Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple. Several observations on his tenure from a long-term Apple customer and observer.

Among the working titles for this post were Good riddance and Stop the praises, and I haven’t chosen them not because I thought they were somehow mean-spirited, but because they sounded like coming from a place of deep care. They sounded like the reaction of someone with deep emotional investment in the whole thing. But over the past few years I — a long-time enthusiastic Apple user and customer — have become desensitised towards most of what Apple does and what Apple has become. And I have to thank Tim Cook for that. I was told on Mastodon that I shouldn’t judge Tim Cook only by the standard that was Apple leadership before him, because that would be missing the point. That “dismissing an era that delivered custom silicon, record financial performance, and a strengthened privacy among many other things feels less like critique and more like nostalgia frustration.” This because my initial reaction after learning that Cook would step down as CEO of Apple was indeed along the lines of…