Cook was an outstanding COO. He became CEO of the most valuable company and kept it like that for the most. Car, AVP, TV+ expenses, panic move away from China, and AI… he is no product or project person. He won’t push Apple forward.
But Tim Cook has pushed Apple further ahead, of it’s competition in comparison to the others. Apple certainly has executed better without wasting untold billions of dollars, the largest acquisition Apple is ever made has been only $3 billion dollars for Beats (still profitable and still going) in the same period Microsoft (Skype) or Google with (Motorola) both failed those are just two examples, and there are many others that both have failed on, again in the same period…. Apples competition have squandered billions and have very little to show for most of those poorly executed Me-too products.
How bad has the rollout been compared to Apple Maps? He fired Scott Forstall for that.
What would have made Apple Intelligence worse was if Apple had given OpenAI billions like Microsoft…… And Microsoft has basically been given a free pass on five blunders in the last 12 to 18 months any of which Apple would have been sentenced to their usual “Doomed” status whenever something happens in the news.
Absolutely ridiculous. As a Mac customer since the 1990s it's clear to me the Mac has never been in a better place. Steve Jobs would have been delighted with what they have been able to achieve with Apple Silicon for the Mac and they make "the whole widget" now just as he always wanted. On top of that Tim Cook is an absolute logistics and supply genius and people underestimate how much this has meant to Apple becoming what it is today. As an Apple shareholder I would like to see Tim stay on for a long while yet.
Apple is a perfectly greased machine to get the last penny out of its customers. What’s missing is a vision for the future. So, Mable a change at the top wouldn’t be that bad after all.
This author is completely wrong: Tim made Apple stagnant while their competitors continued to innovate. Steve Jobs is the sole reason Apple has grown in any capacity: a man who was obsessed with innovation, finding the "perfect product", and taking risks for the future of technology. Tim focused entirely on services in order to generate as much revenue as possible while causing Apple to become irrelevant to tech enthusiasts. I firmly believe Steve would be ashamed at what Apple has morphed into, and Tim is entirely at fault for its current sorry state. Money =/= success =/= innovation.
This author is completely wrong: Tim made Apple stagnant while their competitors continued to innovate. Steve Jobs is the sole reason Apple has grown in any capacity: a man who was obsessed with innovation, finding the "perfect product", and taking risks for the future of technology.
Steve Jobs had plenty of blunders. He famously wanted the Intel Atom to be used in the iPhone and it took one of the principle members of the design team threatening to quit in order to convince him to use ARM instead. The original Apple TV also used an Intel M processor and was a VERY buggy product.
Cook turned Apple into an unbelievably successful wonder machine.
Its products are the best in each category and the best quality out there.
Apple doesn’t have to invent something new all the time. They just need to make the best products on the planet. And they do.
Apple car wasn’t a failure. It was a skunkworks project that ended up not getting greenlit. It wasn’t something apple announced or sold that then failed.
Apple intelligence is more or less what was advertised, with some chunks needing revision and Siri not ready.
People also have to remember that apple went out of its way to respect privacy in training tje ai and ethically purchased the rights to the data it uses. So you can reward the criminals who steal or you can be patient with the only player out there still respecting you as a human being.
I’d gladly pay for the latter.
And that’s why Cook deserves his paradise even today. He’s not going to sell Apple’s soul for the sake of short term gain. He sees the long play. And in the meantime, it’s not like apple isn’t the best game in town as it is.
All the hand-wringing about Apple being late to the AI party is predictably nonsensical.
The key premise at the root of this lament is that the competition is delivering world changing AI products and features while Apple flounders. Poppycock. The reality is that, across the board, AI is a half-baked, overhyped hot mess.
To the extent that it could be unusual that Apple’s marketing folks were allowed to rebrand the existing machine learning pipeline as Apple Intelligence, the rest of the story is following a familiar pattern. Others hit the market first with a New Big Thing that’s hyped to be great, but is, in reality, unfinished and poorly implemented. Meanwhile, Apple hangs back and really works on it. Pundits declare Apple to be doomed and call for Tim Cook’s resignation, because, you know, he’s no Steve Jobs.
Eventually, if the New Big Thing was even a thing, Apple rolls out with an implementation that comes with a twist that makes it somehow… different. Apple makes a big introduction, and the pundits receive it skeptically. It’s too little, too late, they say, and Apple will never catch up.
