Tim Cook has done his supply-chain job and needs to move along. Not sure why investors aren’t pushing for this. I was listening to the recent earnings call and when he says things like “super excited” he couldn’t sound more monotonously unexcited. Jony Ive would have made a great CEO and figurehead.
I've had a big position in Apple for ages so I've appreciated what Tim Cook has done for the share price (I could show you similar graphs from a host of other Cook-free Nasdaq companies that show a similar trajectory) it just seems that Apple have solidified the basics but there's been little wow-factor and innovation since Steve Jobs died, and of everyone, Ive would seem more like the successor to that from a cultural and aesthetic standpoint. I think Jobs left Apple with a safer pair of hands at the helm, but perhaps that has become a limiting factor now.
Surely as much Cook’s doing as Ive’s though. Ive also associated with the entirety of the Apple design culture, perfecting the laptop, “inventing” the iPhone and iPad and iPod, which turned the company into the giant it is today. Easy sell for a mythology around a visionary CEO. Hard to know what the politics was behind the scenes, but the main (or only) strategy for the past decade since Jobs died seems to have been “make the iPhone more profitable”.