Tim Cook’s Choices and Apple’s Bigger Story

Patrick McGee wrote a short piece recently in The New York Times that puts Tim Cook under the microscope, askingP How should we look back at Cook’s time leading Apple?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/opinion/apple-tim-cook-outsourcing-china.html

Since Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, Apple’s Apple’s market value has shot up to nearly $4 trillion, and if you ask Wall Street, Cook’s been the perfect CEO. Share price? Up. Profits? Up. Investor happiness? Through the roof.

But McGee sees a bigger, messier story.

Apple and China: Making the Deal

A lot of Apple’s wild success came from doubling down on China for manufacturing. This was never just about chasing cheaper labor. Apple helped build an almost unbeatable manufacturing network over there. That meant handing Chinese firms tons of technical skills, know-how, and experience, basically everything they needed to assist in the building a dominant industrial sector for tech production.

For Apple, this move was genius. Manufacturing became fast, smooth, and on a scale nobody else could match. For China, it was a jackpot. Apple sped up China’s climb to become a manufacturing superpower.

But, you have to ask: Did Apple’s win come with a hidden cost for the U.S. and the rest of the West?

Critics think so. They say years of shipping jobs and skills overseas damaged American industry, hollowed out working-class towns, and made western economies more precarious.

Changing priorities..?

Profit-maxing strategies that looked good in 2015 may not look good now... Back a decade ago, and for several decades before that simple cost cutting with manufacturing made good business sense, but that was before the US and China started to muscle up to each other and all of the recent shocks - the pandemic and wars messed up supply chains.

So possibly what served Apple and arguably the US well a decade ago doesn't serve either of them so well now?

Some are also critical of Cook for bowing too far to China's will - investing too much in China to make sure they got the lowest costs possible.

So, How Will History Judge Tim Cook?

Surely he must go down as one of the most successful CEOs ever - purely on the share value go up metric.

And that's maybe how he should be judged, given that this was pretty much the only metric anyone in America cared about up until quite recently.

You can't judge his decisions as flawed based on what's needed now, ten years after he started that strategy...