Cook talks about his 15-year career as Apple's CEO: Saving a life with Apple Watch is his greatest pride, and his biggest failure is Apple Maps.

Bloomberg reports that Tim Cook, the soon-to-be departing Apple CEO, admitted during an employee town hall with his successor John Ternus that launching Apple Maps in 2012 was the first “major mistake” of his tenure, which led to the firing of the software executive; and what he is most proud of is the health features of Apple Watch.
(Background: Cook’s 15-year record: Apple’s market value rose 10-fold, profits surged by 699%, and 540 stores spread worldwide)
(Additional background: Cook announced his resignation as Apple CEO, and John Ternus confirmed that he would take over)

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• Launching the map, the first crisis
• The first letter that “the watch saved my life”
• From $350 billion to $4 trillion, and those bets that never came to fruition

At Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater, Cook stood next to the incoming successor Ternus, facing all employees, and talked about a list of mistakes that he described as having “a length that would be very astonishing.”

The backdrop to this employee town hall was that Apple had just announced that it would complete the CEO generation handover on September 1: after 15 years in the role, Cook would officially pass the baton to hardware engineering chief Ternus, and Bloomberg reported the details of the conversation.

Launching the map, the first crisis

Cook said that in 2012, after he took over as CEO, it was his “first truly major mistake” to replace Google Maps on the iPhone and instead push Apple Maps.

How bad was it? The map navigation was riddled with errors: directional guidance was off, landmark names were wrongly placed, and the overall experience was far inferior to Google’s version. Cook admitted, “The product wasn’t ready at all. We thought it was ready because the things we tested were locations near where we were local.”

The aftermath of the Maps incident—during Cook’s tenure, the first major management reshuffle—was that he fired Scott Forstall, the head of the software division. Forstall was a close working partner from the Jobs era; his departure symbolized Apple’s formal move into a post-Jobs-era management structure.

At the time, Cook’s subsequent handling was noteworthy: he publicly apologized and took the initiative to tell users to download other companies’ map apps. “We apologized and said: go use those apps; they’re better than ours. That was a big dose of bitter humility.”

Even to this day, Cook’s assessment is: “Now we have the best map app in the world. We learned what it means to persist, and we also made the right decisions that should be made after making mistakes.”

The first letter that “the watch saved my life”

Cook said that there were “too many moments worth being proud of” over these 15 years, but the standout was the health features of Apple Watch.

When Apple Watch first debuted in 2014, its core health features were limited to heart-rate monitoring; afterward, additional functions were gradually added, including blood-oxygen detection, an electrocardiogram, and high-blood-pressure detection. Cook recalled his reaction when he received what he said was the first-ever user letter that “the watch saved my life”:

“It was a user telling me that the watch saved his life. Of course I get letters like this every day now, but the first one hit me the hardest and made me stop in my tracks right then.”

From $350 billion to $4 trillion, and those bets that never came to fruition

When Cook took over Apple in August 2011, the company’s market value was about $350 billion; today, Apple has surpassed $4 trillion—more than ten times. During this period, he pushed for a comprehensive expansion of large- and small-screen iPads, more iPhone models, AirPods, and online services.

Cook said his list of mistakes had “a length that’s very astonishing,” but under his leadership, Apple largely avoided the large-scale recalls and shipment cancellations that are common for other consumer electronics companies.

Besides the Maps incident, the other two bets that didn’t reach the finish line were: the announcement of AirPower’s failure before the wireless charging pad was officially launched, and a decade-long automatic driving car development plan that ultimately ended without anything coming of it. But Bloomberg pointed out that neither of the two evolved into a crisis that would shake the company’s foundation.

At the employee town hall, the successor Ternus also previewed the product roadmap ahead, declaring that Apple would “change the world” again. Cook, meanwhile, said that he is in good health and plans to stay on for the long term after transitioning to executive chairman.

From the Maps disaster to the watch saving lives, in his farewell speech, this longest-tenured Apple CEO left behind even more than a set of lessons—an instruction manual on how to take responsibility for mistakes and then keep going.