Tapping a hardware guy as CEO sends a good signal, at least to me, looking in from the outside. The company is leading from its strength, and getting back to its roots. I wonder how Woz feels today, seeing this.
But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.
I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.
Chairman Cook was a hardware guy, and is why apple's hardware is excellent.
This just suggests him holding on to more influence. What apple needs, badly, is a software and tech guy (Cook is not a tech guy).
If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.
No don’t waste any time on Linux, Apple memory independence, clustering and moving on to M5, M6, M7, and beyond, a technocrat in charge yes, hopefully Apple will continue to iterate across the software ecosystems and the hardware systems.
Official support for alternative OSes would be nice, but no reason to throw everything out to make that happen.