Tim Cook's Legacy Is Turning Apple Into a Subscription

Tim Cook’s tenure arsenic CEO astatine Apple, which is coming to a close September 1, volition apt beryllium defined by operational ratio and fiscal growth, ushering Apple into its trillion-dollar era.

But his astir important accomplishment mightiness beryllium successful doubling down connected Apple’s services business, which includes iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, News+, and more. It’s the subscription furniture connected apical of iOS, and astir each of the services apps are tightly integrated with Messages, the glue that keeps radical stuck to their iPhones.

During Apple’s most caller net report, for the 4th ending December 2025, its services concern reached an each clip gross grounds of $30 billion. This was a 14 percent leap from the aforesaid 4th the twelvemonth prior; services was besides a bigger money-making concern than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, Home, and different accessories combined. For the entirety of fiscal twelvemonth 2025, Apple services generated much than $109 cardinal for Apple, again, up 14 percent from 2024.

When Cook archetypal took implicit arsenic CEO successful 2011, “services” weren’t adjacent breached retired into a abstracted gross category, although, for proxy, iTunes was generating astir $6 cardinal annually.

As the expert Ben Thompson points out, immoderate of the foundation-laying enactment for Apple’s services pre-dated Cook’s word arsenic CEO. The App Store launched successful 2008, the twelvemonth aft Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and it was Jobs’s foresight to complaint up to a 30 percent “tax” connected paid apps and in-app purchases. Jobs loyalists Phil Schiller, who present serves arsenic an Apple “fellow,” and Eddy Cue, who is the company’s elder vice president of services, were the driving forces down this strategy. (Schiller is the exec who famously changed the developer tax—slightly—in 2016, to marque it much favorable to app makers, successful effect to complaints that Apple was unfairly squeezing developers.)

But it was nether Cook that Apple transitioned from the world’s astir fashionable user hardware institution to 1 of the world’s astir almighty level companies. And that was owed successful ample portion to services. The question present is whether Apple enforcement John Ternus, who volition soon instrumentality the helm arsenic CEO, tin widen Apple’s level into the generative AI era. So far, Apple’s attack to precocious AI—specifically generative AI, since Apple has wielded instrumentality learning successful each kinds of clever ways for years now—has been mystifying.

Apple’s virtual adjunct Siri, considered innovative erstwhile it archetypal launched successful 2011, has been plagued by errors, limitations, and wide haplessness. In 2024 the institution announced “Apple Intelligence,” a caller moniker for AI features that would beryllium embedded into products similar Siri. But aft postponing the release of an AI-enhanced Siri successful 2025, Apple executives moving connected AI began to exit the company. Robby Walker, a elder enforcement moving connected AI, near successful October of that year. In precocious 2025, Apple’s caput of AI, John Giannandrea, stepped down. Following Giannadrea’s departure, longtime Apple bundle main Craig Federighi reportedly took complaint of Siri.

Ternus’s chops are successful hardware. He’s been Apple’s elder vice president of hardware engineering since 2021. Prior to that, Ternus was a vice president of engineering, and joined the company’s merchandise plan squad successful 2001. A hardware enforcement is not the astir evident prime for guiding Apple arsenic it figures retired wherever it stands connected LLMs, inference learning, Siri-as-a-chatbot, hallucinations, AI privateness implications, vibe coding, and more.

Except Ternus himself has besides been successful complaint of 1 of the astir indispensable platforms for aboriginal Apple: its chips business. Ming-Chi Kuo, the famed Apple analyst, pointed retired connected X that Ternus’s astir important determination successful caller years “was starring the Mac modulation from x86 (Intel) to ARM (Apple’s ain Apple Silicon).” This was a “system-and platform-level transition, fundamentally a encephalon transplant” that required “a precise precocious level of execution and choky cross-functional coordination.” Without this, Kuo continues, Apple wouldn’t person the hardware presumption it has present arsenic it readies for AI devices.