Cook leaves in September.

Don’t talk about “retiring after achieving success.” The truth is—he turned Apple into the most profitable machine in the world, and then realized that the machine doesn’t dream.
Steve Jobs left him an iPhone, and he turned the iPhone into a money-printing press. Service revenue tripled, and the market value broke through one trillion dollars. The results sheet is too pretty to be believable.
But one line is missing from the results sheet: where is the next iPhone?
Vision Pro? A flop. Apple Intelligence? Coming late. While OpenAI and NVIDIA are defining the next era, Apple is selling subscriptions.
Cook’s Apple learned how to win profits, but forgot how to win imagination.
This isn’t just a CEO transition. It’s a signal flare for the Silicon Valley power handover— the hardware-dominant era is ending, and the AI war is starting. The next person to sit in this position will not be facing “how to make more money,” but “whether Apple is still the company that defines the future.”
Cook won an era, but the new era doesn’t need him.