Tim Cook’s legacy is turning Apple into a subscription company

Tim Cook period As CEO of Apple, he It’s coming to an end September 1 will likely be defined by operational efficiency and financial growth, bringing Apple into the trillion-dollar era.

But his most significant accomplishment may be doubling Apple’s services business, which includes iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, News+, and more. It’s the subscription layer that sits on top of iOS, and almost all service apps are closely integrated with the Messages app, and it’s the glue that keeps people Stuck in their iPhones.

Through Apple Latest earnings reportfor the quarter ending December 2025, its services business reached an all-time revenue record of $30 billion. This was a 14 percent jump from the same quarter a year earlier. Services were also a business that generated more money than Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, Home, and other accessories combined. For the entire fiscal year 2025, Apple Services generated more than $109 billion for Apple, again, a 14 percent increase from 2024.

When Cook first took over as CEO in 2011, Services wasn’t broken down into a separate revenue category, even though iTunes was generating about $6 billion annually.

As analyst Ben Thompson said PointingSome of the groundwork for Apple Services predated Cook’s tenure as CEO. App Store It was launched in 2008a year after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and it was Jobs’s foresight to impose a “tax” of up to 30 percent on paid apps and in-app purchases. Jobs loyalists Phil Schiller, who now works as an “associate” at Apple, and Eddie Cue, the company’s senior vice president of services, were the driving forces behind the strategy. (Schiller is the CEO of… The developer tax has famously been changed– Slightly – in 2016, to make it more convenient for app makers, in response to complaints that Apple was unfairly pressuring developers.)

But under Cook’s leadership, Apple has gone from the world’s most popular consumer hardware company to one of the world’s most powerful platform companies. This was due in large part to services. The question now is whether Apple CEO John Ternos, who will soon take over as CEO, can expand Apple’s platform into the era of generative artificial intelligence. So far, Apple’s approach to advanced AI — especially generative AI, since Apple has been using machine learning in all sorts of clever ways for years now — has been confusing.

Apple’s virtual assistant Siri, considered innovative when it was first launched in 2011, has been plagued by bugs, limitations and general unhappiness. In 2024, the company announced “Apple Intelligence,” a new moniker for artificial intelligence features that will be included in products like Siri. But yet Release postponed With AI-powered Siri in 2025, Apple executives working on AI are starting to exit the company. Robbie Walker, a senior executive working on artificial intelligence, left the company in October of that year. In late 2025, John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of artificial intelligence, resigned from his position. Following Giannadrea’s departure, longtime Apple software chief Craig Federighi He reportedly took charge of Siri.

Ternus parts are present in the hardware. He has been Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering since 2021. Before that, Ternus was vice president of engineering, joining the company’s product design team in 2001. The hardware executive isn’t the most obvious choice to guide Apple as he explores where it stands in LLMs, inferential learning, Siri-as-a-chatbot, hallucinations, the privacy implications of AI, biometric cryptography, and more.

Except that Ternus himself was also responsible for one of the most important matters Platforms For the future Apple: its chip business. Ming-Chi Kuo, the famous Apple analyst, He pointed at the X Ternus’ most important move in recent years “was leading the Mac transition from x86 (Intel) to ARM (Apple’s own Silicon).” This was a “system- and platform-level transition, essentially a brain transplant” that required “a very high level of implementation and close cross-functional coordination.” Without this, Kuo continues, Apple would not have the hardware status it has now as it prepares for AI devices.