How Apple Changed Under Tim Cook: 15 Years in Numbers

[Black_Mage]

Of all the services launched while Tim was the CEO, I like Apple Pay the best. It's awesome. I don't have anything good to say about ads in Maps though.

 

[840quadra]

The biggest stain on Tim Cook’s legacy is nothing of his own doing; rather, it’s that he never got to enjoy a single day where he wasn’t criticized or treated as a failiure, for simply being “not Steve Jobs”.

His tenure had its hits and misses, but mostly hits… he followed in the footsteps of literal historic greatness, and managed to take the company to even greater heights.

Well done, Tim.

Agreed.

Let us remember failures of Jobs era as well

• Apple Lisa
• iAds
• iReview
• MobileMe
• iTunes Ping
• G4 Cube (partial success, but not as solid as the later Mini, Trashcan Mac of its day)
• iPod version 1 (without windows support)
• Apple HiFi
• Initial Apple TV
• initial imac Hockey Puck Mouse
• White iBook G3 (Prone to logic board failures, display cable failures due to design "first" policy)
• ADC Port
• Firewire (Limited adoption compared to USB)

There were a host of other features that were highly touted and slowly died under his relm. The much hated "Liquid Glass" reminds me of the candy water look of the early versions of Aqua when OS X was new.

Don't get me wrong, I owned and used many items listed above, but financially many were total failures.

 

[Abazigal]

The biggest stain on Tim Cook’s legacy is nothing of his own doing; rather, it’s that he never got to enjoy a single day where he wasn’t criticized or treated as a failiure, for simply being “not Steve Jobs”.

I will say this has been Tim Cook's biggest redeeming quality. That he was his own man and as it turned out, maybe not be Steve Jobs was precisely what Apple needed to navigate an increasingly fragmented and polarised business landscape.

I will stand by my original assertion that different people are needed at different parts of Apple’s trajectory.

Steve Jobs was Churchhill.

Tim Cook is Eisenhower.

Let's see what John Ternus' legacy will be.

 

[JTK Awesome]

Some jokes by old Tim... Vision Pro lol

Apple Car aka Project Titan

RIP Apple Car. This Is Why It Died

Any tech company moving into the auto space needs a manufacturing partner. But Apple’s EV died as it lived: alone.

www.wired.com

 

[citysnaps]

Agreed.

Let us remember failures of Jobs era as well

• Apple Lisa
• iAds
• iReview
• MobileMe
• iTunes Ping
• G4 Cube (partial success, but not as solid as the later Mini, Trashcan Mac of its day)
• iPod version 1 (without windows support)
• Apple HiFi
• Initial Apple TV
• initial imac Hockey Puck Mouse
• White iBook G3 (Prone to logic board failures, display cable failures due to design "first" policy)
• ADC Port
• Firewire (Limited adoption compared to USB)

There were a host of other features that were highly touted and slowly died under his relm. The much hated "Liquid Glass" reminds me of the candy water look of the early versions of Aqua when OS X was new.

Don't get me wrong, I owned and used many items listed above, but financially many were total failures.

And iPod Sox! 🙂

 

[840quadra]

And iPod Sox! 🙂

I actually have 3, I use them to protect my car keys and whenever I take my iPhone 4 out of the house! lol

 

[eveluvsrainbows]

Under Tim Cook, I went from:

- Being in awe of Apple stores to hating them. (I think the Burberry lady broke the store experience.)
- Looking forward to Apple product releases to fearing them. (What will they break next?)
- Being able to enjoy Apple products to being unable to use them due to PWM and dithering.

Apple's best product during Tim Cook's tenure has been its stock -- $AAPL.

I don't know if Apple will change for the better after him. Usually after a financial engineering CEO steps away, the company falls apart pretty quickly. But let's see.

1. What exactly did they break about the store experience? I was most recently at the Apple Store not that long ago to pick up a phone case for my 17 Pro Max and the people there were super helpful and kind and before that I was previously there in March to actually pick up the 17 Pro Max. Granted, I live in Canada, so a lot of the Apple Stores here still use the old layout / design structure instead of the newer design Apple has been rolling out in their store revamps and newly built stores, but even then I don't know what they can change about the people experience that would break the store experience. And even then, around 2 and a half years ago I was at an Apple Store in Los Angeles and there was nothing wrong about that experience either.
2. I'm confused by this as well, what exactly did they break with newer device releases? I've had no major issues with any of my iPhones since 2020 nor have I had any major issues with my MacBook Pro, AirPods, or my Apple Watch, so I am genuinely confused.
3. You can turn off PWM on the iPhone 17 series in Accessibility Settings as they added that setting after they updated the display controller in the A19 series to support enabling and disabling PWM.

Also, with regard to your worry that Apple might not change for the better under Ternus, I think it will. He has worked at Apple since 2001, initially in product design (he first worked on the Cinema Display, I believe the HD variant of it that came out in 2002) before moving to hardware engineering in 2013. He has a signiifcant amount of experience, and he has the potential to have a larger impact on improving Apple's hardware than Cook did especially with how much Ternus knows in that field. From what has been reported, he is also charismatic and well-liked within Apple so that will likely be to his benefit rather than his detriment. Also, Cook wasn't in financial engineering, he got a bachelor of science degree in the field of industrial engineering and a master of business administration degree. Ternus on the other hand got a bachelor of science degree in the field of mechanical engineering, but he has pretty much stayed in that field whereas Cook's career was mainly focused on supply chain matters whereas Ternus' career at Apple has mainly involved product design and hardware engineering. So I believe that Ternus will be a positive for Apple, especially in the hardware and software departments.

And the operating systems turned from classy and stable to a bug-fest. #achievements

That's being fixed with iOS 27 and it is likely that with John Ternus taking the reigns in September and him being a hardware guy, there will be a stronger focus on better integration between hardware and software. That likely means that there will be a stronger focus on software quality as well; it is possible that Ternus could be more hands on with the iOS engineering team than Cook was. You actually already see improved software quality with iOS 27 where they put a larger focus on stability and performance and quality of life tweaks rather than major new features, which improve the overall iOS experience dramatically. The iOS 27 beta cycle for me has by far been the most stable beta cycle I think I have ever participated in.

Also, it should be noted that since 2011, iOS has grown from an immature operating system that was still in its early days (it was only 5 years old in 2011, and lacking a significant amount of functionality to boot even compared to Android at the time) to one that has grown into a quite mature and feature-rich operating system. With additional complexity comes a larger risk of bugs and issues cropping up, and it is impossible to avoid it no matter how hard you try, even with robust quality assurance and testing in place. That's unfortunately just what happens with software when it grows in feature set, it gets harder to ensure 100% stability all the time.

 

[wrxrox]

If I could change anything it would be to get rid of subscription apps and bring back things like iLife that allowed users to create on Mac instead of looking for 3rd party alternatives