Fifteen years, four trillion dollars, and a closing balance

There is a particular pleasure in a set of accounts that closes cleanly, and Tim Cook's do. He ceased to be Apple's chief executive on 1 September 2026, fifteen years after taking the post, and became executive chairman. John Ternus has the job now.

The ledger

Market value at the start: roughly $350 billion. At the end: about $4 trillion. Revenue: $108 billion in FY2011, $416 billion in FY2025. Services, which barely counted as a line at the beginning, is a business of more than $100 billion by itself. Headcount up by over 100,000. Active devices in use: more than 2.5 billion, across 200-plus countries and territories.

One may quarrel with what any of it means. One cannot easily quarrel with the arithmetic.

The figure that deserves more attention than it gets

Buried among the rest: the carbon footprint is 60% below 2015 levels. That is the entry worth pausing on, because it runs the opposite way to everything above it. Revenue roughly quadrupled; the emissions fell by three-fifths in absolute terms. Almost every corporate environmental claim one encounters is a ratio dressed up as a reduction. This one is not.

The successor

Ternus joined in 2001 and was senior vice president of Hardware Engineering — responsible for the physical iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and AirPods. Twenty-five years in the building, and the promotion was announced on 20 April to take effect on 1 September, so nobody had to be startled by it.

Cook's description of him, for the record: he «has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity». Handsome, if a trifle upholstered.

What the next set of accounts cannot look like

Whoever came next was never going to repeat an elevenfold increase in market value; there is simply not that much room above four trillion dollars. Which means the interesting question is no longer growth at all, but whether a company of this size can still be surprising — a rather more difficult thing to put in a table.