Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I've Only Had Good Years' (businessinsider.com)

Business Insider: Under CEO Tim Cook's watch, Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones, booked hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, and launched new products like AirPods and Apple Watch. In fact, Cook says, he's never had a bad year as CEO of Apple. "I've only had good years. No, seriously," he said in an interview with Fast Company. "Even when we were idling from a revenue point of view -- it was like $6 billion every year -- those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn't see that," he continued.

Comments

Re:Lots of iPhone sales = "good years"

[ghoul]

Apple was founded by a product manager, Microsoft by an Engineer. Engineer's think features are cool. Product managers are more focused on all of it just working together seamlessly even if has far fewer features. Apple has never innovated and been the lead on any technology. It has always been the fast copier and copied other people's innovations, simplified them, rounded the edges and come out with a product which "just works".

For Apple's model to work there need to be other companies in the market doing the innovation. With the iPhone becoming a monster and capturing 90% of the profits in the smartphone market there is not much money left on the table for other companies to innovate so I do not expect any great advancements in the smartphone market.

However there are other markets like voice assistants, AI, Cars etc where Apple can take the innovations of Engineer led companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla and repackage them as iProducts which "just work". Thats where Apple's growth will come from.