Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.

iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. System Settings, which used to be one of the cleanest preferences UIs ever shipped, now feels like a bad Electron app pretending to be macOS.

These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re worse than dramatic failures. They’re daily proof that somewhere along the way, Apple stopped caring about the texture of using its own products.

This is Apple in 2026. And this is the Apple that Tim Cook built.

Cook announced his departure last week, and most of the coverage you’ll see is going to be a victory lap. A lot of it is earned. Apple is a three-trillion-dollar company. Services revenue is at record highs. Apple Silicon is one of the great hardware bets of the last decade. He took a company already at the top of its industry and made it bigger than the GDP of most countries.

So why am I glad he’s leaving? Because somewhere in all that growth, Apple stopped making products it was proud of.

What Steve Actually Said

There’s a passage in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that gets quoted less than the famous ones. Jobs talked about how great companies die, and his theory was that the rot has nothing to do with competition or markets or innovation cycles. The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.

He named names. He pointed at IBM under John Akers. He pointed at Microsoft under Ballmer. He even pointed at the Sculley era of his own Apple as the cautionary tale. The phrase Jobs kept circling back to was that the people running these companies eventually “have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.” They can’t tell the difference. They can run a supply chain better than anyone alive, but they couldn’t tell you whether the radius on a button looks right.

That’s not a small criticism. That’s the founder of Apple, on the record, naming the disease and warning the company against catching it.

Then, in 2011, Apple promoted its head of operations to CEO.

I’m not saying Cook was a bad pick at the time. He was the right person to keep the trains running while everyone caught their breath after losing Steve. But fifteen years later it’s worth asking the question Steve himself would have asked. What kind of products are we shipping now?

The Tenet Cook Forgot

Of all the things Steve Jobs believed about Apple, one of them stands out as the most quietly violated under Cook: make products you’d be proud to use yourself.

Not just sell. Not just ship. Use. Sit down at the Mac on a Tuesday night, put your AirPods in, fire off a Message, set up a HomeKit automation, and feel proud of every single one of those things working the way you wanted them to.

Today’s Apple doesn’t pass that test. And the failures aren’t dramatic ones. They’re the small, persistent, daily-friction kind that the founder used to personally drive teams to fix.

You know the list. The 2022 System Settings redesign managed to take a perfectly usable preferences app and ship it as something worse, then leave it that way for three OS releases and counting. Notifications have been re-architected three times in five years and still work inconsistently across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Mail rules have been broken since the Obama administration. The Photos library will quietly drop items, sync ghosts, and offer no diagnostics when something goes wrong. HomeKit loses devices the way a child loses socks. Spotlight returns stale results and pauses for seconds at a time on hardware that should make it instant.

Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.

They survive because they don’t move metrics. They don’t reduce revenue. They don’t show up in the quarterly. But they’re exactly the kind of paper-cuts that would have annoyed Steve at 9pm on a Tuesday, and they would have been fixed by Wednesday morning.

That’s the difference. Steve used the products. Cook signs the budget.

Before Someone Says This Is Just Nostalgia

Yes, I know. Apple under Steve wasn’t perfect. MobileMe happened. Antennagate happened. The hockey-puck mouse happened. Plenty of bad calls happened. Nobody is arguing for some flawless golden age that didn’t actually exist.

The argument is about standards, not perfection. Old Apple shipped mistakes too, and it visibly hated them. The bad release, the launch-day disaster, the public mea culpa, the engineering re-org. The whole company would visibly recoil and try to do better.

Today’s Apple ships friction and treats it like background radiation. That’s not the same thing.

The Counter Argument (-ish)

Yes, Apple Silicon is incredible. Yes, the Watch saved lives. Yes, the iPhone got better cameras and better screens and better batteries. The hardware story under Cook is strong, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

But here’s the thing about hardware. You can grow it through operational discipline. You can squeeze a process node, you can negotiate a better deal with TSMC, you can lean on a thousand suppliers until they bend. That’s exactly the kind of work Cook is good at, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t require a product person at the top.

