Respectfully, this is nuts. Apple is no longer a tiny company where the CEO designs products. Apple is just about the largest company on the planet. We need Tim Cook to manage the company, deal with governments, deal with various crises. Apple has many other people working on product and technology vision. They flesh these out, others figure out if they can be built at all and then if they can be built for a reasonable price then Tim can greenlight them.
Tim Cook told us at a stockholder meeting some years ago that Apple was being more aggressive in R&D with the expectation that only a few projects would see the light of day. This is the way it works. You try lots of things because you don’t know in advance which will pan out.
This is not the 1970s. Apple is not trying to do what is cool for the engineers in Silicon Valley. There are now over a billion Apple users around the world.
Tim Cook regularly gets the support of about 99% of stockholders. If you want to replace him buy up 51% of Apple then name your own CEO. Give us some names of people you think might please you.
You're a shareholder and good for you, but I'm speaking from a consumer standpoint and these two clash under Cook. Maybe these two are meant to clash no matter what, but watch Kara Swisher's interview with Cook, Loreen Powell-Jobs and Jony Ive - they all confirm the previous CEO couldn't care less about share price, it wasn't his strong point.
Apple transitions from a product-led strategy to a monetisation strategy more aggressively every year. Everything they've been doing is a minimum viable iteration at maximum possible upsell and profit. Great for shareholders, but solving humanity's problems and other lofty goals that require real innovation are not on their radar because the CEO has no vision (or if he has, he takes ages to deliver).
Two more things:
Vision Pro was Apple's first attempt in 15 years to carve a new future and by every metric it's an embarrassment. No developer believes in it, it's practically an abandoned platform. Even Apple's messaging has shifted from "spatial computing is the future" (a future no one believed except some tired old Apple bloggers -who happen to also be shareholders- and other sycophants) to "it's for early adopters / we'll see". Do they still believe it's the future or not, because in my view real vision can't feel so uncertain so quickly.
GenAI was nowhere to be seen on Apple's roadmap until OpenAI made it a thing. Apple then tacked on "Apple Intelligence" to iPhone, came up with some insencere slogans (iPhone 16 was built "from the ground up" for AI -
no it wasn't) to assure Wall Street. Apple Intelligence is an incomplete, ill thought-out technology and its release in 2024 was neither for consumers nor the expression of Apple's own vision. They're catching up to a future they aren't so sure they believe in themselves but they chose to release it, in beta, in drip-feed, to appease investors.
Even if it's someone else's job to define the vision, the CEO should be taking the long-term view that monetisation alone cannot sustain Apple forever. A CEO is not just for dealing with China or sucking up to Trump.
