Big Technology Podcast - Was Tim Cook The Right Choice For Apple? — With Tripp Mickle

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

Tripp Mickle is a reporter for The New York Times and author of After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a special episode looking inside Apple after the death of Steve Jobs and evaluating its leadership's performance. Join us for a broad, deep discussion leaning on Tripp's years of reporting on one of the world's most fascinating companies.

LinkedIn Presents Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Well, if you're listening to this show, you know that the company that I'm endlessly fascinated with is Apple. It is a demonstration of what it means to be a 21st century company that dominates in almost every field that it plays in. It's also filled with complicated issues. It tells us it's a statesman or a moral company, yet it does lots of things that might not be considered that way. It's also a beloved company, but also one of the most

secret of companies in the world. Let's peel that back because this week joining us is Trip Mickle. He's a reporter for the New York Times, an author of the new book, After Steve, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost it. So you're about to learn a ton about Apple. Lots of brand new details in this book, which I enjoyed very much. Trip, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me out. Thanks for being here. So let's just start. You start the book talking about the transition from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. Why did Steve Jobs pick Tim Cook as the CEO? because, you know, you would imagine that Apple is a company that would want someone more creative. Tim Cook is more of an operations guy.

It's always been a little bit interesting to me that Cook runs the company. It's a great question. There's not a clear answer, but the clearest answer I was able to get in the book. And if you read the book, you'll see this, is that Steve understood that Tim was responsible for about half the company's value at that point. The supply chain that Tim Cook had constructed. was so superior to what anyone else had in the world of electronics that to have overlooked Tim Cook would have been kind of cut your nose despite your face. In addition to that, Tim had some other strengths that I think Steve recognized that he needed to lean on. And that

was the fact that Tim was skilled at managing a large division within Apple. Not everybody had that strength. This is a kind of a land of silos. And in losing Steve Jobs himself, Apple needed to find a new way to operate. And Tim Cook is the kind of person who's skilled at dissecting an organization and figuring out how to make it excel. That's essentially what he went to school for at all. Isn't that bizarre to you? I mean, Apple's one of the most creative companies on the planet. And I understand that like, okay, operationally cook helped them get the parts and do do things that other companies couldn't. But it's an operation standpoint. Right. I mean, you know, you even break down. You call them the operator and, you know, you have another character

in the book who I'd like to hear more about who you call the artist. But why go with the operator and not the artist? When you say bizarre, the first thing that is bizarre to me is somebody from the Southeast and lives in California. It's bizarre to me that a Southerner would be running this California company that really is so culturally like California, right? I mean, you know, that was part of Jobs ethers and part of the foundation of it. Beyond that, if you look at where the iPhone was shortly after its introduction, it was at like 10 million units. They're at like 200 million units a year now. That's a huge aspect of what Steve Jobs knew Apple needed to be able to do is just accelerate and build out the number of units that they were going to have

to sell. I mean, the iPhone was going to be, for all intents and purposes, in that moment, the future of the company for the forthcoming years. But address the question. Okay, so Tim Cook has done an amazing job building that out. But is it sort of a capitulation where you say, okay, like, we go. And I've, like, broke this down in my book, how you're either a culture of invention or you're a culture of refinement and is the nomination of Cook just sort of an ascension to the fact that you're going

to be a culture of refinement. And in which case, fine, because, you know, if you're going to be a Tim Cook culture of refinement, he took the company three trillion dollars. Milked just about every inch of revenue you can out of the company and does other things. That's pretty interesting. You know, talk about the way that Apple has so much cash on hand. And it's essentially like the world's largest underappreciated hedge fund, which, you know, I'd like to talk to you about. But what does it signal? And has that, has it been the case that Apple undercook has been this, this culture of refinement? The selection signaled that in that moment, Tim Cook was the best, best man for the job.

You'd had, by that point, Tony Fidel fired. You'd had a situation where Scott Forstall relatively soon thereafter was, was ousted, but also probably at that juncture. These are key members of Apple leadership. Yeah, these are key figures at Apple through Apple's history. Tony Fidel being one of the contributors to the creation of the iPod. Scott Forstall being the software engineer who really speared the development of iOS. That's the foundational software for the iPhone and its success.

These kind of people were gone. Avi Tavian, if you go back further. He had helped develop Mac OS, John Rubenstein, Ruby, as he's known, to many of his colleagues, who was the hardware engineer who led the development of the IMAQ was gone. Much of the deep bench that existed at Apple was gone by the time jobs die. So what do you make it? I mean, it's interesting. It sounds uninspired. That's, I mean.

The choice. The choice sounds like. Yeah, well, it's like, you know, I've asked you like, so like, why Tim Cook? So it's a, he was good at operations, B, everybody else was gone. It's interesting if you go back and look at the book. I mean, even Jobs himself had trouble elevating Tim to C.O. C.O. He had advisors who had to squeeze him and say, you're going to lose this guy to Hewlett Packard,

which at the time had an opening per CEO and had Tim Cook very high on their list of people to poach and bring over. and run their company. And these advisors told jobs, if you don't elevate this guy, you're going to lose an important and critical piece of the company and why it's been successful. And that was when Jobs capitulated and did name him CRO and also gave him license to be on the board of Nike at that point. There weren't any other executives at Apple of other companies. This all speaks to some of the dark history that Jobs faced.

