> The M-series chips are probably the biggest win for Apple in the past 15 years.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.
Your point reads as pro Cook to me. We got hardware that decreased obsolescence.
If anything I’d be pissed if Cook was out and the new CEO’s strategy involved making chips that needed upgrades every other year again. Or if they were like, “Macs don’t sell well, let’s cancel the product line.”
I don't necessarily see any reason to attribute this specific outcome to Cook, though. But from a stockholder perspective this is a bit mixed.
Of course Macs are still very profitable compared to what PC makers are making. Now they share a lot of the hardware and software stack with iPad/iPhone. So it shouldn't be too costly to maintain. And well Apple's entire ecosystem is built on them anyway. It's not like anyone besides masochists would consider actually developing apps on iPads...
Yeah, I suppose there was a point he had to sign off on the decision so there is that. Hard to say if his role amounted to anything more than that (maybe it did).
> judged by outcomes
In a general it depends? Of course in Apple's case its not that ambiguous. But then you have companies like Intel where it seems kind of hard to pinpoint the specific individuals responsible for its demise. e.g. Gelsinger presided over what was probably the company's darkest period (remains to be seen of course) and the situation was reasonably stable when he took over. Is he the one to blame for all of it?
Brian Krzanich was the primary architect of Intel's demise. A huge amount of Intel's problems stem from opting to go with DUV rather than EUV light source for lithography, and this decision was made during Krzanich's tenure. This may have stemmed from Krzanich's lack of technical expertise. Gelsinger was brought in to fix things, but the board of directors got uncomfortable with the amount of money required to fix the problem.
It's not really ambiguous at all. Tim Cook for all his faults did not torpedo the cash cow that is called Apple. For almost half a decade the market cap of AirPods alone exceeded Tesla.
In a way yes. But from a business perspective there was a significant spike in Mac sales in 2021-2022. It has mostly levelled off and not that massively above what it was back in the Intel days. They probably also inadvertently increased the upgrade cycle too since there is no longer that much point to upgrade more frequently than every 4-5 years for most people.
As proportion of Apple's total revenue Mac is actually lower than what it was back in 2015. Even lower than iPad revenue last quarter (which peaked ~2012 for that matter).
And well.. as great as the M series is they are pretty much just a scaled up A series chips. IIRC my iPhone was already technically faster than my i7 Macbook back in ~2018.