While he'd filled in for Steve Jobs before, August 24, 2011 was the day when Apple formally became Tim Cook's company, and since then he's built Apple from merely huge to a financial juggernaut.
At the start of August 20, 2011, Steve Jobs was still in charge of Apple and the company's products included the iPhone 4 and the iPad 2. Then by the day's end, Tim Cook was CEO, as Jobs stepped aside for health reasons.
He is the seventh CEO of the company and if seemingly he would've been happier to see Steve Jobs continue, the changeover was not as sudden as it seemed. For as Chief Operating Officer (COO), Cook had already filled in for Jobs during his health-related absences.
Plus while we did not know it before hand, we learned on this day that inside Apple there had long been plans for this moment. Steve Jobs even explicitly referred to them in his resignation letter.
"As far as my successor goes," he wrote to Apple's board, "I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple."
Tim Cook (left) and Steve Jobs (right) — image credit: Apple
That was officially an internal Apple memo, but it was soon followed by a public one from the company. Art Levinson, chairman of the board, issued an announcement.
"The board has complete confidence that Tim is the right person to be our next CEO," he said. "Tim's 13 years of service to Apple have been marked by outstanding performance, and he has demonstrated remarkable talent and sound judgment in everything he does."
Cook's track record
The board would say that, of course, as part of their job was to convince investors that Apple was going to be in safe hands. It seemed to be more than the required level of PR-speak, though, and the board really had already had plenty of time to see Cook in action as CEO.
They'd also seen him in very successful action as the COO. Plus they already knew both how fortunate they had been to get him — and how close he'd come to refusing Steve Jobs's offer to join Apple in 1988.
According to Cook himself, "any purely rational consideration" would have meant him rejecting the job offer from Apple in 1998. That's mostly because Cook was then at Compaq and in retrospect that PC manufacturer had only four more years before it was acquired by Hewlett Packard, and began its slow decline.
Nonetheless, right then in 1998, Compaq was still the most successful PC maker in the world, and Tim Cook looked to have a very good future there. Plus at that time, Apple had yet to truly climb up from its perilous 1990s state.
Tim Cook with Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller
"[However,] I was never going to find my purpose working some place without a clear sense of purpose of its own," Cook said in 2017. "I tried meditation. I sought guidance and religion. I read great philosophers and authors. In a moment of youthful indiscretion, I might even have experimented with a Windows PC. And obviously, that didn't work."
Perhaps he read quickly. For while Cook some time to commit to the decision to join Apple, he also said that it only took minutes for him to know he wanted to.
Then when he did take up the job, he was definitely a quick operator because it seemed to take only minutes for him to make mass closures of factories and warehouses.
As much as with the new iMac and later the iPod, though, Apple's turnaround began with those logistical moves. For instance, Cook made it so that Apple would only ever have a few days' worth of stock waiting in warehouses, instead of months' worth.
That one move, immensely complex to pull off, was crucial for reasons few manufacturers seemed to realise at the time. One who did was Michael Dell, who had made the same move with Dell Computers' online store.
"If I've got 11 days of inventory and my competitor has 80," Dell said in the 1990s, "and Intel comes out with a new 450 megahertz chip, that means I'm going to get to market 69 days sooner."
Cook and Apple wouldn't be so concerned about Intel then, but the principle still applied. And so did the fact that Apple had far less money tied up in unsold inventory than it did before.
A different Apple
Since he took over as CEO, Cook has regularly been accused of being less of a product person than Jobs, but he has also been in charge when Apple has needed to move into services.
Tim Cook — image credit: Apple
Apple under Tim Cook has a broader range of products, going from the now forgotten iPod touch to Apple TV+, and from Apple Watch and Apple Pencil, to Apple Vision Pro. He personally has become far more visibly political than Jobs ever was, even when that has brought him and Apple criticism.
He's not exactly popular at the FBI, for instance. Yet even as Apple stood up to the Feds until they stood down from pressing the company to unlock iPhones over the San Bernardino attacks, it's Cook who has expressed the most regret about the dispute.
Except his wish was not that Apple had changed its mind and given in to the FBI. Instead, he has publicly said that he thinks the case should have gone to court.
Then Cook has also been more visibly willing to support charities himself, and to have Apple donate to relief efforts such as helping with the aftermath of the explosion in Beirut. Although, he's also used personal donations as more of a political tool, such as when he contributed to Trump's inauguration fund.
Different but the same
Apple's current product line has moved on a lot, with the iPhone 17 range about to launch instead of the iPhone 4. Then instead of the iPad 2 that was current back in 2011, it's on the eleventh generation of the iPad, the seventh of the iPad mini, and also the seventh of the iPad Pro.
There is one thing that remains the same, however. Apple is growing faster and further under Tim Cook than it did under Steve Jobs.
Apple CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump — image credit: White House
In 2022, Apple became the first company to reach a $3 trillion market capitalization. Since then it declined and rose again, plus its stock has been hit by Trump's "reciprocal" tariff plans.
Cook is having to navigate Trump's tariffs, and it looks like they will have cost Apple $2 billion by the end of September 2025. But Cook himself is now a billionaire for his troubles.
One remaining question is how much longer he will remain as CEO — and another is who will succeed him. In 2021, Cook said he was "probably" leaving Apple in the next ten years, but even if stands up at the iPhone 17 launch and says he's going, he has now been CEO longer than Steve Jobs.
