Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian. Today, Apple took over the world. Where can it go next? Here's a question for you. What are you listening to this on? Is it an iPhone? Do you have AirPods in? I'm guessing there's a good chance you do. Sorry to Android users. More than any other, there is one man responsible for just how widespread Apple products have become. Tim Cook, who announced his departure last week.
In the last 15 years, the so-called world's most boring CEO has turned the company from a multi-billion dollar one to a $4 trillion giant.
Chapter 2: What significant changes are happening at Apple with Tim Cook's resignation?
Apple has transformed how we live, work, communicate, and on an even bigger scale, it has reshaped the way tech companies do business, do politics, and hell, even global supply chains. But where it was once leading, Apple is now lagging on the AI race and on the very thing that it built its reputation on, product innovation. And now another Apple lifer, John Ternus, is taking over the top job.
Does he have the vision or the bite to lead the company through what could be one of the most disruptive decades in Silicon Valley? From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, the future of Apple. Blake Montgomery, you're the tech editor at The Guardian US. Welcome back to Today in Focus.
Thanks for having me.
Now, for the last week, there has been a lot of chatter about Tim Cook stepping down from Apple.
Big breaking news. Tim Cook has stepped down as the CEO of Apple.
I mean, this is arguably the biggest news that we're going to hear from Apple all year. Tim Cook transitioning to the executive chairman. He's led the company since taking over for Steve Jobs in 2011. And, you know, it's not every day that you get a notification on your phone about the CEO of a company changing jobs. And yet we did. And here we are. So just how big at this point is Apple?
Well, it's worth $4 trillion, which is kind of an unfathomable amount of money. It's worth more than the economies of a lot of countries. And the change of one person helming such a huge planetary-size enterprise is a precedent-changing thing. 166,000 people work for the company. Their devices are in billions of people's hands.
It is going to have effects across the world, even if you may not notice it immediately.
And so how big a moment or even risk is this for one of the world's biggest companies?
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Chapter 3: How did Tim Cook transform Apple during his tenure?
And I don't think your iPhone is going to be a square in the future.
And so what kind of shape was the company in when Tim Cook took over?
It was quite a different company 15 years ago when he took over. It's still in a strong position. It was worth like $300, $350 billion by no means a small company. But Steve Jobs had just died when Tim Cook took over. And there were quite a lot of questions of whether he could live up in any capacity to the things that Steve Jobs had done.
But unlike most companies, Steve Jobs defines Apple. His replacement, Apple's chief operating officer Tim Cook, has filled in for Jobs before with great success. But brilliant as he is, just about every analyst on the planet will tell you he's no Steve Jobs.
Cook takes over in 2011. So Apple is on the rise towards becoming one of the biggest companies in the world. But... It was by no means guaranteed that it could do the revolutionary globe-spanning things that it does now that we kind of take for granted. But a lot of that is due to Tim Cook. No one describes him as a genius in the same way that people revere Steve Jobs.
I don't think there will be... biblically long biographies of tim cook that people mine for their own inspiration however there is an obvious aptitude that he has for the kind of global supply chain management that apple has to navigate as well as this kind of diplomacy that you might do as the head of one of the biggest companies in the world that has led apple to these like heights
So in some ways, from what you're saying, he doesn't have the wizardry that Steve Jobs did and this essence that he was capturing the cultural zeitgeist. Whereas Tim Cook is a bit incredibly competent in comparison. But I wonder, how was it received when he first took over the role?
A lot of questions, a lot of kind of skepticism because, I mean, Tim Cook had run the operational side of Apple's business for several years alongside Steve Jobs. But that's the pretty boring side of the business, the kind that people want to take for granted and don't want to think about it. There is no sex appeal to it in the way that there is to a beautifully designed product.
So Tim Cook is the shareholder CEO. And I mean, if you're an Apple shareholder from 2015 to 2026, you are thrilled. You are so elated with the performance of this company. And that's like his great success. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What challenges does Apple face in the AI race?
company to be valued at a trillion dollars.
And that is a $2 trillion milestone. Apple has become the first company in the world to reach a market value of $3 trillion.
A new record high, it is nearing $4 trillion in market cap.
It was aided, of course, by the pandemic, Solove, that helped. But it also was aided by Tim Cook's management savvy and just the shift in the way investors were thinking about the company and the tech sector overall.
The questions that arose like back then is like, can he debut anything that will recapture the Steve Jobs deal? And he said, I want to debut new stuff, but I'm not that interested in the zeitgeist. I am interested in global supply chain management. Like how glamorous, like you see Tim Cook on a red carpet and you're not excited.
There's no, there's no like thrill, but that's not really necessary for a company that has the thing that has already changed the world, the iPhone. Right. Whether Tim Cook could recapture that innovation and that spirit of the Jobs era became less of a material question to Apple's success.
What kind of products has Cook overseen and how exciting has Apple's innovation been under his tenure?
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Chapter 5: Who is John Ternus and what is his vision for Apple?
I think the innovation has been less exciting. I think that repeated critique of him is true. The debut of a new iPhone every year feels more like listening to Toyota talk about his new lineup of cars. The things that he has shepherded through would be like the Apple Watch, AirPod headphones, which...
To any other company, I think on Earth, these would be massive products and they could function as sizable businesses unto themselves if they were broken out of Apple. To Apple, they are like miniature kingdoms in comparison to the vast dominion of the iPhone.
Other like innovations that are important to the company that are extremely boring to the consumer are like the development of Apple's own chips that go inside its MacBook. That's something that the new CEO like spearheaded, shepherded through, accomplished. And it was a great business boon to Apple and part of this like huge financial success. Do we care?
I don't really think so unless you're like a big Apple head. Another thing that Tim Cook did was like build up Apple's kind of software ecosystem. One of the things that Apple customers really prize about these phones is like their close integration with the software that comes with them, the iOS operating system. And Tim Cook introduced services that make that kind of even more so.
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.
Well, one of the big developments during Tim Cook's tenure, and that's really relevant to Apple, is this growing tension between the US, where Apple is based, and China, where the overwhelming majority of its products are made. Blake, how has Cook navigated that? And what sort of template has he set for the next CEO?
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.
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