Comment by burnerRhodo
10 days ago
steve jobs was the innovator, steve cook is the supply chain guy. They started an electric car not because they thought it was a good idea, but because everyone was going to leave to Tesla or rivian if they didn't. They had no direction and arguements that Tesla had about whether to have a steering wheel...
Then Siri just kinda languishes for forever, and LLM's pass the torch of "Cool Tech", so they try and "Reinvigurate" the team, but with no clear direction. Are they going to be a cloud provider? Are they going to contract out the training? Are they gunna spin up a compute facility even after neglecting to do so since 2012?
Apple needs to just stop trying shit, and just get that app store money. That's why jobs appointed cook. Jobs new cook was no innovator, but he could make apple a money printing machine. Thats what they should stick with.
I agreed with that for a bit... and then out of nowhere came Apple Silicon, incredible specs, incredible backward compatibility, nah, Cook is no dummy.
He's obviously one of the smartest humans on the planet, but he does seem to lack the ability to force new technologies into existence. He's just cranking the dial on all the KPI's of existing products. Which is an incredibly powerful skill to have, it's just a different skill than what jobs had.
Here's the trillion dollar question: how do you print money when the president wants your hardware onshored and the rest of the world wants to weaken your service revenue?
Solve that and you can put Tim Cook out of a job tomorrow.
Well... on shoring the hardware is kinda Cooks specialty. If anyone can do it, he can.
From the service revenue perspective, you can simply play hardball. Threaten to pull out of markets and ensure it's locked in litigation, forever.
Offshoring is Cook's specialty. If he was any good at onshoring then Apple wouldn't be in this position to begin with.
It's too late to play hardball, anyways; Europe has already started enforcing their legislation and America's own DOJ has already prosecuted an antitrust case against Apple. There's no more room to give Apple impunity because everyone admit that they've abused their benefit of the doubt.