On August twenty fourth, 2011 — ten years in the past at present — Apple co-founder Steve Jobs resigned as CEO, leaving the world’s newly minted most useful model within the palms of his successor Tim Cook. Just six weeks later, Jobs died. Needless to say, Cook had some huge footwear to fill: Jobs is remembered because the visionary CEO and marketer behind the Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod, iTunes, and the App Store.

A decade later, what has Tim Cook constructed?

The most useful and worthwhile firm on this planet

Apple is larger than oil.

An organization that turns an internet of complicated elements into subtle computing gadgets now makes more cash than people who successfully pump barrels of money out of the bottom. And it’s as a result of Tim Cook meticulously crafted the abroad provide chains to make it so, contracting producers like Foxconn which make use of a whole lot of hundreds of Chinese laborers for Apple’s manufacturing strains, and delivering a remarkably steady gross margin for years. In August 2011, shortly earlier than Jobs stepped down, Apple had already briefly handed Exxon to develop into the world’s most useful publicly traded firm, on the again of Tim Cook’s efforts as COO and interim CEO. Even in 2019, when Saudi Arabia opened up state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco for buying and selling, it didn’t dominate for lengthy: Apple surpassed it final July on its method to a $2 trillion market cap, and Apple is approaching $2.5 trillion now. It’s extra worthwhile than Saudi Aramco, too.

By any metric possible, Tim Cook has grown Apple right into a behemoth over the previous decade. Revenues reached a report $111 billion this vacation season, quadruple what the corporate noticed the identical quarter in 2011. Profits greater than quadrupled from $6B in Q1 2011 to $28.8B in Q1 2021. The firm holds practically $200 billion in money, greater than double the already-staggering $76 billion it had in 2011, and Apple has greater than doubled in measurement with 147,000 full-time workers — in comparison with 60,400 the 12 months Jobs stepped down.

As of June 2021, Apple now makes a mean of $10,000 each second, $3,600 of which is pure revenue. How way back did you begin studying this story? Chances are Apple grossed half one million {dollars} by the point you end this sentence.

All of those numbers replicate how Cook’s Apple relentlessly pumped out premium merchandise that customers have been keen to purchase, steadily bettering them 12 months by 12 months, at a tempo Jobs’ Apple by no means did. Between 2013 and 2018, Apple bought extra iPhones each single 12 months than it did through the 5 years Jobs was in cost.

For some, the greenback indicators alone are proof Cook has been a whole success. If you spent $1,000 on Apple inventory the week Steve Jobs stepped down, it’d be price practically $11,000 at present, not together with dividends.

But measuring Apple by monetary efficiency alone is just half the story. If you have been hoping Cook could be a Jobs-esque product visionary, you most likely haven’t been fairly as impressed.

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Hardware swings

As the venerable tech journalist Walt Mossberg wrote for us two years in the past, Tim Cook’s Apple has but to provide a really game-changing {hardware} product — nothing on the dimensions of the iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The greatest new Apple merchandise below Tim Cook are both iPhone equipment just like the Apple Watch and AirPods, or merchandise his Apple delivered as a result of they have been what prospects have been asking for — like iPhones with bigger screens. “Steve was pretty adamant that big phones aren’t something we’re going to do,” says tech analyst and former Apple advertising director Michael Gartenberg, noting it was a part of the dialogue across the iPhone 6 Plus launch in 2014. “Tim said consumers want it, we’ve got the capability to do it, so we’re going to do it.”

But there have additionally been some surprisingly public failures, just like the unceremoniously canceled AirPower charging pad, the difficult-to-upgrade Mac Pro that Apple admitted was a mistake, and most of all, the shameful five-year saga the place Apple’s flagship MacGuide laptops had keyboards that simply couldn’t be trusted to not break.

And whether or not he was chasing Steve Jobs’ notion of a post-PC world or attacking it on his personal phrases, Cook’s Apple spent years centered on the iPad on the expense of the Mac, solely to find it was alienating a few of its most necessary followers: the Apple builders it relied on to create iPhone and iPad apps.

(It’s notably egregious when you think about that 2013 Mac Pro and 2016 MacGuide Pro have been alleged to be Apple’s solutions to the concept it’d deserted Mac energy customers.)

