this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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I seriously could do a better job than him. I have so many friends and family that used to be diehard apple fans to the point of nausea, that now think of it as a meh kind of company.
Cook's expertise was in the logistics. He's definitely not been a great leader for them putting out exciting products, but he's the reason they're so much less affected by things like global shipping crises or RAM prices exploding than many other companies are.
Then keep him in the c suite running the logistics, not spearhead a giant company and run their reputation in the ground. This is what you get when you don't keep the creatives in the c suite.
I suspect that the thinking when he was appointed was that logistics was going to be key to Apple's future success. And at the time, they also had a number of high profile creative people in other roles, though they have pretty much all moved on since. And if you look at their financial performance in the years since Cook took over—which is the board actually cares about—it's hard to say that this was a bad approach.
In the short term, yes. You can ride a reputation for years. Now the shit has hit the fan.
It has? They can’t keep the MacBook Neo in stock. iPhones haven’t been the market innovator for a long time but they do what they do and they do it well. I don’t see lots of complaints about iPhone crashing all the time; the biggest issues are battery life of aging devices and repairability.
Seems like Apple is doing just fine.
Their M-Series SoCs are also popular enough that they're the face of AI outside of GPUs and datacentres, and they were pretty big for the whole computing industry, especially given the whole reputation Macbooks had of being slow and prone to heating, and ARM being seen as slow/exclusively for mobile. Apple wasn't the first to make a ARM computer, but from memory, a lot of them were relegated to either Chromebooks or Single-board computers. You'd be silly to put an ARM-based CPU in your laptop, if you were planning to do any serious work.
The whole agentic AI trend of late basically has people flocking to go for an M-Series Mac, even when the setup is mostly routed through an external provider, and could run with minute resources.
It's equally as weird to think that your Macbook runs on an iPad/iPhone chip, but there we are. If you went back 10 - 20 years, and told people that Apple were making Macbooks run on old iPhone chips, they'd think you were joking about how bad they were.
When I update my M1 Pro, I'll definitely be getting another MacBook with enough ram to run some decent models. The way they keep improving the memory bandwidth each generation is pretty great and by the time I do get one, it'll be a pretty wonderful inference machine for local AI.
Also, aside from my development workflows hitting the 16gb ram limit before AI today, it still runs amazingly, so i imagine a high ram laptop would be fine for a very very very long time minus wanting to run even bigger AI models.
But their fans keep eating the shit so it doesn't matter.
Apple has done amazing under Cook and its reputation has certainly not been run into the ground.
The work done by the hardware dept to build CPUs has been a great achievement though. While this started under Jobs, Apple now arguably makes the best CPUs in the market. Competing with AMD/Intel is no easy feat.
My old turbo jet engine loud intel MacBook that made noise at the smallest amount of work imaginable vs the silent more powerful m series laptop that lasted what felt like forever battery wise in comparison was such a nice upgrade.
With everything I do now though my M1 and its 16gb of ram is becoming a little limiting so im going to have to do something about that eventually.
Edit: and its less obvious to others, but them making their own modems now is also a pretty big thing.
His biggest failures, as I’ve heard it, revolve around the fact that he only cares about making short-term profits and doesn’t understand human beings. Steve Jobs did a lot of telling him to go fuck himself back in the day, to the great benefit of kot only the company, but to the customers. Why he was put in as the next guy to lead the company is beyond me.
I don't think it's short-term profits exactly, as much as he's just focused on making a profit, to the exclusion of all else. Logistics work doesn't tend to pay off short-term, and that is a lot of what his tenure focused on, with Apple basically bringing everything back in-house.
RAM prices exploding only means Apple takes a tiny hit to their profit margin per device, considering how inflated they were in the first place.
Apple is charging 999€ for the Air in Europe (less with student discounts), while windows PCs that “compete” with it are 1500€+. If Apple is making bank then the competition is outright robbing everyone.
Lol I'm a former diehard Apple hater that's been using an iPhone for 4 years and loves Apple Silicon Macs.
But I still do think they've done a lot of idiotic things lately. iOS 26 works fine on my phone (some people are reporting performance issues), but the UI is hit and miss.
Apple Vision Pro seemed doomed from the get go, but they really made it worse by not launching a cheaper headset with Air branding half a year or a year in to actually drive market share enough to make it worthwhile for developers. Could've given it an A series CPU since we now know it works in a laptop so why not in XR or whatever they're calling this.
