Tim Cook Sold Out Steve Jobs (2025)

CGMthrowaway

Apple has not had an SVP of Industrial Design for 7 years, since Jony Ive left. This is why every phone is a copy of the last and there is no real product innovation anywhere

mc32

The writer is juxta Steve’s bastard of a father’s status as a visa overstay to contrast with Trump’s policy vis a vis illegal immigration (which doesn’t differ much in practice from his lauded predecessors policies) yet Steve if he did not loathe his biological father in the least completely ignored his existence as much as he ignored the existence of his own bastard daughter. Yes Tim is not Steve. We all knew that and know that, so? It’s still the company that most respects its users’ privacy, which isn’t saying much but it respects it more than other companies with foreigners at the helm such as Microsoft and Google. Not that I think they’d be different if run by American born leadership. Bill nor Eric would not be better. It’s the state of affairs in the world today.

cmiles8

The article is a bit disingenuous. Steve’s main claim to fame was Apple 2.0 when he brought the company back from the brink of bankruptcy. He had almost no choice but to take radical bet-the-farm bets as the status quo was the company goes bankrupt. Tim Cook inherited a company on an upward trajectory and kept it going. His core job was don’t $&@? it up, and at that he was very successful. Was Apple potentially less innovative during his tenure? Yeah probably, but it was stable and grew massively under his oversight, which was the job. Most shareholders that held their stock after Steve left are very happy with their returns since then.

kvuj

> I’m not an uncritical Steve Jobs fan. I know, from having worked closely with people who worked directly for Jobs for many years, that he could be a mercurial, and brutish, boss. That's a pretty big euphemism for Steve Jobs being a piece of shit. What I've realized throughout the years of working is that being able to work as a team is almost more important than your technical capacity. You can always become better in your field, but becoming a better human is a lot harder.

nextstep

2025. He’s right, Tim Cook is a coward and no better than the rest of the oligarchs who kissed the ring and played the game. But Anil also falls into this trap of believing the myth of Jobs over who he actually was. Steve Jobs was a Silicon Valley capitalist who took parts the hippie counterculture ethos and baked it into an image that sold well to consumers. He was not some revolutionary, he just successfully used the language of revolution to sell a better product than his competitors.

josefritzishere

This is a great read. It accurately describes both the personality differences between Cook and Jobs but also the core of moral leadership. "Here is an idea: Apple could, rather than creating golden bribes for child sexual predators, actually send a message to its users explaining that it would like to continue providing value to its customers, and ask those customers for help making that case to their elected officials."

popey

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45258743

bantunes

> There's no point in having fuck-you money in the bank if you never say "fuck you"! Absolutely right.

saejox

A worse person does not make another good.

knivets

2025 Apple is a perfect representation of 2025 America.

altmanaltman

Yes, Steve Jobs was such a fuck you to the establishment. He never had government contracts with NeXT. The article calls him a son of an immigrant five times as if that is a moral virtue for some reason. Dude was a pretty trash human being in reality but people keep seeing him as tech jesus. This article actually suggests Apple ask its customers to vote towards a particular political issue which is a hilarious take given Apple's size. They will not care if a Deamon from hell becomes the president, they will still negotiate and try to continue operations instead of becoming a political activist. Author is projecting their own political outlook as the only correct one and is again turning Steve Jobs into tech jesus without acknowledging historical facts and realities of thing. Furthmore, Tim Cook deserves a lot of criticism but not having a spine cannot be one of them because his role isnt to rage against the machine.

thefz

Oh yeah Jobs was such an anarchist who stuck it to the man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

jfb

The real problem, to me, isn't that Cook sold out Jobs; he sold out his customers, by the increasing rents extracted by the App Store and the services division in general. I'm a long time Apple user, and the idea that ads have any place in my computers is appalling, but now they're in Maps, and they're in the OS as non-dismissible upsells, and I mean, Windows is right over there, all of this is unnecessary strategy taxation on what Apple does well (hardware and software).

arthurfirst

Imagine thinking there is an option but to kiss the ring and still be allowed to play or that there are even two sides. Imaging thinking it even matters what Tim cook or Trump do. Imagine thinking Tim Cook is anything but a stand in book keeper and stock promoter. Imagine thinking Trump is anything but a heel turn pro wrestler. Trump is bunkem for the masses and Tim Cook is irrelevant and a follower. Steve was a an idea guy. Tim was a seeker of efficiencies and consensus -- boring and common. I didn't buy one apple product during Tim's tenure but I still have my IIe and several old Macs converted to Linux. Genius is often regarded as brutish or mean by lesser people. Your feelings on it do not matter.

newAccount2025

2025-09 would be helpful context for the article link

ezekiel68

So many things that could be said about this. For one -- I truly enjoyed the accidental repetition in the article that marked the effort as likely not aided too much by AI. But I couldn't help, most of the way through it, to crystalize the respone, "How did we get the idea Tim Cook was chosen because he was likely to be much like Steve Jobs?" Honestly, having watched the Steve Jobs commencement address several times, I kept going back to his declaration that "Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new."

comrade1234

I've seen the other reality and two words: no notch.

not-so-darkstar

he sure does like talking about steve jobs

737min

Crazy to talk about selling out when the real selling out isnt to the American government, but to the Chinese Communist government. Plenty of Aplle photops with actual dictators. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/opinion/apple-tim-cook-ou...

fortran77

> Steve Jobs was, amongst many other things, the biological son of an unmarried Syrian immigrant who was in the United States on a student visa, and he grew up to be a person who had a really good sense of when to say “fuck you" to the man. What an odd statement. Steve Jobs didn't know his biological parents until he was well into adulthood. And if you're going to bring up his biological father, who he wanted little to do with, why ignore his biological mother, Joanne Carole Schieble? According to the NY Times, "Steve Jobs developed a relationship with his biological mother, Joanne Schieble [Simpson], while firmly declining a relationship with his biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali." https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/2...