Tim Cook: The creator’s builder

For all the dazzling products that would come to define Apple there was Steve Jobs who had returned to head the company. To execute the vision, there was Tim Cook. He had no background in software but was a supply chain specialist. When he joined Apple in 1998 that was the field in which genius was required. As Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, “Tim Cook came out of procurement, which is just the right background for what we needed. I realized that he and I saw things exactly the same way.”

Cook finetuned the operational machinery to bring extraordinary scale, creating the model by which China became the cheap manufacturing hub to service the phe nomenal demand of the iPhone. And he showed that even without Jobs, Apple would not just thrive but boom. When he took over as CEO from Jobs, who was suffering from terminal cancer, Apple was a $350 billion company. As he leaves to become executive chairman, the company’s mar ket capitalisation is just under $5 trillion. And this, with really no defining product like the iPhone. Every iteration of it was, however, solid, stable and a money-spinner.

Cook was a builder, unlike Jobs the innovator. But the price of it was that he missed seeing how generative AI would take over the future. Attempts to get on the bus are yet to bear fruit despite the bottomless cash resources of Apple. The new CEO, John Ternus, will have to make that course correction but he has plenty of runway because of what Cook has built.