For decades, Apple was the brand most associated with American innovation, the company that turned computers into something people wanted on their desks, put a music collection in their pockets and turned the phone into the device much of the world now reaches for first. By nearly every financial measure, it remains one of the most successful companies on Earth. What it has struggled to hold onto, in the view of a growing chorus of critics, is the sense that it still invents.
John Ternus, eight days into the job as Apple's third chief executive since 1997, walked onto the stage at the Steve Jobs Theater on Wednesday carrying that question with him. After cycling through other updates to the iPhone, the Apple Watch and AirPods, Ternus told the audience inside the Steve Jobs Theater that “actually there is one more thing," in a nod to the phrase often used by Jobs, the company's legendary late founder, borrowed from the TV detective show Columbo. The foldable phone has the "largest display ever on an iPhone, yet fits into your pocket," Ternus said, with another nod to Jobs' words when presenting the iPod in 2001.
Newsweek reached out to Apple via email on Wednesday for comment. Jobs was remembered for creating products like the iPod or the iPhone, that people did not know they wanted, but it was Cook who turned Apple into the market leader in smartphones and grew the business beyond its signature product. Cook's financial success is clear, but many tech enthusiasts have long argued that his years at Apple lacked the excitement and innovation that defined Jobs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the point during an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. "They haven't really invented anything great in a while," he said. "Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they're kind of sitting on it 20 years later." Billionaire businessman Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X, has made a similar argument, saying Apple has continued to make "amazing phones" and "great computers" but has failed to produce a breakthrough product on the scale of Jobs' biggest ideas.
"What Apple's missing are the incredible breakthrough products," Musk said in an interview with The Economist in July. "Apple hasn't come up with a sort of Steve Jobs-level breakthrough product." However, Cook's 15 years produced numbers no rival can match. Apple posted $143.8 billion in revenue in its fiscal first quarter this year, up 16 percent year over year, with an installed base above 2.5 billion active devices and gross margin north of 49 percent.
The stock is up roughly 15 percent this year. While Jobs' goal was never simply to make Apple the market leader, but to make a better product, Cook turned it into one. Apple now holds a record 20 percent of the global smartphone market by volume, according to Counterpoint Research.
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