Tim Cook Profiled in New Biography as 'The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level'

[macmarco]

I just love the previous level rather than the next level. In early days, most of the time the products were announced as "It will be shipping today" in keynote speech.

 

[I7guy]

Tim inherited a company with one of the strongest brand values in history, then exploited that by increasing prices while recycling existing parts and designs.

Apple's record profits are not a reflection of Tim's leadership.

The only interesting question about Tim is whether his focus on profit comes from greed, luck combined with cowardice, or self-awareness of his own lack of vision and an acceptance that the best he can achieve is to keep shareholders happy.

@Abazigal raised a great point. The critics by vocalizing, not constructive criticism, but hyperbole are not going to change anything. No matter how many times some of these tired memes are used.

This hyperbole is not changing Apple, nor is it changing that Tim Cook, by all measures of what reasonable* people would apply, raised the bar on Apple’s performance.

*reasonable: not the hyperbolic extremism seen on these forums.

 

[Baymowe335]

I've toured the workings of much smaller clients and was in awe with those. You're right. I can't comprehend the logistics a silicon product must present. So I'll accept that Cook is a genius supplychain architect. But a genius brand leader? After all, those are the shoes that everyone expected to Cook to fill.

Apple's post-Jobs success still depends on product concepts invented under Jobs. Improvements to those products have been a mixed bag. Some barely budged the needle. Some actually harmed. Most were predictable or gimmicky. Meanwhile, the watch, earpods, Apple Music, Homepod, and other Cook era originals still have less adoption than the much-dismissed MacOS products. Cook's genius is less significant if product demand is modest.

Your second paragraph is a classic point made by Cook-bashers, but dismisses the competitiveness of business and totally ignores the sheer numbers.

Let me make something clear to you. Cook is selling over 3X the iPhones as Jobs did and at a higher price point. Say what you want about the product's origin, but that is not just "easy" to do. Do you have any concept how competitive this space is and how many companies are attacking the iPhone? Jobs had a 5 year head start before any real competition hit the iPhone.

Cook took that product, improved it (particularly the silicon and larger screen sizes), and actually strengthened the iPhone's dominance. The ecosystem and services are becoming even more robust, thanks to Cook, locking users into the Apple bubble and making them happy to be there.

Mac AND iPad JUST hit record revenues, so despite the naysayers here, the product line is doing well. Enthusiasts may not be happy with the update cycle or certain features, but the overall business is healthy. That business is simply not as big of a priority as the mobile computing future. Times have changed. More people want powerful, mobile devices like iPad and iPhone. They want convenient wearables like AirPods and Watch.

Wearables are growing at almost 40%
Services are growing at 20%

Those are the areas of growth and the future at Apple. That is also credit to Cook. The exact WRONG thing for him to do would be ignore those areas to focus on a dying segment like Mac. Cook has correctly shifted to services, mobile, health, and incremental improvements to the ecoystem.

BTW, Cook has increased Apple's market value $600B since Jobs was around. You don't just "do" that because someone threw you the keys to iPhone and iPad. As I mentioned, he has elevated those to new heights AND created enormous growing businesses surrounding that.

 

[Anarchy99]

if accuracy was the goal rather than the title being
'The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level'
it would be something like

'The Logistics/Supply chain guy Who Maintained Course at Apple to Record Short-Term Profits but may lead to its Eventual Downfall due to Alienating its Core Customers'

I guess they needed something short.

 

[JOBS-3:16]

People keep talking about Apple's market cap increase while Tim Cook has been Apple's CEO. He has roughly tripled the market cap...ok, great. When Steve Jobs took over again in 1997 Apple's market cap was approx. $10 Billion (on the high end), the market cap when he had to step down in 2011 was approx. $350 billion. Of course Steve had 13 years vs Tim's 7.5, however it's clear to see that Tim Cook is nowhere near the money maker that Jobs was, in terms of the increase of the market cap. 3x increase (Cook) vs 35x increase (Jobs). I'll gladly give Tim Cook another 6 years to make the $12,250,000,000,000+ market cap needed to best Jobs. Won't happen.

 

[Analog Kid]

Well you and I will never see eye to on eye on this because we are coming from completely different points of view. You are valuing Tim's "achievements" in maintaining and even increasing Apple's position as a money-making-machine despite the fact that their products have turned to crap.

I, on the other hand, value Tim, and Apple, based on their ability to create brilliant products, regardless of how much money they rake in. I would vastly, vastly prefer a small, struggling Apple that continued to produce excellent products, both software and hardware, to the bloated marketing-of-crap machine they have become.

