It doesn't look to have achieved those goals this time around.

Innovators like Jobs are incredibly rare. We're lucky he chose someone who would not only preserve the company, but stave off the worst of the enshittification that has eaten Microsoft and HP. Cook is also surprisingly protective of privacy and civil rights. I'll take him over 99% of executives these days.

In what sense is Cook protective of privacy and civil rights? Apple collaborates with the government to the full extent that is required to have access to their market, irrespective of privacy and civil rights implications. China, for example.

In the sense that they don't go much much further than just the bare minimum required by government regulations from the various jusrisdictions they operate in, and they don't treat this overreach as their primary profit center, thereby incentivising themselves to push it as far as they think they can get away with, the way all the other major tech companies do?

The "bare minimum" includes full support of oppressive government's surveillance and censorship requirements that target any sort of dissent, as well as handing over full unsupervised access and ownership of those citizens' data to their government.

So please spare us the PR, arguing that Apple "cares" about privacy or civil rights is dishonest. If they cared about those values they wouldn't be operating in China.

Let me push back on that: Cook was an extraordinarily good choice as successor to Steve, but he also should have left a while ago.