From AirPods to the Apple Car: Tim Cook's biggest hits (and misses) as Apple CEO

After months of rumours, it's finally official. Tim Cook, CEO of one of the world's most valuable companies, is stepping down. At the helm of Apple, Cook has overseen the launch of countless products – many of them hits, and a few of them, er, not so much.

Apple has announced that Cook will be handing the reigns to current senior vice president of hardware engineering John Ternus in September. While it'll be curious to see how Apple fares with a 'product guy' in charge (I guess Ternus is who I need to start begging to reintroduce the iPhone mini now?), we're now in a position to definitively judge the 'Cook era'.

So, did Tim cook? Let's take a look at three of his biggest triumphs, and three of his worst flops.

Hits

01. Apple Silicon

Apple Silicon stands as one of Apple's most decisive bets of the 2020s. By moving away from Intel chips to its own custom ARM-based processors, Apple didn’t just gain control over performance, it redefined it. The M1 chip’s debut in 2020 delivered staggering improvements in speed, efficiency and battery life, instantly outperforming many traditional laptops while running cooler and quieter. We were recently blown away by the M5 Max MacBook Pro.

But Apple Silicon was never just about raw power; it unlocked new product possibilities too. Thinner designs, longer battery life, and features like instant wake made Macs feel more like iPhones in responsiveness. And for creative pros, the leap in real-world workflows, from video editing to 3D rendering, was undeniable.

02. AirPods

Remember the launch of the original AirPods in 2016? The wireless earbuds were widely mocked when. unveiled alongside the iPhone 7. Many weren't ready for the design, with the bright white floating antennas seen as a bit of a joke. Fast forward ten years, and AirPods in all their guises are a phenomenon, and are ubiquitous in the streets.

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What made AirPods a success wasn’t just sound quality, but the entire experience. Instant pairing, reliable connectivity and tight integration across the Apple ecosystem make them feel almost invisible in use. And with the addition of the H1 chip and features like Noise Cancellation, the Pro and Max models offer so much more than your standard set of wired earbuds.

03. The world's first trillion-dollar company

Not a product as much as a statistic. But what a statistic. Under Cook, Apple’s rise to a trillion-dollar valuation marked a defining moment. Many have argued that Cook's measured and operational approach lacks the vision of Steve Jobs, but what better vindication could there be than dollars in the trillions? Last October, the company hit a staggering $4 trillion valuation.

Rather than relying on a single breakout product, Cook built sustained growth through ecosystem expansion and services. Products like the iPhone continued to drive huge revenue, but it was the strategic push into services (App Store, Apple Music, iCloud) as well as wearables and accessories that broadened the company's income streams.

Misses

01. Vision Pro

At a time when Apple was facing criticism for lack of innovation, there was a lot riding on the Vision Pro headset when it was announced in 2023. Marking the brand's first foray into a new product category since the Apple Watch, it was pitched as the next generation of computing. Alas, this wasn't to be.

Technically, it’s an impressive piece of hardware, with cutting-edge displays and spatial computing ambitions. The problem is that for most users, it answers questions they weren't asking.

At £3,500, Vision Pro feels more like a developer kit than a mainstream product. The lack of must-have apps at launch made it hard to justify, and support has hardly improved since then. Unlike the iPhone or even Apple Watch, there’s no single “killer use case” pulling people in. For a company known for nailing timing and purpose, Vision Pro feels early, expensive and oddly out of step.

02. Apple Intelligence

The botched Apple Intelligence rollout has to be one of Apple's most embarrassing debacles of the last decade. The company was already perceived as lagging behind in the AI era, but when it announced its own take on artificial intelligence in October 2024, it looked, for a moment, like the company could end up changing the meaning of AI – quite literally, given the audacious name.

Alas, it wasn't to be. The launch of Apple Intelligence was a litany of missteps, one which hasn't even finished yet. Despite Apple promising a new and improved Siri, the virtual assistant remains missing in action – and in the intervening years, Apple has seen itself become the butt of many jokes about AI. From an unkind internal nickname for the AI team to the pulling of its Siri ads, the whole thing has been uncharacteristically inelegant for the Cupertino company.

03. Apple Car

And finally, the one that never actually happened. After years of speculation, shifting strategies and reported billions in R&D, the project, often referred to internally as Project Titan, ultimately failed to materialise into a real product. Over 2,000 staff were reportedly shifted onto Apple's AI division after the car project died. Those poor guys can't catch a break.

According to Bloomberg, Apple wanted to "change the world with a full-blown self-driving vehicle, taking passengers from point A to point B with zero intervention from a driver. And make it look like nothing anyone had seen before." Ultimately, these ambitions proved too lofty.