Tim Prepare dinner has continuously been criticized, most just lately over Apple Intelligence, however at all times for simply not being Steve Jobs — but the truth that he is not Jobs is what has made Apple the technological and monetary juggernaut it’s right now.
There was criticism proper again firstly in 2011, when Tim Prepare dinner was not the short-term stand-in for Steve Jobs, however was getting the CEO job completely. As we speak there’s criticism of Prepare dinner over how Apple Intelligence has seemingly stumbled.
And in between, say round 2018, there was criticism for the now forgotten weak gross sales of the HomePod. Plus earlier than even then, the Apple Watch was branded a failure, it was known as a tool with out a level.
No residing CEO of any firm is universally praised, and it took Steve Jobs’s passing till he was really beloved. However then after his dying, it was revealed that Jobs did not assume his substitute was a product individual, and it is not as if Prepare dinner may precisely argue.
Prepare dinner’s tenure at Apple has seen the launch of a slew of merchandise that now assist outline the corporate. He is unfold the corporate wider, predicting that companies would grow to be essential.
And he is additionally taken Apple first to a $1 trillion valuation — after which to a $3 trillion one. In each instances, it was the world’s first firm to succeed in these milestones.
But after the primary one, Prepare dinner took time to repeat the type of argument that Jobs had typically made earlier than. Jobs would declare to not take into consideration cash, and belief that should you do good work, the outcomes observe.
“Monetary returns are merely the results of Apple’s innovation, placing our merchandise and prospects first, and at all times staying true to our values,” Prepare dinner wrote in a memo to workers about Apple reaching $1 trillion.
“Steve [Jobs] based Apple on the idea that the ability of human creativity can clear up even the largest challenges — and that the people who find themselves loopy sufficient to assume they’ll change the world are those who do,” Prepare dinner continued. “Simply as Steve at all times did in moments like this, we should always all look ahead to Apple’s vibrant future and the nice work we’ll do collectively.”
Monetary success offers Apple an edge
Cash is not all the pieces, nevertheless it’s lots. Apple has grown a lot beneath Prepare dinner’s aegis that it is really exhausting to definitively say, as an illustration, what your shares could be price should you’d purchased $1,000 of them on the day he took over.
Nevertheless, should you ignore further cash from the dividends Apple has paid shareholders through the years, you will get one measure of the corporate’s progress. A $1,000 funding in 2011 would now be price round $18,500.
That is good for shareholders, and the board. It is also a really clear signal that Prepare dinner won’t ever be pressured out.
It is also’s Prepare dinner’s monetary acumen that has put the corporate the place it’s now. It is as a result of it has this cash that it may scrap the decade-long Apple Automobile undertaking. That cash wasn’t thrown away, it was spent on materials science, on laptop imaginative and prescient, and so forth.
And all that will probably be, and has been, utilized in different Apple merchandise. That money reserve is how Apple can play an extended sport and revenue from that Apple Automobile analysis, regardless of it being a cancelled undertaking.
It is as a result of it has this money and such a robust monetary base that Apple can out-wait any rival over any subject. That is additionally why Apple is then capable of repeatedly be late to a market, but then completely personal it.
Apple thinks of what expertise can be utilized for, and the way it may be used, fairly than creating expertise first and looking for customers. So by the point it enters a market, it has spent years fascinated by it whereas different companies have grow to be entrenched in no matter their first concept was.
Consequently, Jobs could nicely have meant it when he saved saying that cash wasn’t the main focus. It’s cash that allows Apple to focus.
Plus, always remember that proper again firstly of Apple, it was Steve Wozniak who needed to give away his blueprints on the Homebrew Laptop Membership — and Jobs who insisted on promoting them.
So Jobs was removed from unconcerned with cash, and much from being keen to let some potential revenue go.
