that is storage. 256 GB is still standard? My 2009 Mini came with a 320 GB HDD. The 2012 had a 500 GB HDD or a 256 GB SSD. Clearly Apple really wants you to buy iCloud.

 

[Siliconguy]

Expanding on the previous post, The desktop competition;

Beelink SER8 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 7 8745HS(up to 4.9GHz), 32GB DDR5 1TB PCIe4.0 SSD, AMD Radeon 780M Mini Desktop Computer 4K Triple Display HDMI 2.1+DP+USB4/WiFi 6/BT5.2/2.5G LAN, Office/Home/Gaming PC.

$500. It also has a second M.2 slot. The CPU is roughly a match for an M3 Pro. Apple dares not rest on their laurels.

The full size desktop workstation market is already lost to any decent AMD/Intel with a high end Nvidia GPU.

 

[waziazi]

It’s become a real goblin fest over there.

 

[waziazi]

They first told us that 8gb was enough cuz efficiency. Shot themselves in the foot cuz now their crappy AI needs 16gb minimum. Greedy man. Slimy folks. Apple got rotten. Infested by garbage employees.

 

[seek3r]

Or some people simply want more product-oriented leadership and ecosystem cohesion which has been greatly lacking. Doesn’t matter if it was Tim or anyone else, this many years of floundering user experiences is enough to start calling it how it is. They’ve masked much of the problem with hardware and chip teams still outperforming the competition, but the software in general, the cloud experience, the intelligence experience, the devices claiming to work easily together but never doing so experience.

Enough.

Someone needs to step in, look at the whole, and crack the ol’ whip as they say, as the ship is once again massively out of sorts.

Not sure what you’re talking about, my stuff works pretty seamlessly together…

 

[smirking]

Until there are tech breakthroughs that push the boundaries of known physics or open some new frontier, there are no more 'bold' companies.

Lots of people glossing over something key mentioned by @DHagan4755. Battery life is the next frontier and until we have next generation batteries, we're milling out incremental improvements.

Some of the releases mentioned by @maflynn could be seen as precursor forays into futuretech that are waiting on a paradigm change to blossom.

Not dismissing Steve Jobs nor deifying Tim Cook here, but just trying to limit my reply to yet another W.W.S.J.D. post down to as few words as possible. No organization this large is the result of only one person.

 

[coachgq]

Apple is doing what Steve Jobs intended it to do after he died - surviving in a world of mature technology. Until there are tech breakthroughs that push the boundaries of known physics or open some new frontier, there are no more 'bold' companies. Because there's nothing left to be 'bold' about.

The frontier of technology has been conquered, occupied and paved over with a parking lot.

They paved paradise…and put up a parking lot.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

If Steve Jobs had found the fountain of youth, and stayed on at Apple, he’d be as hated now as Tim Cook is.

I loved the attention to detail in the Jobs era. Both software and the hardware.

But lately iOS has been crappy. For example, there are dark mode icons in the iCloud settings with light mode icons everywhere else, “one” is spelled out while everything else is a number in storage settings for Music app. All this is 18.5.
Parts of iOS 26 still show up as iOS 19.0. The dev team has been so lazy. At a company like Apple, these should’ve never been possible. And the most frustrating of all is the autocorrect changing words 2-3 words into a sentence. Jobs would’ve gone berserk till that was fixed.

While Cook isn’t bad per se, the attention to detail and the simplicity that everyone came to love and expect from Apple isn’t there anymore. Just building a product half-assed and getting it out there. And with the keynotes being recorded, they’re not even building the product before announcing it out loud.

The first time I used the iPod shuffle and a MacBook Pro (~2007) are the magical experiences I’ll never forget and haven’t seen in a very long time. Cook is more about churning out the revenue while Jobs was directly about Apple as an experience and didn’t give a damn about money.

Recent products have been good especially the M-series chips and the AirPods Pro but the UI mishaps are what frustrates me most about Cook.

