Tim Cook

"It wasn’t simply Apple dreaming up new ideas for its manufacturers to execute. Rather, it was a collaborative process between Cupertino and Shenzhen. “[[Apple products are] not designed](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor356) and sent over. That sounds like there’s no interaction,” Apple CEO Tim Cook once told an interviewer. The idea of having something designed in California and manufactured elsewhere “requires a kind of hand-in-glove partnership.” [In 2019, United Airlines made](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor357) a promotional banner about how valuable Apple was to its business. United wrote that Apple booked fifty business-class seats daily from San Francisco to Shanghai, from which the airline made $35 million each year. That’s over eighteen thousand business-class seats on one route."

"[A 2012 story](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor358) in the *New York* *Times* reported that Apple needed to hire nearly nine thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China, they were able to do it in two weeks. A large pool of good labor increases the speed of design and production cycles. As Tim Cook once said, “[In the US, you could have](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor359) a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.”"

"Cook, often asked how he feels about all this, has suggested Apple is some kind of change agent. “Your choice is, do you participate? Or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be?” Cook said in 2017. “My own view—very strongly—is you show up and you participate. You get in the arena. Because nothing ever changes from the sideline.” But White says Cook isn’t participating so much as being used—like when he accepted, in October 2019, a role as chairman of the advisory board at the Beijing-based Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. “The role that they want Tim Cook to play is Useful Puppet, one that they can use for propaganda purposes,” she says. In her view, Samsung operates at a considerable business disadvantage because South Korea is a democracy with NGOs, trade unions, and a vibrant press that, for instance, has interviewed grieving parents after some workers developed leukemia from working in factories. “Apple doesn’t have any of that possible pressure,” White says. “Apple actually has a government that prevents all of those key stakeholders in society from writing an article or appearing on television. They can’t even protest.”"

"But Cook’s email to the board was a model of transparency relative to what he and Maestri would tell analysts on the earnings call just a few hours later. They informed Wall Street that Apple was expecting $89 billion to $93 billion of revenue in the holiday quarter, underwhelming investors. But they didn’t say a word about the muted sales of the XR, or the difficulties of forecasting, or that Cupertino now expected China revenues to shrink. Instead, they soothed investors with cheery sentiment. The obfuscation was brazen. Asked specifically about the XR, Cook replied that it’d been on sale for just five days so “we have very, very little data there.” Asked about “deceleration” in emerging markets including China, Cook said it was a “great question” and mentioned “we’re seeing pressure in… markets like Turkey, India, Brazil, Russia.” Then he switched to China, subtly moving from present tense—the nature of the question—and looked back a quarter: “In relation to China specifically, I would not put China in that category. Our business in China was very strong last quarter. We grew 16 percent, which we’re very happy with. iPhone in particular was very strong, very strong double-digit growth there.”"

"How Wang won that order has become part of Apple lore. The story is that procurement head Tony Blevins struck a deal for Luxshare to assemble the earbuds at cost—no margin at all. But unlike so many similar stories, this was less about Blevins’s ruthlessness and more about Grace Wang’s craftiness. She agreed to do the work for free on one condition: that Tim Cook visit her factory and be photographed on the assembly line. It’s difficult to confirm the margins really were zero, but on that day in December when Cook visited Luxshare’s factory northwest of Shanghai, he offered toothy grins and praised all that he saw. “This is an extraordinary example of a Chinese dream being realized,” Cook said. He even took to Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter, to proclaim that Luxshare was making AirPods with “phenomenal precision and care,” and that “Chairman Grace Wang has built a culture of excellence that starts with people. We are thrilled to work with them!”"

"Doug Guthrie recalls the first time he met Mahe. He was one of the people advocating for an official head of China, but he didn’t play a role in the selection process or know who she was. So he was surprised when, on one of his trips to Cupertino, she asked him to come by her office. It was after Chinese New Year, in early 2017, a time when Guthrie had developed real influence with senior executives. He walked to her office in Infinite Loop and exchanged pleasantries. Mahe gazed at him and said, “So I guess I have you to blame?” Guthrie’s eyes widened; the question felt aggressive. “We’ve never met,” he responded. “Have I done something?” And Mahe said, “Well, I’m getting on a plane and going to China, and it’s because Tim [Cook] said, ‘You better listen to Doug Guthrie.’ ” Within a few minutes it became clear Mahe wasn’t just referring to a typical jaunt over to China; she’d been asked to take on a major career challenge, one that would involve moving to Shanghai with her non-Chinese-speaking husband and their children."

"In the years since, two narratives within Apple have developed regarding what happened in those eighteen days. One is that CEO Tim Cook underwent something of a twenty-first-century show trial: Beijing had deliberately accused Apple of something it knew wasn’t true, to demonstrate its power. The whole episode was a spectacle designed to make Cupertino understand its junior position in the partnership and then publicly kowtow. Some hard-liners in China certainly saw Cook’s apology this way: On social media one rejoiced that Apple had been compelled to “bow its arrogant head.”"