Steve Jobs shouldn’t be delivering his grave
Nonetheless, you possibly can, and folk essential of Prepare dinner repeatedly do, make any level you want about Apple after which add that Jobs is popping in his grave. Steve Jobs would by no means have completed this or that. Steve Jobs would by no means have had a failure like Apple Intelligence, and so forth.
That he did have, say, Antennagate, however the reality is that nobody does and nobody can say what Jobs would or would not have completed.
You possibly can examine, say, his response to the iPhone 4’s antenna issues to Tim Prepare dinner’s response to the poor launch of Apple Maps. And you possibly can make some parallels between how Jobs handled the failure of Cellular Me to how Prepare dinner now seems to be coping with Apple Intelligence.
And Jobs had his different failures too. The predecessor to the Mac, the Lisa, was a spectacular one.
However but, Apple waited.
Anyway, you can not predict anybody, and it’s unattainable to even actually guess how Steve Jobs could be appearing if he had been going through right now’s points provided that he has been gone for over a decade. You can’t predict, no person can, how he’d handle an organization that has grown at the very least eight instances in market capitalization, however really extra, given inventory buybacks and so forth.
Saying “Steve Jobs would by no means” or related permutation is a logical fallacy. The argument is nearly at all times utilized by any person who personally disagrees with Prepare dinner’s strategy to one thing.
In response to then-Apple board member Al Gore, Steve Jobs himself stated nobody on the firm ought to ever ask “what would Steve had completed?”
As a result of, merely, no person is aware of. Not even these closest to him.
And remember — Prepare dinner was hand-picked by Jobs. Prepare dinner is actually the person that Jobs needed working the corporate after he was gone.
Shifting on from Steve Jobs
Whether or not beneath Jobs or Prepare dinner, Apple solely hardly ever seems to be again at its previous, at the very least publicly. Nevertheless it does now routinely make an exception for Steve Jobs. Prepare dinner places out statements on each anniversary of Jobs’s dying, and on his birthday.
Then along with Laurene Powell Jobs and Jony Ive, Prepare dinner helped launch the Steve Jobs Archive in 2022.
But when individuals criticize Prepare dinner now, they have a tendency to do it by saying Apple would or would not have completed one thing if Jobs had been nonetheless alive. Or they are saying that basically Apple is coasting on the success that Jobs created.
What that basically means is that Apple launched the iPhone on Jobs’s watch and nothing since then has come near its success. That is honest — and in addition unfair, because the iPhone is the one largest promoting product of any type, on the earth. Ever.
And if nothing can match the iPhone’s gross sales numbers, Apple beneath Tim Prepare dinner has recurrently equalled that gadget’s success when it comes to ubiquity. Regardless of being so typically known as a failure, there may be merely no smartwatch that rivals the Apple Watch, which Prepare dinner introduced in 2014.
That wasn’t the primary sensible watch on the earth, simply because the iPhone was removed from the primary smartphone. In each instances, although, Apple’s gadget grew to become the one to beat.
And it was the identical with AirPods. Whereas Apple wasn’t the primary to provide wi-fi earbuds and right now there are a lot of rivals, however AirPods set the usual.
So did AirTags. But once more, there have been trackers prefer it earlier than, however now AirTags is the widespread time period for all of them, and now they’re a world hit.
Solely the HomePod, Apple Pencil, and Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional have didn’t grow to be ubiquitous. However whereas no figures, and even actually current estimates, can be found, that their gross sales would absolutely maintain most small firms.
And you watched that proper now, Sonos would love to have the HomePod’s gross sales for its audio units.
The merchandise preserve coming
Then there have been vital developments of units that originated beneath Steve Jobs’s watch — such because the iPad Professional. There’s an argument that it’s only in 2025 with iPadOS 26 that the iPad Professional really grew to become a professional gadget, however inform that to the artists who’ve been utilizing because it launched in 2015.
The long-standing criticism of the iPad Professional was that the {hardware} was vastly extra highly effective than the software program. However key to this declare is how Apple pushed forward with making an ever-more highly effective pill.