The deal with the OS reporting different version numbers is a compatibility technique Apple uses to make sure apps don't break because the version check returned an unexpected value.

But who will replace him? The obvious choice might be Craig but he lacks vision as well. Apple's software might have gotten a lick of paint recently but it's still the same old iOS underneath for better and worse. Phil Schiller would be a shoe in but he suffers from the same problem as the rest of the candidates: they're all too close to retirement.

Apple should being back Tony Fadell.

What else should be underneath? What's wrong with XNU/Darwin? Or should the interface and APIs be burnt back to the ground and a whole new set built on the same kernel? I don't understand this argument. (I'm not trying to attack you for it, I want to understand what you're getting at)

i remember watching the first steps of "VR" on a show called beyond 2000, back in the 90s.

Oh man, I used to love watching Beyond 2000!!!

 

[ThailandToo]

Apple is doing what Steve Jobs intended it to do after he died - surviving in a world of mature technology. Until there are tech breakthroughs that push the boundaries of known physics or open some new frontier, there are no more 'bold' companies. Because there's nothing left to be 'bold' about.

The frontier of technology has been conquered, occupied and paved over with a parking lot.

None of what you say is true. It’s just not. First, Tim was meant to lead for three to five years until Forstall would take over. Second, Tim got rid of all the talent that would threat to his $100m annually. Third, Tim knows how to make the wealthy wealthier which is why Tim Crook is still CEO. Fourth, greed and power win over innovation because the short term is rewarded. Fifth, Apple will fall if it doesn’t course correct with new leadership that innovates again. Sixth, innovation is not owning all the key technologies of your products, it just profits more for now. Seventh, Crook’s AAPL is so anticompetitive it should be regulated like the EU has done. I love Apple products, but I don’t love that I can’t do whatever I want with a device I paid for and I can’t wait until Tim’s Apple is dead and Apple can innovate again with new leadership.

 

[seek3r]

What else should be underneath? What's wrong with XNU/Darwin? Or should the interface and APIs be burnt back to the ground and a whole new set built on the same kernel? I don't understand this argument. (I'm not trying to attack you for it, I want to understand what you're getting at)

I'll be honest, I'm not actually sure the folks you're replying to understand that MacOS/iOS/etc are all XNU/Darwin under the hood (née NeXTSTEP/Mach ). When someone says something like "it's still the same old iOS underneath" I generally assume at that point that their understanding of operating systems is limited. To make the point you're making you may need to simplify

 

[seek3r]

None of what you say is true. It’s just not. First, Tim was meant to lead for three to five years until Forstall would take over.

Er, since when? Did Jobs personally tell you this in confidence?

Second, Tim got rid of all the talent that would threat to his $100m annually.

You mean like finally getting Ives out after he managed to thin down macs to the point of making them into furnaces?

Third, Tim knows how to make the wealthy wealthier which is why Tim Crook is still CEO.

You do understand Apple is a for-profit company, right?

Fourth, greed and power win over innovation because the short term is rewarded.

I'll be honest, I havent seen much indication that Apple has been prioritizing short term gains over long term performance, in direct contrast to a lot of other companies. On what basis are you claiming this?

Fifth, Apple will fall if it doesn’t course correct with new leadership that innovates again.

What innovation would you like to see that you think Apple is failing at? And what changes would you make? Sounds a lot like monday morning quarterbacking to me

Sixth, innovation is not owning all the key technologies of your products, it just profits more for now.

Again, what would you "innovate" that Apple isnt doing?

Seventh, Crook’s AAPL is so anticompetitive it should be regulated like the EU has done.

I'd argue that's not only true of most large American companies but true of Apple less so than some of the other tech giants. I'd also argue that this is more a failing of the regulatory framework in the US, or lack thereof, than an individual company problem.

I love Apple products, but I don’t love that I can’t do whatever I want with a device I paid for and I can’t wait until Tim’s Apple is dead and Apple can innovate again with new leadership.

Which devices cant you do whatever you want with that you think would change under other leadership?

