Apple CEO Tim Cook's Legacy Is Dull Products And Spineless Capitulation

15 years after being tasked to replace Steve Jobs, Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down this week, presumably to be replaced with younger white men similarly incapable of standing up to fascism despite no limit of "fuck you money" (Apple has a $4.665 trillion market cap and $62.5 billion cash on hand).

While Apple certainly made boatloads of money during Cook's tenure, the company also steadily morphed into something unthinkable to company founders Jobs and Steve Wozniak: it became not just increasingly unethical, but profoundly and painfully boring.

Under Woz and Jobs (ignoring that the latter was a gargantuan asshole), Apple revolutionized computing then endlessly reinvented elegant design.

Under Cook, Apple routinely produced droll and meaningless hardware iterations tethered to increasingly janky software, peppered with giant pointless failures like the $4000+ Apple Vision Pro VR headset (I still think it was funny that the headset didn't work with glasses, requiring $400 more for prescription inserts).

Because Cook managed to historically hyperscale Apple's derivative hardware iterations, (leveraging no limit of dirt cheap overseas labor through tight collaboration with violent authoritarian governments) the tech press spent a good chunk of last week insisting that Cook's inanity was a good thing:

I mean yes, if you exclusively look at the fact that Apple made gobs of cash selling derivative cack at impossible scale to the thunderous applause of greedy assholes (and grown men who have so tightly soldered a tech brand to their ego they're incapable of seeing reason), Tim Cook was a smashing success.

Our dull corporate press is unsurprisingly obsessed with wealth. If you make large gobs of money you are inherently very smart, skilled, and good. Absolutely everything else is a pesky afterthought. It's why Elon Musk, an unremarkable bigot cosplaying as a supergenius engineer, so easily enamoured a shaky U.S. media for the fifteen year run up to his recreational ketamine-fueled nazi ego implosion.

Speaking with the similarly hollowed-out CBS News, the outgoing Apple CEO conceded his legacy is up for others to define, though he said he hoped people would generally remember him as a "good and decent man":

Are you a good and decent man if you buckle to the censorship, labor, and domestic surveillance demands of the Uyghur-murdering Chinese government? Is that just good business? There's simply nothing you can do about that sort of thing, right? Ethics would be harmful to quarterly returns.

It's clear that it's important to Cook that he's viewed as a good and kind man, as reflected by his use of a Martin Luther King quote in his bio over at Elon Musk's right wing propaganda website:

What did Tim do for others?

Well, who could forget the time Cook, a gay man, enthusiastically presented a shiny gold bauble to the fascist American president, helping to sanewash and normalize the harmful policies of a virulent bigot, whose embarrassing crony capitalism has injected untold chaos (and price hikes) into the U.S. tech sector.

Or the time Cook happily attended the premiere of overt right wing party propaganda, slathering unearned praise on the president's wife, just hours after Alex Pretti was murdered in the street by a masked taxpayer-funded gestapo.

This kind of stuff was, unsurprisingly, either downplayed or ignored during last week's tech media goodbye party.

Apple has bottomless resources when it comes to lobbying government. There was simply no coherent reason for Cook's feckless subservience to Trumpism. They could, were they interested, cleverly and more subtly lobby the fascist government while maintaining a veneer of ethical responsibility.

This level of gushing enthusiasm for the fascist project was an active choice, unnecessary for the continued survival of the company, but perfectly representative of the broad, systemic ethical failure across every level of modern American executive "leadership."

It's worth noting that Cook isn't fully retiring, he'll be shifting over to an Apple executive chairman role, where he will "assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."

Not long ago Cook gave a soggy-ass interview with Esquire on the eve of Apple's 50th anniversary, where he provided a paper-thin defense of his very clear support and normalization of global authoritarians:

Tim Cook: I think you have to have values that are consistent and that you don’t change those with the wind or with the changes in other people. But I think you should interact and engage with everyone. I’ve interacted with both political parties in the U.S. and the people in the middle. I’ve interacted with governments all around the world, some that I have very different views on. But I think until you engage, you never know—you never understand—where somebody else is coming from. And you have no influence at all.

This idea that you need to "engage with" or "have dialogue" with fascism or racism is normalizing gibberish, designed to make Cook's consistent appeasement of global authoritarians seem heady and well-rounded. It's the kind of thing vacuous, unethical MBA types tell themselves to quiet ethical pangs and justify the unrelenting personal prioritization of increasingly-larger boats.

I grew up absolutely in love with Apple Computer. My mom, a school social worker, would bring home Apple IIc and IIe computers during the summer, before we finally could afford an Apple IIgs. I was genuinely inspired by the Steve Wozniak era of Apple. Those early computers changed my life.

Apple's modern soullessness is a sad mockery. And the fact that untold millions of Americans can't tell any difference between these starkly different companies says nothing good about America's pathological obsession with artifice.

There will be some quick tells as to whether incoming new Apple CEO John Ternus is more of the same, including seeing whether or not Apple follows Google's lead and buckles to our mad king's obsession with trying to rename large bodies of water to feed his gargantuan ego.

It should go without saying but if America genuinely adored innovation, we'd rekindle union power, enforce antitrust laws, provide endless financial and tactical advantage to small business innovators, and dismantle corruption. We would not, as it turns out, worship false idols and the abject hollowness of feckless men.