But then there’s a slow burn. The twist that made it different turns out to be the thing that consumers find indispensable. Then while the pundits aren’t looking, Apple’s take becomes the obvious implementation that everybody wants, and the competition has to try to replicate it.
Finally, the Apple version retroactively becomes an instant success, and there was actually no party before Apple showed up. The pundits pretend this was always a foregone conclusion and forget what they said before. They’ve moved on anyway.
The pundits are now focused on decrying Apple’s annual updates to the instant success as too-slow incrementalism. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, after all. Didn’t Jobs launch a new, instantly successful category killer product like every six months? Also, there’s this new New Big Thing that the other companies are doing, and Apple is lagging so far behind that they’re doomed. Tim Cook should resign. He’s no Steve Jobs.
There have been many strategic errors along the way and they can be pointed out but it's unreasonable to expect zero strategic errors. In any years' long stint things will sometimes not work out as planned but if things work out overall then the impact of errors is mitigated.
The whole reason for a strategy is to hope it works out. Whether it actually does or not is mostly out of the company's hands and there are many factors involved.
Going all in with Tsmc for example was a huge risk but it has paid off. The car project probably made some sense when they signed off on it. The Qualcomm situation was terrible on one hand and a huge strategic error on the other but it wasn't like the TSMC situation where a devastating earthquake could have really been a problem. After all, even without Intel, Qualcomm was there to actually provide a solution.
I have serious reservations about its OS platforms and their ability to move forward over the next 15 years filled with AI and IoT but for that we'll have to wait and see.
For AI specifically, there is no doubt that Apple was caught with it pants down but Yikes! moments aren't new for Apple.
I disagree with the 'long game' part.
In a long game scenario this would be just water off a duck's back. Business as usual. No need at all to take the route they took. Just sit back and release a product when it was ready.
Being 'forced to release early' isn't the same as ignoring criticism and even then, Apple is susceptible to criticism when it hits multiple media outlets. Famously Apple didn't ignore the complaints that they couldn't 'innovate'.
Folding phones hit the ground running (save for the Samsung pre-release review units fiasco) and have done very well ever since. Yes, there is a crease but even in the very first folding phones, you couldn't see it unless you looked for it at a weird angle or with the screen turned off. Since then every generation has improved on the previous one. The sole issue is price and even those are coming down on some models.
The reason we didn't have a folding phone from Apple five years ago could also be that they just didn't have one far along in the design process to release.
Apple also 'ignored' criticism about Android features (famously customisation) but is now making customisation a key focus of each new iOS release. In fact, each new iOS major release seems to bring a swathe of Android/HarmonyOS features that have been around for years. Often those features are now the main features on show.
Reacting to AI isn't really the exception, and 'the long game' isn't worth much when we see the company behind the competition on so many levels. From pin hole cutouts (to replace the notch), to cameras (all kinds), modems, graphene, batteries and charging, screen refresh rates, folding and flip phones and of course now AI.
In 2025, there isn't really a decent reason for an iPhone to be stuck with a 60Hz refresh rate for the asking price. That isn't the long game, it's just unnecessarily holding features back for upsell and a few dollars more profit. Drip feeding features to users just because it can get away with it. The same can be said of memory which has historically been held back (again for upsell and profit).
Given how AI was progressing (at lightning speed) and all the buzz around it, there was a point where Apple just couldn't 'ignore' it. They tried for one year (in hindsight an error because it simply drew more attention to the situation) and then found themselves in an ever deeper hole. They had to do something and with every passing day it looks like they were simply overwhelmed by what they decided to promise. They bit off more than they could chew.
The specific case of Siri will definitely be put down to years of poor management.
If they were blindsided by AI in general, they should have had Siri fixed and had it on a solid roadmap years ago. Right now it looks like they were simply kludging things to keep it going. That is pretty serious if that is the case Tim is ultimately responsible for that.
However, Apple - overall - is still satisfying shareholders and if they get bitten by geopolitics (tariffs etc) I'm not going to blame Tim Cook for it.
I think he has been planning to step aside for a while (long before all this blew up) and imagined it happening during the Trump term so if he does go, it won't be because of the current situation.
Cook was an outstanding COO. He became CEO of the most valuable company and kept it like that for the most. Car, AVP, TV+ expenses, panic move away from China, and AI… he is no product or project person. He won’t push Apple forward.
