alt Hacker NewsI'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.
There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.
There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.
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> Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.
Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.
He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.
His legacy is he used Apple to help build China into a technological powerhouse at the expense of American workers.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/06/17/g-s1-72...
Tim Cook is a businessman who made the company bigger than Jobs could.
But he is not an aestheticist as much as Jobs was. See how Cook has been destroying the faces of iPhones and Macs, which had a huge dent or what is ironically called a "dynamic" island on the top of the screen. Back of iPhones is desparetely ugly.
Also he has not been presenting what makes us exicted. Apple's Siri is forgotten so that he has to rely on Google's Gemini instead of developing their own. While Samsung's Galaxy has been deploying its 7th foldable phone, Apple has done none. Leaks are usual so we can tell what he will show at its annual conference well before he acutually does and it gives us no surprise at all.
In a short term, "what Cook's Apple has innovated?" -- I guess zero. Rather, deteriorated.
As a long-standing user who started computer life with Performa 5220, keep using Macs as main machines and now run M3 MAX Macbook Pro to develop web apps, current Apple is never what I think it should be.
Making the company bigger is great. But what about their products and services? These are also where Cook has been leading to. He seems to forget Job's aphorism, "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
So I hope the new CEO changes the course.
To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.
We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.
FaceID, AirPods, Apple Silicon, Vision Pro (though it was flop was a good try). Overall, I would actually place Tim above Steve in terms of business, although maybe not from a Human Computer Interaction design novelty perspective
What did they shut down? Aperture comes to mind, anything else?
>> Few new products were launched
I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.
Things he effectively presided over:
* Apple Silicon, the most far-reaching technical transformation in the company's history (probably a bigger deal than macOS itself)
* Apple Pay
* The Watch and Airpods product categories, both of which Apple now dominates.
All while holding on to its position in phones and improving (drastically) its computers.
It feels like a pretty successful term.