Cooked

By all means, Tim Cook was a better choice for Apple CEO than most people you could pick out of a hat; perhaps even of high executives at Apple working at the time. But this judgement is not unalloyed. The following things happened under his watch (in no particular order): Apple decided against lowering the App Store 30% cut, despite internal arguments from top executives that the rationale was wearing thin (made just before his accession), got into a lawsuit with large app developers because of this inflexibility, held up a double standard of Apple's tracking not being tracking but app developers' tracking being tracking, and fought developers knives-out at every turn in general. Apple maintained this App Store-only platform obsession even when it cost their users significant freedoms in authoritarian countries, and forced them into making hard-to-defend practical decisions, and unevenly applied policies. Apple started focusing on services, and by all accounts aligning the incentives…