As I’m sure you’ve read everywhere else this week, Tim Cook had a fantastic run at Apple. The company was worth $350 billion when he took over in 2011 and is worth nearly $4 trillion as he leaves. In 2025, Apple’s Services division alone brought in more revenue ($109.2 billion) than McDonald’s, Nike, the NFL, and the New York Times combined, and most of that money is pure profit. As Ben pointed out on Tuesday, “the ‘Wearables, Home, and Accessories’ category delivered $35.4 billion in revenue last year, which would rank 128 on the Fortune 500.” The iPhone generates the highest annual revenue and best profit margins of any major smartphone, despite years of incursions from Google and Samsung. Macs have become far and away the best computers in the world, thanks in part to Apple’s masterful execution of the Apple Silicon project.
I, however, will remember the Cook keynotes.
One of the very worst parts of becoming a tech podcaster has been the requirement that I tune in live, twice a year, to sit through sterile, largely pre-recorded, 80-minute Apple product launches.
Contra the Steve Jobs announcements that were legendary at the time and still resonate today (the iPod, the iPhone, pulling an iPod Nano out of his fifth jeans pocket), Apple stopped announcing products in front of audiences during the pandemic, and the live, raucous atmosphere at these events has never really returned. Because why would it?
For a four trillion dollar company marketing products to a billion people at once, the cost of a mistake broadcast all over the world is not worth the marginal (and unmeasurable) benefit of interactive announcements. So what we get instead is a series of 10-15 minute segments on new emojis and camera updates, usually broadcast from giant white rooms in Cupertino that look like sanitariums designed by I.M. Pei. For his part, Cook took caution to the extreme in 2023, when the company finally unveiled the Apple Vision Pro and had the whole world watching, but the CEO never actually put on the headset himself, presumably because he did not want to be memed into oblivion (in retrospect, a move that perfectly foreshadowed Apple’s halfhearted commitment to the product).
But again, none of this is surprising. Live and ambitious keynotes make sense for a company that’s taking market share and less so for a company that already has it. Likewise, it helps when there are actually innovative products to announce, but Apple has had far fewer of those under Cook (though I do love my Vision Pro!).
In broader strokes, I think Cook’s legacy as a CEO may be slightly distinct from his legacy as Apple’s CEO. His aggressive approach to operations optimization and profit maximization was undeniably tremendous for shareholders, but it lacked any of the magic that people have come to associate with a company that sold itself as pushing the human race forward and then, in some ways, actually did. Where Jobs created new product categories for people to love and for Apple to dominate, Cook’s brilliance was in understanding the advantages that came with that dominance, and leveraging them in every conceivable area. He was also the greatest lobbyist on earth, particularly over the past decade as he deftly balanced relationships with the U.S. and Chinese governments.
As someone who podcasts about Apple roughly once a month, what I find most striking about the past few years in Cupertino is how frequently I’ve wanted to argue that Cook’s decision-making will cost his company dearly, only to conclude at the end of a conversation that he was probably playing things the right way.
For one thing, the lack of product innovation is real but understandable. The iPhone is the most successful consumer tech product in the history of the world, and it could very well be a form factor that will dominate for the next 100 years. Some version of a “smart pendant”, “home robot”, “smart car”, or “smart glasses” may sound cool (all products that Apple has worked on or is working on currently), but none of them is the sort of product that billions of people will interact with all day long, every day of their lives. I can’t kill Cook for lacking imagination that no one else in tech has shown, either. Watches and headphones and better cameras are fine, and God bless the engineer who invented security code autofill. (And again: the Macs are phenomenal, while the Vision Pro is, I swear, the greatest iPad in human history).
Elsewhere, Cook’s doubling and tripling down on China (“[By 2008] Apple’s machinery in China had become more valuable than all of Apple’s buildings and retail stores put together”) may look like a mistake in retrospect, but it’s not at all clear the company ever could have scaled Apple products to reach billions of people without the skills, human scale and cost effectiveness of Chinese labor and manufacturing.
“Supply chain all goes back to one guy: Tim Cook,” a former Apple veteran told the Financial Times of the China entanglements in 2023. “This mess is his fault. This isn’t just ‘the buck stops at the top’, it’s that ‘the buck stops with the guy who headed the supply chain.’ And Tim is the master of supply chain.” Maybe? But let’s be clear: Apple had the best supply chain in the world for the past 20 years, and Cook deserves more credit than blame for what that brought the company (and maybe the world, if you want affordable iPhones). By any measure, Cook’s bets on China were fundamental to the dominance that made Apple a $4 trillion company.
My primary criticism of Cook and his China investments is that no CEO in America was better positioned to understand the bankrupt character of the CCP. By at least 2016, Cook should have been able to extrapolate that conflict with the United States was likely inevitable, and continued reliance on almost-exclusively Chinese manufacturers and component suppliers could have catastrophic consequences for Apple.