I think Vision Pro was doomed regardless. Go back and watch the iPhone announcement, then the Vision Pro announcement. Every single person in the auditorium when Jobs is presenting the iPhone is thinking of the thousand things they can do with that device. In the Vision Pro announcement, there’s none of that energy. If they released something that left zero question as to its purpose, the price could sit at $3K and they wouldn’t be able to make them fast enough. Instead we got an Oculus that won’t support most games and costs 6 times as much.
The vision pro utterly baffles me. When they were making the product did no one ever raise the question of what exactly the product they were making was for, because every single reviewer said exactly the same thing, which was that it was an incredibly advanced product, with zero utility.
Andrew Ti has proposed that part of the problem that the VP exemplifies is that the Bay Area is too expensive for regular people to live in, so you have tech millionaires in their little bubbles never getting input from regular people. Specifically from teenagers. If Apple had taken the VP to malls in (say) Minneapolis and Dallas and LA and Newark, the people wearing it would have been roasted by teenagers, and the designers and engineers would know there was still work to do.
Does anyone even like it? I haven't seen anyone online or offline that actually even remotely likes it.
Edit: Nevermind, found the first guy further down the thread
It’s…fine. I miss the direct skeuomorphic design language of the older iOS.
Ever since about the time of Windows 8 I felt like all computers were just designed for other computers.
The skeumorphic days of the early 2000s were nice, and gave things a bit of character. The current trend of having everything be flat colours is fine, but does lose a little bit of that whimsy.
Admittedly, part of it might also just be that the grass is greener. We could easily be saying the same thing in reverse if we were still on the gel look of the time.
Not a fan of the bubble bobble theme
Don't get me wrong, they have some great things about it. Garage Band, for instance. It's just not forward thinking, not quality or design oriented anymore, and tries to keep you on their cloud pretty strongly. At least that's how it was around 2017.
Remember iTunes, if I had gone out with the intention of making an inferior product I don't think I would have succeeded. I cannot believe that they were prepared to slap their name onto that utterly garbage piece of software and then proceed to never fix it.
It's still a bewildering oversight that, or something just like it, is the only way you can link with a device.
If you stuff your phone with photos, you can't delete them by connecting them to a computer and sorting through them on that. You have to use a utility to import them either straight onto the computer, or delete them separately on the phone. Even if you use a Mac instead of a PC, you basically need to work with an iTunes-like interface.
Especially with the focus on trying to make the iPad a computer. You're still largely relegated to the iTunes-type interface, unless you sidestep it with a cloud service, or Airdrop.
Every decision made about the vision pro was idiotic. They didn't even have a developer kit so you had to buy the full price to device and you didn't even get developer options for your trouble so no one developed for it. It wasn't available outside of North America, it didn't have a controller so interactions were clunky, it didn't support gaming which is basically what a VR headset is for, it would only interact with an MacBook making the effective price even higher, it was uncomfortable, the battery was a randomly a separate part to absolutely zero customer benefit as it wasn't hot swappable, after the big swanky launch event Apple proceeded to completely forget about it and didn't release any updates, and as you say they never made an affordable version.
Literally every other VR headset was a superior option, and apples attempt to rebrand the product as "spatial computing" just confused everyone.
Yeah i dont know. Its a tool/technology. It found a somewhat stable market in gaming and lots of its development is tied to the gaming sector. But saying that is basically what its there for is underestimating its future potential by a lot.
It was also not meant to be VR but rather pass through AR (smart approach for now as optical AR is still not as high fidelity)
Again, thats not what they were going for. Cook is apparently super excited about AR & spatial computing and kinda jumped the gun a bit if you ask me. But this was no "Oh no the gamers wont buy it because of the quest or the index etc., quick rebrand it as a spatial computing device"
This stuff is going to fundamentally change how we interact with technology in the next 100 years but apple adapting things when they had their kinks worked out and are ready for a broad audience made it a confusing product coming from them.
That’s my thought too. The Vision Pro is more Newton than anything it’s compared to today. I’m sure that there will be echoes of it in some piece of tech in the next 10-15 years, but it’s not the right device for the right time right now for most people.
I think that they shot themselves in the foot by trying to make it a computer that goes on your face, and have it do as much as possible.
The interface is weird, and comes with a bunch of features that don't seem very useful. The eye thing is simply odd, and the keyboard seems like it would run into the same problems that those laser keyboards that were all the rage back in the day had, where it's awful to type on, since you get no feedback, and are just whacking your hand against a solid surface.
If they had stripped it all the way down into basically being a wearable monitor you can plug into your devices, with workspaces you can expand or move around as you like, in lieu of having a bunch of monitors, it would have been more of a sell.
