Cook doesn't seem to a have any taste for product design, isn't he a logistics guy?

But he clearly falls afoul of Steve Jobs'warning about leaders with no taste.

It’s not a stretch to say that Tim Cook created the whole Shenzhen microelectronics industry. The thousands of specialist component vendors and large integrators that assemble products trace to his instigation with Compaq and then Apple. The iPod, Macs, iPhone, copied the Swiss Watch model of vast redundant networks of component competetors working as an ecosystem to drive down costs.

This created the skill and machinery base that made it possible for other western design companies (such as Android vendors that were not Samsung or Japanese) to make clones of the iPhone quickly and easily. (Let’s be real, every smartphone is an iPhone 1 clone)

China owes a lot to this work.

I don't think that's fully accurate, unless you have a link that confirms it? That Dye designed it, I mean, not that it was horrible...

Jony Ive was the head of design at that point (both hardware and UI). Wikipedia says Dye "contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7" but Ive would have had final say. Certainly at the time as I recall it, iOS 7 was seen as Ive's baby.

Also, I'm not defending iOS 7, but I reckon its visual design was a lot more influential than it gets credit for. Think of those ubiquitous Prime bottles, with their bright saturated color gradients; the first place I remember seeing that style was iOS 7. I bet they picked that style for Prime because kids liked it, and kids liked it because kids like iPhones.

Edit to add: "bright saturated colors" goes back a long way to Fisher Price toys and the like, of course, but it's the gradients specifically that I think iOS 7 popularized.

Dye was the senior rep of the Design org present and commenting on all our software progress. I never once encountered Ive.

How does that benefit anyone?