From The Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul tells the dramatic, untold story inside Apple after the passing of Steve Jobs by following his top lieutenants — Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, and Tim Cook, the COO-turned-CEO — and how the fading of the former and the rise of the latter led to Apple losing its soul.
The book goes on sale on May 3, 2022 (pre-order via Amazon here).
Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator’s death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.
In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.
Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple’s valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world’s stock market into freefall with a single sentence.
Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple’s history while writing After Steve. His research shows the company’s success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive’s departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple’s shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.
MacDailyNews Take: As you know, we are decidedly not on “Team Cook.”
Other “Apple News” outlets inexplicably still are – or they feign it, lest they lose their precious (not really) “access” (canned crap) that Apple doles out like doggie treats to various media mouthpieces who play along, parroting the company line.
Of course, Apple shareholders are happy with Cook’s performance (a long as they don’t think about how much more successful the company could have been with a visionary leader who brought products to market on time (not routinely late), who could innovate, who could himself sell, who could generate excitement on stage, who could decisively pull the trigger on landmark acquisitions in a timely fashion, and whose actions actually matched his words.
After what Steve Jobs built, a chimpanzee could run Apple profitably for many years. (Yes, even Steve Ballmer could do it.) — MacDailyNews, April 10, 2017
Regardless of your estimation of Cook’s performance or lack thereof, this book should be of great interest to all who follow Apple, especially to those of us who fell in love with the company long before Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook away from Compaq in 1998 to order parts for Macs.
You cannot replace Steve Jobs. Period.
Elevating Mr. Lukewarm Wallpaper Paste to CEO, will necessarily dim Apple’s “wow factor.”
Let’s face it: Elon Musk should hire Tim Cook to do PR for The Boring Company. — MacDailyNews, August 24, 2021
But, despite all of the negatives, we considered Cook’s seemingly rock-solid commitment to user privacy – in stark opposition to the rest of Big Tech – to be worth the personality vacuum and never-ending sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Then Cook torched his one big positive this past summer.
Any Apple CEO who would okay on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” (more about that here) is not someone who should be CEO of Apple, regardless of how much revenue he generates by bending over whenever the Chinese Communist Party orders him to do so. Anyone who would approve of on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” simply does not understand Apple.
It’s true: Tim Cook’s Apple has no soul.
A fish rots from the head down.
You want to spend years touting privacy only to cave to governments worldwide by building obvious backdoor surveillance into your computers and devices? And try to use the eminently transparent Think of the Children™ ruse as your trojan horse either because you’re desperate to try to hide your betrayal to the company and its loyal users or you think everyone else is stupid, that we don’t see you selling out Apple and Apple users?
Get lost.
Retire.
Take your nauseatingly vast overpayment and your cloyingly sanctimonious twaddle and go pound sand.
Time for new blood at Apple. Enough with the insipid, spineless, morally bankrupt caretaker. — SteveJack, MacDailyNews, September 20, 2021
Let’s face it, Steve Jobs’ track record of picking Apple CEOs was less than stellar. — SteveJack, MacDailyNews, April 2, 2019
See also: Tim Cook is not the best person to be CEO of Apple – April 2, 2019
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Amen. MDN has laid out the case for a real innovator to take the reins and get going. It is a most compelling case. Maybe they can bring back Scott. I will buy this book.
The Cook Apple (amongst others):
Removing a toy gun emoji and adding a pregnant man emoji.
Tim Cook…a man well representing our times.
Something has happened to “Its Soul.”
You clearly don’t know how emojis are created. Apple did NOT add a pregnant man emoji: the UnicodeConsortium did.
(Although the bit about the pistol emoji is correct: Apple changed it to a toy gun after a bunch of school shootings, and Google and others have followed Apple’s lead.)
That kind of truth and logic is wasted on these jokers. They don’t have a lot to back up their bad assertions other than regurgiating 3 trillion dollar company, things like emojis, phones cries for Steve Jobs. This is why you get junk news. “Apple puts in pregnant man” is clicked by these jokers by the thousands. They’ll not even give an instant of thought or consideration that it’s just clickbait. Why would they? They are desperately searching for clickbait to sate their conformational bias, reality is unneeded.
Please call me an Apple Hater, Star Bar…I love when you do this.
Apple tiny pixel illustration emoji of a hand gun, PAY ATTENTION Leftist, has absolutely NOTHING to do with school shootings.
Lesson two: Apple removing ther hand gun emoji has absolutely NOTHING to do with eliminating school shootings, police killings in NYC, young blacks being shot in Chicago and escalating murders mostly in Blue cities and states.
