Tim Cook was never going to be Steve Jobs.
No one, possibly not even Jobs himself, could ever live up to the last great legend of 20th century business.
But, as his exit date is announced, how should marketers assess the man who stepped into those enormous, distressed sneakers in 2011 and took the helm at Apple?
When Cook took over Apple’s market cap sitting at around $350 billion. Today it sits at $4 trillion. So if we wanted to reduce his tenure to a single data point and this column to a superficial paragraph—which plenty of Wall Street analysts are perfectly happy to do—then there’s your proof point.
But there was more to Apple than just being profitable. And you can make a strong argument that the trajectory that Jobs had created before his departure accounts for a lot of that “success.” Fairly or not, we have all come to expect more from Cupertino. And the uncomfortable truth is that Cook’s Apple did not launch a single genuinely new product category that has actually mattered.
The Apple Watch? Clever. Profitable. A health device masquerading as a fashion item. But it didn’t redefine a category the way the iPhone redefined everything. AirPods were a solid hardware play—arguably Apple’s most culturally sticky product of the Cook era—but wireless earbuds were already a category.
Apple just executed better than everyone else. The HomePod was a commercial embarrassment. Apple TV remains a perennial also-ran. And the Vision Pro—the grand swing, the big bet, the $3,500 headset that solves a problem nobody had—launched in Cupertino to thunderous applause from journalists and near-total indifference from actual consumers. Not exactly the iPhone moment Cook’s supporters promised.
Meanwhile, the thing Cook is brilliant at—operational excellence and margin expansion—has been weaponized against customers in ways that deserve scrutiny.
The Services business, which Cook rightly transformed into Apple’s second engine, is built substantially on a tax on captive consumers. Google paying Apple somewhere north of $15 billion a year to remain the default search engine on Safari is a masterpiece of rent-seeking. Brilliant financially, but strategically shallow and ethically murky. So much so, that regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are circling.
Then there’s China. Cook bet big on its manufacturing, its consumers, and its growth. That bet made Apple vastly more profitable through the 2010s. It also created a strategic dependency that now looks genuinely dangerous. Relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated, Huawei is back, and Apple’s exposure to a single geography is a vulnerability that was entirely foreseeable and insufficiently hedged.
And then there is the future and the biggest miss of the Cook era: AI.
Every company has to be on top and ahead with AI. But it’s particularly crucial for Apple, whose brand is built on three pillars: simplicity, humanity, and creativity.
