Transitioning to the John Turnus era

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god. Marco is so happy right now. This oh my god. I'm so happy. Oh my god. I can't wait. I can't wait to talk about it. Should we just dive in? I mean we got we got some stuff we gotta get through first and that is this is your last chance let me say it again this is your last chance to go to at p.fm slash store and get yourself some sweet sweet s,weet merch. John, would you please give us one last nickel tour of the merch offerings for summer twenty twenty six? I'll just remind people that the sale ends Sunday, April 26th, uh at eleven fifty-nine p.m. uh U.S Eastern Time. So that is your deadline. Uh our products we have this year. We have our ATP Neo uh shirts in the NEO colors. Uh we apologize for not having all the styles that you can imagine available. We could these the only shirts, the literally the only shirts that these colors came in, and we tried to match the styles as best we the colors as best we could. John, can you give us an update on the color sales? Um so uh when we do these sales, there's a minimum number of shirts that have to be ordered uh for them to bother printing them because it's like they do them in batches and they you know, whatever. Uh and that number is 12. Uh 12 people need to order a shirt, otherwise, it will not get printed, and those people will just get uh their money back. And we have the uh ATP Neo shirt collars matching the MacBook Neo. We have indigo, blush, citrus, and silver. And I said last episode that silver was uh proving to be extremely unpopular. Only one person had ordered silver. And I was like, well that, person's not getting their silver shirt, and unless 11 more people order silver since then, since last week's episode, which I know it hasn't a full week because we're recording this on Monday. Um, since then, uh, here's what has happened with the silver shirt: the total number of orders for silver now stand at two . Two people have ordered the silver shirt. One additional person ordered it since last week. So it's not looking good for ATP Neo Silver. Sorry for those two people. I don't think you're going to get your shirts. But the other shirts are there. I mean, if this was a Bezos chart though, this would like this would look really impressive. A hundred percent sales growth in less than a week. Sure. Yeah. I'll I'll put that on my uh goodbye letter just like uh Tim Cook. Um we have our Mac Pro Memorial shirt, which as I noted uh last episode, uh was in we will indeed be sending that to John Turnus. Uh I I might need to change the address and so it no longer says senior vice president of hardware or whatever. But I' Im'm pretty sure it'll get to him. They they probably know who he is and how to find him. Um it is our Mac Pro shirt with the the years uh twenty nineteen through twenty twenty six underneath it. Uh again, prophetic that the uh shirt has always looked a little bit like a tombstone . Um, we've got our ATP T65A and B crossover cable shirts with all sorts of Ethernet conductors crossed over in the ways that you do. Um, we have our M5 Pro and Max shirts again. If you want an M5 Pro and Max shirt, we're probably never going to sell them again. We sell them when the chips come out, whatever the sale is after the chips come out. So don't wait. Maybe you don't have a pro or a max now, but maybe you think you'll have one someday. Now's the time to get the shirt, because you're not going to be able to get it again. Um, we got ATP Pixels, uh, very popular shirt from the past that we brought back. That's a very cool one. It's just the ATP logo. Yes, and let me just quickly interject that the Pixels in particular is available in a wide array of different like t-shirts and tank tops and That's not only true of the Pixel shirt, but it is very true of the Pixel Pixel shirt. So you might want to check that out as well. Yeah, like sin like since uh v recently we've basically made every design available and every possible thing. Pullover hoodie, regular sweatshirt, long sleeve t-shirt, like every tank top, everything. Um, it the only time we don't offer a style is if it's just not available. So the Neos are only available t-shirts, because that's literally all that's available. But yeah, if you don't want a t-shirt and you want something that's different than that, we do sell it. Um, and then we've got our polo, which is just it's a polo shirt and a short sleeve, and that is the only choice there. And we've got our zip hoodie and hat. That's it for our sale. Um, again, um if you want any of these shirts that are not sort of a perennial shirts like the uh the regular ATP logo one, now's time to get them because they'll be gone for good. ATP members get 15% off with their discount code that they can find on their member page by logging into ATP.fm or if they're logged into atp.fm and go to atp.fm slash store and just click on a link, it should autofill their code for them. But if not, you can copy and paste it. Um there you have it. This is the last week. Uh by the time you hear this episode, the sale may be almost be over. Again, it ends at Sun on Sunday, April 26th at eleven fifty-nine, fifty-nine PM Eastern time . Yep. So I will take this as my final opportunity to remind you that every single sale, one of you that is listening to my voice right now says, Oh, I'll remember when I get home to do this, or I'll remember when I get to work to do this. And then inevitably, the day after the sale ends, I get tweets and emails and whatnot. I never thought it would be me, but this time it's me. Don't be that person. Pull over, make sure you use your turn signal if you're walking in Manhattan, get to the side of the street or whatever. Do what you need to do . Pause this podcast and go to atp.fm slash store. Buy yourself some sweet, sweet, sweet ATP merch. Thank you to John for putting all this together as always. And thank you for becoming members and for getting some sweet merch . All right. Let's do just a scant amount of follow-up. I talked last week about my beloved GLINET KVM. This is a little dingus that you can connect to a computer to basically act as a you know keyboard video uh monitor and mouse. Uh and a couple of people wrote in, uh Mark Wadham writes, the manufacturer of the KVM recommends starting with version one point two of their Mac software, which leaves a trivially exploitable set UID root binary on the system that then persists even if the app is removed. So uh basically if you choose to use the Mac OS software, which you do not need to do. In fact, I'm not I don't think I even knew that there was Mac OS software for this thing because I was only ever using it via the web. Um but if you choose to install that, maybe don't choose to because there's uh some complications and uh in pr potential vulnerabilities. Uh Mark wrote quite a lot more than this on a blog post which we will link. Uh but take a look at that before you install the macOS software. And then Dan Goten at Ars Technica writes from actually my birthday this year on March seventeenth. Researchers from the security firm Eclipsium disclosed a n a total of nine vulnerabilities in IPKVMs from four manufacturers, GLINET, and GET slash Yiso, SIPED, and JETKVM. These are unpronounceable, my word. And JETKVM . Uh the most severe flaws allow unauthenticated hackers, excuse me, to gain root access or run malicious code on them. Uh I should also say that a lot of people reached out to say that the cool kid solution is not my beloved GLI net, but rather JetKVM. I honestly I didn't look at it long enough or closely enough to know why that's the cool kit answer, but apparently that's the trendy cool kit answer. But it also has some security vulnerabilities, so tread lightly. With regard to the MacBook Neo, Edward Munn writes, perhaps Apple could sell an A nineteen Pro version of the MacBook Neo with a software locked core for the same price and then upcharge for the full chip. Yuck, but not unprecedented in other fields. And I can't help but think of the brief foray that BMW did with uh subscriptions for heated seats, which everyone was justifiably up in arms about that. I think someone also did like you pay money to unlock more horsepower in your car too. I forget I I'm misremembering something there, but wasn't that Tesla? Basically the same thing. Like uh we have a feature of your hardware that is uh disabled via software and if you pass money we will re enable it and it will make your thing faster. Uh yeah, I think this is also related to our discussion of ads in Apple Maps in terms of ideas that will definitely make money but will make people hate Apple. Please Apple don't do this. This is a joke. Like you know having having features that are available that are unlocked via subscription is most of the apps store' business model. Like that's including my own app uh and Casey yours too. Like you know, I I I don't actually have like I don't think such a model should be like, you know, illegal or considered you know immoral, it but it does irritate people. And like you know, you have to what irritates people like with the heated seats and with this idea of uh you unlocking a core in your thing is when you buy like you get a hardware thing. Because software is, you know, there's no marginal cost. Like software is just infinitely copied, and giving you a copy of the software doesn't really cost much more than giving another person a copy. But when you buy a car, there are there's lab or and materials that go into putting the little wires to heat your butt and your back in the seat, right? You've already got they someone did that, and pay that's that is not that there is a marginal cost for that. That someone has to pay the money to buy those materials and pay the people to put it in. It takes time in the factory and the labor to do it, right? You've got it. And yet they're stopping you from using it. And so I think people feel worse when you buy a hardware physical thing that is a a real live thing that costs money to produce and deliver to you and then they stop you from using the thing the the physical thing that you have in your hands and having a core that works in your SOC and saying , actually we've changed the software so it won't use that perfectly good working core that we manufactured and sent to you. Because it you know, if it's a chip with the working core, it is worth more than the chip without the working core. It's it's it's a it's a version with everything working. You could charge more money for it. I've got it. It's in my computer, but you're saying I can't use it unless I pay you more. That's why people feel worse, because it's a physical good. Versus the whole thing is just software and yeah, you pay money and I unlock features, but like just because like you oh you gave me all the software and it works and you're disabling a fire software. Yeah, but there's no marginal cost to that. Like you didn't get anything more valuable or better than the person who got the software with it, you know, disabled because software is software, it's just bits and that we consider them essentially free to copy and distribute. Um is that logical? Like you can make the argument, well it does cost money to send those bits and figure out what the cost to send the electricity of those extra bits that are in the blah blah blah blah but but in general, I think human nature is if it's a physical good and I already have it and you're stopping me from using it using it, it feels worse than if it's software that I already have that you're stopping me from using some feature in. Honestly, I I don't think that difference matters as much as you do. Like, I I I understand your argument about there being like, you know, physical parts being present and everything. I understand that argument, but in this day and age, like we have blurred the line so much between having the like physical ability to do something versus the right to do it and having to purchase the right to do it. You know, that it's you know not that different from the original Divx thing, it's just a lot less wasteful. But like the, you know, we we have, you know, DRM media now that you have to rent uh you know effectively to be able to access, even though you e even if you have like a downloaded copy on your computer, you still have to rent access to it. You have you know DRM ebooks on the same deal with you know with Kindles and stuff like that. Yeah, well but like but that I I feel like this this line has been blurred so much now. Like we have physical devices that rely on subscription services to operate . There, you know, a lot of like IoT stuff as we were just talking about, um, or you know, just various like new home devices, a lot of those things require some kind of subscription service to even use the physical device. That's not that different. I feel I feel like this line has been blurred so much by modern technology that even though like it is it is totally understandable if this is unpopular, but I don't know if it's necessarily like a like a a a hard line to draw that say to say like this side of this line is okay and this side of this line is wrong. Well we'll see what people do because they really didn't like the seed heaters thing but they're perfectly fine with Sirius XM. You know what I mean? Like a software unlock type feature. People will pay for Sirius XM, even knowing their car has the ability to use Sirius, but oh, you don't have a subscription to Sirius, people accept that. But when they tried to do, hey, we sell you a collar seat heaters, but you can't turn them on unless you give us money, people hated that because they knew their seats had heaters. They knew the heaters were under their butt right now and people weren't just letting turn them on. Whether that makes sense or not, one of those one of those is a business model that people accept, Sirius XM, and one of them is a thing that BMW had to walk back because people hated it so much. So maybe it's just in the car industry where people know that wires are under their butts, but uh we'll see how it goes. I mean the CSXM is a perfect example because the car has to have additional hardware to support that and the the margin al cost to Sirius XM of each person receiving the signal they're already broadcasting is zero. So I think it's actually exactly like software. Well no, the the best argument for Sirius is that they had to put a special antenna in the car just for Sirius and you're paying for the antenna right but uh but I'm not sure the antenna uh hardware is any different uh for receiving Sirius XM, but who knows. It is. It's a satellite antenna. It's totally different. Is it though? Y Yeses.. Yes, it is. Like what it's on a different frequency than the regular radio signals they get? Oh, absolutely. And they can't be picked it has to be picked up by a special antenna? I don't know. Anyway, the I I do feel like there is a difference in uh, you know, the the engine is a better ex ample of like uh one of the cylind two of the cylinders are disabled. They're going up and down, but there's no ignition in them. You know what I mean? It's running in in that mode, and then you can enable those cylinders. That's more like you know, cores being disabled than an SOC. It feels worse. Well what what about all the cars that have like you know you can like mod chip the engine basically to like to use the same hardware but just like you know pull up the specs a little bit? Yeah but that's that's just overclocking. Right. Yeah, basically you can overclock. I mean it'll avoid your warranty and it'll probably damage your engine, but you know, that's up to you. Is that that different from software unlocking features? Well it would be it would be here's the difference. It would if it was if it was like the John Deere thing where the manufacturer forbids you from using the chips, you know what I mean? Like that you can't do it as opposed to do it at your own risk. And I, you know, car manufacturers, I'm sure, would love to do that, but the John Deere lawsuits for people to know the John Deere is a tractor company in the US and they try to DRM all their hardware so people can't repair their own tractors. You have to use, you know, only John Deere can allow you to do it or whatever, so you can't repair them yourself. Um if car manufacturers stopped you from uh you know putting a different engine control uh computer thing on your car. People would be very angry about that because it's such a common pastime. But I'm sure they want to, but people wouldn't like it, you know? Aaron Ross Powell I think all of these examples and exceptions and technicalities sh I actually just prove my point that like this is a very blurry line and as time goes on I think we're gonna have more of the things that are kind of s you know going across both sides of this line and I and I think like I won't draw a hard line and say like, okay this, this is okay, but this isn't. I think there's a lot of stuff and ambiguity here. Even if the line is blurry, there are still things that are clearly on one side of the blurriness or the other, and I feel like paying to re it's paying to use a working core in your chip is really far on one side of it. So the line may be blurry and it may be a big smeary region, but this is so far from the the line part of it that it's just clearly a thing that people would be upset about. But you know that line does move over time, so it could be that people eventually become acclimated to this and they start doing it. But on the MacBook Neo