Tim Cook Isn't Going Anywhere

Tim Cook won't be fired just because you think Apple Intelligence sucks

Silicon Valley keeps calling for Tim Cook’s head. Apple, we’re told, missed the AI boat. Maybe. Or maybe the loudest voices are grading the wrong test. Apple doesn’t build for people who spend weekends wiring up local LLMs. It builds for people who just want the tech to work, every time, without drama. Judged on that score, Cook’s job isn’t about winning a demo. Cook has a job because he delivers reliability at planetary scale. On that, he hasn’t failed.

Picture the actual customer. She’s a grandmother in Peoria who taps a photo and says “Send this to Mark” and trusts that the right image, the right Mark, and the right thread appear. No hallucinations, no weirdness, no privacy leaks. That’s Apple’s bar. It’s not a frontier trick.

Many of the fire Cook! hot takes come from founders and investors living at the edge of AI: custom models, weekend RAG pipelines, and a tolerance for bugs that would make a normal user’s skin crawl. That culture creates breakthroughs, but it’s a terrible lens for evaluating Apple. Apple’s comparative advantage has never been being first; it’s being right. Polished, safe, integrated, universal. If you’re optimizing for mainstream trust across a billion devices, move fast and break things is malpractice.

I worked at Bloomberg 20 years ago and saw how institutions grow rigid while outsiders declared them dead. Apple feels similar.

This is why Apple’s AI posture looks underwhelming to frontier eyes. Apple treats AI like wiring behind the walls: powerful, invisible, and safe. It wants the effects—better photos, smarter keyboard, cleaner summaries—without making the mechanism the star of the show. For a startup, AI is the product. For Apple, AI is the substrate.