The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech.

Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and Meta are advertising companies. Their primary products are ads. Does the author suggest that Apple become an advertising company? How would that even fit with Apple's hardware portfolio? Tesla sells automobiles; Apple could try to sell automobiles too, but... why? Apple has no experience in automobiles. Nvidia is kind of a one trick pony: it sells GPUs, which are currently in massive demand. But is anyone saying, well, Tim Cook has no vision, because Apple didn't make GPUs? Surely Steve Jobs wasn't going to make GPUs either. That's not what Jobs was all about.

Apple is the most successful and profitable consumer computing hardware vendor in the world. They kick their direct competitors asses. Perhaps that market is somewhat saturated and doesn't have as much room for growth as other markets. But so what? It seems like critics just want "growth" without any purpose behind the growth. Steve Jobs always had a purpose and wasn't just looking for money, money, money. The innovation was oriented toward consumer computing hardware.

Meta tried to pivot to the so-called "metaverse", and that got them nowhere. They're still throwing billions at it every year with hardly any return. Nonetheless, Meta is still kicking ass at its core business: selling ads on social media. Now Meta is trying to pivot to AI, throwing a ton of money at it, but who knows how that will pan out for them. Nothing yet. We're supposed to be impressed by 9-figure pay packages for individual engineers, and that is impressive in a way, but it's not impressive in the sense of, look how that paid off for Meta.

It's not clear that even Apple and Microsoft are direct competitors. There's still macOS vs. Windows, which is more or less at a stalemate, but that's not the biggest piece of either company's revenue anymore. And again, nobody is out there saying that Tim Cook lacks vision because Apple is not winning desktop OS market share. None of the critics in the media even care about desktop OS market share.