Steve Jobs famously said, "It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy". But as his first chosen successor moves away from the top job at Apple, 15 years after Jobs' death, the company he founded is as far as possible from a bootleg vessel as can be. Jobs was a genius, a visionary in design, product and marketing. Is Tim Cook close to any of these? Heck, no!
Apple events don't unleash epochal products anymore. In fact, recent announcements show a clear lack of imagination with AI or device innovation, with markets repeatedly giving them thumbs down after every new iPhone unveiling. Has Tim Cook in his 15 years made Apple boring? Of course, yes. But is boring as bad as it is made out to be?
The answer in Apple's case is a resounding NO. Boring is essential for corporate longevity.
So, Cook isn't a showman-inventor but an operations expert. While it's fun and glamorous to be a buccaneer-style founder, the heavy-lifting lies in putting the ship together to insulate it against choppy waters, regulatory and geopolitical attacks, and make it into an institution that is structured in operations, governance, product pipeline, succession planning, for these give returns to all its stakeholders, including the innovators at its core.
In short, a closer look shows how Cook's every weakness is actually a thought-through strategy to steer Apple to stable waters.
Let's begin with the biggest criticism of Cook: Making Apple boring. No out-of-the-world device innovations and no jaw-dropping AI announcement either.
Apple's AI Hesitance
Cook is a firm believer in being the best, which might not necessarily mean being the first. For him, market-timing and first-mover advantage is subordinate to readiness. Cook's strategy is to patiently wait while others validate demand and the noise settles. Historically, Apple then goes for the kill in that category with a product that is dramatically more useful and practical to mainstream users.
The Cook era is full of late-but-integrated entries: Apple Watch in 2014, Apple Pay in 2014, AirPods in 2016, Vision Pro in 2023 with retail availability in 2024, and Apple Intelligence in 2024. None were first in their category; all were framed as deeply integrated with Apple's hardware, software and services stack. The success of each of these products is validation of Cook's strategy.
Though analysts have labelled Apple as an AI laggard, Cook, while announcing John Ternus, the company's hardware chief, as his successor, did tease 2026 as the year with an 'incredible' pipeline of products, including a foldable iPhone and AI-focused wearables.
But Cook's Apple doesn't build everything. It builds only when a dependency threatens to become a chokepoint. So, in the AI cycle, Cook has signalled a greater willingness to loosen his traditional M&A
discipline, saying Apple was open to deals that accelerate its roadmap and had already acquired seven small AI firms in 2025.
Lasting Legacy
It is now clear that there will be no radical iPhone upgrades, and yes, there are Reddit threads arguing for and against it; but the debate is largely settled around the belief that a boring phone is better than unstable, reckless radicalism.
So, every time an upgrade is unveiled, and the 'if Jobs were around' sigh goes up, it invariably settles with the annual production numbers for iPhones. At last count, over 200 million iPhones are manufactured every year.
And this brings us to Cook's lasting legacy, and it is how he managed to move Apple away from the dangers of being a company constantly gyrating around its larger-than-life founder.
Apple-lore has it that Steve Jobs, during his final days, told Cook to avoid the trappings of always second-guessing his own decisions with "what would Steve Jobs do, if he were here", a condition that famously plagued the Walt Disney Company in the aftermath of Walt's death.
So, for Apple to be a multi-generational corporation, the pirate ship had to morph into the Navy.
The scale of the transformation is measurable. Apple's annual net sales rose from $108.2 billion in 2011 to $416.2 billion in 2025; services revenue reached $109.2 billion in 2025; full-time employees increased from about 60,400 in 2011 to about 166,000 in 2025; the installed base surpassed 2.5 billion active devices by January 2026; all these resulted in the valuation zooming from $350 billion in 2011 to $4 trillion in 15 years.
So, what Cook did was make Apple a behemoth that would make the Navy jealous.
(The author is Executive Editor, NDTV)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
