After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

by Tripp Mickle

His ascent to that corporate pinnacle was a remarkable journey for the product of a small Alabama town, where a future managing a Denny’s would have been more probable than a rise to become one of the world’s most admired CEOs.

He believed that once-great companies often declined after they became monopolies, innovation slowed, and the products they made became an afterthought. Eventually, they put salespeople in charge and prioritized how much they sold instead of what they sold.

“He thought about Apple until his last day,” Cook said, “and among his last advice for me and for all of you was to never ask what he would do. ‘Just do what’s right,’ he said.” Jobs’s guidance gave Cook stature.

“We rarely control the timing of opportunities, but we can control our preparation,” he said.

Maps had fallen short of the company’s commitment to making “world-class products.”

Apple wasn’t paying taxes in the United States on profits made in Europe because the money flowed to a subsidiary in Ireland, and it wasn’t paying taxes in Ireland on the profits in Europe because its Irish subsidiary was managed from the United States. A circular but clever logic trick was saving it billions of dollars in taxes.

deciding what not to do was as important as deciding what to do.

they considered the legal risks of providing customers with false positives or negatives and the potential brand damage that could come if Apple became a messenger of doom, tapping people’s wrist to deliver a bleak notification: you have cancer and may die.

blood is red because it reflects red light and absorbs green light, they developed a system to monitor the amount of blood flowing through a wrist’s arteries by flashing green LED lights hundreds of times per second. Each heartbeat increases the blood flow through the arteries. As the blood moves, it absorbs more green light. Between heartbeats, the absorption of green light decreases. Those differences could be calculated in real time by the sensors and algorithms to determine the number of heartbeats per minute. The team developed a separate infrared sensor that shined a light onto the wrist every ten minutes to get a heart rate reading.

“Jeff, if you left your phone at home and got to the office without it, would you go back and get it?” he asked. “Yes,” Williams said. “If you left your watch at home, would you go back to get it?” Dauber asked. Williams paused and thought. “No,” he said. “I’d get it when I got back home.” “That’s why we can’t ship this,” Dauber said. “It’s not ready. It’s not great.”

Architects working on the project were astounded at how the lofty demands of a tech company had forced the construction industry to innovate.

Jobs’s philosophy that the best products lived at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.

“We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick,” he wrote. “This is my brick.”

It would be the users who would tell Apple the watch’s reason for being rather than the other way around.

That Spring, Ive conveyed how he felt to Cook. He let the CEO know that he was tired and wanted to step back from the business. His creative energy had waned, and he wasn’t functioning at the level he wanted to in a job that demanded more than ever.

Apple needed to move its emphasis on the watch from runways to running.

Though Apple wouldn’t unlock a phone, it would decrypt backups on iCloud and turn over messages and photos in response to a subpoena, a detail the company didn’t advertise to customers but promoted to law enforcement. The security loophole put access to the phone within reach.

Not only had Apple helped the government unlock phones in the past, but it had begun storing some Chinese customers’ data on servers in that country, where the government closely monitors its citizens. They reasoned that if privacy was as much of a human right as Cook said it was, he should defy the Chinese government as well. But in that country, where the government could restrict the sale of international brands, Cook had surrendered his moral high ground to protect sales and had explained the compromise away by saying that Apple abided by the rules of the countries where it operated. He had also cut a series of deals with Google worth an estimated $10 billion annually to make it the default search engine of iPhones, allowing Apple to benefit financially from the very data collection practices that he publicly condemned. Plus he allowed the company to encourage people to back up their iPhones to iCloud, for which Apple charged a monthly fee above a data threshold, and didn’t overtly tell them that their sensitive information would be vulnerable to government subpoena.

“It’s what you don’t see that makes this building incredible,”

Ive and the designers had poured years of their time into defining everything inside the building from the curvature of its elevator buttons to the badge readers outside its office doors.

When Ive first broached the idea of leaving the company in 2015, Cook focused on determining a succession plan. In the eyes of those who worked with him, his interest was in protecting the company more than protecting the individual. It was right for shareholders, even as colleagues found it difficult to witness.

Ive was not without blame. Weary after his decades of labor and grief-stricken after Jobs’s death, the would-be keeper of Apple’s flame flickered out. He made mistakes along the way. After Forstall’s ouster, he assumed responsibility for software design and the management burdens that he soon came to disdain. He took on the Leica project while juggling the watch development and Apple Park. He burned himself out.

For an executive who quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., and spoke at length about human rights and privacy in the United States, he took no such stands in China.

Ive’s departure became official two months later, when the company quietly removed his photograph and name from its leadership page. There was no fanfare, nor was there any commemoration of his contributions. In the most Apple way possible, he was there one day and gone the next.