$AAPL Spends Decade Reinventing Technology To Almost Keep Up With Susan Kare’s Pirate Flag

CUPERTINO, CA — Amid concerns that Apple has lost its new product development mojo, new ($AAPL) CEO John Ternus recently sought advice from former chief Tim Cook.

Sources say the former CEO provided his successor with a single piece of advice: match or exceed the hype and financial performance of an obscure piece of Macintosh memorabilia.

The benchmark in question is designer Susan Kare’s hand-painted pirate flag, which from 2014-2026 has appreciated from $1,900 to $23,500. The 12.37-fold return narrowly edged out an 11.6x return driven by Apple's entire corporate playbook of launching the most addictive technology in history, novel wafer fabrication, massive services revenue, and relentless share buybacks that defined Cook’s tenure.

“Tim spoke to John and told him the honest truth,” said senior hardware director Antoine Hoekstra.

“He spent years optimizing assembly lines across six continents, navigating trade wars, and launching the world’s most sophisticated consumer silicon, and in the end, he still lost by a hair to an acrylic on canvas reproduction of a flag that flew over Bandley 3 in 1983 when Steve Jobs's team was developing the original Macintosh Computer.”

Cook advised his successor not to feel demoralized by Susan Kare's product development record, noting that matching the flag’s capital efficiency was nearly impossible to compete with when one considers she is a private individual artist, has an operating expense budget of close to zero dollars and is not issuing forward guidance.