Hours after Apple announced his transition to executive chairman, Tim Cook published a personal letter to the Apple community. It is a different read from the official press release — quieter, more personal, and in some ways more revealing about what the job has meant to him.
Cook says he has started every morning the same way for the past 15 years. He opens his email and reads notes from Apple users around the world. In his letter, he describes what those messages have contained: a mom saved by her Apple Watch, a perfect photo taken at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. “You share little pieces of your lives with me,” he wrote, “and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you.”
He called it “the best job in the world” and said that his successor, John Ternus, is “the perfect person for the job.” Of Ternus, Cook wrote: “He is a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful.”
Cook was careful to frame the transition as a continuation, not a departure. “This is not goodbye,” he wrote, pointing to his new role as executive chairman. He said he will still be involved, still be invested, still care deeply about what Apple does and how it treats the people who use its products.
The letter is worth reading in full for anyone who has used Apple products over the last decade and a half. Cook’s tenure covered the Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Silicon, the App Store’s rise into a platform unto itself, and the quiet transformation of Apple’s services business from a footnote into a $100 billion engine. It also covered the stumbles — the delayed Siri overhaul, the mixed Vision Pro reception, the ongoing questions about whether Apple is moving fast enough on AI. He did not address those in the letter, but they are part of the record.
John Ternus takes over on September 1. For more on the full leadership transition, including the appointment of Johny Srouji as Apple’s first chief hardware officer, see our full coverage of the announcement.