Even so, Apple’s massive investments in Chinese supply chains worked to an unbelievable extent over the past 20 years, and tearing up successful supplier networks in 2017 would have involved incurring a lot of pain, arguably years earlier than was necessary. Apple is at least working to diversify supply chains now, but even with Cold War 2.0 urgency, finding alternatives (without alienating the Chinese government and losing the Chinese consumer market) will be much easier said than done. So here, again, I would love to crush Cook (socially conscious Apple ultimately looked the other way on horrific Foxconn labor practices, among other things), but if I had a fiduciary duty to maximize returns to Apple and its shareholders, I can’t say for sure I would’ve played things much differently (or been smart and relentless enough to play things as well).
There is also the aforementioned $109 billion in annual Services revenue, now responsible for 41% of the company’s overall profit, and built on the strength of Google’s advertising and arguably extortive App Store policies that have gotten Apple in regulatory trouble on multiple continents (amusingly, China is now “Looking at Anti-Monopoly Escorting the Digital Economy from the ‘Apple Tax’ Reduction”). Those policies alone are controversial and worth all the regulatory scrutiny they’ve received, and that’s before you consider something like the Apple “offer” to Facebook that would have taken cuts of Facebook mobile revenue and seen Facebook push users toward premium, ad-free subscriptions (from which Apple would take 30% of all sales). A few years after that deal was rebuffed, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency to temporarily nuke Facebook’s ad business while Apple was building an ads business of its own, and continuing to take a cut of Google advertising (at least $20 billion per year) that uses the same sort of surveillance tactics Apple loudly denounces in its advertising. I’ll also note here that the company has been involved in vicious patent litigation, is notorious for its merciless squeeze on suppliers, and for years schemed to crush Qualcomm and its modem fees.
None of those tactics have been popular, but to the extent anyone thinks there are rational business reasons for Apple to surrender in any of those fights, the most compelling argument would be that the practices are so unsavory they will put a target on Apple’s back and invite regulatory intervention that puts the company’s core businesses at risk. Maybe that will happen; the DOJ sued Apple in 2024, and a motion to dismiss was denied in 2025. That case will proceed to trial. But Apple’s bet under Cook was that the short-term profits were not worth sacrificing, and that Congress, the DOJ or the EU would be too feckless to take meaningful retributive action (on behalf of frustrated developers or Meta) that puts the company’s differentiation in jeopardy. Like unwinding the China supply chains, change may be inevitable, but changing course too early would have cost the company billions of dollars in the intervening years.
Finally, Apple’s AI strategy (or lack thereof) looks reasonable, too. Ben and I have podcasted about this quite a bit over the past few years, and it’s certainly notable that Apple is the only major company in tech that’s not spending hundreds of billions of dollars annually on a hunch that proprietary AI capabilities will be essential to the future. But ultimately, Apple is not an AI company, and spending a trillion dollars trying to become one (which Meta is happy to do) would likely have ended in disaster (Meta’s early returns have not been great, and the Apple Intelligence fiasco looms as evidence that the muscle groups required to succeed in AI simply don’t exist in Cupertino). It’s less interesting to have Apple on the sidelines, but it’s almost certainly a much better decision for Apple.
And that’s ultimately Cook’s legacy, to me. He made sensible choices under the circumstances, nurturing Apple profits and its stock price at every turn. If many of those choices were ultimately predictable and unfulfilling, well, that’s the game for a company at Apple’s stage of the corporate life cycle.
Where Apple under Jobs was selling performance and possibility, Apple today capitalizes on our collective dependence on the iPhone ecosystem and promises superior reliability to any peers. And that’s still a pretty good deal! But it’s a categorically different value proposition than that of the company that was changing the way an entire generation interacted with technology.
Perhaps more than anything else (and hotter than any other take in here), thinking about Cook’s era at Apple makes me grateful for Elon Musk as the spiritual heir to Jobs, pushing forward in all sorts of crazy directions, some of which may benefit billions of people, and a few of which already clearly benefit the United States (I’m not defending about 85% of Elon’s personality, to be clear). Cook’s Apple, and the rest of the now-entrenched big tech companies that took over the world during the last decade, also makes me grateful for AI’s arrival as a disruptive force that may shake up the landscape and birth a generation of new products and new companies.
It’s possible some of that innovation will happen in Cupertino under new CEO John Ternus; we’ll see. But looking back, if Jobs personified what tech promised to be, I think Cook personified what big tech actually became. Disruptive companies became mature businesses, the paradigms stopped shifting as quickly, margins and supply chains and ad businesses were optimized, and everyone got fabulously wealthy. There’s nothing substantive to criticize about Cook’s role in that story, but there’s definitely something bittersweet about the realization that this is what outstanding industry leadership came to look like over the past 15 years.
With all due respect to Apple ads saluting the misfits and troublemakers who push humanity forward, the crazy ones have not been running tech for quite some time. And “here’s to the mild-mannered, responsible and rapacious ones” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.