But hey, if you want to really show how much you value people making tons of $$ selling crap, I found this amazing Diamond HDMI cable for you to purchase!

It continues to blow my mind how many people think that good products and financial success aren't somehow coupled.

It feels like a Yogi Berra quote "Nobody buys their products anymore, they're too successful."

This attitude seems to go hand in hand with the idea that high profits come from high prices. No. Profit requires good margins and high demand. That diamond cable you linked to is $1800. Probably costs them $20 to build. I don’t see any verified purchases on Amazon. So they’ve made:

($1800 - $20) * 0 = $0

That is not tons of money by any definition...

Raising prices doesn't increase profits. Lowering prices doesn't increase profits. Finding the right price-demand product for your market increases profits.

 

[Bin Cook]

Genius is obviously not used in the same context it was in years gone by.

 

[oldwatery]

Nope... As a photographer, and one who greatly cares about image quality, I'll take having a far superior camera over a bump any day.

If having bump keeps you so wound up, maybe it's best to find an equivalent phone without a bump?

As a pro photographer I would not be caught dead using a phone to do the job of a real camera.

 

[panjandrum]

It continues to blow my mind how many people think that good products and financial success aren't somehow coupled.

You do realize that Apple produced (usually, but by no means always) brilliant products for year after year after year with very little in the way of what would be considered serious financial success, don't you? And there are countless similar examples. (From the auto-industry, brands that come to mind instantly as building fantastic products but often not being profitable are Lotus and Packard. Heck, even Porsche struggled finically for many, many years).

It continues to blow my mind that so many people see success only in financial terms.

Sure, in an idealized world financial success would go to the companies offering the best products, or at least offering the best value for money. But it's much more to do with marketing than with actual product quality. All the companies have to do is trick enough people into believing in their products, and they can rake-in the $. Just take a look at the bottled-water industry, which manages to sell people on tap-water stuck in bottles, marketed as somehow better, while creating tremendous pollution and liter, and then raking in substantial profits. Are these bottled-water companies successful? Sure! Are they making good products? Absolutely not! They are simply lying to people too blinded by marketing ploys to figure out what is really going on.

Or, just take a look at the history of the computer market in the mid to late 80s. The DOS/Wintel systems absolutely sucked, and the Mac, while it at least worked, also pretty much sucked. Both Commodore, with the Amiga, and Atari with the ST series, offered systems that were vastly, vastly superior in nearly every possible regard while being simultaneously less expensive. Even the software was better, although getting the general-public to understand that was almost impossible (ask anyone who used Calamus or Pagestream how laughably awful (and slow) the big DTP programs for Mac and Wintel systems were). But they lost the battle. Why? Mostly marketing, and the fact that the people making the purchasing decisions were mindless lemmings.

The sad thing is, this success=money mentality is so deeply-rooted in our psyche that it even filters down to the personal-level. I've got a friend who values nearly everything solely in terms of financial success it is is ruining his health (because he works too much at a sedentary job that pays well and is getting incredibly out of shape), his life (because his health is deteriorating so badly that he can't do many of the things he wants to do), and his relationship with his children (who all see "success" as leading a valuable life they enjoy, but won't necessarily bring massive personal wealth).

As far as I'm concerned Apple under Tim is nothing but a massive failure.

 

[oldwatery]

Kahney centers his book around six values he argues "provide the foundation" for Cook's leadership at Apple: accessibility, education, environment, inclusion and diversity, privacy and security, and supplier responsibility.

And that about sums it up. Not one word about innovation, product development, maintaining the Apple credo, oh, and innovation!

Have a nice day all you stockholders. The rest of us will continue to mourn the death of the company we loved so much and that bought us so much excitement.

 

[Analog Kid]

Exactly! He's focused on accessories and forgotten about the core product - the Mac.

The Mac hasn't been Apple's core product since Jobs removed "Computer" from the company name in 2007. This thread is worth a read:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-computer-incorporated-becomes-apple-incorporated.267811/

One post in the thread reads: "Hope 20 years from now I don't tell my grandkids 'I remember the day Apple Computer died'."

Jobs introduced the change by quoting Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

By the time he left the company, Macs were about a quarter of their revenue and shrinking fast:


Cook didn't forget about the Mac, Jobs left it behind.

