Today, 31 August 2026, is Tim Cook’s last day as chief executive of Apple. John Ternus takes over tomorrow and Cook becomes executive chairman of the board, a move Apple announced on 20 April. In a memo to staff this morning, published in full by 9to5Mac, Cook said he is not leaving the company, only “stepping away from a role that I have loved deeply”. We covered the April announcement and Ternus’s first message to staff at the time.
A MacBook, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple Watch and an Apple TV 4K are all within reach as I write this. Let’s review the key highlights of Cook’s time at Apple.
1998 to 2011: the operations man
Cook joined Apple in March 1998 from Compaq, where he was vice president for corporate materials. Apple hired him to fix how it made and moved things. He closed factories and warehouses, shifted manufacturing to contract partners, and cut Apple’s inventory from months to days.
That is why Apple could later put a new iPhone into a hundred countries in a single weekend, every September, without running out.
2011 to 2016:
Jobs resigned on 24 August 2011 and the board gave Cook the job the same day. Jobs died on 5 October. Apple was worth roughly USD 350 billion.
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Apple Pay launched in October 2014. The Apple Watch went on sale in April 2015 and is now the best-selling watch in the world, with irregular-rhythm notifications and fall detection that have put people in front of doctors.
AirPods shipped in December 2016. The money followed.
Apple booked USD 9.37 billion from iTunes, software and services across the whole of fiscal 2011. Services alone brought in USD 30.7 billion in the June quarter of 2026, according to Apple’s third-quarter results on 30 July.
February 2016:
On 16 February 2016, magistrate judge Sheri Pym ordered Apple to write software stripping the security features from an iPhone 5C belonging to Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino attackers, so the FBI could break into it. The government’s authority was the All Writs Act, a statute from 1789.
Cook refused the same day, in public, in an open letter to customers. He wrote that the FBI was asking Apple to build a backdoor to the iPhone, and that once such a tool existed it would work on any iPhone in anyone’s hands.
Apple did not settle and it did not quietly comply. The FBI withdrew the request in late March 2016 after paying a third party to open the phone.
Ten years on, no chief executive of a company that size has taken that stand again.
2020 to 2023:
Apple bought the processor designer PA Semi in 2008 for USD 278 million. Its first in-house chip, the A4, shipped in the original iPad in 2010.
At WWDC on 22 June 2020 Apple announced the Mac would leave Intel, the M1 arrived that November, and the last Intel Mac Pro was discontinued in June 2023.
Twelve years ran between that acquisition and the first M1 Mac. The payoff is a fanless MacBook Air that beats machines at twice the price on heat and battery, and every PC maker has spent the years since trying to answer it.
2024 to 2026:
Vision Pro launched on 2 February 2024 at USD 3,499 and has not found a mass buyer.
Siri stayed bad for a decade, and Apple licensed Google’s Gemini in January 2026 to rebuild it.
The European Commission fined Apple EUR 500 million in April 2025 over App Store steering rules, a decision Apple is appealing. The US Department of Justice antitrust case filed in 2024 is still live.
As Cook leaves, manufacturing remains concentrated in China, and he has told staff he will keep handling those government relationships himself.
Fifteen years
There is no Apple Store anywhere in Africa. There is no Apple Pay in Kenya.
Ternus gives his first keynote as chief executive on 9 September. He inherits the strongest balance sheet in Apple’s history and an unfinished argument about artificial intelligence. Thank you for the fifteen years, Tim.
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