At long last, the elders have cast their ballots, the conclave has dissolved, and a tastefully designed blue puff of smoke has risen above Apple Park. The long Tim Cook pontificate is over. In his place, an Apple insider named John Ternus has ascended.

Tim Cook was Apple’s first CEO after Steve Jobs, appointed as a trusted and steady hand with a lot of logistics experience. His mandate was to expand on a general vision that had, at the time of Jobs’s death, become fairly clear. Cook oversaw the company’s growth from around $350 billion in market capitalization to nearly $4 trillion today, which was the result, mostly, of delivering and gradually improving upon a line of devices that was, in 2011, freshly revamped and remains recognizable in today’s catalogue: a sharpened slablike iPhone, the iPad, the aluminum Macs and MacBooks, and marginal-for-the-time-being accessory devices like the Apple TV.

Jobs famously warned Cook not to fall into the trap of asking what the late founder would do, but the reality was that he didn’t really need to. He oversaw the launch of accessories like the Apple Watch and AirPods, which were major successes, as well as the Apple Vision Pro, which was an experimental flop. Mostly, he oversaw the expansion of a coherent hardware business with an enormous amount of room to grow, turning it into, at times, the largest company in the world. His largest contribution after that was probably his push into supplemental software and cloud services — iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Music, and too many others to keep track of — which can be understood, in business terms, as ways to squeeze steady recurring revenue out of an already lucrative hardware business. Longtime Apple watcher-diviner John Gruber connects Cook’s legacy to the reputation of his successor, a........

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