The dramatic untold story of what happened inside Apple after Steve Jobs died and Tim Cook and Jony Ive took over is told in a new book

There were two competing narratives about the future of Apple when Steve Jobs died.

Without the larger-than-life leader who had guided Apple's breathtaking turn around since his dramatic return to the company in 1997, Apple's best years were behind it. Others believed that the culture of innovation, thinking different, risk-taking, and execution would continue to introduce revolutionary products to the world.

Both narratives were correct in the end.

Despite billions spent to transform the car and healthcare, no truly breakthrough new product has emerged fifteen years after the introduction of the iPhone. Over the intervening years, the company has vastly out-performed the overall market, as well as its FAANG peers and Microsoft.

Tripp Mickle, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote After Steve: How Apple became a Trillion dollar company and lost its soul.

The book follows the paths of the two key protagonists who shaped the post-Steve period at Apple: Tim Cook and Jony Ive.

Jobs was long haunted by the fragility of the great tech franchises that had come before Apple 

The fate of Hewlett Packard, where Jobs had a summer job, hung particularly heavy in his waning days, because they thought they had left it in good hands, but now it is being dismembered and destroyed. Given his own obsession with product, one wonders what Jobs really thought the likely fate of Apple would be if left in the hands of someone who was not a product person.

In Where After Steve, there is a vivid portrait of the key business and creative decisions made by the two central characters, cast as the left and right brain of the modern Apple.

Mickle is more of a right-brain kind of guy, and his heart clearly belongs to Ive. His portrait of Cook is sympathetic. The new products I designed prove less revolutionary than hoped as the CEO grows into the role. Mickle gives Cook enormous credit for pivoting Apple to services, making investors value the company more than a legacy hardware business that rose and fell depending on the popularity of each iPhone release.

While Apple's reliance on services can extend the life and monetization potential of its legacy products, some of the growing services lines have their own inherent risks. The music and video subscription products are not likely to be profitable. If the federal government wins its antitrust suit against the company, the company's most profitable service, the estimated 15 billion annual payment to be the company's default search function, could simply go away.

At the end of the day, the shadow of the curse of the toast hangs over every consumer electronics company. Every new product, no matter how innovative or how many services it has, will eventually become a toaster.

Apple may not require Jony Ive, who left the company in 2019, to fill the need for continuous creative innovation, but Tim Cook's ultimate legacy will be dependent on whether he can reconcile method and magic in what somehow became the most valuable company.

A senior advisor at Evercore, Jonathan A. Knee is a professor of professional practice at Columbia Business School. The Platform Delusion is his most recent book.