That is a misleading statement. Cook did not "....... became CEO of the most valuable company". When Cook took over as CEO (after Jobs passing in 2011), Apple, Inc. only had a market cap of about $375B. Apple Inc. did not become the most valuable company until over 7 years later, with Cook as CEO. Apple became the first $1T US company (by market cap) in 2018. The first $2T in 2020 and the first $3T in 2024. Not bad by any metric, for a CEO that bungled its EV venture.
Not all that misleading. Apple briefly became the worlds most valuable company in 2011, and vied for the top spot with Exxon for the following few years. The $1tn market cap milestone was a different matter.
This author is completely wrong: Tim made Apple stagnant while their competitors continued to innovate. Steve Jobs is the sole reason Apple has grown in any capacity: a man who was obsessed with innovation, finding the "perfect product", and taking risks for the future of technology. Tim focused entirely on services in order to generate as much revenue as possible while causing Apple to become irrelevant to tech enthusiasts. I firmly believe Steve would be ashamed at what Apple has morphed into, and Tim is entirely at fault for its current sorry state. Money =/= success =/= innovation.
“Tech enthusiasts” hated Steve Jobs. He was a form-over-function sales guy, and not a bona fide engineer. Jobs made closed-system toys for tech-ignorant consumers, not real computers that could be endlessly modified by the vastly more important “tech enthusiasts.” Apple has always been irrelevant to “tech enthusiasts.”
Also, Steve Jobs died fourteen years ago. You cannot speak for what a dead person would think fourteen years after his death.
Jobs’ most significant contribution to Apple’s continued success is his selection (while he was still alive!) of Tim Cook as his successor. Much to the chagrin of “tech enthusiasts,” Cook has remained true to Jobs’ vision by continuing to adhere to the closed system paradigm, focusing on selling hardware that does what tech-ignorant consumers want, and aligning software and services to create an ecosystem that sustains the sale of Apple hardware.
Cook was an outstanding COO. He became CEO of the most valuable company and kept it like that for the most. Car, AVP, TV+ expenses, panic move away from China, and AI… he is no product or project person. He won’t push Apple forward.
That is a misleading statement. Cook did not "....... became CEO of the most valuable company". When Cook took over as CEO (after Jobs passing in 2011), Apple, Inc. only had a market cap of about $375B. Apple Inc. did not become the most valuable company until over 7 years later, with Cook as CEO. Apple became the first $1T US company (by market cap) in 2018. The first $2T in 2020 and the first $3T in 2024. Not bad by any metric, for a CEO that bungled its EV venture.
I would add that Tim Cook did not simply "become" CEO of Apple. Tim Cook was hand-picked for the job by the single most important and admired (and sometimes criticized) person in the history of Apple. The final and lasting legacy of an outgoing chief executive of a successful company experiencing growth and prosperity is to take part in the selection of his or her successor. Steve Jobs did not tarnish his own legacy in any way by pushing for someone who was not up to the job. Steve and Apple's board nailed it with Tim Cook. When the time comes, we should all be hoping that Tim Cook and Apple's board follows up their previous home run with another one.
All the hand-wringing about Apple being late to the AI party is predictably nonsensical.
The key premise at the root of this lament is that the competition is delivering world changing AI products and features while Apple flounders. Poppycock. The reality is that, across the board, AI is a half-baked, overhyped hot mess.
To the extent that it could be unusual that Apple’s marketing folks were allowed to rebrand the existing machine learning pipeline as Apple Intelligence, the rest of the story is following a familiar pattern. Others hit the market first with a New Big Thing that’s hyped to be great, but is, in reality, unfinished and poorly implemented. Meanwhile, Apple hangs back and really works on it. Pundits declare Apple to be doomed and call for Tim Cook’s resignation, because, you know, he’s no Steve Jobs.
Eventually, if the New Big Thing was even a thing, Apple rolls out with an implementation that comes with a twist that makes it somehow… different. Apple makes a big introduction, and the pundits receive it skeptically. It’s too little, too late, they say, and Apple will never catch up.
But then there’s a slow burn. The twist that made it different turns out to be the thing that consumers find indispensable. Then while the pundits aren’t looking, Apple’s take becomes the obvious implementation that everybody wants, and the competition has to try to replicate it.
Finally, the Apple version retroactively becomes an instant success, and there was actually no party before Apple showed up. The pundits pretend this was always a foregone conclusion and forget what they said before. They’ve moved on anyway.