Software is different. Software lives or dies on judgment calls a thousand times a day. Should this preference go in this menu or that one? Should this notification fire silently or with a sound? Should this Bluetooth handoff be aggressive or conservative? Those decisions can’t be operationally optimized. They have to be made by someone who actually uses the thing and has an opinion. Cook is famously not that person.

And the rot follows that exact line. Apple’s hardware reviews are still glowing. Apple’s software reviews… are not. The number of “I’m switching to Linux” or “I’m switching back to Windows” essays from longtime Apple loyalists has gone from a trickle to something that should worry someone on Apple Park’s executive row.

The grumbling isn’t about features. It’s about the texture of using the products. Which is the thing Steve cared about most, and Cook seemingly cares about least.

The Era of *aaS

There’s a related thread here. Cook’s Apple has gradually rebuilt itself as a services company that happens to make hardware. iCloud subscriptions. Apple Music. Apple TV+. Apple Arcade. Apple Fitness+. Apple News+. Apple One. AppleCare+ tiers within tiers. The recurring monthly nudges that show up in apps that used to be one-and-done.

There’s a real argument that this was a defensive move, and it worked. The Services line is now bigger than the GDP of small nations. But there’s also a reason long-time Apple users are uneasy. The company that ran the iPod silhouette ad is now the company that nudges you to try Apple Fitness+ when you open the Watch app for an unrelated reason. The texture changed. The thing that made Apple feel different is, slowly, less different.

And here’s where it loops back to the bug list. When recurring revenue becomes the thing the company optimizes for, the tolerance for friction goes up. A slightly annoying subscription upsell is acceptable as long as the funnel still works. A weird Settings menu is acceptable as long as nobody actually leaves. That’s how product standards quietly erode. Not through one dramatic bad decision, but through a thousand tolerated ones.

Was that the right business call? Maybe. Was it the right product call? Different question. And it’s the question Steve would have asked.

Enter John Ternus

The honest read on Cook’s tenure: he was the right operations CEO for the post-Steve transition, and he stayed long enough to also become the wrong product CEO for the post-iPhone era. That’s not a damning legacy. It’s just a long career with two halves that needed different people.

So who’s getting handed the keys? John Ternus.

If you needed to pick someone inside Apple to course-correct away from the operations-CEO failure mode, Ternus is the right person on paper. He’s been SVP of Hardware Engineering for years. He came up working on the Mac, ran iPad development, and was a key player in the Apple Silicon transition. He’s the one Apple keeps putting on the keynote stage to talk about new hardware. By any honest read, he’s an engineer and a product person, not a salesperson, not an operator. That’s the pick Steve would have nodded at.

BUT…

The piece I just spent a thousand words complaining about isn’t a hardware problem. Apple’s hardware under Cook has been excellent. The thing that rotted is the software experience. The bug list. And Ternus, for all his strengths, has spent his career running hardware, not software. Whether his product instincts translate into fixing the software stack is the open question of his tenure.

The hopeful read is that an engineer-CEO will demand engineering rigor across the whole company, including from the software org that’s been getting away with shipping half-baked work for a decade. The cynical read is that hardware engineers and software engineers are different cultures, and you can lead one without knowing how to fix the other.

I’m cautiously in the hopeful camp. The fact that Apple chose a builder over another finance type or another operations type says they noticed the thing this article is about. That’s not nothing.

But the proof is going to be in the next macOS release. Does System Settings get rebuilt? Does AirPods routing finally stabilize? Does Mail get a rewrite? Do notifications get a coherent strategy across all four operating systems? If yes, this was the right pick. If we get another year of shiny new features with five new bugs and zero fixes for the old ones, then Apple just rearranged the deck chairs.

Because that’s what made Apple. The rest is supply chain.

So yes. Tim Cook is leaving. Good. And John Ternus is taking the keys at exactly the moment Apple needs to remember what it was supposed to be.