Tim's Time
April 21, 2026
Yesterday, Tim Cook announced his timeline for stepping down as Apple’s CEO . I felt like I should write something about this, but I wasn’t sure what. I fell back into thinking about Cook’s time by the numbers.
When Tim Cook steps down from his CEO position in September of this year, he will have had the longest stint as Apple’s CEO. Steve Jobs co-founded Apple and was the Chairman of the Board for a time, but never held the title of CEO until after his ouster and return in 1997. Even then, he was interim CEO (or iCEO) until January 2000. If we include his interim period, Jobs was CEO for 14 years and 6 months. Cook took over from Jobs in August of 2011, and will have been CEO for 15 years and 1 month when he steps down. Pretty close to a third of Apple’s total existence.
Cook has always been a logistics guy. He started at Apple in 1998 as the SVP of Worldwide Operations, and became Chief Operating Officer in 2005. During his time as CEO, he’s focused on increasing profit margins, especially by focusing on services revenue. This hasn’t always been great, especially as the OS and apps get more junked up with ads. But he’s at least kept investors happy. Apple’s stock went from a split-adjusted high of $11.35 on August 24, 2011 to a high of $274.275 yesterday. That’s more than a 2,316% increase. Kind of insane.
During Cook’s time as CEO, Apple launched a lot of products. It’s always tricky to count these things, so I deferred to the list on the List of Apple Products page on Wikipedia. Based on this, there were 335 products announced since Cook took over. If we agree with this page’s (fairly liberal) counting of products, that’s over 1.90 products a month launched under Cook. Even after a quick try at deduplicating things (again, tricky), it’s still more than 1.5 products a month.
I was curious about how these broke down, so I did some quick categorization. I broke things down into Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, HomePod, Apple TV, iPod, displays, Apple Vision Pro, and Other (for everything else like accessories and chargers). This is again based on the Wikipedia data above, so there are duplicates.
| Mac | 95 |
| iPhone | 68 |
| iPad | 58 |
| Apple Watch | 34 |
| AirPods | 11 |
| iPod | 8 |
| Apple TV | 7 |
| HomePod | 6 |
| Displays | 4 |
| Apple Vision Pro | 2 |
| Other | 42 |
Finally, I thought it would be fun to turn some of these findings into an interactive chart. Click the screenshot or the link below to give it a go. It definitely works best on desktop. The products are grouped by month, and I decided to overlay the stock price over time (gathered using yfinance). You can click the labels to turn categories (or the stock line) on or off. You can also use the timeline at the bottom to zoom in on a particular timeframe.
