Tim Cook: ‘50 Years of Thinking Different’

Tim Cook:

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

This is a perfectly cromulent letter to mark a big anniversary for Apple. And it is very Tim Cook. It’s short, earnest, honest, to the point, and uses plain simple language. But what also makes it so Cook-ian is that it’s so utterly anodyne. It’s inoffensive to the point of being unmemorable. The best part of Cook’s letter is when he harks back and explicitly quotes from an Apple ad campaign from 30 years ago.

Ten years from now, when Apple is celebrating its 60th anniversary, no one is going to quote from Tim Cook’s “banger of a letter” commemorating their 50th. 25 years from now, when Apple is celebrating its 75th, that future CEO won’t be quoting from any of the ad campaigns Apple ran while Cook was CEO, because there are no lines worth remembering from them.

★ Friday, 13 March 2026