So it finally happened: Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's CEO after 15 years. And as was rumored, John Ternus is replacing him.
I'm sure the "Applesphere" will be filled with absolutely everyone posting their take on this for the next few days… and I don't really have that many smart things to say, I'm not really an "Apple blogger". But I felt like I should still say something, having been in this community of Mac/iOS devs since around 2008-09, part of it working on it full time. And after all, that "mac" in my handle means something…
I didn't manage to (virtually) get to know Steve Jobs as well as I know many other people did, since I only really got interested in Apple things around 2007, so about 4 years before his death. But still, I knew he was the person who made Apple the company it was, and that he would be very hard if not impossible to replace. I was a bit worried if the company I felt a strong connection to both as a user and as a developer would be able to stay as cool, fun and innovative as it was, if it won't go to crap and become another boring American corporation. But I had a lot of hope that things would turn out just fine.
And I think in his first years as CEO they have. He brought the iPhone and the Mac through several different generations of products, massively increasing the number of people who used them. He turned the company into a well designed machine for planning, designing, producing and distributing any kind of hardware in enormous numbers, as optimally as physically possible. Tim Cook's Apple launched Apple Watch, Retina Macs, FaceID & OLED iPhones, Swift, SwiftUI, visionOS, Apple Silicon chips and ARM-based macOS, and many other interesting things. The company itself is surely doing extremely well financially.
But I feel like somewhere along the way, some good parts of the old Apple have been lost, and in the second half of the Cook period, more and more things have started to go in a wrong direction:
While Apple is doing really well on the hardware front, their famous attention to detail and good design taste in software seem to be long gone; their OSes and apps have more and more issues, UIs are poorly thought through, break their own HIG guidelines, have bad accessibility, are less intuitive to use, bugs often stay unfixed for a long time… Now we got the Liquid Glass redesign that nobody asked for, which made things more shiny and animated at the cost of readability and broke a lot of things, and the Mac is becoming more and more like iOS with each new version, trading off macOS's uniqueness and strengths for a forced unification just for the sake of it.
Their relationship with developers has massively deteriorated over the years. This used to be a company that we had a deep connection to, that was special to us Mac & iOS devs, and now for a lot of us it's just a platform that we're focused on to a smaller or larger degree. The episode of the "Under the Radar" podcast "Our Changing Relationship with Apple" (Feb 2025) described my feelings on this pretty well: "When you lose respect for someone you care about, that's a really hard thing to process (…) and I have lost a lot of respect for Apple."
Indie Mac and iOS developers and small companies have greatly contributed to Apple software platforms being something that a lot of people wanted to use. But at some point they were no longer needed, they served their purpose, and the focus has moved to big companies making them a ton of money with in-app payments and subscriptions. Apps from single developers and smaller teams are often rejected by App Review in very random ways, without a good explanation and a realistic way for appeal, except the infamous "running to the press never helps" (happened to me too). There have been some horror stories about some developers' apps being blocked or rejected after Apple has "sherlocked" some of their features.
Here in the Bluesky / ATProto world we have this phrase "the company is a future adversary", coined by Bluesky to mean that they've been designing things from the beginning with the thought in mind that they themselves may turn into a company that drops "don't be evil" from their motto, and that they need to decentralize the control over the network enough before this happens. I feel like with Apple, we may have passed the "is a future adversary" point long ago.You can say I'm naive to have ever expected anything else in the world of American wild capitalism, but the Tim Cook era of Apple has felt like the company was gradually focused more and more on just chasing profits with dollar symbols in their eyes 🤑 at the cost of everything else. Even large companies with apps on the App Store are often hurt by this, with Apple insisting that everyone has to pay 30% Apple Tax on all revenue for the privilege of selling apps on the store for which there is no alternative. If there's no way this can make a business sense in your case, that's your problem. They have $67 billion US dollars in cash – seriously, at what point does one have enough and does no longer need to come up with new ways to squeeze money from users?
The company also furiously resists any regulation that would force it to give up some control or loosen some restrictions over what things third party developers can do and how much they can be asked to pay for that. They despise the very idea that someone could dare to tell them, the company that single-handedly controls half of the whole mobile phone and tablet OS world, what they should do and how. This in particular applies to the European Union/Commission. Any successfully passed regulation is implemented by "malicious compliance", technically following the law in a way to absolutely minimize the effect.
I'm very far from claiming that Tim Cook is a Trump and Republican supporter by ideology, the way Elon Musk and most of the Big Tech company owners are… but he definitely didn't manage to carry the weight of being a Big Tech company CEO with principles in the Trump era. The $1M donation to Trump's inauguration, the golden statue given as a gift and other things like that are something that we will remember, and that will sadly be a part of his legacy. He could have chosen to give a good example, to use his position for good, and he chose to kiss the ring of the emperor like everyone else.
I know many people will disagree, but I feel like Apple has lost some focus just trying to do too many different things in different areas at the same time. They used to be a company just making big and small computers, but now they somehow also make movies and TV shows?… And fitness training content? And they've apparently spent years trying to make a car?
I don't want to sound too negative. I'm still a fan of Apple OSes and hardware, I love my thin and light ARM MacBook Air and my Mac Studio (less so the iPhone that I can't easily upgrade, because every current model is way too large). I'm pretty happy with my current macOS (Sequoia), with the ecosystem of first and third-party Mac and iOS apps I use, with iCloud and other system APIs they're built on. I'm not even close to seriously considering switching to Linux, Windows or Android. I know I will buy another Mac and another iPhone again in a couple of years and will probably be very happy with it. I still have fun building the occasional iOS or Mac app from time to time. I don't hate Apple or Tim Cook, far from it – I think he tried as best as he could to follow the vision for Apple he had – I'm just disappointed with a lot of things.
So here we are, in 2026, with all of the above and an upcoming new CEO. I don't know much about Ternus, but from what I've read, he seems like a nice and smart guy, it sounds like people like him and put a lot of hope on him. So I will try too. There are enormous expectations that everyone has for him, and he surely knows it.
I don't think it's realistic to expect that everything that's bad will be fixed and fixed soon, I know that things don't really work this way in real life. But there have been cases of companies getting fixed in a noticeable way, e.g. I feel like Satya Nadella has changed Microsoft for the better in a lot of ways when he took over after Ballmer. I will be happy if at least one or two of these improve in some noticeable ways after a while:
more attention to detail, good design, UX, HIG, accessibility and software quality in their OSes and system apps
fixing the relationship and treatment of developers, especially those with apps on the iOS App Store
becoming more open and cooperating, in particular with the EU and other states doing sensible regulation, in particular about opening up the iOS, iPhones and App Store
growing some spine against the Trump regime