Tim Cook will step down as Apple CEO and hand reins over to the iPhone maker’s hardware leader

Ap­ple CEO Tim Cook is step­ping down from the job that he in­her­it­ed from the late Steve Jobs, end­ing a near­ly 15-year reign that saw the com­pa­ny’s mar­ket val­ue soar by more than $3.6 tril­lion dur­ing an iPhone-fu­elled era of pros­per­i­ty.

Cook, 65, will turn the CEO du­ties over to Ap­ple’s head of hard­ware en­gi­neer­ing, John Ter­nus, on Sept. 1 while re­main­ing in­volved with the Cu­per­ti­no, Cal­i­for­nia, com­pa­ny as ex­ec­u­tive chair­man. That’s sim­i­lar to the tran­si­tions made by Ama­zon’s Jeff Be­zos and Net­flix’s Reed Hast­ings af­ter they end­ed their high­ly suc­cess­ful tenures as CEO.

“It has been the great­est priv­i­lege of my life to be the CEO of Ap­ple and to have been trust­ed to lead such an ex­tra­or­di­nary com­pa­ny,” Cook said in a state­ment. “I love Ap­ple with all of my be­ing, and I am so grate­ful to have had the op­por­tu­ni­ty to work with a team of such in­ge­nious, in­no­v­a­tive, cre­ative, and deeply car­ing peo­ple.”

Ter­nus, 50, has been with Ap­ple for the past quar­ter cen­tu­ry, in­clud­ing the past five years over­see­ing the en­gi­neer­ing un­der­ly­ing the iPhone, iPad and Mac — a role that made him a prime can­di­date to suc­ceed Cook.

“I am pro­found­ly grate­ful for this op­por­tu­ni­ty to car­ry Ap­ple’s mis­sion for­ward,” Ter­nus said in a state­ment.

The tran­si­tion to a new CEO comes at a piv­otal time for Ap­ple. Ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence has un­leashed the most up­heaval with­in the in­dus­try since Jobs un­veiled the first iPhone in 2007. Ap­ple has got­ten off to a rough start in AI af­ter stum­bling in its ef­forts to de­liv­er new fea­tures built on the tech­nol­o­gy, as promised near­ly two years ago.

Ear­li­er this year, Ap­ple fi­nal­ly turned to Google — an ear­ly leader in the AI race — for help mak­ing the iPhone’s vir­tu­al as­sis­tant Siri in­to a more con­ver­sa­tion­al and ver­sa­tile helper.

Al­though he nev­er shook the per­cep­tion that he lacked Jobs’ vi­sion, Cook lever­aged the pop­u­lar­i­ty of the iPhone and oth­er break­throughs or­ches­trat­ed by his pre­de­ces­sor to lift Ap­ple to heights that seemed un­fath­omable when it was on the brink of bank­rupt­cy dur­ing the mid-1990s. —(AP)

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Sto­ry by MICHAEL LIEDTKE | As­so­ci­at­ed Press