I am not here to bury Tim Cook, but to praise him. Last month’s announcement that the Apple CEO is handing the job to hardware chief John Ternus in September has been met by assessments questioning “whether the company is prepared for a future beyond the iPhone” and how Apple’s lagging performance in artificial intelligence is “raising questions about whether Cook should lead from here.”

Cook seemingly built the world’s most valuable company but fumbled his final act. Maybe so. Or maybe the man who created trillions of dollars in shareholder value is still seeing a few moves ahead.

The critiques didn’t start recently. Thirteen months ago, John Gruber, a long-respected Apple commentator, wrote “Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.” Apple, he said, had promised a personalized Siri it couldn’t deliver and run ads for features that still don’t exist. The Cupertino, California-based company, Gruber wrote, had squandered credibility it had spent two decades building.

Apple’s self-inflicted humiliation is undeniable. It just didn’t seem to matter to customers. The iPhone 17 marked Apple’s best launch ever. It shipped 247 million iPhones in 2025, took 20% of global unit share and collected most of the industry’s profits. Siri remains a joke next to ChatGPT or Claude. If customers were picking phones based on their AI capabilities, Apple’s sales bonanza could never have happened.

Cook’s 15 years of discipline have given Apple control of the most valuable choke point in consumer technology and made the iPhone the most profitable product in history. That........

© The Japan Times