And that ties in to at least one thing more that Prepare dinner has completed for Apple which was and is revolutionary. He moved Apple on from Intel to its personal Apple Silicon processors, and the distinction for the Mac has been transformative.
Curiously, although, that is maybe the one space the place a direct comparability could be made between Tim Prepare dinner and Steve Jobs. They each pulled off an immensely advanced transfer of processors — with Jobs taking Apple from PowerPC to Intel — and each did it so nicely that it is easy to overlook what a job it was.
On this one case, Tim Prepare dinner appeared to observe Steve Jobs’s playbook to the letter, typically even utilizing the identical phrases in displays.
It is a new world
If Prepare dinner continues to be believed to not a product individual in the way in which that Jobs or Jony Ive would obsess over them, he’s stated to say that he makes use of each product, day-after-day. Steve Jobs famously minimize Apple all the way down to 4 foremost merchandise, however beneath Prepare dinner the agency has ballooned.
There was no Apple TV+ beneath Jobs, as an illustration. Nor Apple Music, nor Apple Arcade, Apple Information, and positively not movies in film theaters.
And if Prepare dinner oversees so many merchandise that he can not really obsess about all of them, there have been experiences that he obsesses about one among them. In early 2025, an nameless supply claimed that Prepare dinner “cares about nothing” besides the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional, and extra just lately the corporate is alleged to have seven units within the works.

Tim Prepare dinner dons the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional | Credit score: Self-importance Truthful
Prepare dinner sees a world through which spatial computing is all over the place. However then Prepare dinner can also be working in a world now that requires him to be one thing that his predecessor may mainly afford to disregard.
Tim Prepare dinner is a politician.
That does now embrace all of his dealings with Trump — each profitable and sadly additionally not — plus he’ll lend his voice to lobbying officers.
Nevertheless it’s additionally seen in his interviews. Whether or not he is criticized, or it is put to him that Apple is doing one thing improper, he has a really well-crafted phrase that he leans on.
“The way in which I see it…” he’ll start, earlier than presenting how Apple would love its actions to be perceived. It is such a brief phrase, nevertheless it’s armed — he will not disagree with you, will not problem you, will simply so very moderately current an alternate and make it sound private.
Prepare dinner is often stated to be affordable and calm and even unflustered. There was proof that Prepare dinner is not so calm as to be a pushover, although.
And there was proof that he does not observe Steve Jobs’s instance and even preferences.
The clearest instance of each of those, although, is in how in 2012 he fired Scott Forstall, regardless of him being a favourite of Jobs’s.
However then you do not get to run a $3 trillion firm by attempting to maintain everybody blissful. You do it by having “the pores and skin of a rhinoceros,” which Prepare dinner as soon as stated “is useful while you’re the CEO of Apple.”
Certain, you possibly can want Prepare dinner to be gone, you possibly can yearn for a halcyon idealized previous the place Jobs by no means had a failed product launch or a fumbled product. All these needs are, is taking a look at Apple via six-colored glasses craving for a previous that by no means existed, and a future the place your individual excellent Apple, your individual excellent Apple product, cannot and will not exist as a result of there are extra workflows than your individual.
We all know that Apple swings by AppleInsider routinely. Past IP logs, we get the periodic nastygram e mail or name after we criticize them, or they do not favor a protection angle we take.
And, we all know that they learn our boards, and poke via social media. We all know that they see a few of our extra vocal commenters calling for Prepare dinner’s ouster.
We additionally know, as we have been instructed, that they get a kick out of the psychological contortions and verbal gyrations that a few of the Prepare dinner bashers undergo to justify their wacky arguments.
Prepare dinner is right here to remain, no matter what you, or I, or inventory analysts, assume. He alone will determine when it is time to go.
And he is earned that proper, based mostly on what he is completed, and, frankly, the immense wealth and success that he is generated for shareholders and the corporate.