People keep talking about Apple's market cap increase while Tim Cook has been Apple's CEO. He has roughly tripled the market cap...ok, great. When Steve Jobs took over again in 1997 Apple's market cap was approx. $10 Billion (on the high end), the market cap when he had to step down in 2011 was approx. $350 billion. Of course Steve had 13 years vs Tim's 7.5, however it's clear to see that Tim Cook is nowhere near the money maker that Jobs was, in terms of the increase of the market cap. 3x increase (Cook) vs 35x increase (Jobs). I'll gladly give Tim Cook another 6 years to make the $12,250,000,000,000+ market cap needed to best Jobs. Won't happen.

To suggest Cook is a failure because he didn't grow Apple by 35x is as absurd as suggesting that Jobs was a failure because it took him the life of the company to get to add $350B to the market cap and Cook did it in just a few years.

You need to freshen up on your exponentials. Remember the tale of the chessboard. Jobs started with one grain of rice in the first square and put two in the second, and 4 in the third... As you progress, each doubling becomes much harder.

Jobs did a great job turning Apple around, but comparing the effort of bringing a failing company sitting on massive intellectual assets back to profitability to bringing one of the most successful companies in the world to be the most successful on a linear scale is disingenuous.

Comparing Cook to Jobs is futile. They are different people running different companies in vastly different circumstances. When Apple was getting their clocks cleaned by Microsoft, Jobs took pride in being small but special. You don't think he'd be proud today to see his vision vindicated by having his hand picked successor lead Apple to becoming the world's most valuable company?

 

[dtmpowerm5]

If I see someone reading this I'm going to crack up. Will definitely ask them how they are enjoying the book with extreme sarcasm

 

[Defthand]

How do we know that Steve jobs would have been able to keep innovating if he’d lived?

Assume he lived and was no longer able to recognize deficits in existing tools, or imagine ways that tech could serve the arts and humanity, rather than cater to social fads and addictions? You wouldn't call him a genius even if he sold a lot of products.

 

[Analog Kid]

Genius is obviously not used in the same context it was in years gone by.

People keep treating "Genius" like he's been elevated to Einstein level or something rather than being lowered to an Apple retail employee...

 

[I7guy]

People keep talking about Apple's market cap increase while Tim Cook has been Apple's CEO. He has roughly tripled the market cap...ok, great. When Steve Jobs took over again in 1997 Apple's market cap was approx. $10 Billion (on the high end), the market cap when he had to step down in 2011 was approx. $350 billion. Of course Steve had 13 years vs Tim's 7.5, however it's clear to see that Tim Cook is nowhere near the money maker that Jobs was, in terms of the increase of the market cap. 3x increase (Cook) vs 35x increase (Jobs). I'll gladly give Tim Cook another 6 years to make the $12,250,000,000,000+ market cap needed to best Jobs. Won't happen.

It’s easier to go from 0 to 100 than 100 to 150.

 

[2ilent8cho]

Tim Cook was hand picked by Steve Jobs. Doesn't sound like "fell ass backwards into the CEO seat".

Steve also hand picked John Sculley back in the 80s and we all know how well that worked out... i love some of the products under Timmy such as my Apple Watch but you could scream at some of the mis-steps they are making.

 

[Analog Kid]

You do realize that Apple produced (usually, but by no means always) brilliant products for year after year after year with very little in the way of what would be considered serious financial success, don't you? And there are countless similar examples. (From the auto-industry, brands that come to mind instantly as building fantastic products but often not being profitable are Lotus and Packard. Heck, even Porsche struggled finically for many, many years).

It continues to blow my mind that so many people see success only in financial terms.

Sure, in an idealized world financial success would go to the companies offering the best products at any given price-point. But it's much more to do with marketing than with actual product quality. All the companies have to do is trick enough people into believing in their products, and they can rake-in the $. Just take a look at the bottled-water industry, which manages to sell people on tap-water stuck in bottles, marketed as somehow better, while creating tremendous pollution and liter, and then raking in substantial profits. Are these bottled-water companies successful? Sure! Are they making good products? Absolutely not! They are simply lying to people too blinded by marketing ploys to figure out what is really going on.

Or, just take a look at the history of the computer market in the mid to late 80s. The DOS/Wintel systems absolutely sucked, and the Mac, while it at least worked, also pretty much sucked. Both Commodore, with the Amiga, and Atari with the ST series, offered systems that were vastly, vastly superior in nearly every possible regard while being simultaneously less expensive. Even the software was better, although getting the general-public to understand that was almost impossible (ask anyone who used Calamus or Pagestream how laughably awful (and slow) the big DTP programs for Mac and Wintel systems were). But they lost the battle? Why? Marketing, and the fact that the people making the purchasing decisions were mindless lemmings.