Right. If you go back to the 80s, he brought in John Scully. He empowered John Scully to lead the company and be somewhat of the grown-up in the room and a bit of a marketing whiz. And then wound up being in Jobs' view, knifed in the back, and thrown and ousted out of his own company. So he had a reluctance that was rooted in his own experience to empower other people around him. And as a result, Apple was very autocratic under his, under his leadership. And that was a key part of its success, right? It was, he was a tyrant. And his rule was, his word was final. And that was critical to the development of the products that they ultimately birth, was Cook a threat to jobs legacy? I think many people who were close to jobs would look at Tim Cook and Tim Cook's background as an operator and say that choice, preserves jobs legacy as the great, you know, the great inventor of all these products.

Why not, Johnny? Why not Johnny? The head of design at Apple. Steve understood that Johnny A's skills were best deployed, managing a small team of 20 designers, thinking ambitiously about the products they made and how those products would work and what they would do. And if you take somebody whose strength is in creativity and you give them the responsibility for managing at that point, I think around the time of Job Staff, it was around

like, I don't know, 11,000 people or something like that. And you give them that responsibility when that's not their skill set, you're just setting them up to fit. So Johnny I've, therefore, was never really part of that. the consideration for CEO of the company. Yeah, that's the artist. That's the artist. Artists aren't meant to file expense reports and approve expenses, right?

They're meant to be dreamers and be thinking about what the future may look like that the rest of us haven't yet, I imagine. Right. And, okay, so I think it's uninspired choice. However, like, and I've been tough on Apple, but my perspective would be that if you put this operations guy in, someone who was there as process of elimination, you know, he might help the company up to like a certain bump and, you know, that would be okay. But he's been leading Apple for a long time now. And the company is, you know, probably stronger than it's ever been. So what did Cook do?

Well, yeah, I'm curious if you think that that's accurate. But what did Cook do after he got the reins of the company to make Apple as successful as it is right now? Your question speaks to how many people have underestimated Tim Cook over the years? If you go back to that immediate transfer of power, most people thought Apple was doomed to fail in that moment, that there was just no way it would continue to excel after Steve Jobs, much less after Steve Jobs being led by Tim Cook. because their skill sets were so radically different. Tim Cook would acknowledge that their skill sets were so radically different. The one thing that he was, and he's talked about publicly, that he was beyond grateful to jobs for doing is freeing him from feeling like he had to be jobs.

One of the last things jobs told him was, don't ask what I would do. Do what you think is right. And Cook has really leaned into that through the course of his career. career. And when you get to this question you pose, which is why is Apple excelled despite the doubts from outsiders and the critics, it's really because Tim has recognized its strengths. He's preserved those. And through methodical work and persistence, he's turned those into great business opportunities. And to expand on that, if you look at, at, things like services.

That's a real testament to Tim Cook recognizing an unseen and underappreciated opportunity already existing within Apple's business and elevating it and pushing it to where it could be so much greater than it already was. Okay, but also, I mean, that they've expanded the iPhone sales. I think there was like 100 million devices when Jobs was around. and now a billion people have iPhones? How did that happen? How did that happen?

Well, let me ask one more thing. So is that, like we talk about services, but it's one fifth of Apple revenue. So is the expansion of Apple selling the iPhone actually what's behind the company's, you know, two and a half trillion dollar valuation and just bombs away revenue that they, you know, bring in every quarter? For sure. Sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, for sure, because services wouldn't, wouldn't be one-fillion. of Apple's revenue without the distribution underlying it from the iPhone's expansion. So the two are intertwined. And that's what Tim Cook has been so effective at doing is taking this seminal product, literally the best selling product in history, and finding ways to build more value on top of it, whether that's with services and software or with the watch, which wasn't necessarily something that he dreamed up, but was something that he supported and advocated for. Yeah. And so you said that he, let's go back to the strengths. He saw Apple's strengths and

exploited them and helped the company become bigger than it never was. What were the, what are the strengths of Apple are primarily its culture, its ambition. And this is a really hard thing for people to appreciate externally. It's attention. into detail and perfectionism that just permeates the entire operation. And that is something that even as big as they've gotten, where they've gone from, you know, like 12,000 employees to 140,000 employees, they've been able to maintain those underlying and underpinning aspects. And by doing so, they're able to continue to release products that are that are sharp. Are they as perfect as products were in the jobs era?

Not always. Were jobs products always perfect? Ping is an example of a product that they pulled back from the market almost immediately. But Apple has been persistent in perfecting the products that it's introduced. And as a result, it's been able to build real bad. So you think Apple's culture is one of his strengths. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, can I elaborate on that? You should be able to. You just wrote the book. I'm just trying to think of the best way to elaborate on it. I mean, you've dealt with. You've come across people from Apple. They have an attention to detail that exceeds many other companies.

And if you look at, the best way I can elaborate on that is, if you look at people who leave Google, they often go on to do startups and those startups have success. And so by contrast, if you look at the people who've left Apple, often they pursue startups and those don't live up to the ambition of the founder. And one of the things that many of those founders will tell you is they begin to hire other people. And if those people aren't from Apple, they don't have that kind of Apple culture within them or that belief in perfection and attention to detail and hard work,

there's their breaks in the chain. And those startups struggle to deliver on the ambition of the founder. And that's what Apple has. Like they all work together toward a goal. It's not always as clean as they would like. And they leave us with the impression that it is because they don't tell you anything about the hardships they run into when they're developing products. They just release them like rabbits out of a hat.