It is nothing more than a sanctimous virtue signaling worthless gesture by cancel culture boneheads that achieves NOTHING in the real world.
Last time I checked plenty of imlements to murder like sword, knife, bat, etc. The hypocrist RUNS DEEP on the Left…
Apple’s new product categories are increasingly complex. VR/AR, an autonomous car.
Apple is in it for the long game, as part of a massive inflection period in technological evolution, not simply producing a cool new gadget every other year. It’s what makes Apple Apple and not Sony.
Good on Tim Cook for keeping his eye on the horizon, and driving not just innovation but evolution at Apple.
Your comments to various articles are so uniformly wrong, silly, and/or stupid that I doubt you even read the articles and Takes, or, if you did, that you are able to understand them.
So, yes, “good on Tim Cook” for destroying the soul of Apple and turning into yet another soulless international conglomerate, you moron.
“destroying the soul of Apple”, how silly is that.
You and the rest of the “oh Steve” brigade is laughable. You also of the “if only Steve was here to”.
You didn’t know Steve Jobs because if you did you’d know the trajectory of Apple is just about where he’d wanted it to be.
You claim to be able to read the mind of a dead man.
How silly is that?
Far less silly than claiming a company has a soul or posting constantly about a company and its products you don’t use and don’t like (that’s beyond silly).
I worked for Apple in the 80s and 90s (as I mentioned in other posts). I have an insider’s view, a view that isn’t the silly dim ‘Where Is Steve, the company needs soul’. So I can say the company, including Steve Jobs, would have done cartwheels down the street to be a 3 trillion dollar company then. The company would have jumped for joy to be have 5 different and highly successful interoperating product categories from audio, to wearables, to tablets, to PCs to smartphones (or an incredible App Store that Steve Jobs started and made certain it was the only way to get an app on iPhone).
Best of all, Steve Jobs worked closely with Tim Cook for many years and knew his very well. Steve Jobs personally selected Tim Cook to lead Apple. Again Steve knew very much what he was getting with Tim Cook despite all of your silly ‘Oh if only Steve was here…’. And the fine slate of products — each of which is or arguably is the best in the market — that interworks with each other better than others and sells remarkably well. The idea that Steve Jobs didn’t envision this, want this, or didn’t;t see Tim Cook possibly doing this is just hilarious.
Finally, that the company doesn’t release products that Steve Jobs may have seen as the future? Duh, he was Steve Jobs. Yet how interesting as you wax poetic about Steve Jobs that again he fully knowingly chose someone whose design background was second, his operational skill was first. But again, yeah, if only Steve were here Apple would be a soulful company, not making big money like MSFT or GOOG, but they’d have unicorns and butterflies flying out of every Apple product packaging you(well not you) opened. Comical, silly, there are many adjectives that fit.
Steve Jobs personally selected John Sculley.
“Let’s face it, Steve Jobs’ track record of picking Apple CEOs was less than stellar.” — SteveJack, MacDailyNews, April 2, 2019
I have no challenge in thinking Apple has lost (some of) its soul, but I have no problem in thinking that much of the US Business sector is any different. Things have changed….greater wealth, but with greater cost.
The change has been happening for years and there’s some connection to China. 1st, China has changed us from a producer to a consumer (by definition). We want our goods and our economy of bubbles and debt cycles “needs” it. In addition, somewhere our minds adjusted to doing business with a totalitarian–ruthless if not a certain Chinese–for “healthy markets.”
Cook isn’t the only player in this game, but Apple occupying the top step of Richest Company, it’s not a stretch to say that AAPL is leading the way of looking away and rationalizing. Practice makes perfect. This practice is also soul numbing.
If this practice of justifying a tragedy because it’s “their business”, or the free market will sort it out, doesn’t effectively make one “lose its soul,” what will?
I like the company, with or without soul. The company still makes fine products, as far as I can tell.
You don’t notice or feel that something’s missing?
Sarah, Mag7 is like Cook. It’s all about the money and his high flying stocks making him money. He has NO SOUL…
“Something is missing” is it? Like a Mounds bar is missing the Almonds?
I highly doubt you use anything Apple but on the chance you actually do, you are silly. You bought into marketing. It’s why Theranos founder can wear a black turtleneck and every one says “oh the next Steve Jobs!”. In love with an image, not reality. So that “something” missing is reality. Maybe the days of having your Binkey?
