End of the Tim Cook era: Did he surpass Steve Jobs?

​Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO after 15 years in the role. During that time, Apple not only launched numerous new gadgets and services but also became one of the world’s most valuable corporations. But if Cook is compared with Steve Jobs, who proved to be the more successful leader?

Last day as CEO

On September 1, Tim Cook will step down as CEO of Apple, although he is not leaving the company entirely. Cook will become executive chairman and will continue handling certain strategic matters, including Apple’s relations with the U.S. and Chinese governments.

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The new CEO will be 51-year-old John Ternus. He has worked at Apple for about 25 years and started as an engineer working on Mac computers. Ternus later oversaw the development of the iPad, AirPods and iPhone before taking charge of the company’s entire hardware engineering operation.

Cook began seriously considering Ternus as his successor about two years ago. After the leadership change was announced, he told employees that there was no one else he would trust more with Apple’s future.

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Ternus will face his first major test almost immediately. On September 9, he will host his first major presentation in the new role. Apple is expected to unveil its next generation of iPhones along with the company’s first foldable smartphone. According to IDC, shipments of foldable iPhones could exceed 17 million units by 2027.

How Apple’s business changed

When Cook took over Apple in August 2011, the company was worth just under $350 billion. Its market capitalization now stands at around $4 trillion, meaning it has increased more than tenfold. Annual revenue has roughly quadrupled over the same period to $416 billion. Net income for the fiscal year ended in September 2025 reached $112 billion, almost eight times what Apple was earning at the beginning of the Cook era.

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The size of Apple’s ecosystem has also expanded sharply. In 2011, there were around 200 million active Apple devices worldwide. By early 2026, that figure had surpassed 2.5 billion. At the same time, the company expanded its iPhone lineup with more expensive Pro and Max models. The average selling price of an iPhone rose from $712 in 2011 to $1,070 in 2025.

Cook’s tenure also brought several major new products. The Apple Watch launched in 2015 and became one of the most popular devices in the smartwatch category. In 2016, Apple introduced AirPods, helping turn fully wireless earbuds into a mainstream product. Another major step was the Mac’s transition from Intel processors to Apple’s own M-series chips, which allowed the company to improve performance while reducing power consumption.

Services became another major source of growth. Under Cook, Apple launched Apple Pay, Apple Music, TV+, Arcade, Fitness+ and other subscription products. In 2011, services accounted for only a small share of revenue. Today, they generate more money than the entire company did when Cook became CEO.

Not every project became a hit

The main criticism of the Cook era is that over 15 years Apple failed to create another product on the scale of the iPhone. The company spent years and billions of dollars developing its own car before shutting the project down in 2024. Vision Pro also failed to become a mainstream device: the headset proved too expensive and too heavy, while sales remained limited.

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Apple’s lag in artificial intelligence proved even more painful. After the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Apple began ramping up its own AI development, but the initial launch of Apple Intelligence stumbled. The company changed the leadership of its AI division and reassigned responsibility for Siri, before deciding to rebuild the voice assistant around Google Gemini technology. The move frustrated parts of Apple’s own AI team and contributed to further departures.

At the same time, Apple spent significantly less on AI infrastructure than its rivals. Its capital expenditures totaled $2.46 billion in the June quarter, while Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft were each planning to spend more than $100 billion in 2026. Rather than building vast numbers of data centers, Apple focused on processing some requests directly on iPhones and Macs, while sending more complex tasks to the cloud.

The company has also faced talent problems. Hundreds of former Apple employees have joined OpenAI’s hardware division, while Apple has cut teams working on Vision Pro, gaming and immersive video. At the same time, the company has had to use additional bonuses and promotions to retain key engineers and prevent further departures.

Who was the better Apple CEO?

Despite these setbacks, it is difficult to describe the Cook era as weak. He did not create anything truly revolutionary, but he managed to turn the foundation built by Jobs into a much larger and more profitable business. Comparing the two executives purely by financial performance would therefore be misleading: each played a different role in Apple’s history.

A good example of the difference between them is the size of the iPhone. In 2010, Jobs publicly mocked competitors’ large smartphones and said consumers would not want devices that were difficult to hold in one hand. Cook proved more pragmatic. In 2014, Apple introduced the iPhone 6 with a 4.7-inch display and the iPhone 6 Plus with a 5.5-inch screen, effectively following growing demand for larger smartphones. The decision paid off: Apple sold more than 10 million of the new iPhones in the first three days, setting a company record.

That approach describes much of the Cook era. He was far less likely to try to convince consumers that they needed an entirely new type of device and more likely to respond to what was already in demand. Larger screens, more expensive iPhone models and the expansion of Apple’s ecosystem allowed the company to keep growing.

That makes it impossible to say definitively which of the two was more successful. Jobs had a greater impact on the technology industry itself and created products that still form the foundation of Apple’s business. Cook proved stronger as a manager: he took the company Jobs left behind, expanded it many times over and showed that Apple could continue growing without its founder.

What Ternus inherits

Cook’s main legacy is an Apple that is far less dependent on a single product than it once was. Beyond the iPhone, the company generates tens of billions of dollars from services, sells watches, headphones, computers and tablets, and has built an ecosystem of 2.5 billion active devices. The new CEO will not have to rebuild that foundation, but he will have to decide where to take it next.

Apple needs to catch up with rivals in AI, find new mass-market product categories and preserve the iPhone’s position at the same time. Cook is handing Ternus a company far larger than the one he inherited himself, but the next breakthrough will be for the new CEO to find.