In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, Apple faces mounting challenges as it navigates geopolitical tensions, regulatory scrutiny, and shifting market dynamics – including embarrassingly missing the GenAI paradigm shift and struggling to catch up. A newly published opinion piece in The Washington Post by Adam Lashinsky says the company “is in need of new blood.”
Adam Lashinsky for The Washington Post:
That Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer and a 27-year veteran of the company, choose to step down at the end of the year isn’t remarkable… It is rather the timing of Williams’s departure, and the person named to replace him, another Cook acolyte named Sabih Khan, that speak to Apple’s predicament…
Apple’s new chief operating officer, in other words, represents more of the same for the company’s leadership at a time when the company faces myriad existential problems that Cook, or his successor, will need to solve.
An inevitable result of its size and success, Apple faces antitrust challenges in the United States and in Europe… President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, particularly his trade war with China, threaten the core of how Apple operates… Apple simply has no short- or medium-term solution to the fact that the bulk of its profits come from devices manufactured outside the U.S. — and still overwhelmingly in China… Then there is the very future of Apple’s products. A year ago, the iPhone maker unveiled with great fanfare something called Apple Intelligence, the company’s promise of AI-infused software that would transform the utility of its key profit generator. Last month, Apple confessed that its AI promises were premature. Instead, Apple is looking to partner with other companies, revealing that it is badly behind in the race for AI leadership.
The AI debacle speaks to how muddled Apple’s product strategy has become. Cook used to brag that all of Apple’s products could fit on one conference-room table. Today, Apple is in danger of becoming the one thing that frightened Jobs more than anything: a company that says yes too often without unleashing anything daringly new. Its current iPhone lineup looks about what it looked like five years ago. Its last big product launch, the Vision Pro augmented-reality headset, has been a costly flop…
What’s needed now is someone as radically different as Cook was from Jobs… Once again, the nearly 50-year-old company needs new blood at the top. Its future depends on it.
MacDailyNews Take: Welcome, Adam, to the atoll we call “Reality Island!” For a long time — years — we were alone here, but now it’s finally getting increasingly populated.
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Apple needed new blood years ago, but the old blood simply won’t let go. – MacDailyNews, January 22, 2025
See also: Steve Jobs never meant for Tim Cook to still be Apple’s CEO in 2025 – MacDailyNews, July 9, 2025
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F I R E T I M C O O K ! ! !
OK we heard this rant a 1000 times…..WHO replaces him ????
That’s the million dollar question no one seems to be able to answer
Craig Federighi, the face most associated with Apple keynotes for over a decade and a capable and enthusiastic spokesperson for the company. If anyone has been groomed for the role of CEO it’s him. He’s 56, he’s been at Apple for nearly 20 years and he’s SVP of Software Engineering, the key to Apple’s future success and the direction the entire industry is racing towards (especially with AI).
Hardware improvements are on an iterative plateau with foldables and headsets/smart glasses still niche categories.
Apple isn’t going to bring someone in from the outside. It would take way too long to get them up to speed in a long-established culture and structure with potentially disastrous results in the interim.
“He’s 56, he’s been at Apple for nearly 20 years and he’s SVP of Software Engineering, the key to Apple’s future success and the direction the entire industry is racing towards”
That’s fair. Given that context, Scott Forstall would also be a great choice as well
To think anyone here has needed insight per a replacement is fantastical. To think a change is needed can be determined by the least of us with observation skills.
Excluded; those that only observe EPS rising and, therefore deem Cook the right person. He’s exchanged matters of enduring value for Wall Street’s short-term/quarterly meter (EPS).
F’g tired of the annuity mindset that drives Cook…while riding the backbone of real research/products of predecessors.
It would be smart to bring back Scott Forestall (who was Steve Jobs’ protege) and thereby correct his unfair departure after being forced to prematurely release Apple Maps, which then Tim and the crew blamed him for its temporary flaws.
Also, Ternus could be the tech czar under Scott and they would be a strong team.
“You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting.”
Actually the stumbling, bumbling with “AI” (there is no such thing, no one has passed the singularity yet) dates all the way back to the beginning of the “Dark Days” when Apple debuted “Casper” as an accent neutral voice interface to Macs. Apple was — at least in the market to the general public — years ahead of any other company. Then Apple did nothing with that until the original version of Siri came out. Part of the blame for that neglect rests squarely with Steve Jobs, the rest with Tim Cook.
The original Siri was not at lot more than a big extension of Casper.
During the 2024 WWDC Apple did say they were working on machine learning and such, eschewing the incorrect term “AI”. But, the public expected Apple to be doing “AI” like everyone else claimed to be doing. The public and the stock market beat Apple up for not doing “AI”.
The real problem is Apple was doing horribly, truly horrifically, in their machine learning, large language model building, machine systems training, neural network implementations, and all the rest. By the end of calendar year 2024, Siri was THE joke of the tech world.
Apple doesn’t need to pay the right people millions per year each to build the best thing. What Apple needs is leadership.
Tim Cook is in his Sculley days, i.e., Sculley’s last days. Tim Cook’s time has passed. Sculley led Apple into the start of the “Dark Days”. Apple needs to find someone to truly LEAD Apple before there are “Dark Days 2.0”. Apple should have been looking for this person 5+ years ago. They’d have that person now if they had. Unfortunately NONE of the current senior management at Apple fits the requirement.
Ramon Laguarta? 🤷
LOL
Kamala needs a job, doesn’t she? Useless Dumocrat Al Snore could be her mentor.