It seems impossible that Tim Cook’s legacy as Apple’s spectacularly successful CEO could be in jeopardy. But in recent months, and especially in recent days, the impossible has become at least conceivable.
The latest tremors came when Apple announced chief operating officer Jeff Williams would retire by yearend after 27 years. Just a day before, the company’s top AI executive, Ruoming Pang, had left to join Meta, and weeks earlier, another high-level AI researcher, Tom Gunter, had also left. The image of a leadership exodus was forming.
More broadly, Apple stock is down 7.2% over the past year, while the S&P is up 6.5% and the Nasdaq is up 12.9%.
Those events brought some of Apple’s most worrisome weaknesses into the forefront. Above all: an apparent serious lag behind competitors incorporating AI into products and services. Last year, with Hollywood fanfare, the company introduced Apple Intelligence, a version of AI that only Apple, creator of the world’s most user-friendly products and services, could possibly create. But it isn’t working out that way. Playing down Apple Intelligence so far, the company has a partnership with OpenAI for some chores performed by Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, and it has reportedly considered a partnership with Anthropic and partnering with or buying Perplexity AI.
For a company of Apple’s scale and stature, lagging behind its major competitors on AI is like lagging behind the competition on the internet in 2000. AI is a general-purpose technology, and those things don’t come along very often. The internet was one. So were digital computing and electricity. They change the world, and they revolutionize the business landscape for every company.
With that in mind, it becomes clear how Tim Cook could be one of the all-time greatest CEOs from 2011 to now yet might not be optimal for the AI era.
As background, remember just how staggeringly successful Apple has been under Cook. When Steve Jobs made him CEO, the company was worth about $300 billion. Now it’s worth $3.2 trillion—a remarkable compound annual growth rate of 18.4% over 14 years. Few people realize that Cook has created far more shareholder wealth than Jobs did.
But now look closer. Craig Moffett, a founder of the MoffettNathanson research firm, is one of the extremely few Wall Street analysts who have a Sell recommendation on Apple stock. He is also a Cook admirer. “By any normal metrics he has had a wildly, wildly successful tenure,” Moffett says. But then he examines how that success has been achieved. “They haven’t produced a major new product outside of possibly the earbuds in a decade,” he says. “Apple has done far more to innovate process than it has product over Tim Cook’s tenure.”
No one can deny Cook’s record, Moffett says, “but to be fair, it has been by exquisitely executing strategies and manufacturing products that were set in motion years before.”
The issue of product innovation becomes especially important now because it isn’t yet clear which products will be right for the AI revolution. Jony Ive, Apple’s longtime design genius, left the company in 2019 and is now working with OpenAI; rampant speculation has him creating a new device for AI, maybe a pendant or a pen. If any such projects are underway at Apple, they are deeply hidden.
Among known products, Apple’s Vision Pro goggles are a high-end niche item, and its HomePod and HomePod mini smart speakers have been modest successes. But if smartphones aren’t at the center of life in the AI world, Apple could be hurting. “There is this nagging question among investors,” Moffett says, “which is increasingly causing disquiet that Apple is unprepared for something that transformational.”
Cook could still surprise us. After all, Apple is famously secretive. Maybe it will suddenly reveal a stunning new device or service. Maybe it will buy a major AI company or partner with one, changing the whole competitive landscape. If that happens and succeeds, Cook could cement a position as one of the all-time great CEOs. But if none of those events happen sometime soon—they seem unlikely—then the Apple board of directors must remember that no CEO is right for all seasons, and the advent of AI heralds a new season fundamentally different from the past 14 years.