 okay so this is popular online right now but uh i believe that uh tim cook doesn't do as good of a job as steve jobs did running apple okay that's a i didn't know that's a thing that's online steve cook oh it's tim cook oh the apple dude i'm on to record so recording on the sides uh normally what i do is someone would come by i'm not giving the whole spiel what i was doing they want to know ahead of time i'll be like um my whole thing is i believe that any two people can have a conversation with each other regardless of the background beliefs whatever they think about whatever they look you want to try it's like a five minute chat it's got a five minute timer here okay cool and would you be cool if i recorded it absolutely cool i'm tyne nice to meet you i'm paul paul paul so really uh is there anything that you want to talk about for five minutes anything that you think is true that really motivates you well okay so this is popular online right now but i believe that uh tim cook doesn't do as good of a job as steve jobs did running apple okay that's a i didn't know that's a thing that's online steve cook oh it's tim cook oh the apple dudes yes tim cook so is tim cook like the leader right now he is okay and then steve jobs and then would you say this is a really important thing in your life like you dedicate your life around this not dedicated my life around it but it is something that has been um you know predominant theme in my life i'm in it i've worked at the apple store i'm an apple stockholder okay i've had many of the products over the years and so i've kept up with um the the releases of watch the annual keynote every year for probably the last decade okay uh how about this then let me do this exactly all right so uh it's a fun topic let's see what we can knock out here so why do you how confident do you think that steve jobs is actually better than tim cook i'm very confident would you say like on a scale from my zero to a hundred percent zero no doubt like i'm all doubt hundred percent no doubt whatsoever if you look at the totally the fact if you look at the quality of the products i would say i'm probably upward 90s okay okay what's the criteria that you're basing it on i'm basing it on the fact that um previously uh their product lineup uh was repairable okay it had a degree of longevity to it and while uh from a cost-benefit ratio it was more expensive to spec something out that was an apple product it generally paid that forward in both user experience and the life of the product and under tim cook's leadership we've seen increased number of quality programs where there's been defects in manufacturing that later have been revealed in litigation through exposing apple zone internal testing practices and them green light again anyway they have started a what they call a tick tock product release cycle and so they'll do they try to do like a major future release and then they try to kind of clean it up the following year and so you get uh the five the five s the six the six s and so it seems like every time they make a bold design choice yeah following year they fix the problem that they could have fixed if they had not had some sort of stockholder meeting they had to appease okay tim cook's bonuses very objectively when he got hired on were not based upon design and agriculture okay they were based upon annual performance and so you also see that surface in the metrics where every keynote he says we have more people adopting ios than ever before okay more people buying the product at launch than ever before but not surprisingly they've also adopted more aggressive means of forcing adaptation by aggressive notifications on people's devices by releasing the product in more countries every year by taking control of supply chain so that they don't run into these manufacturing hurdles that they previously did and some of these things are good but consequence i think is that they feel beholden to their stockholders more than their customers and you see that surface when you get an iphone 6 that bends when it's put in somebody's pocket because they try to make it too thin because that they the desires to manufacture it in such a way that the cost of manufacturing is less sure and they have something very marketable and people don't understand megapixels and right how much ram is in a phone but you tell them this is the thinnest phone that yes you've ever seen yeah that sells yeah because people are not technically inclined to learn all of those other details i used to work with the company that fed raw materials to gorilla glass so like the thinner the glass we would make stronger glass like the technology that make actually stronger you know panes of glass but because they put them in thinner phones they cut them thinner and thinner and thinner so like yeah here's a piece of glass it's twice the strength but now it's twice the thick or half the thickness you basically have maybe even something that's weaker because you compromise the integrity of the material to a degree i appreciate that i mean i worked for atn t singular wireless before that i worked at the apple store and you know i understand that the product now versus a product 10 years ago there's an aesthetic and a feel to it it's nice okay um where i draw a issue is it's more difficult to repair everything is soldered and sealed when they did make the uh decision to seal it they had this absurd statement that we did it because we're courageous and we got rid of this headphone jack because we're courageous and really what they wanted to buy that really what they wanted to do was make them cheaper to manufacture so can i just catch up real quick sure um it sounds like you're in the upper 90s but steve jobs being better as a business manager as an overall ceo as an overall ceo and i think that was evident which i believe is like a kind of a manager of some sort right i'm managing the business he's founded the company yeah and then he got worked out of the company when pepsi's ceo john scully came in okay and um then because he went and did great things with pixar and we would agree that steve jobs wouldn't be able to manage the company anymore since he's passed away right okay so it's just a question of like who's doing a better job right i don't know you know sometimes a dead ceo that does nothing is that screws it up so it's interesting you own stock in apple right i do their stocks have gone up like for the last oh yeah i've doubled my money in four years so um anything and some cook has been managing the company for a pretty long while right and if you were only concerned uh would you mind if i ask investment performance then he's doing a great job would you mind if i ask a quick question sure if he made his product lines repairable but it came out of deficit of stock value