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Tim Cook is nowhere near the product guy that Steve Jobs was but Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. Apple ha

Tim Cook is nowhere near the product guy that Steve Jobs was but Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. Apple has slowly adopted the Tim Cook doctrine the last 10 years and it has made Apple an 800 pound Gorilla that is also swift on it’s feet. Apple Silicon is the ticket to a 10T market cap and beyond. Their chips will instantly give them a huge advantage, from laptops to cars and AR/VR.

GeekyBear 5y ago
The Tim Cook doctrine, in part: We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  Wait till TSMC gets nationalized by China. Apple doesn’t own any fabs and I don’t think anyone else can manufacture their chips.
  - evgen 5y ago
    Do you have any idea what the T in TSMC stands for? None of the important fabs (or at least none getting the latest tech) are in China and you are not going to see another TSMC fab built in China. Ever.
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.
      - neoromantique 5y ago
        > Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
        threeseed 5y ago
        You need three things to keep TSMC operational: facilities, supply chain and people. Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.
        anadem 5y ago
        True, but that doesn't imply that TMSC will be taken over by China. In Ukraine, the territory is what Russia wants (minerals, crops) but in Taiwan it's the "human capital" that's desirable, and the latter isn't so susceptible to invasion. It's likely that Russia, with ten times the armed forces of Ukraine, will devastate Ukraine, unfortunately. But China is more likely to hold off devastating Taiwan.
        davidf18 5y ago
      - prpl 5y ago
        If things go any worse in Shanghai that might be a more realistic demotivator
  - threeseed 5y ago
    a) Ukraine situation has shown that a clean, Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan is increasingly unlikely. Europe has irrevocably changed and is far more hawkish and willing to join the US in economic coercion which China will struggle to defend against. And AUKUS, Quad, AU-JP-UK-US etc are solidifying and unifying opposition in ways never even imagined a few years ago. b) Intel spun up their Foundry Services division specifically to manufacture chips for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
    - butlerm 5y ago
      A Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan would never happen unless a supermajority of the Taiwanese wanted to give their country away to a totalitarian genocidal police state. Where is the upside?
- na85 5y ago
  Vertical integration; not a new concept historically speaking but perhaps new in the tech/bay area bubble.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    It was of course the norm to an extreme (even more so than Apple today) with minicomputer, mainframe, and high performance computing companies through about the 1980s. We're just seeing a mild reversal of the horizontal integration that companies like Intel and Microsoft brought about.
  - zaphirplane 5y ago
    Owning the Vertical integration was historically IMHO out of favour because the the cost and efficiency See IBM, Solaris and hp big iron. Even car makers would source various parts from other smaller companies
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Owning the chain when it can distinguish you is valuable; but if the parts you need are commodities AND you are not the majority of the market, it may not be as worthwhile. Apple making cloned x86 chips probably wouldn’t have been worth it, for example.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    That was Commodore. Remember they owned MOS. The VIC-20 and 64 couldn't have existed as cheaply as they did without that.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  the way I heard it was - Steve Jobs famously had a cash flow problem once regarding hard disk drives, long ago. After that, accumulating cash became a centerpiece to Steve Jobs dictatorship. Controlling the supply chain, ruthlessly, as your competitors would do to you, developed over the years as cash enabled that. In the specialized, fast-paced and global electronic components markets, it was not possible to control all the inputs, but by M&A and relentless, years long campaigns, some parts were brought in. There is nothing new about controlling your industrial inputs, it is simply difficult to do it.
  - pas 5y ago
    Yes, and the most important part is .. you need a sufficiently high-margin business that you can scale up, otherwise you'll never be big enough to "control your inputs". I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc.. But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics]. Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      > to keeping a shitton of inventory no. I do not have industry details, but it was control through contract terms, using harsh negotiating, that prevailed. As oil-backed transportation dropped in price again and again, many industries moved away from holding inventory at all. btw- Dell was harsher than even Steve Jobs, which is hard to do. Tim Cook was literally picked due to his contract "skills" and that he was an obvious work-a-holic.
      - pas 5y ago
        yep, automotive industry turned just-in-time manufacturing into an artform.
- rayiner 5y ago
  It’s not just that. It’s using volume and supply chain strength to be able to write blank checks to the engineers. “What could you design if we could monopolize TSMC’s leading edge process/build aluminum parts for half the price/could make our own sapphire coated glass?”
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make That "Tim Cook doctrine" is 100% Steve Jobs doctrine, from back when companies like Adobe and Microsoft were holding the platform hostage and represented an existential threat to Apple. You'll find that this neatly explains hundreds of notable Apple choices as disparate as QuickTime for Windows, custom silicon efforts going back to the mid-2000s and ultimately leading to the M series, the 1997 Microsoft investment, etc.
sjg007 5y ago
It's never been cheaper to build your own chips and systems. More people should start to do that. There is so much cool computing we can do.
zozbot234 5y ago
> Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. inb4 'Tim Cool, formerly known as Tim Apple'
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation" Other 'Big Corp CEO' features are antitrust and abuse of dominant market position, forbidding suppliers from selling spare parts to device owners, lobbying opposition to right to repair and spreading lies, disabling the device in case of 'unautorised repair', and running software on your device with the goal of sending their own customers to jail. He is wholesomely taking part in taking away property rights from masses of people and bringin about a new age of digital serfdom. You will own nothing, and anything from your phone to your toaster can be used against you.

