Here is a brief excerpt from an article co-authored by Brad Stone, Adam Satariano, and Peter Burrows and featured online by Bloomberg Businessweek. To read the article, check out other resources, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

*     *     *

Like all companies, Apple (AAPL) is not immune to bungling a new product, though its apologies haven’t always seemed heartfelt. After slashing the price of the first iPhone by $200 only a few months following its debut in 2007, Apple tried to placate enraged early adopters with a $100 rebate that they could only spend on Apple products. When the iPhone 4 was introduced with a flawed antenna design in 2010, it took 39 days of complaints for Steve Jobs to hold a press conference—and to offer dissatisfied users a free rubber case.

Considering that history, the reaction of new Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook to the outcry over the balky Maps application on the new iPhone 5 was positively penitent. Only one week after customers got their hands on the highly anticipated device, Cook issued a press release acknowledging the mapping service’s obvious flaws—such as turning much of the east side of Portland, Ore., into a nature park. He also took the unusual step of pointing users to alternatives from rivals such as Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG). “We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers, and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better,” Cook said in a letter to customers posted on Sept. 28 on Apple’s website.

Since Jobs’s death one year ago, many Apple observers have predicted the company would suffer from the loss of his internal authority and intuition about product design and features. Apple is undoubtedly a different company under Tim Cook. It misses Jobs’s conspicuous creativity and entrepreneurial fervor, but it’s gaining in maturity, rationality, and, yes, value.

Over the past year, Cook has visited Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partner Foxconn to advocate for better pay and safer working conditions, reversed a decision to pull its products from an environmental certification program, and issued shareholders a dividend that Jobs stubbornly resisted for years. Less visibly, Cook has managed the inevitable internal strife as Apple’s executives tried to fill the leadership vacuum. And he’s got the operations side of Apple working better than ever, lining up the company’s suppliers to support the unprecedented scale of the iPhone 5 launch, which is on sale in nearly 30 countries and on track to be available in 100 by the end of 2012.

*     *     *

To read the complete article, please click here.

Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. Satariano is a reporter for Bloomberg News in San Francisco. Burrows is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, based in San Francisco.