Here’s to a Simpler, Better Apple ⭐

The bland Tim Cook era is finally over at Apple, allowing the company to think differently again. By which I mean, think more like Steve Jobs and simplify Apple’s product offerings to focus on technical excellence and customers, not just profits. I can’t wait.

I know what you’re thinking. But … the profits. My God, the profits.

Please.

💰 It was never about money

Steve Jobs explicitly denounced financial results as the point of what Apple did, noting that reasonable profits and revenues would come simply by making the best possible products. Under Jobs, Apple cherry-picked the markets it entered, and Jobs’s Apple was respected for reinventing existing product categories—MP3 players, smartphones, and tablets—than it was for innovating new product categories. Under Cook, Apple has spread itself wide by not deep, by filling every imaginable hole in its product lineup and stuffing it full of overlapping offerings, incompatibilities (Lightning/USB-C, Apple Pencil), and other complexities.

We all know, because Apple still promotes this so aggressively, that Cook was told by Jobs to not make decisions based on what he thought Jobs would do. At first, this felt ludicrous because trying to think like Jobs was so unavoidable, for Cook, everyone around him, and everyone outside the company too. But in time, it became clear that Cook took this advice perhaps too literally. Today, Apple has even more complex family of products and services than it did when Jobs returned in the late 1990s. And while today’s Apple doesn’t have the same financial problems of that day, that, too, is a problem. All the money pouring in can mask or even atone for the complexity. You don’t typically notice that you’re too big and top heavy until it becomes a problem.

And it is a problem. Not for Apple per se, not yet. But for Apple’s customers. And that’s who we—and Apple—should be focused on here. Not numbers, not the spreadsheet that Tim Cook lives in every single day. His skills, like those of Steve Ballmer or perhaps Amy Hood, are in accounting. He’s not technical and he’s not a product guy, and he never really got there over 15 years.

Consider the following graphs. They are similar enough to be almost identical.

First, we have Apple’s market capitalization, a measure of the company’s worth, between 1996 and today. The vertical line you see in late 2011 is roughly when Tim Cook took over as CEO. Apple went from roughly $356 billion in value at that time to just under $4 billion today.

Next up is Microsoft’s market cap during the same period. Satya Nadella became CEO in early 2014, when the company was worth just under $320 billion, and it’s worth roughly $3.2 billion today; it dabbled around the $4 trillion mark in late 2025.

I find it both fascinating and disturbing that technology enthusiasts would celebrate Apple’s wealth because they feel that this is somehow the true worth of the company. Especially when many of these same people will criticize Microsoft for whatever sins—Windows 11, Copilot, you name it—and ignore its almost identical wealth. Both companies are fantastically successful. But both companies achieved that success by harming their own customers through enshittification, and both companies are, in fact, just as terrible as the other.

But yeah, the money. I get it. What I care about are the company, its products, and how both impact the human beings that use them. And one of the issues I have with Apple is the hypocritical, hubris-laden way it markets how pious and wonderful it is while behaving in ways that are both illegal and immoral. That is the overarching problem I would like to see Apple fix.

Don’t just talk. Be better.

☑️ Be simpler

The first thing John Ternus should do is the first thing that Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple: Simplify the product lineups. Apple has several top-level product families—iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro, and Accessories, plus Services—and each is in its own quirky far too complex and incoherent.

A few examples.

Apple started with a single iPhone model, expanded to two, and now we have four major models—iPhone, iPhone Pro, iPhone Air, and iPhone e—and there’s a fifth, the iPhone foldable, coming later this year. But there’s really more, right? The iPhone Pro comes in Max and non-Max versions, most obviously, and Apple still sells previous-generation iPhones like the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. Oof.

The iPad is just as convoluted, with a base iPad, an iPad mini, two iPad Air models, and two iPad Pro models. There are iPads with Touch ID and iPad Pros with Face ID. There are three Apple Pencil models that work with different iPad models. Different Magic Keyboards if you want such a thing, each with different capabilities. Different screen types. Etc.

I could go on, but it’s obvious that the Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods all suffer from the same issues. Too many models, too much overlap, weird pricing gaps, expensive purchase-time upgrades, and whatever else. If an Apple product is in any way successful, the company goes nuts padding out that product family. If it’s not, as with Vision Pro and HomePod, we get radio silence. Apple puts out the thing and then pretends it doesn’t exist anymore. Years go by.

Simplifying product lineups like these could take many forms. I have some thoughts about that across the board, I’m sure many do. But the simplest way to state this is that there should be a clear path from the lowest-end model in a product family to the highest with clear differentiation between each and a smooth pricing curve. For example, if you look at the iPhone 17e and base iPhone 17, the added cost of that latter iPhone should be justified by the additional features you get by upgrading; a maxed-out iPhone 17e would cost more than a base iPhone 17, but it would still lack whatever features.

Another way to express this is through the elimination of unnecessary overlap. The iPhone 17e should disappear, replaced by a base iPhone 17 in the same price range. The MacBook Neo or Air should disappear, replaced by a single line that scales across the existing price points. The iPad Air is pointless and the base iPad should just scale up in price and capabilities towards the iPad Pro. And so on. And this isn’t just about the products themselves, but also about all the incompatible accessories for each. It’s too much.