in particular, it seems like the wrong product to try this on. All right. Uh we also wanted to call attention to uh friend of the show, Joe Lyon, who has given us lots of really good feedback over the years about chip related things. Uh Joe uh popped off in a happy way on Mastodon and has, I think it was like twelve toots, tweets, whatever, about um with about our discussion regarding RAM and Apple Silicon and you know do they just order DRAM chips off the market? And and we had talked about that a few episodes back. And it's a pretty good thread that you should check out. So we'll put that link in the show notes. And then uh finally for follow-up, uh Mark Ehrman reports that there's a belief internally that the new Mac Studio won't ship until around October, likely because of the component some sort of component-related d delay, perhaps RAM speaking of. Mark continues also the OLED touchscreen M6 powered MacBook Pros may arrive in early twenty twenty seven instead of late twenty twenty six. Whoopsie diopsies. That's bad news for me 'cause I really kind of want to get a computer sooner rather than later. October is like at that point, like you would imagine the new version of Mac OS would be out or about to come out. And if that's when they announce the new Mac Studios, it's going to be a while before I get one. Uh, who knows what kind of manufacturing delays will be on them, who knows how long I have to wait to get like an Apple friends and family discount or whatever. So this is not looking great. Like uh last year I was disappointed that I could, you know, I failed to get a new computer last year because the Mac Pro situation was uncertain , so I didn't get one. Um, this year I'm like, I'm definitely gonna get one this year, and they'll surely they release the new M5 Mac Studio by WWDC at the latest. And now, due to the wonders of uh AI component shortages, it looks like that's not great. And also, the rumor that the M6 uh, you know, OLED touchscreen MacBook Pros were also going to come out this year is now in risk. Maybe they'll come out at the end of the year, maybe they'll come out early next year, but not looking good for fans of fancy new Macs this year. Yeah, not to mention that if you get your eight terabyte SSD, which by the way, I'm also on that train, and uh whenever you or I buys a computer, we are utterly screwed if these prices keep up. I'm gonna need a home equity loan just to buy new laptops. Yeah, yeah. So uh we'll see. Uh see and and the uh I'm in a worse situation than you because my m well, I'm I'm not even running Mac OS twenty six now, but my Mac will not run Mac OS 20.. Oh, that's right I forgot about that. Yep. So uh clock is ticking. Uh Apple please release uh Mac Studio with an M5 something or other in it. Sooner rather than later. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespa The all-in-one website platform designed to help you stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or scaling your business, Squarespace gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your offerings to the professional website, grow your brand, and get paid all in one place. So I love Squarespace because so many times I, being you know the nerd around me, um, am asked to help somebody build a website. And so often in the past, the answer to this was not very good. The answer was, all right, go, you know, sign up for some server thing, install some packages, um, or have a nerd like me do it for you. And both of those are terrible. You don't wanna have people have to go through you as a gatekeeper. You don't want to be responsible for it, and you don't want to load people with a bunch of like hassles and complexity when they're trying to run their business. Squarespace has all of these problems solved. It's super easy for anyone to use, whether they're technical or not. Everything is visual. Everything is, you know, realistic, real-time previewing and everything. And it's you can make a beautiful website so easily with Squarespace. And they're not just templates. Like you start with their guides, but you customize everything. You can even use AI to like automatically generate even more custom stuff for you so that it looks like your site and your design and your brand, not theirs. And it supports any kind of business you might have in mind. Physical goods, digital goods , services, time slots, paid content, paid newsletters, paid podcasts, membership stuff, all of that, backed up by things like SEO and analytics and everything you might want. Squarespace supports it all. You can see for yourself by starting a free trial. Build your site on Squarespace for free before you launch. You can see how it works for you. If it works well for you, and I think it will, then you can go to squarespace.com slash ATP and get 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. But I think you can honestly go right there. Start right there. You don't even need the trial. But you have the trial. Try it out. Squarespace.com slash atp. It's a wonderful service. I can't wait for you to see for yourself. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show. There's a little bit of news that happened thankfully, and I I must uh give my thanks to someone over at Apple for timing this as they did because I was sitting here uh working on call sheet working fast and furiously on uh some new features for call sheet that I'm really excited about, which we'll talk about another time. And uh all of a sudden my phone started blowing up. I have messages from everywhere. My slacks are going crazy and I didn't know what was going on. And turns out that uh Apple put up a newsroom post and let me read to you uh to be honest, kind of a lot of it, but there's a lot there. So from the Apple Newsroom, Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board of directors, and John Turnus, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple's next chief executive officer , effective the first of September twenty twenty six. The transition I I'm gonna pause you a lot in here because I selected these paragraphs for a reason. I find it somewhat interesting uh as sort of like the last act of Tim Cook as the CEO is that the first sentence of this press release says that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple's board of directors. And I feel like that is not the most important part of this news. I mean, it kind of is, but like can't you also can't you be like the CEO and the executive chairman of Apple? So either way, the this news release is John Turner's new CEO of Apple, right? That's the news release. But Tim Cook gets one last moment in the spotlight, where it's like I'm st as of the writing of this press release, I'm still CEO. I think this is actually reasonable, given that like the the amount of pressure and scrutiny from the press and Wall Street on a move like this. You're gonna say he's not going to an island. It's yeah, it's all about like managing skepticism and doubt. Because that's that's everything like right in this moment, what you need to do when Apple is gonna have a transition away from the a very long running, very financially successful successful CEO. What you need to tell Wall Street is everything's fine, calm down, also new CEO. I feel bad for Turnus though. He gets second billing in his own I'm the new CEO announcement, but uh all right. He'll have plenty of attention. I d I think the funniest thing about this, like you know, right right at the top of this, you have this big picture of Turnus and Tim Cook walking down a floor. They're so happy. They're walking down a walk in Apple Park. Um, and my favorite thing about this is that they are wearing the exact same uniform. Yeah. They're little clothes. Yeah. Like so you ha so basically to be the CEO of Apple, apparently it's important to communicate that you have to be a smiling in side profile white American guy. Uh you have to be wearing a blue button -down shirt untucked with jeans and sneakers. Like that the only difference is that Tim Cook's sneakers are white and John Turnus' sneakers are black. And Tim's look a little bit more athletic and, Turnus' s look a little bit more like canvas. And the the shirt materials are different. You know, Cook has much more of a like like the kind of silky sheen Oxford style material. Turnus looks like he's wearing some kind of um tri-blend. Um maybe I can't identify quite the exact shirt it is, um, but it's that kind of that kind of like you know soft material that is that feels like a t-shirt but has buttons and a collar. Other than that, though, it's like don't worry, we're replacing the CE O with another person that you can all be comfortable with. It's the same kind of guy. Now, of course it isn't at all, but that that's kind of what this picture shows. It's like it's such a uniform and the business suit used to be the uniform of business people, right? Like and everyone everyone kinda looked the same. Then Silicon Valley comes around, like, you know, we can just wear whatever we want. We're not gonna wear suits. We're gonna wear like jeans and t shirts and hoodies and you know that and then like it has just kind of formed its own version of the suit, especially at Apple, where like this is just the Apple suit. It's just a button-down shirt and jeans and sneakers. Now that's probably a very nice button-down shirt. And I bet those are very nice jeans and probably very nice sneakers. But it's still like this is just the Apple suit. And you have to make sure that to show continu ity, these guys like each other. Someone just told a joke, and don't worry, they look pretty similar. Someone in the chat room says that Tim Cook is wearing Travis Scott Jordan 1s in this picture, which are different short uh different shoes than uh Turnus. Uh, I will point out that this is dressing up for Turnus because I can't remember the last time I saw him not wearing a t-shirt. Like even when he just did that, I just talked in last episode about that uh YouTube interview he did with Tom's hardware, wearing the t-shirt. He loves t-shirts. So why keep sending him t-shirts? He loves them. Uh but he dressed up. He dressed up for his big PR photo. He's wearing what looks like a button-down t-shirt. I will give them credit. They are wearing different color Apple Watch Ultras. Uh Cook's rocking the black one and Turner's rocking the white one. And can't tell what Cook's strap is because Turnus also has mastered a move that I wish I could master, the partial sleeve roll up to show off the Apple Watch and and strap selection. I have I wish I could master that move. I I have not yet, but I have much to learn before I can become the next Apple CEO. They just they just slide back down, that's the problem. Well but if you roll them upright they don't. Yeah, you this this is not difficult. Next time we're around each other, which unfortunately three we're gonna be like two or three years, I will I will instruct you. This is about the only thing I can accomplish with that's even vaguely related to fashion. I mean it's easy position. My my experience is they eventually slide down. No, but be when you have like the button sleeve w and to be clear also, Cook did not roll his up because he's he's more formal. But the the problem is you ha you can't just push them up because that makes them all crinkle up and then they just slide back down. There's a bit of a rolling in pro in progress there. How to do it though. I shouldn't have been so smug. This is not buttons on the sleeves. There's no cufflink area buttons on Turnus' shirt. That makes this far more difficult. I take it all back. I can't believe this is the uh the tangent we're going on one sentence of the press release. He's a wizard. A sleeve wizard. Hey man, you y you stopped us. You stopped me. I was I was cruising right along. I know, I know. I'm just stopped I just stopped for the billing thing. Marco went off into fashion. How do you not comment on these guys looking exactly the same in this picture? No, it was a good point. It was a good point. Just you know, I don't need all the the all the fashion detail. Anyway, we can continue. Did they have to include the trash can on the left side? It's a nice looking trash can. They didn't they didn't paint it out. Where was I? Okay, so reading from the newsroom post, the transition, which was approved unanimous unanimously by the board of directors, follows a thoughtful long-term succession planning process. Thoughtful long-term widely leaked succession planning process. They left that widely leaked in that comma separated list of uh But that's fair. Like that is true. Like this was obviously like you know, you can as we look back on even before the leagues, as you look back on some of the executive reshufflings that have happened over the last I'd say at least six months, it has looked pretty apparent that this was probably the path that they were going down and that it was being executed very well. So I do give them credit for that. And don't don't forget uh I don't remember the date of this, but don't forget however long it was. I think it was multiple years ago that Tim Cook said in an interview, which he never accidentally says anything in an interview, that uh he probably wasn' Exactly. And that I I guarantee you there was already I mean, whether whether the plan was finalized, whether all the details were finalized, I guarantee you that, you know, knowing Tim Cook and knowing how careful and deliberate and patient he is, this has probably been planned for a long time. Maybe not maybe not specifically Turnus, although I bet Turnus has been under consideration for a long time. But Tim has probably been planning his exit for a good amount of time. This probably was very careful, very deliberate, and executed, as far as we can tell, very well. And and it's a very Tim Cook move to l to uh leave, not gonna say retire, but to leave your CEO position at age 65 exactly. It's just like you know, social security retirement age or whatever. It's just like it's it's uh it's a plan that I can imagine him coming up with a decade ago and say, Yeah, six I'll probably aim for leaving around sixty-five, and he's doing it. All right, well, also real time follow-up. Uh I asked a sneakerhead friend of mine what is the deal with these shoes that Tim Cook is wearing? He said that they are as, one of you said, the Travis Scott Jordan one fragments, which apparently were impossible to find. Uh my friend Adam said. They were a limited run and only select people were able to get them. So there you go. Nothing's impossible if you're a billionaire. Exactly. Continuing on from the newsroom, Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Turnus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including what? Including engaging with policy makers around the world as the prophecy foretold. This is the thing I didn't want to be true. It was so clear that it was going to me, but I really wished I want him to go to an island. I want him to retire from public life and uh live a a wonderful life with his billions and give to charity and whatever it is that he wants to do. But no, that's not what's going to happen for the reasons Marco decided. Uh that's that's not that's not what he wants to do. It's not good for the the company's stability. He will continue on as chairman. And what will he do as chairman? He will continue to eat poop from our president and other world leaders. And and I think again, like I think given the immense size and scale and influence of Apple in the world and in politics and in finance and all like they're so big. I think this is what they have to do. It's part I mean, look, Steve Jobs did exactly the same thing, right? Wasn't he in the last few months of his life, wasn't he I mean he was dying. I mean, yes. But I mean like what in the last few months of his life, d didn't when he left CEO to cook, didn't jobs stay as president of the board in some form? I forget. That sounds familiar for me, but it's um uh I in the in that role he was mostly concentrating on dying and not really spending a lot of time schmoozing world leaders, but this is a hundred like this is one of the things we talked about with the timing of this. It's like, well, it just it just seems so much cleaner for Cook to to stay out the Trump presidency so he can just be the sin eater and the the garbage sink for that whole ter rible thing and they let let turn us come in clean. But the all alternative is is that okay, Turnus comes in, but Tim continues to be uh Tim Apple to uh our terrible president and to deal with world leaders and do all that other stuff. One, because I mean, dealing with like uh China and everything, he's he's got the experience and the relationships there, whereas I'm imagining John Turnis doesn't spend a lot of time talking to uh whoever is running China these days. I forget what that person's name is. Um so that there's some continuity of care as they say there. But the other thing is, okay, well, Cook will continue to be a meat shield for Turnus so that he is, let's say, less sullied by the terrible things that Apple is doing related to the current U S administration. Like this all makes sense because it did like as we were talking about, it didn't make sense to have to have Tim Cook totally disappear and retire completely during Trump's term. Like given that relationship that's been built up and given how like you'd want the next CEO to have a a more clean political slate after Trump's out of the office, thank God. This didn't make sense for Tim Cook to retire completely