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...