We’ve arrived at something of a crossroads for the world’s favorite smartphone manufacturer and maker of shiny things. On August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as Apple CEO and Tim Cook took over. Today, September 1, Cook leaves the CEO role as new CEO John Ternus steps in.
Fifteen years ago, Apple had to prove that it could survive without Steve Jobs. We now know the answer to that question. Yes, it could — but it stopped behaving quite so much like the maverick company that had thrived on innovation, arrogance, and boldly striking out into new territory. Under Cook, Apple became more disciplined, more predictable, and increasingly focused on refining its established product lines.
It’s perhaps unfair to paint Cook purely as a custodian and refiner of Jobs’ greatest hits — Apple did release the Apple Watch and Vision Pro under his guidance, after all — but history will remember him as the great refiner rather than as a creative genius like Jobs. As Cook hands over the reins to Ternus and Apple prepares for its next chapter, let’s look back at his tenure and how he changed the company.
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1. He made Apple rich
The first thing Cook did was not try to be Steve Jobs. When he inherited the role, Cook was looking at a product lineup that was the envy of every smartphone and computer manufacturer in the world — Apple had the iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod, App Store and iTunes — and he exploited it to the max.
Cook turned Apple into an incredibly efficient global machine, and perhaps we should have seen it coming. Before becoming CEO, he had been Apple’s COO, responsible for worldwide sales, operations, and its supply chain.
Cook turned Apple into a money machine. When he took over, Apple was worth just under $350 billion. That was nothing to be sniffed at, but this year its market value briefly crossed $5 trillion. Apple’s entire revenue in 2011 was $108 billion; in Q3 2026 alone, it generated $109.4 billion. Incredibly, Apple now makes as much money in three months as the company Cook inherited made in an entire year.
2. He made Apple a services company
Considering how many services Apple now runs, and how much money I give it every month, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always like this. When Steve Jobs was in charge, Apple was very much a hardware and software company. Of course, it had iTunes, which gave it incredible connections to the music industry because of its iPod heritage, but in those days you bought music; you didn’t rent it. Now that has all changed.
In 2011, when Cook took over, Apple essentially had iTunes, the App Store and AppleCare. Cook-era Apple gave us Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, Apple Card, Apple News+, Apple Arcade, Fitness+, iCloud+ and the much bigger subscription business around them. It was an impressive shift in Apple’s direction, giving it a reliable stream of recurring revenue while pulling customers even deeper into its ecosystem.
3. Apple Watch and AirPods expanded the ecosystem
Rather than arriving with a bang, the Apple Watch was something of a slow burn. It’s hard to imagine it now, but at launch it felt as though Apple didn’t really know what it wanted the Watch to be. It was several things at once — a fitness tracker, a fashion object, an app platform and a luxury item. There was even an 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition, with prices ranging from $10,000 to $17,000.
In classic Tim Cook fashion, however, the product was refined over time. Apple added increasingly sophisticated health features, including ECG readings and fall detection, allowing the Watch to build up a much more useful picture of your health. What started as a product with a heart-rate monitor and three activity rings developed into a health and fitness watch that deserved its place in the market.
AirPods were a different story altogether. I remember people thinking they were too expensive for earphones, but they hadn’t factored in how easy AirPods made connecting Bluetooth earphones to an iPhone, or switching between other Apple devices such as a MacBook and Apple Watch. They were a big success almost immediately.
Together, Apple Watch and AirPods also made the iPhone more valuable. They weren’t simply accessories; they extended Apple’s ecosystem onto our wrists and into our ears, making its products harder to leave behind.
4. Apple silicon demonstrated that Apple could still execute huge technological transitions
Apple silicon is probably Cook’s biggest technological achievement. Moving the Mac from Intel processors to Apple’s own chips in 2020, while bringing its huge library of existing software and millions of users along with it, was an immense challenge. Yet Apple made the transition look almost routine.
The M-series chips transformed the Mac. They delivered far better performance per watt, substantially longer battery life and much less heat than the Intel processors they replaced. Suddenly, even Apple’s thinnest MacBook Air could offer the sort of performance that had previously required a much bigger, hotter and noisier machine.
The transition also gave Apple control over the Mac’s technological roadmap and brought its computers onto the same fundamental architecture as the iPhone and iPad. Apple had changed the Mac’s processor architecture twice before, but the smoothness of the Apple silicon transition showed that Cook’s Apple could still make an enormous technological bet — and execute it brilliantly.
5. Privacy became a defining philosophy
Perhaps Cook’s most important contribution was turning privacy into one of Apple’s defining principles. Cook repeatedly described privacy as a fundamental human right, but Apple also backed up that language with features that materially changed how its products worked. Even today I still associate Apple with privacy, and I think a lot of other people do as well.
Under Cook, Apple introduced the controversial App Tracking Transparency, which forced apps to ask before tracking people across other apps and websites. It added privacy labels to the App Store, Mail Privacy Protection, Sign in with Apple and more on-device processing, while expanding end-to-end encryption across its services.
Apple even took on the FBI in 2016 rather than create software that could bypass the security of a locked iPhone.
Of course, privacy also became extremely effective marketing for Apple, and it was a lot easier for Apple to go down this route when it made money from hardware instead of selling ads. Apple’s record on respecting privacy in China isn’t spotless, but under Cook it felt like Apple genuinely cared about protecting your data.
Gone but not forgotten
Tim Cook isn’t actually leaving Apple. He’s still on the board, just not the CEO. While Cook’s record of being in charge has been more than impressive, he never quite managed to produce a product that changed the world the way the iPhone did. The Apple Vision Pro was perhaps his biggest attempt, but its timing was unfortunate. Just as it tried to persuade the world to put on a headset, Apple was being blindsided by the rise of generative AI, which left Siri looking seriously underpowered.
Perhaps judging Cook’s reign against the Apple that produced the iPhone is unfair — a product like that is a once in a lifetime event. Now it is John Ternus’ turn at the helm, and he’s going to need to get a grip on Apple’s AI experiments and produce a coherent vision for the future. Tim Cook has put him in a very good position.
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