during this term. And so this is probably one of the many reasons that played into Cook planning to stay on as executive uh chairman of the board. That makes a lot of sense. And I think the only question is like, how cleanly will they be able to keep the separation? Yeah, that's that was my that's my fear. That's like I want John Turner to do things differently than Tim. How easy is it to do things differently than the guy who's still like staring over you from the border. You know what I mean? I don't actually mind like I'm I'm fairly I'm very confident that Tim will let Turnus lead the company without Tim interfering with Turnus. What I'm what I'm worried about is Trump going to Turnus and and bringing him into the spotlight with him instead of going to Tim Cook. Trump whisperer and deal with all that crap. What if Turnus' decision is day one? I'm the new CEO, the new Apple policy is FU Trump. That's really hard for Tim to smooth over. And like it would be it's like essentially screwing up what Tim wants to do because Tim's like, I'm supposed to be talking with the world leaders and dealing with them and trying to keep them placated and and you know selling out our values to make sure that we get all good that we don't have tariffs and all that stuff. Like that's what Tim clearly has wanted to do and continues to do right now. And if Turnus says, no, actually my new policy is no engagement with them. We hate them, uh, we don't engage with them at all, we are their mortal enemy. I don't see how that can exist. You can't have the CEO saying that and the whatever executive chairman of the board trying to continue that other policy. I don't happen I don't think Turnus is going to do that. That's my point. That he is not free to do whatever he wants with the company in this specific realm. And it's one of the specific realms that I think Apple should act differently. Oh yes. But I think if turn like for Turnus, I think the best move for him is to not rock that boat until Trump is out of office. Yeah, yeah. You know, and let Tim continue to be the hate sync in the political sphere, let turn us stay clean in that area and then start making changes once the the path is clear. Then you gotta stop Tim from giving anything anything with an Apple logo made of gold to anybody. It's like you can continue to be our little like diplomat to these terrible people, but I we can't allow you to give Apple branded merchandise to them anymore. It's like in the app store if you have a picture of an iPhone in your app. No, sorry, you can't do that. We are sponsored this episode by Claude. You know, I am always surprised how much Claude can do for me. The other day I had a big spreadsheet and I just I'm like, you know what? Let me see. I don't I don't be able to help me with this, but let me see . And I gave it to Claude and I said, Hey, review this for these criteria. Let me know what you find and what your takeaways are. And it the insights it had, it was pulling references from different areas of it, it was figuring out correlations between different sections that I wouldn't have seen. And then I went and manually went through everything and checked it all, and it was right. I am so blown away by how good Claude is. Claude is the AI for mines that don't stop. at good enough It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. And if you're a developer spending half your day on really tough development tasks, Claude Code is your pal. It runs in your terminal, it reads your code base. It can take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you hand holding it through every step. And this too, I just did this recently because I had a hairy problem. I couldn't figure out why something was happening. And I had Claude look at it, Claude Code look at it. And it found the problem. And I had it fix the problem and then generate some tests. And then I said, you know what? Generate more tests. And so it generated even more tests. I hate writing tests. Claude wrote them all for me. It was amazing. And the code it wrote works and now is well tested. And I didn't have to do either part of that. It was fantasti c. So for problems worth solving or not having Claude do it for you, but for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at Claude.ai slash ATP. That's Claude.ai slash ATP. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in this episode. Claude.ai /slash ATP. Thank you so much to Claude for solving my problems for me and for sponsoring our show. All right. Arthur Levinson, who has been Apple's non-executive chairman for the past fifteen years will become its lead independent director on the first of September twenty twenty six. Tarnis will join the board of directors, also effective the first of September twenty twenty six. Nice for Tarnas. He gets to be on the board of directors. Yeah, that's great. Tim Cook joined Apple in nineteen ninety-eight. He became CEO in twenty eleven and has overseen the introduction of numerous products and services, including new categories like Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro, and services ranging from iCloud and Apple Pay to Apple TV and Apple Music. So this section of the thing, we've skipped a bunch of stuff you can read the press release, but this section is basically like um there are quotes and everything from people saying how they wonder how wonderful everybody is, and we'll read some of those quotes later from uh Tim Cook's letter. But this is the part of the press release written in the voice of the press release, where they are recapping how awesome Toom Cook has been and his history with the company. So joined in 1998 when he became CEO. No mention of jobs in the when he became CEO, although I think it's mentioned elsewhere. And so this is this is the you know that we have a couple of paragraphs excerpted from here saying what his legacy is. So first paragraph of talking about his legacy, here's what I did. I was CEO when we did these things, and he's got Apple Watch AirPods and he throws an Apple Vision Pro because we know Tim really likes that, but I'm not sure that's on your greatest hits. And then he talks about uh services: iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple TV, Apple Music. Some of those arguably like iCloud are, you know uh, transitional things from the job era and everything, but some of those are clearly his, like Apple Pay has got Tim Cook written all over it, and Apple TV predates him, obviously, but not the current Apple TV. And Apple Music is services. So I would say Apple Watch and AirPods are two big feathers in his cap and Apple Vision Pro remains to be seen, but that's how they chose to well that that's his sizzle reel for product stuff things product things that regular people would know about that I did as CEO. And you know, it's not a bad list. No, it really isn't. Continuing, under Cook's leadership, Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately 350 billion to four trillion, which this is old news, but that is stark. You started at 350 billion, which is nothing to you know shake your fist at, and end at four trillion dollars. That's just bananas. Continuing, uh, representing a more than one thousand percent increase in yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled from one hundred and eight billion in fiscal year twenty twenty twenty eleven, excuse me, to more than four hundred and sixteen billion in fiscal year twenty twenty five. So this is the Tim Cook section of Tim Cook's accomplishment. Made numbers go up by more than you can imagine. Again, if you've ever seen this on a graph that has a zero, you know, uh a zero-rooted uh y-axis, and you label the errors of Apple's history. So, first of all, if you label the errors of Apple's history like you know, before like 1990 and earlier, you have to keep in mind that during those years, Apple was like uh I mean they did a joke about it in Forest Comp. It's like, hey, if you got in on the ground floor of Apple before the Apple II became popular, you made a ton of money because Apple was one of the first big tech stocks. It's like, oh, this little thinking company named Apple, they're going somewhere. And then the Apple II comes out and it's everywhere. And it's like, wow, the stock went up so much. Apple's value as a company going from nothing to huge success was a big story in the 80s. And yes, again, so much so that it ends up as a joke a gag in the the Forrest Gump movie and stuff, right? Look at that section of the graph on like to you know from the founding of Apple till today, and it looks like the flat part. That's the part where nothing happened. That's the amazing success of Apple in the in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, that's basically flat. And then you see Steve Jobs come back and like he turned the company around. And then you see this the line start to go up a little bit, but it's still kind of in the flat part. And then you see Tim Cook era, and it's like, oh, this is where Apple really was successful because the numbers just get massive. It's like a big hockey stuff graph and graph and Tim Cook dominates the chart in terms of these kind of numbers. Uh we'll get to more of them in a second, but just merely like what is the market cap? Uh, what is the yearly revenue? Just huge, huge. Tim Cook, uh, I I I'm sure people can do lots of math on it of like how many multi- I mean he did a thousand percent injuries or whatever, but like how many multiples of like the the go-go eighties apple has he grown? It's just tremendous. And if you don't care about business, if you don't care about the, you know, the success of business people and CEOs and so on and so forth, then maybe these numbers don't impress you, but I know there's a lot of people in the world who are you know who treat business as uh an ex uh a pursuit in and of itself, regardless of what business you're in. If you are the CEO of a company, uh and you're tasked with making the company's suc ceed it's going to be very difficult for it's gonna be like he's like the wayne grensky of CEOs like you'd never want to be compared against his numbers like it within your chosen sport of like I am a CEO it's like okay uh, did you take your you, know, how how much did you make your company succeed? They brought you in as CEO and when you retired, the company was twice as big as it was before. And Tim Cook's like, I did a 1000% increase. Right. And we started huge. This is how big we started. We started at 350 billion market cap, and I leave it four trillion. And then he just drops the mic and walks away. I don't care that much about business, but we'll other people do. And I think that is much more impressive than his list of products. During his tenure, Apple has grown by more than 100,000 team members and increased its active install base to more than 2.5 billion devices. Apple services has been a major focus of Cooks. And during his tenure, the category has grown to become more than a $100 billion business, the equivalent of a Fortune 400 company. Yeah. So the obviously they don't go into details as we always talk about like what does that mean, the services category, and it really means you know rent seeking for software developers, which is not a particularly wonderful and friendly thing to describe. But again, when people read this, they think, wow, that he really signed up a lot of people for Apple TV Plus, and that's not what it is. It's not absolutely not. Um, but that's his thing, it's the thing that's currently growing. You gotta put it in the press release. Wall Street loves it for the people who are interested in the sport, and to be clear, I'm not it that interested in the sports of uh business, but for the people who are interested in the in the sport of business, these are big, big numbers. I'm interested in the sport of you know good products, and that section is less impressive. But if you are into these stats, these are big, big numbers. These are just embarrass anybody numbers. These are kind of like tin uh, you know, John Turnus. Don't even try to do this because if you did another thousand percent increase, it would be like the uh uh paperclip uh game. What is that game? Universal paperclips? Oh yeah. Oh it becomes paperclips. If if if John Turnis had a Tim Cook-like performance, the entire Earth would be Apple . So it's not possible. So don't don't even try. Like don't don't try and I hope I hope the uh like the law of big numbers where it's like it's real easy to double when you have a small number. You just mentioned it with the uh silver Neo shirt, but it's really, really hard to do that next doubling when you're you know , you are uh ninety nine percent of the GDP of the planet or something. So yeah, uh hopefully Turnus will be dissuaded from even attempting to match this kind of numerical performance and thus turn his attention to things that are more important in my opinion Aaron Powell By the way, I have very important real-time follow-up. So I I fur I first thought that it might have been something from like um you know, marine layer, normal brand, fahardy, however that's s pronounced, um anything like that and it's uh maybe Theory. I checked all those sites. So it's none of those. No, that's i I figured it wouldn't like super, super high-end thing because that doesn't seem like their way. Those those sneakers are pretty much super high-end, it sounds like in terms of sneakers. Well, yeah, but so I I couldn't figure it out. So I eventually just pasted it into Gemini and said find these. Um and it did, and I'm pretty sure the matches are correct. They are both from Vuori, that the brand of like, you know, fancy exercise wear and stuff. I don't know how it's pronounced. I say Vuori, but it's probably not that. Anyway, Turnus is wearing the long sleeve ponto button down, it is a casual technical take on a classic button down, a slightly fitted athletic cut. And then Tim Cook has the bridge button down. It's a performance woven shirt designed to look like a tradition al dress shirt with technical benefits. So it's a more structured, crisp look compared to the one Turnus was wearing. But still a minimalist aesthetic. Both shirts are around 100 bucks. Not bad, not bad choices. And I think they they accurately represent both of these people. It's like Turnus is looking a little more casual, Tim's looking a little more formal, but they're still both kind of technical athletic casual combos. Perfect. I can't believe this company is not sponsoring the show. The funny thing is, I think they did sponsor they they did sponsor podcasts around our sphere um in the past. I don't think they ever sponsored us, um, but they uh they they certainly were nearby. All right, well, if you could uh provide links for the show notes, I would appreciate it. Yep. Continuing from the newsroom, Cook has made Apple's core values even more central to the company's decision making and product development. So this one, like the first line that hurt me was the the other one that I put in bold in this thing, which is you know, engaging with policymakers around where we all saw coming and there it is. This one, I'm not sure I saw this um claim coming. Even though as you'll read it, as you'll continue when you read, it's a hundred percent true , but there I feel like there is an error of omission here. Um, because to the extent that people are upset with Tim Cook, it is due to his lack of making Apple's core values central central to the company's decision making. You know what I mean? And the problem is there's lots of core values, and lots of them he has made even more central. Like I this is a true statement. We'll get to it in a second why it's true, but it is also the source of I think pretty much all of almost all of the dissatisfaction with Tim Cook, whether it's minor dissatisfaction, like I don't like what he's doing with the products and Apple's core values used to be about products, like as in keep selling an old product to people will keep buying it instead of wiping the table clean because you know something's better, all the way up to hey, how you deal with the Trump administration is upsetting because we don't feel it reflects Apple's core values. That whole range of dissatisfaction with Tim Cook is not making Apple's core values central to the company's decision making. But you know, I I give them credit for following it up with evidence because it is partially true. Under his leadership, the company reduced its carbon footprint by more than sixty percent below twenty fifteen levels during a period in which revenue nearly doubled. Thumbs up, and by the way, big victory lap there saying, Hey, not only if we've been doing this environmental stuff, which is part of Apple's core values, and they have totally been doing it and they're kicking butt and they're like, Look, we are doing 60%, reduced it by 60% since 2015. And by the way, because I'm Tim Cook, during that period, I doubled our revenue. So we reduced our carbon emissions, not at like status quo, like we're just doing the same stuff and we reduced it by 60%. I doubled our revenue because I'm Tim Cook and that's what I do, and we still reduced it. Amazing. Big mic drop. It is one of Apple's core values, just not the one I'm mad about. Cook, who has long advocated for privacy as a fundamental human right, has made privacy and security imperative at Apple, setting a standard for user protection that continues to set the company apart from the rest of the technology industry. True. 100% true. Thumbs up and I and and as Marco pointed