alt Hacker NewsCook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.
What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.
The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.
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> Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down
This is one of those political things where people deny something right up until the minute when it happens.
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years
How frequently do you expect a new major product category across the industry? Is there any company who launched one that wasn't ChatGPT in the same time frame?
CEO’s always say they are not planning to leave up until the moment they leave.
This seems true at many companies. While I'm not all that impressed by many current leaders, I'm sort of terrified of my generation (younger gen x) taking over because some of them seem to not be prepared or not have been prepared for the roles.
Look outside the HackerNews/Silicon Valley bubble: Apple is doing very well. Consumers broadly don't care whether their phone has AI, as long as it has the ChatGPT/etc apps. iMessage and FaceTime have a stranglehold on, uh, everyone in America. They sell more iPhones every quarter. Their services revenue keeps going up. Mac sales are up big. Apple Silicon is so far ahead of anything else on the market, they could stay on the M5 platform for three years and still be #1. Apple Watch is the most popular watch brand in the world (and its not close; sensing a pattern?). Airpods, alone, make more money than Texas Instruments or SuperMicro. Yes; Vision Pro and iPhone Air sold poorly. Who cares? They're both obvious stepping stones to products that will sell well (Vision Pro -> Glasses-style AR device, iPhone Air -> thin engineering will help with the iPhone Fold). Apple can afford to take risks and adjust.
Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.
Also it's hard to maintain exponential growth forever.
> Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.
No he isn't and no there wasn't.
> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years
I agree this is true, but Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover. Smartphones, iPods, earbuds, good desktop PCs were all after they watched what was good and then made it better (if you like what they did, anyway).
The next hardware category is probably AR glasses if someone can make them good and cheap, nobody has so Apple won’t do anything but wait. I’m sure they have an optics lab working on something, but probably not full throttle (and the Vision Pro is an attempt to make the OS).