But they do get it done. And I think that kind of startup world that you and I are both familiar with here in the Bay Area is a testament to why Apple's culture is so strong. Right. And, you know, I remember speaking of someone, and this is in my book, but someone who had been at Apple who was in this, she mentioned that she was in this hotel room or hotel conference room and picks up a mug from the table. And she feels the mold line between the handle and the cup. And she goes, they could have just taken a little bit more time and smooth

that out and then pauses and goes, F you, Steve Jobs, because that's the sense of perfectionism that Apple had imbued in them is that everything needed to be as perfect as possible. That's a great example. And you run into that constantly. And it is kind of mystifying when you look at people who spun out of Apple, who had great success there and have not been able to replicate it elsewhere. Tony Fidel is one of the exceptions to the rule. He was able to have a second act with Nest, but that's few and far between in the Apple landscape. Doesn't that make Apple struggle with software? Because with hardware, okay, I get it. Get the mold line off the cup. With software, a lot of the times, it's you get an imperfect product out, iterate, improve, iterate,

improve until the point where it's actually something that lots of people want to use. But it's much more difficult to do that, you know, to get it perfect right the first time. And Apple has struggled with that. Look at Maps, for instance. What's your perspective? Right. If you talk to, I recall talking to somebody who left Apple and landed at Facebook and they were on the software side of the equation.

And they found it impigurating to be able to work inside an environment where they A, B, tested things and where they did iterate an environment. prove. Whereas at Apple, they felt handcuffed because they would do all this work and do a product release annually. And then they'd turn around and do all this work and do a product release annually. And they didn't have that kind of refinement that you're talking about that is customary at more software-centric companies like Facebook. Okay. I also want to ask you about the subtitle of the book, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul. So we talked a little bit of how about how Apple became a trillion-dollar company, right? It is sort of relentless operations,

the ability to apply some of the principles out to different products like the watch and now services. But what about losing its soul? What is Apple's soul and how did it lose it? It's a pretty bold subtitle. The subtitle is a reference literally to the relationship that Steve Jobs had with Johnny Ive. He considered him a spiritual partner and a creative soulmate. So literally Apple lost its soul because Johnny Ive left the company in 2019. Metaphorically, it also speaks to some of the reasons that Johnny Ive became disillusioned increasingly during the Tim Cook years and eventually departed because of the company became a place, because the company was once a place where art led to commerce, and with time, it became a place where commerce dictated art.

What does that mean? That means that shortly after Steve Jobs' death, there was an understanding internally within Apple, but if we're going to pursue a product, it has to be a minimum of a $10 billion business. Because otherwise, it's not going to deliver enough financial value to us to meet the expectations of Wall Street. it will be more trouble than it is worth. So all of a sudden there were commercial restrictions on the ideas and products you might pursue. And isn't that short-sighted also? Because how are you supposed to know if business is going to be $10 billion at the outset?

Well, I mean, you can look at things like, okay, they're giant industries like health care or auto or energy. all of a sudden the iPhone was so big that these were the type of sectors that Apple was looking at and saying for us to continue to grow, those are the arenas that we have to be playing in because they had already saturated the electronics market and pretty much dominated it and become the largest profit generator in that world. So they had to look beyond those walls that they were kind of building. built to excel in and chase other big industries. And how do you think they've done trying to chase those industries? It's been uneven, right? I think we can look at the track record over the past decade and say that of those areas that they've decided to pursue, the foremost are healthcare and auto.

We still don't have a car, even though they set a goal of releasing one by 2019. And with healthcare, the watch got off to a shaky start. It took some time for adoption to build. It's been growing since then. It's still the linchpin of their health ambitions, but its health capabilities are somewhat limited. And their exploration of things like medical, digital medical records has yet to yield anything that's benefited in bottom one. Right. What's your sense of what's going on?

with the car after having reported on it. Still at it, you know, still trying to solve a hard problem. I mean, the book goes into great detail highlighting why they had this ambition to come in and disrupt Tesla in the same way they disrupted Nokia years earlier in the smartphone world and why they weren't able to fulfill that ambition. And in large part, that's because of dissension. within the ranks between senior leaders. The people who are advocating the idea of disrupting Tesla

were largely on the engineering side, the hardware engineering side. Designers such as Johnny Hyde were advocating full autonomy, which takes much, much longer. And while that would be a huge leap, the world's not ready for that. Waymo has been at it more than anybody else, and we still don't have full autonomy from them. So how do you then square Apple's culture, right, which you talk about this, you know, culture of perfection, a very, a very effective culture, in your opinion, with the inability to, you know, come to an agreement on a car, for instance. Because my reporting tells me that this car is nowhere near close to being ready to hit, you know, to even achieve the basic goals that it's wanted to.