out, I think in the last episode, he has done that more than his predecessor. These are places where not only he has continued Apple's core values, he has made them even more central. There's no arguing that he has made environment and privacy even more central to the company's decision making and that those are today's Apple's core values. So partial credit. Yeah. He has also pushed for continued innovation in the accessibility space. I would say he just basically continued that one because I think Apple's pretty good about that before. But again, thumbs up, core value Turnus joined Apple's product design team in 2001 and became a vice president of hardware engineering in twenty thirteen. Prior to Apple, Turnis worked as a mechanical engineer at virtual research systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. So I'm this I'm thinking this is uh in my mind because both of my on my mind because both of my children are in college now. Uh my son is about to graduate with both a bachelor's and a master's degree, and my daughter is just working on her bachelor's degree. Um , and I just wanted to put wanted to highlight this because it's like, okay, I think a lot of kids today think um , if I don't go to a good school, or if I don't get an advanced degree, I'm never going to be anything. Turnus has got a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. And as someone with an engineering degree, I can tell you an engineering degree from anywhere is is nothing to sneeze at. But University of Pennsylvania is not MIT and he's just got a bachelor's degree and he's gonna be the CEO of Apple. So I don't think is that your your degree and your school are not your dest iny. Um Steve Jobs famously didn't even complete college because he didn't think it was doing anything good for him. So uh, and you know, uh Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard or whatever the hell it was. Um and I know that's a cliche of like, I'm gonna be a Silicon Valley CEO, I don't need to go to school. I'm not telling you not to go to school. What I'm telling you is that um if you didn't get into the school of your dreams or if you quote unquote only have a bachelor's degree, that's not gonna be your limiting factor. It's gonna be everything else about you. That's gonna limit you. But you know, it won't be that. Yeah, there are a lot of uh industries and businesses that really care a lot about the school you went to and how you did in it. Um fortunately for people like me, that's not all industries. Uh not not all businesses. Um I barely graduated from college. My GPA was so low. I don't actually even know it. I I failed a required class senior year, had to take it in summer school at a different university, transfer the credits in, get my diploma by mail. It was a whole thing. But I think my final GPA was somewhere around two point oh. You know, certainly never anything I would have ever given a an employer. And that's not what stopped you from being CEO of Apple. Right. Well I mean I bet he got good grades. All I'm saying is that he's just got a bachelor's degree. I just feel like simple like talking to my kids and everything and everyone is like, oh well you can't get anywhere in this industry if you don't have uh at least a master's and probably a PhD. It's like no, no, you can be CO of Apple if you just have a bachelor's degree. It's fine. Yeah. Like it to the secret to success is who you know. Um, but the second best secret to success is what you've done. And that's what the you know, the tech business cares most. What have you done? And and that, you know, so start doing stuff and that's that's how you get far. You don't just uh rest on college forever. For what it's worth, the University of Pennsylvania as ranked by US News and World Report, which I'm sure this is a racket, but that's the best I can do on short notice. University of Pennsylvania sixteenth best engineering school in the United States. That's pretty good. Would you like would you like to guess, John, what is Boston University? What rank? Um that I I think I told you this before my daughter was looking at BU and her like it was like listed as like a far reach school for her. Like B U is a far reach. Like I went to B U and so did my wife and it was not a fancy school when we went there, but apparently its reputation has increased. I'm gonna say B U is twenty five. Uh that is a very good guess. It is number thirty-two tied . Uh I can't see I don't see the list. I've just been searching universities. I can't see w what other schools it's tied with, other than I can tell you it's tied with Virginia Tech, which is where I went. It also got an engineering degree. Also only barely though. Well, uh you and Turnus and it like really what you want to look up is well well how is the University of Pennsylvania regarded when John Turnus went there, which was a long time ago. But 100%. But I just thought it was funny. Sorry to slam the university pins of money. As I said, an engineering degree from anywhere, uh, any good accredited university is a difficult thing. Yes. Definitely agree. All right. So um I can move on, and there's there's plenty of other things for us to talk about. Is there anything I mean, Marco, do you wanna do your victory lap before we start talking about other things? Well, I th I mean, let's let's at least get through like we have the whole show for this. So I think we can just get through the uh the the last things that we have here and then we can just give our, you know, uh thoughts on the whole thing. Because I do want to get to the New York Times thing because I think that's central to what I'm sure Marco wants to talk about, which is like the Tim Cook legacy. Mm-hmm. All right. So also announced today, Johnny Suru gi has been named Apple's chief hardware Offeric. This is a different newsroom post. Apple today announced that effective immediately Apple executive Johnny Suruji will become Chief Hardware Officer. Suruji, who most recently served as senior vice president of hardware technologies, will assume an expanded role leading hardware engineering, which John Turnus most recently oversaw, as well as the hardware technologies organization. And I did a little asking around my understanding of hardware technologies is that that's the Apple Silicon part, and then the hardware engineering is, you know, putting devices together part. Yeah, I mean if you want to, you can click this in puzzle piece wise to the rumor about Ser uji, you know, potentially looking elsewhere and then them saying, No, totally, I'm staying, I'm not going anywhere. And it's like, well, as we said at the time, uh it doesn't mean that rumor was untrue. It just means that that rumor was late and then maybe Suruji had a talk with Tim Cook and they decided that he would stay by, you know, giving him this more responsibility. Or it could just be that he was gliding into this role like this is always going to happen because it makes sense. Like who are you gonna who you are gonna bump up to take Turnus' place when he leaves as the hardware guy? Putting the awesome chip guy as now the hardware guy makes perfect sense because hey, chip guy, you knocked it out of the park as chip guy, then you get to be all hardware guy, like rewarding success. And Turnus knocked out of the park as all hardware guy, and now he gets to be CEO. So this all makes perfect sense. Uh I'm glad Suruji's sticking around. He seems to uh I I like I like the results. I like his work. Like Marco said, it what what can you do? Ser uji can do a lot. So he's maybe talent retention is a potential challenge for him that we've heard rumor wise. But uh so far products are pretty good. So thumbs up on Johnny uh getting the nod to be hardware guy. Yeah. Yep. Additionally, uh, this was actually the first thing that I happened to see uh was a community letter from Tim. Uh it was very good. It is not very long. I really I I really enjoyed this and we'll hear your two opinions here in a moment, but uh I recommend reading this whole letter. I think this is an amount of human humanity, humanness, I I can't think of what we're looking for. Yeah, thank you. Um that we don't typically get from T im, and I did listen to the emergency re-recording or additional recording of upgrade before I we recorded tonight. And I think Jason was saying that, you know, we haven't heard Tim be this human since uh his coming out letter uh from I think it was like twenty fourteen or something like that. Frank Gruber said that. Oh maybe it was Gruber. Okay, I thought I thought it was Jason, but maybe I'm it doesn't matter. Somebody said it and I would like to plus one it. portions of it that John has selected. Today we announced that I'm taking the next step in my journey at Apple. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world. That leader is John Turnus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job. Writing his more personal informal letter about what's going on. And he describes Turnus as first a brilliant engineer, which I I mean, no one is describing Tim Cook as a brilliant engineer because he's not. Uh that's the new CEO of Apple. So that is music to a lot of people's ears because that is John Turners' reputation, and that is how Tim Cook has chosen to describe him. Not a great business leader or uh, you know, a master of the supply chain or whatever, but a brilliant engineer. And then what is he done at Apple? Building products. So thumbs up on that characterization. Whether it was chosen carefully in Tim Cook style to spin the story in the way that he wants it to be told, or whether it is just simply a reflection of reality that he is in fact a brilliant engineer with just a bachelor's degree. But you know, that's his mindset, that's his bent. He's working on hardware. This is how he thinks, this is how he looks at the world. I hope it's true because I like that mindset. Uh do remember, even though I don't disagree with your c your characterization that Tim is not a brilliant engineer, he did get a uh undergraduate degree in industrial en engineering from Auburn. Right, but he did not spend his career pursuing anything really related to that. Uh maybe I don't know. Supply chain engineering, maybe. I guess. That's what I was gonna say. All right, well, I mean it doesn't matter. Anyway, moving on. Anyway, uh I've have you ever seen a news story where it describing Tim Cook as a brilliant engineer or any or him characterized that way by other people talking about him, it tends not to be the top line item about Tim Cook. Certainly not. Uh coming back to Cook's uh letter, John cares so much about who we are at Apple, what we do at Apple , who we reach at Apple, and he has the heart and character to lead with extraordinary integrity. I'm so proud to call him Apple's next CEO. Yeah, that that that that part I liked because um again uh Tim Cook being more human, saying like what do I want in my successor? You know, what am I looking for in and uh and a leader? Um uh heart and character to lead with integrity. That Tim Cook cares about that. Regardless of how much we disagree with him about his the manifestation of his supposed integrity, with his various decisions that he's made at various times, about having to do with app store and developer relations and political stuff or whatever, that uh, you know, he believes that he is acting with integrity and heart. And that's what he's looking for in a leader. He believes John Turnus is going to do the same thing. And every I mean, I f still kind of feel like John Turnus is a bit of a cipher because we've never seen him speak out of turn, so to speak, because uh whatever. Um because he's always he's always been uh speaking in his capacity as an underling to the CEO of Apple and they are very like single voice focused and on message or whatever. So maybe we'll see different stuff from him now. But I've never heard anything about him that has made it that had made me think that he is not in fact a person of character and integrity. And I really hope that's true. Tim Cook says it's true, so fingers crossed. This is not goodbye, but at this moment of transition I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you. Thank you for the confidence and kindness you've shown me. Thank you for saying hi to me on the street and in our stores. Thank you for cheering alongside me when we unveiled a new product or service. Thank you most of all for believing in me to lead the company that has always put you at the center of our work. Every day we get up and think about what we can do to make your life a little bit better, and every day you've made mine the best I could have asked for. Thank you, Tim Cook. And I believe that he does like it when people say it hi to him and and cheer when they uh announce new products. And and not because of like ego gratification. He thinks he's wonderful. I just really think he's always enjoyed that part of being CEO. Like he enjoys that people are excited to see him and they really love Apple products. And not and like in a wholesome way. Like, I do think that's the kind of person he is. Like he's just you know, an Oshuc h'appsy kind of guy. And uh the I when I see him in those environments, I don't think he's acting happy or like, you know, being like false to the public or like glad handing like a politician. I honestly think that he maybe you don't enjoy being mobbed by like fans or whatever, but he ba that he basically he does appreciate that. He that is probably one of the more fun parts of his job where he's not uh yelling at people to get on planes to China, but is instead just getting to hear , you know, that people applaud when they announce products or they're so excited to go into the Apple store to get a new thing, or as he said at the top of his letter, which I cut, which again uh I echo what Casey said you should read. He talks about the first thing he does every day when he wakes up at some ungodly hour before he exercises, is read emails from people. And you're like, Oh, I bet I bet like he has staff that just filters the emails and just sends him the good ones, Trump style. But no, he talks about um he reads emails to people tell me how their Apple Watch saved the life and all this stuff but he also he mentions in his typical Tim Cook understatement when people will say that their products are disappointing them and the areas where they could do better. So he's getting your angry emails too, right? Like people aren't filtering out, I hope, all the angry emails that people get about how I've been Apple customer since X year, but now I'm so disappointed and blah blah blah. No, he's getting those too. And hopefully they motivate him to do better. And you know, that was all in the letter. And so I I feel like this again, I don't know if Tim Cook, and I there's very little to judge him by because he's so guarded as a person, but this letter does read to me like really coming from his heart and he's being honest about the things he says. He's also it's very Tim Cook in the things that he omits and doesn't talk about and doesn't address, which is also part of him that annoys me, but you know, it's his letter. He can write what he wants. For Tim Cook, it's fine. It's heartfelt. It is I I think it is honest . In typical Tim Cook fashion, you don't get a lot out of it. Like there's not a lot of value. There's not a lot of surprises. There's not yeah, there's no super new information revealed here that we didn't know before, you know? No. Like it's f ine. I'm glad he wrote it. Um and it is exactly what standard cook fashion it is exactly what you'd expect. His signature is weird too. Can we agree his signature is weird? Yeah, oh that's really weird. Yeah, I noticed that too. I've never seen his signature. Like you see Jobs' signature 'cause people are always getting him to sign stuff, especially in the Jobs 2 era. But even before that you'd see a signature on like the Apple founding documents and crap like that. And so you're familiar with the Steve and Steve Jobs didn't have great signature either but the Tim Cook one, wow, is it weird? Yeah. The T is weird and Tim . It's not script. Like the the T the I M is kind of script, although the M looks like an N, and then Cook is just like print. It's just it's just any it's fine. Uh he's probably signed his name a lot. He's probably sick of it. Yep. And then this final bit, like I put this final bit in just because uh this is a stand-in. I mean, we're recording this the day of the announcement, so there's sure to be more, but this this New York Times bit uh that uh Casey's about to read is the stand-in for uh how does the rest of the world, who is not like in the insular little Apple techno, you know, enthusiast sphere, how do they see what is the story from their perspective? Now, granted, it's slightly modified by the author of this New York Times uh article, who are at least one person I know, Trip Mickle has been on the Apple beat and written books about Apple, so he's not really an outsider, but like how is this presented to the world ? What does it what does this story look like uh to the general public? And my this New York Times snippet is my stand-in for that. So Kelly Huang and Trip Mickle write, the retirement of Mr. Cook will end one of the most successful management runs in the history of American business. Apple has lost several top executives in recent months, worrying investors about the depth of its next next generation of managers and its long term strategy, particularly with artificial intelligence. The company 's largely