Can Tim Cook Stop Apple Going the Same Way as Nokia?

A year ago, when Apple used a jamboree at its home in Silicon Valley to unveil its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy, grandly known as Apple Intelligence, it was a banner occasion.

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The following day, the firm's value soared by more than $200bn—one of the biggest single-day leaps of any company in American history. The excitement was fueled by hopes that generative AI would enable Apple to transform the iPhone into a digital assistant—in effect, Siri with a brain—helping to resuscitate flagging phone sales. Twelve months later, that excitement has turned into almost existential dread.

It is not just that many of last year's promises have turned out to be vaporware. Siri's overhaul has been indefinitely postponed, and Apple Intelligence is no match for other voice-activated AI assistants, such as Google's Gemini. Meanwhile, Apple's vulnerabilities in China have been exposed by President Donald Trump's trade war. Moreover, it faces new legal and regulatory challenges to the two biggest parts of its high-margin services business.

Its shares, down by almost a fifth this year, have lagged behind its big-tech peers, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. But those are not the most alarming comparisons. In a new book, "Apple in China," Patrick McGee draws an ominous parallel between Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, and Jack Welch, boss of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Like Welch, Mr. Cook has made a fortune for investors—when Apple's market value first exceeded $3trn, in 2022, it had risen by an average of more than $700m per day since he took over from Steve Jobs in 2011. But Mr. McGee raises the possibility that, as at GE, Apple's success may obscure serious vulnerabilities. If that is the case, what can Mr. Cook do to avoid the sort of fate that befell GE and other once-great companies that suddenly lost their way, such as Nokia, a Finnish telecoms firm, disrupted by Apple in the early 2000s?