If there’s one piece of tech news that dominated today, it’s Tim Cook officially stepping down as Apple CEO. Actually, this was announced back in April, when Apple put out a press release saying Cook would hand the CEO title to John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering, on September 1. Tony mentioned it back then too.
But an announcement is one thing; when the day actually comes, it feels different.
After all, it’s been a full 15 years. In August 2011, Steve Jobs resigned and officially handed Apple over to Cook. Back then, Tony was still using an iPhone 4, debating whether to spend a few bucks on an App Store game.
Fifteen years later, the iPhone has gone from the 4 all the way to the 17. It has accompanied a generation from school to the workplace, and witnessed the mobile internet boom mature. For many people, the iPhone was their very first digital device. The Apple that Cook is leaving behind is a company whose market cap once topped $4 trillion — more than 10 times what it was when he took over. Net profit has grown more than fourfold, and overall revenue is nearly four times as large. By any measure, it’s a tech giant.
Despite a nearly spotless track record, opinions about Cook in the tech community have always been divided. Some see him as just a professional manager, playing it safe on the foundation Steve Jobs built, lacking innovation. Others think he’s an underappreciated management genius — after all, there aren’t many people in the world who can grow a company to $4 trillion.
Tony thinks both views are right, but neither tells the whole story. So now that he’s officially handing over the reins, let’s take a proper look at Cook’s 15 years.
Let’s rewind to 2011, a year when Apple was at its most brilliant and most dangerous. Brilliant because the iPhone 4 had raised the bar for smartphones to a new level — Retina display, glass back, multi-touch; any single feature was a leap ahead. For many young people, Apple was synonymous with cool and innovation. Dangerous because Steve Jobs’s health was failing. In August, he formally resigned as CEO and was succeeded by Cook, then COO. The news sent shockwaves through the tech world. Not because Cook wasn’t capable, but because in everyone’s eyes, he was nothing like Jobs.
What kind of person was Jobs? A perfectionist and obsessive. He’d make designers redo work over the thickness of a line or the size of a button; he’d push engineers to scrap and restart if he didn’t like the circuit layout, even if users would never see it. His product logic was always “I’m going to give users the best,” not “what users say they want.”
Cook, by contrast, was a classic rationalist. He’d spent years in supply chain, and his strengths were inventory management, cost control, and efficiency. It’s said that when he joined Apple in 1998, the inventory turnover cycle was 31 days. He cut it to six days in about seven or eight months, and a year later to two days — an almost impossible number in consumer electronics at the time. Simply put, Jobs excelled at going from 0 to 1 and creating stunning products; Cook excelled at squeezing every ounce of advantage out of the supply chain and making the most money. Because their approaches were so different, no one thought Cook could fill Jobs’s shoes.
Looking back now, everyone underestimated him. He never became a second Steve Jobs, but in his own way, he took Apple to heights even Jobs never reached.
After taking over, Cook didn’t make a big splash with grand moves. Instead, he did things that seemed to defy Jobs’s principles — most famously, throwing out Jobs’s “3.5 inches is the golden size” maxim. Jobs had repeatedly said 3.5 inches was the perfect phone size. But in Cook’s second year, Apple released the 4-inch iPhone 5, and with the iPhone 6, they rolled out both 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch models, fully embracing big screens. Many Apple fans accused him of abandoning the company’s soul, but the market gave the truest response: the iPhone 6 series sold over 220 million units worldwide, still the best-selling iPhone in history, and pushed Apple’s revenue to a new level.
And remember the stylus that Jobs mocked when unveiling the original iPhone? Cook turned it into the iPad’s best companion. When the iPad Pro launched in 2015, Apple introduced the Apple Pencil with low latency and pressure sensitivity that set a benchmark. It became a drawing and note-taking tool for designers and students, transforming the iPad from an entertainment tablet into a productivity device.
You could say Cook didn’t follow Jobs’s playbook, but you have to admit he really understood what consumers wanted. The two most successful new product categories in the Cook era were both heavily criticized online when they launched, yet each turned out to be a huge hit.
In 2014, the Apple Watch was released, and the internet ridiculed it: a gimmick that needs daily charging, good for nothing but showing off. And what happened? Today, the Apple Watch is the undisputed leader in global smartwatches, shipping over 40 million units a year — more than the entire Swiss watch industry’s exports. Its health features like heart-rate monitoring, blood oxygen, and fall detection have also saved many lives.
In 2016, AirPods came out, and the mockery was even louder: you’d lose them while walking, and the sound quality is worse than cheap wired earphones. And what happened? AirPods sparked the entire TWS headphone industry. At its peak, for every two true wireless earphones sold globally, one was a pair of AirPods. That single category generated over $20 billion in annual revenue at its height — bigger than many public companies’ total yearly revenue.
Many say Cook lacks innovation, but here’s his real genius: he doesn’t need to be first. He just identifies the right direction, then uses Apple’s supply chain, ecosystem, and brand to dominate the category and take most of the profit. The Apple Watch and AirPods are examples; the self-developed M-series chips are another.
In 2020, when Apple announced it would ditch Intel and switch to its own chips in the Mac, many worried — there had been failed architecture transitions before. Then the M1 came out, and its power efficiency stunned the x86 camp. The M1 MacBook Air could rival high-end x86 processors in efficiency alone and delivered up to 18 hours of video playback. The M2, M3, and M4 kept adding advantages, boosting the Mac’s performance and reputation while also powering the iPad Pro. From that point on, Apple controlled the chips for iPhone, iPad, and Mac entirely in-house — it could decide when and what to upgrade, without depending on anyone else’s roadmap.