Right. Right. So how does that get to the idea of perfection? Well, you said they have a cult. Their culture is one of their strengths, but it sounds like with the car, the culture is one of the biggest drawbacks. If you talk about the infighting and the inability to agree on what it's... I wouldn't argue that the problem there is perfection. I would say that the issue is how hierarchical Apple is. Yeah, so say more about that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's such a hierarchical company.

I mean, there are literally a dozen people that meet once a week and chart the direction of the company. And then it flows and filters all the way down through the ranks. and in the jobs era, he was kind of the final bit of hierarchy for the company. But in the Tim Cook era, Tim's largely stayed out of product. And so you've had a bit of a void. He's left his lieutenants to sort out their disagreements among themselves and not provided that direction because, again, he's not a product guy. He doesn't try to be a product guy.

That's not his nature. And as a result, these disagreements have popped up, as we've seen in the carcates. And that's, that slowed some of their product development. Yeah. I mean, it's just, I think it's amazing that Apple continues to chug along, given that all these bullet points or all these data points, I would think would hold it back. But it continues to crush it. So the book is after Steve, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company and lost its soul. We're talking with Trip Mickle, the author.

and the reporter, a reporter at the New York Times. New reporter at the New York Times, congrats on the new job trip. We'll be back after the break to talk a little bit more about Apple's relationship with China, which I find endlessly interesting, and as well as to address some of the questions that have popped up on LinkedIn and Twitter and talk about Apple's approach to politics. So stick around.

We'll be back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. two million professionals read the hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily show where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes

or less and explain why you should care about them. So, search for the Hustle Daily show and your favorite podcast app like the one you're using right now. And we're back here with Trip Mickle, reporter at the New York Times and author of After Steve, how Apple became a trillion dollar company and lost it, Seoul, soul being Johnny Ive. Let's talk about China. How important, you know, we talk about how Apple's become this two point,

you know, X trillion dollar company. How important is its relationship with China to do? I mean, we talk about how they forge relationship with the Chinese government. They have a very big market for the phones there. And their manufacturing is tied up pretty intricately into China. Yeah, 100%. You just laid it all out.

I mean, it is, it is foundational to their business now. And if you go back and look at the moments that they've had slip-ups, it's largely been China-related. The best example being early 2019 when they had to slash guidance because the iPhones that they expected to do quite well in China fell far short of their expectations. So this is a rare miss.

I've been 16 years since they'd had to slash guidance. and that just underscored how important the sales are in that market. And then on the flip side, a year later, in 2020, they slashed guidance again because China was the first to get hit with COVID, and they shut down a lot of their manufacturing operations. And Apple was unable to produce the phones that it needed to sell around the world. That dependency in China was once again under a microscope. And this most recent quarter, they also, they basically crushed their earnings expectations, beat everything except for iPads, which people expected.

And, you know, then they do the conference call and they talk about how they're going to have some issues with China in the coming quarter. And their stock just plumbed. Right. They were they were punished by investors, not for their past performance, but for what's, what's currently occurring because of the COVID restrictions in and around Shanghai where they've had to shut down a lot of their factors. Yeah. I mean, there was a, I think you've had Jack Mickus on here before. And I think Jack had a line in his New York Times story a couple of years ago, or a year ago, about Apple and China. And his turn of phrase when it came to China was, there is no plan B. Right. Yeah. So yeah, I spoke with Jack about that. Do you, do you, do so Tim Cook is like talked about how, or Tim Cook is portrayed as this like, state's been like CEO who talks about like all these issues and you know points apple as the moral good good company you know there's also been reports that I think it might have been in Jack story that like they've had like you know they've worked with subcontractors who um you know

have plants in Xinjiang and like maybe that labor is coming to them you know in like pretty unethical ways you know via the Chinese government maybe you can clear up what I'm what I'm saying here. But doesn't that, does it compromise them ethically, morally at all by being that, you know, closely linked with the government in China? For the astute viewer, it does. But for the average person, that's not on their radar. And therefore, they haven't faced a lot of blowback. I, it does seem like if you look at the shifting political winds in the country, that that could change in the future. If we wind up in a situation where there is a big wave of Republicans into Congress in the Senate, they seem more inclined to hold tech companies' feet to the fire on their dependency on China

and some of their grandstanding in the U.S., if you will. There was a good example of this about a week ago. There's an FCC commissioner who put out a letter criticizing Tim Cook for, or making a really eloquent speech of privacy and how important privacy was and how Apple was kind of a bulwark to protect consumers' privacy relative to its tech peers. And the FCC commissioner was like, yeah, but what about China? Like, you have this huge business in China, this huge empire. If you're so concerned about privacy, why have you taken down VPNs there and went through

a number of issues to point out the inconsistency between what Tim Cook was saying about privacy in the U.S. and what Apple's actions are in China. Yeah, that was Brendan Carr who's been on the show. Oh, I didn't realize Brendan had been on the show. So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I found it interesting. I thought it was weird that he concentrated only on the Voice of America app, which is the thing

that he was like, why are you taking this down? But, you know, it's like, but anyway, I do think that, like, it's interesting that it was called out. Here's, I wrote this question down. Can a company that big, you know, 2.6 trillion global operations obviously makes deals with, you know, governments around the world. Can a company that large be principled or is it sort of a fallacy? What do you think? The company that large can talk about being principled, but I don't think we have any evidence of a company that large actually being, you know, the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa.