The pundits are now focused on decrying Apple’s annual updates to the instant success as too-slow incrementalism. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, after all. Didn’t Jobs launch a new, instantly successful category killer product like every six months? Also, there’s this new New Big Thing that the other companies are doing, and Apple is lagging so far behind that they’re doomed. Tim Cook should resign. He’s no Steve Jobs.
If that were the case, Apple would have sat back and continued its refusal to even pronounce the letters 'AI'.
It didn't and for good reason. Not only did it not do that, but it chose to 'talk it up', promise features, but 'later' and then not hit the mark with what it managed to ship.
You are free to describe the current state of AI how you please but one thing is unquestionable: the buzz around AI hasn't died down. The opposite is true.
That means, whatever its state, people are using it and getting results. Results they are perfectly happy with. Drawbacks included.
That is why Apple couldn't wait a few years to deliver its own take.
There are hundreds of LLMs out there doing amazing things.
I'm very happy with Perplexity Pro and get results I could never get from something like Siri.
Now 'Manus' is getting all the news and proving useful:
All the hand-wringing about Apple being late to the AI party is predictably nonsensical.
The key premise at the root of this lament is that the competition is delivering world changing AI products and features while Apple flounders. Poppycock. The reality is that, across the board, AI is a half-baked, overhyped hot mess.
To the extent that it could be unusual that Apple’s marketing folks were allowed to rebrand the existing machine learning pipeline as Apple Intelligence, the rest of the story is following a familiar pattern. Others hit the market first with a New Big Thing that’s hyped to be great, but is, in reality, unfinished and poorly implemented. Meanwhile, Apple hangs back and really works on it. Pundits declare Apple to be doomed and call for Tim Cook’s resignation, because, you know, he’s no Steve Jobs.
Eventually, if the New Big Thing was even a thing, Apple rolls out with an implementation that comes with a twist that makes it somehow… different. Apple makes a big introduction, and the pundits receive it skeptically. It’s too little, too late, they say, and Apple will never catch up.
But then there’s a slow burn. The twist that made it different turns out to be the thing that consumers find indispensable. Then while the pundits aren’t looking, Apple’s take becomes the obvious implementation that everybody wants, and the competition has to try to replicate it.
Finally, the Apple version retroactively becomes an instant success, and there was actually no party before Apple showed up. The pundits pretend this was always a foregone conclusion and forget what they said before. They’ve moved on anyway.
The pundits are now focused on decrying Apple’s annual updates to the instant success as too-slow incrementalism. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs, after all. Didn’t Jobs launch a new, instantly successful category killer product like every six months? Also, there’s this new New Big Thing that the other companies are doing, and Apple is lagging so far behind that they’re doomed. Tim Cook should resign. He’s no Steve Jobs.
I could not agree more. Like I said, I'm not happy with the way Apple reacted to what other people convinced them was a threat. In reality Apple was already on the right track for what Apple does best. They did not need to overreact like they did. I feel the media and market pundits, with help from those whose only reason for existing was to come up with a version of AI that drew a lot of public attention on its own, laid out a trap for Apple to step into - and Apple kindly obliged them and is still trying to scrape the crap off their shoes.
Apple has never been an "AI" company. That's not the reason for Apple's existence or their success. Apple builds integrated products and services that make people's lives a little better. Apple, as a products and services company, has been on a path to incorporate additional intelligence into their products and services for years. Once the criticism around AI started they became defensive and tried to show the market that they could hang with the cool kids too. By doing so they deviated from their plans and reactively started making promises that their AI, Apple Intelligence, was just around the corner when it really wasn't. In the meantime, Apple had to keep shipping products that customers can touch and feel on a cadence their customers and the media had come to expect.
I imagine Apple threw a lot of bodies at the "problem." Anyone who's worked in software product development knows that throwing a bunch of bodies at a big software development and integration problem ultimately slows things down and leads to even more unforced errors.
I do believe that Apple will ultimately deliver AI, aka Apple Intelligence, in their products and it will deliver enormous value. Of course there will be a price to pay for that value and we may not like some of the consequences, but Apple will absolutely deliver. I think we've seen time and again that companies who are successful at doing other big things, like selling AI toolkits, providing enabling technology, or selling products on a global online store, can spin up their own efforts at doing what Apple does so well. A few of them, like Google, can make it work by compromising in some areas, but others find out that it's a lot more difficult to do what Apple does and be as successful as Apple has been.
