In case you were waiting for clarity, after 15 years at the helm, Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s CEO on September 1, 2026, Apple announced on Monday. John Ternus, currently Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, will take over. Cook isn’t leaving the company; he is moving to executive chairman. But the transition marks the end of an era that many once thought impossible: a post-Jobs Apple that didn’t just survive, but grew into a USD 4 trillion business with annual revenue that nearly quadrupled on his watch.

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple,” Cook said in a statement. “I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people who have been unwavering in their dedication to enriching the lives of our customers.”

Over the last 15 years as CEO, Cook oversaw a product portfolio that expanded well beyond the iPhone and Mac that Jobs left behind. Here are five products that defined the Cook era.

Apple Watch

AirPods

Apple Silicon

iPhone Air

Apple Services

Big hits and a few misses along the way

When Apple Watch launched in 2015, the reaction was mixed. Smartwatches had been tried before and largely ignored. But Cook’s Apple kept iterating, and This watch found its identity not as a fashion accessory or a phone companion, but as a health device. Fall detection, ECG, blood oxygen monitoring, crash detection, This watch evolved into something genuinely useful for millions of people. By last year, it accounted for roughly 25% of global smartwatch sales, As per a Counterpoint report. Cook is widely credited with creating the wearables category at Apple, and This watch is the clearest example of that. With the latest Series 11 ( review ), Watch SE 3, and Watch Ultra 3, Cook has created a wearable portfolio that almost everyone can buy today and is likely to remain unchallenged for years to come.

Launched in 2016 and mocked almost immediately for the “wireless” earbuds that looked like someone had simply cut the cord off a pair of EarPods, AirPods have since become one of the most recognisable consumer tech products in the world. Under Ternus’s hardware engineering leadership, and during Cook’s tenure, AirPods evolved from a convenience product into the world’s best-selling in-ear headphones, with industry-leading active noise cancellation and, most recently, over-the-counter hearing aid functionality. That last addition is arguably the most meaningful, turning a fashion accessory into a health tool accessible to millions.

Much like the Apple Watch, the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro 3 are leaders in their respective classes and remain among the most recognisable Apple products today.

The transition from Intel to Apple-designed silicon, beginning with the M1 chip in 2020, was one of the most significant architectural shifts in Apple’s history. It gave Apple control over its most critical technology, delivered performance and power efficiency gains that competitors are still catching up to, and revitalised the Mac category. The Mac is now more powerful and more popular globally than at any point in its 40-year history, and Apple Silicon is the foundation of that. It was a long, complex, risky transition, and it paid off completely.

Today, Apple Silicon not only powers Mac computers like the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air but also the iPad, from the iPad Air to the iPad Pro, cementing them as some of the most powerful computing devices in the world.

The iPhone Air (review), introduced last fall, represented something different from the incremental updates that had come to define the annual iPhone cycle. Radically thin and built with new materials and manufacturing techniques, it signalled that Apple’s hardware ambitions under Ternus, who led the effort, were moving in a new direction. And while the Air was an engineering marvel and was seen as a step towards Apple’s foldable iPhone, it failed to attract shoppers, leading Apple to cut production and focus on its iPhone 17 series instead.

Not a single product, but arguably Cook’s most consequential contribution to Apple’s business. When Cook became CEO, services were a side note. He turned them into a USD 100 billion annual business, spanning iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple TV+, Apple Music, and the App Store. Services changed Apple’s financial profile fundamentally, providing recurring revenue that made the company far more resilient to the cyclical nature of hardware sales. It is, in many ways, Cook’s most durable legacy.

Like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook also had his share of failed product launches as well. The Apple Vision Pro was Cook’s big swing at a new computing platform that largely missed with consumers, who were unwilling to pay several thousand dollars for a mixed-reality headset. Not every bet lands, and Cook’s record is notable precisely because the misses were few relative to the scale of what he built.

Ternus, who has spent nearly his entire career at Apple and was central to several of the products above, inherits a company in strong shape. Whether he can extend that record is the question the industry will be watching closely from September 1.