stayed on the sidelines as the rest of the technology industry has committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI. Apple is also navigating increasingly choppy political waters, including whiplash over the Trump administration's terrorist In recent years, Mr. Cook, out of necessity, has become the technology industry's leading diplomat, making regular visits to Washington and Beijing to try to manage the often conflicting agendas of President Trump in what is Xi Jinping? I think that's right. Hopefully. China's leader. Even so, Apple is still one of the most profitable companies in the world, thanks to the stability of its sales of its iPhones, products like the Apple Watch and services, including iCloud and Apple Pay. Yeah, so again, this is uh this sort of summary of, you know, this is a very short story. I feel like they should have had this pre-written like people's obituaries who are real old, but they apparently didn't, because this definitely feels like it was hastily slapped together today. They should have pre written the transition memo, but I guess they don't do that for transitions, only for deaths. Um the top line thing is, you know, uh they say retirement of Mr. Cook, which is not probably that accurate, but anyway. End one of the most successful mansion runs in the history of American business. Yep, that's line one. That's gotta be line one, especially for the New York Times. So like we talk about news, he's a CEO, we're gonna measure him against other CEOs the way you measure other hockey players against Wayne Grinsky. He is the Wayne Grinsky of CEOs. He made numbers go up more than any numbers when ever went up before. Tim Cook, yeah, yeah, yeah. Number one. Um and then there's some other stuff about it. And then they go to like, okay, well what about like there's got to be some bad stuff too, controversies or whatever. And so they talk about top executives reason leaving in recent months, but I feel like it's just you know, when there's a change in leadership, it's always gonna happen. I don't think that's on Tin Cook. That's just the way it works. Um but then their first line item of like things that might not be so hot about Tim Cook's Apple, like prob potential problem areas or maybe places where he dropped the ball, they go for AI investment because in the the general news sphere outside of the very insular techno nerd sphere, but maybe also inside of it is like all these companies, all the big companies making headlines today are spending just so much money on AI, and Apple is mostly not. And they're talking about , you know, capital expenditures. How much money are we putting towards this in this year? How much money are we spending on building new data centers or buying GPUs or doing all the like money that we're laying out to do stuff and everyone's spending tons of money and not Apple. They don't they they say like company has largely stayed on the sidelines and they say as the rest of the technology industry has committed to spending hundreds of billions developing, they don't really talk about Apple failing. They didn't say Apple failing to ship Apple intelligence or like failing to give things to their customers that other companies are giving, which I feel like is the bigger failure. Like I don't think let's look at their capital expenditures compared to other companies and determine whether they're succeeding or failing in AI. Let's look at things they said they were going to ship and failed to. Meanwhile, lots of other companies are shipping things that do the things that they were promising and customers like it. But they don't mention that. They just mention the capital expenditures. Maybe it's because of the New York Times. Then they get to navigating increasingly choppy political waters, talking about tariffs and Trump. And then I feel like this is this is so a New York Times view of this, because it's not even uh presented as uh uh an opinion or one of multiple positions, but they just basically said Cook out of necessity had become technology industry's leading diplomat. That wasn't a necessity. That's a choice. He's this is how he's choosing to interact with China and Trump or whatever. But it's not like it's not out of necessity, but New York Times like, well, he had to do it. He just what he has what Timcak has done was a necessity. Like you can you can say you could agree with it or disagree with it, but it was in fact a choice, not a necessity. But the New York Times is like, no, this is totally a necessity. He had to do this. And to do anything else would be uh, you know, unthinkable because what would it do to the stock price? Um, so that's their position. And then finally, what is not in this New York Times summary at all is many of the concerns that I and other super tech nerd people have about Tim Cook's leadership of Apple having to do with App Store policies, uh developer relations, uh the specifics of the decisions with respect to trump and china uh all that stuff is not um not in the public consciousness not you know,' Im sure Tripnical knows about it but, doesn' doesn't care, itt go in the New York Times story because the only people who care about the stuff are weird Apple nerds. And I think it's right that only weird apple nerds care about that, but this is a weird apple nerd podcast, and it hurt me that none of that is in this summary. And so when I see every story in the regular media, not in the tech media, about this transition, I'm going to be reading and looking. Is there any awareness that a subset of super nerd weirdo Apple tech enthusiasts are really mad at Tim Co ok about stuff that never gets mentioned in this. And I find that I don't know, a little bit disheartening. Because if it never gets mentioned in the New York Times stor story, I feel like it makes it easier for Turner's to dismiss it. It makes it easier for Turners to ignore Marco's bl We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick, and safe to remove your personal data from hundreds of data brokers online, at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everyone vulnerable. So you know those sites that like when you search a search engine for someone's name, you get all these sites saying like person's name, address, person's name, phone number, you know, home address, and you know, you can look up like their relatives' names or where they went to college, like all this stuff. Those are data broker websites. They're this kind of gross business where they just try to collect as much info as possible on people and then offer it for some amount of money to whoever comes by looking for it. And it's kind of creepy. You know, somebody can just go and pay twenty bucks or whatever to get your home address, your phone number, like your kids' names, your parents' names. It's it's a messed up business. Um so what delete me does is they have an automatic service that goes around and opts you out and has takedowns sent to all these sites for your data so that your data has to get removed from them. So all these sites they all have some kind of opt-out procedure, but they're all different and there's no other way to go around and just like you know bulk remove yourself. So delete me has automated the process and then it's an ongoing thing. So you sign up for Delete Me, and it's an ongoing service that will continually monitor for new datab ases that pop up and will try to opt you out of every single one they can find. So I personally went looking for a service to do this a while ago before they were a sponsor, and Delete Me came highly recommended, so I tried it and it's great. Take control of your data and help keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now at a special discount for our listeners. Get twenty percent off your delete me plan. When you go to joindeleteme.com/slash ATP and use promo code ATP at checkout. The only way to get twenty percent off is to go to joindeleteme.com slash ATP and enter code ATP at checkout. That's joinedeleteme.com slash ATP code ATP. Thank you so much to DeleteMe for sponsoring our show. I am so happy this is finally happening. The Tim Cook era has had its strengths. You know, back back when Steve Jobs was clearly you know getting sicker and when it became apparent, oh, they he needs to step down as CEO. All of us in like the Apple blogosphere and fandom, we were all basically on board. Like, yeah, Tim Cook is the obvious choice to be the next CEO. And that was for a number of reasons. Tim Cook was already taking a visible leadership position in the company. It was very obviously the plan was to have him be the next CEO. He was good at his job. He was good at operations. He you know he he was good at at what he was hired to do, uh which was to be an operational genius and a bean counter. He was really good at that. And we all knew at that time that like for a company to lose Steve Jobs, it was gonna be a huge deal for you know public perception, for doubts about the future. Everybody was gonna freak out, especially Wall Street, was going to freak out about, you know, will Apple be able to continue innovating without Steve Jobs? And so Tim Cook was the obvious and the safe choice . And he led pretty much exactly the way you would expect based on the way that story was was aimed at that time. He was brought in to be the safe, confident for Wall Street leader to take over from the visionary founder, to assuage everyone's fears, and to make the company like predictable and grown up and to grow all the numbers over time . That's exactly what he did. So he did the job he was hired to do. He did exactly what Steve Jobs probably expected and wanted him to do. This ship is in motion. It's it's a it's an amazing, it's an amazing ship, it's done some great things. Continue on the path and figure out what's next and keep this amazing thing going. Don't let Apple die when Steve Jobs died. And and by the way, also I would imagine what Steve Jobs wished for Tim Cook was to I have to get to the quote or whatever, but to continue to uh embody Apple's core values in the their decision making. Uh and and and fitting in with the jobs telling him,' Dont do what I would do, do what you feel is right. One of the first things he did after he took over and Jobs was gone was change Apple's policy in charitable giving because jobs didn't want to like I think Apple j Apple didn't any match under jobs or whatever it was. Tim Cook says this is more important to me than it was to Steve Jobs. I want to change Apple's charitable giving and matching policy. So I'm going to do that. And in the environment, uh, I'm sure Jobs cared about that. But when Tim Cook took over, that's a that's a a value that he brought in that he cared about more than jobs and he really concentrated on that. And I guarantee you that Steve Jobs wanted what he wanted was things that are important to you that mesh with the like the the core values of Apple as trying to do good in the world, pursue those. They may be different than mine. I cared about these things, you care about those things, but as long as the things are all good things, pursue them. Because I don't think he would be happy if Tim Cook took over Apple and just scaled the company, but then didn't do any of the other sort of stuff, like the environment or privacy or accessibility, and just kind of like left the let them at status quo or let them die on the vine. I don't think jobs would have been happy about that. Even if he wanted Tim Cook to take over to be a steady leader to scale the company, he would also really want, you know, I mean if Tim Cook's not going to do the thick different ad campaign, but like whatever the equivalent of that is to Tim Cook. And it seems like to him that was basically like the environment and privacy. Right. Um and I I think he did that and I think jobs would have been happy with that as well. So Tim Cook took this amazing ship that jobs had really had built and grew all the numbers. The Tim Cook era was not defined by massive, like big splash brand new revolution ary products. Even though I think part of Apple's great product portfolio was attributable to the Tim Cook era. I think, you know, mainly if if I had to point out like the biggest successes like in terms of like innovative products, it's got to be the Apple Watch and the AirPods. Uh those were both solidly within the Tim Cook era. And and both of those, by the way, like he really you mentioned the stories like comparing him to jobs. Those stories haunted him for years. How many years did you have to see those stupid stories, but oh, Apple's gonna do an announcement. But is Tim Cook gonna be able to pull a Steve Jobs and but like he could not get rid of those damn stories? And when he did introduce new things, was like, Yeah, but what he did, that's not bad. It was like the whole like overnight success thing. Like the iPhone wasn't an overnight success either, but in hindsight everyone thought it was. So when he came out when Apple came out with AirPods, it's like all right, fine, like whatever, they're they're earphones, but like honestly who who cares about headphones compared to the the iPhone? It's like fast forward a few years and allow it to grow like the phone did. And guess what? AirPods are an incredibly important and successful product that totally changed their market category almost in the same way that the phone did, simply by popularizing the concept of tiny little wireless earbuds. But when they were announced, everyone was like, uh well, you know, whatever. It's no iPhone, right? And you know, nothing's gonna be the iPhone, but like and same thing with the Apple Watch. It takes take a while to get going, but you'd fast forward a few years and you wake up and you're like, huh. The Apple Watch massively dominates the smartwatch industry that it basically founded on its own by for the first thing to reach volumes. And AirPods are, I think, another one of those, like if AirPods were their own company, I think they'd be in the Fortune 500 as well. Huge success, but it's like, ah, they're boring. And they weren't a hit on day zero. So we get to write the story about how Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs. Right. And and the real and Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs, but Tim Cook is Tim Cook and he he did and does have a lot of strengths that he did bring to this job. The downside is that Tim Cook does not really value and understand some pretty important things that are critical to Apple's products. Number one, he's not a products person at all. He's also not seemingly particularly a fan of computers or computing devices. Like he doesn't hate them, but he doesn't seem to have a passion for them. And he doesn't seem to understand software or design . Okay, what does it mean to lead Apple? Apple is a company that succeeds by making really great products that integrate good hardware, made with good operations, sure, with good software and good design of both hardw are and software interfaces. And Tim Cook doesn't really understand a lot of those elements. He probably didn't fancy himself as somebody understanding those, but also that meant that he made leadership choices that I think didn't maximize the chances of those univers ally and consistently excelling. And we saw that. Tim Cook is really good at numbers and being the bean counter and being the operations person . But he's not that good at products. He relied on other people to do that for him. But because he didn't really have as much of a sense for it as Steve Jobs did. I think it led him to make really inconsistent and misguided choices much of the time in those areas. And I think his self-awareness of that weakness is part of what led him to at least one poor decision, which was the uh bending over backwards to make Johnny Ives stay longer than he wanted to. Which at the time, like again, from Wall Street's perspective and from Tim Koch's perspective, seems like a good idea. Like everyone loves Johnny Ive, he's super famous, he's done awesome stuff. Don't let him leave Apple. But I think it really hurt the company's products. And because he knew it's like, look, I need to delegate these things since I'm not good at them. And who better to delegate to than Johnny Ive, the world's best designer? In fact, I want him, yeah, I need him to stay there because if he leaves, who do I delegate to after? It's a risk. I know this guy's a safe bet, so I'm gonna put him in charge of all design. And that was the wrong decision, and it was made, I feel like, out of trepidation about the idea of finding someone to fill that role. But like if you already if you become CEO and you've already got Johnny Ive, it's kind of like like I don't have to worry about design. I got that covered. I know it's not my strength, but I've got the world's best designer of the things that Apple makes, Johnny Ive, right? But he gets older, he gets restless, he wants to move on to other things. He starts thinking about leaving the company. You're like, no, no, stay. We'll put you in charge of the software too. You can design Apple Park, whatever you want. And there was a real dark period of Apple design there where things were not going great. And Tim was like, Well, I've done my job as CEO, I retained the important talent. And it's like, if he wasn't so afraid of finding a new person to delegate design to that he could be confident would be, you know, do a good job, he wouldn't have uh made Johnny Ive overstay his welcome. It is very important to point out, like in the same way that Wall