How Tim Cook Turned Apple Into A Media Powerhouse

For most of its history under late co-founder Steve Jobs, Apple was very much defined by expensive consumer gadgets like Macs, iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Indeed, 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.

The Tim Cook era at Apple, meanwhile, didn’t so much turn that playbook on its head as extend it.

Over time, Jobs’ now-outgoing successor (Cook will become Apple’s executive chairman in September, passing the torch to hardware engineering senior VP John Ternus as CEO) layered something else 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 increasingly volatile Trump administrations.

Apple’s reinvention as a media giant under Tim Cook

The push that he spearheaded for Apple to become a major media force, meanwhile, 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 they’d 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.

Then there’s 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.

New Apple TV releases include the now-streaming A24-esque Margo’s Got Money Troubles, with a stacked cast including Elle Fanning and Michelle Pfeiffer, while the Anya Taylor-Joy led crime series Lucky is coming later this summer (in July).

On the movie side, Apple TV also 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.

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 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 now hands off to Ternus. Not just a company that sells devices, but one that increasingly shapes the content flowing through them.

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.”