But instead Cook stuck around, perhaps influenced, towards the end, by the sound of senior executives stampeding past his office on their way out. The mass exodus was carefully orchestrated, he insisted, knowing that his own departure would only make things look worse. But that departure has now finally arrived, and John Ternus will take the top seat tomorrow.
Those additional six years have made Cook’s corporate eulogy rather more of a challenge. On the product side, there have been groundbreaking and successful launches, but the products that were successful were very rarely groundbreaking, and the ones that were were such a flop that Apple had to fire 100 employees in the Vision Pro team. What was the last truly exciting product of the Cook era? The Apple Watch came out in 2015, the AirPods in 2016 and the iPhone X in 2017. Even the first Apple silicon Macs came out in 2020. It’s cruel in some ways that the iPhone Ultra will arrive a few days after Cook leaves office, but that is typical of the man’s selflessness. He wants to give Ternus a head start.
AI has been a mixed bag, to say the least. In recent months, some analysts (including this one) have started to view Cook’s approach in this area more favorably, but let’s be honest: This was no masterstroke. Like spatial computing, Cook looked on AI as a priority target, and the fact Apple ended up outsourcing much of its AI infrastructure and expertise to Google and OpenAI was the lucky result of internal failure rather than wise strategising. Siri AI is now fit for purpose but plenty of reputational damage was done over the course of years as a result of its previous and scandalously long-running incompetence.
Then there’s the ethical side of things: the criteria by which it will be judged, in Cook’s own words, whether or not he was a good and decent man. There were the questions over employee working conditions in 2021 and the anti-unionization tactics in 2022. Cook’s Apple is loosening its iron grip on the App Store but every concession is given up grudgingly and by the smallest possible increments. Such is the company’s relationship with its developer “partners.”
It’s probably wise, finally, to skip quickly over the divisive optics of Cook’s involvement in President Trump’s second term, other than to mention that this relationship seems likely to dominate his time as executive chairman. So much goodwill has been burned in the past six years that some may view this “promotion” as karma.
A complicated legacy, then, and time to give someone else a turn at the wheel. Someone who focuses more on developing great products and a little less on squeezing the costs and honing the logistics. Someone without the baggage of 15 years in the limelight. Someone who can start afresh in their relationship with employees, developers, and customers, and leave governmental liaison duties to the chairman.