The sad thing is, this success=money mentality is so deeply-rooted in our psyche that it even filters down to the personal-level. I've got a friend who values nearly everything solely in terms of financial success it is is ruining his health (because he works too much at a sedentary job that pays well and is getting incredibly out of shape), his life (because his health is deteriorating so badly that he can't do many of the things he wants to do), and his relationship with his children (who all see "success" as leading a valuable life they enjoy, but won't necessarily bring massive personal wealth).

As far as I'm concerned Apple under Tim is nothing but a massive failure.

If they were such brilliant products, why weren’t more people buying them?

Are you suggesting it’s because Steven P. Jobs, master of the Reality Distortion Field, sucked at marketing?

Free markets and capitalism are nothing more than resource allocation optimizers. They are a way of ensuring that more capital and labor are dedicated to things people value. Success==Money is just a way of saying that, barring fraud or criminal behavior, the success comes from people valuing the product enough to allocate their resources to acquiring it.

Apple is making a ton of money because people value their products— maybe not for reasons you approve of, but the “free” in free markets means people have self determination. Same is true for your friend: he apparently values material pleasures more than his lifespan— he may be making different choices than you would like him to, but an unregulated economy leaves that choice to him. That doesn’t bar you from marketing in favor of your self interest and trying to convince him to allocate his resources such that he’s around longer.

 

[hermes16]

The team is in Apple's pipelines!

A pipeline of dongles and cables.

 

[Shanghaichica]

Steve also hand picked John Sculley back in the 80s and we all know how well that worked out... i love some of the products under Timmy such as my Apple Watch but you could scream at some of the mis-steps they are making.

Are we really comparing Sculley to Tim? Sculley wasn’t even remotely successful.

 

[JOBS-3:16]

The Mac hasn't been Apple's core product since Jobs removed "Computer" from the company name in 2007. This thread is worth a read:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-computer-incorporated-becomes-apple-incorporated.267811/

One post in the thread reads: "Hope 20 years from now I don't tell my grandkids 'I remember the day Apple Computer died'."

Jobs introduced the change by quoting Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

By the time he left the company, Macs were about a quarter of their revenue and shrinking fast:
View attachment 831492

Cook didn't forget about the Mac, Jobs left it behind.

To suggest Cook is a failure because he didn't grow Apple by 35x is as absurd as suggesting that Jobs was a failure because it took him the life of the company to get to add $350B to the market cap and Cook did it in just a few years.

You need to freshen up on your exponentials. Remember the tale of the chessboard. Jobs started with one grain of rice in the first square and put two in the second, and 4 in the third... As you progress, each doubling becomes much harder.

Jobs did a great job turning Apple around, but comparing the effort of bringing a failing company sitting on massive intellectual assets back to profitability to bringing one of the most successful companies in the world to be the most successful on a linear scale is disingenuous.

Comparing Cook to Jobs is futile. They are different people running different companies in vastly different circumstances. When Apple was getting their clocks cleaned by Microsoft, Jobs took pride in being small but special. You don't think he'd be proud today to see his vision vindicated by having his hand picked successor lead Apple to becoming the world's most valuable company?

Where in this post did I suggest that Cook was a failure? "...suggesting that Jobs was a failure because it took him the life of the company to get to add $350B to the market cap..." Clearly your reading comprehension is lacking. Jobs did not work for Apple, for the life of company. Remember those 12 years that he didn't work for Apple? He did increase Apple's market cap by 35x during his second round of employment with Apple. Tim Cook will not get close to that number, period. I will agree with you on one of your points, comparing Cook to Jobs is futile, as there is no comparison.

 

[Defthand]

Your second paragraph is a classic point made by Cook-bashers, but dismisses the competitiveness of business and totally ignores the sheer numbers.

Let me make something clear to you. Cook is selling over 3X the iPhones as Jobs did and at a higher price point. Say what you want about the product's origin, but that is not just "easy" to do. Do you have any concept how competitive this space is and how many companies are attacking the iPhone? Jobs had a 5 year head start before any real competition hit the iPhone.

Cook took that product, improved it (particularly the silicon and larger screen sizes), and actually strengthened the iPhone's dominance. The ecosystem and services are becoming even more robust, thanks to Cook, locking users into the Apple bubble and making them happy to be there.

Mac AND iPad JUST hit record revenues, so despite the naysayers here, the product line is doing well. Enthusiasts may not be happy with the update cycle or certain features, but the overall business is healthy. That business is simply not as big of a priority as the mobile computing future. Times have changed. More people want powerful, mobile devices like iPad and iPhone. They want convenient wearables like AirPods and Watch.