right i mean they you know it's really only individuals and even even they're flawed right um but it's really only individuals that can can be principled and see that that that kind of like principle of nature all the way through so right i'm happy to hear examples otherwise if you if you think there are but um but i can't point point to learn no i think it's difficult i think i always find this like you know we are the moral good in the world's coming from corporations um to be a little weird like you know, I would, I think it would be much more honest to be like, hey, we're here to cell phones. Tim, Tim Cook was astute and attuned to that. I mean, if you go back and the book hits on this, hits on like where this kind of principled presentation came from that Apple's

really advanced. It was really rooted in their effort to develop a brand campaign in and around 2012. They were under a lot of fire at that point in time because the New York Times had done its eye economy series highlighting how many jobs had gone to China, some of the working conditions for workers there. Greenpeace was really upset about some of apples, not even at that point greenwashing, but just really kind of environmental practices. The company was really trying to push back on that, and it decided for the first time in years it was going to develop a brand campaign. It was going to be the first one since Think Different. And in the course of that, one of the ideas that were floated by the ad agency that was working with Applelinus

was this idea of leave the world better than you found it. And it was, you know, it was a really captivating ad in that it showed a tree that kind of like had grown up and got really, really big. It started as like a small apple tree. And this was a kind of a cartoonish like drawing and the tree gets really big. And it's highlighting all the responsibilities that as a tree gets that much bigger. that it has to the world. And it culminated with the tagline,

leave it better than you found it. And Tim Cook looks at it and it really resonates with it. But he says, you know what? I'm going to use this internally because I can't very well go out and say, we're going to leave the world better than we found it right now when we're under attack for environmental issues. We're facing criticism for worker conditions in China. But he did internalize it.

He did use it to rally staff. And then gradually, as Apple improved in those other areas, is he began to use it publicly as well. Yeah, it's been a pretty successful campaign for that. Right. I think people generally feel good about owning iPhone products or Apple products, whether they should or should. Right.

It's been really successful for them. And it's also been critical for Tim Cook finding a way to redefine himself relative to Steve Jobs. You know, Steve Jobs, if you're stepping into the legacy of this executive who was so tremendous in terms of dreaming up. introducing revolutionary products, that's not your thing. So you can't do that. This has become Tim's thing. I mean, he's talked a lot about these issues. One of the first things he did after becoming CEO was introduced corporate matching to nonprofits.

And these things have been really effective in terms of winning over staff and having staff believe in the Apple mission within the world. But it's kind of interesting because it also made. Tim Cook kind of hated by his hometown. Right, right, right. It is kind of funny. I mean, that was the most fascinating thing about doing the reporting for this book was going to Robert Stale, Alabama.

It's about an hour outside of Mobile. And showing up and thinking, this is a small town. Of course, everybody's going to want to talk about Tim Cook because he's local boy done good. And instead, you'd knock on doors and people would kind of bristle at the notion of talking about Tim. And that's largely because, as I peeled it back, in 2014, Tim gave a speech about seeing a cross-burning in Robertsdale when he was a teenager. And the town just, A, didn't believe that cross-burning actually happened, and B, didn't appreciate having a kind of, it spotlighted for the world and thought that it put the town in a negative light.

and therefore they just don't really like Tim in his own hometown. It's very strange. Yeah, there's some kind of interesting details in the book about how the story doesn't fully add up. Do you think he made it up? He was challenged by a close friend about that who sent him a pointed email saying, Tim, if this happened, like, what did you do?

Did you go to the police? What action did you take? And he just kind of shrugged her off and said, do you not believe me? There are some teachers around that time that knew Tim Cook, and they recall him telling stories like this or about that event. And so it does seem to have some grounding in his own memory and his own recollection, but the town itself doesn't have any recollection of this event. And it's really hard to bear it out.

I mean, I reported that one pretty deeply. And, you know, it was a cross burning in the yard of a black resident. And there weren't black residents yet at that time because it was a sunset town, meaning most of the black community lived in neighboring communities. And when they, when sunset arrived, they were, they left Robert Stale itself. Yeah. Did Apple, what was it like? with Apple on this? Did they play ball? Did they make Tim Cook available? Tim Cook didn't respond to any of my emails or outreach to talk to him for this book.

Apple took its standard tag, which is, you know, we're not, we're not going to make anybody available. I don't know how often you've had a chance to interview people over there, but generally speaking, they don't believe in talking about the past. they don't generally believe in talking about the president and they certainly don't believe about in talking about the future so in essence they kind of don't talk like that's just their nature that's kind of their starting point ground zero for them yeah so do you think that was a you know sort of a blessing or a curse for you when it came to reporting this book because i feel like you can also always like i mean it's nice to be able to speak with principles but um i feel like you can tell a more honest story without like having to include their spin well if that was

If I was able to speak with principles, it wouldn't preclude me from talking to others and rounding out my understanding of things. I generally come at things and think, look, I have an open notebook. I want to fill it with as much as possible. And in doing so, I'm able to kind of weigh different and competing narratives so that I get the most accurate story to bring forward for a reader. I mean, that's our job, in essence, as reporters. And so I never enjoy having people tell me, like, well, they don't want to talk to me. That just means I can't do as good a job for the reader as I need to.

