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Good riddance, Tim.

Dimitris Kritsilis

27 min read·<br>Apr 21, 2026

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How the beige caretaker turned a design company into an annuity, and why September 1 is the best news Apple has had since Apple Silicon<br>Press enter or click to view image in full size

Uncle Tim may now enjoy his favorite pastime away from our favorite productsLast Monday, Tim Cook announced he steps down from his role as Apple CEO on September 1, 2026, sliding sideways into an executive-chairman seat while hardware chief John Ternus inherits the keys to Cupertino. Fifteen years. Roughly $945 billion returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. A stock chart that justifies the tenure in the only language Cook has ever fluently spoken.<br>It is also, depending on what Ternus does with the next eighteen months, the best news Apple has had since the launch of Apple Silicon in 2020 and the iPhone 6 in 2014. Those were the last two product moments that altered the shape of the company rather than maintaining it. Everything in between has been cadence: the same devices, the same keynote beats, the same black turtleneck cosplay, year after year, with the material innovation budget diverted to share repurchases. Cook leaving is the first structural change at Apple in a decade that didn’t require an engineer to ignore him.<br>I was one of the people who loved this company. Not in the blue-check sense of the word, where loving Apple means defending whatever Apple shipped most recently. I mean the older kind of love that formed in the late 90s watching Jobs stand alone on a stage with a black turtleneck and a working prototype, effortlessly making statements about computing, design, product, that are quoted as soundbites to this day. How can you not love a company that once made a film for the thirtieth anniversary of the Mac about the people who used it, shot entirely on iPhone, released quietly as a love letter to its users. Apple cared about its own history enough to make something beautiful about it. That company is the ghost Cook inherited, and over fifteen years he let it starve.<br>What Cook Actually Built<br>The products are still worth owning, for some definitions of worth. They are status objects now, which is a different proposition than the one Apple sold in 1998 or 2007. Status objects don’t need to be exciting. They need to be expensive, recognizable, and difficult enough to leave that the switching cost protects the margin. That is the category Cook inherited a design-led company into, and the transition is complete. There is no “think different” behind a 2026 iPhone. There is an NPV calculation wearing a chassis whose industrial design was meaningfully last rethought around 2017, refreshed each September with the same thinking that went into it: operations efficiency and margin optimization on a recycled shell.<br>The machinery of this transition has been public for a decade, and no amount of blue-check throat-clearing changes what the filings say.<br>Since Apple began repurchasing its own stock in 2012, the company has spent more than $800 billion on buybacks, with total capital returned to shareholders crossing $945 billion by May 2025. Apple has spent more on buying back its own shares than the entire market capitalization of JPMorgan or Exxon Mobil. R&D, meanwhile, ran about $31 billion in fiscal 2024, roughly 8 percent of revenue, while Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon sit at 12 to 14 percent and Meta and Nvidia run close to 30 percent. In absolute dollars, Amazon spent $85.6 billion on R&D, Alphabet $45.9 billion, Meta $39.1 billion. The company with more cash on hand than any of them chose to out-buyback the industry rather than out-invest it. The DOJ put the stark version on the antitrust record: $33 billion in R&D against $77 billion in buybacks in a single year, cited as evidence of a company defending a moat rather than widening it.<br>The services pivot tells you where the strategy actually sits. Services revenue went from $24.3 billion in fiscal 2016 to $85.2 billion in fiscal 2023, roughly 22 percent of net sales. Services margins run around 75 percent against 36 percent on hardware, and services grow 13.5 percent year-over-year while iPhone growth has decelerated to 4.2 percent. Once you accept that the business is recurring revenue extracted from the installed base, every product decision of the last decade reads coherently: iterate the hardware slowly enough to protect margins, slow the OS changes that might disturb compatibility, shepherd users toward subscriptions, and return the remaining cash to Wall Street.<br>The Cadence Breakage<br>One of the underrated artifacts of Cook-era Apple is what happened to the release calendar itself. Jobs-era Apple ran on a legible tick-tock: new industrial design in year one, internals bump in year two,...