Tim Cook Wishes You a Happy Diwali. The iPhone 18 Pro Max Sends Its Regards

For a moment on Diwali morning, I thought Tim Cook was going to leave us wondering which phone took the picture. There were red bangles, two hands around a diya and enough flowers to make the rest of us feel we’d underdone the table. Cook wished everyone celebrating a happy Diwali. He hoped the festival’s light would brighten the year ahead. And then, just as I was about to spend the rest of the day worrying that someone close to Apple might have borrowed a Samsung, came the reassurance: “Shot on iPhone 18 Pro Max by Gursimran Basra.”

I’m glad he cleared that up. It would have been a long day.

The photograph is Basra’s. The man doing the wishing is Apple’s executive chair, since John Ternus took over as CEO in September. Cook has handed over the job. He’s still on caption duty. In 2021, he posted two Diwali pictures by Basra. The phone then was an iPhone 13 Pro Max. Five years later, one of those names needed updating.

The wording varies. In 2024, Cook gave Rohit Vohra and the iPhone 16 Pro Max their due. In 2025, he thanked Apeksha Maker and named the iPhone 17 Pro Max. For Holi in 2025, Kushagra Tiwari got the credit and the phone got the hashtag. You can take the hashtag out of the Diwali greeting, as Cook did this year. The sales department will survive. Its entire model name is still in the sentence.

Samsung has a camera. It also has a monster

Samsung India has done “Shot on Galaxy”. It published a winter shoot by a Delhi University photography club member who took a Galaxy S10+ to Himachal Pradesh. More recently, Samsung Australia shot a three-part office mystery on Galaxy. If I were playing the boss in a series paid for by Samsung, I’d give the person who brought an iPhone to set the afternoon off.

Samsung sells battery life, too. In “Wall Huggers”, it parked iPhone users next to airport sockets to sell the Galaxy S5. In India it invented a furry monster called Mo-B to take on the Galaxy M51, a phone with a 7,000 mAh battery. Those are different gags because a battery needs time to make its point. A single picture can show you what a camera did with a flame. It takes a while to show you that somebody got through a layover without sitting on the floor.

Google calls its football series “Shot on Pixel”. The clubs’ social teams use Pixel cameras to bring fans closer to the action. Xiaomi invites photographers to share their work under “Shot on Xiaomi x Leica”, getting two names into the credit where Apple needs one. And vivo India had Sidharth Malhotra share pictures from his trip home on the V80 in its own festive campaign. The competition here is for the association you make when you see a good phone picture. Apple has the diya. Google has the touchline. Samsung has the airport floor if you want to talk batteries.

I did find a Christmas cousin. On December 1, 2024, Cook used #ShotOniPhone for Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit Christmas animation at Battersea Power Station. Apple’s write-up named the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Cook’s Christmas Day greeting that year named no device. I’m sure the iPhone took it well.

The caption has a job

The clever thing about the original “Shot on iPhone 6” campaign was that the line answered a question the picture made you want to ask. A photograph looked good enough to go on a billboard. You found out someone had made it with a phone. The campaign’s creators described a category that was busy talking about megapixels. They put up the pictures. It was an excellent argument and, for anyone who had ever paid for a camera before going on holiday, a slightly upsetting one.

Eventually the line became something you could spot coming. In 2023 Apple filmed its Mac launch on iPhone and edited it on Mac. It showed the crew, the rigs and the iPhone 15 Pro Max at work. There was a point to making a keynote that way. There was also something very Apple about announcing a computer and finding room to tell you what shot the announcement and what cut it. I assume someone made coffee, but the company has yet to establish what it was brewed on.

This year Apple had a whole Diwali film in which to talk about its camera. For Step Into the Light, Raw Mango’s Sanjay Garg took the iPhone 18 Pro to a Rajasthan fort with dancers, Indian textiles and Juhi Chawla. The cinematographer explained what the camera’s widest aperture let him do with the dancers in low light. That’s a useful answer to the question of why you’d pick this camera. Cook’s post has a simpler assignment. When you think of taking a lovely picture of a diya, it would like you to remember the name of a phone.

There’s a good reason to keep saying it. A photograph can move around the internet without the phone ever appearing in the frame. If you leave the model out of the caption, the photographer may get a compliment and the audience may get a lovely picture. The phone has to hope someone asks. Apple puts the answer in the post, where people can see it without stopping to ask. You don’t even have to want a new phone for the name to get lodged somewhere between the diya and the laddoo.

That doesn’t make the greeting cynical. Basra’s name travelled with a good picture, which is a better bargain than the one many photographers get when their work starts circulating. He also chose where to put the hands and how to let the flame do the work. You can own the same phone and still come home with a picture of your thumb. The camera credit is fair. I’d just like to know whether Apple has reached the point where the audience can supply it unaided.

Try reading the greeting and stopping before the model name. You’ve still got Diwali, the light and the good wishes. You’ve also got the moment when you expect Cook to say what the photograph was shot on. That expectation is what years of repetition bought Apple. Samsung and Google can put their names under good pictures, too. They’d have to do it quite a lot before I’d start filling in the words when the man at the top wished me well.

Next year I’d like Cook to keep us in suspense and post the picture with the photographer’s name. Most of us would guess the camera before the diya went out. If it ever turns out to be a Samsung, I promise to read right to the end.