I worked at Apple in the 80s and 90s, so listen up. Your belief of “Ohhhh if only Steve”? Yea, that is laughable. Repeat, laughable. Apple has always been about high revenue. Worked there, can tell you from the pre Tim Cook days, about revenue. How comical any of you (the few who actually do use Apple products) think otherwise. But Apple was also always about turning out a limited number of products that are the best or amongst the best in the space. So, umm, yea Tim Cook has been selling middling Apple Toasters and Toothbrushes? He has given up the ecosystem to gain market share? Turned out a cheap video streaming stick? A plastic Chromebook? Cuts everything to the bone for rock bottom pricing? His company didn’t;t turn out best in class smartwatch? Amongst best in class wireless audio? Best in class desktop caliber Apple Silicon?
Wake up (sorry, love the site but that includes you MDN). Tim Cook has taken the founding principles of Steve Jobs Apple and continued it almost to point of mimic. But he is not Steve Jobs and the ability to see future tech (sometimes – even Steve Jobs was wrong). Steve Jobs was one of a kind. That’s over. His hand picked CEO has taken his precepts and done amazing. Get over yourselves.
“Something is missing” is it?
Yes, your brain cells.
You seem to have missed a salient point; one of many:
But, despite all of the negatives, we considered Cook’s seemingly rock-solid commitment to user privacy – in stark opposition to the rest of Big Tech – to be worth the personality vacuum and never-ending sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Then Cook torched his one big positive this past summer.
Any Apple CEO who would okay on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” (more about that here) is not someone who should be CEO of Apple, regardless of how much revenue he generates by bending over whenever the Chinese Communist Party orders him to do so. Anyone who would approve of on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” simply does not understand Apple.
Care to comment on actual substance of MDN’s critique of Cook the Chinese lap dog?
Yeah. I’ve never looked for “soul” from Apple. Just great products. It’s always been a commercial company, and Steve Jobs, whose gift really was mostly taking other people’s clumsily, untimely implemented ideas and “sophisticating” them, was as interested in commercial success as anyone else.
Shhhhh Kopola – don’t say that, the truth will hurt their feelings. It makes the Apple hater trolls who love to say “Oh if Steve was just here” (they’d bizarrely hate Apple just as much if he were here) or the few of these posters that are actual Apple fans but stuck in a 1997 black turtleneck media loop, they don’t want to here that Steve Jobs was VERY much a businessman, also interested in just as much as anyone is max revenue. Steve Jobs was clear in what he wanted, he wanted to take something and make it really good (best example the cell phone). And to make a lot of money for the company.
No one could fill Steve Jobs shoes to see future tech but what a handpick he made to choose Tim Cook. A million John Sculley’s were there to mass market cheap products with the Apple banding. Tim Cook has stuck to the founders’ principle and today is a fairly unique ecosystem of top of the market products.
Take the Apple Watch, no no, take the M1 MacBook Air. Steve Jobs is looking down smiling at that. He’s smiling ear to ear at an ecosystem of products that work better together than any competitor (not really even close), one that shows great user satisfaction and keeps users in Apple. Smiling ear to ear…
Btw, the Electric Car was Steve Jobs initial idea. Years later, billions of dollars, media and stock market climbing the walls for it – Tim Cook hasn’t released anything because for Steve Jobs Apple, it isn’t good enough yet. Smiling ear to ear.
Tim Cook’s compromised position on invading user privacy through draconian surveillance is not something Jobs would have allowed, he would have sooner resigned. That alone violates such a fundamental value at Apple that it’s unforgivable. Making money hand over fist through semi-monopolisitc methods, supply chain management and extreme beancounting (often leaving out no-brainer features to squeeze a few more bucks per unit) is NOT rocket science. Tim Cook was handed a fledgling golden goose (brilliant products he had nothing to do with designing) and he put it to work with all of the elegance and sophistication of force feeding to make foie gras.
Buying and holding Microsoft over the past decade (Cook’s tenure) would have earned me as much as AAPL. I can’t even name any new product they’ve released since then besides the Surface. Don’t tell me Cook is anything special! The radical leftism, greedy iPad OS neutering, laggard Mac Pro development and sloppier and buggier software releases each year, are just a few of Cook’s calling cards. This company should be worth $4 trillion at least. And at the very least they should occassionally delight their customers like they used to, now it’s a daily game of “wonder what Apple feature won’t work today?” The “soul” is most definitely gone.
Ridiculous Lost the Soul ? Please Never
Can’t handle the Success of this Great Company Apple
You are as paranoid as a Trump.worshiper. You’ll get no donations from me!
Me neither.
The word autosarcophagy comes to mind regarding MDN and their obsessions….essentially it means self cannibalism, eating one’s self.
Perplexing and idiotic.
I see a lot of hand-wringing on this site about how Apple is beholden to the Communist Chinese government, but then so is Walmart, Target and most other large US companies.
Also, I don’t see ANY hand-wringing how the prior administration was beholden to the Communist Russian government, and kissed up to every wanna-be dictator on the planet (Philippines, Hungary, Brazil, etc.)