The Apple Watch is now a success product in a class of 1, as Google and others proceed flailing to compete. But a part of the Apple Watch’s success is solely how expectations decrease over time. When it was introduced in late 2014 as Cook’s first huge new product, it was explicitly introduced as a product innovation on par with the Mac, iPod, and iPhone, with its digital crown touted as “Apple’s most revolutionary navigation tool since the iPod Click Wheel and iPhone Multi-Touch.” The pitch was that it may change your life by altering your well being — and that it was a luxurious product, too, with an 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition variant beginning at $10,000.

But Apple needed to reboot your complete Watch interface and ditch the ultra-luxury variations earlier than lastly discovering its footing with the Apple Watch Series 3 in 2017. Even now, there’s not loads of proof it’s meaningfully bettering individuals’s well being, except for the occasional anecdotal reports about individuals whose watches detected a fall or a coronary heart charge spike in time to avoid wasting their life.

Apple’s AirPods, its second huge wearable product below Cook, are additionally a smash hit. But in some ways, AirPods are symbolic of your complete Cook period, the place a seemingly apparent thought, executed at scale and tied tightly to the iPhone, turns into not solely a enterprise but in addition a cultural success. “It’s that process, that continued refinement of Apple, that has been Tim Cook’s genius,” says Gartenberg, declaring how Cook’s Apple did the seemingly not possible by transitioning the Mac away from Intel processors virtually in a single day.

While it’s too early to inform, the M1 chip might go down as one among Cook’s greatest swings: his Apple channeled the corporate’s relentless efforts to enhance its Arm-based iPhone processors 12 months after 12 months after 12 months into a brand new M1 laptop computer chip that blew away the skeptics, upending our whole idea of laptop computer efficiency in a single day. Jobs might have purchased P.A. Semi in 2008 to cut back the corporate’s reliance on companions to energy the iPhone, however by 2011 Apple hadn’t but launched its personal CPU cores inside an Apple A-series chip, a lot much less its personal graphics. Cook’s Apple made it occur, and Cook took a victory lap this April by including the brand new M1 chip into the iPad.

Still, each the AirPods and Watch have basically been equipment for the iPhone, not new computing platforms in their very own proper: standalone Watch apps haven’t develop into a booming market. Cook’s greatest guarantees have principally but to pan out: he spent a 12 months after Jobs’ demise speaking about Apple’s TV efforts, solely to completely begin over with the Apple TV Plus streaming service. He’s repeatedly mentioned Apple’s biggest contribution to the world would be in health, with the Watch and the Peloton-like Fitness Plus platform the small beginnings of that effort.

And whereas Cook has teased for half a decade that augmented actuality may develop into a brand new platform — calling it “a big idea like the smartphone,” “profound,” and “critically important” to Apple’s future — it’s largely simply been teasers. Very little has come of ARKit, which introduced fundamental augmented actuality apps to the iPhone, since its 2017 debut, and Apple’s rumored AR headset has — if understandably — been a 12 months or two away for the final three years in a row.

The companies flip

If Tim Cook stepped down from Apple tomorrow, although, analysts wouldn’t be asking if a product visionary will take his place — they’d be questioning whether or not the following CEO will proceed turning Apple right into a companies firm.

In the second quarter of 2016, Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri drew monetary analysts’ consideration to a exceptional truth it had quietly been disclosing for effectively over a 12 months — Apple was changing into a companies firm, too. The App Store and the corporate’s different paid subscriptions have been accelerating quarter over quarter and 12 months over 12 months — they usually had raked in $4.8 billion in Q1 2015 alone. In 2017, after pulling in over $7 billion per quarter for 3 fiscal quarters in a row, Apple declared its companies enterprise was the scale of a Fortune 100 firm all by itself. Last quarter, Apple saw a record $17.5 billion in services revenue, practically half the scale of the iPhone and greater than double every other {hardware} class.

As emails from the Epic v. Apple trial (#10) revealed, the App Store alone had already eclipsed the corporate’s whole Mac and iPad companies in 2016, with solely the iPhone towering above it. Add motion pictures, music, books, magazines, paid iCloud storage plans, AppleCare, Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, and Apple Fitness Plus, and also you’ve bought a wide selection of companies collectively pulling in billions.

