When the global chip shortage hit in 2020 and 2021, automakers shut down assembly lines for months. Apple barely stumbled.
The surface reasons were simple enough. Apple is Taiwan Semiconductor’s largest customer, and TSMC gave Apple priority on its manufacturing lines while automakers, who had canceled their own orders early in the pandemic, got pushed to the back of the queue when they tried to ramp back up. Buying power bought queue position
That’s the story everyone tells. It’s true as far as it goes, but I believe it’s incomplete.
The reasons are more nuanced, and the key is this: Apple worked with its suppliers, including TSMC, and made decisions together, as partners. And the suppliers trusted the decisions, because they knew they were backed all the way to the top of the pyramid.
Tim Cook ran Apple’s operations for over a decade before he ran the whole company. When he became CEO, supply chain didn’t just have a friend in the corner office: it had the corner office.
In the last piece, I told you the chief supply chain officer at most companies has lost their seat at the table. Apple never had that problem, because for fifteen years, the person sitting in the most powerful seat already thought like a supply chain leader.
The advantage wasn’t a company trait. I believe it was one person’s disposition, sitting in one chair.
Even that advantage has limits, though. Apple is currently in the middle of an AI-driven memory chip shortage severe enough that Cook himself called it “a hundred-year flood,” the worst he’s seen in four decades in the industry. Apple has already raised prices on Macs and iPads. This time, the buyers competing for the same memory are bigger than Apple.
The built-in seat at the table bought better odds. It never bought immunity.
Now the seat is changing hands. Cook is stepping down as CEO this year, and his successor’s background is in hardware engineering, not operations — a deliberate shift toward product-first leadership rather than the operations discipline Cook was known for.[i]
None of that means Apple’s supply chain is about to collapse. Plenty of capable people run it day to day, with or without an operator at the very top.
But the specific advantage Apple has enjoyed – a chief executive who never had to be convinced that supply chain mattered, because he’d spent his career in it – doesn’t automatically pass to whoever takes the job next.
That’s the same argument from the last two pieces, playing out at the biggest scale I can point to. Attention isn’t a company trait. It’s a discipline the person in the corner office has to keep choosing. Not just when they first sit down, but every year they’re in that chair.
[i] Apple Newsroom, “Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman; John Ternus to become Apple CEO,” April 20, 2026.