Tim Prepare dinner is stepping down because the CEO of Apple and transitioning to a job as the corporate’s government chairman, efficient September 1, the corporate announced on Monday. John Ternus, Apple’s senior vp of {hardware} engineering, will substitute Cook as CEO.
Prepare dinner’s departure had been speculated upon in current months. In an period when each different Large Tech firm has thrown vital assets at creating superior AI, Apple is extensively perceived as a laggard. Ternus’ outdated job will fall to Johny Srouji, who was elevated to chief {hardware} officer from a senior vp on Monday. Srouji has been instrumental to Apple’s growth of customized laptop chips.
Prepare dinner’s legacy at Apple will probably be tied to the corporate’s large monetary progress over the previous 20 years. When he took over as CEO in 2011, the corporate’s market capitalization was round $350 billion; it’s now north of $4 trillion. Greater than 2.5 billion folks all over the world used an Apple machine as of January, in keeping with the corporate.
Throughout Prepare dinner’s tenure Apple launched each the Apple Watch and AirPods, essential anchors for the corporate’s equipment unit, which generated practically $36 billion in income over the past fiscal yr. Its companies enterprise, which retains customers locked into Apple {hardware} and now accounts for over 1 / 4 of the corporate’s complete gross sales, grew from about $3 billion 1 / 4 on the finish of 2011 to about $30 billion within the last three months of final yr.
However a number of the tasks developed underneath Prepare dinner, corresponding to Apple’s self-driving automotive, have been much less profitable. Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional, the corporate’s delayed foray into digital actuality headsets, was extensively thought-about to be too costly and failed to achieve traction. Whereas Prepare dinner expertly managed Apple’s manufacturing cycles throughout the world pandemic and rapidly diversified the corporate’s provide chain when it encountered stress from tariffs, Prepare dinner’s legacy is prone to be that of an operations grasp reasonably than a product innovator.
Prepare dinner’s dealings with China are additionally part of his operational legacy, as China grew to become not solely a vital hub of producing but in addition an essential client marketplace for Apple. As of final yr, Apple held the highest spot in smartphone market share within the nation, with an estimated 22 percent. In recent times, although, Apple has confronted scrutiny over what some lawmakers allege is the usage of pressured labor involving Uyghur Muslims by its contractors. Apple additionally reportedly tried to lobby against certain provisions in a 2020 bill that may have prevented pressured labor in China.
Prepare dinner, like many tech CEOs, has cozied as much as President Donald Trump since Trump’s return to the White Home—generally even standing, grim-faced, beside the president at public occasions. Prepare dinner personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration festivities in early 2025. He additionally appeared at Trump’s inauguration itself, alongside Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. In an odd show of fealty final August, Prepare dinner offered Trump with a customized Apple plaque that was nested in a pure gold base. He additionally attended a personal screening of the Melania documentary on the White Home, hours after a federal immigration agent shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti during a street protest.
In 2014, the usually non-public Prepare dinner introduced that he’s homosexual in an op-ed in Bloomberg Businessweek. On the time, Prepare dinner wrote that being homosexual gave him a deeper understanding of “what it means to be within the minority and supplied a window into the challenges that folks in different minority teams take care of on daily basis.” His expertise had taught him to “rise above adversity and bigotry,” Prepare dinner wrote. He additionally cited concern for kids being bullied as a motivation for him to talk out about his personal experiences.
