One fact that cannot be erased is that since Cook took the helm at Apple, the company's annual revenue has soared from $108 billion to over $416 billion, and its market value has expanded from around $350 billion to over $4 trillion.
On September 1, John Ternus officially took over as Apple CEO from Tim Cook, marking the most significant power transition at Apple in 15 years.
The Apple left by Cook is the world's most profitable and largest consumer electronics company. The professional manager, who was once questioned for being unable to replace Jobs, has proven himself over 15 years, also proving Jobs' vision at the time.
However, what Apple truly lacks today is not a better iPhone, but the next product that can change the world.
This time, the one searching for answers has become Tenus.
When Jobs appointed Tim Cook as his successor due to personal health reasons, the decision was widely questioned. At the time, many people thought that Cook, a skilled manager with a background in operations, could not replace the visionary "Jobs" and continue Apple's glory.
To this day, the notion that "Apple lacks innovation under Cook" still persists, but one fact that cannot be erased is that since Cook took the helm, Apple's annual revenue has soared from $108 billion to over $416 billion, and its market value has expanded from around $350 billion to over $4 trillion.
Cook has spent 15 years proving that Apple remains a great company even without Jobs.
All of this is thanks to Cook's efforts to strengthen the global supply chain, drive the development of core chip research, expand the software and hardware ecosystem, and through continuous stock buybacks and dividend payments, convert the abundant operating results into generous shareholder returns. Cook has reshaped Apple's business model, expanding the hardware product system left by Jobs into a massive and stable business system.
Berkshire has long been a major shareholder of Apple, with the investment generating more than $150 billion in value for the company. At this year's Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, Buffett specifically asked Cook to stand up and receive applause from the shareholders in attendance. For a professional manager, receiving public recognition from the "Oracle of Omaha" Buffett upon retirement may be more meaningful than any praise.
Cook has gained widespread recognition both internally and externally, with his drawn-out "Good morning" becoming an indispensable part of Apple's launch events.
Apple remains strong at this moment, with its latest quarterly financial report showing the company has achieved its best performance for the same period in history, and the massive tech empire is still running at high speed.
The 65-year-old Cook is in good health, but has chosen to step down at this time, taking on the role of executive chairman of the board, and will continue to be responsible for communicating with global policymakers. Perhaps he is more aware than anyone that Apple's next decade will require a different type of leader at the helm.
Amazon, which expanded from e-commerce giant to cloud computing and comprehensive tech platform, and Google, which grew from search giant to diversified tech empire, both completed leadership transitions at critical turning points in their development.
Apple has also reached a crossroads today.
Looking at Apple's product line, the Apple Watch and AirPods are certainly very successful, but they are more of an extension of the existing ecosystem rather than redefining an industry like the iPhone. The Vision Pro is impressive in terms of hardware capabilities, but is limited by its high price and the immature application and content ecosystem, making it difficult to become a mass consumer product in the short term. As for the termination of the long-running car project, it means that Apple ultimately found it difficult to find a viable commercialization path in a completely new hardware field.
Apple's existing hardware products have highly mature core functions, and the company can, of course, continue to iterate in areas such as chips, imaging, and displays, or even take on a "tech, with a focus on iterative upgrades" approach, making minor upgrades to core functions, and there will still be a large number of users willing to pay for the next generation of products.
The iPhone 17 series, despite not bringing revolutionary product upgrades, has garnered strong market feedback solely based on its performance and experience optimizations, coupled with a pricing system filled with "value for money".
The issue is that while this continuous iteration can temporarily sustain Apple's growth, it cannot replicate the kind of disruptive industrial transformation that the iPhone brought about. This is the crisis hidden behind Apple's prosperity - not that today's products are not good enough, but that there is no clear idea where tomorrow's new products will come from.
In terms of hierarchy, Apple still has many veteran executives in charge of various business lines such as software, services, and retail, but they all struggle to answer the difficult question of "where is the next iPhone".
When a product company has already established a highly mature business system, it may need to return to the product itself.
He was successively in charge of the hardware development of products such as the iPad, AirPods, and iPhone, and became a key person responsible for the Mac's transition to Apple Silicon (Apple's self-researched chip system based on the ARM architecture), ultimately leading Apple's entire hardware engineering department. It can be said that no one understands Apple's hardware system better than Ternus.
The first hurdle for Tenor is the AI functionality that Apple has been criticized for in recent years, which lags behind.
Manufacturers like Samsung seem to be moving faster than Apple in terms of AI functions on smartphones, with some system-level AI features genuinely improving user experience, such as the AI-powered photo editing functions that are now commonly found on phones. However, these features are mostly limited to optimizing user experience, and most users still keep one or several frequently used AI apps on their phones.
"Opening an app and completing tasks" is the most basic usage logic of smartphones, and system-level AI has yet to truly become a new entry point for integrating various services, which is far from enough to subvertively change the way phones are used.
ByteDance and ZTE Nubia's previously launched Doudou AI phone was a bold experiment, in which AI attempted to take over operational permissions that originally belonged to users, but soon clashed with the permissions, security mechanisms, and business rules of existing apps.
What needs to be redesigned is not just the software in phones, but also the hardware that carries AI technology itself. Tennus's work over the past 25 years has been to turn Apple's complex engineering technology into products that consumers can use.
From this perspective, Apple's choice of a hardware engineer to succeed Cook does not mean that Tenner knows what the "next iPhone" is. On the contrary, perhaps it is because no one knows the answer that Apple needs someone closer to the product itself to find new answers.
As Cook said in an internal email to all Apple employees on the day of his departure:
Few people understand as well as Tenus does what it takes to build products that can change the world.
Cook didn't become Jobs, nor did he need to be Jobs, as he wrote his own chapter for Apple. Now, Apple has turned to a new page, with Ternus at the helm.
We may not be "Apple fans" and may not necessarily buy Apple products, but for all consumers, it is still possible to look forward to a company at the forefront of the consumer electronics industry coming out with a product that amazes us and shows us a new way for people to interact with the world.
The cover photo shows Tenus (front) and Cook (back), sourced from CFP