Tim Cook’s job was to make Apple boring—and he did. Cook, Apple’s chief executive officer, is stepping down after 15 years in the role. He had succeeded Steve Jobs after the visionary co-founder of Apple Computer Company left only months before dying of pancreatic cancer in 2011. Since then, Apple has grown in market value by 2,000 percent. It has also transformed into a staid, if immensely effective, firm that sells people glass rectangles, wireless earbuds, and, sometimes, computers. This legacy is not tragic, but it is somber. The crucible in which the personal computer and the smartphone were forged is just a big company now.

Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak started Apple Computer in 1976 to bring Woz’s design for an early personal computer to market, but Jobs did not serve as CEO until 1997, when he returned after years away. Before then, a series of more ordinary businesspeople had run the company—mostly former semiconductor executives including Michael Scott, Mike Markkula, and Gil Amelio, along with the former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley. But by the mid-2000s, after the iMac, iPod, and iPhone had appeared, Jobs had become the apotheosized Visionary CEO—a model for the technology industry and beyond. His exacting and sometimes unreasonable demands, which dated back to the design of the Macintosh in the early 1980s, had made him a singular and irreplaceable presence: a figure who could bend an organization, an industry, and the public who would be transformed by its products to his will.

Cook, by contrast, had come to Apple as a run-of-the-mill executive in 1998, after a dozen years in the boring-sounding job of director of North American fulfillment for IBM and a brief stint in the equally unvisionary title of vice president for corporate materials at Compaq, a once-well-known PC brand that was sold and dismantled in the early 2000s. In a commencement speech delivered at his alma mater, Auburn University, in 2010, Cook described the decision to join Apple as rash, given the company’s low standing at the time: “I wanted to throw caution and logic to the wind and join Apple.” Cook’s appeal for Apple was something like the opposite. An engineer, he was not a risky or dangerous choice; he was simply charged with fixing the company’s manufacturing operations.

By all measures, Cook was massively successful. In his initial role, he turned Apple into an efficient manufacturing powerhouse. During Cook’s tenure as CEO, the firm’s market capitalization reached $4 trillion, and its revenues increased more than fourfold. Apple introduced several new product lines, most of which became cultural and commercial hits—in particular the Apple Watch, a wearable that transformed into a health-and-fitness device, and AirPods, the wireless earbuds that normalized always-on ambient-audio life. Cook’s Apple also introduced a services ecosystem—including Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, and others, which now bring in $100 billion in annual revenue.

But after 15 years of Cook’s leadership, the risk and danger that a younger Cook did not possess have been mostly eviscerated from Apple as a whole. The Apple Vision Pro, an overpriced “spatial computing” headset that didn’t catch on, surely counts as a risk—but also a failure. The Apple Watch was successful, but it doesn’t feel revolutionary, as the iPhone did; rather, it’s just a smaller version of the thing, worn on the wrist. People continue to buy and upgrade their Apple devices, but doing so now feels routine. Instead of marvel at Apple’s inventiveness, today you might more often feel resignation, as one smartphone, laptop, or tablet replaces another. Mirroring his products, Cook settled comfortably into the role of a generic executive. At an appropriately mundane workforce-policy meeting that both Donald Trump and Cook attended in 2019, Trump mistakenly referred to Cook as “Tim Apple.” (He did so again this week in a social-media post about Cook’s departure.) It was a verbal slip, but the gaffe concealed a curious truth: Apple’s CEO had become just some guy, not a dreamer, mystic, or pioneer.

[Charlie Warzel: The vision pro is the perfect gadget for the apocalypse]

Within the company, an effective solemnity seems to have replaced playful invention. Jony Ive, the company’s longtime industrial-design chief, left to provide services to OpenAI and Ferrari instead. The public-facing new-product keynotes that Jobs had invented, and that the whole technology sector has since adopted, now seem overproduced, polished to a respectable but characterless shine. When I have contacted the company for stories over the past decade, the personnel allowed to speak with me have, at times, struck me as robotic or defeated. While I was reporting a story about Apple Intelligence last year, my Apple host sent me an invitation via the WebEx videoconference service rather than the more popular Zoom or Apple’s own FaceTime, conveying an IBM-like enterprise neutrality. Though a small detail, the moment felt revealing, as if to telegraph Apple’s embrace of bland reliability.

John Ternus will replace Cook as CEO in September (Cook will stay on as an executive). Currently Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, Ternus has worked at Apple for 25 years, effectively his entire career. He oversaw the development of the AirPods and, later, iPhone and Apple Watch. When he starts the job, Ternus will be 51, the same age that his predecessor was in 2011. Apple released a photograph of the two men grinning at each other across the years between them in matching navy button-downs and indigo-blue jeans. The image reminds me of the internet meme that shows Spider-Man pointing at himself: Tim Apple pointing at John Apple.

[Matteo Wong: OpenAI’s ambitions just became crystal clear]

This is not a sneer; it’s just what success looks like decades after radicalism hardens into normalcy. In 2000, Bill Gates handed Microsoft over to Steve Ballmer, a longtime executive at that company, who then handed it off to another long-serving insider, Satya Nadella. Google’s Larry Page did the same, to the Googler Eric Schmidt, and later to a fellow company veteran, Sundar Pichai. American culture celebrates a revolutionary spirit in business, but longevity dictates domestication. Someday, Mark Zuckerberg will hand over the reins of Meta to a safe successor. Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, the current darlings of generative-AI fanaticism, will become subdued if their firms survive. To persist is to put down roots for the long term. All companies that grow either do so or die.

A long time has passed since Steve Jobs was a radical: half a century since the invention of the personal computer; 30 years since Jobs became CEO of the company he had founded; 20 since the iPhone. Young adults today may not even know who Steve Jobs was, and they almost certainly do not remember him. Apple is just a company now, a big and successful one, which makes consumer electronics that people use to run their life. It has been for some time. Tim Cook saw to it, and now somebody else will.