Along with these increasingly complete hardware products, Cook also built a business often overlooked: services. Before Cook, Apple was essentially a hardware company. Under Cook, they expanded the existing App Store and iCloud, and launched subscription services like Apple Music and Apple TV+. Today, Apple’s services business generates over $100 billion in annual revenue with a gross margin of about 75%. To put it in perspective: if services were a standalone company, its revenue alone would make it a Fortune 500 company — and one of the most profitable. That also explains why Apple’s market cap reached $4 trillion: capital markets love stable, high-margin, sustainable growth businesses. As long as Apple keeps selling products, it’s a money-printing machine that never stops.
Of course, not everything Cook touched turned to gold in these 15 years. The most prominent failure was Apple’s car project. Rumors say Cook secretly started the project in 2014, hoping to replicate the iPhone’s success and redefine the automobile. The team peaked at over 2,000 people, poaching engineers from Tesla and Detroit, with cumulative R&D spending estimated at over $10 billion. The project went from an ambitious fully autonomous car to constantly lowering goals and changing direction. People close to Apple’s supply chain told Tony that Apple had even chosen Chery as a partner, and Chery built several prototypes. But mass production never happened. In 2024, the entire project was scrapped, with some teams moved to AI. For a company with tens of billions in liquid assets and immense supply chain muscle, spending ten years and then giving up is a bit out of character for an Apple that usually succeeds at what it sets out to do.
XR did make it out. In 2024, Apple’s long-awaited Vision Pro launched. Eye tracking, gesture interaction, Micro-OLED screens — the hardware and software noticeably raised the bar for head-mounted displays, far ahead of contemporaries. But the $3,499 price tag and heavy form factor turned off many potential users. Apple called it a “spatial computing device,” with ambitions clearly bigger than just selling a headset; they wanted to get an early foothold in the next computing platform. Two years on, however, Vision Pro sales have been mediocre: fewer than 400,000 units shipped in 2024, far below the million-unit target. People acknowledge the technology, but not that many are willing to wear it day in and day out.
In recent years, what’s been even more painful for Apple than XR is AI — maybe one of the few areas in the Cook era where Apple has been playing catch-up. After ChatGPT ignited generative AI in late 2022, Microsoft, Google, and Meta charged ahead, and Chinese manufacturers were keen to stuff AI into every corner of their systems. Apple, however, didn’t unveil Apple Intelligence until WWDC 2024. And even then, many of the showcased features were “future” items, rolled out in batches. The first batch in October 2024 included text rewriting, notification summaries, and photo cleanup. But the most eye-catching features — the new Siri that could understand personal context, read screens, and act across apps — were delayed. By March 2025, Apple added a note on its product page saying those Siri features would take longer than expected. Only this June did Apple finally reintroduce a new Siri with personal context, on-screen awareness, and cross-app actions, now in developer beta, with a public beta coming later.
In other words, Apple isn’t without AI; the NPU in its chips had long been doing machine learning, and on-device compute and privacy have always been strengths. But in this wave, for the first time, it really seemed like Apple was slow to react.
Whether it’s the failed car project, the lukewarm XR reception, or the AI lag, it increasingly feels like Apple is no longer the industry leader it once was. Every year around product launches, netizens complain about incremental updates. Many believe Cook has made Apple “ordinary.” The Apple that once said “Think Different,” wanted to change the world, and redefined categories one after another, now seems more like a methodical money-making machine under his watch. In the past, Apple was a clear trendsetter: multi-touch, App Store, Touch ID, 3D Touch, Face ID — each was a trend Apple started, and Android makers could barely keep up. But lately, that feeling seems to have faded. Is Apple really lacking innovation or technology? The Dynamic Island interaction, the hardware-software ecosystem synergy, and the self-developed M-series chips are all major achievements. But for loyal Apple fans, perhaps the visceral sense of disruption is missing.
People often compare Cook to Jobs, saying Cook doesn’t match Jobs’s product innovation. But the truth is, a genius like Jobs, who single-handedly redefined industries, is an exception. You can’t expect every leader to pull off a 0-to-1 miracle. Jobs’s greatness was creating era-defining products like the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod, making Apple a synonym for technology and innovation. Cook’s success lies in taking what Jobs left and building it into a vast commercial empire. He may not have created many world-changing new categories, but he made Apple’s supply chain more stable, its ecosystem stronger, its profit engine more powerful, and its resilience higher. He transformed Apple from a company dependent on blockbuster products into a giant driven by hardware, services, and ecosystem together. You could even say that if anyone other than Cook had taken over, Apple might not be where it is today. No matter how brilliant a product or how deep the legacy, the dividends eventually run out. A mature commercial system is what keeps a company alive.
Of course, Cook isn’t really retiring. After stepping down as CEO, he will become Apple’s executive chairman, staying involved in important matters, including helping Apple maintain and strengthen global relationships and deal with policymakers around the world. To be fair, that role suits him well. Today’s tech giants face troubles far beyond products — antitrust, tariffs, supply chains, geopolitics; any single shift can affect Apple’s business by billions of dollars. Having a veteran who has navigated global political and business circles for over a decade and knows all kinds of players continue in that capacity is pretty much right up his alley. And the 65-year-old Cook has said he plans to hold the position for the long term, so we’ll probably still see him in the news for years to come.
Fifteen years ago, Steve Jobs handed Apple to Cook, and Cook proved he didn’t have to be a second Jobs to take Apple to unprecedented heights. Today, 15 years later, Cook has handed the 50-year-old company to Ternus. Just as everyone once questioned whether Cook could fill Jobs’s shoes, the world now wonders: can Ternus keep this $4 trillion juggernaut steady? And can Apple, without Cook at the helm, make its way into the next era?
