I would not say "cares more", but at least balances the desires better than Tim did. Tim never understood what he was doing to the Apple brand.
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Tim Cook Stepping Down as Apple CEO Next Week: 15 Years in Quotes
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Happy_John
macrumors 68020
Of course Dolly Parton had better quotes. She was a musician, and actor, she was an incredibly well known celebrity who worked in the entertainments industry. Giving good quote, either in lyrics or interviews, was her job.
Being a good bean counter was his job as CEO. It’s a very warped view of corporations to think a CEO should be an entertainer. A CEO works for the shsreholders. He did a very good job for the shareholders.
In a way, I miss the days when CEOs were assumed to be boring, faceless suits. CEOs being expected to be “cool” and showy, especially in tech, comes across as more than a little cringe and PT Barnum.
“Yes, I’ll invest my money with someone who wears silly leather jackets and/or has a self-publicised drug issue.”
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klasma
macrumors G4
Pitogyro
macrumors regular
The low level of Cook’s quotes is indicative of his ability to discuss innovation and have something thoughtful to say. No one asked for him to be an entertainer.
PsykX
macrumors 68040
Cook is an engineer and holds a BS degree from Auburn University. He also has an MBA from Duke University.
ThomasJL
macrumors 68020
We all missed out on 15 years of Steve Jobs-like innovation that likely would've happened if Scott Forstall had been made CEO instead of Tim Cook. Forstall was one of the closest things, if not the closest thing, Apple had to another Jobs. But instead, we got Cook, who is extremely talented at being a bean counter, and clueless and mediocre at being a product person. Cook ran Apple like a typical MBA degree holder would, which is by not asking "What would Steve Jobs do?," but rather by asking "What would McKinsey and Goldman Sachs do?"
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Happy_John
macrumors 68020
You have absolutely no basis to support this claim.
With Apple now having 1+ Billion active/happy/repeat customers who love purchasing Apple products year after year after year, propelling Apple to becoming one of the most successful consumer tech companies in the world, is testament to Tim Cook's outstanding leadership at Apple.
Squidiey
macrumors regular
Squidiey
macrumors regular
Have a not-so-nice day, Tim Crook.
Bad Luck!
Bad Luck!
And?
Tim Cook was only at Apple for 14 years when he became CEO.
In 2041, someone joining Apple today will have been at the company for 15 years.
Plus there has been significant turnover over the last five years, mostly because all of the people who were at Apple for decades and decades all retired.
I stick by what I said, assuming there is another CEO transition in 2041, it’s very likely the next person will have not worked at Apple before this decade, and certainly not when Steve was there.
It’s very likely, if everything goes smoothly, that Apple’s next CEO will more than likely be a Ternus apprentice, whoever the design, operations, or marketing head is at the time.
Apple’s current marketing and operations heads were both born in the 60s, and while they don’t necessarily have a design head at the moment, almost all of the top people for hardware and software design are already in their 60s and or have worked at Apple literally since the 90s. These people will very likely not be even considered due to their age.
Obviously, I could be entirely wrong, but I think it’s very likely that whoever the next CEO is will likely be someone in their 40s, probably about 15 years from now, who worked at Apple throughout their 20s and 30s.
Steve became CEO when he was 42, Tim and John, both 51.
They certainly aren’t going to choose some 65-year-old dude who was there when the iPod nano was a brand new product, or even the Apple Watch.
klasma
macrumors G4
And that means that I wouldn’t make any bets on how long the successor will already have been at Apple, other than being not older than, say, mid-fifties in 2041.
gleepskip
macrumors 65816
Happy_John
macrumors 68020
All good and reasoned points.
But 2041 is quite a while away, and looking at the current political, economic and tech industry climate, there’s very little practical anyone can say about where Apple will be at in 15 years.
ThomasJL
macrumors 68020
That photo is exactly what I'm talking about. That was industry-leading skeuomorphism, which was pioneered by Apple, in large part due to Scott Forstall's visionary leadership. It was the pinnacle of user-friendliness due to the visual cues that made it intuitive, especially to children and the elderly who had never used a smartphone or computer. Tim Cook allowed Jony Ive to throw all of that in the garbage, and to replace all of it with Microsoft-pioneered flat design, which we are still stuck with today (neumorphism and glassmorphism are both flat design variants).
Under Forstall's leadership, Microsoft copied Apple. Under Cook's leadership, Apple copied Microsoft. That is what Cook considers innovation: copying a company that Steve Jobs said had "no taste," and "they don't bring much culture into their product." Just look at that photo in the quoted post to see how Forstall's skeuomorphism has so many cultural references, and notice how flat design totally lacks that. See this nearly one-minute video for those exact quotes from Jobs:
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I’m a bit confused with what this is supposed to illustrate.
Has anyone actually watched any interview with Scott post 2012? He wasn’t exactly complimentary towards those types of designs, even saying that in his personal belief, Apple went a little too far in the comically realistic direction.
And even under his time at Apple, the designs changed quite a bit.
The move towards flat designs was an industry-wide thing, Scott would have eventually followed, just like every company did.
Software that Scott worked on in 2001 looked pretty different than the stuff he was working on in 2012, just saying. If he was at the company in 2025, it’s likely the software would look pretty different than how it looked in 2012. Things evolve, things change.
erikkfi
macrumors 68000
Sadly Tim did lose sight of a lot of this with the introduction of ads into Apple products for the first time. I'm hoping John Ternus will roll that anti-customer change back.
gleepskip
macrumors 65816
Correct. But in order to evolve or change, you started and ended with something other than an Excel spreadsheet.
mrr
macrumors 65816
jclardy
macrumors 601
Under Jobs I don't think Apple would have ever reached the world's most valuable company - his decisions would have been too consumer focused. But now Cook brought them to the top, and hopefully Ternus can now bring some more innovation and branch out a bit from the endless iPhone upgrade cycle that has driven the growth for the past 15 years.