Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Apple CEO Tim Cook announced this week that he’s stepping down from his position in September and handing the reins to John Ternus, currently the company’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering and a 25-year employee.
This change had been telegraphed pretty far in advance, both by media reports (Bloomberg’s well-connected Mark Gurman flagged Ternus as a frontrunner in May 2024, and The New York Times gave him a glossy profile in January) and by Apple (when it announced the MacBook Neo last month, it was Ternus, not Cook, who delivered the prepared remarks).
I’ve been covering Apple for various outlets throughout Cook’s tenure as CEO, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how Apple has changed in the 15 years since he formally took over from an ailing Steve Jobs in the summer of 2011. Under Cook, the company has become less surprising but massively financially successful; some of Apple’s newer products have flopped or underperformed, but far more have become and stayed excellent thanks to years of competent iteration.
This isn’t a comprehensive list of everything Cook has done as CEO, but it’s my attempt at a big-picture, high-level summary and a snapshot of where Apple is now, to serve as a comparison point once Ternus kicks off his tenure.
The Tim Cook era can’t lay claim to any single hardware announcement as important or far-reaching as the iPhone, the iPod, or even the iPad. Apple has definitely introduced good—even great—hardware in the last 15 years, though.
The main difference is that Apple products introduced during the Jobs era tended to belong at or near the center of your digital life. The Macintosh popularized the graphical user interface. The iPod was a constant musical companion on commutes, during workouts or study sessions, or when plugged into someone’s speaker at a party. The iPhone, obviously, became the most important personal computing device since the personal computer. And the iPad, as conceived by Jobs, was clearly intended to be a new kind of primary computing device (it was only under Cook that the iPad settled into its current in-betweener rut, computer-like but not computer-like enough to supplant the Mac’s mouse-and-pointer usage model).
Hardware introduced during Cook’s tenure, on the other hand, tended to be at its best when it extended or sat atop those Jobs-era products in some way. The AirPods and the wider universe of Beats headphones are the archetypal example—wireless headphones with just enough proprietary Apple technology in them that they’re much easier and more pleasant to use with other Apple products than typical Bluetooth headphones.
Similarly, the Apple Watch is a convenient way to tap into a tiny subset of your iPhone’s communication capabilities (plus fitness tracking). The HomePod is a speaker version of AirPods. I don’t know a kid with an iPad who doesn’t also have an Apple Pencil for doodling and sketching. Apple never released a TV set, but the Apple TV is the streaming box that makes the TV I already have feel the most like a TV and the least like a billboard. Apple never released a car, but it did introduce CarPlay, a useful add-on that is a prerequisite for me when I’m in the market for a car.
None of these products changed the face of their industries the way the iPod, iPhone, or iPad did, but they’ve all become ubiquitous, succeeding on the strength of Apple’s other products and services. That’s the kind of thing Cook’s Apple was good at inventing—reasons to stick around in Apple’s ecosystem once you’d already been drawn in.
Apple still makes the majority of its money from hardware, but especially in recent years, the steadiest growth has come from Apple’s services—things like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV (the service, not the box), and software subscriptions like the new Creator Studio bundle.
The iCloud branding was introduced at the tail end of Jobs’ tenure, but its growth (and the growth of most Apple services and subscriptions) all happened on Cook’s watch. In 2011, Cook’s first year as CEO, Apple brought in a then-record $102.5 billion in annual revenue; in 2025, the Services division alone pulled down more than $109 billion in revenue. Not bad for a collection of features that rose from the ashes of the failed MobileMe service (and .Mac and iTools before it).
I don’t think the rise and increasing importance of the Services division has been entirely good for Apple or its users. The need to convert customers into subscribers and to upsell current subscribers to higher service tiers means that Apple’s users are now subject to some of the same kinds of notifications and reminders that so richly annoy PC users in Windows 11.
Similar forces have led to ads that subtly clutter up Apple’s App Stores and some that occasionally expose users to low-quality and scammy apps. Similar ads will start showing up in the Maps app soon, and it remains to be seen how obtrusive and useful (or anti-useful) they’ll be.
While it lacked somewhat in world-changing, all-new products, Cook’s Apple was also very good at relentlessly iterating on and improving Apple’s core products.
