Scott was wealthy beyond his dreams and wanted a family which allowed him to pursue other interests. Having worked with Scott at NeXT and later Apple, his Masters in Machine Learning/AI was never used but his deep experience at Stanford in ObjC/C made him an intricate team member of AppKit. He was a lead Architect by the time of the merger on OpenStep and its APIs.
Ive's was a failure at Apple until Steve arrived and Jony found a kindred spirit to harness and hone their views on form and function. We hired former key engineers back during NeXT hardware days and NeXTSTEP OS expertise in quad FAT/mach microkernel modernization expertise that led to Cocoa and XNU.
Ive's got the green light to hire a hand picked Industrial Design department and pioneer engineers like Avi and returning genius Jon Rubinstein built their Kernel/System and Hardware teams.
Federighi left early during the merger only to come back as before today he was one of the architects on NeXT EOF and we were moving from Enterprise to Consumer.
Scott was tight with Steve who Scott saw as a mentor and one person who could reign Scott's ego in.
Tim's Industrial Engineering & MBA background made him a savant for the manufacturing world of supply chain.
Scott was not natural to management. He excelled in research and architecture with peers he respected. He was not natural at leading large teams. Craig is more a team general and Tim being a pragmatist didn't have Steve's vision to manage disparate personalities as well.
I deeply admired Steve, Laurene and my NeXT family, and most at Apple.
Steve as Chairman with Tim as CEO would have been the Dream Team. So far it's been incredible even with Steve's early passing.
Steve made sure to impart his ideals and pros/cons of his successes and failures as part of the core values Tim upholds.
No key departures are sudden. Contingencies and successors are already made before such announcements. It's one of the few world's companies mindful to such processes. Steve admired Japanese culture and adopted a lot of Zen principles within NeXT and Apple.
They live on after his passing.
Apple will continue to evolve and bring new creative ideas to push industries forward. The idea that Apple is late/too late to AI is absurd. AI or Advance Machine Learning is gimmicky now to build ROI for much more serious applied science breakthroughs yet to come.
Apple is deeply invested and those patents they keep receiving aren't window dressing.