Yeah. Okay, that's a good point. All right. Are you open to take me? I asked folks on LinkedIn and Twitter, you know, if they had any questions about Apple and, like, a bunch flooded in. You done to take some of them? Yeah, sure.

I saw some of those flooding. I thought it was cool. Yeah, nice. You crowdsource this one. Yeah. Also, that third is going to stay open on LinkedIn. So if folks want to come in and, you know, Trip, if you were up to respond, like, that would be cool. But anyway, let's keep the questions flowing and maybe we can get trip back in the comments there.

And I'll put a link to your Amazon page and we can roll with that. All right, let's take this one from Michael Cohn. He said, I'd love to know your take on whether I've had to move on for Apple to become a trillion-dollar company. We all think he was the sole of the company we use, but he wonders if his focus on design over functionality took the pendulum too far in the wrong direction. I'm going to answer that question in two ways. First, in looking back at the history of Apple, it's pretty clear that its alchemy is rooted in pairs. Jobs and was built the company. Jobs and I've sort of rescued the company from bankruptcy.

and then Ive and Cook were responsible for this most recent decade where you had the two similar products being the watch and services, each one responsible for a separate piece of that. So I think Ives' contribution to this decade has been hugely important. It got off to a rocky start, the watch did, but the wearables business has become a $38 billion business, and that's a very valuable piece of Apple's overall. sales. Did he, did in his period of being part-time, did there, was there evidence in the eyes of

people at Apple that form trump function? Yes. Yes. And the book details that largely through the experience of Apple employees once they got to Apple Park. They just felt that there were some things that were overlooked that could have made the headquarters and the headquarters experience sharper and a better experience. I mean, great example is you're walking into the glass walls,

just like the lack of the lack of anticipation that people might do that. So tell that story. People, people would. I think that's a Mark Bergen story. It was going to be on the show. So people would walk into the walls inside the headquarters because they were that. It's so clear and so pristine the glass internally. And there are walls that separate various.

pieces of the circle from each other and doors, that people would just walk straight into the door. And so eventually, and there were enough of these that they were calling 911 and bloody noses and so on and so forth. And so employees eventually started, you know, walking some of them with their hands out saying they were like almost like some examples just to be sure, like they were, their hands would hit the glass before their nose did. And early on, because Apple was having such a hard time with this, they were, they.

They ordered tons of stickers, and they went in and put them up so that people could see the glass. So these are like little black dots that go on the glass. So there blemishes on the perfection of the glass itself. And staff took to calling those Johnny's Tears. Oh, amazing. Okay, cool. By the way, did he speak with you for the book? You know, we just don't get to talk to everybody.

So, you know, you try your best. and you get to everybody and you ask and you ask. I got an email from him because I sent one detail that we were able to come across. It was a video of his father developing Hovercraft many years ago. And I just sent it to him just because I thought it was just so cool. I guess this is ancient BBC footage of his dad in action. And I sent it to him. And I talked to a lot of people.

He remember working on it. And he wrote me back. He said he remembered it. you know just like it was yesterday um and that was like 50 some odd years ago 60 years ago that that that uh that hovercraft was was built so there's one quote from johnny in the book it's it's from that email wow that was the extent of it did you speak to steve wasniak was has a busy schedule so he he was not able to make time but he his his story has been told And it was not at the centerpiece of this book.

I do have some commentary from Woz because I remember, and I don't know if you were there, but they did the 10th anniversary release of the iPhone in 2017, and it was the first event on campus, and Was was there, and he was kind of holding court with a lot of reporters talking about how the Steve Jobs Theater was just so emblematic of the design sensibilities of Steve himself. And so there are some quotes from Waz in there, including his pronounced skepticism that the iPhone, even after that 10th anniversary edition, had much life left in it. He was, he was kind of ready for a post-smart phone world at that point. Yeah. I remember that. Yeah. So for my book, I emailed Waz, and I was like, let's meet. And I think he emailed back and he's like,

nah, I don't really do business books. And then I was like, well, and I was like, A, B, she considered ABC, and he's like, all right, in which case, let's figure out one in where. And it was this hilarious meeting. We had, like, me, him, his wife, and his business partner all met down in a diner and just kind of, you know, shot the shit about sort of Apple's culture and stuff like that. He's an interesting dude. Very interesting, dude.

I think that was probably the one and only meeting. I'm going to get with him now. All right, let's go back to some questions. So this is from Michael Brown on Twitter. Was there a deliberate shift from the magic of technology through Steve to focusing on turning customers into large locked-in recurring revenue? I think that's great. It's basically a pointer on like, you know,

had Apple basically decided that, you know, it had its products and now it was just basically time to milk revenue out of consumers. I think Steve Jobs also, he, He was at the forefront of building the walled garden, right? So I don't think he would have any qualms about saying, like, well, if we build a walled garden and it's better than any other garden and everybody stays in there, like, we'd know money out of them. Like, he would be supportive of that. I'm just playing Monday morning quarterback here and guessing what his attitude would be about that. Apple has done that quite effectively, but they've looked to stretch beyond that to some degree.

You know, the watch was their effort at that. And again, it was uneven with its introduction, but it has game ground. Yeah. We got another one from Maribel Lopez. How is the process of innovating changed in a post-Jobes world? It's interesting because, yeah, it seems to be like jobs would be the source of most ideas. I liked how he, you had this anecdote in the book where he would go to Johnny. You'd be like, I have a lousy idea.

