When Apple named its next chief executive last month it did so without ceremony. Tim Cook will become executive chairman on September 1; John Ternus, his senior vice-president of hardware engineering, will succeed him as CEO. The announcement came with a photograph, not a keynote: the two men walking through Apple Park, the circular glass campus in Cupertino that Steve Jobs designed with the British architect Norman Foster and did not live to see completed.

It was the first Apple succession of the post-masterpiece age, and the prose matched. Apple said the transition had been approved unanimously by its board after a “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.”

Cook had spent 15 years building a company that could change its CEO without spectacle. He took over from Jobs in August 2011, six weeks before Jobs died, and spent the next 15 years embedding Apple into our daily lives. He also grew the company more than tenfold. That is the growth curve of a Silicon Valley start-up, not a company that was already worth $350 billion when he took the job. Today Apple is worth around $4 trillion, more than every other company in the FTSE 100 combined. It has 2.5 billion active devices, roughly one for every three people on earth.

What Cook erased is the feeling of using Apple. The iPhone is capable of more tasks than ever, but it no longer announces itself as an Apple product. Commuters tap through train gates with Apple Pay, an AirTag in a missing suitcase phones home from Istanbul, and when parents call........

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