Jorge Figueroa

“The taciturn master of supply-chain efficiency had become the most important business leader in the world; no one on earth had more to gain from open trade or more to lose from a trade war. He knew that his comments would be tracked on both sides of the Pacific to determine whether his loyalty in the trade war lay with China or the United States.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“After years of being hounded by the same question—What’s the next new device?—Cook had finally delivered his answer: There isn’t one. His message hadn’t been aimed at Main Street; it was for Wall Street. He wanted investors to see that Apple was making a major shift. Rather than its products creating glory, Cook outlined a future in which Apple basked in the glory of others. He didn’t want to merely update the iPhone every year; he wanted people to pay Apple subscription fees for the movies they watched on that iPhone. He didn’t want to enable digital payments; he wanted Apple to be the processor of every transaction. And he didn’t want Apple to make the screen on which people read articles; he wanted to sell access to the magazines they read. For years, Cook had seen new revenue opportunities in each of those businesses. He had plotted a path to get there, buying Beats in 2014, courting Hollywood agents and directors in the years that had followed, and forging strong ties with Goldman Sachs throughout that time. He saw in all of it a way to shed the burden of a device business that was running out of juice and enter a world of services that promised unlimited growth.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“The $9 billion decrease in iPhone revenue had been the largest drop in a single quarter since 2007. The company’s most important product was running out of steam.”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

“Its track record in services was mixed. iTunes had been a runaway success that had transformed the music industry, but Apple Maps had been a bust. MobileMe, a 2008 online service for email, contacts, and calendar, hadn’t worked, and Siri, Apple’s novel voice assistant, had fallen behind its rivals in performance. In the absence of the next game-changing device, Cook was betting that he could persuade customers to stick with iPhones by getting them as tethered to Apple Music and other services as they had been”
― Tripp Mickle, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul