Tim Cook’s defining achievement leading Apple has been building an enduring consumer franchise that has kept users loyal through 15 years of changing technology and competition. Monday is his last day as CEO. Yet for all of his accomplishments — and the incredible returns he delivered for shareholders — Jim Cramer thinks that Cook has always lived in the shadow of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs . “This is about, once again, people just not giving Tim his due,” Cramer said during the Investing Club’s ” Morning Meeting .” “The long knives never went away for Tim Cook.” On Tuesday, Cook becomes executive chairman and John Ternus , a longtime Apple executive and most recently the company’s hardware chief, takes the CEO reins. Ternus has big shoes to fill . Since Cook took over in August 2011, Apple shares have gained roughly 2,280%, compared with about 555% for the S & P 500 . Apple’s market capitalization has ballooned from roughly $350 billion when Cook started to more than $4.7 trillion. At one point, Apple’s market cap topped $5 trillion, the second stock to ever do that. (Fellow Club name Nvidia was the first and remains firmly above that threshold.) Cramer said that kind of staggering value creation reflects much more than simply inheriting the iPhone from Jobs. “What matters here is that this was services, it was a buyback, it was a belief that the consumer product should always be right,” Cramer said, pointing to the drivers behind Apple’s extraordinary run under Cook. “I applauded Tim and feel very strongly that he was one of the great executives of all time.” Cramer also pushed back on the notion that Cook was merely a skilled operator who kept Apple’s machine churning. Critics often knocked Cook for not innovating as Jobs did. “There’s this completely bogus narrative about Tim, which is that all he did was keep the trains running on time,” Cramer said on ” Squawk on the Street ” on Monday. “That’s ridiculous.” Instead, Cramer pointed to Cook’s ability to sustain the iPhone’s appeal and keep consumers coming back through successive generations of premium devices. Remember, the iPhone was first introduced in 2007. The iPhone was “updated so many times that it’s just such a different phone,” Cramer said. The bulk of the iPhone’s nearly 20-year run has been under Cook’s watch. “Business to consumer is impossible. That man mastered it,” Cramer said. “His intention was [to make] the best consumer product of all time, and he succeeded.” Cook also expanded Apple into new devices — mostly successfully, the Apple Watch and AirPods. To be sure, he had some clunkers, too, like the Vision Pro virtual reality headset. All the while, Cook created a sticky ecosystem with devices feeding a high-margin services business. In fiscal 2025, Apple’s services business was about 20% of revenue — an $82 billion business all by itself. For comparison, and to see how big that number is, Club name Wells Fargo ‘s revenue last year was $83 billion. Not to mention, Cook was a supply-chain master with an ability to deftly navigate the often choppy political waters. He was able to absorb skyrocketing memory costs for quarter after quarter, but finally had to give in and hike prices on Macs and iPads in June. No iPhone price changes were announced yet, but we expect them at the Sept. 9 launch event , which will be the first under Ternus. The memory shortage is not going away anytime soon, and neither are questions about Apple’s long-term artificial intelligence strategy. Cook’s decision not to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on AI that Apple’s peers have will give Ternus some time. But AI and memory are two of the many things that Ternus will have to navigate, while demonstrating to Wall Street that he has a plan to build on Cook’s successes. (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AAPL. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
