Apple vs the Law

I dream of an alternate reality where Steve Jobs makes snide remarks about politics, sets things right with the App Store (worldwide), Siri, Ai and the lackluster UI and quality control of software lately. Steve would get on top of things and speak his mind and we were all better off for it.

There's a severe lack of character in Tim Cook, I think the best thing to come out under his reign is the M-series hardware and return to sane computer design. He's timid, and his penny pinching fuckery is costing Apple a lot of goodwill that's a lot more precious and harder to gain back.

Maybe it's a shareholder problem, whatever—the early 2000's spirit of Apple was splendid.

I admire Steve Jobs as a visionary as much as everyone else, but I never thought it was fair for people to keep discounting Tim Cook as the “lesser” man between the two. He was the one who took the company to a trillion dollar valuation. He took on the operations and supply chain work that no computer nerd or product visionary ever wants to take. He did the hard, unsexy work that no one wanted to do and yet people see him as worse for it.

It's easy to assume that Apple is where it is today because of Jobs. But when you look back, there are actually a number of key decisions made by Tim Cook since Job's death that led Apple here.

Cook has plenty of leadership vision. He's led Apple into the VR space with Vision Pro, and has pushed into services/content (Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+), and wearables (Beats acquisition, Apple Watch, AirPods). He's defined Apple as a company that cares about privacy, and it's because of him that Apple is so stubbornly fighting regulation in the EU and US.

If anything, you could criticize Cook for being too ambitious, if you thought that his attention to these areas came at the expense of iPhone & Mac quality.