Johnny would be like most of them actually were lousy, but some of them would just like, you know, silence the room and a lot of this stuff came from jobs and johnny's brain so how did it change in a post jobs jobs world at apple so in the post jobs jobs jobs world the the reason that the book focuses so much on on the watch is because that is the preeminent example of the product that they introduced that was new in a new product category after jobs um and johnny drove much of that He really was the driving force behind it. There are some competing stories about what the first idea of it was, whether it was Johnny at a whiteboard, which is a story that's highlighted in the book, writing the word smartwatch

on the whiteboard for a few of his designer colleagues and saying, this is what we're going to do. or it was some of the designers kind of just banning it about text messages and saying like, oh, we're going to do smart watch and a designer who wanted to just test the idea the next day it came in, Julian Hone, who wound up doing a lot of lead work on the watch and making a model, an early model blockup.

But it really was sprung from the studio, even though ideas were percolating elsewhere. And the reason I bring that up is because, because at Apple, there does need to be a driving force to get products into the marketplace, to get products to develop. And the open question now with Johnny Gaughn is, who is that driving force? I don't have the answer. And I think maybe we'll get the answer when we see AR glasses or when we see a car come forward.

The car, to your point earlier, it seems a long way off still. And by the time that comes forward, how many people will have run that project, you know? I mean, they've been churning through executives and leaders on it for a long time. Yeah, and it's interesting now that Johnny's no longer at the company. No words. I always thought, yeah, design was the source of it. I heard it's moved to marketing in some ways. But I guess we'll find out.

Thoughts on that? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think marketing has more sway over the future product as a concept. points of ives absence again this is a very hierarchical company um yeah and and without somebody from design with a seat at the table at the top of the hierarchy which in johnny's absence that doesn't exist anymore jeff williams is the is the person running design and he is he is there at those executive meetings um but he's he's not by nature a designer uh so therefore

marketing has a bigger voice. Yeah, it's interesting. And I guess that goes to your point of commerce over form to start with. Okay, here's one. Here's another one from, man, I feel like I should have just turned this over to LinkedIn and Twitter. If you were asking great questions. This is from Vdala 77. I couldn't understand the logic of the first-gen gold Apple Watch focusing on the luxury element,

when in reality the watch will be practically obsolete from a technical. standpoint in a very short period of time what was johnny's thinking about this so i guess it like sort of goes to like you know why make this expensive gold band if you're about to develop the next generation pretty quickly like why would people pay that much money and it's and to build on that it is interesting that they transformed it from a fashion thing to a health thing so maybe you could talk a little bit about it's a great question one that the the book spends a lot of time digging into, which is, which is why was, why was fashion so critical to some of the early marketing of the watch? And I came into it with the, with the attitude and mindset that a lot of

outside observers did, which is like, that just seems like crazy. We're like, why would you, why would you spend a ton of time and energy on that? And left with a deeper appreciation for the thinking behind. If you go back and you look at what made, um, what made, in the eyes of a lot of a lot of people at Apple what made the iPod so successful was it was this convergence of what Apple was great at,

making great product and great software with a cultural medium in music. And there was some ambition at the outset of the watch that they could pull off a similar feat and they could fuse their sophistication with making product and software with fashion.

So fashion was a stand-in for music in this case. And the reason that they were so focused on that was because they felt that if the fashion world rejected the watch and said, this is ugly and like you should never wear it, that it would just influence, because the taste makers there are so influential, that it would it would sour people on wearing the watch. And they really wanted to get over that hurdle. They felt that hurdle was critical. I left pretty persuaded that that was sound focus. And when you start at that point and you think, okay, well, we need, this was another challenge they faced. They were making a product that existed previously. So people were bringing their own expectations to it.

Yes, we had mobile phones, but we never really had a smartphone until the iPhone, right? It really kind of created a category as much as anything. We've had watches for hundreds of years. So they had to straddle this kind of legacy and invent kind of like a future. And the gold is rooted in that. Is it nonsensical, as you all noted? Yeah, absolutely. Like, what was the point of that?

But were there, were there tastemakers who they got that watch to, who they showed it off? and it, as a result, influenced other people's perception of it. Yes, I mean, Carl Lagofeld, Beyonce, some of these people had a chance to get that gold watch. And it did have some influence from a PR stand. Let's go to this one from Ethereum West, not a security. Did Johnny Ive leave because Apple got boring innovation-wise, or was it because he became, less influential after jobs passed.

