Commercial: What Tim Cook's Apple will be like

Rather counter-intuitively, the most revealing anecdote about the future of Apple to be found in Issacson's monumental-yet-slight (a wonderful trick of the higher American journalese) biography of Steve Jobs is this one, concerning a meeting Tim Cook early in his role as chief operating officer in 1998:

...Cook was told of a problem with one of Apple's Chinese suppliers. "This is really bad," he said. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes later he looked at an operations executive sitting at the table and unemotionally asked, "Why are you still here?" The executive stood up, drove directly to the San Francisco airport, and bought a ticket to China. He became one of Cook's top deputies.

My point is: Cook is not that different from Jobs.