Here’s a surprising fact: CEO Tim Cook has now been with Apple longer than its iconic co-founder and former CEO, the late Steve Jobs, which means it’s now conceivable that the person who has the biggest influence on what the Cupertino tech giant has become for 50 years and what it will be for the next 50 is Cook. But that’s probably not how Cook, who has been with the company for 28 years, sees it.
“He’s a once-in-a-thousand-years person… and I loved him,” Cook said in a recent interview with CBS News’ David Pogue (author of Apple: The First 50 Years). The company, almost allergic to looking back, has, as Cook put it, been forced to develop new muscle and find ways to celebrate the milestone, which includes the interview, Pogue’s upcoming book and as-yet-unannounced potential celebrations and content on the official anniversary date, April 1, 2026.
It was grim, to be honest…
Tim Cook on the state of Apple in 1998
Cook covered a range of topics, including what is special about the company (people and culture), and acknowledged that his tenure covers more than half of the company’s history. Still, I noted his reflections on how and why he chose to join Apple in 1998, and it mostly boiled down to Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, and his vision.
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“The company was running without Steve,” Cook said. Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak, but was forced out just a decade later. He would not return until 1997 and the company was not in good shape.
“It was bleak, to be honest,” Cook told Pogue, recalling worries about making payroll and whether or not the business would succeed.
Look at
Hard times and an inspiring leader
I remember those days and how Jobs secured $150 million in funding from, of all places, Microsoft to keep the company afloat. In 2012, when I had the opportunity to ask Cook about his decision to join Apple, he revealed that when he initially got the headhunter’s call for an interview, he said no because he hadn’t been with Compaq that long. What’s more, Compaq was a big PC company and at the time Apple was struggling.
Cook eventually relented and took a red-eye to meet Jobs on a Saturday.
“The honest-to-God truth is five minutes into the conversation, I want to join Apple,” Cook told me at the time.
I heard echoes of the comment in the story Cook shared with Pogue about the initial interview process that brought him to Apple,
“I was taken, in the first meeting with him, and I wanted to throw caution to the wind and join,” he told Pogue.
The honest-to-God truth is five minutes into the conversation, I want to join Apple,” Cook told me at the time.
Tim Cook in 2012 on why he wanted to join Apple
Jobs was always a charismatic showman on stage, but what could he have said in that first meeting that so inspired Cook? It turned out that it was all about a fresh and useful counterintuitive strategy.
At a time when everyone else in the tech industry was targeting the company, he “took Apple deep into consumers at a time when I knew other people were doing the exact opposite,” he told me in 2012, adding that Jobs even revealed a little about the product that would eventually become the iMac.
“I never thought following the pack was a good strategy. You know you’re destined to be average at best by doing that, and so I saw brilliance in that,” Cook added in that 2012 conversation.
The best possible advice
When Jobs asked him to become CEO, he also gave Cook a big gift, telling him, “Never ask what I would do, just do the right thing,” Cook recalled to Pogue. It took the burden off Cook’s shoulders of “What would Steve do?”
Still, Cook admits he thinks about Steve Jobs every day and made it clear that this is still the company the two Steves built in a garage 50 years ago.
“[Jobs] principles are the DNA of this company, 50 years after its inception and I hope 100 years and 200 years into the future,” Cook told Pogue.
Maybe that’s why there’s always been something different about Apple and its customers.
What’s next?
“Apple was the only technology company I knew, including the one I worked at,” Cook said in 2012, “that had worked where if a customer got angry with the company, they would yell and scream loudly, but they would continue to buy.”
“At Compaq, if people got mad at Compaq, they’d just buy from Dell. At Dell, if they got mad at Dell, they’d just buy at that point from IBM, and then people moved back and forth freely, but an Apple customer was a unique breed, and there was this feeling that’s like that — you just don’t see that in technology in general. You could see it and feel it in Apple customers.”
Perhaps Cook is finally in a reflective mood because his long journey may be coming to an end. Rumors continue to swirl about his succession plan, with most experts pointing to Apple Hardware chief John Ternus as a likely successor (Apple COO Sabih Khan is a dark horse candidate). Cook previously said he wouldn’t leave “until the voice in my head says, ‘It’s time.’ However, Cook was notably absent from the latest MacBook Neo unveiling, and Ternus was front and center
Whatever the near future holds, Cook sounds ready to look back on Apple’s first half century, “There’s great value in looking back and feeling gratitude for the journey, feeling grateful for all the characters that have been a part of that journey.”
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