Tim Cook Stepping Down as Apple CEO Next Week: 15 Years in Quotes

[Tyler O'Bannon]

Let’s see how John Apple does

 

[yabeweb]

You forgot:
"We have some great products in our pipeline"

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

R&D and operations are two different business units. No reason both can’t be done. There was little extrinsic motivation, you’re right. But some people are mission driven, rather than results driven. Apple is currently a results driven company, with a few values. It used to be mission driven. That’s what people miss. And we understand that isn’t necessarily the most profitable way to think. And, we don’t care.

I’m not sure I entirely agree.
The Vision Pro strikes me as an absolute mission-driven product more than a results-driven product.
The vast majority of regular consumers will never, and certainly can’t, purchase it due to its extremely high retail price, extremely low utility, and cumbersome form factor. Apple knows this.
But it’s clearly driven by a mission, the mission being that this is Apple’s ultimate vision of computing, the idea of something that’s just there, in front of you, in your space. Not a squared off rectangle of glass and metal separating you from your content, but your content, including your entertainment and memories, appearing directly within your space.
Now, if that vision is practical, can be argued all day, but I think it’s hard to argue that Apple ever expected to see much results with the first generation Vision Pro.
Compare this to something like the AirPods or the Apple Watch, which were introduced with Apple’s whole chest clearly expecting results, those being millions and millions of sales and to quickly, become the best-selling watch company and headphone company, which they did within two years of both products introductions.

One could also argue the entire project tighten saga was significantly more mission driven than results driven, but they eventually realized that it was going to go absolutely nowhere.


I also think that Apple’s pure size doesn’t help it in this way, they are so big now to where they can’t just ship everything that could be cooked up in their labs. Look at the whole micro LED saga, they eventually just realized that they would have to produce them at too large of scale to be worth anything, that’s an issue, even the most mission-driven company can’t solve. Not just how to produce a certain type of product, but how to produce it at massive, massive scale. To go from zero devices on the market, having micro LED, to 100 million devices on the market, having micro LED in three months. The supply chain is literally Tim Cook’s thing, and even he couldn’t figure out an economically responsible way to do something like that.

 

[Lounge vibes 05]

The "doubling down on secrecy" thing never happened.There were always leaks during the Tim Cook Era.

Again, a scale issue, not anything Tim Cook really could have done about that. Even Steve Jobs started to be haunted by that by the end of his time at Apple.
When you are selling 600,000 iMac G3s in a matter of seven months, the Internet barely exists, and you’re halfway to bankruptcy, it’s a lot easier to keep things hush hush.
When you’re producing 220 million iPhones every year in several different countries at this point and selling them by the airplane load, and you’ve got literally the entire political landscape watching your every move across the globe, it’s kind of a lot harder to keep that under wraps.
Whatever Apple was doing in 1998, 2001, pretty much anything before the iPhone really was of very little consequence to the average person.
Today, one wrong move. And they tank millions and millions of retirement accounts and frustrate billions of users.
Of course they can barely keep a secret.

 

[gleepskip]

Sadly, it's about many here needing something, anything, to disparage/slam Tim Cook. Over the years it has become a race-to-the-bottom daily ritual.

You pretend there is only one critical thing that could be said about Tim.

 

[citysnaps]

You pretend there is only one critical thing that could be said about Tim.

Absolutely not. There's been a large array of disparaging slams here that have been thrown at Cook over the last 15 years he's been CEO at Apple.