Blake Montgomery

He also introduced like Apple Pay, Apple TV Plus, Apple Music came out under him and now is a legitimate competitor to Spotify, the biggest one in the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Being closely involved and speaking directly to the leaders of the country where Apple has its major manufacturing hubs, which is this completely global operation that is quite difficult to manage.

In the past six years, we've seen the great difficulties that global events can disrupt those complex networks, the COVID pandemic, the war in Iran.

Managing

This long winding path that an iPhone takes from California to China to Vietnam to India and back to California and then to the rest of the world is not an easy task, even if it is an unglamorous one.

And Tim Cook is staying on as executive chairman of the board.

And in Apple's press release, it explicitly said his role will involve engaging with global policymakers.

So that's Apple acknowledging that this is his greatest strength and his greatest asset to the company.

Cook would appear at like state events with Xi Jinping.

The darker side of that is that he made a lot of concessions on privacy to Chinese regulators.

Like the company's iCloud data was moved into like local Chinese servers where the government has easier access to pull a person's data and the Chinese state is like quite censorious.

There are a lot of like privacy apps that are not available.

available in the Apple App Store in China that are available elsewhere.

And Tim Cook has been called out on that.

It is.

And it's quite two-faced.

Like, there's a different Tim Cook on the other side of the Pacific.

Apple ran a very famous ad campaign in 2019, was very short, just said privacy, that's iPhone.