[doitLP]

> Cook was, without question, an operational genius

I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?

[throw0101d]

> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with:

* https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems

Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.

[rootusrootus]

> Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.

Ha, we keep on asking that at my current company, and they keep on doing it anyway. What is it they say the definition of insanity is, again?

[jinushaun]

I think you underestimate what he does. It seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but if it were so easy, others would not be so far behind. A difficult thing done well looks easy. Reminds me of when Toyota disrupted auto manufacturing.

Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.

[doitLP]

I’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are!

I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!

[Someone]

I think a major difference is that Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores where you buy the stuff they advertise they can make; it cooperates with manufacturers to get them to build things that they couldn’t make before.

They are willing to pay billions up front to get production lines built to their specifications and guarantee that they will buy X products over Y time, in exchange for exclusivity.

For example, when Apple decided they wanted to use CNC aluminum milling to build laptop frames, no factory could do that at their scale and desired precision.

And yes, you can only do that if you have lots of cash flowing around, but that’s not sufficient. You also need a process that gives you a very good chance that such investments pay out.

[bigyabai]

> Apple doesn’t see factories purely as stores

At Apple's scale, you basically can't operate like this. Placing an order for 50 million iPhone screens is not a consumer-grade request, you have to customize and coordinate your orders to get all 50 million delivered. It's hard to see the genius in this, the advantages you've listed are all courtesy of scale and liquidity.

[geodel]

Huh, courtesy of scale is because of 50 million customers were convinced that iPhone has quality enough to pay premium over 100s of other phone models. No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.

[Someone]

> No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.

That’s why I argue that’s something Apple does different. Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung go to a manufacturer and ask them to make what they know they can make, preferably at cut throat price, while Apple goes there and says “we think you can make this, too; let’s discuss how we can get there, and how much money you’ll need for it”.

Of course, reality is more nuanced. Samsung, for instance, experiments a lot with folding displays (I expect Apple does, too, but is not satisfied with them yet), but I think it is correct in the large picture. Other manufacturers would say “we need a laptop body; let’s see who can build them, and what quality they have, Apple says “we want a laptop body made of one piece of aluminum; let’s see who we can work with to make that possible”.

And yes, having loads of money and high-margin products helps in that regard, but as I said and the post I reply to seems to acknowledge, that’s not sufficient.

[bigyabai]

Indeed, and if we pay that courtesy to it's original owner then Steve Jobs was the "genius" behind that. Tim Cook inherited the empire, and steered the resources Jobs left for him.

> No one is stopping Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc of the world to put order of 50 million widgets and get best quality at cut throat price.

I don't think you are familiar with Samsung's ball game, including them in a list like this.

[altmanaltman]

Samsung literally makes and sells a lot of those displays to Apple. What are you talking about

[zemvpferreira]

I would earnestly suggest reading Apple In China:

https://www.amazon.com/Apple-China-Capture-Greatest-Company/...

It both captures Tim's genius and the genius of the person much geniuser than him: Xi Jinping.

[momojo]

I bet it's more about what he didn't do. Like how a stable marriage seems boring but is the accumulation of many many right (by necessarily genius) decisions.

[motoxpro]

I mean sounds like you are asking the question "What is the job of a CEO?"

[doitLP]

Not really. I’m asking why he’s a genius. When I was told that WW2 wouldnt have gone the same without George C Marshall or how amazing Teddy Roosevelt was at getting stuff done, I went and read their bios and now I understand. Cook does things different than other CEOs apparently so what are those? Other have recommended Apple In China so I’ll start there!

[shafoshaf]

I think this is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory fallacy. There is a correlation to Cook and the performance, but the idea that this was all because of one single guy at the top is survivor bias. For example, other companies didn't fail at outsourcing to China because their CEOs weren't as personally involved as Cook, it was because the team as a whole didn't perform.

Looking today, Trump is as much a symptom as the problem. He didn't get there just because of who he is, he rode on the backs of all the people who voted for him, the state legislators who gerrymandered for him, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, etc...

[dboreham]

This is how the electronics industry always worked. I times of yore it was IBM who bought up all the capacity in various fabs then defined later what devices would be manufactured on those wafers.

[dwaite]

Apple funds creation of new factories in return for exclusive use of the parts they produce. I believe they also prefer to negotiate pricing down to cost, then pay bonuses for meeting quantity/date goals.

Supposedly, the reason there weren't more iPod competitors back in the day was that Apple already had negotiated exclusive rights at pre-negotiated prices to buy a big chunk of the flash memory that otherwise would have been on the market.

[jmyeet]

I haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing.

Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready.

As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back.

So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it.

So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash.

Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.

[alsetmusic]

> Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?

Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail).

That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.

[doitLP]

Thanks, but how did he do it? Actually what does he do than saying “ok guys tip priority is moving these units”? Like do he come up with the strategies? Or is he good at picking winners when he sees them from proposals of his underlings?

[pjc50]

This is one of those things like becoming chess #1: all you have to do is make the optimal decision in a series of meetings, over and over again, for years.

[alsetmusic]

I don't know, but he was Chief Operations Officer when all of this happened, so whatever happened in those regards happened on his watch and should be credited to him (as well as those reporting to him).

It's not like Microsoft's head of gaming has no bearing on their horrible mismanagement of the studios they bought and shuttered. That person was responsible. Do I know what they did day to day? No. But there's someone new in that position and I think that tells us something.

[jklp]

I think this is something a lot of people who haven't managed others before find hard to understand

The easiest example I've found is comparing a manager to a conductor in an orchestra.

Most people will only see a conductor on the night of the performance, and they don't look like they do much, but a lot of the work is actually done before the night.

