Squashing

MacKenzie Sigalos, writing for CNBC, under the misleading headline “Tim Cook Squashes Retirement Rumors, Says He ‘Can’t Imagine Life Without Apple’”:

Asked about reports that he was preparing to step aside, Cook told ABC, “No, I didn’t say that. I haven’t said that. I love what I do deeply. Twenty-eight years ago, I walked into Apple, and I’ve loved every day of it since.”

He added that he “can’t imagine life without Apple.”

The Good Morning America interview was with Michael Strahan, in a five-minute segment for the show. Strahan actually did a decent job. He asked Cook if Apple expects to be reimbursed for the $3+ billion dollars they spent on Trump’s tariffs last year, now that the Supreme Court has ruled them invalid. (Cook says they’re waiting to see what the courts say about getting that money back.) Strahan then asked a pretty pointed question about Cook’s high-profile appearances alongside Trump — attending the inauguration (Strahan didn’t mention that Cook paid Trump $1 million for the honor to attend), the 24-karat-gold Apple-logo trophy, attending the White House premiere of Melania. Cook answered by saying he’s not political and only cares about policy, which makes sense only if you believe government policy decisions aren’t political — which is to say it makes no sense. But Strahan asked, and Cook’s answer speaks for itself.

But to the point of Sigalos’s report on the interview for CNBC, Cook didn’t “squash” anything related to his tenure at Apple in that interview. Watch for yourself. Cook correctly points out that he himself has never said anything (in public, at least) about being tired or wanting to “step back a little bit”, as Strahan claimed he had read. But Cook does not refute that he might soon step aside as CEO, nor does he say he intends to remain CEO for the foreseeable future. It’s an incredibly deft non-answer that would remain true if Cook steps down as CEO in two weeks, on April 1 (Apple’s anniversary), and would remain true if he’s still CEO five years from now. (The “can’t imagine life without Apple” comment would fit like a glove if, say, he steps aside as CEO but becomes executive chairman of the board.)

This headline is journalistic malpractice from CNBC.

The rest of Sigalos’s report is even worse:

The comments come after a turbulent stretch for Apple’s C-suite. In December, the company lost AI chief John Giannandrea, its top lawyer and a key design executive in a single week — while chip guru Johny Srouji reportedly signaled he might leave, too.

The departures raised pointed questions about whether Cook’s operational leadership style is the right fit for the artificial intelligence era.

Where to even start with this? Jiminy.

Giannandrea was shown the door after he blew it with Apple Intelligence. Cook took Giannandrea’s responsibilities away almost a year ago, weeks after the company’s embarrassing admission that next-generation Siri would be delayed by at least a full year. The December news was that Giannandrea was officially “retiring”, but that was just Cook allowing him as graceful and dignified an exit as possible. He was effectively fired back in April or May.

Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel, just plain old retired in December after a successful nine-year stint in the role. Lisa Jackson announced her retirement as VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives, alongside Adams. Zero drama around either of their departures — just, for Apple, coincidentally bad timing.

The Alan Dye leaving for Meta thing, that was unexpected, and, to some degree, turbulent. But I have yet to speak to a single person within Apple, nor a single UI designer outside Apple, who thinks it’s anything but good news for Apple that Dye jumped ship for Meta. Not just that Dye is a fraud of a UI designer. Not just that he and his inner circle have vandalized MacOS, the crown jewel of human-computer interaction. Not just that he and his team are given — or have taken — credit for innovative, high-quality work on VisionOS that really belongs to the interaction team Mike Rockwell put together for VisionOS. Not just that Dye left Apple for a rival company, period — something unheard of amongst Apple’s bleed-in-six-colors executive ranks. But that he left for Meta, of all fucking companies? That’s the proof that Dye (and his urban cowboy magazine-designer cohort) never belonged at Apple in the first place.

And then there’s the Srouji thing, which was reported only once, by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, and then effectively retracted two days later after Srouji shot it down with a meant-to-leak memo to his staff. My own reporting, talking to several sources close to and in some cases within Apple’s executive ranks, is that there is no truth to Gurman’s Bloomberg report that Srouji threatened Tim Cook that he was considering leaving Apple for a competitor.

To believe that report, you need to believe not only that Srouji is unhappy while seeing his life’s work flourish, leading what is inarguably one of the most successful silicon design divisions in the history of computing, and but also that at age 62, he would consider leaving Apple not to retire but to head up chip design at another company — any of which possible destinations being a company that is years behind Apple in chip design. And you have to believe that it’s a successful tactic for senior executives at Apple to get what they want from Tim Cook by threatening him with poaching offers from competing companies. And that Johny Srouji would either personally leak this to Mark Gurman, or loose-lippedly blab about it to someone who would leak it to Mark Gurman. And that Gurman reporting the already-very-difficult-to-believe story at Bloomberg, making private negotiations public and embarrassing both Cook personally and Apple as a company, would lead Tim Cook to cave in and do whatever it took to make Srouji happy enough to stay at Apple and write that memo refuting the report.

That does not sound like Tim Cook.

Is that report, and all that it implies, possible? Sure. It’s also possible that monkeys might fly out of my butt. It’s also possible that the Srouji story was bogus, seeded by a company that had just poached an Apple executive, and had successfully spun that story in their favor to such an extent that Bloomberg called it a “major coup” in its headline, and their intention with the bogus Srouji story was to put the narrative out there to seed doubt about Apple as a company and Cook’s leadership, personally.

Mission accomplished, at least with the gullible reporters and editors at CNBC.