The iPad’s hardware evolution is a textbook example. When he took over in 2011, Apple sold one iPad: the iPad 2, an updated version of the original. Then it got a Retina screen. Then Apple made a mini version. Then it decided to make an even nicer, more expensive one called the iPad Pro. Then it made a cheap one to appeal to people who just needed something basic and functional. Then it revived the iPad Air as an in-betweener model to cover the gap between the cheap one and the expensive one. Over a yearslong process, Apple went from having a single one-size-fits-all iPad to offering a different model for just about every conceivable niche. The iPhone and Mac lineups have morphed in similar ways.
Calling all of these changes “iterative” can mask the impressiveness of the underlying achievements. Though it started under Jobs, the Apple Silicon initiative was a monumental accomplishment: taking low-power smartphone chips and relentless improving them, year after year, over the course of more than a decade, until they were power-efficient enough to power pocket-sized smartphones; cheap enough to build that they could go inside $99 smart speakers and $130 streaming boxes; and powerful enough to drive everything from the MacBook Pro to the Mac Studio desktop.
But even this transition was relatively unassuming on its face. If you’re a regular non-tech-savvy consumer who just buys a new MacBook Air when your old one breaks, the biggest achievement of the Apple Silicon switch is that it was almost entirely invisible.
Not every iteration has been a slam-dunk success. There’s an iPad for everyone, but the platform as a whole has felt stuck for a long time, with fast and capable hardware hampered by software that doesn’t take full advantage of it. The Mac went through a rough patch in the mid-to-late 2010s when the company neglected its desktops, and its laptops were saddled with unsatisfying and unreliable keyboards (Jony Ive and his maximalist pursuit of minimalism usually take the blame for these lackluster Macs, but they still happened on Cook’s watch). Apple’s software is also the source of on-and-off griping, with last year’s Liquid Glass redesign occasioning some particularly harsh criticism.
But Cook’s Apple operates on a reliable cadence; if you don’t like this year’s version of something, hey, you’re only a year or so away from a fresh iteration that could fix all your problems! Hope springs eternal.
Cook’s Apple has pitched a few ideas that didn’t go anywhere. Remember AirPower? Third-party Apple Watch apps? The fact that the post-2015 Apple TV was kind of supposed to be a game console? The last decade and a half of the Mac Pro?
But the company’s biggest swing-and-miss under Cook was the one time he made an explicitly Jobsian attempt to create a new device to live at the center of your digital life: the Vision Pro.
When Apple announced the Vision Pro in 2023, the company’s slick pre-recorded videos depicted a life built entirely around the headset. You would use Vision Pro to browse the web or look at spreadsheets and photos; you would watch a virtual screen on your Vision Pro rather than watching a TV; you would attend virtual meetings with your virtual avatars; you would wear your Vision Pro during your child’s birthday party so you could better record an immersive spatial video that you could then watch later (on your Vision Pro, natrually), reliving the moment that you kind-of-almost experienced while it was actually happening.
It’s difficult to judge this vision of the future on its own merits because the headset’s $3,499 starting price dramatically limited its appeal. But I’ve used a Vision Pro multiple times. It’s a product that demos exceptionally well, and it is a genuinely cool way to experience photos and video. But the idea of using one for multiple hours every day, or of trying to socialize in real life while the people around me try to meet my digital avatar’s dead eyes, is absurd.
Whether it’s because of the price or because people just don’t want a massive computer strapped to their face, the Vision Pro currently exists in some kind of purgatory. It was given a perfunctory update late last year to update its chip, but little effort was made to address any of its fundamental shortcomings, including the price. You’ll periodically see news about a new high-profile third-party app or new first-party apps and features. But consumer and app developer apathy have both kept Vision Pro from getting multiple must-have killer apps the way that the iPhone (and to a lesser extent, the iPad) did. A lack of killer apps means even less interest from buyers, which means even less reason for developers to bother.
Some reporting has already suggested that John Ternus didn’t love the Vision Pro. But he’s also said to be more “decisive” and less “deliberative” than Cook. Either way, this sounds like a death knell for the current product: It either goes away, or Ternus spearheads a dramatic rethinking that gives it a shot in the arm.
Vision Pro could still succeed in a different form at a different time; it’s well within the realm of possibility that Vision Pro will serve as the seed of a more successful product down the road. If this happened, though, it would be a different pathway to success than any other Apple product has followed.
