Tim Cook Steps Down as Apple CEO
Tim Cook’s run as Apple’s chief executive is over. After fifteen years in the role, Cook has handed the company to John Ternus, formerly Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. Apple’s own newsroom announcement sets the CEO transition as effective September 1, 2026, though several outlets (Fox Business, 9to5Mac) described August 31, Cook’s actual final working day, as his “last day” as CEO. Both are accurate, just describing different edges of the same handover. Apple announced the plan back in April 2026, giving the company, and Cook, more than four months to prepare for it.
Who’s Taking the Wheel
Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001. Over the next two decades he moved through the hardware engineering ranks, becoming vice president in 2013 and senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021, according to Apple’s own announcement. Before Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems and holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, per the same announcement. In that statement, Cook described Ternus as having “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator.”
Cook Isn’t Fully Gone
Cook is staying on as executive chairman of Apple’s board. In that role, Apple says he’ll continue engaging with policymakers around the world. Citing Bloomberg reporting, 9to5Mac states that work will include managing Apple’s relationships with the Trump administration and the Chinese government, a detail not independently confirmed by the other sources here.
Cook became CEO in August 2011, taking over when Steve Jobs stepped away for health reasons roughly six weeks before his death. In Apple’s April announcement of the transition, Cook called it “the greatest privilege of my life” to have led the company.
The Numbers
Apple’s own announcement in April put the company’s growth under Cook at a market cap rising from roughly $350 billion to $4 trillion, and yearly revenue nearly quadrupling to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025. Apple’s stock kept climbing after that announcement: Fox Business reports Apple crossed $4 trillion again in October 2025 and briefly touched $5 trillion in July 2026, before settling back to roughly $4.6 trillion by the time of the actual handoff, second only to Nvidia. Services, the subscriptions and platform-fees business Cook built up from almost nothing, is now, in Apple’s own words, “a more than $100 billion business.” One additional report puts that figure more precisely at $109.1 billion for the most recent fiscal year, though Apple’s own announcement doesn’t confirm that exact number. Fox Business also notes that under Cook, Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market cap, back in 2018.
Right on Schedule
The handoff lands just ahead of Apple’s September 9 product event, expected to be Ternus’s first big keynote as CEO. Both MacRumors and 9to5Mac report new iPhone 18 Pro models and a long-rumored foldable iPhone are on the way, alongside updated Apple Watches and iOS 27, so Ternus doesn’t get much of a grace period before he’s the one on stage.
Most CEO transitions come with some scramble. This one didn’t. Apple named Ternus back in April, more than four months before the actual changeover, and Cook worked his last day already knowing exactly when it would end.