Wearables are growing at almost 40%
Services are growing at 20%

Those are the areas of growth and the future at Apple. That is also credit to Cook. The exact WRONG thing for him to do would be ignore those areas to focus on a dying segment like Mac. Cook has correctly shifted to services, mobile, health, and incremental improvements to the ecoystem.

BTW, Cook has increased Apple's market value $600B since Jobs was around. You don't just "do" that because someone threw you the keys to iPhone and iPad. As I mentioned, he has elevated those to new heights AND created enormous growing businesses surrounding that.

I, like most fans here, am interested in whether Apple's products impress, and that Apple preserves its integrity and respect for customers. I'm not attracted to their prevelance and financial success. Those metrics could apply to McDonald's.

 

[JOBS-3:16]

The Mac hasn't been Apple's core product since Jobs removed "Computer" from the company name in 2007. This thread is worth a read:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-computer-incorporated-becomes-apple-incorporated.267811/

One post in the thread reads: "Hope 20 years from now I don't tell my grandkids 'I remember the day Apple Computer died'."

Jobs introduced the change by quoting Gretzky: "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."

By the time he left the company, Macs were about a quarter of their revenue and shrinking fast:
View attachment 831492

Cook didn't forget about the Mac, Jobs left it behind.

To suggest Cook is a failure because he didn't grow Apple by 35x is as absurd as suggesting that Jobs was a failure because it took him the life of the company to get to add $350B to the market cap and Cook did it in just a few years.

You need to freshen up on your exponentials. Remember the tale of the chessboard. Jobs started with one grain of rice in the first square and put two in the second, and 4 in the third... As you progress, each doubling becomes much harder.

Jobs did a great job turning Apple around, but comparing the effort of bringing a failing company sitting on massive intellectual assets back to profitability to bringing one of the most successful companies in the world to be the most successful on a linear scale is disingenuous.

Comparing Cook to Jobs is futile. They are different people running different companies in vastly different circumstances. When Apple was getting their clocks cleaned by Microsoft, Jobs took pride in being small but special. You don't think he'd be proud today to see his vision vindicated by having his hand picked successor lead Apple to becoming the world's most valuable company?

"You don't think he'd be proud today to see his vision vindicated by having his hand picked successor lead Apple to becoming the world's most valuable company?"

Hmmmmmm, I think Apple already became the world's most valuable company...under Steve Jobs. Again, nice try.

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/08/09/apple-most-valuable-company-anniversary/

 

[Radon87000]

Steve Jobs took the company from the grave to $1t? Wow.
[doublepost=1554896060][/doublepost]

The company (thanks to Tim's shortsighted accounting lenses) is no longer at 1T after the disappointing iPhone sales. And if anyone took the company near 1T, we look at the guy who created the product which made it happen.

That’s because Tim’s a genius who made it look like child’s play. Nothing like over aggrandizing the past and devaluating the future. Apple would have failed under jobs if Cook hadn’t done his thing.

(The author agrees btw...Cook is a genius)

So are you insinuating that Satya Nadella/ Steve Ballmer are more innovative than Bill Gates because the company reached greater heights under them? Because we all know who created the products which made Microsoft successful.
[doublepost=1554918872][/doublepost]

How do we know that Steve jobs would have been able to keep innovating if he’d lived?

Within a span of just 15 years Jobs came up with 3 product lines, all of them smash hits. Its been almost 10 years of Tim Cook and so far nothing except incremental improvements which the competition has already done before

 

[nebojsak]

The Mac hasn't been Apple's core product since Jobs removed "Computer" from the company name in 2007. This thread is worth a read:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apple-computer-incorporated-becomes-apple-incorporated.267811/

One post in the thread reads: "Hope 20 years from now I don't tell my grandkids 'I remember the day Apple Computer died'."

But who the hell gives a heck about quotes and sayings? Steve himself could have renamed his company "Apple Donuts", but that is not changing the fact that the computers and stuff he used to sell at his time simply worked. Could anybody imagine the situation in which any of the Apple computers in -say- 2008. comes with same well-documented issues and same buggy and cheap hardware through a two or three generations? Like Microsoft used to do, but massively overpriced.

Apple has turned to a Coca Cola/McDonald's type of company, selling gadgets for kids and housewives. Which is nice, but they should at least stop lying to their old customers.

 

[trifid]

1985 - Jobs leaves Apple, Apple lives off the Macintosh for 11 years making breakthrough record high profits along the way but then went downhill to almost bankruptcy in 1996.

2011 - Jobs passes away - Apple lives off the iPhone for 8 years.

I think it's too premature to credit Cook with "genius" if history serves of anything.