Summary:<\/p>\n
\u2013 Tim Cook<\/a> is stepping down as Apple CEO after 15 years.\n<\/p>\n \u2013 John Ternus<\/a> will lead Apple as the company faces the AI<\/a> era.<\/p>\n \u2013 Cook leaves behind a company valued at more than $4.5 trillion.\n<\/p>\n When Tim Cook took over as\u00a0Apple\u2018s CEO, he did not try to fill the big shoes of its legendary founder and product visionary Steve Jobs. Instead, he took Jobs\u2019 advice: \u201cNever ask what I would do, just do the right thing.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Fifteen years on, having taken the iPhone<\/a> maker from a $350 billion company to a more than $4.5 trillion behemoth, Cook will pass the baton to\u00a0Apple\u00a0hardware chief John Ternus, who will be steering the company in the AI era.<\/p>\n Cook will become executive chairman on September 1, guiding\u00a0Apple\u2018s dealings with policymakers amid tense relations between its home market, the U.S. and China<\/a>, where many of its products are made.\n<\/p>\n The transition caps one of the most consequential CEO tenures ever.\n<\/p>\n Unlike Jobs\u2019 product design genius, Cook ascended the\u00a0Apple\u00a0ladder by making the company\u2019s supply chain the envy of every manufacturer. As CEO, Cook used this operations-first mindset to take\u00a0Apple\u2018s cutting-edge products to the masses.\n<\/p>\n In a perfect example of his business<\/a> acumen, Cook understood\u00a0Apple\u00a0could make money from the customer long after the iPhone sale, turning the 2.5 billion installed iPhone user base into a recurring revenue machine. That business has outpaced growth in the company\u2019s hardware business in recent years.\n<\/p>\n Apple\u2018s annual sales rose from $108 billion at the start of Cook\u2019s tenure to $416 billion in the last fiscal year, while profit grew more than fourfold to $112 billion.\n<\/p>\n Its wearables business, home to Cook-era iPhone accessories such as the\u00a0Apple\u00a0Watch and AirPods, brought in $35 billion in sales in fiscal 2025.\n<\/p>\n \u201cNot only did Cook create his own path of operational and supply chain success, but he also created a \u2018values-driven\u2019 culture within\u00a0Apple,\u201d said Christopher Brown, a financial \u200badviser at private wealth management firm Synovus \u2060Securities, which holds the iPhone maker\u2019s shares.\n<\/p>\n \u201cWhat followed was a consumer brand loyalty and dependency flywheel that generated trillions of dollars in revenue.\u201d\n<\/p>\n AI and other misses<\/p>\n Critics have long accused\u00a0Apple\u00a0of losing its innovation edge in the Cook era. Cook, they say, has failed to answer what comes after the iPhone, as hardware rivals look to displace the smartphone as the default consumer device.\n<\/p>\n Cook\u2019s tenure had other misses: a decade-long EV project\u00a0Apple\u00a0scrapped in 2024 just as they took off in China. The company also famously botched the launch of\u00a0Apple\u00a0Maps in 2012, months after Cook took charge, leading to the departure of close Jobs collaborator and software chief Scott Forstall<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n Apple\u2018s bet on the Vision Pro augmented-reality headset, which debuted at a whopping $3,499 in 2023, failed to produce strong sales, and its products have lagged in AI features, including delays in revamping Siri.\n<\/p>\n \u201cAI is the single biggest challenge for Ternus.\u00a0Apple\u00a0needs to demonstrate that AI will be more than an app on the iPhone, more than Siri,\u201d said Brian Mulberry, chief market strategist at Zacks Investment Management, which owns\u00a0Apple\u00a0stock.\n<\/p>\n \u201cBeyond AI, the pressure to continue to remove manufacturing<\/a> from China without pressuring margins is a tall task to undertake, but part of that process is already underway,\u201d he said.\n<\/p>\n Apple\u2018s dependence on China delivered decades of manufacturing efficiency, but rising Sino-U.S. tensions, tariffs<\/a> and supply-chain disruptions exposed the risks of concentrating production in a single country, prompting the iPhone maker to expand manufacturing in India<\/a> and other countries.\n<\/p>\n Those moves, including making most U.S.-bound iPhones in India by the end of 2026 and assembling certain devices such as AirPods and iPads in Vietnam, have helped\u00a0Apple\u00a0better navigate the tariff storm that disrupted businesses across the U.S.\n<\/p>\n Cook elevated a broader leadership team and recast\u00a0Apple\u00a0as an institution, giving himself room to focus on strategy and resource allocation while keeping a lower public profile, said Bill Birmingham, managing director at REX Financial.\n<\/p>\n \u201cThis gave Cook space to make unpopular decisions and even be ruthless out of the spotlight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary: \u2013 Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 15 years. \u2013 John Ternus will lead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":215632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[155],"tags":[594,23893,633,25809,5030,552,474,544,3898,250,16876,29307,16311,2665,4093,583,1528,2344,1071,2435,96453,643,1021,5023,2506,3601,584,628,1745,14932],"class_list":["post-215631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tim-cook","tag-ai","tag-airpods","tag-apple","tag-apple-maps","tag-apple-watch","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-business","tag-california","tag-ceos","tag-china","tag-consumer-electronics","tag-corporate-strategy","tag-cupertino","tag-financial-markets","tag-india","tag-investing","tag-iphone","tag-john-ternus","tag-leadership","tag-manufacturing","tag-scott-forstall","tag-siri","tag-steve-jobs","tag-stocks","tag-supply-chain","tag-tariffs","tag-technology","tag-tim-cook","tag-trade","tag-vision-pro"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117215762992948402","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}