"Cook’s reputation quickly extended beyond the Apple campus. When Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s head of hardware, invited Cook to the Netherlands to negotiate with a company called Lucent as they were trying to help make Wi-Fi a standard, Cook demonstrated a skill in negotiating that awed him. Apple wasn’t even a big company at the time, but Cook managed to grasp every facet of Lucent’s business to understand what the real costs were, so he could low-ball an offer and convince them they’d still earn profit at scale. “Tim hammered home the prices,” Rubinstein says. “It was basically a proctology exam.”"

"Over the following three weeks, as the media attacks widened, Cupertino learned that treating Chinese government officials like vendors in their supply chain wasn’t going to fly. Only then did Cook pen an apology letter, in Mandarin, for Apple’s China website. (According to one person, the Apple CEO also flew to Beijing for a secret meeting with China’s top officials. “The Chinese would never accept a written apology,” this person says. “You have to lose face in front of them, and bow.”)"

"Tall, with resolute eyes, exhibiting a stiff posture and exuding a quiet confidence, Tim Cook looked like an IBM executive right out of central casting. He was a small-town Alabama boy, born in 1960 as the second of three sons. Cook had no obviously discernible genius, but he made up for it with an industriousness more suited to characters of fiction. After years of being voted “Most Studious” by his high school classmates, he went off to Auburn University to study industrial engineering."

"Numerous executives who worked with both Jobs and Cook can’t help but contrast them. One executive says Steve Jobs was difficult because his emotions could abruptly go from zero to a hundred. “Tim,” this person adds, “goes from thirty-five to thirty-six.” And yet somehow that would be more disconcerting, because it was so unusual. A former vice president at Apple says the way you knew Tim Cook was upset was when he would say, “I just don’t understand.” This person adds: “When he’d say that, you’d see little puddles on the floor—the sweat coming off of people.”"

"Tim Cook had once described inventory as “fundamentally evil,” likening electronics to dairy products that might spoil. Another time he said, “I’d prefer to be able to talk inventories in terms of hours, not days.” The results showed this was not a mere aspiration. Apple had 2.5 times better inventory turns than Nokia or Tesco, a grocer lauded for its efficiency, and it was 12 times better than Coca-Cola."

"Tim Cook’s obfuscations and omissions on the November 1 earnings call infuriated investors. The revenue warning he issued two months later caused Apple’s market value to fall $75 billion, and investors, led by the UK’s Norfolk county council, sued. When the case moved forward and lawyers for Norfolk asked that documents from “relevant” individuals be made available in discovery, Apple surprised the opposing lawyers by not including emails from Isabel Mahe. The plaintiffs thought they were onto something. They accused Apple of “attempting to unjustifiably circumscribe discovery” by excluding such an important individual. They demanded her inclusion, perplexed that Apple “somehow concluded” that the managing director of Greater China wasn’t relevant in a lawsuit concerning the economic conditions, sales, forecasts, and production of iPhones—*in China.*"

"Two years after the death of Steve Jobs, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison claimed it was inevitable Apple would struggle under Tim Cook. You only had to look, he said, at what happened to the company in the period after Jobs was ousted in 1985. “We already know. We saw. We conducted the experiment,” Ellison told talk show host Charlie Rose in 2013. His finger tracing an upwards curve, he said Apple had been an extraordinary success during Jobs’s first spell at the company, only to slump—his finger dropped—when he left. “We saw Apple with Steve Jobs” when he returned in 1997—up went his finger. “Now, we’re gonna see Apple without Steve Jobs”—another drop. “He is irreplaceable. They will not be nearly so successful.”"

"The problem was, shareholder-first capitalism enabled—indeed, even encouraged—corporations to ignore, if not undermine, the national interest. Executives found that they could focus on actions to reap short-term benefits—gambits such as cutting costs and outsourcing jobs to Asia—and ignore wider societal impact. As this book has demonstrated, Cupertino’s interests have significantly diverged from Washington’s since the death of Steve Jobs; the wider implications could end up tarnishing Cook’s legacy."

"Chapter 36, “5 Alarm Fire,” is exclusively sourced from more than 1,000 pages of documents including emails among Apple’s top executives; internal studies of China, India, and Huawei; and depositions of key figures including Tim Cook. This material was made public in December 2023, several months before Apple settled the case, but through some miracle it hadn’t been noticed or reported on. I spent more than thirty hours sifting through the documents and the resulting narrative is, I believe, the first presentation of the material outside of a courtroom. Other chapters were supplemented by original material derived from unnamed sources. These include notes from a series of Steve Jobs–led meetings in the summer of 1997; internal surveys of Chinese consumer sentiment in 2010; internal presentations on labor demand and churn in Chinese factories; and other material discussing Apple/supplier relationships and its dilemmas with China from after 2015."