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

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

MacDailyNews

May 30

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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:

— 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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Apple appears ready to flex its AI model muscles

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Apple appears ready to flex its AI model muscles

MacDailyNews

May 30

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Since Apple Intelligence launched last fall, the company’s AI efforts have mostly amounted to a string of setbacks. The biggest one? The full suite of Apple Intelligence features still hasn’t rolled out and likely won’t for another nine months,” Gene Munster writes for Deepwater Asset Management. “That puts it about a year behind schedule, a kind of delay I haven’t seen in all my years following Apple.’

Gene Munster for Deepwater Asset Management:
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Until recently, based on Apple’s capex outlook, I had all but ruled out the company offering its LLM to developers. But according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it now sounds like Apple will start offering its smaller models, and eventually its full LLM, to developers. The announcement is expected at WWDC. The big unknown is timing of when will developers actually be able to build these models into their apps. My guess is we’ll start to see the smaller models go live late this year.
Shares of AAPL barely moved on the news, likely because investors still see Apple’s AI push as a “show me” story after so many recent delays.

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MacDailyNews Take: Anything positive whatsoever on the Apple Intelligence vaporware front would be most appreciated by Apple device users, developers, and AAPL shareholders.

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Apple working to remove mechanical buttons from iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch

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Apple working to remove mechanical buttons from iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch

MacDailyNews

May 30

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Apple Watch Ultra features a new customizable Action button in high-contrast international orange that gives users quick physical control for a range of functions. — Apple Watch Ultra’s customizable Action button in high-contrast international orange

A rumor from China suggests Apple is developing solid-state buttons with haptic feedback for not only the iPhone but also future iPad and Apple Watch models.

Tim Hardwick for MacRumors:
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Back in 2022, several reports suggested that Apple intended to bring solid-state buttons to the iPhone 15 Pro in 2023 as part of “Project Bongo.” Solid-state haptic buttons reduce mechanical wear, while enabling users to differentiate between a light press and a firm press to trigger different functions. However, the plan was reportedly canceled at a late stage. They were then rumored to come to the iPhone 16 Pro, before being shelved indefinitely.
Or that’s what was believed at the time. It appears that Apple never fully dropped the idea, if Weibo-based leaker Instant Digital is correct. Last month, the leaker claimed Apple was still investigating haptic buttons for a future iPhone. And today the account has doubled down on the claim, saying the project is not just active for the iPhone, but for Apple’s “entire product line,” including iPad and Apple Watch.

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MacDailyNews Take: As anyone who’s used Apple’s Force Touch trackpad on a MacBook knows, it’s magical when done well. It can also be a great aid for removing weight (no hinge mechanism required) and for liquid ingress resistance.

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