The latest “loss of soul” is keeping the production going in the face of a worldwide chip shortage. Jealous of success MDN?
If you could read, you’d have read this:
But, despite all of the negatives, we considered Cook’s seemingly rock-solid commitment to user privacy – in stark opposition to the rest of Big Tech – to be worth the personality vacuum and never-ending sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Then Cook torched his one big positive this past summer.
Any Apple CEO who would okay on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” (more about that here) is not someone who should be CEO of Apple, regardless of how much revenue he generates by bending over whenever the Chinese Communist Party orders him to do so. Anyone who would approve of on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” simply does not understand Apple.
Care to comment on actual substance of MDN’s critique of Cook the Chinese lap dog?
No need to be snarky. If you have to do that to make a point, I won’t read your comment.
MDN is right. Some things about Apple now, Jobs would NEVER have supported. No politics, even with his opinions and his flaming progressive wife, he stayed away. Privacy was #1.
Insanely great products. Safari is updated too slowly and it’s a shit show right now. They have made it practically unusable. I don’t see OS innovation. Microsoft is making money hand over fist on SaaS and Apple is going to get left behind. At this stage, they look like Blockbuster.
Their only saving grace is moving to ARM. But with privacy concerns, that isn’t going to be enough to bleed off customers.
I haven’t used a Windows box for personal use in years, but Mac may not be compelling enough anymore. Hardware is great, software isn’t cutting it.
A “shit show”? What is your issue with Safari?
It reminds me of the old Apple commercials, “Block or Allow”. Privacy features get in the way and block sites and pop ups, especially for financial and business sites. There isn’t a way to get around it.
Some use two factor authentication, which the browser should save create a cookie to recognize your machine. No matter the setting, Safari won’t save the cookies, so you have to jump through hoops every time you access the sites.
Thirdly, they update it too slowly, and using it in a business environment is messy, the ciphers and protocols are always behind the times. If there is an issue, it takes them forever to address it.
And this is just Safari, don’t even get me started on integration with other systems, and 2FA in general.
Yes, SJ was very charismatic and he could (mostly) tell what products people wanted. But he had also a great team that sometimes convinced him to add something or to leave off. For example, Steve didn’t want apps on the iPhone from other producers. Good they made him change is mind because without that I am sure that the iPhone would not have had this big of a success. Tim may seem a bit lame but he is still a good business man and has managed the company quite well. Some of the influencers at Apple have made quite some bad decisions like leaving off the magsafe and SD card reader on MacBooks, make the products thinner and thinner so the battery would not last and some products might bend. I doubt that Steve would have ever let them make an iPhone with a notch. Let’s look forward and hope that the next transition at Apple when Tim is retiring will go well. I am a little worried about that.
Saw this interesting tweet, “The same week the Left is begging to cancel @JoeRogan for “misinformation”, @Apple creates a pregnant man emoji. I just can’t.”
Honk, Honk…
Apple named “Most Admired Company” by Fortune Magazine. There must be some soul in that rating. I am pleased as a shareholder and user of Apple products.
You presume the “judges” have a culturally heathy viewpoint. Is Fortune Mag where people go for life confirmation beyond market value?
The anonymous author of this article should consider removing their head from their butt in order to see more clearly. And to MacDailyNews: STOP offering air-headed articles without attribution … it further detracts from your limited relevance
Oh, the humanity!!
AAPL is a corporation and, by some metrics, the most successful company in the world. Steve Jobs, innovator and harsh taskmaster, was its sainted founder. He anointed Tim Cook as his successor. Tim, in turn, grew the franchise to the multi trillion-dollar behemoth it is today.
Both Jobs and Cook applied their own unique talents growing the franchise to the best of their abilities.
I stand in awe of their successes.
Let’s all be honest here!
What we had as original Apple devotees is gone in many ways but Apple and it’s cool devices are still cool with their incremental improvements.
We all know People like Steve Jobs are very rare so comparing Tim to Steve is unfair it’s always going to put Tim in a bad light but Tim in command has been essential in making Apple inc into the biggest company on the planet.
To say Steve baller could have guided Apple is a low blow and unfair as Mr balmer could not get himself out of a paper bag without looking like a idiot.
We all loved Steve Jobs and miss him but Tim has done good; the best a mere mortal could do.
Steve Jobs picked the right person to make his company no1 and I believe he knew it would be championed on privacy more than innovation because Steve knew his friend, Tim’s strengths.
Elon is the current ‘unique human ‘ or innovative dreamer on the planet but Apple is in good hands with Tim and the Apple creatives as Cupertino .