Today, September 1, 2026, marks a new era for Apple, the beginning of a new chapter led by a lifelong product person, and the official end of Tim Cook's Apple. Cook stepped down as CEO after 15 years at the helm, handing the reins to John Ternus, Apple's former head of hardware engineering, who becomes CEO effective today. Cook isn't disappearing entirely, he moves into the newly created role of executive chairman, where he'll continue engaging with policymakers and advising on select company matters.
It's a fitting moment to look back at the Cook era, and to share my own history with Apple products along the way.
Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and a Hard Act to Follow
Apple's brand will forever be linked to Steve Jobs. As iconic as he was, Jobs actually spent several years away from Apple before returning to turn the company around, and when he came back, his tenure was cut short by illness and, ultimately, his death in October 2011, just two months after handing the CEO role to Cook.
That left Tim Cook filling some of the biggest shoes in tech history, carrying the responsibility of keeping the Apple vision, and Jobs' design and product philosophy, alive.
By almost any financial measure, he pulled it off. When Cook took over in August 2011, Apple was valued at roughly $350 billion and generated about $108 billion in annual revenue. Fifteen years later, Apple's market cap sits at roughly $4.6–4.7 trillion, annual revenue has climbed to around $416 billion, and the company has shipped an estimated 3.1 billion iPhones under his leadership. Apple's stock rose more than 2,000% during his tenure, and the company returned more than $1 trillion to shareholders along the way. The Cook era brought some genuinely interesting products, a few well-documented failures, and finished about as strong, financially, as any tech leadership run in history.
In this post, I want to share some of my thoughts on the products I've enjoyed over the years, my current setup, where I think Apple products stand today, and what I'm watching for as the Ternus era begins.
My First Apple Products
My first iPhone was a 5, and later a 5s, I used both the same year, bought secondhand about a year after release, around 2012/2013. I wanted to try Apple products for the first time as I was starting to make decent income and could finally justify the price. I was a young web and graphic designer in my second corporate job, right around the time I was getting into building mobile apps and discovering the power of the App Store.
That period marked two chapters of my life that still hold up today: a preference for small phones, and getting hooked on the Apple ecosystem. Soon after, I moved to a pre-owned MacBook Pro, then started requesting new MacBooks for design work at the companies I worked for. That got me using Mac-only design apps like Sketch, this was before Adobe XD and Figma existed, and it pulled me further into interface design, eventually shaping my career as a product designer and builder, which I'm still embedded in today.
When Phones Got Bigger (and I Didn't Want Them To)
Apple kept up a steady cadence of new products every year, but after the iPhone 6, phones started getting bigger, and the whole industry hype around bigger screens killed off the small-phone form factor I'd come to love. That was a sad era for me, I didn't want to upgrade to bigger phones. It just wasn't my style, and I didn't want to lug around a larger device.
Over those years, some genuinely great products showed up, AirPods among them, but the Mac side of the business had a rougher stretch. The trash-can Mac Pro, the butterfly keyboard, and the Touch Bar are some of the most-cited stumbles of the early-to-mid Cook era. More were still to come before he fully redeemed himself.
Going Small Again, and Going Silicon
After years on bigger iPhones, I upgraded again when rumors started circulating that the iPhone 13 mini would be the last mini in the lineup. Since its release, I've daily-driven that mini for roughly five years.
That same year also marked what was, at the time, a genuinely revolutionary moment in Apple computing: the arrival of Apple Silicon and the M1 chip. I moved my whole setup over, from an Intel MacBook to an M1 Mac mini, an M1 iPad, and the iPhone 13 mini. I've been running essentially the same setup daily for about five years now.
Where Apple Stands Today
That brings us to the current lineup. Once the M-series silicon was fully embedded across the Mac ecosystem, Apple started experimenting with where else it could go, the Apple Vision Pro, and the Mac Studio line, which effectively replaced both the Mac Pro and the ultra-slim iMac as the "serious" desktop options.
This era has had its own wins and failures. The Mac mini became a genuinely cheap, accessible entry point into the Apple ecosystem. The Vision Pro turned out to be an interesting disaster at best, commercially. And the iPad's identity has only gotten more confused, the "what even is a computer" problem. iPads are powerful enough to run macOS but are still limited to iPadOS. I'd hoped the software side would have evolved further by now; instead, iPadOS still feels like a half-baked, would-be desktop OS with very tablet-shaped roots, which makes day-to-day workflows a genuine pain if you're moving between Mac and iPad, as I do daily between my Mac mini and M1 iPad Pro.
As most workflows shift further toward cloud- and browser-based tools, one of Apple's biggest recent hits has been the MacBook Neo, a genuinely new product category for the company. Announced in March 2026, it's a 13-inch laptop powered by the same A18 Pro chip found in the iPhone, starting at just $599 (or $499 for students and educators), Apple's most affordable Mac ever. It's clearly targeting the non-traditional, budget-conscious buyer, which is an interesting contrast to Apple's usual playbook of high-end luxury pricing, the $10,000 gold Apple Watch and the infamous $999 Mac Pro wheels among them. Remember those?
A Strong Financial Finish, a Shakier Software Story
Tim Cook's era is ending from a position of real strength, the company is more profitable than it's ever been. Apple has generally played it safe with new product categories, favoring steady, incremental design changes over the years. Products like the MacBook Neo and the "e" line of iPhones (like the iPhone 17e) show an interesting strategy: get more people into the Mac and iPhone ecosystems at a lower price point, even as costs elsewhere keep climbing.
The next chapter under Ternus is going to be worth watching closely. As much as Apple has played it safe on hardware, the company has increasingly looked like it's falling behind on software. Much of what came out of WWDC 2026 amounted to refinements rather than leaps, the Apple magic of "it just works" has felt shakier lately.
Things don't always work together as seamlessly as they used to, the OS can feel clunky in places, and design missteps have been more visible than usual, especially with Liquid Glass, the translucent, glass-inspired interface Apple introduced at WWDC 2025 and spent much of the following year trying to stabilize and refine for legibility. Coming from a design background, the current state of Apple's software feels genuinely sub-par for a company that's supposed to be a design leader.
I'm curious to see how the new CEO addresses some of these issues, particularly around Siri and the broader Apple Intelligence promise, which has lagged competitors. On the hardware side, I'm also watching how Apple handles pricing given the ongoing chip and component shortages driven by AI demand, the MacBook Neo has already crept up in price since launch.
The real question is whether Apple leans further into affordable products like the Neo, or falls back on its old playbook of high-margin, high-end hardware to justify the numbers.
Either way, watching Apple hand the wheel to a career hardware engineer, rather than another operations or supply-chain leader, is going to make for an interesting next five years.