Some will see contradiction here: I just said that Apple’s product lineups are too complex and now I’m adding things. But there is a big difference between configuring a product with options and having multiple products and brands and all the incompatible accessories. I know we can never go back to that simple four product grid that Steve Jobs discussed soon after his return to Apple 25 years ago. But Apple can and should cut back on the fluff, as Jobs did then to the innumerable models of Mac Performas and other products Apple was then selling. Apple could still meet all the customer needs it meets today by having fewer models. And it would be less confusing and better for those customers.

💩 Be less terrible

Under Tim Cook, Apple has refused to crack open iPhones used by terrorists. It has aggressively defended its onerous App Store fees worldwide while ignoring that this fee structure was always arbitrary and has nothing to do with its actual costs or the value of the services it provides. And it has cozied up to totalitarian regimes like China and wannabes like the current idiot running the U.S., giving him golden participation trophies he gleefully accepts like the simpleton he is.

Apple needs to do better. It needs to be better.

It is an irony of Epic (ahem) proportions that if Apple had just pursued less unreasonable app fee profits then none of the legal drama of the past several years would have ever occurred. All it had to do, what it could still do right now, is just charge 4 to 5 times the fees of a Mastercard or Visa, say 12 to 15 percent, and its App Store-related antitrust issues would have never happened. Even though fees of that level are just as unjustifiable.

But that’s not what Apple did. Instead, it fought tooth and nail in every jurisdiction that came after it. When it lost, as it only did partially against Epic Games in the U.S., it then engaged in a strategy we call malicious compliance, which one might more accurately describe as non-compliance. It disadvantaged and blocked those that dared compete with its own products and services. And it did these things for one reason and one reason only: To push back the inevitable date at which its onerous fees will inevitably decline.

It is unreasonable to believe that Apple’s steep upward climb financially will continue under John Ternus. But it wasn’t going to continue under Cook, either. Jobs’s incredible run of back-to-back hits with the iPod and iPhone was unprecedented in corporate history, and even had he lived, that would have come to a close regardless. The iPad was already not as successful as its predecessor, and that decline was always going to continue.

If you extrapolate that situation to today with Ternus and money, he could simply ride out the inevitable and—wait for it—just do the right thing. Not the right thing financially, the literally right thing. Stop exploiting customers and developer partners. Stop overcharging for nothing. Stop taking moral stands so extreme that Apple respects the rights of a terrorist more than those of his victims. Stop handing China all the technical wizardry that it needs to defeat the United States. You know, the obvious low-hanging fruit on this tree of terrible behavior.

💥 Be more human

When Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft, fans of the company were happy to see an engineer running the company again. But Apple never had an engineer CEO, as it turns out, not really. In fact, its history is defined by marketers, which actually makes sense. But the hope for Ternus is that he is more of a product guy than Cook. If so, he will be closer in some ways to Steve Jobs, who was also not an engineer.

It’s impossible to say today where he will land, however. The next few months, but really the next few years, will tell that tale. Which products he introduces but also, as noted above, which he scales back or even gives up on. One thing that was missing from this week’s transition announcement and the related internal and external memos was any hint that Cook and Ternus had been working together in any way on strategy. That is, as I write this, Cook is still very much in control, from what we know now. When that will change is unclear. As is what direction Ternus will take.

Here’s what’s quite clear: The Tim Cook legacy is complex. There’s the financial success, which I feel is his true legacy. And then a string of minor hits and some notable misses. He failed utterly at AI, and while Apple’s history rewriters will be quick to position that as a win, the important point here is that this failure highlights the structural weakness of Apple’s hierarchy under Cook and how its “not invented here” mentality finally bit it right on the ass. Strategies are always like that. They work great until they don’t. This is a culture problem.

In some ways it’s not fair to point out that no one has ever eagerly gobbled up videos of Tim Cook announcing any Apple product or service, as we still do with Jobs, because Tim Cook is so wooden and boring. But he is and was the leader of this company and it was his decision to be the face of its product announcements. I’m not a big fan of Satya Nadella but he, too, is a middling to terrible public speaker and one of his best decisions was to step back and let others present at major events.

Yes, a diverse range of Apple executives have appeared at recent product events. But these things were all pre-recorded with Hollywood-style effects. Perhaps a more human Apple could emerge with Ternus, a person who is well-spoken and would be well-served by bringing back live events. Apple’s executive suite is a bunch of aging billionaires who don’t represent or understand the customer base in any meaningful way. It’s time for a different way of doing things. Even Microsoft mostly gets that. I mean, come on. No one is holding up Microsoft as the way to do anything these days. But there it is.

🍀 Best of luck

To be clear, I want John Ternus to succeed. I just want that success to be on behalf of Apple’s customers, not on behalf of Wall Street, and feel that doing so is what will make Apple truly great. I want a simpler, more human Apple that actually behaves as well as it promotes itself, something I feel would be the ultimate expression of thinking differently in the post-Tim Cook years. It’s something that everyone should want, even Apple’s biggest fans.

So good luck, Mr. Ternus.