Tim Cook’s tenure Apple’s CEO position, which ends on September 1, will likely be defined by operational efficiency and financial growth, leading Apple into a trillion-dollar era.
But his most critical achievement may be doubling down on Apple’s services business, which includes iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, News+ and more. This is the subscription tier of iOS, and almost all service apps are tightly integrated with Messages, the glue that keeps people glued to their iPhones.
While Apple latest earnings reportin the quarter ending December 2025, its services business reached a record high of $30 billion in revenue. This was a 14 percent jump from the same quarter a year earlier; services was also a more profitable business than Macs, iPads, Apple Watches, home appliances and other accessories combined. For the full year 2025, Apple Services generated more than $109 billion for Apple, again up 14 percent from 2024.
When Cook first took over as CEO in 2011, “services” wasn’t even separated into a separate revenue category, even though iTunes generated about $6 billion a year by proxy.
As analyst Ben Thompson emphasizessome of the work involved in laying the foundation for Apple’s services occurred before Cook’s tenure as CEO. The App Store launched in 2008, a year after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and Jobs predicted that there would be a “tax” of up to 30 percent on paid apps and in-app purchases. The driving forces behind this strategy were Jobs loyalists Phil Schiller, now an Apple “associate,” and Eddy Cue, the company’s senior vice president of services. (Schiller is a performer who the famous change in development tax— slightly — in 2016 to make the situation more favorable for app developers, in response to complaints that Apple was unfairly pressuring developers).
But it was under Cook that Apple transformed from the world’s most popular consumer hardware maker to one of the world’s most powerful platform companies. And this is largely due to the services. The question now is whether Apple executive John Ternus, who will soon take the reins as CEO, will be able to expand Apple’s platform into the era of generative artificial intelligence. So far, Apple’s approach to advanced AI – particularly generative AI, as Apple has been using machine learning in a variety of clever ways for years – has been puzzling.
Apple’s virtual assistant Siri, considered inventive when it launched in 2011, has been plagued by bugs, limitations and general unhappiness. In 2024, the company announced “Apple Intelligence,” a recent moniker for the artificial intelligence features that will be built into products like Siri. But then postponement of release Siri with enhanced artificial intelligence In 2025, Apple executives working on artificial intelligence began to leave the company. Robby Walker, a senior executive working on artificial intelligence, left in October this year. At the end of 2025, Apple’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, stepped down. After Giannadrea’s departure, longtime Apple software chief Craig Federighi apparently took over Siri.
Ternus cutlets are in the equipment. As of 2021, he is Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering at Apple. Previously, Ternus was vice president of engineering, and in 2001 he joined the company’s product design team. A chief hardware officer isn’t the most obvious choice to lead Apple, as it determines its position on LLM programs, inferential learning, Siri as a chatbot, hallucinations, the privacy implications of AI, vibration coding, and more.
Except that Ternus himself was also responsible for one of the most critical platforms for the future Apple: its chip business. Ming-Chi Kuo, renowned Apple analyst, he pointed to X that Ternus’ most critical move in recent years “was leading the transition of Macs from x86 (Intel) processors to ARM (Apple’s own Apple Silicon).” It 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 would not be in the hardware position it currently has as it prepares for AI devices.