The main issue is that because there are so many musicians in an orchestra, it's hard to have an overall view of what everyone's doing and if a piece sounds good.

The main job of the conductor is to be the person who has that big picture. They make sure everyone is playing in time and in key. And if they're tricky parts of the piece - they make sure it's played properly. If it isn't, they hold individual practice sessions to make those parts smoother. If some musicians aren't performing well, they have conversations with them and maybe let them go. If there aren't enough musicians they hire more. And if the pieces aren't working they change them from the millions of pieces available to play. And they have to do it in a way so as not to make the orchestra angry and all quit!

So to answer your question what does Tim Cook actually do? Does he tell his staff the priority is moving xyz units, does he come up with the core strategy, does he pick up good ideas from his staff. The answer is most likely yes to all the above - but that's such a small part of it.

The big thing he needs to do is have a vision for how he wants the business to be, and then do those parts you mentioned, plus the hundreds of other tasks and decisions to get it there.

[raw_anon_1111]

Read the “Apple in China” book.

[greedo]

Can't agree more with this recommendation. As a long time Apple user (Apple ][c back in 1984 started my journey), I thought I knew a lot about Apple. But how they actually made the iPhone work was just an amazing read.

[Barbing]

The book’s Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China

Some critique, but widely praised

[BeetleB]

I believe the idea was either his or Steve Jobs's.

I don't know how much of the details were his, but taking the risk and seeing it through deserves a lot of credit.

For most companies (even now), the idea of JIT manufacturing is terrifying. How will they guarantee there isn't a slowdown and you'll have a shortage at Christmas (or in any random month)? Most CEOs like always having some inventory. They went in the opposite direction and decided the ideal case was not having any inventory.

[colechristensen]

Compared to game consoles, graphics cards, and all manner of other electronics things... have you ever seen Apple products on those stock tracker websites? Has there ever been an actual problem with scalpers? Ever had to sign up for a waiting list?

No. Besides being a little hard to find some things for a period of days after a new release, you can just buy Apple stuff.

The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS

[alsetmusic]

I was overly sleepy due to prescribed sleeping pills when I woke up at 6am to preorder my M5 MacBook Pro. I got stuck on the order page for five minutes because I didn't notice that I had to pick the color and hadn't done so. I checked out ten minutes after preorders went live and that cost me a week on delivery whereas I normally complete preorders fast enough to have my product arrive on the day of release.

We ordered a MacBook Neo for my partner and she had to wait three weeks for it despite the company obviously expecting strong interest in the product at launch.

> The PS5 was hard to find in stores for TWO YEARS

Pandemic and supply chain issues surely contributed to that. It can't be cited without context.

[prewett]

"and supply chain issues" is what Apple didn't have. Well, I'm sure they had them, but they were able to navigate them.

The Mac M1 came out on practically the same day as the PS5, so I think it is a great example. The M1 was available in volume when they said it was going to be. What did Tim Cook do? That. Millions of products available when they said it was going to be, during pandemic-disrupted shipping.

[albedoa]

Interesting. Do you think that "I forgot to push a button and had to wait a week to receive a new release" supports or counters the claim that new releases are sometimes hard to find for a period of days.

[gordonhart]

I just bought an M5 Macbook from an electronics retailer because they actually stocked it, whereas ordering the same machine for the same price from Apple would have been a custom build delivered mid May.

[dmboyd]

Well you currently can’t buy a desktop Mac with decent ram at any price, and right now ebay and marketplace are full of people scalping Mac minis.

[dwaite]

define "decent"

[1234letshaveatw]

I've been waiting a few weeks for the blush Neo I ordered

[Keyframe]

I don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then months after announcements their supplies are limited or geo locked. Samsung probably comes close, and it helps they're so vertically integrated.

[JustExAWS]

The Pixel only sales 5 million a year…

[Keyframe]

google says 3x more, but it's still nothingburger. galaxy is the one on parity with it. I have a pixel and I had to go through hoops in order to buy one in another country and have it brought in and I'm in EU. Samsung doesn't have those issues, but it lags between announcing and shipping. Apple is the only one I know that announces something and it's available either today or within days. Lenovo announces and then nothing - they have announced x1 carbon gen 14 in january.. still can't buy it. It's laughable. This is Tim Cook's value and it can't be denied.

[kccqzy]

Squeezing the suppliers in just the right way. When you squeeze them too hard and the pricing is too low, the suppliers stop making quality parts and Apple would have a reputation for hardware failures. Squeezing the suppliers not enough and the pricing is too high, then Apple suffers either from a reduced profit margin or a higher ASP. I find that negotiating with suppliers is an art. Cook is quite good at it.

[bradleyankrom]

> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?

Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?

[jinushaun]

I think people underestimate execution. When something is done well, it looks easy. But if it was so easy, why are other competitors struggling to execute the same thing?

[doitLP]

Yes but those are outcomes — what did he do that got him there? Lots of people want preferential production and lower cost; Was it that he had the budget to pay more and dictate standards? If that’s the case that’s not genius as much as having the balls to make bets that paid off.

[geodel]

To be honest no genius every existed under sun. What did Newton do? Just applied some common sense. If apple is not flying away there has to be some force pulling it down, he just named it gravity. What did Einstein do? Using Riemann geometry to already prevailing ideas. Not much of genius, using already invented things I'd say. What did Edison do? If one conducts thousand failed experiment a few might succeed. It doesn't take a genius to get that. And so on and on.

[detourdog]

The biggest problem Apple had before Cook was inventory management. They would produce more Performas then they could sell which weighed their cash flow. The dead weight of inventory was a really big problem. Right sizing production to meet demand was what initially saved Apple.