this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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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.
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.
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.
Apple has done amazing under Cook and its reputation has certainly not been run into the ground.
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, for them 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.
But their fans keep eating the shit so it doesn't matter.
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.