Apple is swapping its operations-minded CEO for an engineer, a bet that the next decade has to be won on new products rather than squeezing more profit out of the old ones.

• Tim Cook is stepping down after 15 years, with hardware chief John Ternus taking over the most valuable company on Earth.
• Cook never launched a hit product of his own, but he turned Apple into a profit machine — a tight supply chain plus monthly subscriptions like iCloud and the App Store's 30% cut on other apps' subscriptions.
• Apple keeps about 27 cents of every dollar it sells as profit, better margins than most software companies and far above carmakers or retailers.
• That focus on efficiency over invention left Apple behind on AI: the promised smarter Siri slipped for years and finally shipped running on Google's Gemini, not Apple's own AI.
• Ternus led the move off Intel chips to Apple's own M-series and fronted the Vision Pro, a flop but a long bet on what comes after the phone.

Outlook: Expect Apple to push harder on new hardware and AI under Ternus, with the risk that the quiet subscription money machine gets less attention.