GeekyBear 5y ago

The Tim Cook doctrine, in part: We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make

drexlspivey 5y ago
Wait till TSMC gets nationalized by China. Apple doesn’t own any fabs and I don’t think anyone else can manufacture their chips.
- evgen 5y ago
  Do you have any idea what the T in TSMC stands for? None of the important fabs (or at least none getting the latest tech) are in China and you are not going to see another TSMC fab built in China. Ever.
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.
    - neoromantique 5y ago
      > Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands. The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
      - threeseed 5y ago
        You need three things to keep TSMC operational: facilities, supply chain and people. Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.
        anadem 5y ago
        True, but that doesn't imply that TMSC will be taken over by China. In Ukraine, the territory is what Russia wants (minerals, crops) but in Taiwan it's the "human capital" that's desirable, and the latter isn't so susceptible to invasion. It's likely that Russia, with ten times the armed forces of Ukraine, will devastate Ukraine, unfortunately. But China is more likely to hold off devastating Taiwan.
      - davidf18 5y ago
    - prpl 5y ago
      If things go any worse in Shanghai that might be a more realistic demotivator
- threeseed 5y ago
  a) Ukraine situation has shown that a clean, Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan is increasingly unlikely. Europe has irrevocably changed and is far more hawkish and willing to join the US in economic coercion which China will struggle to defend against. And AUKUS, Quad, AU-JP-UK-US etc are solidifying and unifying opposition in ways never even imagined a few years ago. b) Intel spun up their Foundry Services division specifically to manufacture chips for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
  - butlerm 5y ago
    A Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan would never happen unless a supermajority of the Taiwanese wanted to give their country away to a totalitarian genocidal police state. Where is the upside?
na85 5y ago
Vertical integration; not a new concept historically speaking but perhaps new in the tech/bay area bubble.
- ghaff 5y ago
  It was of course the norm to an extreme (even more so than Apple today) with minicomputer, mainframe, and high performance computing companies through about the 1980s. We're just seeing a mild reversal of the horizontal integration that companies like Intel and Microsoft brought about.
- zaphirplane 5y ago
  Owning the Vertical integration was historically IMHO out of favour because the the cost and efficiency See IBM, Solaris and hp big iron. Even car makers would source various parts from other smaller companies
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Owning the chain when it can distinguish you is valuable; but if the parts you need are commodities AND you are not the majority of the market, it may not be as worthwhile. Apple making cloned x86 chips probably wouldn’t have been worth it, for example.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  That was Commodore. Remember they owned MOS. The VIC-20 and 64 couldn't have existed as cheaply as they did without that.
mistrial9 5y ago
the way I heard it was - Steve Jobs famously had a cash flow problem once regarding hard disk drives, long ago. After that, accumulating cash became a centerpiece to Steve Jobs dictatorship. Controlling the supply chain, ruthlessly, as your competitors would do to you, developed over the years as cash enabled that. In the specialized, fast-paced and global electronic components markets, it was not possible to control all the inputs, but by M&A and relentless, years long campaigns, some parts were brought in. There is nothing new about controlling your industrial inputs, it is simply difficult to do it.
- pas 5y ago
  Yes, and the most important part is .. you need a sufficiently high-margin business that you can scale up, otherwise you'll never be big enough to "control your inputs". I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc.. But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics]. Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    > to keeping a shitton of inventory no. I do not have industry details, but it was control through contract terms, using harsh negotiating, that prevailed. As oil-backed transportation dropped in price again and again, many industries moved away from holding inventory at all. btw- Dell was harsher than even Steve Jobs, which is hard to do. Tim Cook was literally picked due to his contract "skills" and that he was an obvious work-a-holic.
    - pas 5y ago
      yep, automotive industry turned just-in-time manufacturing into an artform.
rayiner 5y ago
It’s not just that. It’s using volume and supply chain strength to be able to write blank checks to the engineers. “What could you design if we could monopolize TSMC’s leading edge process/build aluminum parts for half the price/could make our own sapphire coated glass?”
CharlesW 5y ago
> We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make That "Tim Cook doctrine" is 100% Steve Jobs doctrine, from back when companies like Adobe and Microsoft were holding the platform hostage and represented an existential threat to Apple. You'll find that this neatly explains hundreds of notable Apple choices as disparate as QuickTime for Windows, custom silicon efforts going back to the mid-2000s and ultimately leading to the M series, the 1997 Microsoft investment, etc.

sjg007 5y ago

It's never been cheaper to build your own chips and systems. More people should start to do that. There is so much cool computing we can do.

zozbot234 5y ago

> Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. inb4 'Tim Cool, formerly known as Tim Apple'

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation" Other 'Big Corp CEO' features are antitrust and abuse of dominant market position, forbidding suppliers from selling spare parts to device owners, lobbying opposition to right to repair and spreading lies, disabling the device in case of 'unautorised repair', and running software on your device with the goal of sending their own customers to jail. He is wholesomely taking part in taking away property rights from masses of people and bringin about a new age of digital serfdom. You will own nothing, and anything from your phone to your toaster can be used against you.