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> Cook was, without question, an operational genius I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a
by doitLP 5mo ago
> Cook was, without question, an operational genius
I’ve seen this quoted time and again. In this article the evidence is that he outsourced manufacturing to a JIT chain in China. That doesn’t seem very genius to me. Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else?
Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally?
- bradleyankrom 5mo ago> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else? Those seem like pretty significant wins for Cook, unless I am underestimating the difficulty of doing so. Perhaps with the volume or sheer money involved, it's not as hard as it sounds?
- jinushaun 5mo agoI think people underestimate execution. When something is done well, it looks easy. But if it was so easy, why are other competitors struggling to execute the same thing?
- doitLP 5mo agoYes but those are outcomes — what did he do that got him there? Lots of people want preferential production and lower cost; Was it that he had the budget to pay more and dictate standards? If that’s the case that’s not genius as much as having the balls to make bets that paid off.
- geodel 5mo agoTo be honest no genius every existed under sun. What did Newton do? Just applied some common sense. If apple is not flying away there has to be some force pulling it down, he just named it gravity. What did Einstein do? Using Riemann geometry to already prevailing ideas. Not much of genius, using already invented things I'd say. What did Edison do? If one conducts thousand failed experiment a few might succeed. It doesn't take a genius to get that. And so on and on.
- Keyframe 5mo agoI don't know, but I think in order to see if that claim hold water you would have to comparatively check what and if their competitors are doing. If they're not strained for suppliers and are executing globally at once, then Cook isn't anything special. Google for example, to this day, isn't able to launch anything globally at once and even after some time after announcement. Lenovo is doing paper launches and then months after announcements their supplies are limited or geo locked. Samsung probably comes close, and it helps they're so vertically integrated.
- JustExAWS 5mo agoThe Pixel only sales 5 million a year…
- Keyframe 5mo agogoogle says 3x more, but it's still nothingburger. galaxy is the one on parity with it. I have a pixel and I had to go through hoops in order to buy one in another country and have it brought in and I'm in EU. Samsung doesn't have those issues, but it lags between announcing and shipping. Apple is the only one I know that announces something and it's available either today or within days. Lenovo announces and then nothing - they have announced x1 carbon gen 14 in january.. still can't buy it. It's laughable. This is Tim Cook's value and it can't be denied.
- jinushaun 5mo agoI think you underestimate what he does. It seems simple and obvious in hindsight, but if it were so easy, others would not be so far behind. A difficult thing done well looks easy. Reminds me of when Toyota disrupted auto manufacturing. Under Tim Cook, Apple has pretty much exclusive access to certain parts and suppliers. Apple buys up all the silicon. Competitors can’t compete at the same quality without paying a premium, which digs into margins. It’s one of the reasons why non-Apple stuff feels so cheap. This lockdown allows Apple to have huge margins compared to competitors because Apple pays a discounted rate due to sheer volume.
- dboreham 5mo agoThis is how the electronics industry always worked. I times of yore it was IBM who bought up all the capacity in various fabs then defined later what devices would be manufactured on those wafers.
- dwaite 5mo agoApple funds creation of new factories in return for exclusive use of the parts they produce. I believe they also prefer to negotiate pricing down to cost, then pay bonuses for meeting quantity/date goals. Supposedly, the reason there weren't more iPod competitors back in the day was that Apple already had negotiated exclusive rights at pre-negotiated prices to buy a big chunk of the flash memory that otherwise would have been on the market.
- doitLP 5mo agoI’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are! I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!
- motoxpro 5mo agoI mean sounds like you are asking the question "What is the job of a CEO?"
- throw0101d 5mo ago> Yes they were able to uphold high standards and get preferential production and pricing but what else? Ask Boeing, who outsourced a lot of stuff (for the 787, and other things) and had all sorts of problems. To the point they re-integrated a company they spun out in the first place to try to save money with: * https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acquisition-of-Spirit-AeroSystems https://boeing.mediaroom.com/2025-12-08-Boeing-Completes-Acq... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_AeroSystems Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc.
- rootusrootus 5mo ago> Ask all the companies that outsourced IT and software development to (e.g.) India, etc. Ha, we keep on asking that at my current company, and they keep on doing it anyway. What is it they say the definition of insanity is, again?
- alsetmusic 5mo ago> Can anyone point me to what he does, on a day to day basis, that makes him and operational genius? How does it manifest in him personally? Under Jobs, he transformed the company from one that had hardware taking up space in warehouses waiting to be purchased and shipped to The iPod Company. Their sales of iPods were a huge part of their growth and resurgence. They had entirely new models and designs every year and they managed to get them into customers' hands in time for the holiday season every year after announcing the new ones every September. Every Mac was built after the online purchase, not before (obviously this doesn't count those going to retail). That takes someone really knowing how to optimize. I don't know if it's "genius", but that was the point of the reference.
- doitLP 5mo agoThanks, but how did he do it? Actually what does he do than saying “ok guys tip priority is moving these units”? Like do he come up with the strategies? Or is he good at picking winners when he sees them from proposals of his underlings?
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- raw_anon_1111 5mo agoRead the “Apple in China” book.
- greedo 5mo agoCan't agree more with this recommendation. As a long time Apple user (Apple ][c back in 1984 started my journey), I thought I knew a lot about Apple. But how they actually made the iPhone work was just an amazing read.
- Barbing 5mo agoThe book’s Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China Some critique, but widely praised
- kccqzy 5mo agoSqueezing the suppliers in just the right way. When you squeeze them too hard and the pricing is too low, the suppliers stop making quality parts and Apple would have a reputation for hardware failures. Squeezing the suppliers not enough and the pricing is too high, then Apple suffers either from a reduced profit margin or a higher ASP. I find that negotiating with suppliers is an art. Cook is quite good at it.
- detourdog 5mo agoThe biggest problem Apple had before Cook was inventory management. They would produce more Performas then they could sell which weighed their cash flow. The dead weight of inventory was a really big problem. Right sizing production to meet demand was what initially saved Apple.
- jmyeet 5mo agoI haven't seen anyone else mention this but... vendor financing. Being a manufacturer is capital intensive. As lithography shrinks, it has generally required building a new fab. Intel in it's heyday used to do it this way, for example. But this goes for everything in Apple's supply chain. Even the new generations of glass on an iPhone are probably capital intensive to develop and make production-ready. As most here would know, you can raise money by borrowing it or by selling equity. These suppliers generally borrowed money. You can do that directly from a bank or, if you're big enough, by issuing bonds. So you might borrow $1 billion to make a new factory and then have to pay that back. You might need to prove to banks and/or investors that they'll get their money back. So Apple has for decades now been sitting on an unimaginable pile of cash. I believe it was Tim Cook who pioneered this approach where Apple went to these suppliers and said "we'll lend you the money for this but in exchange we get 2 years of exclusive supply to what you produce". Apple was still getting paid back. And since Apople was the buyer there was almost no risk to any of it. So in one fell swoop, Apple gave a better deal to suppliers who needed capital, got a competitive advantage over other companies with exclusive supply and got a return on the huge pile of cash. Apple didn't invent vendor financing. That's why it has a name. But Tim Apple [sic] turned it into a locked-in competitive advantage at basically zero cost and zero risk.