There's a combination of both. It's a really perceptive question, but the book really covers why both of those became true. He was, first of all, tired after developing the watch. He wanted to step back. In stepping back, there were also changes of the company where more and more right-brain leaders had influence. And while he was working part-time with the company,

company, that influence of right brain leaders only increased. And so his influence weight. And the combination of the two ultimately led to his exit. Fascinating. Okay, we're coming towards the home stretch, but I found this to be pretty interesting. John Basile, he says, they became the company they claimed to be fighting against 38 years ago. And then links the Apple 1984 ad where, you know, Apple, someone representing Apple sort of throws the hammer into, you know, this big, I guess, faceless character which is or face character which is supposed to resemble IBM but yeah in many ways they have become right right they they are now um facing lawsuits from you know many who say that they've become like this big uh massive company that restricts their ability to do business and

is actually squeezing the upstarts that they used to be all about right here's to the crazy ones right their old commercial well what happened to that what happened to that does the person ask the question, work at Epic, because I do feel like this is like Epic's core line of argument against Apple, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about getting big. And I think the struggle at Apple has been, as you get that big, like, they still, especially for people who were at the company when it was on the brink of bankruptcy, and those people are still very much senior leadership positions there, they still feel like,

you know, the company, the small company they once were. That's still part of their ethos. And I think that creates some internal conflict where they behave in ways that can, they can have catastrophic, you know, impact on smaller companies. And they don't fully appreciate their own weight in half. Yeah. Here's my last question for you. So I found it fascinating reading in the beginning of the book about jobs,

paranoia about what Apple would become after him. Clearly he knew there was going to be an after jobs era. And he talked about companies like Polaroid, for instance, never quite figured it out afterwards, or Disney, which like took a long time as a struggling company before figuring it out. And it's a huge and important thing that the successor is someone who helps propel the innovation versus let it let's it slide. So I'm going to give you to two hours. options to sort of compare Tim Cook to. And I'm curious, who do you think he's closer to? Do you think he's closer to Steve Bomber, who was given this asset by Bill Gates, right,

Windows, and basically decided to milk as much money out of it, who cares what the future brings? Or do you think he's someone closer to a Michael Eisner, who had you resuscitated Disney by, you know, green lighting, lots of hits, and, you know, basically brought that company's mojo back? Which one does cook more closely resemble? He's not Balmer because his success speaks for itself and because

they have managed to launch some products that have really continued the company's sales success in a way and they haven't really missed something. I mean that was the big knock on Balmer, right? He missed the smart phone. You can't really point to something that Apple's missed

that's been catastrophic for them in the way that missing the smartphone was for Balmer and Microsoft. Iser? Eisner had to come in and revive Disney. So it's hard for me to say he's Isner. He's more Isner than his bomber, but Isner really came in and revived Disney

after this period of dormancy. Tim inherited a company that was poised to go on a tremendous run because the power and popularity of the iPhone was only beginning to be unleashed. as he came into his own, he's found a way to squeeze more value out of that particular product and charted his own. I think in the future, it'll ultimately be, you'll say there are three choices. Is he more like Balmer?

Is he more like Eiser or is he more like Tim Cook or she, whoever the executive might be? And Apple's future do you think is bright moving forward or do you think that it's been soaring based off of like Steve Jobs' ideas like the iPhone and eventually? Even air, I like think about AirPods, which are like, you know, those are headphones for an iPhone and a watch is for watch. The Apple Watch is a watch for iPhone owners. So I got, God, I always do this. I said last question, but this is really the last one. Yeah.

So in the future, how they're going to, how's it looking for Apple? The epilogue really highlights the clouds ahead for Apple. And there are some dark clouds on the horizon. The first being antitrust and the threat that it poses to the entire services business. and that core app store business that is so central to the service revenue that they generate. And then the other being China, we're in a time period when the plates of geopolitics are shifting in such a way that what may happen down the line could be catastrophic for Apple. I mean, if China were to do something like Russia's done and preemptively invade a territory that they consider part of their country, Taiwan, what does that mean for Apple?

What does that mean for its manufacturing? What does that mean for its reliance on TSM for the chips that power its products? And what does that mean for the sales of iPhone? And I guess we'll have I guess we just, that's going to be the story to watch. It would be, I'll end. It'll be, it'll be a big problem for the company. Yeah. Okay.

After Steve, how Apple became a trillion-dollar company lost its soul is on sale this week. Congratulations, Trip. Trip is the author. Where can people find the book? Where can people find your work online? You can find it in bookstores, Amazon, bookshop. org, and Barnes & Noble, just about anywhere, anywhere you're looking. And then my work on the future about Apple will be in,

on the New York Times website. Okay, great. Well, I quite enjoyed the book. I really enjoyed learning kind of more about the history of Tim Cook, who's one of the most secretive CEOs, in my opinion. And it's great. It's cool that you went back to his hometown. I'm glad you shared some of that with us today.

So folks, I hope you go check it out and get a chance to read it on your own. Thank you, again, Tripp, for being here. Thank you, Nate Gawatini, for editing this. appreciate your work, Nate. And thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. I really appreciate that. Thanks to all of you, the listeners. Hey, if you're still here and you want to give us a rating, five stars would really be appreciated.

We're almost close to 100, so maybe you could be the 100th, and that will make you feel great. I'm sure it'll make us feel great here at Big Technology Podcast. Also promised you my voice would be better after last week. Well, I've done all the exercises and I feel like I've brought the A game this week. So thanks again for being patient. All right. We will see you soon. We actually have a new bonus episode coming up pretty soon with Rich Greenfield talking about the market. He's one of the best analysts out there. And I am totally puzzled by the market. So hopefully we'll get a chance to bring you a bonus episode about what's going on pretty soon. All right, signing off, we will see you next time. Thanks again for listening. This has been Big Technology podcast and hope you have a good one. Thank you.