Tim Cook to step down as Apple chief executive after nearly 15-year reign

Apple chief executive Tim Cook is stepping down from the job that he inherited from the late Steve Jobs.

It ends a nearly 15-year reign that saw the US company’s market value soar by more than 3.6 trillion dollars during an iPhone-fuelled era of prosperity.

Mr Cook, 65, will hand chief executive duties to Apple’s head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, on September 1 while remaining involved with the Cupertino, California, company as executive chairman.

It follows similar transitions made by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Netflix’s Reed Hastings after they ended their highly successful tenures as chief executive.

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company,” Mr Cook said in a statement.

“I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people.”

Although he never shook the perception that he lacked Mr Jobs’s vision, Mr Cook leveraged the popularity of the iPhone and other breakthroughs orchestrated by his predecessor to lift Apple to heights that seemed unfathomable when it was on the brink of bankruptcy during the mid-1990s.