Apple (AAPL) has formally entered a new era, with John Ternus taking over as CEO on September 1 after Tim Cook’s extraordinary 15-year run at the helm.
When Cook assumed the top job in August 2011, Apple was already a formidable company with a loyal customer base, a hit iPhone, and a relatively new iPad product line.
What followed over the next decade and a half was a transformation few could have predicted, turning Apple into one of the most valuable and profitable businesses in history.
Apple’s annual revenue grew from $108 billion in fiscal 2011 to $416 billion in fiscal 2025, representing a near-quadrupling of the company’s top line under Cook’s leadership.
iPhone sales were already enormous when Cook arrived, but he managed to push them from roughly $47 billion annually to nearly $210 billion, cementing the device as the backbone of Apple’s business.
Beyond hardware, Cook oversaw the aggressive expansion of Apple’s services segment, which includes the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, and Apple Pay, generating recurring high-margin revenue from an already-captive user base.
Apple’s services segment generated $30.74 billion in revenue during its fiscal third quarter of 2026, ending June 27, with a gross margin exceeding 75%, underlining just how profitable that business has become.
Cook also deployed Apple’s enormous cash flow into sustained share buyback programs, steadily increasing earnings per share and rewarding long-term shareholders over many years.
Ternus now inherits a company with more than 2.5 billion active devices worldwide, giving him a vast platform from which to launch new products and expand existing services.
However, scaling a business already generating more than $400 billion in annual revenue presents a fundamentally different and arguably harder challenge than the growth Cook navigated in Apple’s earlier phase.
Investors watching AAPL will be closely scrutinising whether Ternus can find new growth vectors worthy of the company’s scale, or whether the business settles into a slower, more mature trajectory.
The transition marks one of the most significant leadership changes in the technology industry in years, with the weight of Cook’s legacy setting a high bar for Apple’s incoming chief executive.