It’s not clear which of those make a dent past the App Store, as Apple stopped speaking about Apple Music’s paid subscribers after it hit 60 million in June 2019, and the corporate nonetheless successfully provides away Apple TV Plus free of charge.

But Cook’s sights are set past content material companies, too: with Apple Pay, the Apple Card, Apple Cash, and the upcoming Apple Pay Later, the corporate appears to be edging into banking as effectively, locking in a reduce of your transactions on the identical time it’s locking you into its software program ecosystem.

There is one place that Cook’s Apple admirably received’t go: whereas a few of Apple’s service upsells might be extremely annoying, Cook has been a champion for person privateness, calling it “a fundamental human right,” and famously preventing the FBI over requests that, privateness advocates agreed, may result in governments having backdoors into customers’ telephones. It’s the uncommon tech large that isn’t utilizing your knowledge as a income stream.

Some of Apple’s companies play goes again to the times of Steve Jobs. One 12 months earlier than he died, he delivered an inside technique presentation the place he declared 2011 the “Year of the Cloud,” and that Apple ought to “tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem.” But nearly all of Apple’s companies at present have been launched on Tim Cook’s watch, and Apple Pay particularly ought to go down as one of many firm’s recreation altering strikes — whereas different telephone makers do have a direct equal, it was Cook’s Apple that drove on the spot, seamless, touchless funds throughout giant elements of the world.

Growing pains

The query now could be whether or not Apple can sustain with its all-encompassing pursuit of progress, as a result of after a decade some cracks are starting to indicate.

Consumers, opponents, and lawmakers world wide are beginning to deal with Apple like simply one other large firm attempting to extract income any means it could possibly — and because the firm has develop into chargeable for a billion gadgets and a pair of million apps, its fame is beginning to take some brutal physique blows.

Apple has by no means apologized a lot because it has prior to now few years, whether or not it’s for artificially slowing down older iPhones to protect their batteries, secretly having human contractors take heed to Siri recordings, or backing away from forcing a developer so as to add in-app purchases.

Photo by Vlad Savov / The Verge

Even as Tim Cook continues to push Apple as a privateness firm, the place what occurs in your telephone stays in your telephone, Apple is grappling with the fact of kid porn and making probably worrying privateness concessions because of this.

The firm’s embroiled in lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny across the globe alleging the App Store is a monopoly, and whereas it’s totally unsure whether or not judges will agree, Apple’s personal inside emails do a reasonably good job of displaying how the corporate values lock-in and favors some builders over others, regardless of Tim Cook’s testimony below oath.

Even as Apple tries to take care of the picture of a technological chief that places individuals first, the corporate has deployed a military of lobbyists to kill regulation it opposes in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Louisiana, and Georgia — the place Apple reportedly threatened to pull its investment from a historically Black college if a problem to its App Store went by. The firm has asked the Biden administration to pressure the South Korean government from enacting an analogous regulation. Even as Apple initiatives a picture of its App Store as a reliable place to buy, it’s develop into more and more apparent that its 500 human reviewers don’t have time to catch probably the most egregious scams efficiently bilking customers out of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, though emails present Apple’s been conscious of the issue for years.

Cook’s all-important provide chains have persistently been below hearth, too, with reviews that Apple turned a blind eye to labor regulation violations in China.

Although Apple prides itself on a tradition of secrecy, it’s presently present process a wave of worker activism that may change that tradition eternally in methods past Cook’s management — though the corporate could also be illegally attempting to manage it anyhow.

And though Tim Cook has touted variety for a few years, and deserves credit score for popping out as the primary brazenly homosexual CEO of a Fortune 500 firm, Apple’s own leadership page remains to be extraordinarily white.

It’s doable Tim Cook received’t be the one to unravel these issues. He’s been with the corporate for 23 years, and he recently told Kara Swisher he most likely received’t nonetheless be there after one other decade has handed. But few of them have been issues within the Steve Jobs period: many are a operate of the Apple that Tim Cook constructed.