Tim Cook steps down as Apple CEO

Apple said on Monday that Tim Cook will step down as chief executive on 1 September, ending a 15-year run that took the company from Steve Jobs’s succession crisis to a roughly $4 trillion market value. Cook will move to the role of executive chairman, while John Ternus, Apple’s 51-year-old senior vice president of hardware engineering, becomes CEO and joins the board, according to TechCrunch. Longtime board chair Arthur Levinson will shift to lead independent director.

The handover elevates an executive whose career has been built inside Apple’s product machine rather than its finance and operations functions. Cook arrived in Cupertino in 1998 to fix what Jobs saw as a broken supply chain; his tenure professionalised manufacturing, tightened inventory discipline, and turned procurement leverage into a core competitive weapon. That operational focus also underwrote the company’s pivot toward recurring revenue: Apple says its Services business now exceeds $100 billion a year, a scale that makes platform control, default settings, and distribution fees at least as important as the next device cycle.

Ternus’s résumé signals a different centre of gravity. He has overseen hardware engineering through the iPhone, iPad and Mac line refreshes of the last decade, and is associated with the cadence of annual upgrades that keep Apple’s installed base monetisable. The risk is that the same system that optimises for iteration can struggle when a new category needs patient adoption and a clear reason to exist. TechCrunch points to Apple Vision Pro—Cook’s bet on mixed reality—as a high-profile example: a technically ambitious headset that, at several thousand dollars and over a pound on the face, failed to become a mass-market platform.

Governance changes also matter because Apple’s strategic battles are increasingly fought outside the product lab. Services growth depends on regulators tolerating Apple’s control over payments, app distribution, and device-level integration, while global competition depends on resilient supply chains and access to advanced components. Cook’s continued presence as executive chairman keeps the board anchored to the era that built those systems, while the promotion of a hardware chief suggests Apple wants its next CEO to own the physical roadmap as scrutiny and competition intensify.

Apple’s shares fell about 0.9% in after-hours trading following the announcement, according to TechCrunch.

On 1 September, the company will have a new CEO, an old CEO still in the chairman’s office, and a board that has effectively split the chair’s authority into two roles.