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WaPo: ‘Apple faces existential problems and is in need of new blood’

MacDailyNews

Jul 9

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In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, Apple faces mounting challenges as it navigates geopolitical tensions, regulatory scrutiny, and shifting market dynamics – including embarrassingly missing the GenAI paradigm shift and struggling to catch up. A newly published opinion piece in The Washington Post by Adam Lashinsky says the company “is in need of new blood.”

Adam Lashinsky for The Washington Post:
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That Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer and a 27-year veteran of the company, choose to step down at the end of the year isn’t remarkable… It is rather the timing of Williams’s departure, and the person named to replace him, another Cook acolyte named Sabih Khan, that speak to Apple’s predicament…
Apple’s new chief operating officer, in other words, represents more of the same for the company’s leadership at a time when the company faces myriad existential problems that Cook, or his successor, will need to solve.
An inevitable result of its size and success, Apple faces antitrust challenges in the United States and in Europe… President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, particularly his trade war with China, threaten the core of how Apple operates… Apple simply has no short- or medium-term solution to the fact that the bulk of its profits come from devices manufactured outside the U.S. — and still overwhelmingly in China… Then there is the very future of Apple’s products. A year ago, the iPhone maker unveiled with great fanfare something called Apple Intelligence, the company’s promise of AI-infused software that would transform the utility of its key profit generator. Last month, Apple confessed that its AI promises were premature. Instead, Apple is looking to partner with other companies, revealing that it is badly behind in the race for AI leadership.
The AI debacle speaks to how muddled Apple’s product strategy has become. Cook used to brag that all of Apple’s products could fit on one conference-room table. Today, Apple is in danger of becoming the one thing that frightened Jobs more than anything: a company that says yes too often without unleashing anything daringly new. Its current iPhone lineup looks about what it looked like five years ago. Its last big product launch, the Vision Pro augmented-reality headset, has been a costly flop…
What’s needed now is someone as radically different as Cook was from Jobs… Once again, the nearly 50-year-old company needs new blood at the top. Its future depends on it.

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MacDailyNews Take: Welcome, Adam, to the atoll we call “Reality Island!” For a long time, years, we were alone here, but now it’s getting increasingly populated.

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.

Sigh.

You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024

Apple needed new blood years ago, but the old blood simply won’t let go. – MacDailyNews, January 22, 2025

See also: Steve Jobs never meant for Tim Cook to still be Apple’s CEO in 2025 – MacDailyNews, July 9, 2025

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