15 Years Ago, Steve Jobs Bet on Tim Cook’s Competence. It Paid Off to the Tune of $4 Trillion

Tim Cook’s era at Apple is coming to a close. Here’s how his impact will be remembered—and what John Ternus needs to tackle first.

Tim Cook. Illustration: Inc.; Photos: ; Adobe Stock

On the evening of August 24, 2011, Nasdaq halted trading in Apple stock while the company released a short letter from Steve Jobs resigning as chief executive. In after-hours trading the shares fell 5.22 percent, from $376.18 to $355.99, taking close to $19 billion off a company then worth about $350 billion. The letter recommended Tim Cook as successor, which surprised nobody. Cook had been running Apple’s day-to-day operations through Jobs’s medical leaves for the better part of two years.

Even the most doubtful analysts, nonetheless, granted his competence. Barclays left its $515 stock price target unchanged that night and called Cook a proven executive who understood the inner workings of the company, while saying plainly that Jobs was not replaceable. The concern was about what kind of company Apple had just become. Apple was the product company, and it had handed itself to a supply chain specialist. Walter Isaacson—who wrote the authorized biography of Jobs published that October—has recalled Jobs praising Cook’s range and then adding that Cook was not a product person.

Fast forward 15 years, and Apple’s next chief

Fast forward 15 years, and Apple’s next chief executive is a day away from stepping into the role. The tech giant made the same succession choice again—picking a chief executive that’s the opposite of the current one. But this time, Apple’s stock barely moved.

What the operations man did with the CEO title

Cook’s final fiscal year (2025) as CEO closed at $416.2 billion in revenue and $112 billion in net income, against $108 billion in revenue in fiscal 2011. iPhone revenue went from $47.1 billion to $209.6 billion over the same period. Services, a footnote in the Jobs era, reached $109.2 billion last year and is now Apple’s second-largest business. Wearables—built out of the Apple Watch and AirPods—brought in $35.6 billion. Today, Apple’s market capitalization sits at almost $4.6 trillion, about 13 times where it stood the night Jobs resigned.

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The question put to Cook for 15 years was where his “iPhone moment” was. Look back over the years, and the answer becomes clear—it wasn’t a single new product launched in a keynote. AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and Apple TV+ run on more than 2.5 billion active devices. Each of those extends the iPhone rather than replacing it, and together they quadrupled revenue and multiplied the valuation thirteenfold.

Cook launched one product category of his own,

Cook launched one product category of his own, and he has been clear about what it means to him. Asked what he was proudest of across his 15 years, he named the Apple Watch and its health features rather than any financial record, recalling the first message he received from a user who said the device had saved their life. Apple’s first new category since the iPad reached scale quickly. Strategy Analytics put 2019 Apple Watch shipments at 30.7 million against 21.1 million for every Swiss brand combined, and roughly 250 million are in use today. The business has since flattened. Counterpoint Research recorded shipments falling from 43 million in 2022 to 34 million in 2024, with Apple’s share of the smartwatch market slipping from about 25 percent to 22.5 percent, the only decline among the top five vendors.

Not every attempt at launching a product category has been quite so successful. Vision Pro, Apple’s attempt at a new computing platform, shipped in February 2024 at $3,499 and has never had its unit sales disclosed by Apple, with outside estimates putting first-year shipments around 500,000 against an initial target of a million. Apple’s growth came instead from scale, pricing discipline, distribution into markets it had barely entered in 2011, and control of the components.

Source: www.inc.com