Apple CEO Tim Cook miscalculates, goes quiet as his influence with President Trump fades

Apple CEO Tim Cook
Before President Donald Trump’s recent Middle East trip, the White House invited CEOs and representatives from numerous U.S. companies to accompany him. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, chose not to attend, according to two sources familiar with the matter. This decision seemed to irritate President Trump. During his visits to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he made several remarks critical of Mr. Cook and Apple.
Tripp Mickle for The New York Times:
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During his speech in Riyadh, Mr. Trump paused to praise Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, for traveling to the Middle East along with the White House delegation. Then he knocked Mr. Cook.
“I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to Mr. Huang at an event attended by chief executives like Larry Fink of the asset manager BlackRock, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Jane Fraser of Citigroup and Lisa Su of the semiconductor company AMD.
Later in Qatar, Mr. Trump said he “had a little problem with Tim Cook.” The president praised Apple’s investment in the United States, then said he had told Mr. Cook, “But now I hear you’re building all over India. I don’t want you building in India.”
On Friday morning, Mr. Trump caught much of his own administration and Apple’s leadership off guard with a social media post threatening tariffs of 25 percent on iPhones made anywhere except the United States. The post thrust Apple back into the administration’s cross hairs…
Nu Wexler, principal at Four Corners Public Affairs and a former Washington policy communications executive at Google and Facebook, said Mr. Cook’s “very public relationship” with Mr. Trump has backfired.
“It has put Apple at a disadvantage because every move, including a potential concession from Trump, is scrutinized,” Mr. Wexler said. Because Mr. Trump didn’t “have much incentive to either go easy on Apple or cut a deal on tariffs,” he said, “the incentive to crack down is much stronger.”
The timing of the White House’s new tariff plan couldn’t be worse for Mr. Cook, who has led Apple for nearly 14 years.
Last month, the company suffered a stinging defeat in an App Store trial. The judge in the trial rebuked Apple executives, saying they had “outright lied under oath” and that “Cook chose poorly,” and ruled that Apple had to change how it operates the App Store. Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief designer who became estranged from Mr. Cook and left the company in 2019, joined OpenAI last week to build a potential iPhone competitor. Its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, released in January 2024 to fanfare, has been a disappointment. And in March, Apple postponed its promised release of a new Siri, raising fresh doubts about its ability to compete in the industry’s race to adopt artificial intelligence.

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MacDailyNews Take: Apple needed a new CEO at least a decade ago. Instead, the endless iteration parade continues, with each year’s entries now unveiled via canned videos, growing ever more tiresome, diffused with ever more vapor, as each new paradigm shift is blindly missed by an aging, boring-as-beige CEO surrounded by burnt-out, surfeited VPs.
We’ve long been the canaries in the coal mine.
This lack of focus, lack of attention to detail, lack of striving for perfection will catch up to Apple eventually if it is not arrested and corrected in time.
So – sigh – we once again present to Apple CEO Tim Cook, where the buck supposedly stops, the Trophy for Misplaced Priorities:
The Misplaced Priorities Trophy — MacDailyNews, November 29, 2017

Apple is not firing on all cylinders.
The quality has been slipping for years and the mistakes, bad designs, stupid decisions, product delays and worse have been piling up. – MacDailyNews, May 18, 2017

Steve Jobs is irreplaceable, but someone with vision, taste, and focus is what’s required here.
The magic of Steve Jobs was vision, focus on the products from the user’s point of view, fastidious attention to detail, and next-level marketing acumen. – MacDailyNews, January 29, 2018

Steve Jobs could make a power cord seem insanely great. Tim Cook could put a room to sleep while unveiling teleportation; he makes watching paint dry seem like must-see event.
Apple is currently helmed by a charisma black hole. Sparks are therefor not emitted.
Lacking a charismatic leader who could sell ice cubes to eskimos, execution is the key. High quality products and services that just work with timely updates in sufficient supply at launch… Apple’s issues with late, old, sometimes problematic products and services do more to dampen excitement and devotion than anything. – MacDailyNews, January 4, 2019

You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years. Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024

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