Street was very afraid to lose Steve Jobs, they were similarly afraid to lose Johnny Ive. Not quite to that level, but it was it was notable. And that and there's another case of where like the mainstream press, the the concerns that we were voicing at the time in the the little Apple Tech nerd's fear about Johnny Ive do not exist. Did not exist in the mainstream press. All they knew is Johnny Ive equals iPod, i Mac, iPhone, uh, if he leaves Apple stock price go down. Like all of our concerns about the product decisions he was making and everything would just did not appear in these articles, despite the fact that maybe they'd have like lower sales on the laptops or something, or maybe there'd be a s you know a story or two about the butterfly keyboard and stuff like that. But it was never it was never in the conversation of like Apple needs to retain Johnny Ive. Of course they do. And you know, this one little corner of Apple's most enthusiastic fans were saying, losing Johnny Ive might not be that bad at this point. But like that was not visible in the in the the larger world, and probably was another easy way for Tim Cook to disregard it because it never came up on his radar that people were upset about decisions Johnny Ive was making about products. Exactly. So we get through, you know, the the Johnny Ive era and and during this era, they almost killed the Mac. They sure tried. And this this is not an exaggeration. Like it it was very clear that the direction that Tim Cook wanted to wanted to go was the iPad is the next era of mainstream computing. The Mac is legacy. Let's phase it out. That was very obviously the path they were on in both hardware and software. The Mac became even more neglected. Uh they went through some terrible the the terrible hardware era of uh twenty sixteen through twenty twenty, uh or twenty nineteen. You know, the th the whole butterfly keyboard era where every map and also removing all the ports from laptops. Right. Removing all the ports, making the the whole touch bar uh thing. That was apparently on Turnus. Hey, whatever. Like it happened on Tim Cook's watch, right? Like and and as a result of the leadership uh structure that he had that he had maintained. It was a bad time for the Mac. You forgot dropping the ball in the Mac Pro. Of course. I mean, yeah, there 's so many. I mean they had to do the Mac roundtable, right? Obviously things were a mess. The software quality took a huge dive during a lot of that span as well. They really had a lot of problems with software quality. These days, they do have some problems remaining in that area, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be. Design quality, that that's you know, that's well obviously that's a more recent uh you know biggest problem, but uh but it's certainly been going this way for a while. Anyway, a lot of problems. And then you start looking at the the industry as a whole as, everything shifts first towards like really big cloud services and really big data services. Like you have the rise of things like obviously Facebook and the social networking whole area there and all the advertising sophistication that they're developing and tracking all this stuff. And I think Apple's behavior around that was largely good in the sense that they did stand up for privacy a lot and they did block a lot of the impact of that from getting too deep into too many of their customers' systems. But there was this huge part of the industry developing that Apple took no part in and wanted nothing uh to do with, except they wanted some of the money. Uh so they then started doing things like App Store ads, they're now doing Apple Maps, as they they like're going in these directions. They want the money, but they don't want to invest to either make these products great for users or particularly sophisticated in terms of like their capabilities like ad targeting. So they just they're just kind of doing these kind of like you, know hal,f-assed cra,ppy versions of those kind of things. And then and the whole services narrative they're pushing during this time and the services growth story relies on somewhat making additive things that make people's lives overall better, but largely either imposing taxes as a gatekeeper and or making the user experience worse to make a bit more money. And that is largely the the revenue growth story. Taking existing product lines and just making them keep going, great, okay. But the impact of the cook era on them is we've maximized the money. It's it's going great and we need to find more. So after we can't raise prices anymore, what we're gonna do is just start adding tack on things. Services, ads, fees , upsells, and then we're gonna just push and push and squeeze and just maximize everything. And that's when the user experience starts taking a nose dive as we were talking about literally last week. What Tim Cook has led is a big expansion of the numbers and generally you know making the ship stable and mature and making it reliable for Wall Street, but at the cost of some of the areas of the products having some pretty weird turns on in the middle there due to a lack of understanding or leadership. And now some pretty big questions about their fundamental values that might be being compromised, that could long-term erode the products. And the same thing is happening with the Apple brand itself, based on Tim Cook's political choices and what he built over this entire time was massively building up China to a to a point now that is geopolitically kind of risky. Uh it is existentially risky for Apple in case anything weird would happen between the US and China. And strategically, that's a pretty large flaw, I think. He did his job, he made the number made the numbers go up, but in such a way that I think was optimized for short-term gain, and ignored a lot of the long-ter m risks and quality and strateg y that will possibly come to bite them later. Then finally , he totally overinvested in bad product decisions, the Vision Pro and the Car , and then totally underinvested in what actually has turned out to be a pretty big deal, AI. And this story isn't over yet. We don't know how this is going to end up. We do know where it has been. We do know that Apple's efforts at AI so far have been nothing. They've resulted in almost nothing. Siri has been just a massive disaster for a very long time. It's been holding back all their products. It has caused significant brand damage. And meanwhile, the industry is taking off in this massive way in this other area that they are just nowhere in. So when you look at this pattern, the numbers guy takes over from the visionary CEO, the numbers all go up, the products kind of zigzag a little bit or a little confused. Mostly just make a bunch of money and mostly you're okay. But then another then, the next big thing is complet ely missed. That's Steve Bomber. That's exactly Steve Bomber. Tim Cook just did a better job of it. Tim Cook was a better bomber. But he's still a bomber. He still has played basically that story arc in the company's history. He grew everything, he kept the ship going, he kept things stable , but didn't have product sense and has left the company in not an amazing place in terms of future product growth because he totally blew it on the next big wave. Microsoft missed mobile. Apple has missed AI. Microsoft did eventually do things in mobile. Apple will eventually do things in AI. But I think it's pretty clear that they're never going to be a leader in it. It's too late. Like they would have had to start a while ago. They would have had to maybe buy one of these companies when it was much smaller. They would have they they would need a very, very different corporate ethos and priority set that I just don't think they have. And so if Apple's ever a leader in AI, um I'd be very, very surprised. In the same way that if Microsoft is ever a leader in mobile, I'd be very, very surprised. Microsoft is still a great company and they still make tons of money and they succeed in other areas, but they did take a pretty big hit in their potential and in the roads they're able to take by basically being nowhere and mobile. That could happen to Apple with AI. Apple could be very restricted in its paths in the future and it could be missing out on a whole bunch of potential because they missed AI. And meanwhile , could that you know billions and billions of dollars to develop the Vision Pro in the car have been better spent in any other way for any of the other products? Maybe making Siri better all this time, maybe maybe getting into AI a little bit earlier. And so even if you set aside the the more recent stuff with Trump, which is abhorrent, and and that I think should tarnish Tim Cook's legacy forever. His general leadership with the company has been fine , predictable, but not visionary, and not particularly effective for a design forward product focused company. He did really well at making money. And Apple has made a lot of money. They made all the money. Good job . But where are the products? The brightest part of the product lineup right now is hardware. The hardware is great . And hey, we got the hardware chief now as CEO. So I think this is very promising. That the Tim Cook era is ending. We now have an end date, and I think I mean, basically it's ending now-ish, like even though officially it's September, but like this transition is gonna happen faster than we realize. You know, we're I think we're not gonna see Tim Cook on stage at WBDC. Like, there's gonna be like you know, I think we're I think we're mostly done seeing Tim Cook doing a lot of public things. Um I think he's gonna he's gonna let Turnus, you know, take over a lot of that stuff immediately to get him get him out there and everything. So I think the Tim Cook era is really effectively over. And the Turnus era is beginning. And we're gonna see what that means. All of these problems could continue. We might have brand new, all s all sorts of brand new problems we didn't even realize that we were taking for granted during the Tim Cook era. But I don't think so. I think Turnus is going to be good. Because he so far his background suggests that he actually has closer to what we want in terms of product sense , you know, love of computing and computers and computing devices. And he's just he is also a younger generation. This will trigger over probably the next five years , most of the Apple leadership that hasn't turned over yet to turn over. Uh and we're gonna get a generational turnover in Apple leadership. And that could take us in some exciting directions too, which we've talked about in the past. So I think there's not this transition is not without risk. Um, you know, there's always risk that something that we love or need will get worse. But I'm hopeful because I think that the things that Tim Cook was hired to do, he basically did, for better and for worse. His job is done, and now it's time to see what's next for Apple . And all of the flaws of the Tim Cook era can be swept in swept behind us and we can move forward as best as we can and try to improve. And and I'm looking forward to what that what that ends up being. So Marco, you're I hear you saying and, don't let me put words in your mouth, but I hear you saying that Cook to a degree had a a an edict, he had a mission, and he has succeeded in that mission, and and I think that that I agree with that wholeheartedly. Do you consider Cook to have been successful by whatever metric you so choose? We agree that on paper, if his m if his goal was to grow the company in leaps and bounds, and he has achieved that, that is already agreed to. Do you think it was successful ? It's not a straight yes or no. I think like if you had to say like overall was he successful, yes . I do think though that there's a lot of asterisks on that. Again. Like I I am very concerned with the strategic importance that he has created in China. I think that is really uncomfortable for a lot of reasons, both for the world and for the country, our country, and for Apple itself, all of those things I I think were made uh were put were left in a worse position today because of Apple's build-up of China. The products, you know, as mentioned, you know, products are are you know hit or miss in in certain ways. But he was he was hired to be the Wall Street calming replacement for Steve Jobs and to take the company into like the bigger, bigger and bigger and bigger direction. And he did that. So he did he did what he was hired to do. I just think he didn't know his own shortcomings enough to put proper leadership in place below him to to cover the things he didn't he wasn't good at. And I think the Tim Cook era probably lasted longer than it should have in general. I would have liked to see the transition happen five years ago. Um but hey I think he knew his shortcomings. He just it's difficult when you we're difficult when you know you have the shortcomings to know the right person to pick. And it's I think the main difficulty is like it's difficult for him to correctly weight the importance of issues in the categories where he's not an expert. So I'm sure he had some vague awareness about all the various things that we've complained about, the like product problems that Apple has had. But he's got so many things that he's juggling having to do with things beyond just the details of the products that when it comes time for him to decide where to concentrate, things really have to be a seven alarm fire before he actually does something about like the the laptop keyboards or something. 'Cause so below his concern for so long. Whereas if your product guy likes jobs or even maybe like turn us will see, um, even though in the grand scheme of things, some some issue, some uh disgruntlement about the some particular of a design of a particular product isn't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. You know, but we're Apple. This is the stuff we're supposed to get right. And suddenly it demands more forceful leadership from you in that area. Not that you're going to fix it yourself or know how to fix it, but that you're going to rank it, you're going to pay more attention to it. And I really do feel like that Tim Cook paid attention to the things that he understood well and it took it was harder for things that he wasn't good at to go up to his level. And I think, again, I think he did know that he wasn't good at those things, but I think it's one of those things where it's like choosing what to spend your time and attention on is itself a an action as a CE O. You may have thought, well, I'm not spending my attention on product design because I don't know anything about that. I've delegated it's fine, but you have to pay attention to that. You have to treat it as seriously as you would treat a supply chain issue or you know some some other thing that you are good at just because you don't have expertise in it doesn't mean that you can just safely ignore it and everyone will take care of it because you're the leader of all of Apple. You do get to delegate to your lieuten ants um and maybe you have difficulty judging whether they're good at their jobs, but in the end it is your job to oversee everything and figure out which part needs attention now. And he just didn't seem to ever give attention to the parts that, you know, that were that were failing because they weren't in his strengths. Um as for your comparison to Ballmer, I continue to think that's not valid. Uh mostly because we'll see here. I mean we'll find out, but like um when Ballmer left the Satina Della transformation of Microsoft was basically to turn it into a different kind of company. It was like uh Balmore was a continuation of the Gates Microsoft. And Nadella said, actually, I have a vision of a different Microsoft that just cares about different things. We're not all about Windows everywhere, we're not about Windows and Office anymore. Now we're a services company. Um, now we're gonna do our things on all platforms. It was just a real, a real transformation of the company to be a different kind of business, sort of like IBM transform from the early days of IBM, the the company that made the PC is not today's IBM. You know what I mean? IBM has transformed itself also into coincidentally into more of a services type company. I don't think the Tim Cook to John Turnus transition will see Apple being transformed in the same way that Microsoft was after Nudella, which makes me say that Tim Cook is not a Steve Ballmark because Turnus doesn't have to transform Apple into a totally different kind of company, right? It would be as if Apple stopped caring about selling integrated hardware and software and just became like a you know a a a business to business services company that so that put its software on all platforms, that's not gonna happen. And I think that shows that Tim Cook didn't screw up Apple as but and also under Tim Cook's leadership, like you kind of uh passed by this quickly, but I don't want to undersell it. Like he overs aw the iPhone product line, not just like, oh, just keep the iPhone going. He didn't just keep the iPhone going. He continued to make sure the iPhone was it was we say this every year. The it's good every year. Almost every single iPhone is really good and gets better. And that's Apple's most important product. And it's one of the things Tim Cook seemed to be able to pay attention to. There weren't a lot of stinker iPhones. And it's not like the iPhone just stayed at the status quo and was afraid to make any