Cook’s greatest business success was understanding that the iPhone was more than a device. It was the window through which much of the world would experience the internet, and that created opportunities for Apple to make money well beyond selling hardware. I remember investors struggling to understand why Services would ever account for more than 5% of revenue, given that, at the time, the company’s service focus was the App Store, warranties, and some nascent cloud revenue. In the spring of 2014, the acquisition of Beats Music gave investors the roadmap that Apple was going direct into subscriptions, along with a sense that they would eventually launch something in TV and movies, given co-founder Jimmy Iovine’s content background.

Fast forward 12 years from the Beats deal. In the most recently reported June quarter, Services generated $30.7B in revenue, up 12% y/y, and accounted for 28% of Apple’s total revenue. More importantly, Services transformed Apple’s profitability. When Cook took over in 2011, Apple’s overall gross margin was 40.5%. In the June 2026 quarter, it was 50.1%. Services itself carried a 75.6% gross margin in the quarter, compared to hardware’s gross margin of 40.1%.

On top of the revenue and profit bump, Services have also become part of the fabric that binds Apple’s products together. iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and Apple TV make the devices more valuable together, which increases upgrade rates and gives the company more pricing leverage.

To be clear, Jobs laid the groundwork for the Services business with the launch of the standalone App Store in 2008, and Cook likely took it well beyond what Steve had envisioned.

Cook wrote the book for CEOs on how to navigate geopolitics. In 2017, he understood earlier than most technology CEOs that running one of the world’s largest companies would increasingly require managing relationships with governments, not just customers, employees, and Wall Street.

That became visible during the first Trump administration as U.S.-China trade tensions escalated. Cook was the first major tech CEO to invest heavily in a direct relationship with the White House. Today, seeing CEOs regularly engage Washington seems commonplace. At the time, Cook’s approach was unusual.

What has always amazed me is that he managed to get close to the White House while simultaneously maintaining Apple’s relationship with China. It felt like one week Cook was in Washington making Trump feel good about Apple’s commitment to America. The next week, he would be in Beijing meeting with Chinese leadership, reinforcing Apple’s commitment to the country. Then, the following week, he would visit India or Southeast Asia, cutting new supply deals. Somehow he kept everyone happy. Luckily for Apple, his new role as chairman will keep him in the geopolitical seat.

No surprise here. Apple was too slow to get behind AI. The irony is that Cook saw AI coming long before most. In 2018, Cook brought on John Giannandrea, who had led Google’s search and AI efforts, to run Apple’s machine learning and AI strategy. Cook said at the time that machine learning and AI were “important to Apple’s future.” It was clear that he understood the importance of AI, which makes the miss even more painful.

To be clear, Apple’s valuation today is higher because of what they’re doing in personalized AI. I believe it would be even higher had the company moved faster. Maybe that would have meant developing more custom silicon optimized specifically for AI at scale. Maybe it would have meant building a chatbot aimed at competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. Maybe it would have taken an entirely different form.

Long-term, Apple still has a massive AI opportunity ahead of it. Personalized AI has barely begun, along with the theme of local inference, which should drive a multi-year hardware upgrade cycle.

Ultimately, Cook’s greatest contribution has little to do with Apple’s market cap. Over the past 20 years of interacting with and observing Cook, what stands out most to me is his ability to achieve meteoric success while continuing to be someone who genuinely wants to do good, not only for Apple but for the world.

Disclaimer