Everything Apple does is done to promote Apple products and services for Apple customers. They aren't competing against OpenAI to sell AI services other technology that gets the market all giddy and bubbly. As long as Apple keeps being Apple they should continue to see their success continue to grow.
Could you imagine if Tim Cook would have had to demonstrate the feature live in real time like Jobs used to do instead of a nicely edited prerecorded video.
That's comparing Apples to oranges.
Cook can not demo the feature live because the feature do not yet exist in any real product by Apple. or even in a product that is in production with a firm future release date.
While Jobs on the other hand had a real live product to demo. That were either immediately available after the demo or a firm release date usually not more than a few weeks away.
But in reality, there probably never have been or ever will be, a CEO that can demo a product as well as Jobs did. The "reality distortion field" lived and died with Jobs. Not only is it not possible for Cook to demo an Apple product like Jobs, there isn't any other CEO or any future CEO of Apple that can. Not demoing a product like Jobs, is not a point against having Cook as CEO.
Absolutely ridiculous. As a Mac customer since the 1990s it's clear to me the Mac has never been in a better place. Steve Jobs would have been delighted with what they have been able to achieve with Apple Silicon for the Mac and they make "the whole widget" now just as he always wanted. On top of that Tim Cook is an absolute logistics and supply genius and people underestimate how much this has meant to Apple becoming what it is today. As an Apple shareholder I would like to see Tim stay on for a long while yet.
Actually Jobs made a comment that he learned that it wasn’t a good idea for a company to make every part themselves.
How’s the Metaverse doing? Facebook renamed their company because they thought the Metaverse was the next great thing. Missteps happen, but cook has been tremendous for Apple. I will say that Apple has shown signs of slipping and Apple Intelligence is the latest. I would even say that Vision Pro was rushed and he is spinning it as a product for early adopters. He deserves some grace but should be criticized when deserved.
How’s the Metaverse doing? Facebook renamed their company because they thought the Metaverse was the next great thing. Missteps happen, but cook has been tremendous for Apple. I will say that Apple has shown signs of slipping and Apple Intelligence is the latest. I would even say that Vision Pro was rushed and he is spinning it as a product for early adopters. He deserves some grace but should be criticized when deserved.
Metaverse is doing great much of the companies livestock lives in alternative half reality as directed by the customers.
Cook was an outstanding COO. He became CEO of the most valuable company and kept it like that for the most. Car, AVP, TV+ expenses, panic move away from China, and AI… he is no product or project person. He won’t push Apple forward.
But Tim Cook has pushed Apple further ahead, of it’s competition in comparison to the others.
Comments
There have been many strategic errors along the way and they can be pointed out but it's unreasonable to expect zero strategic errors. In any years' long stint things will sometimes not work out as planned but if things work out overall then the impact of errors is mitigated.
The whole reason for a strategy is to hope it works out. Whether it actually does or not is mostly out of the company's hands and there are many factors involved.
Going all in with Tsmc for example was a huge risk but it has paid off. The car project probably made some sense when they signed off on it. The Qualcomm situation was terrible on one hand and a huge strategic error on the other but it wasn't like the TSMC situation where a devastating earthquake could have really been a problem. After all, even without Intel, Qualcomm was there to actually provide a solution.
I have serious reservations about its OS platforms and their ability to move forward over the next 15 years filled with AI and IoT but for that we'll have to wait and see.
For AI specifically, there is no doubt that Apple was caught with it pants down but Yikes! moments aren't new for Apple.
I disagree with the 'long game' part.
In a long game scenario this would be just water off a duck's back. Business as usual. No need at all to take the route they took. Just sit back and release a product when it was ready.
Being 'forced to release early' isn't the same as ignoring criticism and even then, Apple is susceptible to criticism when it hits multiple media outlets. Famously Apple didn't ignore the complaints that they couldn't 'innovate'.
Folding phones hit the ground running (save for the Samsung pre-release review units fiasco) and have done very well ever since. Yes, there is a crease but even in the very first folding phones, you couldn't see it unless you looked for it at a weird angle or with the screen turned off. Since then every generation has improved on the previous one. The sole issue is price and even those are coming down on some models.
The reason we didn't have a folding phone from Apple five years ago could also be that they just didn't have one far along in the design process to release.