changes. The iPhone has developed like we wish all of Apple's product lines would develop. It got a lot of attention. It had a lot of innovation. Things were tried. Mistakes were fixed quickly. Uh the hardware software integration was pretty good. Even the OS 26 is not that bad on the phone, not like on the Mac, right? So I don't think like Ballmer is like, I'll let's just squeeze every last ounce of money out of Windows and Office and not really make them any better. He didn't just squeeze every ounce of money out of the phone. He continued to make the phone better. And he also added a bunch of services and off it. But it's not like he said, Well, the phone, the phone, when I become CEO in 2011, we'll just it's fine. We don't need to really change the phone much after that. We'll just keep having the same selling the same phone like that. I think they have pressed on the phone and Apple Silicon and all that stuff. Like so in the areas where he did pay attention, he did. I I gave him some credit for the product lines that he cared about and paid attention to didn't just stay at the status quo. Uh and the iPhone is the m their most important product. And I think they just continue to knock it out of the park with that product. I mean I care more about the Mac. I like the Mac more , but there's no arguing that they've been resting on their laurels with the phone. They've been a the perfect combination of innovative and careful because you can't be like all the you know the other Android phones that can just try all sorts of stuff like that's why Android has folding phones first. Everyone Android has all the different innovations in the the phones like they they'll try everything right Apple has to be careful but it also means don't just do the same thing forever try new stuff see how it works they made big ones they made small ones they made fat ones they made thin ones, they're gonna make a folding one . Uh, they they got rid of the home button, you know. They're I give Tim Cook credit for that as well. Um, and as for the China stuff, like this is where like values being embodied in decision mak ing is come it becomes difficult because basically, as you know, if you read the Apple in China book, like it's not possible to scale Apple. Uh Tim Cook becomes CEO in 2011. Uh, he wants to scale Apple up and sell more phones. It's very it's basically impossible to do that without doing what he did with China. There's not even a lot of countries that you could have swapped out for China. Like don't do it with China, do it with somebody else. Like what are the other options? It's kind of a situation where it's like if you really want to adhere to your core values, Apple cannot grow this fast. I mean, that's the reality of planet Earth. Was if you just sat down in 2011 and said, So, Tim, you want to make the line go like this, but what if I told you literally the only way to make the line go at that angle is you've got to invest heavily in China and with all the caveats and problems that comes with. Or you could invest uh equally heavily or more heavily in these other places that are you know not authoritarian regimes like china or whatever, right? But now the line can't go up as steep. Which one do you want to do? And he made his choice, which was I'm gonna make the line go up the the steeper one and I'm gonna invest in China . And I think mostly to his credit, he knows the downsides of that maybe better than anyone. He knows the downsides of it. And Apple has been trying to pull out of China. There's been nothing in the notes for ages about Apple's uh the various efforts to pull back from China to the extent possible. I think something like I forget what the stat was, maybe like half of the of a particular model of iPhone was not made in China, but was made in India or something like that. This is a delicate situation to extract themselves from. It is a problem of their own making, but it's not like they're doing nothing. In all their press releases, they'll be like, rah, rah, China, we love you. We're not backing off or whatever. But look at what they're actually doing. They are trying to build more stuff in places other than China. And it's really hard and they're doing it really slowly. And that's why it was a you know, that's why it was a momentous decision and why it is going to be his legacy as he's leaving Turnus with this holding the bag on this or whatever. But I think it's not like he, you know, he was going full throttle all China all the time until the day he left. I think he has already tried to already started turning the ship around years ago. It's just a big ship and it's gonna take a long time. So I don't know. I I it I mean, if you ask me, has he been a success as a CEO, I think it's inarguably yes, even though all the things that I have to complain about, but my complaints have increased as his tenure has gone on, and that merely tells me his time should end and now is ending and, so I'm happy about that. But um I think as a CEO, even though he didn't make every decision the way I wanted him to, he made uh mostly good decisions and has inarguably been successful , and I do continue to think, despite uh various times that uh Marco has uh not been able to uh bring himself to believe this is the case, I do think in his heart of hearts he is a good person who is merely misguided many times, let's say. And maybe it's because I'm an optimistic person and I want to see the best in people. And who can know? Like, I'm just guessing about a person I've never met, you know what I mean? Like it's hard to know. He's so guarded. But it seems to me that he has a good person who thinks he's doing the right thing and is just mistaken sometimes. And that's like all of us. The problem is that his uh mistaken uh assumptions about him doing the right thing have effects that are magnified by four trillion dollar market cap . And that is uh that is, you know, he said he describes it as like what I know to be the best job in the world. It's almost kind of like a curse. Like, would you really want to be in charge of the world's biggest technology company? It's a lot of responsibility, and everything you do wrong is magnified. Uh it's like being, you know, uh control in control of the world's most powerful military if you had a conscience, for example. Um it's a lot of responsibility and I'm not sure it's the best job in the world. The best job in the world seems like uh already having that kind of money and sitting at a beach, maybe, but uh that doesn't seem to be uh the things that Tim Tim Cook wants to do. So here 's hoping that he gets to that beach sooner rather than later and let's turn us uh make decisions out from the shadow of Tim Cook. Oh, and then one final thing, uh long term versus short term. You've frequently said that he's made uh short term decisions, but I feel like the time scales are important here. He's been CEO for what? Um fifteen years or something? Thereabouts. Yeah. Like and like his chickens are coming home to roost on his bad decisions, like in China. And you're calling that he made that decision for short term? It's like, well, short term, I think, is like quarter to quarter or year to year. But if you make a decision that's turn it's gonna turn out to be a big problem in a decade, that's long-term thinking in business, right? So I I he's made mistakes, and I feel like the mistakes have been long-term mistakes, not a short-term mistake. I don't think most of the things he's done have not been with an eye towards I got to hit the numbers for next quarter. Almost all of his decisions, including the bad ones, have been with an eye towards a decade from now. What is this going to be like? So I think that, and you know, you're grading on a curve here, but a lot of CEOs really are in the mindset of like, what do I gotta scrap together for this earnings report? Uh and Tim Cook has mostly been isolated from that simply because he's the uh you know, app he's been so good at leading Apple to continue to be successful that he has never been put into a position where everyone is staring at him and saying, boy Tim, you better hit you better not have another loss this quarter or we're gonna be coming out with the knives. It's just merely been a question of, oh, did you make as many billions this time as you did last time? And even the car thing, like you mentioned, you know, sinking the money into that. Looking at how much money tech companies are putting into AI stuff now, I think like one year or one quarter's worth of the tech industry 's capital investment in AI probably dwarfs all the money Apple ever spent on the car in a decade. Just because it was, you know, speculative and they didn't build anything and they're like, oh, Apple spent $10 billion dollars on the car. It's like people spend ten billion dollars in one quarter on stupid data center crap for a service they haven't even launched yet. So yeah, the car was a miss, but A, I give him props for not shipping it because it would have been bad. Uh and B, in the grand scheme of CapEx, the car, especially Apple's amount of money, the car is nothing compared to the money that that companies are speculatively putting into AI in their panic spending in the hope not to be left behind. And you know, maybe that'll turn out, you know, maybe it'll be egg in Apple's face and we said Apple you should have been panic spending and putting those time of m kinds of uh dollars into AI because it turns out no one uses iPhones anymore and everyone just uses their hovering earphone pod from OpenAI and Johnny I or whatever. But right now that's not the case. So uh, you know, I would also say on the Vision Pro, kind of the jury's still out on how the how the AI thing's gonna turn out and how the Vision Pro thing's gonna turn out. At least Vision Pro shipped and maybe they make money on the hardware that they sell. I'm not even sure that's the case. But uh remains to be seen. I think ultimately there's a lot to complain about with regard to Tim Cook. And some of us, Marco, have done that a little more vocally than others, but um I I I do think there's a lot to complain about. I also think that by any reasonable metric, his tenure at Apple was unbelievably successful. And perhaps I'm just getting, you know, not wispy eyed but you know maybe I'm just looking at things with rose colored glasses because you know it's the end of an era but I look at my computer that I'm using right now which is you know an M3 Max MacBook Pro what's like three years old now, something like that. it And's still incredible. I look at this MacBook Neo that you know just came out and from e everything that anyone has ever said, you know, yeah, it's got flaws, but on the grand scheme of things, it in the grand scheme of things, it's incredible. My iPhone takes phenomenal pictures and keeps me connected with people far, far, far away. You know, one of my dearest friends from high school is now living in Australia and bull FaceTime, not irregularly, and that's just one example of many . Um you know, I I look at the Vision Pro, and yes, we can snark about how it's kind of a failed product so far. We can snark about how it weighs as, you know, uh a whole ton and it's not exceedingly com fortable and you know, I don't have the occasion to put it on very often, but as I've said many, many, many times on the show, every time I put a Vision Pro Vision Pro on and use it, I am reminded that I am strapping the future to my face. And there's so much incredible stuff that Apple has done. I think that their stewardship for privacy, I think them not caving during the San Bernardino situation, which obviously was fraught and you know you could make a very strong argument that Apple did not make the right choice. I think they did. I I think that there are things that we can complain about, but on the whole, the last 15 years, which has been almost the entirety of my time paying attention to Apple. I only started paying attention a couple of years, a few years before Tim took over as CEO. It's been an incredible ride to watch all this and not to be a part of it, but to be a part of it. And to go from you know, my first real introduction to Apple, my first Apple product was in was an iPod Nano , and I adored that thing and actually just found it recently. And it's incredible. Like even even today, it feels incredible in hand. And obviously the dock connector is not great, but you know, by and large, it's still a really cool product. And I look at all these devices and I look at the things that Apple of the last 15 years have afforded people, but especially me, you know, I mean my career, no matter how you look at it, right now anyway, is based on you know is is revolves around Apple. And I think that that's largely true for all three of us at the moment. And that's not all Tim, of course, but it's hard not to get nostalgic. It's hard not to look back on the last 15 years. I mean, hell, this this podcast started in for real in March of 2013. So this is almost the accidental Tim Cook podcast, you know? And um and I can't help but feel like it's been a pretty damn good run. I echo a lot of the complaints that Marco has had . I have echoed them and I echo them now. And I think that I echo, you know, I I echo a lot of the complaints that John has. As much as I give John a hard time about his bl beloved Mac Pro, like it does kind of suck that there isn't a just completely ban anas, absolutely no, you know, no punches pulled computer anymore. But on the whole, I really do look at the last 15 years and say, you know what? That's job pretty well done. And I think that we are all largely, not exclusively, largely better off for it. And I think that he should ride off into the sunset feeling happy and accomplished and proud of what he has done. I do wonder if he'll give do you think he'll give uh he probably won't because he's executive chairman. Like at what point does Tim Cook start giving candid interviews? Ever? Or does he just die? Because like Wow. I don't think I don't think it's in him. Yeah obviously when he's on the board he's not going to give any candid anything. Let's say he retires from I I will he that's the question. Will Tim Cook ever retire from Apple's board? I think he will. And I think the answer to your question when he will get start to get candid . If I were to wager a guest and to s and try to psychoanalyze someone who I met once for about 30 seconds, um I would say that he will start to get more candid when he is of ill health. And I think right before he dies. No, truly, I I really mean it because if you think about it. I don't know if he'll do it then even. I don't think so. I'm not sure he will. I'm not sure he will. And I could I could make a strong argument that he won't. But my guess Art Levinson is like seventy five and he's getting he's not even he's not even leaving. He's just getting booted out of the the the non executive chairmanship and he's gonna be he's still gonna be what is it, the uh the lead independent director. Like our Levinson's not leaving that board until he dies, and I imagine the same will be true of Tim Cook. So I don't think he'll ever give a candid interview about Apple. I think he will, because I think if you're Tim Cook, and again I'm I'm really psychoanalyzing in a way that's borderline inappropriate, but what is his legacy? You know, he doesn't to the best that we all know, he doesn't have any children. He doesn't to the best that we all know have any spouse. Um so Apple is to a large degree his legacy. And I think that if it were me and I was on death's door, and I don't mean that to be flippant, I'm being genuine. Like if I was on death's door, that is when I would want to try to do what I could to establish whatever legacy or properly cement any legacy that I may have had. And I think that if he is to get candid, and I echo what you I echo both of you going, I don't know about that. But if he is to get candid, I think it's basically when time is running out and he just wants to make sure that whatever it is that's important to him, be that reminding everyone about all the good environmental stuff Apple does or all the good privacy stuff Apple does and and you know, washing away all the bad stuff. Uh one way or another, I think that's when he gets candid. I feel like he's just gonna be a company man to the end. Like even if he's totally off the board, he's an ill health he's he's just never gonna say anything bad about Apple, never gonna give you candid stories about what it was like to fight in the trenches. Unlike, for example, like we talked about that recent like what was it, 40th anniversary of the Mac thing or whatever, where you get people from the Mac team telling like stories they've told before, but like very sort of uh candid, dysfunctional inside stories about the creation of the products they worked on because Apple is not their legacy, right? Their legacy in some respects is their participation in this team, warts and all, but they're they're not afraid to first of all, they've been gone from Apple for decades. And second of all, Apple was not their company. So they don't have to continue to say, I just love Apple. It's wonderful. It's been the best thing in my life, blah, blah, and never say anything bad about it. No, they want to tell you the bad stories. They want to tell you the stories about how things were broken and people argued and you know how how their bosses were dummies and they did something clever despite their bosses telling them to you know like they'll do that now while they're