Tripp Mickle

I mean, if you're a college football fan,

Nobody followed Bear Bryant for decades until Nick Saban came along, right?

Like, you skip generations.

And Tim Cook, he wasn't a miss, despite what people thought out of the gate.

But there's another question about Tim, and that's based on the lack of new products, right?

I mean, Apple is still really living off the iPhone.

and off the products that it stitched onto the iPhone that have made the iPhone stickier than even it was when it was first released.

And the question will be whether or not it runs out of momentum eventually and whether or not his successor can succeed in innovating again and delivering a new product that potentially adds to the company's prospects for the future.

There are two signature things that I think he did that really changed the trajectory for Apple.

And the first was striking a China Mobile deal.

two years after taking over as CEO of the company.

He'd spent a long time working on that.

It changed Apple's trajectory in China.

It unlocked the iPhone in China and turned China not just from a market that made and produced the iPhone, but it turned Apple into a company that really captured sales from the rising middle class in China.

And that's really become a bedrock of their business.

And also, to Patrick's point earlier, it's a precarious, you know, part of their business as well because of the global, the geopolitical circumstances and the adversarial relationship today between the U.S.

and China.

And then the second thing he did was he looked at the iPhone and he said, okay, well, how do we make more money off a product that now is in the pockets of a billion people around the world?

And he leaned into services in 2019 and made that a focus of the company's business.

He launched new services that drew attention to that, including like TV Plus and, you know, a credit card.