Apple also 'ignored' criticism about Android features (famously customisation) but is now making customisation a key focus of each new iOS release. In fact, each new iOS major release seems to bring a swathe of Android/HarmonyOS features that have been around for years. Often those features are now the main features on show.
Reacting to AI isn't really the exception, and 'the long game' isn't worth much when we see the company behind the competition on so many levels. From pin hole cutouts (to replace the notch), to cameras (all kinds), modems, graphene, batteries and charging, screen refresh rates, folding and flip phones and of course now AI.
In 2025, there isn't really a decent reason for an iPhone to be stuck with a 60Hz refresh rate for the asking price. That isn't the long game, it's just unnecessarily holding features back for upsell and a few dollars more profit. Drip feeding features to users just because it can get away with it. The same can be said of memory which has historically been held back (again for upsell and profit).
Given how AI was progressing (at lightning speed) and all the buzz around it, there was a point where Apple just couldn't 'ignore' it. They tried for one year (in hindsight an error because it simply drew more attention to the situation) and then found themselves in an ever deeper hole. They had to do something and with every passing day it looks like they were simply overwhelmed by what they decided to promise. They bit off more than they could chew.
The specific case of Siri will definitely be put down to years of poor management.
If they were blindsided by AI in general, they should have had Siri fixed and had it on a solid roadmap years ago. Right now it looks like they were simply kludging things to keep it going. That is pretty serious if that is the case Tim is ultimately responsible for that.
However, Apple - overall - is still satisfying shareholders and if they get bitten by geopolitics (tariffs etc) I'm not going to blame Tim Cook for it.
I think he has been planning to step aside for a while (long before all this blew up) and imagined it happening during the Trump term so if he does go, it won't be because of the current situation.
Who fills his shoes is a mystery.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-08-09/apple-rises-from-near-bankruptcy-to-become-most-valuable-company
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/ExxonMobil-Overtakes-Apple-to-Become-the-Worlds-Largest-Company.html
Maybe check these things out before rushing to correct someone with your half-rememberings?
It didn't and for good reason. Not only did it not do that, but it chose to 'talk it up', promise features, but 'later' and then not hit the mark with what it managed to ship.
You are free to describe the current state of AI how you please but one thing is unquestionable: the buzz around AI hasn't died down. The opposite is true.
That means, whatever its state, people are using it and getting results. Results they are perfectly happy with. Drawbacks included.
That is why Apple couldn't wait a few years to deliver its own take.
There are hundreds of LLMs out there doing amazing things.
I'm very happy with Perplexity Pro and get results I could never get from something like Siri.
Now 'Manus' is getting all the news and proving useful:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/11/1113133/manus-ai-review/
Just one of many popping up all over the place.
Apple has never been an "AI" company. That's not the reason for Apple's existence or their success. Apple builds integrated products and services that make people's lives a little better. Apple, as a products and services company, has been on a path to incorporate additional intelligence into their products and services for years. Once the criticism around AI started they became defensive and tried to show the market that they could hang with the cool kids too. By doing so they deviated from their plans and reactively started making promises that their AI, Apple Intelligence, was just around the corner when it really wasn't. In the meantime, Apple had to keep shipping products that customers can touch and feel on a cadence their customers and the media had come to expect.
I imagine Apple threw a lot of bodies at the "problem." Anyone who's worked in software product development knows that throwing a bunch of bodies at a big software development and integration problem ultimately slows things down and leads to even more unforced errors.
I do believe that Apple will ultimately deliver AI, aka Apple Intelligence, in their products and it will deliver enormous value. Of course there will be a price to pay for that value and we may not like some of the consequences, but Apple will absolutely deliver. I think we've seen time and again that companies who are successful at doing other big things, like selling AI toolkits, providing enabling technology, or selling products on a global online store, can spin up their own efforts at doing what Apple does so well. A few of them, like Google, can make it work by compromising in some areas, but others find out that it's a lot more difficult to do what Apple does and be as successful as Apple has been.
Everything Apple does is done to promote Apple products and services for Apple customers. They aren't competing against OpenAI to sell AI services other technology that gets the market all giddy and bubbly. As long as Apple keeps being Apple they should continue to see their success continue to grow.
Cook is only keeping the big ship steady. I get why Warren Buffett sold $80B of Apple shares in 2024 after Car and AVP.