Cook makes shareholders happy but he's not much of a leader. Jobs was a leader.

The butterfly keyboard catastrophe whereby Apple sold broken laptops for 4 years just because they didn't want to waste money retooling, would never have happened under Jobs. Jobs had the courage to say fuck the shareholders when necessary, Cook does not and it's a recurring theme of his leadership.

Being a 70's child, thus having lived through most Apple consumer history, I would say it slowly feels like the Apple of old, when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT and Pixar, the main difference is that now they have enough money to burn and make dumb decisions.

I recently got a newer iPhone and moved to iOS 18 with the hardware change. I had to watch some youtube tutorials explaining navigation and swipe locations. Over and over I've had the thought "this never would have flown under Steve."