Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO at Apple, which is coming to an in depth September 1, will probably be outlined by operational effectivity and monetary progress, ushering Apple into its trillion-dollar period.
But his most vital achievement is likely to be in doubling down on Apple’s providers enterprise, which incorporates iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, News+, and extra. It’s the subscription layer on high of iOS, and nearly all the providers apps are tightly built-in with Messages, the glue that retains folks caught to their iPhones.
During Apple’s most up-to-date earnings report, for the quarter ending December 2025, its providers enterprise reached an all time income file of $30 billion. This was a 14 % soar from the identical quarter the 12 months prior; providers was additionally an even bigger money-making enterprise than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, Home, and different equipment mixed. For everything of fiscal 12 months 2025, Apple providers generated greater than $109 billion for Apple, once more, up 14 % from 2024.
When Cook first took over as CEO in 2011, “services” weren’t even damaged out right into a separate income class, though, for proxy, iTunes was producing round $6 billion yearly.
As the analyst Ben Thompson factors out, a few of the foundation-laying work for Apple’s providers pre-dated Cook’s time period as CEO. The App Store launched in 2008, the 12 months after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and it was Jobs’s foresight to cost as much as a 30 % “tax” on paid apps and in-app purchases. Jobs loyalists Phil Schiller, who now serves as an Apple “fellow,” and Eddy Cue, who’s the corporate’s senior vice chairman of providers, had been the driving forces behind this technique. (Schiller is the exec who famously modified the developer tax—barely—in 2016, to make it extra favorable to app makers, in response to complaints that Apple was unfairly squeezing builders.)
But it was underneath Cook that Apple transitioned from the world’s hottest shopper {hardware} firm to one of many world’s strongest platform corporations. And that was due largely to providers. The query now’s whether or not Apple government John Ternus, who will quickly take the helm as CEO, can lengthen Apple’s platform into the generative AI period. So far, Apple’s strategy to superior AI—particularly generative AI, since Apple has wielded machine studying in all types of intelligent methods for years now—has been mystifying.
Apple’s digital assistant Siri, thought of revolutionary when it first launched in 2011, has been suffering from errors, limitations, and normal haplessness. In 2024 the corporate introduced “Apple Intelligence,” a brand new moniker for AI options that will be embedded into merchandise like Siri. But after suspending the discharge of an AI-enhanced Siri in 2025, Apple executives engaged on AI started to exit the corporate. Robby Walker, a senior government engaged on AI, left in October of that 12 months. In late 2025, Apple’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, stepped down. Following Giannadrea’s departure, longtime Apple software program chief Craig Federighi reportedly took cost of Siri.
Ternus’s chops are in {hardware}. He’s been Apple’s senior vice chairman of {hardware} engineering since 2021. Prior to that, Ternus was a vice chairman of engineering, and joined the corporate’s product design staff in 2001. A {hardware} government isn’t the obvious alternative for guiding Apple because it figures out the place it stands on LLMs, inference studying, Siri-as-a-chatbot, hallucinations, AI privateness implications, vibe coding, and extra.
Except Ternus himself has additionally been accountable for one of the vital important platforms for future Apple: its chips enterprise. Ming-Chi Kuo, the famed Apple analyst, identified on X that Ternus’s most essential transfer lately “was leading the Mac transition from x86 (Intel) to ARM (Apple’s own Apple Silicon).” This was a “system-and platform-level transition, essentially a brain transplant” that required “a very high level of execution and tight cross-functional coordination.” Without this, Kuo continues, Apple wouldn’t have the {hardware} place it has now because it readies for AI gadgets.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-tim-cook-subscription-business/