I suspect that the thinking when he was appointed was that logistics was going to be key to Apple's future success. And at the time, they also had a number of high profile creative people in other roles, though they have pretty much all moved on since. And if you look at their financial performance in the years since Cook took over—which is the board actually cares about—it's hard to say that this was a bad approach.

My old turbo jet engine loud intel MacBook that made noise at the smallest amount of work imaginable vs the silent more powerful m series laptop that lasted what felt like forever battery wise in comparison was such a nice upgrade.

With everything I do now though my M1 and its 16gb of ram is becoming a little limiting so im going to have to do something about that eventually.

Edit: and its less obvious to others, but them making their own modems now is also a pretty big thing.

I don't think it's short-term profits exactly, as much as he's just focused on making a profit, to the exclusion of all else. Logistics work doesn't tend to pay off short-term, and that is a lot of what his tenure focused on, with Apple basically bringing everything back in-house.

Apple is charging 999€ for the Air in Europe (less with student discounts), while windows PCs that “compete” with it are 1500€+. If Apple is making bank then the competition is outright robbing everyone.