Tripp Mickle

He elbowed Apple into new areas so that it can make more money just because of the sheer heft and the number of people who own the iPhone.

Yeah, I mean, just to elaborate on that.

Yeah, please.

You know, one of the things Patrick's getting at here, too, is that what Tim did over time was turn Apple into a juggernaut, a giant machine, right?

Where operations had a bigger voice in product development.

And some of that was necessity, right?

They're making 200 million iPhones a year.

You have to make sure that you hit certain deadlines to be able to deliver those iPhones.

But the rigidness of those deadlines closed some of the creativity possibilities for people who had once developed these products in a more nimble fashion.

And that's locked them into the product lineup they have.

And to Patrick's point, made it hard to be as innovative as they once were.

And to people from the outside looking in, it's led to accusations that Apple's more uninspired.

Yeah, certainly.

I mean, they took their eye off the ball in Siri and that was never, you know, part of the business, a product that they prioritize.

And therefore, they weren't really in a position to step into the AI race in a competitive fashion because it just wasn't a muscle that they built up over time.

And as a result, you know, they wound up in this position of getting scared internally about what AI, the threat AI posed to them.

The fact that this could be a technological revolution that creates a new operating system that breaks up the kind of the connective tissue between iOS and the iPhone, that kind of software hardware experience that we're all accustomed to that's part of the iPhone's magic.

They were scared by that, and so they threw out their best shot at developing AI, and it just backfired.

I mean, they've kind of backed into this position of waiting and seeing what will happen, in part because they missed out of the gate with what they developed.

And as Patrick said, that leaves them in this position of having to wait to see how it will play out rather than actually dictating on their terms what happens to their business in this AI race.