Tim Cook Sat Out the AI Race — Will the New CEO Pay the Price?

“After 15 years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook is officially stepping down. During Cook's tenure, Apple's revenue almost quadrupled, and its market value increased by about 3.6 trillion dollars. On September 1st, Cook will be transitioning to the role of executive chairman.”

“Cook will hand the CEO reins to John Ternus, Apple's head of hardware engineering. Ternus has spent 25 years, half his life at the company, overseeing the hardware behind every major Apple product. The transition marks the start of a new era for Apple, with plenty of unanswered questions about what comes next.”

“Apple is basically the only company that is not investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI infrastructure. I mean, look at Amazon, its CapEx is expected to reach $200 billion this year. For Google, it's close to that, $175 billion. Then Apple is going to spend only $14 billion. They're actually cutting their spending.”

“The Vision Pro is an engineering marvel, but it's basically a disaster as a product. No pun intended, it lacks vision. That's Tim Cook; the engineering talent in the company can build a great product, but it doesn't have an ecosystem. Companies like YouTube and Netflix had no interest in building for it. That's a failure.”

“Striking a China mobile deal changed Apple's trajectory in China. It unlocked the iPhone in China and turned China into a market that captured sales from the rising middle class. That's really become a bedrock of their business, but it's a precarious part of their business because of the geopolitical circumstances and the adversarial relationship today between the US and China.”