Apple CEO Tim Cook holds an iPhone 17 during an Apple special event at Apple headquarters on September 09, 2025, in Cupertino, California.
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For most of its history under late co-founder Steve Jobs, Apple was defined by expensive consumer gadgets like Macs, iPods, iPhones and iPads. Starting from the company’s founding through Jobs’ death in 2011, the center of gravity inside Apple never really wavered: It was all about beautifully designed hardware that customers lined up on release day to buy.
Meanwhile, the Tim Cook era at Apple extended that playbook, rather than turning it on its head.
As Tim Cook will step down as Apple’s CEO to become the company’s executive chairman in September, hardware engineering senior VP John Ternus will take over what Jobs’ now-outgoing successor layered on top of Apple’s gadget-heavy strategy: a media ecosystem encompassing music, TV, movies and journalism that would go on to profoundly reshaped the iPhone maker.
So much so, that Apple is now arguably one of the most important media companies in the world thanks to services like Apple Music and Apple TV (formerly branded as Apple TV+).
As word of Apple’s just-announced CEO transition continues to spread and Cook’s legacy begins to be assessed, this is likely to be one of the more obvious yet easy to overlook aspects of his leadership. That’s partly because Cook, who wrote in a letter announcing his transition that he feels “a gratitude that I cannot put into words,” also positioned Apple as a privacy-focused alternative to ad-driven rivals while navigating two Trump administrations.
The push that he spearheaded for Apple to become a major media force, however, can’t be ignored.
Start with Apple Music. On paper, that service was Apple’s immediate answer to the rise of Spotify. But it also turned out to be something much more strategic — a way to keep users inside Apple’s world, long after it bought the hardware. It was also a big shift for Apple when Apple Music launched in 2015, with the company that popularized buying individual songs for $0.99 now selling access to a massive song library.
Apple also went farther than Spotify did, bringing personality and culture to the Apple Music service by tapping voices like Zane Lowe for artist interviews and live radio shows. Apple often leverages those conversations by adding them to YouTube, such as Lowe’s recent chat with BTS about the group’s comeback album Arirang. The YouTube version of that interview is currently approaching 4 million views.
Then there’s Apple’s TV and movie streaming service.
With Apple TV, Apple didn’t try to out-Netflix its gargantuan rival on the basis of volume. Instead, it went a quasi-HBO route, meaning the release of very few titles, a focus on prestige and big cultural swings. That service launched in 2019, and only a few years later it already had big wins under its belt that cut through the streaming clutter — including shows like Ted Lasso and Severance.
Jason Sudeikis as Coach Ted Lasso in “Ted Lasso,” streaming on Apple TV.
Apple
Ted Lasso was Apple TV’s first breakthrough TV hit, racking up billions of minutes of U.S. viewing according to Nielsen data. Severance eventually surpassed it, according to Apple. The dystopian workplace drama became the company’s most-watched series ever, until Pluribus later took the top spot. (That said, Apple doesn’t release Netflix-style view counts.)
New Apple TV releases include the now-streaming A24-esque Margo’s Got Money Troubles, with a stacked cast featuring Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer, while the Anya Taylor-Joy led crime series Lucky is coming later this summer. The eight-episode Jessica Chastain thriller The Savant, in which she’ll play an investigator who infiltrates online extremist and hate groups, is also finally headed toward an Apple TV release this summer according to Chastain herself after the show’s postponement last year in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death.
Apple’s streamer has gone on to rack up hundreds of major awards wins and nominations since its launch, including 81 Emmy nominations in 2025 along with multiple wins for shows like Severance. On the movie side, Apple TV became the first streamer to take home Hollywood’s top prize: a Best Picture Oscar in 2022 for the feel-good drama CODA, cementing Apple as a major player in the film and TV business.
Apple’s 2025 Brad Pitt-led racing drama F1 was the company’s first undeniable box office smash, grossing around $634 million worldwide as of this writing.
Damson Idris as Joshua Pearce and Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes in the Apple Original Films movie “F1."
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Also worth a mention here is yet another service — Apple News, which might be the most under-appreciated piece of this puzzle.
Apple, to be sure, doesn’t produce the journalism that lives inside the Apple News app. It aggregates and distributes that journalism, sitting between publishers and readers in a way that exerts a major influence on how news is consumed.
Taken together, all of these services give the company a daily presence in how people listen, watch and read. And when those services are bundled together through a subscription deal like Apple One, they became a formidable media package that lives entirely inside Apple’s ecosystem.
This is a big part of the Apple that Cook will soon hand off to Ternus. Not just a company that sells devices, but one that increasingly shapes the content flowing through those devices.
Cook, for his part, made the formal announcement of his transition in the goodbye letter by referring to his tenure as the opportunity of a lifetime, one in which he became “the leader of a company that ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.”
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