Tim Cook’s Trump Diplomacy Is Only Part Of His Legacy As Apple CEO

What will Tim Cook's legacy be when he steps down

as the CEO of Apple on September 1st of this year?

He'll likely be remembered for operational efficiency

and ushering Apple into its trillion dollar era,

and maybe he will even be remembered

for that really strange gold award

he presented US President Donald Trump at the White House.

Or just maybe, Tim Cook will be remembered for services

for basically turning Apple into a subscription company

because during his tenure as CEO,

the company really doubled down on products like iCloud,

the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, News+ and more.

This subscription layer on top of iOS,

along with other free services like Messages,

are pretty much the glue that have kept people

stuck to iPhone and other Apple products.

In Apple's most recent quarterly earnings report,

its services business reached

an all time revenue record of 30 billion,

which actually made it a bigger money-making business

than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, Home

and accessories combined.

For the whole of 2025, Apple Services raked in

$109 billion in revenue for the company,

Under Cook's reign, Apple basically transitioned

from being one of the world's

most popular consumer hardware companies

into one of the world's most powerful platform companies.

And there were a lot of executives working under Cook

who helped execute on this vision.

And some of this pre-dated Cook's term as CEO,

and was actually kind of the vision of Steve Jobs.

But still, these past 15 years have been critical for Apple.

The question now is whether

Cook's appointed successor John Ternus

can extend Apple's platform into the generative AI era.

Ternus is one of Apple's hardware chiefs,

which may not seem like the most obvious choice

if you are a company that's perceived

as being a little bit behind in generative AI right now.

But the truth is that Ternus has dealt

with a lot of complexity during his 25-year term at Apple,

and it's exactly that kind of complexity

and that knowledge of it that's going to be required

in order to bring Apple up to speed in AI.