alive because it doesn't it's not a threat to their legacy to your point, Casey. Whereas I feel like there is no time when Tim Cook is alive when he will not feel that he has to continue to tow the company line and do say rah-rah apple. Like even something as simple as my you know, regrets about how China was handled. You know, say something disastrous happens, you know, God forbid, but say something disastrous happens with China while he's still alive. And and he's eighty-seven years old and he's on his deathbed and he's being interviewed. He does an interview. Would he say, like, my one regret is maybe I could have China handled China differently? I think he would not say that. On death's door. I think he'd be like, Nope, you're never that's never gonna come out of my mouth. I might feel it, but I'm never gonna say it. So tough luck. But we'll see. Like I mean, it's when people are guarded in private in this way, and when people are so disciplined in their communication, um it's human nature to wish that we could get it the real them. And I guess I think the best we're gonna get for Tim Cook is the increasing number of stories from people who are in the room with Tim, because they that that story is like their currency to like here's my tell all book not the tell book you know like like this it's the only reason we know the the why are you still here story about the guy who had to go fly to China. We don't know that from Tim Cook we know it from the people who were in the room with him. And as those people who were in the room with him, retire, maybe we 'll see them, you know, on the butt 50th anniversary of the iPhone. They're uh they're on stage in a little panel with uh Cyber David Pogue. Um they'll tell their stories about uh when Tim Cook was a jerk in a meeting or, what Tim Cook really thought about something behind the scenes, you know, like and honestly, I'm not even sure how candid he is in that. Like it, you know, how many people hear Tim Cook's real opinion about anything ever like related to Apple? Probably like a hand peoples' people could fit in a small room. Uh and the rest of the people aren't, you know, don't get to hear that. But we'll see. Um I'm for now, I wish he would fade from Apple's day to day even more than he already is, but you know, you take what you can get. Uh, quote unquote retirement to be the executive chairman is better than him staying CEO. All right. Thank you to our sponsors this episode, Squarespace, Claude, and Delete Me. And thanks to our members who support us directly who can join us at ATZFM slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is our weekly bonus topic, ATP over time. Every single episode has bonus content exclusive to members. This week in overtime we're going to be talking about uh media and the limits of human perception. We're going to be talking about audiophile stuff, fancy video stuff. It's going to be a lot of fun. So you can join a listen at atb.fm slash join Thanks everybody. We'll talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental Oh it was accidental Accidental John didn't do any research Marco in Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Accidental Oh it was accidental accident al and you can find the show notes at ATP.fm And if you're into Mastodon you can follow them at C A S E Y Y L I S S So that's K C Lis M A R C O A R M Marco Armin S I R A C U S C user it's accident al accident al They didn't mean to accident al accident al Check podcast so long So for the after show, I need to tell you what I told Merlin in a recent episode, but if don't look at the internet, you may already be spoiled for this and may may make this after show totally moot. But if so, Mark, we can just cut it out and we'll do a different one. All right, this is for you two. No looking at the internet. I'm hoping you didn't see information that was on the internet very recently that would make this not fun. Uh I would like the two of you in the in the style of of uh you two trying to name uh the uh versions and names of uh macOS oh gosh I would like you two to name the CEOs of Apple in order Oh no. In order? Oh god. Now I feel like you're helped a little bit because recently there was the speaking of David Pogue, he had that Apple at fifty book, and I know Casey was reading that. I finished it. That's that's gonna g there you go. It's giving you a lot of information and that's been in the news and maybe Marco's seen it fly by, so but his memory is bad. So you two can collaborate if you want, or you can compete. But there's no way we will do this without collaborating. I can tell you that right now. All right. Well well uh maybe maybe you should listen before you collaborate, you both uh we're gonna do them chronological order. So and we'll do Marco first because he's the least likely to know the answer. Um God. Uh Apple's first CEO. Marco is what is your guess? If you both don't know it, then you can collaborate. Well there was that guy who was CEO for like twelve days right at the beginning. Don't help him, Casey. We don't hear what he says. Oh I have a function names I so I have a couple of names floating right in my head, but I don't think it's right. I know like I think Mar Mike Markle was one of the earlier ones. I think John Browitt was one of those earlier ones. But like oh geez, the very case you want to help out. I think the very first one technically was probably Steve Jobs. That is wrong. Casey you want to help him out? No, it was Ron Wayne, wasn't it? No. You don't have any other card. You just read the book. Yeah, no, was who was the guy, the 12 days guy? Wasn't that Ron Wayne? Uh I don't know what you're talking about, but no, it was not. No, who's the the third one? The the adult in the room with the two of them? It's some name that we don't know. Like we that we've never we never talk about. Actually be before we even do the list, do you know how many CEOs there have been of Apple? Uh like twelve including John Turnus. Oh oh like thirteen or fourteen, something like that. Yeah, I was gonna say the same. Somewhere low, low ten, like you know, low double digits, less than fifteen. I th if if you think there are thirteen or fourteen, I would love to see you trying to name all thirteen, but that's too high. There's not that many. Okay. So the first one was eight, wasn't it? There there have been eight Apple CEOs, including John Turnus. So for number one, you don't have it, Casey? No, it's the uh who's the guy uh he was n't who was the the person who signed the incorporation papers and then bailed out and then bailed out two weeks later, but he was never CEO of Apple. Then I got nothing. Don't look in the chat room either because they're spoiling it for all of you. No, I'm not. Okay. Um uh Marco, uh uh what do you call it? Um The Office. Uh Main character. Michael Scott? That was the first CEO of Apple. Michael Scott, 1977 to 1981. How did I not know that? Also known as Mike Scott. Maybe that's why. All right. Well, that's that's tough one because it's seven nineteen seventy-seven, nineteen eighty one. I don't think either one of you were alive. Although Casey did just read the book about him. Remember, he was brought in as a CEO when they formed the company. Okay. Um, number two, after Mike Scott. Oh, I got nothing on this. That was probably jobs. Nope. Uh, you had to before, Marco. You want to try again? Was it John Browitt? No. No. Marklo' CEO. Mike Markola? Yes. Mike Markle. Don't uh Casey, don't look at the chat room either. I'm not looking at the chat room. All right. Mike Markala, nineteen eighty-one to nineteen eighty-three. The two Mike's Mike Scott and Mike Markula . All right. Number three. He's starting in nineteen eighty three. So we did seventy-seven to eighty one, eighty-one to eighty-three. Now it's nineteen eighty-three. Who becomes C EO of Apple? I think actually so my my thinking now, I think Jobs was never CEO before he was ousted. I I think that's how this happened. Um Casey, you want to help him with this? No, I thought that that was correct. I'm just I'm saying you can collaborate now because you really need you really need each other. Yeah, we do, and I'm useless. So I know at some point we have like, you know, John Scully, Gil Emilio, like we had the series I get was Scully the next one? I think Scully might have been the next one. Yeah, but not not this early though. Because wasn't it who fired Jobs? Yes. Jobs was never fired. My answer was John Scully. What year? What year did you say John? 1983 he's starting. Markle Markle ends in 83. I thought scul but no, I think Marco is right. I think it is Scully. You got it right. John Scully. He was recruited by Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said, Do you want to do you wanna sell sugar water for the rest of your life? Because he was at Pepsi or, do you want to come with me and change the world? He recruited John Scully to become CEO of Apple in nineteen eighty-three. John Scully lasted from nineteen eighty three to nineteen ninety-three. Yeah, long span. He launched the Newton because he thought he was a product visionary, but he was a guy from Pepsi Alright, then was it Gil Emilio? So Scully Scully is as gone in ninety-three. Who comes in in nineteen ninety-three? Jobs is obviously not here anymore because Jobs departed Apple during the Scully era in nineteen eighty-five, I believe. So Scully is there for nineteen eighty-three, eighty-five Jobs leaves, and then it's just the John Scully show from eighty-five to nineteen ninety-three. Yeah, but I thought there was somebody before. Maybe that maybe was there Mike Markle of then . We already did Mike Markle. Oh, was that John Brown? Mike Markle. Brown is the guy who ran the Apple store retail for like six months. Oh, that's right. That was for like a hot second. That is a that is very not in the papermaster. I don't know why that name was stuck in your head, but I just want to save you from saying brow at the end. It sounded like a CEO name. All right. After John Scully, who takes over. No, but there was someone bef between him and Emilio. I could have sworn, but I can't place who it was. Because Marco's right. I think Marco had said it was Emilio. I'll give you a hint. Uh this CEO famously hid under his desk at various points because things were going really badly. And he was of poor physical health. God, I can't remember his name now, but I know who you're thinking of. I don't know. I I couldn't pull a name out of a hat, but I know who you're thinking of. Yeah, I've heard that name before, but I don't know anything about it. This is this is like the the period where Casey and I are not paying attention at all. Right. Hiding under his desk is the note card on Michael Spindler, not uh profiles encourage. It doesn't seem like that would be a Tim Cook thing to do. No, Tim Cook is never hiding under his desk, I can tell you that. I don't think Tim Tim Cook has Tim Cook ever sat down? Yeah, exactly. He's always on the move like a shark. Yeah. All right. That's all right. So this ends in nineteen ninety six. In nineteen ninety six, who takes Ober as the fifth CEO of Apple? That must be a Gil Emilio finally. Well hold on, wait, wait, wait. No, hold on though, because if that's number five, one, two, three, four, four. Because jobs is back by like ninety seven or ninety eight, right? Yeah, the g Spindler is leaving in ninety six One, two, three, four, four. Who takes over from Spindler in ninety six? Oh no, no, you've got it. You've got it. I just need to do the math. Right? Gil Emilio. Uh yeah, who famously uh compared the Macintosh to the MagLite, which was the only other hardware electronic product he could think of that was high qual ity. He's like the Mac is kind of like the MagLite, because that was the time when you know Maglights were popular and it was like it's like a flashlight, but like a really good, really expensive flashlight. So the Mac is like the Mag Lite. Oh, sorry, Gil. Yeah. They really had a moment there with the Maglites, but then like LEDs happened and really killed them. This is way before LEDs. This isn't 1996. So Maglites were incredibly popular. Look it up, kids. It was it was a whole thing. Anyway, uh, he lasted from 1996 to 1997. The most important decision he ever made, obviously, was to buy next and get Steve Jobs back. Who was the sixth CEO of Apple? Steve Jobs. That's right. The first time he was ever CEO of Apple, he was not CEO of Apple of any at any other time. He was the co-founder, but they brought on CEOs to because they were kids and they brought on adults who understood business to be CEOs. And one of those people was recruited by Jobs himself. And that was the one who essentially uh defeated him in the politics in the boardroom politics of the day, resulting in Jobs leaving. But when he came back, he was I CEO and, then regular CEO, Steve Jobs, 1997 to 2011. He did not leave. He was not kicked out. He died. It was sad. Number seven. And Tim Cook. There you go. And number eight. And then John Turnus. John Turnus twenty twenty six two question mark. We I I feel like we did okay. Yeah, my apologies to uh John Syracuse, Jason Snell, and John Gruber. I mean I, I don't this is don't expect people who weren't into Apple to know these things. I just I felt like Casey could have knocked it out because he just read a book on Apple history that talked about all of these people. Yes, but I've read other things since then. And then just push that out of your brain. Casey has a small context window. He's waiting for the upgrade. Also, wasn't that book like six hundred pages long? Like it was. Even by the by the time you're at the end of the book, you've forgotten the beginning. Also true. It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Uh no, it was an incredible book though, despite the fact that I remember ed nothing of it because I'm an idiot and I have no memory. Uh no, it really was worth your time and and I think I might have said this already on the show, but it just in case, you should find it in like a local library, which is how I did, or buy it or whatever. Uh or if you're reading it on a Kindle like device, make sure it's one with color because they are incredible photographs in this book. It's uh really, really, really uh worth your time. You know, w they didn't sponsor anything like that. It's just genuinely a really, really good book. And you should have to I just started reading that one, but like it I from what I've gathered from other people looking at, there's not much in there that I haven't read in the seven thousand other books I've read about Apple. My go-to recommendation for the years that are covered in this book is uh Infinite Loop by Michael S. Malone. It obviously ends at the date of publication and doesn't have any of the stuff after that. I think it ends like like j like I think they added like a little chapter at the end about like Steve Jobs coming back or some crap, but like it's basically like Mike Scott, Mike Markola, John Scully, Michael Spindler, Gil Emilio, bookends, more or less, you know, and then a Steve Jobs addendum, right? So it's it's it's like early Apple, like up to the mid to late 90s, but boy does a really good job of covering all that stuff and really making these people into characters that are memorable. Um the fifth the David Pog's fiftieth book obviously covers a much larger time span and has uh rehashes of many of the similar stories, but probably can't spend as much time, even at 600 pages or whatever, can't spend as much time as a book that was written in the 90s can spend on the shorter time span that it has to cover. So yeah, just uh Jason put a bunch of uh bo ok recommendations for Apple History, I think, on Six Colors recently. And I think he also did uh some recommendations in his Wall Street Journal article. So maybe we should link to those in the show notes. But my personal rec for, I guess what is now early Apple history is Infinite Loop by I think his name is Michael S. Malone. We'll put a link in the show notes. But um but yeah, for if you want a more comprehensive one, the pog one is apparently good too. I like I said I've just started it. Yeah, it's very good. I also wanted to call out uh what is it? Is it Revolution in the Valley? Is that the um Hertzbelled one? Yeah. I mean, just go to folklore.org, because Revolution in the Valley is the Valley is the paper version of a subset of folklore.org. If you wanna know specifically about stories from the creation of the Macintosh, which is one of my favorite periods in Happel's history and projects. Folklore.org is a website written by Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the original Mac team, and he gets testimonials from I mean, in the modern era, they would call it an oral history of the early Mac or whatever, but really what it is is a bunch of blog posts written by original uh Mac team members, including Hertzweld himself. And there is a paper version of that called Revolution in the Valley that I think has most of the articles on the website, but maybe not all of them, but definitely check out folklore.org if you're interested in that. Well , we did it, Marco. I I feel okay with this. We did better than the the Mac names, but I guess it's because there's fewer of them, although thinking if it was thirteen or fourteen CEOs, I'm like who are all these other people? It's not been a lot. Mike Scott, Mike Markola, John Scully, Michael Spindler, Gil Emilio, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, John Turnis. There's only two Johns in there: Scully and Turnus.