Tim Cook's biggest hits and misses as Apple CEO
Daniel Howley · Technology Editor
Fri, August 28, 2026 at 2:47 PM GMT+3 5 min read
Monday, Aug. 31, is Tim Cook's last day as chief executive of Apple (AAPL), a position he's held since taking over the role in 2011 following the death of Steve Jobs.
Cook has overseen a dramatic expansion of Apple's market capitalization from about $350 billion to more than $4 trillion. It briefly eclipsed the $5 trillion mark in July.
It would be an understatement to say that Cook's tenure as Apple CEO has been a success.
"By any traditional metric, Tim performed extraordinarily well," Harvard Business School professor and former Intel board member David Yoffie told Yahoo Finance.
"He was taking over from a legendary CEO, which in and of itself is generally terrifying," Yoffie said. "He produced about a 10x improvement in shareholder value. The market cap went from about $350 billion to between $4 and $5 trillion, which puts him among the most successful CEOs at driving shareholder value among anybody in the world in the last 15 years."
What to know as John Ternus steps into the CEO role
From iPhones to services
Cook wasn't the CEO when Apple initially launched the iPhone in 2007 — that was Jobs — but he has transformed the business segment nonetheless, making it the engine that has powered Apple's continued growth over the years.
"He took the iPhone, which was already a successful product by the time he [became] CEO, and [turned] it into the most successful product in world history," Yoffie said.
The iPhone accounted for $209.5 billion of Apple's $416.1 billion in total sales in 2025. That's roughly 50% of the company's revenue from a single business segment. To do that, he dramatically expanded the iPhone lineup, adding phones with bigger screens and more powerful processors and cameras to appeal to premium consumers.
"He broadened the iPhone franchise quite significantly," BofA Global Research analyst Wamsi Mohan explained.
"I mean, many more skews up and down, different price points. I think … just managing the complexity around the supply chain associated with that … that's all Tim Cook," Mohan added.
Part of the iPhone's success comes down to Cook's dramatic expansion into the Chinese market. While the Americas remain Apple's largest market, with $178.3 billion in sales in 2025, China is a critical part of the company's business, with $64.3 billion in sales.
Cook also created a broad ecosystem of products and services tied to the iPhone, including Apple Music+, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+, the Apple Watch, and AirPods.
Services is now Apple's second-largest business, with $109.1 billion in revenue last year. Wearables, the company's third-largest segment, brought in $35.6 billion.
"Apple would not be the scale or size of what it is today … [if Cook] hadn't been able to extend the iPhone franchise into services, and therefore build out an entirely new revenue stream as well as profit stream," Yoffie said.
During his time as CEO, Cook also shaped Apple's approach to privacy and security, establishing the company as a leader in the space.
The company regularly positions its products as more secure than those of fellow Big Tech rivals such as Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Meta (META), even as it uses Google as the default search engine in its Safari browser.
The company has also gone toe-to-toe with governments over requests to create backdoors in its products. Cook famously tangled with the FBI when it called on Apple to build one into the iPhone so the agency could get data from one used by a shooter in the San Bernardino, Calif., terror attack in 2015.
The CEO argued that creating such software would instantly make iPhones worldwide vulnerable to hacking, and that there's no way to guarantee the system wouldn't be abused.
"The idea of privacy and security is something that influences all of their product decisions, and why that matters, and why it's been an important part of a success, is because consumers care about that, and it is a selling point," Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster said.
The next iPhone and AI
While Cook has transformed Apple into a juggernaut, critics have also pointed to the lack of an iPhone successor as a sign that the company isn't innovating.
Mohan, however, pushed back against that.
"The reality is that, given the portfolio he had, he grew that portfolio tremendously, and those franchises, each of those franchises, tremendously," he said. "The iPhone overshadows everything because it is so big and so successful. But still, I think he did make a lot of efforts that have positioned Apple for the better."
Apple's Vision Pro, one of the company's first new product categories in years, also came up short, though Apple is reportedly using some of the technologies it developed for the headset for future smart glasses.
More recently, Apple has faced pushback for being slow to adopt generative AI, prompting it to delay its upcoming enhanced version of Siri, originally announced in 2024.
But unlike its peers that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI chips and data centers, Apple has been insulated from some of the shocks running through the broader AI trade on Wall Street.
The company will launch a new lineup of AI features in September, which could also erase any AI-related ill will toward it.
Cook isn't saying goodbye to Apple, either. While John Ternus will become CEO, Cook will serve as chair of the company's board. Meaning his impact on the tech giant could still be felt for some time.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley.
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