would you prefer that i don't think it's as simple as that but would you but i'm correct here that you would give sure i mean like so as somebody who carries an iphone who has learned video editing and done a bunch of work on a macro for the years would i mind seeing a a understandable hit to my stock prices to see uh the long-term benefit of them manufacturing their products to the quality that they were known for in the mid 2000s absolutely okay because i think that the payoff is it's a longer game if you're beholden to the stock holder than the decisions that you make record early okay you want to control supply chain you want to reduce the cost of production you want to reduce the cost of labor but just so i can catch up just so i can catch up does it sound like it doesn't sound like whether it's repairable or not repair was that big of a deal then because if it's repairable and you'd still be in the n upper 90s or if it's not repairable and you still be in the n upper 90s it doesn't seem like it would help okay but i so what's the real foundation of like why you think steve johnson repairability repairability is um it's important i think to any consumer who owns electronics because then um if apple owns the supplies for the the parts and apple controls whether or not you're allowed to repair your device then you're locked into their ecosystem sure yeah yeah and that comes with additional cost which again additional cost is better for stockholders yeah for consumers yeah i'm both okay i'm concerned with a fair split it sounds like you have like this there's like separate interests of like i respect him cook as the business choices he's making but the product he's making is like lower quality i would but maybe the more comprehensive complaint is also the quality of engineering has suffered so one example there would be the new macro pro lineup okay they uh chose to use a new type of keyboard with a butterfly type switch which has very low travel and allows for them to regain some millimeters of depth within the macbook while still allowing for the logic board the battery and the other components to be within sure pause for a second no no no this i mean okay this camera is good enough i can clean up the audio okay yeah so uh the engineering decision was made to use this different keyboard and to rivet it into place uh simultaneously in a product that they consider to be a pro product they have a headphone jack which used to have um optical audio within it they remove the optical audio they remove the uh the i o on it so they don't have a sd port anymore they had a very popular and well received charging solution and a magsafe adapter they scrub that in favor of a usbc port exclusive usbc port so they don't have the usb type a for b connections any longer uh and so for something that is marketed towards and supposedly designed and engineered for a professional you now have to go and buy a bunch of adapters to be able to use all of these to kind of throw something out of you tim cook actually walked back on that and put in the engineering protocols that you prefer would that make you rank him higher than steve jobs uh higher than steve jobs yes well i would have to see it along the track record steve jobs have if you did it over a longer track record then over a long period of time um i i don't know how it would compare them right so like how would you in in the theoretical do i think that he has the potential to ever surpass the founder of the company yeah no because i think the founder has a vision for creation where the current CEO has a vision for uh sustainability so regardless of whatever tim cook does from here on out is never going to be better than steve jobs do you think that's reasonable i think he could i think he could take it in an excellent direction and i think you could see him as great in his own right i i don't think that he'll ever be able to attain that legacy and are you saying then you don't have a criteria to know what it looks like if you were wrong well so i'm in the highly subjective opinion of it's better yeah like we started off on a fun opinion right yeah um but uh do you have a criteria to know what it will look like if you were wrong i would have to see a degree of innovation where he takes the company into a rank one over the other sure yeah okay okay so we have a guy who created computers yeah and then had a vision for an app store in the 1980s yeah before there was even online distribution amazing um and and so you see uh through historical documentation and then the actual company's performance uh a vision that is cast that's very ambitious that comes to fruition right um how could tim cook do that now well maybe automation and the whole car thing maybe yeah that could be his legacy sure sure yeah and and i could see that being something that has such a net positive for society and such an incredible impact that if he were the thought leader on that he would the driving force behind it driving he would uh he would probably in his own right i think surpassed steve jobs in certain capacities okay cool and i and i would be cool with that but what i see is a guy who and i never said you were absolute sure you were definitely not absolute when you came in but it sounds like the criteria that you have is a bit more nebulous compared to like where we're at right yeah i think that's valid okay but uh oh and i forgot to set the timer that's okay but i'm pretty sure i think we're over five but i think can i summarize the top so like you thought um tim cook was doing an inferior job compared to steve jobs with regards to the the integrity of the quality of the products he was making out the engineering controls and it seemed to be as good compared to steve jobs the vision the innovation didn't seem to be on par but before i think it seemed like we didn't really have the basis for it would take for you to say one was higher because one it's objective yeah absolutely but if we could establish criteria for what it would take for you to be comfortable with saying one's higher than the other it seemed like we didn't have that before maybe now we have something closer to that yeah i enjoyed appreciated the start okay thank you man paul you can talk with you too cool that's about it it does it draws passion out of you it doesn't it's but how do you feel how would you say you felt or you probably my only complaint would be five minutes seems very short because i could go into a laundry list where i could talk for a five minute monologue on all the individual design choices that have led to me feeling this way because i would be willing to excuse one or two really bad design choices sure but if you look at okay well let's look at every single product line yeah the last five years yep and every single one of them are similar