Tim Cook Steps Down — With Joanna Stern

Hey, everyone. Well, big breaking news. We're here with Joanna Stern of The New Things and the author of I'm Not a Robot. And I'm going to break this news to her right here on camera. Joanna, Tim Cook has stepped down as the CEO of Apple. And John Turnus is going to replace him as of September 1st. Wow. So, Joanna had no idea this happened as we were recording an episode. That episode will come on Big Technology Podcast pretty soon. But we're just going to get this out here now. And this will be a bit of an emergency show. So, we have 15 minutes. What do you think about the significance of the news? Wow, wow, wow. I'm, like, scared to go look at my phone right now. Not, I mean, shocking in terms of timing. Not shocking in terms of the choice and that it's happening. I think we just kind of thought this was going to be pushed down the road a little bit. What do you think? The timing, I thought, was going to happen this year. Yeah. It obviously puts Apple into this sort of uncharted territory. You could have seen Tim Cook as an extension of Steve Jobs. Turnus is pretty young. So, it's definitely going to be a brand new era for Apple. And I also am curious what you think about this. He's the senior vice president of hardware engineering. In an age where AI is going to really factor a lot, I'm curious if someone running hardware engineering is the right choice for Apple. What do you think? I mean, it will be very interesting to see how a company that has recently become an operations, not recently, since Cook took over, is really an operations company, right? That's how he steered the company post-Jobs. And he left all of the other hardware and the software stuff to his deputies, right? He put great people into those positions, sometimes not as great people as we've seen a lot of turnover. And now it kind of flips back. It goes back to someone who's very interested in the hardware, the design, the actual products. Which, you know, can only, I think, be great for Apple as the company that makes the best tech out there. The question becoming, though, you know, what Cook did on services, what he did on the supply chain, what he did in all of these other things is the really big question. Here's a letter, a community letter, from Tim. For the past 15 years, I've started about every morning the same way. I opened my email and read notes I received the day before from Apple's users all over the world. You shared little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you, about the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch, about the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. You thanked me for the ways Mac has changed, what you can do at work, and sometimes give me a hard time because something you care about isn't working like it should. I mean, I think that, like, that beginning of this is obviously his resignation note. That beginning of the note really, it sort of captures what Cook has been so good about. Right. Good at. And what's sort of been surprising about his ability post-Jobs is that he carried the Apple narrative, right? I think that, you know, someone coming from operations, moving, you know, taking over leadership from someone like Jobs who was all about the story, the real unclear thing at the beginning of Cook's tenure was just like, can this guy keep the story going? And he did. He did. He really did. And that's sort of, I mean, we'll see if Turnus is able to keep it through, keep that going. But I think that's just something we should talk about with Cook. It's going to be one of his biggest legacies is he kept Apple, whether it was through his showdown with the FBI around privacy, the navigating the tough political waters that a company like Apple does, for better or worse, right? Because certainly there's criticism of how much he over-indexed on China and, you know, many about the gold bar in the Oval Office. But he kept the story. That's tough. And that'll be the challenge, I think, moving forward. And look, he was great. Look at the products that came post-Tim. I mean, post-Jobs. I mean, there's, we just, we talked about AirPods. We talk about Apple Watch. We talk about, I mean, I don't think enough credit goes to the investment in silicon and, you know, whatever M-chip you have in your laptop right now was a massive shift. I mean, it's like what they're now able to do in laptops and computing because they own that full stack. That's a Cook thing. That was a Cook move and, like, truly changed the computing industry, but also was, like, fundamentally changed how that vertical integration has had to happen for other computer companies. Yeah. Well, I'll keep reading if that's all right. Yes, please do. It says, over the coming months, I will be transitioning into my new role. He's taking the next step of his journey at Apple, leaving my CEO job behind in September and becoming Apple's executive chairman. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world. That leader is John Turnus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who I've spent the past 25 years building the Apple products that users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, more meaningful. He's the perfect person for this job. Can I, let me just share a piece of criticism of Tim Cook's Apple, and I'm curious if the lesson has been learned. And that is that, like, they have been so obsessed with every detail, focused on everything, every possible way to make something better, right? The thinning it down, a little bit more battery life. And the criticism has been that by doing that, by making the iPhone thinner and last a little longer, they've missed, like, what the next trend will be. They took a half-hearted swing at the metaverse with Vision Pro. That didn't work out. And their AI story has obviously been bumpy. Any merit to that? I think merit to that, but you watch the markets. Every couple years, sell more iPhones than they've sold in years past. This strategy worked. This was, whether we want to, I think there's always the question of who is Apple for? Or who are these Apple, what does Apple do? It's really, who is their tech for, right? And their decisions for? Is it for the consumers who want to use this stuff? Or is it for Wall Street so we can always have another product and another product and another product? Look, I think you can find two people that say the same, you can find people that say both, right? Like, they came out with some great products in the last number of years. Talk about the M chips. Like, again, Macs are the best laptops you can use. And yes, it helped sell more laptops. It helped, you know, Apple make more money on that part of the business. Same goes for iPhones. Every, you know, every year we get a new iPhone. Do we need a new iPhone every year? No, but for some people, they get a better phone and Wall Street gets another upgrade cycle. So you look at both of these things. And Cook, I think, fell in the middle somewhere, right? Like, far more than Jobs was, you know, leaning probably towards ever thinking about Wall Street and thinking about the earnings and all of that. But also, he's kept up with some really great products. Yeah, it's in the market reaction and we'll have to see. We'll publish this Tuesday. We're recording Monday just as the news breaks. The after hours trading is pretty interesting. What is it? The stock dropped down, bounced right back up and then back down again. So right now, as we talk, it's just down $2.25. So down less than a percent. Yeah, I think, look, I think people were primed for this. I think I'm shocked at the timing. I thought they'd wait till after September. But given that we know there's so many products in the pipeline around September, I guess it's not super shocking. I mean, look, Turnus has been doing media tours. He's been out there. Have you ever met him? I haven't. I mean, have you met him? Yeah, yeah. Talk a little bit about this guy then. Look, he's very thoughtful. He clearly loves talking about hardware and talking about the products. You know, whether it's the Neo or an iPhone, he's very invested in the details around the products. But also, I think, has a marketing bent to him, similar to, you know, any Apple executive who's clearly focused on just talking about what users, what the customer gets and how good it is. But yeah, I mean, you know, he's a little bit understated, very, just kind of cool guy, I would say. Like, it's also a different face for Apple, I think, in a really interesting way. Young. Young. 51 years old. Yep. Or about, yeah, 50, 51. Yeah, no, I think it's a very different face for Apple. So he's going to be the leader for the next bunch of years, most likely. The board likes him. Yes. It is interesting how it kind of leaked. It's like, the one— Oh, that it was him? That it was going to be him for a while and Apple tried to deny it. But the one thing that's been interesting under Cook recently is