New book: ‘After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul’

From The Wall Street Journal’s Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul tells the dramatic, untold story inside Apple after the passing of Steve Jobs by following his top lieutenants — Jony Ive, the Chief Design Officer, and Tim Cook, the COO-turned-CEO — and how the fading of the former and the rise of the latter led to Apple losing its soul.
The book goes on sale on May 3, 2022 (pre-order via Amazon here).
(Apple/Steve Jobs logo image by Jonathan Mak)
HarperCollins Publishers:

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his “spiritual partner at Apple.” The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs’s spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator’s death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.
In many ways, Cook was Ive’s opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.
Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple’s valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world’s stock market into freefall with a single sentence.
Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple’s history while writing After Steve. His research shows the company’s success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive’s departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple’s shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.

MacDailyNews Take: As you know, we are decidedly not on “Team Cook.”
Other “Apple News” outlets inexplicably still are – or they feign it, lest they lose their precious (not really) “access” (canned crap) that Apple doles out like doggie treats to various media mouthpieces who play along, parroting the company line.
Of course, Apple shareholders are happy with Cook’s performance (a long as they don’t think about how much more successful the company could have been with a visionary leader who brought products to market on time (not routinely late), who could innovate, who could himself sell, who could generate excitement on stage, who could decisively pull the trigger on landmark acquisitions in a timely fashion, and whose actions actually matched his words.
After what Steve Jobs built, a chimpanzee could run Apple profitably for many years. (Yes, even Steve Ballmer could do it.) — MacDailyNews, April 10, 2017
Regardless of your estimation of Cook’s performance or lack thereof, this book should be of great interest to all who follow Apple, especially to those of us who fell in love with the company long before Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook away from Compaq in 1998 to order parts for Macs.
You cannot replace Steve Jobs. Period.
Elevating Mr. Lukewarm Wallpaper Paste to CEO, will necessarily dim Apple’s “wow factor.”
Let’s face it: Elon Musk should hire Tim Cook to do PR for The Boring Company. — MacDailyNews, August 24, 2021
But, despite all of the negatives, we considered Cook’s seemingly rock-solid commitment to user privacy – in stark opposition to the rest of Big Tech – to be worth the personality vacuum and never-ending sanctimonious hypocrisy.
Then Cook torched his one big positive this past summer.
Any Apple CEO who would okay on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” (more about that here) is not someone who should be CEO of Apple, regardless of how much revenue he generates by bending over whenever the Chinese Communist Party orders him to do so. Anyone who would approve of on-device image scanning and the reporting of results to “the authorities” simply does not understand Apple.

It’s true: Tim Cook’s Apple has no soul.
A fish rots from the head down.
You want to spend years touting privacy only to cave to governments worldwide by building obvious backdoor surveillance into your computers and devices? And try to use the eminently transparent Think of the Children ruse as your trojan horse either because you’re desperate to try to hide your betrayal to the company and its loyal users or you think everyone else is stupid, that we don’t see you selling out Apple and Apple users?
Get lost.
Retire.
Take your nauseatingly vast overpayment and your cloyingly sanctimonious twaddle and go pound sand.
Time for new blood at Apple. Enough with the insipid, spineless, morally bankrupt caretaker. — SteveJack, MacDailyNews, September 20, 2021

Let’s face it, Steve Jobs’ track record of picking Apple CEOs was less than stellar. — SteveJack, MacDailyNews, April 2, 2019
See also: Tim Cook is not the best person to be CEO of Apple – April 2, 2019
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.

The post New book: ‘After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul’ appeared first on MacDailyNews.