It’s clearly both technical and political. But what you think Tim did nothing technical in his time at Apple and built up technical teams to make it into the powerhouse through luck? Tactics are fine but strategy is everything and Cook clearly is both tactically and strategically excellent.

Source: worked at Apple and at Google and we struggled at Google to build supply chains and get the same cost effectiveness. People talk about how Apple is overpriced and then ignore that the feature set/cost tradeoff is matched by only Samsung on mobile and even then they make a fraction of the money that Apple does.