By Dan Moren
September 29, 2023 2:05 PM PT
The Back Page: Everything is fine until it isn’t
And thus was Tim Cook finally brought low—not by Apple’s anti-union practices, nor by his continued willingness to do business with a charming individual like Elon Musk, nor even by Apple’s questionable relationships with the Chinese government.
But by an iPhone case.
The tapestry of Cook’s descent is woven finely, with threads coalescing from across his tenure. As the history books tell us, the beginning of the end for Tim Cook’s regime at Apple, those many years ago, was precipitated by what seemed the most reasonable of initiatives: replacing leather goods with a more environmentally sustainable material. After all, who ever got in trouble for not slaughtering a sacred cow?
The problem, however, lay in the new material. An attempt to ape the feel of premium suede, it proved vulnerable to scratches, easily stained, and less durable than the animal-based material it had supplanted.
All of that would have been bad enough, but the subsequent revelation that the so-called fabric was nothing more than cut-up patches of Eddy Cue’s suits shook the Apple community to its very core.
Cook was barraged with emails, day and night, from irate customers across the world insisting that he return the fine Corinthian leather to its rightful place among Apple cases and watchbands. Attempts to placate them, to explain the environmental impact of animal products, fell on deaf ears, even after two further sketches starring Octavia Spencer followed by a thirteen-episode miniseries on Apple TV+, One Tough Mother Nature. The merest mention of the case’s material—soon banned from utterance in Apple Park’s halls—evinced the most Tim Apple of reactions.
The only refuge for the CEO was the barren moonscape afforded to him by his nightly forays with the Vision Pro. So complete was his solitude, that Cook surprised everyone when he opted to have the company’s future development in the product line halted, so that he would not be disturbed in his “lunar sanctuary.”
Soon he took to spending more and more time there, donning the spatial computer in meetings while his deputies looked on in dismay and attempted to cover for him. “Tim is just very personally invested in the future of AR,” Craig Federighi assured befuddled project leads, even as they found themselves pinned by the dead-eyed stare of Cook’s simulated gaze.
Even Apple’s storied PR handlers couldn’t spin this debacle forever. It wasn’t long before discontented murmurs of replacement began to crescendo amongst the rank and file. But even before any action could be taken, Cook simply…vanished. One morning, at 4:30am, his assistant entered his office to find it vacant but for a set of chic eyeglasses, neatly folded on the desk.
What became of Cook is still unknown to this day, but there are those who say that if you stroll amongst Apple Park’s orchard in the dead of night and listen carefully, you can still hear an anguished voice crying “FineWooooovennnnnnn.”
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]