As it is, it comes across as a proof-of-concept that's stuffed to the gills with gimmicks to try and make it fit a niche, which in turn makes it seem a toy more so than anything else.
Help them switch to GrapheneOS!
Yeah.
The hardware is fantastic.
The software is like one of those brides where they bind the feet so they can never become independent. And then services revenue is a goitre on this creatures neck constantly throwing it off balance as it tries to shamble forward.
I very much want ~2010 apple, where the hardware was maybe a bit meh, but the software was top tier.
The hardware is premium. That doesn't mean it's good. It's impossible to work on or upgrade, for example. The parts are all high quality and the design is usually solid (except for a handful of things like systems known to overheat and "you're holding it wrong" antennas), but for how much it costs I don't want to have to buy a whole new one when I want to upgrade or have a hardware problem, no matter how much Apple would want me to.
Since 2011 when he took over Apple, to 2020, Cook doubled the company's revenue and profit, and the company's market value increased from $348 billion to $1.9 trillion.In 2025.
Just saying.
I frankly don't know about Apple and Tim Cook specifically, but broadly a lot of enthusiasts may not be as excited about revenue and profit as they are about how good the experience is for them.
For example, looking at a well executed enjoyable game with no bullshit micro transactions or loot boxes or anything most would agree that is a good game.
But revenue and profit wise some random low effort mobile game with micro transactions would blow that good game out of the water business wise.
Unfortunately, lots of "better business" is explicitly screwing over the customers as much as they can possibly get away with, so I'm not super excited about arguments around revenue, profit, and market cap as a measure of a company I should like to buy from.
Sure, but then people should be honest about what they are actually saying:
“I’m glad he left because I hate what they did to my iPhone during his tenure.” Instead of “I’m glad he left, he’s been a disaster for Apple.”
One is honest and accurate, the other isn’t.
Also in what is Apple really screwing people over? The MacBook is more competitive than it’s ever been so much so that M chips continue to be the gold standard every brand aims to beat and MacBooks are more affordable than ever considering the pricing we’re seeing now. Really, all things considered, the Liquid Glass design is (maybe) a L drop in an ocean of Ws for Apple.
Yeah it’s weird that people argue Tim was bad for Apple. All the major metrics are in the green since he took over, the only complaints I see about Apple today is something abstract like “I don’t like the bubbly design of my device.”
If anything, he has only improved Apple’s products since the mid 2010s when their products were suffering from focusing on thinness instead of usability.
I’m not optimistic on this one, since one of the features of huge corporations is that the institutional shareholders that own them appoint the person they think will deliver the best YoY growth and Earnings Per Share. For a company that’s mostly saturated its market, this means enshittification and thumbscrew-tightening on its existing customers.
He may not have the product vision or salesmanship of Jobs, but he’s a logistics genius and was a MAJOR part of saving Apple when he came on. I’m reading the book “Apple in China”, and he was very responsible for Apple’s incredible supply chain and the fact that Apple, itself, holds relatively little inventory with the exception of its stores.
The company has grown exponentially under Cook. The problem is that there hasn’t really been an awe inspiring new product developed fully under him.
And he sucked up to a fascist (screenshot at 4 minutes in article video):
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/07/tim-cook-gift-to-trump/
the next one will do the same
Innocent question:
besides Liquid ass (which really only people online complain about, the average user doesn’t care), in what has Tim Cook been bad for Apple?
The MacBook has become extremely competitive price wise and even the iPhone since all other brands seem to have inflated their prices sky-high. And with the launch of Neo it is even more competitive. The M chip keeps running circles around the competition and Apple stock keeps rising year after year.
So what was the issue with him?
I've found it makes more sense when you think of it from the shareholder perspective.
Its not that they're blind idiots, its that their motivations are not what they say they are. If they were trying to make the best and most ergonomically advanced product possible, as stated, then their moves often seem stupid and tone-deaf. But, if you consider that they are trying to increase margin as much as possible any action that makes the product or support cheaper by a greater margin than it loses customers, they're moves are brilliant!
More and more users are disgruntled and dissatisfied, but barely any of them skip the lines when the next model comes out, so the shareholder's plan is working excellently.
If we want a return to companies competing for our dollars, we need a return to markets that have competitors. If there are fewer companies in a sector than players on a bowling team, you can bet they are in collusion and acting as a unit in the ways that affect consumer agency, so there is no competition in the classic sense. They all agree to suck together so few will leave. They all win and we all lose.
It’s the biggest company in the world. (Well, unless GPUs are here to stay).
He’s done pretty good.