After much speculation, Tim Cook has officially announced that he will step down as Apple’s CEO this year. During his 15-year tenure at Apple, he led a number of projects, including the iPhone 4s, iOS 7, iOS 26, and Vision Pro, and helped the company become one of the world’s most valuable. In his memo, Tim Cook confirmed that John Ternus will become Apple’s next CEO. During his transition, Cook stated that he will remain with the company as executive chairman.
During his tenure, he inspired millions with his words of wisdom, and here are the top ten quotes from him that you should remember.
Read: Tim Cook steps down as Apple CEO after 15 years in charge
Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units. Somebody gets it home and they feel great when they pay the money, but then they get it home and use it and the joy is gone.
Too often people think about intuition as the same as relying on luck or faith. At least as I see it, nothing could be further from the truth. Intuition can tell you, of the doors that are open to you, which one you should walk through. But intuition cannot prepare you for what’s on the other side of that door.
There’s this thing in technology, almost a disease, where the definition of success is making the most. How many clicks did you get, how many active users do you have, how many units did you sell? Everybody in technology seems to want big numbers. Steve Jobs never got carried away with that. He focused on making the best.
There are times in all of our lives when a reliance on gut or intuition just seems more appropriate—when a particular course of action just feels right. And interestingly I’ve discovered it’s in facing life’s most important decisions that intuition seems the most indispensable to getting it right.
We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number, so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose…..It’s not just saying yes to the right products, it’s saying no to many products that are good ideas, but just not nearly as good as other ones.
It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.
We see that privacy is a fundamental human right that people have. We are going to do everything that we can to help maintain that trust.
He’s (Steve Jobs) not given credit as a teacher. But he’s the best teacher I ever had by far. There was nothing traditional about him as a teacher. But he was the best. He was the absolute best.
We weren’t first on the MP3 player; we weren’t first on the tablet; we weren’t first on the smartphone. But we were arguably the first modern smartphone, and we will be the first modern smartwatch—the first one that matters.