Apple needs a visionary QB again: It’s past time for game manager Tim Cook to hand off the ball

Apple CEO Tim Cook (photo: David Paul Morris — Bloomberg/Getty Images)
In American football, a “game manager” quarterback is one who protects the ball, executes the playbook, and keeps the scoreboard ticking through steady, conservative play. Tim Cook has been precisely that for Apple: an operations maestro who took the reins from the legendary Steve Jobs in 2011 and transformed the company into a financial juggernaut, ballooning its market cap from $350 billion to over $4 trillion through supply-chain efficiency, massive stock buybacks, and incremental refinements of products created under Apple’s visionary co-founder Steve Jobs.
Yet, as Jobs himself might have envisioned, Cook was never meant to be the long-term playmaker — the electrifying, risk-taking, charismatic visionary who redraws the field with bold, game-changing innovations. Jobs built Apple on “insanely great” breakthroughs: the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Under Cook’s stewardship, however, the company has increasingly relied on iteration rather than revolution, neglecting opportunities in AI (like the long-stagnant Siri), launching underwhelming entries like Vision Pro in rushed form, and prioritizing financial engineering over audacious product leaps.
Nearly 15 years into his tenure — one far longer than Jobs likely intended for a transitional “caretaker” CEO — Apple stands at a crossroads. With executive departures signaling the end of an era and succession planning accelerating, it’s time for Cook to step aside. The world’s most valuable company deserves a charismatic, exciting leader once more: a true visionary capable of reigniting the magic that made Apple not just profitable, but culturally unstoppable.
Richard Waters for Financial Times:
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The Financial Times’ report that succession planning at Apple is now in high gear makes it seem increasingly likely that the pre-eminent consumer tech company will soon be under new management.
Strong demand for the iPhone 17 lifted Apple’s stock market value past $4tn for a while over the past month. With a strong tailwind from the huge stock buybacks that Cook instigated as one of his first acts as chief, the share price is up 20-fold from the day he took over in 2011.
But, with artificial intelligence threatening the biggest upheaval to the tech world in decades, Cook will also leave huge questions. His successor will need to demonstrate a stronger appetite for risk and a willingness to bet on a new vision for how technology can reshape people’s lives…
His successor will need to show that they can both co-opt AI to reinforce what Cook built while also harnessing its disruptive potential to ride the next consumer tech wave.
The botched launch of Apple Intelligence — key parts of which were delayed early this year — was worrying. How much that will matter in the long run is hard to tell… But there are obvious risks to taking a back seat in the AI revolution. If LLMs are at the centre of innovation, then acting merely as a rent collector while leaving it to others to define the next must-have digital experiences would put Apple in an uncomfortable position.
Also, if LLMs come to represent what is essentially a new operating system, they will have strategic importance.

Hopefully, the days of a COO masquerading as an Apple CEO are finally drawing nigh. Apple deserves a visionary leader who can once again drive relentless, world-changing product innovation. – MacDailyNews, December 9, 2025

The Vision Pro headset represented his biggest gamble on a new device… But as a compelling vision of how mixed-reality headsets will change your life — the kind of thing that Steve Jobs excelled at — it was a flop. Instead, Meta has stolen a lead with a more lightweight, fashion-conscious range of “smart” glasses…
Apple’s next chief will need to increase the scale of the company’s bets. Among the first jobs: convincing its shareholders, who have become accustomed to the iPhone’s steady profits, that it is time to look beyond Tim Cook’s gravy train.

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MacDailyNews Take: As our own SteveJack wrote last July:

Steve Jobs famously said of Tim Cook, “Tim is not a product person, per se.” That has turned out to be an understatement, especially with the fact that the Apple Watch, AirPods, and even the Vision Pro concept began under Jobs.
I’ve closely observed Apple for decades and I believe that Steve Jobs never meant for Tim Cook to be Apple’s CEO in 2025.
When Jobs handpicked Cook as his successor in 2011, many believed it was a strategic move to stabilize the company during a tumultuous transition following Jobs’ untimely death. However, I contend that Jobs intended Cook to serve as a short-term CEO, a 3-5 year placeholder to mollify investors, not to lead Apple for nearly a decade and a half, stagnating its innovative spirit, jettisoning innovative executives, while relying on financial engineering, mainly in the form of hundreds of billions of dollars in buybacks, to prop up the company’s success.
Jobs, a visionary known for his relentless pursuit of groundbreaking products, built Apple into a cultural and technological titan with the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. His genius lay in anticipating consumer needs before they did. Cook, hired from Compaq in 1998 as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations, was the operational mastermind behind Apple’s supply chain efficiency, going all-in on CCP-controlled China to maximize Apple’s profit margins.
Jobs clearly valued Cook’s logistical prowess, but I believe Jobs saw Cook as a caretaker, not a long-term visionary, expecting him to maintain stability for a few years until a product-focused, visionary successor emerged.
Under Cook, Apple’s market capitalization soared from $376 billion in 2011 to over $3.9 trillion in early 2025 making it the world’s most valuable company (it has since shed some $800 billion over the year, falling to third place behind Nvidia and rival Microsoft). Yet, much of this growth stems from financial engineering, service expansions like iCloud and Apple Music, and a steady stream of annual incremental product updates, rather than revolutionary Jobsian innovation.
The Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro were initiated under Jobs’ tenure, with their completion coming during Cook’s tenure. The Apple Car project, also conceived by Jobs, was abandoned after a long, chaotic, and costly period under Cook.
It’s clear that Cook lacks the disruptive, charismatic spark Steve Jobs infused throughout Apple. Basically, all of Apple’s successes under Cook are iterations of Steve Jobs’ products and services.
Cook’s lack of hands-on product involvement has slowed innovation, with half-baked products like the Vision Pro being launched to consumers too early and, unsurprisingly, failing to sell. Apple clearly missed the generative AI (GenAI) paradigm shift under Cook and has been struggling to catch up ever since. Steve Jobs likely would not have released the Vision Pro and visionOS in the condition they were launched under Tim Cook. Jobs very likely would have not neglected Siri (which he purchased) for over a decade and a half and would almost certainly have foreseen GenAI early. Very likely, Jobs focus on Siri would have led him and Apple to GenAI first. Visionary Jobs’ main focus was about creating “insanely great” products; Cook’s seems to be about iteration and other, side pursuits.
If Jobs intended Cook as a relatively short-term placeholder, the question remains: who was meant to follow? Speculation points to figures like former software chief Scott Forstall — who Cook rather quickly forced out of the company, ostensibly over the botched Maps launch (which way okayed by Cook, by the way) – and head product designer Jony Ive, who left Apple after years of feeling unchallenged under Cook. Jobs highly valued both executives, even granting Ive more operational power than Cook at the time of his death. Today, Ive is collaborating with OpenAI on a potentially revolutionary AI product, not working for Apple. The departure of these executives, whether explicit or tacit, conveniently solidified Cook’s long-term hold on the CEO role.
While Cook’s canned-video tenure has been financially stellar overall, Apple has for many years coasted and thrived on Jobs’ lingering momentum, propped up by Cook’s beige operational savvy and financial engineering. After Cook’s tenure finally, blessedly ends, only time will reveal if Apple can rediscover its Jobsian revolutionary edge.

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