Tim Cook’s year is doomed, and it’s not even June yet

Has anyone done a check-in with Tim Cook lately? You know, just drive by the Apple campus and see how things are going? Maybe bring him an edible basket of some kind? He’s been having a year.

To be fair, he’s been having a year where the company is still doing great business and has more money than a deity that, while it preaches spiritual wealth over monetary wealth, is still somehow the go-to benchmark in this saying.

Writing for The New York Times, Tripp Mickle details Cook’s latest travails: “Tech’s Trump Whisperer, Tim Cook, Goes Quiet as His Influence Fades”

It should be noted that Mickle’s work can be considered rather dubious, but he hasn’t written anything that has had people reaching for the classic blinking guy gif when linking to it for at least… well, four days.

Yes, it’s been less than a week since Mickle wrote “Is Trump’s ‘Made in America’ iPhone a Fantasy?”, in which he could have saved a lot of time by simply linking to Betteridge’s Law and then taking off early for the Memorial Day weekend. Instead, he tried to nuance a pretty simple answer to death.

And… and… got involved in some of that olde tyme eugenics.

Young Chinese women have small fingers, and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.

Tripp Mickle, My 23, 2025

That is a pro tip for aspiring sources right there. When you want to spout your ideas on the supposed inherent natural abilities of the races, insist you be referred to anonymously as a “supply chain expert.” Then the person answering angry emails all weekend is Tripp Mickle, not you.

But that was last week. This is this week. Presuming the linear nature of time has not been summarily done away with, like so many of our long-standing societal norms. Cook’s bad, awful 2025 is pretty much on the record, and Mickle manages to avoid quoting anyone making forays into race theory this time.

First, there was Apple’s trouble shipping all of Apple Intelligence, then it was its loss on the App Store anti-steering policy. Now it’s this guy.

President Trump is miffed that Cook declined to tag along on his field trip to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both countries, by the way, where you can get the death penalty for being gay, not that they’re likely to try to execute the guy who makes the iPhones. It’s not like he’s a journalist, after all.

As Mickle notes, Cook managed to steer through Trump’s first administration by distracting him with shiny objects like a plant in Texas that makes a couple of Mac Pros every so often. This time, Cook greased the skids with a $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund. Nope, we haven’t forgotten about that, although it seems like the president has, either because of the dementia or just inherently having the attention span of a sugar-addled toddler.

“I mean, Tim Cook isn’t here but you are,” Mr. Trump said to [Nvidia CEO Jensen] Huang…

Good job, Jensen Nvidia.

Subsequent to taking exception to Apple shifting manufacturing to India instead of the U.S. where people are clamoring in the streets for the opportunity to spend 14 hours a day screwing iPhones together for pennies, Trump threatened a 25 percent tariff on imported iPhones.

The new tariff threat is a reversal of fortune for Mr. Cook. In eight years, he’s gone from one of Mr. Trump’s most beloved chief executives … to one of the White House’s biggest corporate targets.

It’s almost like trying to cozy up to tin-plated autocrats who have a very limited understanding of how things actually work pays off less than you might think it does.

Still, Apple’s market value has increased by more than $2.5 trillion under his leadership, or about $500 million a day since 2011.

Despite following Apple for decades and keeping at least one eye on these numbers, the Macalope had to check that math because it simply seemed preposterous. Preposterous it still may be, but it’s also right.

For Apple, this may be a case of too much success being a bad thing. It is unlikely that Cook could have avoided Trump’s attention, given its inherent gravimetric field. The question is, now that a moderate show of obsequiousness has proven insufficiently mollifying, what will Cook do next?