Apple CEO Tim Cook reflects on the lesson from Steve Jobs' biggest flop: 'Be intellectually honest — and have the courage to change' (AAPL)

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October 15, 2017 5:02 PM

Tim Cook talks about the Power Mac G4 Cube, one of Apple's biggest flops ever.

Back in 2000, Apple released the Power Mac G4 Cube, a funky small PC designed by Jony Ive himself. It was a good-looking piece of hardware, but it flopped so hard that Apple discontinued it after a year.

In a talk at Oxford, Apple CEO Tim Cook reflected on the "spectacular failure commercially" of the Cube, and what he learned from his mentor Steve Jobs about failure amid the whole experience.

In a broader sense, Cook says that Jobs taught him the value of intellectual honesty — that, no matter how much you care about something, you have to be willing to take new data and apply it to the situation. Cook says he actually struggled with Jobs' propensity for changing his tune.

“Steve, of everyone I’ve known in life, could be the most avid proponent of some position and within minutes or days if new information came up you would think he’d never, ever thought that before [...] He was a pro at this," says Cook. "And at first I thought, oh, he really flip flops! And then all of a sudden I saw the beauty in it. Because he wasn’t getting stuck, like so many other people do when they just say I’ve got to keep going on, my pride, you know. So be intellectually honest — and have the courage to change.”

As a postscript to this story, the Cube may not have been a smash, but it did find a cult audience. Even today, dedicated Apple fans are hacking their Cubes with more modern hardware and newer versions of the Mac operating system.

Watch the full talk here:

In Conversation with Apple CEO Tim Cook - The Oxford Foundry Launch

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