You can't sit here and tell me (us) that Tim has overseen, as a CEO, grand new inventions in his almost 15 years as CEO .
No, because neither did Steve Jobs.
I feel like this is a well-known fact already that people like to ignore, but, Apple has never really been the company to *invent* things. Even the iPhone was a bunch of technology that already existed compiled together, it wasn’t even the first touchscreen phone, an apple at that time, even didn’t create the majority of technology put into it.
However under Cook we have seen…
The first iPad, MacBook, iMac and external display with retina quality resolution. When Jobs passed away outside of the iPhone, the highest quality display you could get on a mobile Apple product was sub-1080P.
The first Apple created CPU and GPU. While Steve Jobs saw the introduction of the A4 and A5, these were modified Samsung chips with PowerVR GPUs. The first truly designed by Apple CPU was the A6 in the iPhone 5, and Apple didn’t design its own in-house GPU until the A11 in 2017, over half a decade after jobs’ death.
The Apple Watch. Let’s not forget that the Samsung Galaxy gear introduced in 2013 set records for being one of Best Buy‘s most returned products in history, the Apple Watch was truly the first successful modern smart watch.
AirPods. Wireless headphones existed before it, but not quite in the same way. The AirPods were the first main stream truly wireless headphones, and even though it’s been forgotten over the years, they had features that we take for granted these days like a case that could recharge them on the go and automatic device pairing and switching.
The Neural Engine first used in the A11 Bionic. Despite Apple’s struggle with large language models, they were putting neural engines in their products five years before anyone knew what a LLM was.
FaceID. It’s level of security still hasn’t been matched, all of the competitors can still be fooled with photographs. As far as I know, it’s still the only facial recognition technology in a smart phone or a tablet that uses dot projection and has that level of security.
The M1 chip. Do I even need to elaborate? So, so much skepticism for something that ended up working out so, so well.
The Apple Vision Pro. Love it or hate it, it certainly isn’t a rehashed Jobs product, it is very much its own thing.
And this isn’t even barely scratching the surface of the moves that Apple has made within the last 15 years.
