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A day after Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, toured a Chinese factory where the company’s products are made, an audit commissioned by Apple criticized the long hours and dangerous working conditions at plants run by Foxconn, the operator of the factory Mr. Cook visited last week.

When he became chief, many people wondered whether Mr. Cook, a skilled manager of Apple’s operations, could ever rival the visionary influence of Mr. Jobs on Apple products. Instead, it appears Mr. Cook could make his earliest and most significant mark by changing how Apple’s products are made.

“I want to give credit to Tim Cook for this,” said Dara O’Rourke, associate professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “He’s admitting they’ve got problems.”

Apple’s supply chain is a subject much closer to Mr. Cook than it was to his predecessor. Not long after Mr. Jobs returned to lead Apple in 1997, he hired Mr. Cook to clean up the manufacturing operations, which were in disarray, with bloated inventory that hurt its profits. Over more than a decade, Mr. Cook helped transform Apple’s operations into the envy of the electronics industry, with an array of partners, mostly in Asia, able to efficiently pump out its latest products.

In contrast to Mr. Cook, Mr. Jobs never visited the factories in China where Apple’s products were made, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified to avoid antagonizing Apple.

During the years when he was chief executive, Mr. Jobs was never as directly engaged with Apple’s effort to audit its suppliers as Mr. Cook was, according to a former Apple executive who declined to be identified. Still, when Mr. Jobs learned of the more serious violations of its supplier code of conduct — instances where child labor was used, for example — he was outraged, this person said.

Mr. Cook has spoken publicly of how his blue-collar roots growing up in Alabama gave him an early appreciation for factory work. “I spent a lot of time in factories personally, and not just as an executive,” Mr. Cook told investors at a conference in San Francisco in February. “I worked in a paper mill in Alabama and an aluminum plant in Virginia.”

Some labor rights advocates, though, said they were not yet convinced that last week’s report about conditions in Foxconn factories would lead to meaningful improvements for workers, saying that earlier promises of progress by Apple and its partners had not been fulfilled.

“It looks like a pattern I’ve observed before,” said Jeff Ballinger, a global labor activist and researcher. “It’s a report to get you over and hopefully things will die down. It’s not very convincing.”

Since 2007, Apple has published annual reports with the results of audits of factories where its products are produced. But in the last several months under Mr. Cook’s watch, the company has taken a bolder set of steps to prod its suppliers into making workplace improvements.

In January, when Apple published its 2012 annual report on conditions within its suppliers’ factories, the company also released the names of 156 companies that supplied it with parts and other services involved in the manufacturing of Apple products, something it had previously declined to do.

To help end excessive overtime work, it began publishing monthly reports on compliance with Apple’s policy of a 60-hour workweek at its supplier factories. For the month of February, Apple said that compliance figure rose to 89 percent from 84 percent in January.

This year, Apple also became the first technology company to join the Fair Labor Association, and it invited the nonprofit global monitoring group to conduct inspections of its suppliers’ factories in China and elsewhere.

Last week, the group published the results of its first inspections of Apple’s supply chain, citing numerous violations of Chinese labor laws and regulations at Foxconn factories, including instances where workers exceeded the 60-hour workweek that is the association’s standard.