 

[grammatica]

Ahem.

But seriously, either the next CEO must reorient Apple’s culture to the Steve Jobs era or a group of activist investors must gain a significant stake in Apple to influence its decisions.

 

[heretiq]

these folks also seem to be forgetting Jobs had plenty of stumbles too, no one’s perfect, they’re looking back with rose tinted glasses

Yep. I think few know the history of the company, the people who actually did the behind the scenes work to get the company where it is now, or how difficult it is to run a billions-unit scale business so well that most of us have the luxury of taking it for granted and therefore feel like we know more than those actually doing the hard work day-in and day-out.

 

[Ctrlos]

What else should be underneath? What's wrong with XNU/Darwin? Or should the interface and APIs be burnt back to the ground and a whole new set built on the same kernel? I don't understand this argument. (I'm not trying to attack you for it, I want to understand what you're getting at)

iOS was stretched to fill large screen phones it was never designed for. Steve Jobs used to question who would want larger screens when you can't easily reach everything with one thumb.

People clearly want larger screen devices than the 3" displays of yore so why not redesign the OS to take that into account? Jobs was right: there should be no interactions outside the reach of your thumbs

When I say iOS needs to be redesigned I mean from an interaction point of view.

 

[Ctrlos]

So, does this support OPs assertion that one of the most successful CEOs in the history of commerce should be preemptively removed while presiding over the world’s most valued company with the highest brand loyalty and CSAT ratings .. because the company stumbles occasionally while doing things that are impossible for 99.99+% of businesses?

The fish, as they say, rots from the head. I'm not saying Tim Cool is doing a bad job because he's not. But their recent wobbles begin and end with him.

Apple sent someone to court to commit perjury on their behalf. They are now facing the lost of dozens of billions a year because they refused to just run the App Store at cost (which Schiller vouched for). They burned hundreds of billions in R&D trying to build a car and now continue to cannibalise their own products rather than actually do something creative.

 

[Ctrlos]

Not only do I agree with this, I also absolutely hate the comparison to RIM.
It’s a comparison that barely makes sense, RIM did one thing well for a *very* short amount of time. They didn’t have a massive ecosystem of devices, they had the blackberry… and nothing else.

All it took for blackberry to fall was for their phone to become less desirable.
Apple easily could have followed the same path if they refused to do anything after the iPod.
But they haven’t, instead they’ve diversified.
Computers, phones, tablets, speakers, watches, streaming platforms, digital marketplaces, custom silicon, all of their own software and services, headphones, item trackers, headsets, TV boxes, and so on and so on.
Plus, unlike RIM, Apple has a 50 year legacy.

RIM had two CEOs that created management chaos. It was an objectively badly ran company that made all sorts of wrong decisions, complacency being one of them.

Apple have become complacent in many of their markets. They mask their lack of creative ambition with cannibalising their own products. They've been spending too long in a reactionary position, giving people what they want instead of showing them what they never knew they needed. Every big change in the OS26 like was from some Apple intern reading these forums and not creative talent pushing their platforms forward.

 

[Bungaree.Chubbins]

iOS was stretched to fill large screen phones it was never designed for. Steve Jobs used to question who would want larger screens when you can't easily reach everything with one thumb.

People clearly want larger screen devices than the 3" displays of yore so why not redesign the OS to take that into account? Jobs was right: there should be no interactions outside the reach of your thumbs

When I say iOS needs to be redesigned I mean from an interaction point of view.

So you’re wanting the interface to be fundamentally redesigned, with new interaction concepts to make the modern larger screens more user friendly. That makes sense to me.

Personally I can’t see any better methods, but I’m not particularly imaginative, so I’ll keep being happy with what we’ve got until I see something better.

 

[waziazi]

noooo oooooooooooooo

 

[montuori]

Personally I can’t see any better methods [...]

Longer thumbs of course. Steve would have figured this all out by now but Tim's not cracking the whip hard enough down in the bioengineering lab. Alas.