Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 15 years at the helm, and after all that time you’d imagine there might be a moment or two that he looks back on with regret. As it turns out, there is, as he recently revealed to Apple employees in a leaked town hall meeting — but I’m wondering if he might have made a different choice.
Speaking to Apple employees, Cook picked the disastrous Apple Maps launch in 2012 as his “first really big mistake,” according to reporting from Bloomberg. And it’s not without good reason: in many places around the world, Apple Maps’ initial release was so bad — with incorrect directions, mislabeled places, inaccurate satellite imagery, and much more — that Cook was forced into a contrite and very rare public apology. Scott Forstall, the Apple exec in charge of Maps, was pushed out of the company entirely.
According to Bloomberg, Cook summed up Maps’ calamitous opening salvo this way: “The product wasn’t ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more of local kind of stuff.” In other words, it seems as though Apple couldn’t see the forest for the trees — it was so focused on getting details right in areas local to the company that it neglected to see the bigger picture and the broader problems that affected the service.
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That said, like any good mistake, Cook said that the Apple Maps roll-out proved to be a “valuable experience” for the company. “We apologized for it, and we said, ‘Go use these other [mapping] apps. They’re better than ours.’ And that was some humble pie,” he added, before continuing: “But it was the right thing for our users. And so it’s an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions that we made… Now we’ve got the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence, and we did exactly the right thing having made the mistake.”
Cook said that other missteps, like the abandoned AirPower charger and the scrapped self-driving car project, were on his list of regrets. Yet he added that Apple had mostly avoided the product recalls and cancelations that have dogged other firms in recent history.
Analysis: Has Apple actually learned it lesson?
While Cook may cite Maps’ bumpy start when the product “wasn’t ready” as being a “valuable experience,” it’s not the case that Apple has managed to avoid repeating the same error. In fact, we got a reminder of that just this week when Google revealed that the revamped version of Siri — powered at least in part by Google Gemini — would be arriving later in 2026.
Why is that a problem? Well, Apple initially revealed the new version of Siri in June 2024, whereupon the company promised that Apple Intelligence would enable Siri to understand your personal context, work within apps, and more. Yet we won’t be getting any of that for many more months. Even when those features do arrive, they’ll be over two years later than promised.
If you say that releasing a product too early was a serious mistake but claim that it taught you valuable lessons, you have to actually prove that in practice. The Siri debacle — where Apple was clearly caught flat-footed by the emergence of ChatGPT and panicked, passing off something that was evidently nothing more than a set of flashy mockups as the real deal — suggests that Apple hasn’t entirely taken the Maps fiasco on board.
Of course, that’s not to say that this is a common problem for Apple. The company has been remarkably consistent when it comes to announcing a product or feature and then actually following through with it. But it’s frustrating to see Tim Cook discuss a clear example of a half-baked product that was rushed out of the door during the exact same week that we get a timely reminder about an overhyped Siri overhaul that was nowhere near ready when it was shunted out into the world.
No tech leader is perfect, and compared to some of his ghoulish contemporaries, Tim Cook looks close to angelic. But as both Apple Maps and Siri go to show, if you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk too.
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