Tim Cook generally seems keen to avoid expressing anything that might be perceived as a personal opinion in public. It’s not that the company is incapable of taking principled stands on topics like privacy and human rights (PDF). But under Cook, Apple has been willing to downplay these principles in the interest of the company’s bottom line. This is illustrated most clearly in Apple’s dealings with China and with the US government under Donald Trump.
Apple’s revenue soared precipitously in the mid-2010s partly due to strong sales in China. As CFO under Jobs, Cook had overseen the outsourcing of most of Apple’s manufacturing to China and other countries, and by the mid-2010s, the iPhone was earning more in China than it was in the United States. But needing access to Chinese workers and customers also made Apple more reliant on the good graces of the Chinese government.
Reporting from The New York Times and elsewhere has highlighted the compromises Apple was willing to make to retain access to Chinese manufacturing and consumers. The company has engaged in censorship of the Chinese App Store, including removing news apps, and has moved user data to Chinese servers controlled by a state-owned company. The Chinese version of Apple Maps doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of Taiwan, and the Chinese version of iOS excludes Taiwan’s flag from the emoji keyboard. Apple has even allegedly removed the old “designed by Apple in California” markings from its products in response to criticism.
In Apple’s words, this kind of compliance aligns with what the company does in other countries: following the rules even when it doesn’t like them. But it’s a far cry from an earlier and more idealistic version of Silicon Valley, which occasionally declined to do business in China rather than comply with its government’s demands.
When it comes to Trump, Cook’s main move has been to appeal to the president’s stated interest in domestic manufacturing. During both Trump terms, Apple has loudly and publicly highlighted its domestic investments, including the manufacturing of certain Mac models and data center servers; commitments to TSMC and other chip companies with US-based operations; funding for US-based TV and film productions; and training opportunities for US-based employees and workers.
During Trump’s second term, Cook has also joined most other tech executives in lavishing Trump more directly with money and praise, the kind of performative obsequiousness that many CEOs have engaged in to secure contracts, tariff exemptions, and other forms of preferential treatment. Cook personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, which he also attended; Apple has donated an undisclosed amount to Trump’s White House ballroom project; and Cook personally delivered an autographed statue to the president along with more commitments to domestic investment. In the words of the president himself, Cook has been more than willing to “kiss [his] ass” in exchange for “BIG HELPS.”
And as in China, these efforts to curry favor have (so far) gotten Apple what it has wanted. The company has never come close to making a single iPhone or even a MacBook entirely in the US, but it has also repeatedly avoided the worst of the administration’s various tariff regimes.
Whether Jobs, Ternus, or any other CEO would have handled these situations any differently is up for debate. But one of Cook’s duties as Apple’s executive board chairman will be “engaging with policymakers around the world.” To me, that signals he will continue to be Apple’s face in dealing with governments and politicians, suggesting that Ternus’ Apple will maintain its mostly conciliatory, bottom-line-maximizing approach.
To end on a lighter note: I’ve attended dozens of Apple events at this point, and one of the biggest changes over Cook’s tenure at Apple has been how it unveils its new products.
When people talk about Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field,” what they are mostly talking about is his sense of showmanship. He wasn’t a wild-eyed infomercial spokesman or carnival barker like some of his peers could be, but he was gifted at using a presentation to tell a story and using that story to make his audience buy into what he wanted them to. Jobs made the products the star of any Apple presentation, but he was usually second-billed.
Cook clearly never had the zeal for the stage that Jobs did, and from early in his tenure, he seemed content to take the stage mostly to deliver introductory remarks and then pass the baton to someone else. Starting during the pandemic, the live-on-stage sections of Apple’s product events (and developer sessions) essentially ended, in favor of more heavily produced pre-recorded video.
These videos still usually feature a person on a stage in front of a screen accompanied by a slide deck. They’re also delivering the same basic information about the improvements and benefits of new products. You’re just not looking at a person presenting live on a real stage in front of a real screen anymore.
This is probably a bit easier on the people doing the presenting—to know they can flub a line or do another take —and to never have to be afraid that a demo will fail because of non-compliant Wi-Fi. But above all, it makes these presentations more predictable, and for better or worse, predictability is one of the hallmarks of Cook’s time as Apple’s CEO.
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