The Short Version
A retrospective on Tim Cook's Apple era credits the Intel-to-Apple-Silicon switch as its biggest engineering move, while AirTag's five-year sales dominance is complicated by ongoing stalking concerns.
Tim Cook's Apple gets judged two ways: the products people love and the engineering decisions that actually changed the company. AirPods and Apple Watch became cultural fixtures, but the switch from Intel chips to Apple's own silicon in 2020 is what turned Cook's run from profitable to genuinely disruptive. AirTag's five-year run as the world's best-selling item tracker is impressive, and the stalking problem Apple keeps quietly engineering around is proof that a product can win the market and still have a serious unresolved flaw.