blastdoor

sunman42 said:

blastdoor said:

The 21st century has been very good for Ireland 

Except from 2007 to 2013 or so.

Compared to the previous thousand years, even that was pretty good. 

Becoming chair could be part of a sensible transition plan. As chair, cook can oversee the new guy to make sure they picked the right person and provide guidance/mentorship for the new CEO. 

For any successful CEO close to retirement, their most important remaining job is working with the board to find successor candidates. Steve Jobs did his job well — he picked Cook. One thing that is especially remarkable about Jobs’ pick is that Cook is very different from Jobs. It would be very tempting to pick a “mini me” as a replacement. For Jobs, that might have been Ive. But because Jobs cared more about Apple than his ego, he picked someone very different from himself because he knew that is what Apple needed next. And Jobs was right Cook was great for Apple in the ten years after Jobs left. 

nubus said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

BH has 300 million shares in AAPL. It is more than 20% of the total holdings. I don't think you can say that Buffett doesn't like Apple.

If shareholders are displeased, they're looking at about the last five minutes, which is ridiculous.

Cook's the right guy, in the right job, at the right time. Who's your pitch for his replacement?

BH dropped 2/3 of their stocks. I wouldn't say BH is pleased with his performance. Cook took the job when Apple was #1. It is now #3. With tariffs and the Google case it could be #4.

Shareholders do look at 5 minutes and it can be ridiculous. The CEO of the #1 most valuable company in Europe 2024 lost his job earlier this year due to stock performance. With Cook - lack of products, lack of diversification, and stalling revenue.

Pitch for replacement... 75% of GDP and 96% of the population is outside US. Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Nvidia, AMD, Tesla, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Coca Cola (another BH favorite) - all multinational corporations with a CEO raised outside US. I would however go with Sam Altman. Not due to AI but for his mindset.

Overall I agree with Nubus. Tim Cook did a great job in his first 5 to 10 years but he has lost the plot. I think there are some obvious candidates to replace him, such as the current SVPs of software and hardware engineering. There are likely many great candidates inside and outside Apple that I don't know about. But the board should be actively (though quietly) identifying and assessing candidates. 

I don't think Cook should be "fired," but he should be encouraged to retire. Steve Jobs made it clear that he didn't think people should try to guess what he would have done when making decisions -- they should be their own person. But that's not license to make bad decisions. Too many bad decisions have been made under Cook. 

ACDC makes a lot of sense to me, especially if the new packaging technology for M5 makes a wider range of CPU/GPU combinations available. 

I think it would be great if it wasn't just developers, but any users who sometimes need to access a lot more CPU/GPU than what they have available in their Mac, for whatever purpose.