Captain Cook In Uncharted Territory At Apple

It did this thanks to a notoriously stubborn and difficult CEO in Steve Jobs, who surrounded himself with talented lieutenants and listened to what his investors thought but ultimately made all of his decisions himself.

Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs, and that's been fine for the years since Jobs has no longer been with us. Cook's long tenure at Apple, and a gift for supply-chain logistics, made him the right CEO when Apple's largest challenge seemed to be iterating and building the iPhone to sell billions of them around the world. In his own way, Cook was as good a promise keeper as Jobs.

Yet all of a sudden, Captain Cook seems to be in uncharted territory. He's found himself there thanks to opening up his decision-making to the whims of Wall Street, which was demanding some big news on what Apple would do with artificial intelligence.

Jobs wouldnt have allowed himself to be rushed, but Cook did. By prematurely introducing Apple Intelligence to the world, Cook gave his company a deadline it wasn't sure it could meet, and now it hasn't. The company has broken promises to customers, with TV spots trumpeting features that are still nowhere near completion, nudging customers to buy a smartphone that costs tens of thousands of rand and does not do as advertised. Naturally, there was small print.

That's the way forward, here - a return to the roots of the iPhone as a place for external developers to create ground-breaking applications. To get out of this AI hole, and keep the iPhone on the cutting edge, they need to borrow that famous battle cry from the former Microsoft man Steve Ballmer: Developers! Developers! Developers!